Victorian Age

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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

No. 61

Editors:

THE RT. HON. H. A. L. FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.

PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT.D., LL.D., F.B.A.

PROF. SIR J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.

PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.

_A complete classified list of the volumes of The Home University

Library already published to be found at the back of this book._

THE VICTORIAN AGE

IN LITERATURE

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

LONDON

THORNTON BUTTERWORTH LTD.

COPYRIGHT, 1913,

BY

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

INTRODUCTION 7

I THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE AND ITS ENEMIES 12

II THE GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 90

III THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 156

IV THE BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 204

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 253

INDEX 255

The Editors wish to explain that this book is not put forward as an

authoritative history of Victorian literature. It is a free and personal

statement of views and impressions about the significance of Victorian

literature made by Mr. Chesterton at the Editors’ express invitation.

THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE

INTRODUCTION

A section of a long and splendid literature can be most conveniently

treated in one of two ways. It can be divided as one cuts a currant cake

or a Gruyère cheese, taking the currants (or the holes) as they come. Or

it can be divided as one cuts wood—along the grain: if one thinks that

there is a grain. But the two are never the same: the names never come

in the same order in actual time as they come in any serious study of a

spirit or a tendency. The critic who wishes to move onward with the life

of an epoch, must be always running backwards and forwards among its

mere dates; just as a branch bends back and forth continually; yet the

grain in the branch runs true like an unbroken river.

Mere chronological order, indeed, is almost as arbitrary as alphabetical

order. To deal with Darwin, Dickens, Browning, in the sequence of the

birthday book would be to forge about as real a chain as the “Tacitus,

Tolstoy, Tupper” of a biographical dictionary. It might lend itself

more, perhaps, to accuracy: and it might satisfy that school of critics

who hold that every artist should be treated as a solitary craftsman,

indifferent to the commonwealth and unconcerned about moral things. To

write on that principle in the present case, however, would involve all

those delicate difficulties, known to politicians, which beset the

public defence of a doctrine which one heartily disbelieves. It is quite

needless here to go into the old “art for art’s sake”—business, or

explain at length why individual artists cannot be reviewed without

reference to their traditions and creeds. It is enough to say that with

other creeds they would have been, for literary purposes, other

individuals. Their views do not, of course, make the brains in their

heads any more than the ink in their pens. But it is equally evident

that mere brain-power, without attributes or aims, a wheel revolving in

the void, would be a subject about as entertaining as ink. The moment we

differentiate the minds, we must differentiate by doctrines and moral

sentiments. A mere sympathy for democratic merry-making and mourning

will not make a man a writer like Dickens. But without that sympathy

Dickens would not be a writer like Dickens; and probably not a writer at

all. A mere conviction that Catholic thought is the clearest as well as

the best disciplined, will not make a man a writer like Newman. But

without that conviction Newman would not be a writer like Newman; and

probably not a writer at all. It is useless for the æsthete (or any

other anarchist) to urge the isolated individuality of the artist, apart

from his attitude to his age. His attitude to his age is his

individuality: men are never individual when alone.

It only remains for me, therefore, to take the more delicate and

entangled task; and deal with the great Victorians, not only by dates

and names, but rather by schools and streams of thought. It is a task

for which I feel myself wholly incompetent; but as that applies to every

other literary enterprise I ever went in for, the sensation is not

wholly novel: indeed, it is rather reassuring than otherwise to realise

that I am now doing something that nobody could do properly. The chief

peril of the process, however, will be an inevitable tendency to make

the spiritual landscape too large for the figures. I must ask for

indulgence if such criticism traces too far back into politics or ethics

the roots of which great books were the blossoms; makes Utilitarianism

more important than Liberty or talks more of the Oxford Movement than

of The Christian Year. I can only answer in the very temper of the

age of which I write: for I also was born a Victorian; and sympathise

not a little with the serious Victorian spirit. I can only answer, I

shall not make religion more important than it was to Keble, or politics

more sacred than they were to Mill.

CHAPTER I

THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE AND ITS ENEMIES

The previous literary life of this country had left vigorous many old

forces in the Victorian time, as in our time. Roman Britain and Mediæval

England are still not only alive but lively; for real development is not

leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from

a root. Even when we improve we never progress. For progress, the

metaphor from the road, implies a man leaving his home behind him: but

improvement means a man exalting the towers or extending the gardens of

his home. The ancient English literature was like all the several

literatures of Christendom, alike in its likeness, alike in its very

unlikeness. Like all European cultures, it was European; like all

European cultures, it was something more than European. A most marked

and unmanageable national temperament is plain in Chaucer and the

ballads of Robin Hood; in spite of deep and sometimes disastrous changes

of national policy, that note is still unmistakable in Shakespeare, in

Johnson and his friends, in Cobbett, in Dickens. It is vain to dream of

defining such vivid things; a national soul is as indefinable as a

smell, and as unmistakable. I remember a friend who tried impatiently to

explain the word “mistletoe” to a German, and cried at last, despairing,

“Well, you know holly—mistletoe’s the opposite!” I do not commend this

logical method in the comparison of plants or nations. But if he had

said to the Teuton, “Well, you know Germany—England’s the

opposite”—the definition, though fallacious, would not have been wholly

false. England, like all Christian countries, absorbed valuable elements

from the forests and the rude romanticism of the North; but, like all

Christian countries, it drank its longest literary draughts from the

classic fountains of the ancients: nor was this (as is so often loosely

thought) a matter of the mere “Renaissance.” The English tongue and

talent of speech did not merely flower suddenly into the gargantuan

polysyllables of the great Elizabethans; it had always been full of the

popular Latin of the Middle Ages. But whatever balance of blood and

racial idiom one allows, it is really true that the only suggestion that

gets near the Englishman is to hint how far he is from the German. The

Germans, like the Welsh, can sing perfectly serious songs perfectly

seriously in chorus: can with clear eyes and clear voices join together

in words of innocent and beautiful personal passion, for a false maiden

or a dead child. The nearest one can get to defining the poetic temper

of Englishmen is to say that they couldn’t do this even for beer. They

can sing in chorus, and louder than other Christians: but they must have

in their songs something, I know not what, that is at once shamefaced

and rowdy. If the matter be emotional, it must somehow be also broad,

common and comic, as “Wapping Old Stairs” and “Sally in Our Alley.” If

it be patriotic, it must somehow be openly bombastic and, as it were,

indefensible, like “Rule Britannia” or like that superb song (I never

knew its name, if it has one) that records the number of leagues from

Ushant to the Scilly Isles. Also there is a tender love-lyric called “O

Tarry Trousers” which is even more English than the heart of _The

Midsummer Night’s Dream_. But our greatest bards and sages have often

shown a tendency to rant it and roar it like true British sailors; to

employ an extravagance that is half conscious and therefore half

humorous. Compare, for example, the rants of Shakespeare with the rants

of Victor Hugo. A piece of Hugo’s eloquence is either a serious triumph

or a serious collapse: one feels the poet is offended at a smile. But

Shakespeare seems rather proud of talking nonsense: I never can read

that rousing and mounting description of the storm, where it comes to—

“Who take the ruffian billows by the top,

Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them

With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds.”

without seeing an immense balloon rising from the ground, with

Shakespeare grinning over the edge of the car, and saying, “You can’t

stop me: I am above reason now.” That is the nearest we can get to the

general national spirit, which we have now to follow through one brief

and curious but very national episode.

Three years before the young queen was crowned, William Cobbett was

buried at Farnham. It may seem strange to begin with this great

neglected name, rather than the old age of Wordsworth or the young death

of Shelley. But to any one who feels literature as human, the empty

chair of Cobbett is more solemn and significant than the throne. With

him died the sort of democracy that was a return to Nature, and which

only poets and mobs can understand. After him Radicalism is urban—and

Toryism suburban. Going through green Warwickshire, Cobbett might have

thought of the crops and Shelley of the clouds. But Shelley would have

called Birmingham what Cobbett called it—a hell-hole. Cobbett was one

with after Liberals in the ideal of Man under an equal law, a citizen of

no mean city. He differed from after Liberals in strongly affirming that

Liverpool and Leeds are mean cities.

It is no idle Hibernianism to say that towards the end of the eighteenth

century the most important event in English history happened in France.

It would seem still more perverse, yet it would be still more precise,

to say that the most important event in English history was the event

that never happened at all—the English Revolution on the lines of the

French Revolution. Its failure was not due to any lack of fervour or

even ferocity in those who would have brought it about: from the time

when the first shout went up for Wilkes to the time when the last

Luddite fires were quenched in a cold rain of rationalism, the spirit of

Cobbett, of rural republicanism, of English and patriotic democracy,

burned like a beacon. The revolution failed because it was foiled by

another revolution; an aristocratic revolution, a victory of the rich

over the poor. It was about this time that the common lands were finally

enclosed; that the more cruel game laws were first established; that

England became finally a land of landlords instead of common

land-owners. I will not call it a Tory reaction; for much of the worst

of it (especially of the land-grabbing) was done by Whigs; but we may

certainly call it Anti-Jacobin. Now this fact, though political, is not

only relevant but essential to everything that concerned literature. The

upshot was that though England was full of the revolutionary ideas,

nevertheless there was no revolution. And the effect of this in turn was

that from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the

nineteenth the spirit of revolt in England took a wholly literary form.

In France it was what people did that was wild and elemental; in England

it was what people wrote. It is a quaint comment on the notion that the

English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were

rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

It has been well and wittily said (as illustrating the mildness of

English and the violence of French developments) that the same Gospel of

Rousseau which in France produced the Terror, in England produced

Sandford and Merton. But people forget that in literature the English

were by no means restrained by Mr. Barlow; and that if we turn from

politics to art, we shall find the two parts peculiarly reversed. It

would be equally true to say that the same eighteenth-century

emancipation which in France produced the pictures of David, in England

produced the pictures of Blake. There never were, I think, men who gave

to the imagination so much of the sense of having broken out into the

very borderlands of being, as did the great English poets of the

romantic or revolutionary period; than Coleridge in the secret sunlight

of the Antarctic, where the waters were like witches’ oils; than Keats

looking out of those extreme mysterious casements upon that ultimate

sea. The heroes and criminals of the great French crisis would have been

quite as incapable of such imaginative independence as Keats and

Coleridge would have been incapable of winning the battle of Wattignies.

In Paris the tree of liberty was a garden tree, clipped very correctly;

and Robespierre used the razor more regularly than the guillotine.

Danton, who knew and admired English literature, would have cursed

freely over Kubla Khan; and if the Committee of Public Safety had not

already executed Shelley as an aristocrat, they would certainly have

locked him up for a madman. Even Hébert (the one really vile

Revolutionist), had he been reproached by English poets with worshipping

the Goddess of Reason, might legitimately have retorted that it was

rather the Goddess of Unreason that they set up to be worshipped.

Verbally considered, Carlyle’s French Revolution was more

revolutionary than the real French Revolution: and if Carrier, in an

exaggerative phrase, empurpled the Loire with carnage, Turner almost

literally set the Thames on fire.

This trend of the English Romantics to carry out the revolutionary idea

not savagely in works, but very wildly indeed in words, had several

results; the most important of which was this. It started English

literature after the Revolution with a sort of bent towards independence

and eccentricity, which in the brighter wits became individuality, and

in the duller ones, Individualism. English Romantics, English Liberals,

were not public men making a republic, but poets, each seeing a vision.

The lonelier version of liberty was a sort of aristocratic anarchism in

Byron and Shelley; but though in Victorian times it faded into much

milder prejudices and much more bourgeois crotchets, England retained

from that twist a certain odd separation and privacy. England became

much more of an island than she had ever been before. There fell from

her about this time, not only the understanding of France or Germany,

but to her own long and yet lingering disaster, the understanding of

Ireland. She had not joined in the attempt to create European democracy;

nor did she, save in the first glow of Waterloo, join in the

counter-attempt to destroy it. The life in her literature was still, to

a large extent, the romantic liberalism of Rousseau, the free and humane

truisms that had refreshed the other nations, the return to Nature and

to natural rights. But that which in Rousseau was a creed, became in

Hazlitt a taste and in Lamb little more than a whim. These latter and

their like form a group at the beginning of the nineteenth century of

those we may call the Eccentrics: they gather round Coleridge and his

decaying dreams or linger in the tracks of Keats and Shelley and Godwin;

Lamb with his bibliomania and creed of pure caprice, the most unique of

all geniuses; Leigh Hunt with his Bohemian impecuniosity; Landor with

his tempestuous temper, throwing plates on the floor; Hazlitt with his

bitterness and his low love affair; even that healthier and happier

Bohemian, Peacock. With these, in one sense at least, goes De Quincey.

He was, unlike most of these embers of the revolutionary age in letters,

a Tory; and was attached to the political army which is best represented

in letters by the virile laughter and leisure of Wilson’s _Noctes

Ambrosianæ_. But he had nothing in common with that environment. It

remained for some time as a Tory tradition, which balanced the cold and

brilliant aristocracy of the Whigs. It lived on the legend of Trafalgar;

the sense that insularity was independence; the sense that anomalies are

as jolly as family jokes; the general sense that old salts are the salt

of the earth. It still lives in some old songs about Nelson or Waterloo,

which are vastly more pompous and vastly more sincere than the cockney

cocksureness of later Jingo lyrics. But it is hard to connect De Quincey

with it; or, indeed, with anything else. De Quincey would certainly have

been a happier man, and almost certainly a better man, if he had got

drunk on toddy with Wilson, instead of getting calm and clear (as he

himself describes) on opium, and with no company but a book of German

metaphysics. But he would hardly have revealed those wonderful vistas

and perspectives of prose, which permit one to call him the first and

most powerful of the decadents: those sentences that lengthen out like

nightmare corridors, or rise higher and higher like impossible eastern

pagodas. He was a morbid fellow, and far less moral than Burns; for when

Burns confessed excess he did not defend it. But he has cast a gigantic

shadow on our literature, and was as certainly a genius as Poe. Also he

had humour, which Poe had not. And if any one still smarting from the

pinpricks of Wilde or Whistler, wants to convict them of plagiarism in

their “art for art” epigrams—he will find most of what they said said

better in Murder as One of the Fine Arts.

One great man remains of this elder group, who did their last work only

under Victoria; he knew most of the members of it, yet he did not belong

to it in any corporate sense. He was a poor man and an invalid, with

Scotch blood and a strong, though perhaps only inherited, quarrel with

the old Calvinism; by name Thomas Hood. Poverty and illness forced him

to the toils of an incessant jester; and the revolt against gloomy

religion made him turn his wit, whenever he could, in the direction of

a defence of happier and humaner views. In the long great roll that

includes Homer and Shakespeare, he was the last great man who really

employed the pun. His puns were not all good (nor were Shakespeare’s),

but the best of them were a strong and fresh form of art. The pun is

said to be a thing of two meanings; but with Hood there were three

meanings, for there was also the abstract truth that would have been

there with no pun at all. The pun of Hood is underrated, like the “wit”

of Voltaire, by those who forget that the words of Voltaire were not

pins, but swords. In Hood at his best the verbal neatness only gives to

the satire or the scorn a ring of finality such as is given by rhyme.

For rhyme does go with reason, since the aim of both is to bring things

to an end. The tragic necessity of puns tautened and hardened Hood’s

genius; so that there is always a sort of shadow of that sharpness

across all his serious poems, falling like the shadow of a sword.

“Sewing at once with a double thread a shroud as well as a shirt”—“We

thought her dying when she slept, and sleeping when she died”—“Oh God,

that bread should be so dear and flesh and blood so cheap”—none can

fail to note in these a certain fighting discipline of phrase, a

compactness and point which was well trained in lines like “A

cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms.” In France he

would have been a great epigrammatist, like Hugo. In England he is a

punster.

There was nothing at least in this group I have loosely called the

Eccentrics that disturbs the general sense that all their generation was

part of the sunset of the great revolutionary poets. This fading glamour

affected England in a sentimental and, to some extent, a snobbish

direction; making men feel that great lords with long curls and whiskers

were naturally the wits that led the world. But it affected England also

negatively and by reaction; for it associated such men as Byron with

superiority, but not with success. The English middle classes were led

to distrust poetry almost as much as they admired it. They could not

believe that either vision at the one end or violence at the other could

ever be practical. They were deaf to that great warning of Hugo: “You

say the poet is in the clouds; but so is the thunderbolt.” Ideals

exhausted themselves in the void; Victorian England, very unwisely,

would have no more to do with idealists in politics. And this, chiefly,

because there had been about these great poets a young and splendid

sterility; since the pantheist Shelley was in fact washed under by the

wave of the world, or Byron sank in death as he drew the sword for

Hellas.

The chief turn of nineteenth-century England was taken about the time

when a footman at Holland House opened a door and announced “Mr.

Macaulay.” Macaulay’s literary popularity was representative and it was

deserved; but his presence among the great Whig families marks an

epoch. He was the son of one of the first “friends of the negro,” whose

honest industry and philanthropy were darkened by a religion of sombre

smugness, which almost makes one fancy they loved the negro for his

colour, and would have turned away from red or yellow men as needlessly

gaudy. But his wit and his politics (combined with that dropping of the

Puritan tenets but retention of the Puritan tone which marked his class

and generation), lifted him into a sphere which was utterly opposite to

that from which he came. This Whig world was exclusive; but it was not

narrow. It was very difficult for an outsider to get into it; but if he

did get into it he was in a much freer atmosphere than any other in

England. Of those aristocrats, the Old Guard of the eighteenth century,

many denied God, many defended Bonaparte, and nearly all sneered at the

Royal Family. Nor did wealth or birth make any barriers for those once

within this singular Whig world. The platform was high, but it was

level. Moreover the upstart nowadays pushes himself by wealth: but the

Whigs could choose their upstarts. In that world Macaulay found Rogers,

with his phosphorescent and corpse-like brilliancy; there he found

Sydney Smith, bursting with crackers of common sense, an admirable old

heathen; there he found Tom Moore, the romantic of the Regency, a

shortened shadow of Lord Byron. That he reached this platform and

remained on it is, I say, typical of a turning-point in the century. For

the fundamental fact of early Victorian history was this: the decision

of the middle classes to employ their new wealth in backing up a sort of

aristocratical compromise, and not (like the middle class in the French

Revolution) insisting on a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme.

It went along with the decision of the aristocracy to recruit itself

more freely from the middle class. It was then also that Victorian

“prudery” began: the great lords yielded on this as on Free Trade.

These two decisions have made the doubtful England of to-day; and

Macaulay is typical of them; he is the bourgeois in Belgravia. The

alliance is marked by his great speeches for Lord Grey’s Reform Bill: it

is marked even more significantly in his speech against the Chartists.

Cobbett was dead.

Macaulay makes the foundation of the Victorian age in all its very

English and unique elements: its praise of Puritan politics and

abandonment of Puritan theology; its belief in a cautious but perpetual

patching up of the Constitution; its admiration for industrial wealth.

But above all he typifies the two things that really make the Victorian

Age itself, the cheapness and narrowness of its conscious formulæ; the

richness and humanity of its unconscious tradition. There were two

Macaulays, a rational Macaulay who was generally wrong, and a romantic

Macaulay who was almost invariably right. All that was small in him

derives from the dull parliamentarism of men like Sir James Mackintosh;

but all that was great in him has much more kinship with the festive

antiquarianism of Sir Walter Scott.

As a philosopher he had only two thoughts; and neither of them is true.

The first was that politics, as an experimental science, must go on

improving, along with clocks, pistols or penknives, by the mere

accumulation of experiment and variety. He was, indeed, far too

strong-minded a man to accept the hazy modern notion that the soul in

its highest sense can change: he seems to have held that religion can

never get any better and that poetry rather tends to get worse. But he

did not see the flaw in his political theory; which is that unless the

soul improves with time there is no guarantee that the accumulations of

experience will be adequately used. Figures do not add themselves up;

birds do not label or stuff themselves; comets do not calculate their

own courses; these things are done by the soul of man. And if the soul

of man is subject to other laws, is liable to sin, to sleep, to

anarchism or to suicide, then all sciences including politics may fall

as sterile and lie as fallow as before man’s reason was made. Macaulay

seemed sometimes to talk as if clocks produced clocks, or guns had

families of little pistols, or a penknife littered like a pig. The other

view he held was the more or less utilitarian theory of toleration; that

we should get the best butcher whether he was a Baptist or a

Muggletonian, and the best soldier whether he was a Wesleyan or an

Irvingite. The compromise worked well enough in an England Protestant in

bulk; but Macaulay ought to have seen that it has its limitations. A

good butcher might be a Baptist; he is not very likely to be a Buddhist.

A good soldier might be a Wesleyan; he would hardly be a Quaker. For the

rest, Macaulay was concerned to interpret the seventeenth century in

terms of the triumph of the Whigs as champions of public rights; and he

upheld this one-sidedly but not malignantly in a style of rounded and

ringing sentences, which at its best is like steel and at its worst like

tin.

This was the small conscious Macaulay; the great unconscious Macaulay

was very different. His noble enduring quality in our literature is

this: that he truly had an abstract passion for history; a warm, poetic

and sincere enthusiasm for great things as such; an ardour and appetite

for great books, great battles, great cities, great men. He felt and

used names like trumpets. The reader’s greatest joy is in the writer’s

own joy, when he can let his last phrase fall like a hammer on some

resounding name like Hildebrand or Charlemagne, on the eagles of Rome or

the pillars of Hercules. As with Walter Scott, some of the best things

in his prose and poetry are the surnames that he did not make. And it is

remarkable to notice that this romance of history, so far from making

him more partial or untrustworthy, was the only thing that made him

moderately just. His reason was entirely one-sided and fanatical. It

was his imagination that was well-balanced and broad. He was

monotonously certain that only Whigs were right; but it was necessary

that Tories should at least be great, that his heroes might have foemen

worthy of their steel. If there was one thing in the world he hated it

was a High Church Royalist parson; yet when Jeremy Collier the Jacobite

priest raises a real banner, all Macaulay’s blood warms with the mere

prospect of a fight. “It is inspiriting to see how gallantly the

solitary outlaw advances to attack enemies formidable separately, and,

it might have been thought, irresistible when combined; distributes his

swashing blows right and left among Wycherley, Congreve and Vanbrugh,

treads the wretched D’Urfey down in the dirt beneath his feet; and

strikes with all his strength full at the towering crest of Dryden.”

That is exactly where Macaulay is great; because he is almost Homeric.

The whole triumph turns upon mere names; but men are commanded by

names. So his poem on the Armada is really a good geography book gone

mad; one sees the map of England come alive and march and mix under the

eye.

The chief tragedy in the trend of later literature may be expressed by

saying that the smaller Macaulay conquered the larger. Later men had

less and less of that hot love of history he had inherited from Scott.

They had more and more of that cold science of self-interests which he

had learnt from Bentham.

The name of this great man, though it belongs to a period before the

Victorian, is, like the name of Cobbett, very important to it. In

substance Macaulay accepted the conclusions of Bentham; though he

offered brilliant objections to all his arguments. In any case the soul

of Bentham (if he had one) went marching on, like John Brown; and in the

central Victorian movement it was certainly he who won. John Stuart Mill

was the final flower of that growth. He was himself fresh and delicate

and pure; but that is the business of a flower. Though he had to preach

a hard rationalism in religion, a hard competition in economics, a hard

egoism in ethics, his own soul had all that silvery sensitiveness that

can be seen in his fine portrait by Watts. He boasted none of that

brutal optimism with which his friends and followers of the Manchester

School expounded their cheery negations. There was about Mill even a

sort of embarrassment; he exhibited all the wheels of his iron universe

rather reluctantly, like a gentleman in trade showing ladies over his

factory. There shone in him a beautiful reverence for women, which is

all the more touching because, in his department, as it were, he could

only offer them so dry a gift as the Victorian Parliamentary Franchise.

Now in trying to describe how the Victorian writers stood to each other,

we must recur to the very real difficulty noted at the beginning: the

difficulty of keeping the moral order parallel with the chronological

order. For the mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and

not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will

occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect.

Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated:

notions will be first defined long after they are dead. It is no good

getting the almanac to look up moonshine; and most literature in this

sense is moonshine. Thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it

were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus

Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet

delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no

one can understand tradition, or even history, who has not some

tenderness for anachronism.

Now for the great part of the Victorian era the utilitarian tradition

which reached its highest in Mill held the centre of the field; it was

the philosophy in office, so to speak. It sustained its march of

codification and inquiry until it had made possible the great victories

of Darwin and Huxley and Wallace. If we take Macaulay at the beginning

of the epoch and Huxley at the end of it, we shall find that they had

much in common. They were both square-jawed, simple men, greedy of

controversy but scornful of sophistry, dead to mysticism but very much

alive to morality; and they were both very much more under the influence

of their own admirable rhetoric than they knew. Huxley, especially, was

much more a literary than a scientific man. It is amusing to note that

when Huxley was charged with being rhetorical, he expressed his horror

of “plastering the fair face of truth with that pestilent cosmetic,

rhetoric,” which is itself about as well-plastered a piece of rhetoric

as Ruskin himself could have managed. The difference that the period had

developed can best be seen if we consider this: that while neither was

of a spiritual sort, Macaulay took it for granted that common sense

required some kind of theology, while Huxley took it for granted that

common sense meant having none. Macaulay, it is said, never talked about

his religion: but Huxley was always talking about the religion he hadn’t

got.

But though this simple Victorian rationalism held the centre, and in a

certain sense was the Victorian era, it was assailed on many sides,

and had been assailed even before the beginning of that era. The rest of

the intellectual history of the time is a series of reactions against

it, which come wave after wave. They have succeeded in shaking it, but

not in dislodging it from the modern mind. The first of these was the

Oxford Movement; a bow that broke when it had let loose the flashing

arrow that was Newman. The second reaction was one man; without teachers

or pupils—Dickens. The third reaction was a group that tried to create

a sort of new romantic Protestantism, to pit against both Reason and

Rome—Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Maurice—perhaps Tennyson. Browning

also was at once romantic and Puritan; but he belonged to no group, and

worked against materialism in a manner entirely his own. Though as a boy

he bought eagerly Shelley’s revolutionary poems, he did not think of

becoming a revolutionary poet. He concentrated on the special souls of

men; seeking God in a series of private interviews. Hence Browning,

great as he is, is rather one of the Victorian novelists than wholly of

the Victorian poets. From Ruskin, again, descend those who may be called

the Pre-Raphaelites of prose and poetry.

It is really with this rationalism triumphant, and with the romance of

these various attacks on it, that the study of Victorian literature

begins and proceeds. Bentham was already the prophet of a powerful sect;

Macaulay was already the historian of an historic party, before the true

Victorian epoch began. The middle classes were emerging in a state of

damaged Puritanism. The upper classes were utterly pagan. Their clear

and courageous testimony remains in those immortal words of Lord

Melbourne, who had led the young queen to the throne and long stood

there as her protector. “No one has more respect for the Christian

religion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding it into

private life----” What was pure paganism in the politics of Melbourne

became a sort of mystical cynicism in the politics of Disraeli; and is

well mirrored in his novels—for he was a man who felt at home in

mirrors. With every allowance for aliens and eccentrics and all the

accidents that must always eat the edges of any systematic

circumference, it may still be said that the Utilitarians held the fort.

Of the Oxford Movement what remains most strongly in the Victorian Epoch

centres round the challenge of Newman, its one great literary man. But

the movement as a whole had been of great significance in the very

genesis and make up of the society: yet that significance is not quite

easy immediately to define. It was certainly not æsthetic ritualism;

scarcely one of the Oxford High Churchmen was what we should call a

Ritualist. It was certainly not a conscious reaching out towards Rome:

except on a Roman Catholic theory which might explain all our unrests by

that dim desire. It knew little of Europe, it knew nothing of Ireland,

to which any merely Roman Catholic revulsion would obviously have

turned. In the first instance, I think, the more it is studied, the more

it would appear that it was a movement of mere religion as such. It was

not so much a taste for Catholic dogma, but simply a hunger for dogma.

For dogma means the serious satisfaction of the mind. Dogma does not

mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought. It was a revolt

against the Victorian spirit in one particular aspect of it; which may

roughly be called (in a cosy and domestic Victorian metaphor) having

your cake and eating it too. It saw that the solid and serious

Victorians were fundamentally frivolous—because they were

fundamentally inconsistent.

A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes’ intelligent

talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So

long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a

shape. Mahomet created, when he forbade wine but allowed five wives: he

created a very big thing, which we have still to deal with. The first

French Republic created, when it affirmed property and abolished

peerages; France still stands like a square, four-sided building which

Europe has besieged in vain. The men of the Oxford Movement would have

been horrified at being compared either with Moslems or Jacobins. But

their sub-conscious thirst was for something that Moslems and Jacobins

had and ordinary Anglicans had not: the exalted excitement of

consistency. If you were a Moslem you were not a Bacchanal. If you were

a Republican you were not a peer. And so the Oxford men, even in their

first and dimmest stages, felt that if you were a Churchman you were not

a Dissenter. The Oxford Movement was, out of the very roots of its

being, a rational movement; almost a rationalist movement. In that it

differed sharply from the other reactions that shook the Utilitarian

compromise; the blinding mysticism of Carlyle, the mere manly

emotionalism of Dickens. It was an appeal to reason: reason said that if

a Christian had a feast day he must have a fast day too. Otherwise, all

days ought to be alike; and this was that very Utilitarianism against

which their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault.

This idea, even by reason of its reason, narrowed into a sort of sharp

spear, of which the spear blade was Newman. It did forget many of the

other forces that were fighting on its side. But the movement could

boast, first and last, many men who had this eager dogmatic quality:

Keble, who spoilt a poem in order to recognise a doctrine; Faber, who

told the rich, almost with taunts, that God sent the poor as eagles to

strip them; Froude, who with Newman announced his return in the arrogant

motto of Achilles. But the greater part of all this happened before what

is properly our period; and in that period Newman, and perhaps Newman

alone, is the expression and summary of the whole school. It was

certainly in the Victorian Age, and after his passage to Rome, that

Newman claimed his complete right to be in any book on modern English

literature. This is no place for estimating his theology: but one point

about it does clearly emerge. Whatever else is right, the theory that

Newman went over to Rome to find peace and an end of argument, is quite

unquestionably wrong. He had far more quarrels after he had gone over to

Rome. But, though he had far more quarrels, he had far fewer

compromises: and he was of that temper which is tortured more by

compromise than by quarrel. He was a man at once of abnormal energy and

abnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written

the Apologia. If he sometimes seemed to skin his enemies alive, it was

because he himself lacked a skin. In this sense his Apologia is a

triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in this

sense he does indeed (to use his own expression) vanquish not his

accuser but his judges. Many men would shrink from recording all their

cold fits and hesitations and prolonged inconsistencies: I am sure it

was the breath of life to Newman to confess them, now that he had done

with them for ever. His _Lectures on the Present Position of English

Catholics_, practically preached against a raging mob, rise not only

higher but happier, as his instant unpopularity increases. There is

something grander than humour, there is fun, in the very first lecture

about the British Constitution as explained to a meeting of Russians.

But always his triumphs are the triumphs of a highly sensitive man: a

man must feel insults before he can so insultingly and splendidly

avenge them. He is a naked man, who carries a naked sword. The quality

of his literary style is so successful that it succeeds in escaping

definition. The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionate

patience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap.

But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I have

said: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing

irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise. So far as the

present purpose is concerned, his protest died with him: he left few

imitators and (it may easily be conceived) no successful imitators. The

suggestion of him lingers on in the exquisite Elizabethan perversity of

Coventry Patmore; and has later flamed out from the shy volcano of

Francis Thompson. Otherwise (as we shall see in the parallel case of

Ruskin’s Socialism) he has no followers in his own age: but very many in

ours.

The next group of reactionaries or romantics or whatever we elect to

call them, gathers roughly around one great name. Scotland, from which

had come so many of those harsh economists who made the first Radical

philosophies of the Victorian Age, was destined also to fling forth (I

had almost said to spit forth) their fiercest and most extraordinary

enemy. The two primary things in Thomas Carlyle were his early Scotch

education and his later German culture. The first was in almost all

respects his strength; the latter in some respects his weakness. As an

ordinary lowland peasant, he inherited the really valuable historic

property of the Scots, their independence, their fighting spirit, and

their instinctive philosophic consideration of men merely as men. But he

was not an ordinary peasant. If he had laboured obscurely in his village

till death, he would have been yet locally a marked man; a man with a

wild eye, a man with an air of silent anger; perhaps a man at whom

stones were sometimes thrown. A strain of disease and suffering ran

athwart both his body and his soul. In spite of his praise of silence,

it was only through his gift of utterance that he escaped madness. But

while his fellow-peasants would have seen this in him and perhaps mocked

it, they would also have seen something which they always expect in such

men, and they would have got it: vision, a power in the mind akin to

second sight. Like many ungainly or otherwise unattractive Scotchmen, he

was a seer. By which I do not mean to refer so much to his

transcendental rhapsodies about the World-soul or the Nature-garment or

the Mysteries and Eternities generally, these seem to me to belong more

to his German side and to be less sincere and vital. I mean a real power

of seeing things suddenly, not apparently reached by any process; a

grand power of guessing. He saw the crowd of the new States General,

Danton with his “rude flattened face,” Robespierre peering mistily

through his spectacles. He saw the English charge at Dunbar. He

guessed that Mirabeau, however dissipated and diseased, had something

sturdy inside him. He guessed that Lafayette, however brave and

victorious, had nothing inside him. He supported the lawlessness of

Cromwell, because across two centuries he almost physically felt the

feebleness and hopelessness of the moderate Parliamentarians. He said a

word of sympathy for the universally vituperated Jacobins of the

Mountain, because through thick veils of national prejudice and

misrepresentation, he felt the impossibility of the Gironde. He was

wrong in denying to Scott the power of being inside his characters: but

he really had a good deal of that power himself. It was one of his

innumerable and rather provincial crotchets to encourage prose as

against poetry. But, as a matter of fact, he himself was much greater

considered as a kind of poet than considered as anything else; and the

central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

He first emerged, as it were, as a student and disciple of Goethe. The

connection was not wholly fortunate. With much of what Goethe really

stood for he was not really in sympathy; but in his own obstinate way,

he tried to knock his idol into shape instead of choosing another. He

pushed further and further the extravagances of a vivid but very

unbalanced and barbaric style, in the praise of a poet who really

represented the calmest classicism and the attempt to restore a Hellenic

equilibrium in the mind. It is like watching a shaggy Scandinavian

decorating a Greek statue washed up by chance on his shores. And while

the strength of Goethe was a strength of completion and serenity, which

Carlyle not only never found but never even sought, the weaknesses of

Goethe were of a sort that did not draw the best out of Carlyle. The one

civilised element that the German classicists forgot to put into their

beautiful balance was a sense of humour. And great poet as Goethe was,

there is to the last something faintly fatuous about his half

sceptical, half sentimental self-importance; a Lord Chamberlain of

teacup politics; an earnest and elderly flirt; a German of the Germans.

Now Carlyle had humour; he had it in his very style, but it never got

into his philosophy. His philosophy largely remained a heavy Teutonic

idealism, absurdly unaware of the complexity of things; as when he

perpetually repeated (as with a kind of flat-footed stamping) that

people ought to tell the truth; apparently supposing, to quote

Stevenson’s phrase, that telling the truth is as easy as blind hookey.

Yet, though his general honesty is unquestionable, he was by no means

one of those who will give up a fancy under the shock of a fact. If by

sheer genius he frequently guessed right, he was not the kind of man to

admit easily that he had guessed wrong. His version of Cromwell’s filthy

cruelties in Ireland, or his impatient slurring over of the most

sinister riddle in the morality of Frederick the Great—these passages

are, one must frankly say, disingenuous. But it is, so to speak, a

generous disingenuousness; the heat and momentum of sincere admirations,

not the shuffling fear and flattery of the constitutional or patriotic

historian. It bears most resemblance to the incurable prejudices of a

woman.

For the rest there hovered behind all this transcendental haze a certain

presence of old northern paganism; he really had some sympathy with the

vast vague gods of that moody but not unmanly Nature-worship which seems

to have filled the darkness of the North before the coming of the Roman

Eagle or the Christian Cross. This he combined, allowing for certain

sceptical omissions, with the grisly Old Testament God he had heard

about in the black Sabbaths of his childhood; and so promulgated

(against both Rationalists and Catholics) a sort of heathen Puritanism:

Protestantism purged of its evidences of Christianity.

His great and real work was the attack on Utilitarianism: which did real

good, though there was much that was muddled and dangerous in the

historical philosophy which he preached as an alternative. It is his

real glory that he was the first to see clearly and say plainly the

great truth of our time; that the wealth of the state is not the

prosperity of the people. Macaulay and the Mills and all the regular run

of the Early Victorians, took it for granted that if Manchester was

getting richer, we had got hold of the key to comfort and progress.

Carlyle pointed out (with stronger sagacity and humour than he showed on

any other question) that it was just as true to say that Manchester was

getting poorer as that it was getting richer: or, in other words, that

Manchester was not getting richer at all, but only some of the less

pleasing people in Manchester. In this matter he is to be noted in

connection with national developments much later; for he thus became the

first prophet of the Socialists. Sartor Resartus is an admirable

fantasia; The French Revolution is, with all its faults, a really

fine piece of history; the lectures on Heroes contain some masterly

sketches of personalities. But I think it is in Past and Present, and

the essay on Chartism, that Carlyle achieves the work he was chosen by

gods and men to achieve; which possibly might not have been achieved by

a happier or more healthy-minded man. He never rose to more deadly irony

than in such macabre descriptions as that of the poor woman proving

her sisterhood with the rich by giving them all typhoid fever; or that

perfect piece of badinage about “Overproduction of Shirts”; in which

he imagines the aristocrats claiming to be quite clear of this offence.

“Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse us of overproduction? We

take the Heavens and the Earth to witness that we have produced nothing

at all… He that accuses us of producing, let him show himself. Let

him say what and when.” And he never wrote so sternly and justly as when

he compared the “divine sorrow” of Dante with the “undivine sorrow” of

Utilitarianism, which had already come down to talking about the

breeding of the poor and to hinting at infanticide. This is a

representative quarrel; for if the Utilitarian spirit reached its

highest point in Mill, it certainly reached its lowest point in Malthus.

One last element in the influence of Carlyle ought to be mentioned;

because it very strongly dominated his disciples—especially Kingsley,

and to some extent Tennyson and Ruskin. Because he frowned at the

cockney cheerfulness of the cheaper economists, they and others

represented him as a pessimist, and reduced all his azure infinities to

a fit of the blues. But Carlyle’s philosophy, more carefully considered,

will be found to be dangerously optimist rather than pessimist. As a

thinker Carlyle is not sad, but recklessly and rather unscrupulously

satisfied. For he seems to have held the theory that good could not be

definitely defeated in this world; and that everything in the long run

finds its right level. It began with what we may call the “Bible of

History” idea: that all affairs and politics were a clouded but unbroken

revelation of the divine. Thus any enormous and unaltered human

settlement—as the Norman Conquest or the secession of America—we must

suppose to be the will of God. It lent itself to picturesque treatment;

and Carlyle and the Carlyleans were above all things picturesque. It

gave them at first a rhetorical advantage over the Catholic and other

older schools. They could boast that their Creator was still creating;

that he was in Man and Nature, and was not hedged round in a Paradise or

imprisoned in a pyx. They could say their God had not grown too old for

war: that He was present at Gettysburg and Gravelotte as much as at

Gibeon and Gilboa. I do not mean that they literally said these

particular things: they are what I should have said had I been bribed to

defend their position. But they said things to the same effect: that

what manages finally to happen, happens for a higher purpose. Carlyle

said the French Revolution was a thing settled in the eternal councils

to be; and therefore (and not because it was right) attacking it was

“fighting against God.” And Kingsley even carried the principle so far

as to tell a lady she should remain in the Church of England mainly

because God had put her there. But in spite of its superficial

spirituality and encouragement, it is not hard to see how such a

doctrine could be abused. It practically comes to saying that God is on

the side of the big battalions—or at least, of the victorious ones.

Thus a creed which set out to create conquerors would only corrupt

soldiers; corrupt them with a craven and unsoldierly worship of success:

and that which began as the philosophy of courage ends as the philosophy

of cowardice. If, indeed, Carlyle were right in saying that right is

only “rightly articulated” might, men would never articulate or move in

any way. For no act can have might before it is done: if there is no

right, it cannot rationally be done at all. This element, like the

Anti-Utilitarian element, is to be kept in mind in connection with after

developments: for in this Carlyle is the first cry of Imperialism, as

(in the other case) of Socialism: and the two babes unborn who stir at

the trumpet are Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Kipling also

carries on from Carlyle the concentration on the purely Hebraic parts of

the Bible. The fallacy of this whole philosophy is that if God is indeed

present at a modern battle, He may be present not as on Gilboa but

Golgotha.

Carlyle’s direct historical worship of strength and the rest of it was

fortunately not very fruitful; and perhaps lingered only in Froude the

historian. Even he is more an interruption than a continuity. Froude

develops rather the harsher and more impatient moral counsels of his

master than like Ruskin the more romantic and sympathetic. He carries on

the tradition of Hero Worship: but carries far beyond Carlyle the

practice of worshipping people who cannot rationally be called heroes.

In this matter that eccentric eye of the seer certainly helped Carlyle:

in Cromwell and Frederick the Great there was at least something

self-begotten, original or mystical; if they were not heroes they were

at least demigods or perhaps demons. But Froude set himself to the

praise of the Tudors, a much lower class of people; ill-conditioned

prosperous people who merely waxed fat and kicked. Such strength as

Henry VIII had was the strength of a badly trained horse that bolts, not

of any clear or courageous rider who controls him. There is a sort of

strong man mentioned in Scripture who, because he masters himself, is

more than he that takes a city. There is another kind of strong man

(known to the medical profession) who cannot master himself; and whom it

may take half a city to take alive. But for all that he is a low

lunatic, and not a hero; and of that sort were too many of the heroes

whom Froude attempted to praise. A kind of instinct kept Carlyle from

over-praising Henry VIII; or that highly cultivated and complicated

liar, Queen Elizabeth. Here, the only importance of this is that one of

Carlyle’s followers carried further that “strength” which was the real

weakness of Carlyle. I have heard that Froude’s life of Carlyle was

unsympathetic; but if it was so it was a sort of parricide. For the

rest, like Macaulay, he was a picturesque and partisan historian: but,

like Macaulay (and unlike the craven scientific historians of to-day) he

was not ashamed of being partisan or of being picturesque. Such studies

as he wrote on the Elizabethan seamen and adventurers, represent very

triumphantly the sort of romance of England that all this school was

attempting to establish; and link him up with Kingsley and the rest.

Ruskin may be very roughly regarded as the young lieutenant of Carlyle

in his war on Utilitarian Radicalism: but as an individual he presents

many and curious divergences. In the matter of style, he enriched

English without disordering it. And in the matter of religion (which

was the key of this age as of every other) he did not, like Carlyle, set

up the romance of the great Puritans as a rival to the romance of the

Catholic Church. Rather he set up and worshipped all the arts and

trophies of the Catholic Church as a rival to the Church itself. None

need dispute that he held a perfectly tenable position if he chose to

associate early Florentine art with a Christianity still comparatively

pure, and such sensualities as the Renaissance bred with the corruption

of a Papacy. But this does not alter, as a merely artistic fact, the

strange air of ill-ease and irritation with which Ruskin seems to tear

down the gargoyles of Amiens or the marbles of Venice, as things of

which Europe is not worthy; and take them away with him to a really

careful museum, situated dangerously near Clapham. Many of the great men

of that generation, indeed, had a sort of divided mind; an ethical

headache which was literally a “splitting headache”; for there was a

schism in the sympathies. When these men looked at some historic

object, like the Catholic Church or the French Revolution, they did not

know whether they loved or hated it most. Carlyle’s two eyes were out of

focus, as one may say, when he looked at democracy: he had one eye on

Valmy and the other on Sedan. In the same way, Ruskin had a strong right

hand that wrote of the great mediæval minsters in tall harmonies and

traceries as splendid as their own; and also, so to speak, a weak and

feverish left hand that was always fidgeting and trying to take the pen

away—and write an evangelical tract about the immorality of foreigners.

Many of their contemporaries were the same. The sea of Tennyson’s mind

was troubled under its serene surface. The incessant excitement of

Kingsley, though romantic and attractive in many ways, was a great deal

more like Nervous Christianity than Muscular Christianity. It would be

quite unfair to say of Ruskin that there was any major inconsistency

between his mediæval tastes and his very unmediæval temper: and minor

inconsistencies do not matter in anybody. But it is not quite unfair to

say of him that he seemed to want all parts of the Cathedral except the

altar.

As an artist in prose he is one of the most miraculous products of the

extremely poetical genius of England. The length of a Ruskin sentence is

like that length in the long arrow that was boasted of by the drawers of

the long bow. He draws, not a cloth-yard shaft but a long lance to his

ear: he shoots a spear. But the whole goes light as a bird and straight

as a bullet. There is no Victorian writer before him to whom he even

suggests a comparison, technically considered, except perhaps De

Quincey; who also employed the long rich rolling sentence that, like a

rocket, bursts into stars at the end. But De Quincey’s sentences, as I

have said, have always a dreamy and insecure sense about them, like the

turret on toppling turret of some mad sultan’s pagoda. Ruskin’s sentence

branches into brackets and relative clauses as a straight strong tree

branches into boughs and bifurcations, rather shaking off its burden

than merely adding to it. It is interesting to remember that Ruskin

wrote some of the best of these sentences in the attempt to show that he

did understand the growth of trees, and that nobody else did—except

Turner, of course. It is also (to those acquainted with his perverse and

wild rhetorical prejudices) even more amusing to remember that if a

Ruskin sentence (occupying one or two pages of small print) does not

remind us of the growth of a tree, the only other thing it does remind

of is the triumphant passage of a railway train.

Ruskin left behind him in his turn two quite separate streams of

inspiration. The first and more practical was concerned, like Carlyle’s

Chartism, with a challenge to the social conclusions of the orthodox

economists. He was not so great a man as Carlyle, but he was a much more

clear-headed man; and the point and stab of his challenge still really

stands and sticks, like a dagger in a dead man. He answered the theory

that we must always get the cheapest labour we can, by pointing out that

we never do get the cheapest labour we can, in any matter about which we

really care twopence. We do not get the cheapest doctor. We either get a

doctor who charges nothing or a doctor who charges a recognised and

respectable fee. We do not trust the cheapest bishop. We do not allow

admirals to compete. We do not tell generals to undercut each other on

the eve of a war. We either employ none of them or we employ all of them

at an official rate of pay. All this was set out in the strongest and

least sentimental of his books, Unto this Last; but many suggestions

of it are scattered through Sesame and Lilies, _The Political Economy

of Art_, and even Modern Painters. On this side of his soul Ruskin

became the second founder of Socialism. The argument was not by any

means a complete or unconquerable weapon, but I think it knocked out

what little remained of the brains of the early Victorian rationalists.

It is entirely nonsensical to speak of Ruskin as a lounging æsthete, who

strolled into economics, and talked sentimentalism. In plain fact,

Ruskin was seldom so sensible and logical (right or wrong) as when he

was talking about economics. He constantly talked the most glorious

nonsense about landscape and natural history, which it was his business

to understand. Within his own limits, he talked the most cold common

sense about political economy, which was no business of his at all.

On the other side of his literary soul, his mere unwrapping of the

wealth and wonder of European art, he set going another influence,

earlier and vaguer than his influence on Socialism. He represented what

was at first the Pre-Raphaelite School in painting, but afterwards a

much larger and looser Pre-Raphaelite School in poetry and prose. The

word “looser” will not be found unfair if we remember how Swinburne and

all the wildest friends of the Rossettis carried this movement forward.

They used the mediæval imagery to blaspheme the mediæval religion.

Ruskin’s dark and doubtful decision to accept Catholic art but not

Catholic ethics had borne rapid or even flagrant fruit by the time that

Swinburne, writing about a harlot, composed a learned and sympathetic

and indecent parody on the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.

With the poets I deal in another part of this book; but the influence of

Ruskin’s great prose touching art criticism can best be expressed in the

name of the next great prose writer on such subjects. That name is

Walter Pater: and the name is the full measure of the extent to which

Ruskin’s vague but vast influence had escaped from his hands. Pater

eventually joined the Church of Rome (which would not have pleased

Ruskin at all), but it is surely fair to say of the mass of his work

that its moral tone is neither Puritan nor Catholic, but strictly and

splendidly Pagan. In Pater we have Ruskin without the prejudices, that

is, without the funny parts. I may be wrong, but I cannot recall at this

moment a single passage in which Pater’s style takes a holiday or in

which his wisdom plays the fool. Newman and Ruskin were as careful and

graceful stylists as he. Newman and Ruskin were as serious, elaborate,

and even academic thinkers as he. But Ruskin let himself go about

railways. Newman let himself go about Kingsley. Pater cannot let himself

go for the excellent reason that he wants to stay: to stay at the point

where all the keenest emotions meet, as he explains in the splendid

peroration of The Renaissance. The only objection to being where all

the keenest emotions meet is that you feel none of them.

In this sense Pater may well stand for a substantial summary of the

æsthetes, apart from the purely poetical merits of men like Rossetti and

Swinburne. Like Swinburne and others he first attempted to use mediæval

tradition without trusting it. These people wanted to see Paganism

through Christianity: because it involved the incidental amusement of

seeing through Christianity itself. They not only tried to be in all

ages at once (which is a very reasonable ambition, though not often

realised), but they wanted to be on all sides at once: which is

nonsense. Swinburne tries to question the philosophy of Christianity in

the metres of a Christmas carol: and Dante Rossetti tries to write as if

he were Christina Rossetti. Certainly the almost successful summit of

all this attempt is Pater’s superb passage on the Mona Lisa; in which he

seeks to make her at once a mystery of good and a mystery of evil. The

philosophy is false; even evidently false, for it bears no fruit to-day.

There never was a woman, not Eve herself in the instant of temptation,

who could smile the same smile as the mother of Helen and the mother of

Mary. But it is the high-water mark of that vast attempt at an

impartiality reached through art: and no other mere artist ever rose so

high again.

Apart from this Ruskinian offshoot through Pre-Raphaelitism into what

was called Æstheticism, the remains of the inspiration of Carlyle fill a

very large part in the Victorian life, but not strictly so large a part

in the Victorian literature. Charles Kingsley was a great publicist; a

popular preacher; a popular novelist; and (in two cases at least) a very

good novelist. His Water Babies is really a breezy and roaring freak;

like a holiday at the seaside—a holiday where one talks natural history

without taking it seriously. Some of the songs in this and other of his

works are very real songs: notably, “When all the World is Young, Lad,”

which comes very near to being the only true defence of marriage in the

controversies of the nineteenth century. But when all this is allowed,

no one will seriously rank Kingsley, in the really literary sense, on

the level of Carlyle or Ruskin, Tennyson or Browning, Dickens or

Thackeray: and if such a place cannot be given to him, it can be given

even less to his lusty and pleasant friend, Tom Hughes, whose

personality floats towards the frankness of the Boy’s Own Paper; or to

his deep, suggestive metaphysical friend Maurice, who floats rather

towards The Hibbert Journal. The moral and social influence of these

things is not to be forgotten: but they leave the domain of letters. The

voice of Carlyle is not heard again in letters till the coming of

Kipling and Henley.

One other name of great importance should appear here, because it cannot

appear very appropriately anywhere else: the man hardly belonged to the

same school as Ruskin and Carlyle, but fought many of their battles, and

was even more concentrated on their main task—the task of convicting

liberal bourgeois England of priggishness and provinciality. I mean,

of course, Matthew Arnold. Against Mill’s “liberty” and Carlyle’s

“strength” and Ruskin’s “nature,” he set up a new presence and entity

which he called “culture,” the disinterested play of the mind through

the sifting of the best books and authorities. Though a little dandified

in phrase, he was undoubtedly serious and public-spirited in intention.

He sometimes talked of culture almost as if it were a man, or at least a

church (for a church has a sort of personality): some may suspect that

culture was a man, whose name was Matthew Arnold. But Arnold was not

only right but highly valuable. If we have said that Carlyle was a man

that saw things, we may add that Arnold was chiefly valuable as a man

who knew things. Well as he was endowed intellectually, his power came

more from information than intellect. He simply happened to know certain

things, that Carlyle didn’t know, that Kingsley didn’t know, that Huxley

and Herbert Spencer didn’t know: that England didn’t know. He knew that

England was a part of Europe: and not so important a part as it had been

the morning after Waterloo. He knew that England was then (as it is now)

an oligarchical State, and that many great nations are not. He knew

that a real democracy need not live and does not live in that perpetual

panic about using the powers of the State, which possessed men like

Spencer and Cobden. He knew a rational minimum of culture and common

courtesy could exist and did exist throughout large democracies. He knew

the Catholic Church had been in history “the Church of the multitude”:

he knew it was not a sect. He knew that great landlords are no more a

part of the economic law than nigger-drivers: he knew that small owners

could and did prosper. He was not so much the philosopher as the man of

the world: he reminded us that Europe was a society while Ruskin was

treating it as a picture gallery. He was a sort of Heaven-sent courier.

His frontal attack on the vulgar and sullen optimism of Victorian

utility may be summoned up in the admirable sentence, in which he asked

the English what was the use of a train taking them quickly from

Islington to Camberwell, if it only took them “from a dismal and

illiberal life in Islington to a dismal and illiberal life in

Camberwell?”

His attitude to that great religious enigma round which all these great

men were grouped as in a ring, was individual and decidedly curious. He

seems to have believed that a “Historic Church,” that is, some

established organisation with ceremonies and sacred books, etc., could

be perpetually preserved as a sort of vessel to contain the spiritual

ideas of the age, whatever those ideas might happen to be. He clearly

seems to have contemplated a melting away of the doctrines of the Church

and even of the meaning of the words: but he thought a certain need in

man would always be best satisfied by public worship and especially by

the great religious literatures of the past. He would embalm the body

that it might often be revisited by the soul—or souls. Something of the

sort has been suggested by Dr. Coit and others of the ethical societies

in our own time. But while Arnold would loosen the theological bonds of

the Church, he would not loosen the official bonds of the State. You

must not disestablish the Church: you must not even leave the Church:

you must stop inside it and think what you choose. Enemies might say

that he was simply trying to establish and endow Agnosticism. It is

fairer and truer to say that unconsciously he was trying to restore

Paganism: for this State Ritualism without theology, and without much

belief, actually was the practice of the ancient world. Arnold may have

thought that he was building an altar to the Unknown God; but he was

really building it to Divus Cæsar.

As a critic he was chiefly concerned to preserve criticism itself; to

set a measure to praise and blame and support the classics against the

fashions. It is here that it is specially true of him, if of no writer

else, that the style was the man. The most vital thing he invented was a

new style: founded on the patient unravelling of the tangled Victorian

ideas, as if they were matted hair under a comb. He did not mind how

elaborately long he made a sentence, so long as he made it clear. He

would constantly repeat whole phrases word for word in the same

sentence, rather than risk ambiguity by abbreviation. His genius showed

itself in turning this method of a laborious lucidity into a peculiarly

exasperating form of satire and controversy. Newman’s strength was in a

sort of stifled passion, a dangerous patience of polite logic and then:

“Cowards! if I advanced a step you would run away: it is not you I fear.

Di me terrent, et Jupiter hostis.” If Newman seemed suddenly to fly

into a temper, Carlyle seemed never to fly out of one. But Arnold kept a

smile of heart-broken forbearance, as of the teacher in an idiot school,

that was enormously insulting. One trick he often tried with success. If

his opponent had said something foolish, like “the destiny of England is

in the great heart of England,” Arnold would repeat the phrase again and

again until it looked more foolish than it really was. Thus he recurs

again and again to “the British College of Health in the New Road” till

the reader wants to rush out and burn the place down. Arnold’s great

error was that he sometimes thus wearied us of his own phrases, as well

as of his enemies’.

These names are roughly representative of the long series of protests

against the cold commercial rationalism which held Parliament and the

schools through the earlier Victorian time, in so far as those protests

were made in the name of neglected intellect, insulted art, forgotten

heroism and desecrated religion. But already the Utilitarian citadel had

been more heavily bombarded on the other side by one lonely and

unlettered man of genius.

The rise of Dickens is like the rising of a vast mob. This is not only

because his tales are indeed as crowded and populous as towns: for truly

it was not so much that Dickens appeared as that a hundred Dickens

characters appeared. It is also because he was the sort of man who has

the impersonal impetus of a mob: what Poe meant when he truly said that

popular rumour, if really spontaneous, was like the intuition of the

individual man of genius. Those who speak scornfully of the ignorance of

the mob do not err as to the fact itself; their error is in not seeing

that just as a crowd is comparatively ignorant, so a crowd is

comparatively innocent. It will have the old and human faults; but it is

not likely to specialise in the special faults of that particular

society: because the effort of the strong and successful in all ages is

to keep the poor out of society. If the higher castes have developed

some special moral beauty or grace, as they occasionally do (for

instance, mediæval chivalry), it is likely enough, of course, that the

mass of men will miss it. But if they have developed some perversion or

over-emphasis, as they much more often do (for instance, the Renaissance

poisoning), then it will be the tendency of the mass of men to miss that

too. The point might be put in many ways; you may say if you will that

the poor are always at the tail of the procession, and that whether they

are morally worse or better depends on whether humanity as a whole is

proceeding towards heaven or hell. When humanity is going to hell, the

poor are always nearest to heaven.

Dickens was a mob—and a mob in revolt; he fought by the light of

nature; he had not a theory, but a thirst. If any one chooses to offer

the cheap sarcasm that his thirst was largely a thirst for milk-punch, I

am content to reply with complete gravity and entire contempt that in a

sense this is perfectly true. His thirst was for things as humble, as

human, as laughable as that daily bread for which we cry to God. He had

no particular plan of reform; or, when he had, it was startlingly petty

and parochial compared with the deep, confused clamour of comradeship

and insurrection that fills all his narrative. It would not be gravely

unjust to him to compare him to his own heroine, Arabella Allen, who

“didn’t know what she did like,” but who (when confronted with Mr. Bob

Sawyer) “did know what she didn’t like.” Dickens did know what he didn’t

like. He didn’t like the Unrivalled Happiness which Mr. Roebuck praised;

the economic laws that were working so faultlessly in Fever Alley; the

wealth that was accumulating so rapidly in Bleeding Heart Yard. But,

above all, he didn’t like the mean side of the Manchester philosophy:

the preaching of an impossible thrift and an intolerable temperance. He

hated the implication that because a man was a miser in Latin he must

also be a miser in English. And this meanness of the Utilitarians had

gone very far—infecting many finer minds who had fought the

Utilitarians. In the Edinburgh Review, a thing like Malthus could be

championed by a man like Macaulay.

The twin root facts of the revolution called Dickens are these: first,

that he attacked the cold Victorian compromise; second, that he

attacked it without knowing he was doing it—certainly without knowing

that other people were doing it. He was attacking something which we

will call Mr. Gradgrind. He was utterly unaware (in any essential sense)

that any one else had attacked Mr. Gradgrind. All the other attacks had

come from positions of learning or cultured eccentricity of which he was

entirely ignorant, and to which, therefore (like a spirited fellow), he

felt a furious hostility. Thus, for instance, he hated that Little

Bethel to which Kit’s mother went: he hated it simply as Kit hated it.

Newman could have told him it was hateful, because it had no root in

religious history; it was not even a sapling sprung of the seed of some

great human and heathen tree: it was a monstrous mushroom that grows in

the moonshine and dies in the dawn. Dickens knew no more of religious

history than Kit; he simply smelt the fungus, and it stank. Thus, again,

he hated that insolent luxury of a class counting itself a comfortable

exception to all mankind; he hated it as Kate Nickleby hated Sir

Mulberry Hawke—by instinct. Carlyle could have told him that all the

world was full of that anger against the impudent fatness of the few.

But when Dickens wrote about Kate Nickleby, he knew about as much of the

world—as Kate Nickleby. He did write The Tale of Two Cities long

afterwards; but that was when he had been instructed by Carlyle. His

first revolutionism was as private and internal as feeling sea-sick.

Thus, once more, he wrote against Mr. Gradgrind long before he created

him. In The Chimes, conceived in quite his casual and charitable

season, with the Christmas Carol and the Cricket on the Hearth, he

hit hard at the economists. Ruskin, in the same fashion, would have told

him that the worst thing about the economists was that they were not

economists: that they missed many essential things even in economics.

But Dickens did not know whether they were economists or not: he only

knew that they wanted hitting. Thus, to take a last case out of many,

Dickens travelled in a French railway train, and noticed that this

eccentric nation provided him with wine that he could drink and

sandwiches he could eat, and manners he could tolerate. And remembering

the ghastly sawdust-eating waiting-rooms of the North English railways,

he wrote that rich chapter in Mugby Junction. Matthew Arnold could

have told him that this was but a part of the general thinning down of

European civilisation in these islands at the edge of it; that for two

or three thousand years the Latin society has learnt how to drink wine,

and how not to drink too much of it. Dickens did not in the least

understand the Latin society: but he did understand the wine. If (to

prolong an idle but not entirely false metaphor) we have called Carlyle

a man who saw and Arnold a man who knew, we might truly call Dickens a

man who tasted, that is, a man who really felt. In spite of all the

silly talk about his vulgarity, he really had, in the strict and

serious sense, good taste. All real good taste is gusto—the power of

appreciating the presence—or the absence—of a particular and positive

pleasure. He had no learning; he was not misled by the label on the

bottle—for that is what learning largely meant in his time. He opened

his mouth and shut his eyes and saw what the Age of Reason would give

him. And, having tasted it, he spat it out.

I am constrained to consider Dickens here among the fighters; though I

ought (on the pure principles of Art) to be considering him in the

chapter which I have allotted to the story-tellers. But we should get

the whole Victorian perspective wrong, in my opinion at least, if we did

not see that Dickens was primarily the most successful of all the

onslaughts on the solid scientific school; because he did not attack

from the standpoint of extraordinary faith, like Newman; or the

standpoint of extraordinary inspiration, like Carlyle; or the standpoint

of extraordinary detachment or serenity, like Arnold; but from the

standpoint of quite ordinary and quite hearty dislike. To give but one

instance more, Matthew Arnold, trying to carry into England constructive

educational schemes which he could see spread like a clear railway map

all over the Continent, was much badgered about what he really thought

was wrong with English middle-class education. Despairing of

explaining to the English middle class the idea of high and central

public instruction, as distinct from coarse and hole-and-corner private

instruction, he invoked the aid of Dickens. He said the English

middle-class school was the sort of school where Mr. Creakle sat, with

his buttered toast and his cane. Now Dickens had probably never seen any

other kind of school—certainly he had never understood the systematic

State Schools in which Arnold had learnt his lesson. But he saw the cane

and the buttered toast, and he knew that it was all wrong. In this

sense, Dickens, the great romanticist, is truly the great realist also.

For he had no abstractions: he had nothing except realities out of which

to make a romance.

With Dickens, then, re-arises that reality with which I began and which

(curtly, but I think not falsely) I have called Cobbett. In dealing with

fiction as such, I shall have occasion to say wherein Dickens is weaker

and stronger than that England of the eighteenth century: here it is

sufficient to say that he represents the return of Cobbett in this vital

sense; that he is proud of being the ordinary man. No one can understand

the thousand caricatures by Dickens who does not understand that he is

comparing them all with his own common sense. Dickens, in the bulk,

liked the things that Cobbett had liked; what is perhaps more to the

point, he hated the things that Cobbett had hated; the Tudors, the

lawyers, the leisurely oppression of the poor. Cobbett’s fine fighting

journalism had been what is nowadays called “personal,” that is, it

supposed human beings to be human. But Cobbett was also personal in the

less satisfactory sense; he could only multiply monsters who were

exaggerations of his enemies or exaggerations of himself. Dickens was

personal in a more godlike sense; he could multiply persons. He could

create all the farce and tragedy of his age over again, with creatures

unborn to sin and creatures unborn to suffer. That which had not been

achieved by the fierce facts of Cobbett, the burning dreams of Carlyle,

the white-hot proofs of Newman, was really or very nearly achieved by a

crowd of impossible people. In the centre stood that citadel of atheist

industrialism: and if indeed it has ever been taken, it was taken by the

rush of that unreal army.

CHAPTER II

THE GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS

The Victorian novel was a thing entirely Victorian; quite unique and

suited to a sort of cosiness in that country and that age. But the novel

itself, though not merely Victorian, is mainly modern. No clear-headed

person wastes his time over definitions, except where he thinks his own

definition would probably be in dispute. I merely say, therefore, that

when I say “novel,” I mean a fictitious narrative (almost invariably,

but not necessarily, in prose) of which the essential is that the story

is not told for the sake of its naked pointedness as an anecdote, or for

the sake of the irrelevant landscapes and visions that can be caught up

in it, but for the sake of some study of the difference between human

beings. There are several things that make this mode of art unique. One

of the most conspicuous is that it is the art in which the conquests of

woman are quite beyond controversy. The proposition that Victorian women

have done well in politics and philosophy is not necessarily an untrue

proposition; but it is a partisan proposition. I never heard that many

women, let alone men, shared the views of Mary Wollstonecraft; I never

heard that millions of believers flocked to the religion tentatively

founded by Miss Frances Power Cobbe. They did, undoubtedly, flock to

Mrs. Eddy; but it will not be unfair to that lady to call her following

a sect, and not altogether unreasonable to say that such insane

exceptions prove the rule. Nor can I at this moment think of a single

modern woman writing on politics or abstract things, whose work is of

undisputed importance; except perhaps Mrs. Sidney Webb, who settles

things by the simple process of ordering about the citizens of a state,

as she might the servants in a kitchen. There has been, at any rate, no

writer on moral or political theory that can be mentioned, without

seeming comic, in the same breath with the great female novelists. But

when we come to the novelists, the women have, on the whole, equality;

and certainly, in some points, superiority. Jane Austen is as strong in

her own way as Scott is in his. But she is, for all practical purposes,

never weak in her own way—and Scott very often is. Charlotte Brontë

dedicated Jane Eyre to the author of Vanity Fair. I should hesitate

to say that Charlotte Brontë’s is a better book than Thackeray’s, but I

think it might well be maintained that it is a better story. All sorts

of inquiring asses (equally ignorant of the old nature of woman and the

new nature of the novel) whispered wisely that George Eliot’s novels

were really written by George Lewes. I will cheerfully answer for the

fact that, if they had been written by George Lewes, no one would ever

have read them. Those who have read his book on Robespierre will have

no doubt about my meaning. I am no idolater of George Eliot; but a man

who could concoct such a crushing opiate about the most exciting

occasion in history certainly did not write The Mill on the Floss.

This is the first fact about the novel, that it is the introduction of a

new and rather curious kind of art; and it has been found to be

peculiarly feminine, from the first good novel by Fanny Burney to the

last good novel by Miss May Sinclair. The truth is, I think, that the

modern novel is a new thing; not new in its essence (for that is a

philosophy for fools), but new in the sense that it lets loose many of

the things that are old. It is a hearty and exhaustive overhauling of

that part of human existence which has always been the woman’s province,

or rather kingdom; the play of personalities in private, the real

difference between Tommy and Joe. It is right that womanhood should

specialise in individuals, and be praised for doing so; just as in the

Middle Ages she specialised in dignity and was praised for doing so.

People put the matter wrong when they say that the novel is a study of

human nature. Human nature is a thing that even men can understand.

Human nature is born of the pain of a woman; human nature plays at

peep-bo when it is two and at cricket when it is twelve; human nature

earns its living and desires the other sex and dies. What the novel

deals with is what women have to deal with; the differentiations, the

twists and turns of this eternal river. The key of this new form of art,

which we call fiction, is sympathy. And sympathy does not mean so much

feeling with all who feel, but rather suffering with all who suffer. And

it was inevitable, under such an inspiration, that more attention should

be given to the awkward corners of life than to its even flow. The very

promising domestic channel dug by the Victorian women, in books like

Cranford, by Mrs. Gaskell, would have got to the sea, if they had been

left alone to dig it. They might have made domesticity a fairyland.

Unfortunately another idea, the idea of imitating men’s cuffs and

collars and documents, cut across this purely female discovery and

destroyed it.

It may seem mere praise of the novel to say it is the art of sympathy

and the study of human variations. But indeed, though this is a good

thing, it is not universally good. We have gained in sympathy; but we

have lost in brotherhood. Old quarrels had more equality than modern

exonerations. Two peasants in the Middle Ages quarrelled about their two

fields. But they went to the same church, served in the same semi-feudal

militia, and had the same morality, which ever might happen to be

breaking it at the moment. The very cause of their quarrel was the cause

of their fraternity; they both liked land. But suppose one of them a

teetotaler who desired the abolition of hops on both farms; suppose the

other a vegetarian who desired the abolition of chickens on both farms:

and it is at once apparent that a quarrel of quite a different kind

would begin; and that in that quarrel it would not be a question of

farmer against farmer, but of individual against individual. This

fundamental sense of human fraternity can only exist in the presence of

positive religion. Man is merely man only when he is seen against the

sky. If he is seen against any landscape, he is only a man of that land.

If he is seen against any house, he is only a householder. Only where

death and eternity are intensely present can human beings fully feel

their fellowship. Once the divine darkness against which we stand is

really dismissed from the mind (as it was very nearly dismissed in the

Victorian time) the differences between human beings become

overpoweringly plain; whether they are expressed in the high caricatures

of Dickens or the low lunacies of Zola.

This can be seen in a sort of picture in the Prologue of the _Canterbury

Tales_; which is already pregnant with the promise of the English novel.

The characters there are at once graphically and delicately

differentiated; the Doctor with his rich cloak, his careful meals, his

coldness to religion; the Franklin, whose white beard was so fresh that

it recalled the daisies, and in whose house it snowed meat and drink;

the Summoner, from whose fearful face, like a red cherub’s, the children

fled, and who wore a garland like a hoop; the Miller with his short red

hair and bagpipes and brutal head, with which he could break down a

door; the Lover who was as sleepless as a nightingale; the Knight, the

Cook, the Clerk of Oxford. Pendennis or the Cook, M. Mirabolant, is

nowhere so vividly varied by a few merely verbal strokes. But the great

difference is deeper and more striking. It is simply that Pendennis

would never have gone riding with a cook at all. Chaucer’s knight rode

with a cook quite naturally; because the thing they were all seeking

together was as much above knighthood as it was above cookery. Soldiers

and swindlers and bullies and outcasts, they were all going to the

shrine of a distant saint. To what sort of distant saint would Pendennis

and Colonel Newcome and Mr. Moss and Captain Costigan and Ridley the

butler and Bayham and Sir Barnes Newcome and Laura and the Duchess

d’Ivry and Warrington and Captain Blackball and Lady Kew travel,

laughing and telling tales together?

The growth of the novel, therefore, must not be too easily called an

increase in the interest in humanity. It is an increase in the interest

in the things in which men differ; much fuller and finer work had been

done before about the things in which they agree. And this intense

interest in variety had its bad side as well as its good; it has rather

increased social distinctions in a serious and spiritual sense. Most of

the oblivion of democracy is due to the oblivion of death. But in its

own manner and measure, it was a real advance and experiment of the

European mind, like the public art of the Renaissance or the fairyland

of physical science explored in the nineteenth century. It was a more

unquestionable benefit than these: and in that development women played

a peculiar part, English women especially, and Victorian women most of

all.

It is perhaps partly, though certainly not entirely, this influence of

the great women writers that explains another very arresting and

important fact about the emergence of genuinely Victorian fiction. It

had been by this time decided, by the powers that had influence (and by

public opinion also, at least in the middle-class sense), that certain

verbal limits must be set to such literature. The novel must be what

some would call pure and others would call prudish; but what is not,

properly considered, either one or the other: it is rather a more or

less business proposal (right or wrong) that every writer shall draw the

line at literal physical description of things socially concealed. It

was originally merely verbal; it had not, primarily, any dream of

purifying the topic or the moral tone. Dickens and Thackeray claimed

very properly the right to deal with shameful passions and suggest their

shameful culminations; Scott sometimes dealt with ideas positively

horrible—as in that grand Glenallan tragedy which is as appalling as

the OEdipus or The Cenci. None of these great men would have

tolerated for a moment being talked to (as the muddle-headed amateur

censors talk to artists to-day) about “wholesome” topics and suggestions

“that cannot elevate.” They had to describe the great battle of good and

evil and they described both; but they accepted a working Victorian

compromise about what should happen behind the scenes and what on the

stage. Dickens did not claim the license of diction Fielding might have

claimed in repeating the senile ecstasies of Gride (let us say) over his

purchased bride: but Dickens does not leave the reader in the faintest

doubt about what sort of feelings they were; nor is there any reason why

he should. Thackeray would not have described the toilet details of the

secret balls of Lord Steyne: he left that to Lady Cardigan. But no one

who had read Thackeray’s version would be surprised at Lady Cardigan’s.

But though the great Victorian novelists would not have permitted the

impudence of the suggestion that every part of their problem must be

wholesome and innocent in itself, it is still tenable (I do not say it

is certain) that by yielding to the Philistines on this verbal

compromise, they have in the long run worked for impurity rather than

purity. In one point I do certainly think that Victorian Bowdlerism did

pure harm. This is the simple point that, nine times out of ten, the

coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the

word that excuses it. A common evasion, for instance, substitutes for

the word that brands self-sale as the essential sin, a word which weakly

suggests that it is no more wicked than walking down the street. The

great peril of such soft mystifications is that extreme evils (they

that are abnormal even by the standard of evil) have a very long start.

Where ordinary wrong is made unintelligible, extraordinary wrong can

count on remaining more unintelligible still; especially among those who

live in such an atmosphere of long words. It is a cruel comment on the

purity of the Victorian Age, that the age ended (save for the bursting

of a single scandal) in a thing being everywhere called “Art,” “The

Greek Spirit,” “The Platonic Ideal” and so on—which any navvy mending

the road outside would have stamped with a word as vile and as vulgar as

it deserved.

This reticence, right or wrong, may have been connected with the

participation of women with men in the matter of fiction. It is an

important point: the sexes can only be coarse separately. It was

certainly also due, as I have already suggested, to the treaty between

the rich bourgeoisie and the old aristocracy, which both had to make,

for the common and congenial purpose of keeping the English people

down. But it was due much more than this to a general moral atmosphere

in the Victorian Age. It is impossible to express that spirit except by

the electric bell of a name. It was latitudinarian, and yet it was

limited. It could be content with nothing less than the whole cosmos:

yet the cosmos with which it was content was small. It is false to say

it was without humour: yet there was something by instinct unsmiling in

it. It was always saying solidly that things were “enough”; and proving

by that sharpness (as of the shutting of a door) that they were not

enough. It took, I will not say its pleasures, but even its

emancipations, sadly. Definitions seem to escape this way and that in

the attempt to locate it as an idea. But every one will understand me if

I call it George Eliot.

I begin with this great woman of letters for both the two reasons

already mentioned. She represents the rationalism of the old Victorian

Age at its highest. She and Mill are like two great mountains at the end

of that long, hard chain which is the watershed of the Early Victorian

time. They alone rise high enough to be confused among the clouds—or

perhaps confused among the stars. They certainly were seeking truth, as

Newman and Carlyle were; the slow slope of the later Victorian vulgarity

does not lower their precipice and pinnacle. But I begin with this name

also because it emphasises the idea of modern fiction as a fresh and

largely a female thing. The novel of the nineteenth century was female;

as fully as the novel of the eighteenth century was male. It is quite

certain that no woman could have written Roderick Random. It is not

quite so certain that no woman could have written Esmond. The strength

and subtlety of woman had certainly sunk deep into English letters when

George Eliot began to write.

Her originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power

in fiction as well or better than she. Charlotte Brontë, understood

along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The

latter comes into our present consideration only as that most

exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an

unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the

complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all

the after women went about looking for their brains. She could describe

a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Brontë could do.

She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what

she did not know—like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished

world before the great progressive age of which I write.

One of the characteristics of the central Victorian spirit was a

tendency to substitute a certain more or less satisfied seriousness for

the extremes of tragedy and comedy. This is marked by a certain change

in George Eliot; as it is marked by a certain limitation or moderation

in Dickens. Dickens was the People, as it was in the eighteenth century

and still largely is, in spite of all the talk for and against Board

School Education: comic, tragic, realistic, free-spoken, far looser in

words than in deeds. It marks the silent strength and pressure of the

spirit of the Victorian middle class that even to Dickens it never

occurred to revive the verbal coarseness of Smollett or Swift. The other

proof of the same pressure is the change in George Eliot. She was not a

genius in the elemental sense of Dickens; she could never have been

either so strong or so soft. But she did originally represent some of

the same popular realities: and her first books (at least as compared

with her latest) were full of sound fun and bitter pathos. Mr. Max

Beerbohm has remarked (in his glorious essay called Ichabod, I think),

that Silas Marner would not have forgotten his miserliness if George

Eliot had written of him in her maturity. I have a great regard for Mr.

Beerbohm’s literary judgments; and it may be so. But if literature

means anything more than a cold calculation of the chances, if there is

in it, as I believe, any deeper idea of detaching the spirit of life

from the dull obstacles of life, of permitting human nature really to

reveal itself as human, if (to put it shortly) literature has anything

on earth to do with being interesting—then I think we would rather

have a few more Marners than that rich maturity that gave us the

analysed dust-heaps of Daniel Deronda.

In her best novels there is real humour, of a cool sparkling sort; there

is a strong sense of substantial character that has not yet degenerated

into psychology; there is a great deal of wisdom, chiefly about women;

indeed there is almost every element of literature except a certain

indescribable thing called glamour; which was the whole stock-in-trade

of the Brontës, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp clambers amid rotten

wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray when Esmond with his

melancholy eyes wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues

of Castlewood. Of this quality (which some have called, but hastily, the

essential of literature) George Eliot had not little but nothing. Her

air is bright and intellectually even exciting; but it is like the air

of a cloudless day on the parade at Brighton. She sees people clearly,

but not through an atmosphere. And she can conjure up storms in the

conscious, but not in the subconscious mind.

It is true (though the idea should not be exaggerated) that this

deficiency was largely due to her being cut off from all those

conceptions that had made the fiction of a Muse; the deep idea that

there are really demons and angels behind men. Certainly the increasing

atheism of her school spoilt her own particular imaginative talent: she

was far less free when she thought like Ladislaw than when she thought

like Casaubon. It also betrayed her on a matter specially requiring

common sense; I mean sex. There is nothing that is so profoundly false

as rationalist flirtation. Each sex is trying to be both sexes at once;

and the result is a confusion more untruthful than any conventions. This

can easily be seen by comparing her with a greater woman who died before

the beginning of our present problem. Jane Austen was born before those

bonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by the

Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that

Jane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austen

may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth

that was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing his

faults, says, “I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice

though not in theory,” he gets nearer to a complete confession of the

intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the

Brontës’ heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot’s. Jane

Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her

later rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of small

nationalities.

The Brontës suggest themselves here; because their superficial

qualities, the qualities that can be seized upon in satire, were in this

an exaggeration of what was, in George Eliot, hardly more than an

omission. There was perhaps a time when Mr. Rawjester was more widely

known than Mr. Rochester. And certainly Mr. Rochester (to adopt the

diction of that other eminent country gentleman, Mr. Darcy) was simply

individualistic not only in practice, but in theory. Now any one may be

so in practice: but a man who is simply individualistic in theory must

merely be an ass. Undoubtedly the Brontës exposed themselves to some

misunderstanding by thus perpetually making the masculine creature much

more masculine than he wants to be. Thackeray (a man of strong though

sleepy virility) asked in his exquisite plaintive way: “Why do our lady

novelists make the men bully the women?” It is, I think, unquestionably

true that the Brontës treated the male as an almost anarchic thing

coming in from outside nature; much as people on this planet regard a

comet. Even the really delicate and sustained comedy of Paul Emanuel is

not quite free from this air of studying something alien. The reply may

be made that the women in men’s novels are equally fallacious. The reply

is probably just.

What the Brontës really brought into fiction was exactly what Carlyle

brought into history; the blast of the mysticism of the North. They were

of Irish blood settled on the windy heights of Yorkshire; in that

country where Catholicism lingered latest, but in a superstitious form;

where modern industrialism came earliest and was more superstitious

still. The strong winds and sterile places, the old tyranny of barons

and the new and blacker tyranny of manufacturers, has made and left that

country a land of barbarians. All Charlotte Brontë’s earlier work is

full of that sullen and unmanageable world; moss-troopers turned

hurriedly into miners; the last of the old world forced into supporting

the very first crudities of the new. In this way Charlotte Brontë

represents the Victorian settlement in a special way. The Early

Victorian Industrialism is to George Eliot and to Charlotte Brontë,

rather as the Late Victorian Imperialism would have been to Mrs. Humphry

Ward in the centre of the empire and to Miss Olive Schreiner at the edge

of it. The real strength there is in characters like Robert Moore, when

he is dealing with anything except women, is the romance of industry in

its first advance: a romance that has not remained. On such fighting

frontiers people always exaggerate the strong qualities the masculine

sex does possess, and always add a great many strong qualities that it

does not possess. That is, briefly, all the reason in the Brontës on

this special subject: the rest is stark unreason. It can be most clearly

seen in that sister of Charlotte Brontë’s who has achieved the real

feat of remaining as a great woman rather than a great writer. There is

really, in a narrow but intense way, a tradition of Emily Brontë: as

there is a tradition of St. Peter or Dr. Johnson. People talk as if they

had known her, apart from her works. She must have been something more

than an original person; perhaps an origin. But so far as her written

works go she enters English letters only as an original person—and

rather a narrow one. Her imagination was sometimes superhuman—always

inhuman. Wuthering Heights might have been written by an eagle. She is

the strongest instance of these strong imaginations that made the other

sex a monster: for Heathcliffe fails as a man as catastrophically as he

succeeds as a demon. I think Emily Brontë was further narrowed by the

broadness of her religious views; but never, of course, so much as

George Eliot.

In any case, it is Charlotte Brontë who enters Victorian literature. The

shortest way of stating her strong contribution is, I think, this: that

she reached the highest romance through the lowest realism. She did not

set out with Amadis of Gaul in a forest or with Mr. Pickwick in a comic

club. She set out with herself, with her own dingy clothes, and

accidental ugliness, and flat, coarse, provincial household; and

forcibly fused all such muddy materials into a spirited fairy-tale. If

the first chapters on the home and school had not proved how heavy and

hateful sanity can be, there would really be less point in the

insanity of Mr. Rochester’s wife—or the not much milder insanity of

Mrs. Rochester’s husband. She discovered the secret of hiding the

sensational in the commonplace: and Jane Eyre remains the best of her

books (better even than Villette) because while it is a human document

written in blood, it is also one of the best blood-and-thunder detective

stories in the world.

But while Emily Brontë was as unsociable as a storm at midnight, and

while Charlotte Brontë was at best like that warmer and more domestic

thing, a house on fire—they do connect themselves with the calm of

George Eliot, as the forerunners of many later developments of the

feminine advance. Many forerunners (if it comes to that) would have felt

rather ill if they had seen the things they foreran. This notion of a

hazy anticipation of after history has been absurdly overdone: as when

men connect Chaucer with the Reformation; which is like connecting Homer

with the Syracusan Expedition. But it is to some extent true that all

these great Victorian women had a sort of unrest in their souls. And the

proof of it is that (after what I will claim to call the healthier time

of Dickens and Thackeray) it began to be admitted by the great Victorian

men. If there had not been something in that irritation, we should

hardly have had to speak in these pages of Diana of the Crossways or

of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. To what this strange and very local sex

war has been due I shall not ask, because I have no answer. That it was

due to votes or even little legal inequalities about marriage, I feel

myself here too close to realities even to discuss. My own guess is that

it has been due to the great neglect of the military spirit by the male

Victorians. The woman felt obscurely that she was still running her

mortal risk, while the man was not still running his. But I know nothing

about it; nor does anybody else.

In so short a book on so vast, complex and living a subject, it is

impossible to drop even into the second rank of good authors, whose name

is legion; but it is impossible to leave that considerable female force

in fiction which has so largely made the very nature of the modern

novel, without mentioning two names which almost brought that second

rank up to the first rank. They were at utterly opposite poles. The one

succeeded by being a much mellower and more Christian George Eliot; the

other succeeded by being a much more mad and unchristian Emily Brontë.

But Mrs. Oliphant and the author calling herself “Ouida” both forced

themselves well within the frontier of fine literature. _The Beleaguered

City_ is literature in its highest sense; the other works of its author

tend to fall into fiction in its best working sense. Mrs. Oliphant was

infinitely saner in that city of ghosts than the cosmopolitan Ouida ever

was in any of the cities of men. Mrs. Oliphant would never have dared to

discover, either in heaven or hell, such a thing as a hairbrush with its

back encrusted with diamonds. But though Ouida was violent and weak

where Mrs. Oliphant might have been mild and strong, her own triumphs

were her own. She had a real power of expressing the senses through her

style; of conveying the very heat of blue skies or the bursting of

palpable pomegranates. And just as Mrs. Oliphant transfused her more

timid Victorian tales with a true and intense faith in the Christian

mystery—so Ouida, with infinite fury and infinite confusion of

thought, did fill her books with Byron and the remains of the French

Revolution. In the track of such genius there has been quite an

accumulation of true talent as in the children’s tales of Mrs. Ewing,

the historical tales of Miss Yonge, the tales of Mrs. Molesworth, and so

on. On a general review I do not think I have been wrong in taking the

female novelists first. I think they gave its special shape, its

temporary twist, to the Victorian novel.

Nevertheless it is a shock (I almost dare to call it a relief) to come

back to the males. It is the more abrupt because the first name that

must be mentioned derives directly from the mere maleness of the Sterne

and Smollett novel. I have already spoken of Dickens as the most homely

and instinctive, and therefore probably the heaviest, of all the

onslaughts made on the central Victorian satisfaction. There is

therefore the less to say of him here, where we consider him only as a

novelist; but there is still much more to say than can even conceivably

be said. Dickens, as we have stated, inherited the old comic, rambling

novel from Smollett and the rest. Dickens, as we have also stated,

consented to expurgate that novel. But when all origins and all

restraints have been defined and allowed for, the creature that came out

was such as we shall not see again. Smollett was coarse; but Smollett

was also cruel. Dickens was frequently horrible; he was never cruel. The

art of Dickens was the most exquisite of arts: it was the art of

enjoying everybody. Dickens, being a very human writer, had to be a very

human being; he had his faults and sensibilities in a strong degree; and

I do not for a moment maintain that he enjoyed everybody in his daily

life. But he enjoyed everybody in his books: and everybody has enjoyed

everybody in those books even till to-day. His books are full of baffled

villains stalking out or cowardly bullies kicked downstairs. But the

villains and the cowards are such delightful people that the reader

always hopes the villain will put his head through a side window and

make a last remark; or that the bully will say one thing more, even from

the bottom of the stairs. The reader really hopes this; and he cannot

get rid of the fancy that the author hopes so too. I cannot at the

moment recall that Dickens ever killed a comic villain, except Quilp,

who was deliberately made even more villainous than comic. There can be

no serious fears for the life of Mr. Wegg in the muckcart; though Mr.

Pecksniff fell to be a borrower of money, and Mr. Mantalini to turning a

mangle, the human race has the comfort of thinking they are still alive:

and one might have the rapture of receiving a begging letter from Mr.

Pecksniff, or even of catching Mr. Mantalini collecting the washing, if

one always lurked about on Monday mornings. This sentiment (the true

artist will be relieved to hear) is entirely unmoral. Mrs. Wilfer

deserved death much more than Mr. Quilp, for she had succeeded in

poisoning family life persistently, while he was (to say the least of

it) intermittent in his domesticity. But who can honestly say he does

not hope Mrs. Wilfer is still talking like Mrs. Wilfer—especially if it

is only in a book? This is the artistic greatness of Dickens, before and

after which there is really nothing to be said. He had the power of

creating people, both possible and impossible, who were simply precious

and priceless people; and anything subtler added to that truth really

only weakens it.

The mention of Mrs. Wilfer (whom the heart is loth to leave) reminds one

of the only elementary ethical truth that is essential in the study of

Dickens. That is that he had broad or universal sympathies in a sense

totally unknown to the social reformers who wallow in such phrases.

Dickens (unlike the social reformers) really did sympathise with every

sort of victim of every sort of tyrant. He did truly pray for all who

are desolate and oppressed. If you try to tie him to any cause narrower

than that Prayer Book definition, you will find you have shut out half

his best work. If, in your sympathy for Mrs. Quilp, you call Dickens the

champion of downtrodden woman, you will suddenly remember Mr. Wilfer,

and find yourself unable to deny the existence of downtrodden man. If in

your sympathy for Mr. Rouncewell you call Dickens the champion of a

manly middle-class Liberalism against Chesney Wold, you will suddenly

remember Stephen Blackpool—and find yourself unable to deny that Mr.

Rouncewell might be a pretty insupportable cock on his own dung-hill. If

in your sympathy for Stephen Blackpool you call Dickens a Socialist (as

does Mr. Pugh), and think of him as merely heralding the great

Collectivist revolt against Victorian Individualism and Capitalism,

which seemed so clearly to be the crisis at the end of this epoch—you

will suddenly remember the agreeable young Barnacle at the

Circumlocution Office: and you will be unable, for very shame, to

assert that Dickens would have trusted the poor to a State Department.

Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of men in the weak

modern way; he was the brotherhood of men, and knew it was a brotherhood

in sin as well as in aspiration. And he was not only larger than the old

factions he satirised; he was larger than any of our great social

schools that have gone forward since he died.

The seemingly quaint custom of comparing Dickens and Thackeray existed

in their own time, and no one will dismiss it with entire disdain who

remembers that the Victorian tradition was domestic and genuine, even

when it was hoodwinked and unworldly. There must have been some reason

for making this imaginary duel between two quite separate and quite

amiable acquaintances. And there is, after all, some reason for it. It

is not, as was once cheaply said, that Thackeray went in for truth, and

Dickens for mere caricature. There is a huge accumulation of truth,

down to the smallest detail, in Dickens: he seems sometimes a mere

mountain of facts. Thackeray, in comparison, often seems quite careless

and elusive; almost as if he did not quite know where all his characters

were. There is a truth behind the popular distinction; but it lies much

deeper. Perhaps the best way of stating it is this: that Dickens used

reality, while aiming at an effect of romance; while Thackeray used the

loose language and ordinary approaches of romance, while aiming at an

effect of reality. It was the special and splendid business of Dickens

to introduce us to people who would have been quite incredible if he had

not told us so much truth about them. It was the special and not less

splendid task of Thackeray to introduce us to people whom we knew

already. Paradoxically, but very practically, it followed that his

introductions were the longer of the two. When we hear of Aunt Betsy

Trotwood, we vividly envisage everything about her, from her gardening

gloves to her seaside residence, from her hard, handsome face to her

tame lunatic laughing at the bedroom window. It is all so minutely true

that she must be true also. We only feel inclined to walk round the

English coast until we find that particular garden and that particular

aunt. But when we turn from the aunt of Copperfield to the uncle of

Pendennis, we are more likely to run round the coast trying to find a

watering-place where he isn’t than one where he is. The moment one sees

Major Pendennis, one sees a hundred Major Pendennises. It is not a

matter of mere realism. Miss Trotwood’s bonnet and gardening tools and

cupboard full of old-fashioned bottles are quite as true in the

materialistic way as the Major’s cuffs and corner table and toast and

newspaper. Both writers are realistic: but Dickens writes realism in

order to make the incredible credible. Thackeray writes it in order to

make us recognise an old friend. Whether we shall be pleased to meet the

old friend is quite another matter: I think we should be better pleased

to meet Miss Trotwood, and find, as David Copperfield did, a new friend,

a new world. But we recognise Major Pendennis even when we avoid him.

Henceforth Thackeray can count on our seeing him from his wig to his

well-blacked boots whenever he chooses to say “Major Pendennis paid a

call.” Dickens, on the other hand, had to keep up an incessant

excitement about his characters; and no man on earth but he could have

kept it up.

It may be said, in approximate summary, that Thackeray is the novelist

of memory—of our memories as well as his own. Dickens seems to expect

all his characters, like amusing strangers arriving at lunch: as if they

gave him not only pleasure, but surprise. But Thackeray is everybody’s

past—is everybody’s youth. Forgotten friends flit about the passages of

dreamy colleges and unremembered clubs; we hear fragments of unfinished

conversations, we see faces without names for an instant, fixed for ever

in some trivial grimace: we smell the strong smell of social cliques

now quite incongruous to us; and there stir in all the little rooms at

once the hundred ghosts of oneself.

For this purpose Thackeray was equipped with a singularly easy and

sympathetic style, carved in slow soft curves where Dickens hacked out

his images with a hatchet. There was a sort of avuncular indulgence

about his attitude; what he called his “preaching” was at worst a sort

of grumbling, ending with the sentiment that boys will be boys and that

there’s nothing new under the sun. He was not really either a cynic or a

censor morum; but (in another sense than Chaucer’s) a gentle pardoner:

having seen the weaknesses he is sometimes almost weak about them. He

really comes nearer to exculpating Pendennis or Ethel Newcome than any

other author, who saw what he saw, would have been. The rare wrath of

such men is all the more effective; and there are passages in _Vanity

Fair_ and still more in The Book of Snobs, where he does make the

dance of wealth and fashion look stiff and monstrous, like a Babylonian

masquerade. But he never quite did it in such a way as to turn the

course of the Victorian Age.

It may seem strange to say that Thackeray did not know enough of the

world; yet this was the truth about him in large matters of the

philosophy of life, and especially of his own time. He did not know the

way things were going: he was too Victorian to understand the Victorian

epoch. He did not know enough ignorant people to have heard the news. In

one of his delightful asides he imagines two little clerks commenting

erroneously on the appearance of Lady Kew or Sir Brian Newcome in the

Park, and says: “How should Jones and Brown, who are not, _vous

comprenez, du monde_, understand these mysteries?” But I think Thackeray

knew quite as little about Jones and Brown as they knew about Newcome

and Kew; his world was le monde. Hence he seemed to take it for

granted that the Victorian compromise would last; while Dickens (who

knew his Jones and Brown) had already guessed that it would not.

Thackeray did not realise that the Victorian platform was a moving

platform. To take but one instance, he was a Radical like Dickens; all

really representative Victorians, except perhaps Tennyson, were

Radicals. But he seems to have thought of all reform as simple and

straightforward and all of a piece; as if Catholic Emancipation, the New

Poor Law, Free Trade and the Factory Acts and Popular Education were all

parts of one almost self-evident evolution of enlightenment. Dickens,

being in touch with the democracy, had already discovered that the

country had come to a dark place of divided ways and divided counsels.

In Hard Times he realised Democracy at war with Radicalism; and

became, with so incompatible an ally as Ruskin, not indeed a Socialist,

but certainly an anti-Individualist. In Our Mutual Friend he felt the

strength of the new rich, and knew they had begun to transform the

aristocracy, instead of the aristocracy transforming them. He knew that

Veneering had carried off Twemlow in triumph. He very nearly knew what

we all know to-day: that, so far from it being possible to plod along

the progressive road with more votes and more Free Trade, England must

either sharply become very much more democratic or as rapidly become

very much less so.

There gathers round these two great novelists a considerable group of

good novelists, who more or less mirror their mid-Victorian mood. Wilkie

Collins may be said to be in this way a lesser Dickens and Anthony

Trollope a lesser Thackeray. Wilkie Collins is chiefly typical of his

time in this respect: that while his moral and religious conceptions

were as mechanical as his carefully constructed fictitious conspiracies,

he nevertheless informed the latter with a sort of involuntary mysticism

which dealt wholly with the darker side of the soul. For this was one

of the most peculiar of the problems of the Victorian mind. The idea of

the supernatural was perhaps at as low an ebb as it had ever

been—certainly much lower than it is now. But in spite of this, and in

spite of a certain ethical cheeriness that was almost de rigueur—the

strange fact remains that the only sort of supernaturalism the

Victorians allowed to their imaginations was a sad supernaturalism. They

might have ghost stories, but not saints’ stories. They could trifle

with the curse or unpardoning prophecy of a witch, but not with the

pardon of a priest. They seem to have held (I believe erroneously) that

the supernatural was safest when it came from below. When we think (for

example) of the uncountable riches of religious art, imagery, ritual and

popular legend that has clustered round Christmas through all the

Christian ages, it is a truly extraordinary thing to reflect that

Dickens (wishing to have in The Christmas Carol a little happy

supernaturalism by way of a change) actually had to make up a mythology

for himself. Here was one of the rare cases where Dickens, in a real and

human sense, did suffer from the lack of culture. For the rest, Wilkie

Collins is these two elements: the mechanical and the mystical; both

very good of their kind. He is one of the few novelists in whose case it

is proper and literal to speak of his “plots.” He was a plotter; he went

about to slay Godfrey Ablewhite as coldly and craftily as the Indians

did. But he also had a sound though sinister note of true magic; as in

the repetition of the two white dresses in The Woman in White; or of

the dreams with their double explanations in Armadale. His ghosts do

walk. They are alive; and walk as softly as Count Fosco, but as solidly.

Finally, The Moonstone is probably the best detective tale in the

world.

Anthony Trollope, a clear and very capable realist, represents rather

another side of the Victorian spirit of comfort; its leisureliness, its

love of detail, especially of domestic detail; its love of following

characters and kindred from book to book and from generation to

generation. Dickens very seldom tried this latter experiment, and then

(as in Master Humphrey’s Clock) unsuccessfully; those magnesium blazes

of his were too brilliant and glaring to be indefinitely prolonged. But

Thackeray was full of it; and we often feel that the characters in _The

Newcomes_ or Philip might legitimately complain that their talk and

tale are being perpetually interrupted and pestered by people out of

other books. Within his narrower limits, Trollope was a more strict and

masterly realist than Thackeray, and even those who would call his

personages “types” would admit that they are as vivid as characters. It

was a bustling but a quiet world that he described: politics before the

coming of the Irish and the Socialists; the Church in the lull between

the Oxford Movement and the modern High Anglican energy. And it is

notable in the Victorian spirit once more that though his clergymen are

all of them real men and many of them good men, it never really occurs

to us to think of them as the priests of a religion.

Charles Reade may be said to go along with these; and Disraeli and even

Kingsley; not because these three very different persons had anything

particular in common, but because they all fell short of the first rank

in about the same degree. Charles Reade had a kind of cold coarseness

about him, not morally but artistically, which keeps him out of the best

literature as such: but he is of importance to the Victorian development

in another way; because he has the harsher and more tragic note that has

come later in the study of our social problems. He is the first of the

angry realists. Kingsley’s best books may be called boys’ books. There

is a real though a juvenile poetry in Westward Ho! and though that

narrative, historically considered, is very much of a lie, it is a good,

thundering honest lie. There are also genuinely eloquent things in

Hypatia, and a certain electric atmosphere of sectarian excitement

that Kingsley kept himself in, and did know how to convey. He said he

wrote the book in his heart’s blood. This is an exaggeration, but there

is a truth in it; and one does feel that he may have relieved his

feelings by writing it in red ink. As for Disraeli, his novels are able

and interesting considered as everything except novels, and are an

important contribution precisely because they are written by an alien

who did not take our politics so seriously as Trollope did. They are

important again as showing those later Victorian changes which men like

Thackeray missed. Disraeli did do something towards revealing the

dishonesty of our politics—even if he had done a good deal towards

bringing it about.

Between this group and the next there hovers a figure very hard to

place; not higher in letters than these, yet not easy to class with

them; I mean Bulwer Lytton. He was no greater than they were; yet

somehow he seems to take up more space. He did not, in the ultimate

reckoning, do anything in particular: but he was a figure; rather as

Oscar Wilde was later a figure. You could not have the Victorian Age

without him. And this was not due to wholly superficial things like his

dandyism, his dark, sinister good looks and a great deal of the mere

polished melodrama that he wrote. There was something in his all-round

interests; in the variety of things he tried; in his half-aristocratic

swagger as poet and politician, that made him in some ways a real

touchstone of the time. It is noticeable about him that he is always

turning up everywhere and that he brings other people out, generally in

a hostile spirit. His Byronic and almost Oriental ostentation was used

by the young Thackeray as something on which to sharpen his new razor of

Victorian common sense. His pose as a dilettante satirist inflamed the

execrable temper of Tennyson, and led to those lively comparisons to a

bandbox and a lion in curlpapers. He interposed the glove of warning and

the tear of sensibility between us and the proper ending of _Great

Expectations_. Of his own books, by far the best are the really charming

comedies about The Caxtons and Kenelm Chillingly; none of his other

works have a high literary importance now, with the possible exception

of A Strange Story; but his Coming Race is historically interesting

as foreshadowing those novels of the future which were afterwards such a

weapon of the Socialists. Lastly, there was an element indefinable about

Lytton, which often is in adventurers; which amounts to a suspicion that

there was something in him after all. It rang out of him when he said to

the hesitating Crimean Parliament: “Destroy your Government and save

your army.”

With the next phase of Victorian fiction we enter a new world; the

later, more revolutionary, more continental, freer but in some ways

weaker world in which we live to-day. The subtle and sad change that

was passing like twilight across the English brain at this time is very

well expressed in the fact that men have come to mention the great name

of Meredith in the same breath as Mr. Thomas Hardy. Both writers,

doubtless, disagreed with the orthodox religion of the ordinary English

village. Most of us have disagreed with that religion until we made the

simple discovery that it does not exist. But in any age where ideas

could be even feebly disentangled from each other, it would have been

evident at once that Meredith and Hardy were, intellectually speaking,

mortal enemies. They were much more opposed to each other than Newman

was to Kingsley; or than Abelard was to St. Bernard. But then they

collided in a sceptical age, which is like colliding in a London fog.

There can never be any clear controversy in a sceptical age.

Nevertheless both Hardy and Meredith did mean something; and they did

mean diametrically opposite things. Meredith was perhaps the only man

in the modern world who has almost had the high honour of rising out of

the low estate of a Pantheist into the high estate of a Pagan. A Pagan

is a person who can do what hardly any person for the last two thousand

years could do: a person who can take Nature naturally. It is due to

Meredith to say that no one outside a few of the great Greeks has ever

taken Nature so naturally as he did. And it is also due to him to say

that no one outside Colney Hatch ever took Nature so unnaturally as it

was taken in what Mr. Hardy has had the blasphemy to call Wessex Tales.

This division between the two points of view is vital; because the turn

of the nineteenth century was a very sharp one; by it we have reached

the rapids in which we find ourselves to-day.

Meredith really is a Pantheist. You can express it by saying that God is

the great All: you can express it much more intelligently by saying that

Pan is the great god. But there is some sense in it, and the sense is

this: that some people believe that this world is sufficiently good at

bottom for us to trust ourselves to it without very much knowing why. It

is the whole point in most of Meredith’s tales that there is something

behind us that often saves us when we understand neither it nor

ourselves. He sometimes talked mere intellectualism about women: but

that is because the most brilliant brains can get tired. Meredith’s

brain was quite tired when it wrote some of its most quoted and least

interesting epigrams: like that about passing Seraglio Point, but not

doubling Cape Turk. Those who can see Meredith’s mind in that are with

those who can see Dickens’ mind in Little Nell. Both were chivalrous

pronouncements on behalf of oppressed females: neither has any earthly

meaning as ideas.

But what Meredith did do for women was not to emancipate them (which

means nothing) but to express them, which means a great deal. And he

often expressed them right, even when he expressed himself wrong. Take,

for instance, that phrase so often quoted: “Woman will be the last thing

civilised by man.” Intellectually it is something worse than false; it

is the opposite of what he was always attempting to say. So far from

admitting any equality in the sexes, it logically admits that a man may

use against a woman any chains or whips he has been in the habit of

using against a tiger or a bear. He stood as the special champion of

female dignity: but I cannot remember any author, Eastern or Western,

who has so calmly assumed that man is the master and woman merely the

material, as Meredith really does in this phrase. Any one who knows a

free woman (she is generally a married woman) will immediately be

inclined to ask two simple and catastrophic questions, first: “Why

should woman be civilised?” and, second: “Why, if she is to be

civilised, should she be civilised by man?” In the mere intellectualism

of the matter, Meredith seems to be talking the most brutal sex

mastery: he, at any rate, has not doubled Cape Turk, nor even passed

Seraglio Point. Now why is it that we all really feel that this

Meredithian passage is not so insolently masculine as in mere logic it

would seem? I think it is for this simple reason: that there is

something about Meredith making us feel that it is not woman he

disbelieves in, but civilisation. It is a dark undemonstrated feeling

that Meredith would really be rather sorry if woman were civilised by

man—or by anything else. When we have got that, we have got the real

Pagan—the man that does believe in Pan.

It is proper to put this philosophic matter first, before the æsthetic

appreciation of Meredith, because with Meredith a sort of passing bell

has rung and the Victorian orthodoxy is certainly no longer safe.

Dickens and Carlyle, as we have said, rebelled against the orthodox

compromise: but Meredith has escaped from it. Cosmopolitanism,

Socialism, Feminism are already in the air; and Queen Victoria has

begun to look like Mrs. Grundy. But to escape from a city is one thing:

to choose a road is another. The free-thinker who found himself outside

the Victorian city, found himself also in the fork of two very different

naturalistic paths. One of them went upwards through a tangled but

living forest to lonely but healthy hills: the other went down to a

swamp. Hardy went down to botanise in the swamp, while Meredith climbed

towards the sun. Meredith became, at his best, a sort of daintily

dressed Walt Whitman: Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding

and blaspheming over the village idiot. It is largely because the

free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they

want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their

small but sincere movement has failed.

For the duel is deadly; and any agnostic who wishes to be anything more

than a Nihilist must sympathise with one version of nature or the

other. The God of Meredith is impersonal; but he is often more healthy

and kindly than any of the persons. That of Thomas Hardy is almost made

personal by the intense feeling that he is poisonous. Nature is always

coming in to save Meredith’s women; Nature is always coming in to betray

and ruin Hardy’s. It has been said that if God had not existed it would

have been necessary to invent Him. But it is not often, as in Mr.

Hardy’s case, that it is necessary to invent Him in order to prove how

unnecessary (and undesirable) He is. But Mr. Hardy is anthropomorphic

out of sheer atheism. He personifies the universe in order to give it a

piece of his mind. But the fight is unequal for the old philosophical

reason: that the universe had already given Mr. Hardy a piece of its

mind to fight with. One curious result of this divergence in the two

types of sceptic is this: that when these two brilliant novelists break

down or blow up or otherwise lose for a moment their artistic

self-command, they are both equally wild, but wild in opposite

directions. Meredith shows an extravagance in comedy which, if it were

not so complicated, every one would call broad farce. But Mr. Hardy has

the honour of inventing a new sort of game, which may be called the

extravagance of depression. The placing of the weak lover and his new

love in such a place that they actually see the black flag announcing

that Tess has been hanged is utterly inexcusable in art and probability;

it is a cruel practical joke. But it is a practical joke at which even

its author cannot brighten up enough to laugh.

But it is when we consider the great artistic power of these two

writers, with all their eccentricities, that we see even more clearly

that free-thought was, as it were, a fight between finger-posts. For it

is the remarkable fact that it was the man who had the healthy and manly

outlook who had the crabbed and perverse style; it was the man who had

the crabbed and perverse outlook who had the healthy and manly style.

The reader may well have complained of paradox when I observed above

that Meredith, unlike most neo-Pagans, did in his way take Nature

naturally. It may be suggested, in tones of some remonstrance, that

things like “though pierced by the cruel acerb,” or “thy fleetingness is

bigger in the ghost,” or “her gabbling grey she eyes askant,” or “sheer

film of the surface awag” are not taking Nature naturally. And this is

true of Meredith’s style, but it is not true of his spirit; nor even,

apparently, of his serious opinions. In one of the poems I have quoted

he actually says of those who live nearest to that Nature he was always

praising—

“Have they but held her laws and nature dear,

They mouth no sentence of inverted wit”;

which certainly was what Meredith himself was doing most of the time.

But a similar paradox of the combination of plain tastes with twisted

phrases can also be seen in Browning. Something of the same can be seen

in many of the cavalier poets. I do not understand it: it may be that

the fertility of a cheerful mind crowds everything, so that the tree is

entangled in its own branches; or it may be that the cheerful mind cares

less whether it is understood or not; as a man is less articulate when

he is humming than when he is calling for help.

Certainly Meredith suffers from applying a complex method to men and

things he does not mean to be complex; nay, honestly admires for being

simple. The conversations between Diana and Redworth fail of their full

contrast because Meredith can afford the twopence for Diana coloured,

but cannot afford the penny for Redworth plain. Meredith’s ideals were

neither sceptical nor finicky: but they can be called insufficient. He

had, perhaps, over and above his honest Pantheism two convictions

profound enough to be called prejudices. He was probably of Welsh

blood, certainly of Celtic sympathies, and he set himself more swiftly

though more subtly than Ruskin or Swinburne to undermining the enormous

complacency of John Bull. He also had a sincere hope in the strength of

womanhood, and may be said, almost without hyperbole, to have begotten

gigantic daughters. He may yet suffer for his chivalric interference as

many champions do. I have little doubt that when St. George had killed

the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess. But certainly neither

of these two vital enthusiasms touched the Victorian trouble. The

disaster of the modern English is not that they are not Celtic, but that

they are not English. The tragedy of the modern woman is not that she is

not allowed to follow man, but that she follows him far too slavishly.

This conscious and theorising Meredith did not get very near his problem

and is certainly miles away from ours. But the other Meredith was a

creator; which means a god. That is true of him which is true of so

different a man as Dickens, that all one can say of him is that he is

full of good things. A reader opening one of his books feels like a

schoolboy opening a hamper which he knows to have somehow cost a hundred

pounds. He may be more bewildered by it than by an ordinary hamper; but

he gets the impression of a real richness of thought; and that is what

one really gets from such riots of felicity as Evan Harrington or

Harry Richmond. His philosophy may be barren, but he was not. And the

chief feeling among those that enjoy him is a mere wish that more people

could enjoy him too.

I end here upon Hardy and Meredith; because this parting of the ways to

open optimism and open pessimism really was the end of the Victorian

peace. There are many other men, very nearly as great, on whom I might

delight to linger: on Shorthouse, for instance, who in one way goes with

Mrs. Browning or Coventry Patmore. I mean that he has a wide culture,

which is called by some a narrow religion. When we think what even the

best novels about cavaliers have been (written by men like Scott or

Stevenson) it is a wonderful thing that the author of John Inglesant

could write a cavalier romance in which he forgot Cromwell but

remembered Hobbes. But Shorthouse is outside the period in fiction in

the same sort of way in which Francis Thompson is outside it in poetry.

He did not accept the Victorian basis. He knew too much.

There is one more matter that may best be considered here, though

briefly: it illustrates the extreme difficulty of dealing with the

Victorian English in a book like this, because of their eccentricity;

not of opinions, but of character and artistic form. There are several

great Victorians who will not fit into any of the obvious categories I

employ; because they will not fit into anything, hardly into the world

itself. Where Germany or Italy would relieve the monotony of mankind by

paying serious respect to an artist, or a scholar, or a patriotic

warrior, or a priest—it was always the instinct of the English to do it

by pointing out a Character. Dr. Johnson has faded as a poet or a

critic, but he survives as a Character. Cobbett is neglected

(unfortunately) as a publicist and pamphleteer, but he is remembered as

a Character. Now these people continued to crop up through the Victorian

time; and each stands so much by himself that I shall end these pages

with a profound suspicion that I have forgotten to mention a Character

of gigantic dimensions. Perhaps the best example of such eccentrics is

George Borrow; who sympathised with unsuccessful nomads like the gipsies

while every one else sympathised with successful nomads like the Jews;

who had a genius like the west wind for the awakening of wild and casual

friendships and the drag and attraction of the roads. But whether George

Borrow ought to go into the section devoted to philosophers, or the

section devoted to novelists, or the section devoted to liars, nobody

else has ever known, even if he did.

But the strongest case of this Victorian power of being abruptly

original in a corner can be found in two things: the literature meant

merely for children and the literature meant merely for fun. It is true

that these two very Victorian things often melted into each other (as

was the way of Victorian things), but not sufficiently to make it safe

to mass them together without distinction. Thus there was George

Macdonald, a Scot of genius as genuine as Carlyle’s; he could write

fairy-tales that made all experience a fairy-tale. He could give the

real sense that every one had the end of an elfin thread that must at

last lead them into Paradise. It was a sort of optimist Calvinism. But

such really significant fairy-tales were accidents of genius. Of the

Victorian Age as a whole it is true to say that it did discover a new

thing; a thing called Nonsense. It may be doubted whether this thing was

really invented to please children. Rather it was invented by old

people trying to prove their first childhood, and sometimes succeeding

only in proving their second. But whatever else the thing was, it was

English and it was individual. Lewis Carroll gave mathematics a holiday:

he carried logic into the wild lands of illogicality. Edward Lear, a

richer, more romantic and therefore more truly Victorian buffoon,

improved the experiment. But the more we study it, the more we shall, I

think, conclude that it reposed on something more real and profound in

the Victorians than even their just and exquisite appreciation of

children. It came from the deep Victorian sense of humour.

It may appear, because I have used from time to time the only possible

phrases for the case, that I mean the Victorian Englishman to appear as

a blockhead, which means an unconscious buffoon. To all this there is a

final answer: that he was also a conscious buffoon—and a successful

one. He was a humorist; and one of the best humorists in Europe. That

which Goethe had never taught the Germans, Byron did manage to teach the

English—the duty of not taking him seriously. The strong and shrewd

Victorian humour appears in every slash of the pencil of Charles Keene;

in every undergraduate inspiration of Calverley or “Q.” or J. K. S. They

had largely forgotten both art and arms: but the gods had left them

laughter.

But the final proof that the Victorians were alive by this laughter, can

be found in the fact they could manage and master for a moment even the

cosmopolitan modern theatre. They could contrive to put “The Bab

Ballads” on the stage. To turn a private name into a public epithet is a

thing given to few: but the word “Gilbertian” will probably last longer

than the name Gilbert.

It meant a real Victorian talent; that of exploding unexpectedly and

almost, as it seemed, unintentionally. Gilbert made good jokes by the

thousand; but he never (in his best days) made the joke that could

possibly have been expected of him. This is the last essential of the

Victorian. Laugh at him as a limited man, a moralist, conventionalist,

an opportunist, a formalist. But remember also that he was really a

humorist; and may still be laughing at you.

CHAPTER III

THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS

What was really unsatisfactory in Victorian literature is something much

easier to feel than to state. It was not so much a superiority in the

men of other ages to the Victorian men. It was a superiority of

Victorian men to themselves. The individual was unequal. Perhaps that is

why the society became unequal: I cannot say. They were lame giants; the

strongest of them walked on one leg a little shorter than the other. A

great man in any age must be a common man, and also an uncommon man.

Those that are only uncommon men are perverts and sowers of pestilence.

But somehow the great Victorian man was more and less than this. He was

at once a giant and a dwarf. When he has been sweeping the sky in

circles infinitely great, he suddenly shrivels into something

indescribably small. There is a moment when Carlyle turns suddenly from

a high creative mystic to a common Calvinist. There are moments when

George Eliot turns from a prophetess into a governess. There are also

moments when Ruskin turns into a governess, without even the excuse of

sex. But in all these cases the alteration comes as a thing quite abrupt

and unreasonable. We do not feel this acute angle anywhere in Homer or

in Virgil or in Chaucer or in Shakespeare or in Dryden; such things as

they knew they knew. It is no disgrace to Homer that he had not

discovered Britain; or to Virgil that he had not discovered America; or

to Chaucer that he had not discovered the solar system; or to Dryden

that he had not discovered the steam-engine. But we do most frequently

feel, with the Victorians, that the very vastness of the number of

things they know illustrates the abrupt abyss of the things they do not

know. We feel, in a sort of way, that it is a disgrace to a man like

Carlyle when he asks the Irish why they do not bestir themselves and

re-forest their country: saying not a word about the soaking up of every

sort of profit by the landlords which made that and every other Irish

improvement impossible. We feel that it is a disgrace to a man like

Ruskin when he says, with a solemn visage, that building in iron is ugly

and unreal, but that the weightiest objection is that there is no

mention of it in the Bible; we feel as if he had just said he could find

no hair-brushes in Habakkuk. We feel that it is a disgrace to a man

like Thackeray when he proposes that people should be forcibly prevented

from being nuns, merely because he has no fixed intention of becoming a

nun himself. We feel that it is a disgrace to a man like Tennyson,

when he talks of the French revolutions, the huge crusades that had

recreated the whole of his civilisation, as being “no graver than a

schoolboy’s barring out.” We feel that it is a disgrace to a man like

Browning to make spluttering and spiteful puns about the names Newman,

Wiseman, and Manning. We feel that it is a disgrace to a man like

Newman when he confesses that for some time he felt as if he couldn’t

come in to the Catholic Church, because of that dreadful Mr. Daniel

O’Connell, who had the vulgarity to fight for his own country. We feel

that it is a disgrace to a man like Dickens, when he makes a blind

brute and savage out of a man like St. Dunstan; it sounds as if it were

not Dickens talking but Dombey. We feel it is a disgrace to a man like

Swinburne, when he has a Jingo fit and calls the Boer children in the

concentration camps “Whelps of treacherous dams whom none save we have

spared to starve and slay”: we feel that Swinburne, for the first time,

really has become an immoral and indecent writer. All this is a certain

odd provincialism peculiar to the English in that great century: they

were in a kind of pocket; they appealed to too narrow a public opinion;

I am certain that no French or German men of the same genius made such

remarks. Renan was the enemy of the Catholic Church; but who can imagine

Renan writing of it as Kingsley or Dickens did? Taine was the enemy of

the French Revolution; but who can imagine Taine talking about it as

Tennyson or Newman talked? Even Matthew Arnold, though he saw this peril

and prided himself on escaping it, did not altogether escape it. There

must be (to use an Irishism) something shallow in the depths of any man

who talks about the Zeitgeist as if it were a living thing.

But this defect is very specially the key to the case of the two great

Victorian poets, Tennyson and Browning; the two spirited or beautiful

tunes, so to speak, to which the other events marched or danced. It was

especially so of Tennyson, for a reason which raises some of the most

real problems about his poetry. Tennyson, of course, owed a great deal

to Virgil. There is no question of plagiarism here; a debt to Virgil is

like a debt to Nature. But Tennyson was a provincial Virgil. In such

passages as that about the schoolboy’s barring out he might be called a

suburban Virgil. I mean that he tried to have the universal balance of

all the ideas at which the great Roman had aimed: but he hadn’t got hold

of all the ideas to balance. Hence his work was not a balance of truths,

like the universe. It was a balance of whims; like the British

Constitution. It is intensely typical of Tennyson’s philosophical temper

that he was almost the only Poet Laureate who was not ludicrous. It is

not absurd to think of Tennyson as tuning his harp in praise of Queen

Victoria: that is, it is not absurd in the same sense as Chaucer’s harp

hallowed by dedication to Richard II or Wordsworth’s harp hallowed by

dedication to George IV is absurd. Richard’s court could not properly

appreciate either Chaucer’s daisies or his “devotion.” George IV would

not have gone pottering about Helvellyn in search of purity and the

simple annals of the poor. But Tennyson did sincerely believe in the

Victorian compromise; and sincerity is never undignified. He really did

hold a great many of the same views as Queen Victoria, though he was

gifted with a more fortunate literary style. If Dickens is Cobbett’s

democracy stirring in its grave, Tennyson is the exquisitely ornamental

extinguisher on the flame of the first revolutionary poets. England has

settled down; England has become Victorian. The compromise was

interesting, it was national and for a long time it was successful:

there is still a great deal to be said for it. But it was as freakish

and unphilosophic, as arbitrary and untranslatable, as a beggar’s

patched coat or a child’s secret language. Now it is here that Browning

had a certain odd advantage over Tennyson; which has, perhaps, somewhat

exaggerated his intellectual superiority to him. Browning’s eccentric

style was more suitable to the poetry of a nation of eccentrics; of

people for the time being removed far from the centre of intellectual

interests. The hearty and pleasant task of expressing one’s intense

dislike of something one doesn’t understand is much more poetically

achieved by saying, in a general way “Grrr—you swine!” than it is by

laboured lines such as “the red fool-fury of the Seine.” We all feel

that there is more of the man in Browning here; more of Dr. Johnson or

Cobbett. Browning is the Englishman taking himself wilfully, following

his nose like a bull-dog, going by his own likes and dislikes. We cannot

help feeling that Tennyson is the Englishman taking himself

seriously—an awful sight. One’s memory flutters unhappily over a

certain letter about the Papal Guards written by Sir Willoughby

Patterne. It is here chiefly that Tennyson suffers by that very

Virgilian loveliness and dignity of diction which he put to the service

of such a small and anomalous national scheme. Virgil had the best news

to tell as well as the best words to tell it in. His world might be

sad; but it was the largest world one could live in before the coming of

Christianity. If he told the Romans to spare the vanquished and to war

down the mighty, at least he was more or less well informed about who

were mighty and who were vanquished. But when Tennyson wrote verses

like—

“Of freedom in her regal seat,

Of England; not the schoolboy heat,

The blind hysterics of the Celt”

he quite literally did not know one word of what he was talking about;

he did not know what Celts are, or what hysterics are, or what freedom

was, or what regal was or even of what England was—in the living Europe

of that time.

His religious range was very much wider and wiser than his political;

but here also he suffered from treating as true universality a thing

that was only a sort of lukewarm local patriotism. Here also he

suffered by the very splendour and perfection of his poetical powers. He

was quite the opposite of the man who cannot express himself; the

inarticulate singer who dies with all his music in him. He had a great

deal to say; but he had much more power of expression than was wanted

for anything he had to express. He could not think up to the height of

his own towering style.

For whatever else Tennyson was, he was a great poet; no mind that feels

itself free, that is, above the ebb and flow of fashion, can feel

anything but contempt for the later effort to discredit him in that

respect. It is true that, like Browning and almost every other Victorian

poet, he was really two poets. But it is just to him to insist that in

his case (unlike Browning’s) both the poets were good. The first is more

or less like Stevenson in metre; it is a magical luck or skill in the

mere choice of words. “Wet sands marbled with moon and cloud”—“Flits by

the sea-blue bird of March”—“Leafless ribs and iron horns”—“When the

long dun wolds are ribbed with snow”—in all these cases one word is the

keystone of an arch which would fall into ruin without it. But there are

other strong phrases that recall not Stevenson but rather their common

master, Virgil—“Tears from the depths of some divine despair”—“There

is fallen a splendid tear from the passion-flower at the gate”—“Was a

great water; and the moon was full”—“God made Himself an awful rose of

dawn.” These do not depend on a word but on an idea: they might even be

translated. It is also true, I think, that he was first and last a lyric

poet. He was always best when he expressed himself shortly. In long

poems he had an unfortunate habit of eventually saying very nearly the

opposite of what he meant to say. I will take only two instances of what

I mean. In the Idylls of the King, and in In Memoriam (his two

sustained and ambitious efforts), particular phrases are always flashing

out the whole fire of the truth; the truth that Tennyson meant. But

owing to his English indolence, his English aristocratic

irresponsibility, his English vagueness in thought, he always managed to

make the main poem mean exactly what he did not mean. Thus, these two

lines which simply say that

“Lancelot was the first in tournament,

But Arthur mightiest in the battle-field”

do really express what he meant to express about Arthur being after all

“the highest, yet most human too; not Lancelot, nor another.” But as his

hero is actually developed, we have exactly the opposite impression;

that poor old Lancelot, with all his faults, was much more of a man than

Arthur. He was a Victorian in the bad as well as the good sense; he

could not keep priggishness out of long poems. Or again, take the case

of In Memoriam. I will quote one verse (probably incorrectly) which

has always seemed to me splendid, and which does express what the whole

poem should express—but hardly does.

“That we may lift from out the dust,

A voice as unto him that hears

A cry above the conquered years

Of one that ever works, and trust.”

The poem should have been a cry above the conquered years. It might well

have been that if the poet could have said sharply at the end of it, as

a pure piece of dogma, “I’ve forgotten every feature of the man’s face:

I know God holds him alive.” But under the influence of the mere

leisurely length of the thing, the reader does rather receive the

impression that the wound has been healed only by time; and that the

victor hours can boast that this is the man that loved and lost, but

all he was is overworn. This is not the truth; and Tennyson did not

intend it for the truth. It is simply the result of the lack of

something militant, dogmatic and structural in him: whereby he could not

be trusted with the trail of a very long literary process without

entangling himself like a kitten playing cat’s-cradle.

Browning, as above suggested, got on much better with eccentric and

secluded England because he treated it as eccentric and secluded; a

place where one could do what one liked. To a considerable extent he did

do what he liked; arousing not a few complaints; and many doubts and

conjectures as to why on earth he liked it. Many comparatively

sympathetic persons pondered upon what pleasure it could give any man to

write Sordello or rhyme “end-knot” to “offend not.” Nevertheless he

was no anarchist and no mystagogue; and even where he was defective, his

defect has commonly been stated wrongly. The two chief charges against

him were a contempt for form unworthy of an artist, and a poor pride in

obscurity. The obscurity is true, though not, I think, the pride in it;

but the truth about this charge rather rises out of the truth about the

other. The other charge is not true. Browning cared very much for form;

he cared very much for style. You may not happen to like his style; but

he did. To say that he had not enough mastery over form to express

himself perfectly like Tennyson or Swinburne is like criticising the

griffin of a mediæval gargoyle without even knowing that it is a

griffin; treating it as an infantile and unsuccessful attempt at a

classical angel. A poet indifferent to form ought to mean a poet who did

not care what form he used as long as he expressed his thoughts. He

might be a rather entertaining sort of poet; telling a smoking-room

story in blank verse or writing a hunting-song in the Spenserian stanza;

giving a realistic analysis of infanticide in a series of triolets; or

proving the truth of Immortality in a long string of limericks. Browning

certainly had no such indifference. Almost every poem of Browning,

especially the shortest and most successful ones, was moulded or graven

in some special style, generally grotesque, but invariably deliberate.

In most cases whenever he wrote a new song he wrote a new kind of song.

The new lyric is not only of a different metre, but of a different

shape. No one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as

that horrible one beginning “John, Master of the Temple of God,” with

its weird choruses and creepy prose directions. No one, not even

Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as Pisgah-sights. No

one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _Time’s

Revenges_. No one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same

style as Meeting at Night and Parting at Morning. No one, not even

Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _The Flight of the

Duchess_, or in the same style as The Grammarian’s Funeral, or in the

same style as A Star, or in the same style as that astounding lyric

which begins abruptly “Some people hang pictures up.” These metres and

manners were not accidental; they really do suit the sort of spiritual

experiment Browning was making in each case. Browning, then, was not

chaotic; he was deliberately grotesque. But there certainly was, over

and above this grotesqueness, a perversity and irrationality about the

man which led him to play the fool in the middle of his own poems; to

leave off carving gargoyles and simply begin throwing stones. His

curious complicated puns are an example of this: Hood had used the pun

to make a sentence or a sentiment especially pointed and clear. In

Browning the word with two meanings seems to mean rather less, if

anything, than the word with one. It also applies to his trick of

setting himself to cope with impossible rhymes. It may be fun, though it

is not poetry, to try rhyming to ranunculus; but even the fun

presupposes that you do rhyme to it; and I will affirm, and hold under

persecution, that “Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle-us” does not rhyme to

it.

The obscurity, to which he must in a large degree plead guilty, was,

curiously enough, the result rather of the gay artist in him than the

deep thinker. It is patience in the Browning students; in Browning it

was only impatience. He wanted to say something comic and energetic and

he wanted to say it quick. And, between his artistic skill in the

fantastic and his temperamental turn for the abrupt, the idea sometimes

flashed past unseen. But it is quite an error to suppose that these are

the dark mines containing his treasure. The two or three great and true

things he really had to say he generally managed to say quite simply.

Thus he really did want to say that God had indeed made man and woman

one flesh; that the sex relation was religious in this real sense that

even in our sin and despair we take it for granted and expect a sort of

virtue in it. The feelings of the bad husband about the good wife, for

instance, are about as subtle and entangled as any matter on this earth;

and Browning really had something to say about them. But he said it in

some of the plainest and most unmistakable words in all literature; as

lucid as a flash of lightning. “Pompilia, will you let them murder me?”

Or again, he did really want to say that death and such moral terrors

were best taken in a military spirit; he could not have said it more

simply than: “I was ever a fighter; one fight more, the best and the

last.” He did really wish to say that human life was unworkable unless

immortality were implied in it every other moment; he could not have

said it more simply: “leave now to dogs and apes; Man has for ever.” The

obscurities were not merely superficial, but often covered quite

superficial ideas. He was as likely as not to be most unintelligible of

all in writing a compliment in a lady’s album. I remember in my boyhood

(when Browning kept us awake like coffee) a friend reading out the poem

about the portrait to which I have already referred, reading it in that

rapid dramatic way in which this poet must be read. And I was profoundly

puzzled at the passage where it seemed to say that the cousin

disparaged the picture, “while John scorns ale.” I could not think what

this sudden teetotalism on the part of John had to do with the affair,

but I forgot to ask at the time and it was only years afterwards that,

looking at the book, I found it was “John’s corns ail,” a very

Browningesque way of saying he winced. Most of Browning’s obscurity is

of that sort—the mistakes are almost as quaint as misprints—and the

Browning student, in that sense, is more a proof reader than a disciple.

For the rest his real religion was of the most manly, even the most

boyish sort. He is called an optimist; but the word suggests a

calculated contentment which was not in the least one of his vices. What

he really was was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure

rather than a scheme. He did not explain evil, far less explain it away;

he enjoyed defying it. He was a troubadour even in theology and

metaphysics: like the Jongleurs de Dieu of St. Francis. He may be said

to have serenaded heaven with a guitar, and even, so to speak, tried to

climb there with a rope ladder. Thus his most vivid things are the

red-hot little love lyrics, or rather, little love dramas. He did one

really original and admirable thing: he managed the real details of

modern love affairs in verse, and love is the most realistic thing in

the world. He substituted the street with the green blind for the faded

garden of Watteau, and the “blue spirt of a lighted match” for the

monotony of the evening star.

Before leaving him it should be added that he was fitted to deepen the

Victorian mind, but not to broaden it. With all his Italian sympathies

and Italian residence, he was not the man to get Victorian England out

of its provincial rut: on many things Kingsley himself was not so

narrow. His celebrated wife was wider and wiser than he in this sense;

for she was, however one-sidedly, involved in the emotions of central

European politics. She defended Louis Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel; and

intelligently, as one conscious of the case against them both. As to

why it now seems simple to defend the first Italian King, but absurd to

defend the last French Emperor—well, the reason is sad and simple. It

is concerned with certain curious things called success and failure, and

I ought to have considered it under the heading of The Book of Snobs.

But Elizabeth Barrett, at least, was no snob: her political poems have

rather an impatient air, as if they were written, and even published,

rather prematurely—just before the fall of her idol. These old

political poems of hers are too little read to-day; they are amongst the

most sincere documents on the history of the times, and many modern

blunders could be corrected by the reading of them. And Elizabeth

Barrett had a strength really rare among women poets; the strength of

the phrase. She excelled in her sex, in epigram, almost as much as

Voltaire in his. Pointed phrases like: “Martyrs by the pang without the

palm”—or “Incense to sweeten a crime and myrrh to embitter a curse,”

these expressions, which are witty after the old fashion of the conceit,

came quite freshly and spontaneously to her quite modern mind. But the

first fact is this, that these epigrams of hers were never so true as

when they turned on one of the two or three pivots on which contemporary

Europe was really turning. She is by far the most European of all the

English poets of that age; all of them, even her own much greater

husband, look local beside her. Tennyson and the rest are nowhere. Take

any positive political fact, such as the final fall of Napoleon.

Tennyson wrote these profoundly foolish lines—

“He thought to quell the stubborn hearts of oak

Madman!”

as if the defeat of an English regiment were a violation of the laws of

Nature. Mrs. Browning knew no more facts about Napoleon, perhaps, than

Tennyson did; but she knew the truth. Her epigram on Napoleon’s fall is

in one line

“And kings crept out again to feel the sun.”

Talleyrand would have clapped his horrible old hands at that. Her

instinct about the statesman and the soldier was very like Jane Austen’s

instinct for the gentleman and the man. It is not unnoticeable that as

Miss Austen spent most of her life in a village, Miss Barrett spent most

of her life on a sofa. The godlike power of guessing seems (for some

reason I do not understand) to grow under such conditions. Unfortunately

Mrs. Browning was like all the other Victorians in going a little lame,

as I have roughly called it, having one leg shorter than the other. But

her case was, in one sense, extreme. She exaggerated both ways. She was

too strong and too weak, or (as a false sex philosophy would express it)

too masculine and too feminine. I mean that she hit the centre of

weakness with almost the same emphatic precision with which she hit the

centre of strength. She could write finally of the factory wheels

“grinding life down from its mark,” a strong and strictly true

observation. Unfortunately she could also write of Euripides “with his

droppings of warm tears.” She could write in A Drama of Exile, a

really fine exposition, touching the later relation of Adam and the

animals: unfortunately the tears were again turned on at the wrong

moment at the main; and the stage direction commands a silence, only

broken by the dropping of angel’s tears. How much noise is made by

angel’s tears? Is it a sound of emptied buckets, or of garden hose, or

of mountain cataracts? That is the sort of question which Elizabeth

Barrett’s extreme love of the extreme was always tempting people to ask.

Yet the question, as asked, does her a heavy historical injustice; we

remember all the lines in her work which were weak enough to be called

“womanly,” we forget the multitude of strong lines that are strong

enough to be called “manly”; lines that Kingsley or Henley would have

jumped for joy to print in proof of their manliness. She had one of the

peculiar talents of true rhetoric, that of a powerful concentration. As

to the critic who thinks her poetry owed anything to the great poet who

was her husband, he can go and live in the same hotel with the man who

can believe that George Eliot owed anything to the extravagant

imagination of Mr. George Henry Lewes. So far from Browning inspiring or

interfering, he did not in one sense interfere enough. Her real

inferiority to him in literature is that he was consciously while she

was unconsciously absurd.

It is natural, in the matter of Victorian moral change, to take

Swinburne as the next name here. He is the only poet who was also, in

the European sense, on the spot; even if, in the sense of the Gilbertian

song, the spot was barred. He also knew that something rather crucial

was happening to Christendom; he thought it was getting unchristened. It

is even a little amusing, indeed, that these two Pro-Italian poets

almost conducted a political correspondence in rhyme. Mrs. Browning

sternly reproached those who had ever doubted the good faith of the King

of Sardinia, whom she acclaimed as being truly a king. Swinburne,

lyrically alluding to her as “Sea-eagle of English feather,” broadly

hinted that the chief blunder of that wild fowl had been her support of

an autocratic adventurer: “calling a crowned man royal, that was no more

than a king.” But it is not fair, even in this important connection, to

judge Swinburne by Songs Before Sunrise. They were songs before a

sunrise that has never turned up. Their dogmatic assertions have for a

long time past stared starkly at us as nonsense. As, for instance, the

phrase “Glory to Man in the Highest, for man is the master of things”;

after which there is evidently nothing to be said, except that it is

not true. But even where Swinburne had his greater grip, as in that

grave and partly just poem Before a Crucifix, Swinburne, the most

Latin, the most learned, the most largely travelled of the Victorians,

still knows far less of the facts than even Mrs. Browning. The whole of

the poem, Before a Crucifix, breaks down by one mere mistake. It

imagines that the French or Italian peasants who fell on their knees

before the Crucifix did so because they were slaves. They fell on their

knees because they were free men, probably owning their own farms.

Swinburne could have found round about Putney plenty of slaves who had

no crucifixes: but only crucifixions.

When we come to ethics and philosophy, doubtless we find Swinburne in

full revolt, not only against the temperate idealism of Tennyson, but

against the genuine piety and moral enthusiasm of people like Mrs.

Browning. But here again Swinburne is very English, nay, he is very

Victorian, for his revolt is illogical. For the purposes of intelligent

insurrection against priests and kings, Swinburne ought to have

described the natural life of man, free and beautiful, and proved from

this both the noxiousness and the needlessness of such chains.

Unfortunately Swinburne rebelled against Nature first and then tried to

rebel against religion for doing exactly the same thing that he had

done. His songs of joy are not really immoral; but his songs of sorrow

are. But when he merely hurls at the priest the assertion that flesh is

grass and life is sorrow, he really lays himself open to the restrained

answer, “So I have ventured, on various occasions, to remark.” When he

went forth, as it were, as the champion of pagan change and pleasure, he

heard uplifted the grand choruses of his own Atalanta, in his rear,

refusing hope.

The splendid diction that blazes through the whole of that drama, that

still dances exquisitely in the more lyrical Poems and Ballads, makes

some marvellous appearances in Songs Before Sunrise, and then mainly

falters and fades away, is, of course, the chief thing about Swinburne.

The style is the man; and some will add that it does not, thus

unsupported, amount to much of a man. But the style itself suffers some

injustice from those who would speak thus. The views expressed are often

quite foolish and often quite insincere; but the style itself is a

manlier and more natural thing than is commonly made out. It is not in

the least languorous or luxurious or merely musical and sensuous, as one

would gather from both the eulogies and the satires, from the conscious

and the unconscious imitations. On the contrary, it is a sort of

fighting and profane parody of the Old Testament; and its lines are made

of short English words like the short Roman swords. The first line of

one of his finest poems, for instance, runs, “I have lived long enough

to have seen one thing, that love hath an end.” In that sentence only

one small “e” gets outside the monosyllable. Through all his

interminable tragedies, he was fondest of lines like—

“If ever I leave off to honour you

God give me shame; I were the worst churl born.”

The dramas were far from being short and dramatic; but the words really

were. Nor was his verse merely smooth; except his very bad verse, like

“the lilies and languors of virtue, to the raptures and roses of vice,”

which both, in cheapness of form and foolishness of sentiment, may be

called the worst couplet in the world’s literature. In his real poetry

(even in the same poem) his rhythm and rhyme are as original and

ambitious as Browning; and the only difference between him and Browning

is, not that he is smooth and without ridges, but that he always crests

the ridge triumphantly and Browning often does not—

“On thy bosom though many a kiss be,

There are none such as knew it of old.

Was it Alciphron once or Arisbe,

Male ringlets or feminine gold,

That thy lips met with under the statue

Whence a look shot out sharp after thieves

From the eyes of the garden-god at you

Across the fig-leaves.”

Look at the rhymes in that verse, and you will see they are as stiff a

task as Browning’s: only they are successful. That is the real strength

of Swinburne—a style. It was a style that nobody could really imitate;

and least of all Swinburne himself, though he made the attempt all

through his later years. He was, if ever there was one, an inspired

poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover

who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes.

With Swinburne we step into the circle of that later Victorian influence

which was very vaguely called Æsthetic. Like all human things, but

especially Victorian things, it was not only complex but confused.

Things in it that were at one on the emotional side were flatly at war

on the intellectual. In the section of the painters, it was the allies

or pupils of Ruskin, pious, almost painfully exact, and copying mediæval

details rather for their truth than their beauty. In the section of the

poets it was pretty loose, Swinburne being the leader of the revels. But

there was one great man who was in both sections, a painter and a poet,

who may be said to bestride the chasm like a giant. It is in an odd and

literal sense true that the name of Rossetti is important here, for the

name implies the nationality. I have loosely called Carlyle and the

Brontës the romance from the North; the nearest to a general definition

of the Æsthetic movement is to call it the romance from the South. It is

that warm wind that had never blown so strong since Chaucer, standing in

his cold English April, had smelt the spring in Provence. The Englishman

has always found it easier to get inspiration from the Italians than

from the French; they call to each other across that unconquered castle

of reason. Browning’s Englishman in Italy, Browning’s _Italian in

England_, were both happier than either would have been in France.

Rossetti was the Italian in England, as Browning was the Englishman in

Italy; and the first broad fact about the artistic revolution Rossetti

wrought is written when we have written his name. But if the South lets

in warmth or heat, it also lets in hardness. The more the orange tree is

luxuriant in growth, the less it is loose in outline. And it is exactly

where the sea is slightly warmer than marble that it looks slightly

harder. This, I think, is the one universal power behind the Æsthetic

and Pre-Raphaelite movements, which all agreed in two things at least:

strictness in the line and strength, nay violence, in the colour.

Rossetti was a remarkable man in more ways than one; he did not succeed

in any art; if he had he would probably never have been heard of. It was

his happy knack of half failing in both the arts that has made him a

success. If he had been as good a poet as Tennyson, he would have been a

poet who painted pictures. If he had been as good a painter as

Burne-Jones, he would have been a painter who wrote poems. It is odd to

note on the very threshold of the extreme art movement that this great

artist largely succeeded by not defining his art. His poems were too

pictorial. His pictures were too poetical. That is why they really

conquered the cold satisfaction of the Victorians, because they did mean

something, even if it was a small artistic thing.

Rossetti was one with Ruskin, on the one hand, and Swinburne on the

other, in reviving the decorative instinct of the Middle Ages. While

Ruskin, in letters only, praised that decoration Rossetti and his

friends repeated it. They almost made patterns of their poems. That

frequent return of the refrain which was foolishly discussed by

Professor Nordau was, in Rossetti’s case, of such sadness as sometimes

to amount to sameness. The criticism on him, from a mediæval point of

view, is not that he insisted on a chorus, but that he could not insist

on a jolly chorus. Many of his poems were truly mediæval, but they would

have been even more mediæval if he could ever have written such a

refrain as “Tally Ho!” or even “Tooral-ooral” instead of “Tall Troy’s on

fire.” With Rossetti goes, of course, his sister, a real poet, though

she also illustrated that Pre-Raphaelite’s conflict of views that

covered their coincidence of taste. Both used the angular outlines, the

burning transparencies, the fixed but still unfathomable symbols of the

great mediæval civilisation; but Rossetti used the religious imagery (on

the whole) irreligiously, Christina Rossetti used it religiously but (on

the whole) so to make it seem a narrower religion.

One poet, or, to speak more strictly, one poem, belongs to the same

general atmosphere and impulse as Swinburne; the free but languid

atmosphere of later Victorian art. But this time the wind blew from

hotter and heavier gardens than the gardens of Italy. Edward

Fitzgerald, a cultured eccentric, a friend of Tennyson, produced what

professed to be a translation of the Persian poet Omar, who wrote

quatrains about wine and roses and things in general. Whether the

Persian original, in its own Persian way, was greater or less than this

version I must not discuss here, and could not discuss anywhere. But it

is quite clear that Fitzgerald’s work is much too good to be a good

translation. It is as personal and creative a thing as ever was written;

and the best expression of a bad mood, a mood that may, for all I know,

be permanent in Persia, but was certainly at this time particularly

fashionable in England. In the technical sense of literature it is one

of the most remarkable achievements of that age; as poetical as

Swinburne and far more perfect. In this verbal sense its most arresting

quality is a combination of something haunting and harmonious that flows

by like a river or a song, with something else that is compact and

pregnant like a pithy saying picked out in rock by the chisel of some

pagan philosopher. It is at once a tune that escapes and an inscription

that remains. Thus, alone among the reckless and romantic verses that

first rose in Coleridge or Keats, it preserves something also of the wit

and civilisation of the eighteenth century. Lines like “a Muezzin from

the tower of darkness cries,” or “Their mouths are stopped with dust”

are successful in the same sense as “Pinnacled dim in the intense inane”

or “Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.” But—

“Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before

I swore; but was I sober when I swore?”

is equally successful in the same sense as—

“Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer

And without sneering teach the rest to sneer.”

It thus earned a right to be considered the complete expression of that

scepticism and sensual sadness into which later Victorian literature was

more and more falling away: a sort of bible of unbelief. For a cold fit

had followed the hot fit of Swinburne, which was of a feverish sort: he

had set out to break down without having, or even thinking he had, the

rudiments of rebuilding in him; and he effected nothing national even in

the way of destruction. The Tennysonians still walked past him as primly

as a young ladies’ school—the Browningites still inked their eyebrows

and minds in looking for the lost syntax of Browning; while Browning

himself was away looking for God, rather in the spirit of a truant boy

from their school looking for birds’ nests. The nineteenth-century

sceptics did not really shake the respectable world and alter it, as the

eighteenth-century sceptics had done; but that was because the

eighteenth-century sceptics were something more than sceptics, and

believed in Greek tragedies, in Roman laws, in the Republic. The

Swinburnian sceptics had nothing to fight for but a frame of mind; and

when ordinary English people listened to it, they came to the conclusion

that it was a frame of mind they would rather hear about than

experience. But these later poets did, so to speak, spread their soul in

all the empty spaces; weaker brethren, disappointed artists, unattached

individuals, very young people, were sapped or swept away by these

songs; which, so far as any particular sense in them goes, were almost

songs without words. It is because there is something which is after all

indescribably manly, intellectual, firm about Fitzgerald’s way of

phrasing the pessimism that he towers above the slope that was tumbling

down to the decadents. But it is still pessimism, a thing unfit for a

white man; a thing like opium, that may often be a poison and sometimes

a medicine, but never a food for us, who are driven by an inner command

not only to think but to live, not only to live but to grow, and not

only to grow but to build.

And, indeed, we see the insufficiency of such sad extremes even in the

next name among the major poets; we see the Swinburnian parody of

mediævalism, the inverted Catholicism of the decadents, struggling to

get back somehow on its feet. The æsthetic school had, not quite

unjustly, the name of mere dilettanti. But it is fair to say that in the

next of them, a workman and a tradesman, we already feel something of

that return to real issues leading up to the real revolts that broke up

Victorianism at last. In the mere art of words, indeed, William Morris

carried much further than Swinburne or Rossetti the mere imitation of

stiff mediæval ornament. The other mediævalists had their modern

moments; which were (if they had only known it) much more mediæval than

their mediæval moments. Swinburne could write—

“We shall see Buonaparte the bastard

Kick heels with his throat in a rope.”

One has an uneasy feeling that William Morris would have written

something like—

“And the kin of the ill king Bonaparte

Hath a high gallows for all his part.”

Rossetti could, for once in a way, write poetry about a real woman and

call her “Jenny.” One has a disturbed suspicion that Morris would have

called her “Jehanne.”

But all that seems at first more archaic and decorative about Morris

really arose from the fact that he was more virile and real than either

Swinburne or Rossetti. It arose from the fact that he really was, what

he so often called himself, a craftsman. He had enough masculine

strength to be tidy: that is, after the masculine manner, tidy about his

own trade. If his poems were too like wallpapers, it was because he

really could make wallpapers. He knew that lines of poetry ought to be

in a row, as palings ought to be in a row; and he knew that neither

palings nor poetry looks any the worse for being simple or even severe.

In a sense Morris was all the more creative because he felt the hard

limits of creation as he would have felt them if he were not working in

words but in wood; and if he was unduly dominated by the mere

conventions of the mediævals, it was largely because they were (whatever

else they were) the very finest fraternity of free workmen the world is

ever likely to see.

The very things that were urged against Morris are in this sense part of

his ethical importance; part of the more promising and wholesome turn he

was half unconsciously giving to the movement of modern art. His hazier

fellow-Socialists blamed him because he made money; but this was at

least in some degree because he made other things to make money: it was

part of the real and refreshing fact that at last an æsthete had

appeared who could make something. If he was a capitalist, at least he

was what later capitalists cannot or will not be—something higher than

a capitalist, a tradesman. As compared with aristocrats like Swinburne

or aliens like Rossetti, he was vitally English and vitally Victorian.

He inherits some of that paradoxical glory which Napoleon gave

reluctantly to a nation of shopkeepers. He was the last of that nation;

he did not go out golfing: like that founder of the artistic shopman,

Samuel Richardson, “he kept his shop, and his shop kept him.” The

importance of his Socialism can easily be exaggerated. Among other

lesser points, he was not a Socialist; he was a sort of Dickensian

anarchist. His instinct for titles was always exquisite. It is part of

his instinct of decoration: for on a page the title always looks

important and the printed mass of matter a mere dado under it. And no

one had ever nobler titles than The Roots of the Mountains or _The

Wood at the End of the World_. The reader feels he hardly need read the

fairy-tale because the title is so suggestive. But, when all is said, he

never chose a better title than that of his social Utopia, _News from

Nowhere_. He wrote it while the last Victorians were already embarked on

their bold task of fixing the future—of narrating to-day what has

happened to-morrow. They named their books by cold titles suggesting

straight corridors of marble—titles like Looking Backward. But Morris

was an artist as well as an anarchist. News from Nowhere is an

irresponsible title; and it is an irresponsible book. It does not

describe the problem solved; it does not describe wealth either wielded

by the State or divided equally among the citizens. It simply describes

an undiscovered country where every one feels good-natured all day. That

he could even dream so is his true dignity as a poet. He was the first

of the Æsthetes to smell mediævalism as a smell of the morning; and not

as a mere scent of decay.

With him the poetry that had been peculiarly Victorian practically

ends; and, on the whole, it is a happy ending. There are many other

minor names of major importance; but for one reason or other they do not

derive from the schools that had dominated this epoch as such. Thus

Thompson, the author of The City of Dreadful Night, was a fine poet;

but his pessimism combined with a close pugnacity does not follow any of

the large but loose lines of the Swinburnian age. But he was a great

person—he knew how to be democratic in the dark. Thus Coventry Patmore

was a much greater person. He was bursting with ideas, like

Browning—and truer ideas as a rule. He was as eccentric and florid and

Elizabethan as Browning; and often in moods and metres that even

Browning was never wild enough to think of. No one will ever forget the

first time he read Patmore’s hint that the cosmos is a thing that God

made huge only “to make dirt cheap”; just as nobody will ever forget the

sudden shout he uttered when he first heard Mrs. Todgers asked for the

rough outline of a wooden leg. These things are not jokes, but

discoveries. But the very fact that Patmore was, as it were, the

Catholic Browning, keeps him out of the Victorian atmosphere as such.

The Victorian English simply thought him an indecent sentimentalist, as

they did all the hot and humble religious diarists of Italy or Spain.

Something of the same fate followed the most powerful of that last

Victorian group who were called “Minor Poets.” They numbered many other

fine artists: notably Mr. William Watson, who is truly Victorian in that

he made a manly attempt to tread down the decadents and return to the

right reason of Wordsworth—

“I have not paid the world

The evil and the insolent courtesy

Of offering it my baseness as a gift.”

But none of them were able even to understand Francis Thompson; his

sky-scraping humility, his mountains of mystical detail, his occasional

and unashamed weakness, his sudden and sacred blasphemies. Perhaps the

shortest definition of the Victorian Age is that he stood outside it.

CHAPTER IV

THE BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE

If it be curiously and carefully considered it will, I think, appear

more and more true that the struggle between the old spiritual theory

and the new material theory in England ended simply in a deadlock; and a

deadlock that has endured. It is still impossible to say absolutely that

England is a Christian country or a heathen country; almost exactly as

it was impossible when Herbert Spencer began to write. Separate elements

of both sorts are alive, and even increasingly alive. But neither the

believer nor the unbeliever has the impudence to call himself the

Englishman. Certainly the great Victorian rationalism has succeeded in

doing a damage to religion. It has done what is perhaps the worst of all

damages to religion. It has driven it entirely into the power of the

religious people. Men like Newman, men like Coventry Patmore, men who

would have been mystics in any case, were driven back upon being much

more extravagantly religious than they would have been in a religious

country. Men like Huxley, men like Kingsley, men like most Victorian

men, were equally driven back on being irreligious; that is, on doubting

things which men’s normal imagination does not necessarily doubt. But

certainly the most final and forcible fact is that this war ended like

the battle of Sheriffmuir, as the poet says; they both did fight, and

both did beat, and both did run away. They have left to their

descendants a treaty that has become a dull torture. Men may believe in

immortality, and none of the men know why. Men may not believe in

miracles, and none of the men know why. The Christian Church had been

just strong enough to check the conquest of her chief citadels. The

rationalist movement had been just strong enough to conquer some of her

outposts, as it seemed, for ever. Neither was strong enough to expel the

other; and Victorian England was in a state which some call liberty and

some call lockjaw.

But the situation can be stated another way. There came a time, roughly

somewhere about 1880, when the two great positive enthusiasms of Western

Europe had for the time exhausted each other—Christianity and the

French Revolution. About that time there used to be a sad and not

unsympathetic jest going about to the effect that Queen Victoria might

very well live longer than the Prince of Wales. Somewhat in the same

way, though the republican impulse was hardly a hundred years old and

the religious impulse nearly two thousand, yet as far as England was

concerned, the old wave and the new seemed to be spent at the same time.

On the one hand Darwin, especially through the strong journalistic

genius of Huxley, had won a very wide spread though an exceedingly

vague victory. I do not mean that Darwin’s own doctrine was vague; his

was merely one particular hypothesis about how animal variety might have

arisen; and that particular hypothesis, though it will always be

interesting, is now very much the reverse of secure. But it is only in

the strictly scientific world and among strictly scientific men that

Darwin’s detailed suggestion has largely broken down. The general public

impression that he had entirely proved his case (whatever it was) was

early arrived at, and still remains. It was and is hazily associated

with the negation of religion. But (and this is the important point) it

was also associated with the negation of democracy. The same

Mid-Victorian muddle-headedness that made people think that “evolution”

meant that we need not admit the supremacy of God, also made them think

that “survival” meant that we must admit the supremacy of men. Huxley

had no hand in spreading these fallacies; he was a fair fighter; and he

told his own followers, who spoke thus, most emphatically not to play

the fool. He said most strongly that his or any theory of evolution left

the old philosophical arguments for a creator, right or wrong, exactly

where they were before. He also said most emphatically that any one who

used the argument of Nature against the ideal of justice or an equal

law, was as senseless as a gardener who should fight on the side of the

ill weeds merely because they grew apace. I wish, indeed, that in such a

rude summary as this, I had space to do justice to Huxley as a literary

man and a moralist. He had a live taste and talent for the English

tongue, which he devoted to the task of keeping Victorian rationalism

rational. He did not succeed. As so often happens when a rather

unhealthy doubt is in the atmosphere, the strongest words of their great

captain could not keep the growing crowds of agnostics back from the

most hopeless and inhuman extremes of destructive thought. Nonsense not

yet quite dead about the folly of allowing the unfit to survive began

to be more and more wildly whispered. Such helpless specimens of

“advanced thought” are, of course, quite as inconsistent with Darwinism

as they are with democracy or with any other intelligent proposition

ever offered. But these unintelligent propositions were offered; and the

ultimate result was this rather important one: that the harshness of

Utilitarianism began to turn into downright tyranny. That beautiful

faith in human nature and in freedom which had made delicate the dry air

of John Stuart Mill; that robust, romantic sense of justice which had

redeemed even the injustices of Macaulay—all that seemed slowly and

sadly to be drying up. Under the shock of Darwinism all that was good in

the Victorian rationalism shook and dissolved like dust. All that was

bad in it abode and clung like clay. The magnificent emancipation

evaporated; the mean calculation remained. One could still calculate in

clear statistical tables, how many men lived, how many men died. One

must not ask how they lived; for that is politics. One must not ask how

they died; for that is religion. And religion and politics were ruled

out of all the Later Victorian debating clubs; even including the

debating club at Westminster. What third thing they were discussing,

which was neither religion nor politics, I do not know. I have tried the

experiment of reading solidly through a vast number of their records and

reviews and discussions; and still I do not know. The only third thing I

can think of to balance religion and politics is art; and no one well

acquainted with the debates at St. Stephen’s will imagine that the art

of extreme eloquence was the cause of the confusion. None will maintain

that our political masters are removed from us by an infinite artistic

superiority in the choice of words. The politicians know nothing of

politics, which is their own affair: they know nothing of religion,

which is certainly not their affair: it may legitimately be said that

they have to do with nothing; they have reached that low and last level

where a man knows as little about his own claim, as he does about his

enemies’. In any case there can be no doubt about the effect of this

particular situation on the problem of ethics and science. The duty of

dragging truth out by the tail or the hind leg or any other corner one

can possibly get hold of, a perfectly sound duty in itself, had somehow

come into collision with the older and larger duty of knowing something

about the organism and ends of a creature; or, in the everyday phrase,

being able to make head or tail of it. This paradox pursued and

tormented the Victorians. They could not or would not see that humanity

repels or welcomes the railway-train, simply according to what people

come by it. They could not see that one welcomes or smashes the

telephone, according to what words one hears in it. They really seem to

have felt that the train could be a substitute for its own passengers;

or the telephone a substitute for its own voice.

In any case it is clear that a change had begun to pass over scientific

inquiry, of which we have seen the culmination in our own day. There had

begun that easy automatic habit, of science as an oiled and

smooth-running machine, that habit of treating things as obviously

unquestionable, when, indeed, they are obviously questionable. This

began with vaccination in the Early Victorian Age; it extended to the

early licence of vivisection in its later age; it has found a sort of

fitting foolscap, or crown of crime and folly, in the thing called

Eugenics. In all three cases the point was not so much that the pioneers

had not proved their case; it was rather that, by an unexpressed rule of

respectability, they were not required to prove it. This rather abrupt

twist of the rationalistic mind in the direction of arbitrary power,

certainly weakened the Liberal movement from within. And meanwhile it

was being weakened by heavy blows from without.

There is a week that is the turn of the year; there was a year that was

the turn of the century. About 1870 the force of the French Revolution

faltered and fell: the year that was everywhere the death of Liberal

ideas: the year when Paris fell: the year when Dickens died. While the

new foes of freedom, the sceptics and scientists, were damaging

democracy in ideas, the old foes of freedom, the emperors and the kings,

were damaging her more heavily in arms. For a moment it almost seemed

that the old Tory ring of iron, the Holy Alliance, had recombined

against France. But there was just this difference: that the Holy

Alliance was now not arguably, but almost avowedly, an Unholy Alliance.

It was an alliance between those who still thought they could deny the

dignity of man and those who had recently begun to have a bright hope of

denying even the dignity of God. Eighteenth-century Prussia was

Protestant and probably religious. Nineteenth-century Prussia was almost

utterly atheist. Thus the old spirit of liberty felt itself shut up at

both ends, that which was called progressive and that which was called

reactionary: barricaded by Bismarck with blood and iron and by Darwin by

blood and bones. The enormous depression which infects many excellent

people born about this time, probably has this cause.

It was a great calamity that the freedom of Wilkes and the faith of Dr.

Johnson fought each other. But it was an even worse calamity that they

practically killed each other. They killed each other almost

simultaneously, like Herminius and Mamilius. Liberalism (in Newman’s

sense) really did strike Christianity through headpiece and through

head; that is, it did daze and stun the ignorant and ill-prepared

intellect of the English Christian. And Christianity did smite

Liberalism through breastplate and through breast; that is, it did

succeed, through arms and all sorts of awful accidents, in piercing more

or less to the heart of the Utilitarian—and finding that he had none.

Victorian Protestantism had not head enough for the business; Victorian

Radicalism had not heart enough for the business. Down fell they dead

together, exactly as Macaulay’s Lay says, and still stood all who saw

them fall almost until the hour at which I write.

This coincident collapse of both religious and political idealism

produced a curious cold air of emptiness and real subconscious

agnosticism such as is extremely unusual in the history of mankind. It

is what Mr. Wells, with his usual verbal delicacy and accuracy, spoke of

as that ironical silence that follows a great controversy. It is what

people less intelligent than Mr. Wells meant by calling themselves _fin

de siècle_; though, of course, rationally speaking, there is no more

reason for being sad towards the end of a hundred years than towards the

end of five hundred fortnights. There was no arithmetical autumn, but

there was a spiritual one. And it came from the fact suggested in the

paragraphs above; the sense that man’s two great inspirations had

failed him together. The Christian religion was much more dead in the

eighteenth century than it was in the nineteenth century. But the

republican enthusiasm was also much more alive. If their scepticism was

cold, and their faith even colder, their practical politics were wildly

idealistic; and if they doubted the kingdom of heaven, they were

gloriously credulous about the chances of it coming on earth. In the

same way the old pagan republican feeling was much more dead in the

feudal darkness of the eleventh or twelfth centuries, than it was even a

century later; but if creative politics were at their lowest, creative

theology was almost at its highest point of energy.

The modern world, in fact, had fallen between two stools. It had fallen

between that austere old three-legged stool which was the tripod of the

cold priestess of Apollo; and that other mystical and mediæval stool

that may well be called the Stool of Repentance. It kept neither of the

two values as intensely valuable. It could not believe in the bonds that

bound men; but, then, neither could it believe in the men they bound. It

was always restrained in its hatred of slavery by a half remembrance of

its yet greater hatred of liberty. They were almost alone, I think, in

thus carrying to its extreme the negative attitude already noted in Miss

Arabella Allen. Anselm would have despised a civic crown, but he would

not have despised a relic. Voltaire would have despised a relic; but he

would not have despised a vote. We hardly find them both despised till

we come to the age of Oscar Wilde.

These years that followed on that double disillusionment were like one

long afternoon in a rich house on a rainy day. It was not merely that

everybody believed that nothing would happen; it was also that everybody

believed that anything happening was even duller than nothing happening.

It was in this stale atmosphere that a few flickers of the old

Swinburnian flame survived; and were called Art. The great men of the

older artistic movement did not live in this time; rather they lived

through it. But this time did produce an interregnum of art that had a

truth of its own; though that truth was near to being only a consistent

lie.

The movement of those called Æsthetes (as satirised in Patience) and

the movement of those afterwards called Decadents (satirised in Mr.

Street’s delightful Autobiography of a Boy) had the same captain; or

at any rate the same bandmaster. Oscar Wilde walked in front of the

first procession wearing a sunflower, and in front of the second

procession wearing a green carnation. With the æsthetic movement and its

more serious elements, I deal elsewhere; but the second appearance of

Wilde is also connected with real intellectual influences, largely

negative, indeed, but subtle and influential. The mark in most of the

arts of this time was a certain quality which those who like it would

call “uniqueness of aspect,” and those who do not like it “not quite

coming off.” I mean the thing meant something from one standpoint; but

its mark was that the smallest change of standpoint made it unmeaning

and unthinkable—a foolish joke. A beggar painted by Rembrandt is as

solid as a statue, however roughly he is sketched in; the soul can walk

all round him like a public monument. We see he would have other

aspects; and that they would all be the aspects of a beggar. Even if one

did not admit the extraordinary qualities in the painting, one would

have to admit the ordinary qualities in the sitter. If it is not a

masterpiece it is a man. But a nocturne by Whistler of mist on the

Thames is either a masterpiece or it is nothing; it is either a nocturne

or a nightmare of childish nonsense. Made in a certain mood, viewed

through a certain temperament, conceived under certain conventions, it

may be, it often is, an unreplaceable poem, a vision that may never be

seen again. But the moment it ceases to be a splendid picture it ceases

to be a picture at all. Or, again, if Hamlet is not a great tragedy it

is an uncommonly good tale. The people and the posture of affairs would

still be there even if one thought that Shakespeare’s moral attitude was

wrong. Just as one could imagine all the other sides of Rembrandt’s

beggar, so, with the mind’s eye (Horatio), one can see all four sides of

the castle of Elsinore. One might tell the tale from the point of view

of Laërtes or Claudius or Polonius or the gravedigger; and it would

still be a good tale and the same tale. But if we take a play like

Pelléas and Mélisande, we shall find that unless we grasp the

particular fairy thread of thought the poet rather hazily flings to us,

we cannot grasp anything whatever. Except from one extreme poetic point

of view, the thing is not a play; it is not a bad play, it is a mass of

clotted nonsense. One whole act describes the lovers going to look for a

ring in a distant cave when they both know they have dropped it down a

well. Seen from some secret window on some special side of the soul’s

turret, this might convey a sense of faerie futility in our human life.

But it is quite obvious that unless it called forth that one kind of

sympathy, it would call forth nothing but laughter and rotten eggs. In

the same play the husband chases his wife with a drawn sword, the wife

remarking at intervals “I am not gay.” Now there may really be an idea

in this; the idea of human misfortune coming most cruelly upon the

optimism of innocence; that the lonely human heart says, like a child at

a party, “I am not enjoying myself as I thought I should.” But it is

plain that unless one thinks of this idea (and of this idea only) the

expression is not in the least unsuccessful pathos; it is very broad and

highly successful farce. Maeterlinck and the decadents, in short, may

fairly boast of being subtle; but they must not mind if they are called

narrow.

This is the spirit of Wilde’s work and of most of the literary work done

in that time and fashion. It is, as Mr. Arthur Symons said, an attitude;

but it is an attitude in the flat, not in the round; not a statue, but

the cardboard king in a toy-theatre, which can only be looked at from

the front. In Wilde’s own poetry we have particularly a perpetually

toppling possibility of the absurd; a sense of just falling too short or

just going too far. “Plant lilies at my head” has something wrong about

it; something silly that is not there in—

“And put a grey stone at my head”

in the old ballad. But even where Wilde was right, he had a way of being

right with this excessive strain on the reader’s sympathy (and gravity)

which was the mark of all these men with a “point of view.” There is a

very sound sonnet of his in which he begins by lamenting mere anarchy,

as hostile to the art and civilisation that were his only gods; but ends

by saying—

“And yet

These Christs that die upon the barricades

God knows that I am with them—in some ways.”

Now that is really very true; that is the way a man of wide reading and

worldly experience, but not ungenerous impulses, does feel about the

mere fanatic, who is at once a nuisance to humanity and an honour to

human nature. Yet who can read that last line without feeling that Wilde

is poised on the edge of a precipice of bathos; that the phrase comes

very near to being quite startlingly silly. It is as in the case of

Maeterlinck, let the reader move his standpoint one inch nearer the

popular standpoint, and there is nothing for the thing but harsh,

hostile, unconquerable mirth. Somehow the image of Wilde lolling like an

elegant leviathan on a sofa, and saying between the whiffs of a scented

cigarette that martyrdom is martyrdom in some respects, has seized on

and mastered all more delicate considerations in the mind. It is unwise

in a poet to goad the sleeping lion of laughter.

In less dexterous hands the decadent idea, what there was of it, went

entirely to pieces, which nobody has troubled to pick up. Oddly enough

(unless this be always the Nemesis of excess) it began to be

insupportable in the very ways in which it claimed specially to be

subtle and tactful; in the feeling for different art-forms, in the

welding of subject and style, in the appropriateness of the epithet and

the unity of the mood. Wilde himself wrote some things that were not

immorality, but merely bad taste; not the bad taste of the conservative

suburbs, which merely means anything violent or shocking, but real bad

taste; as in a stern subject treated in a florid style; an over-dressed

woman at a supper of old friends; or a bad joke that nobody had time to

laugh at. This mixture of sensibility and coarseness in the man was very

curious; and I for one cannot endure (for example) his sensual way of

speaking of dead substances, satin or marble or velvet, as if he were

stroking a lot of dogs and cats. But there was a sort of power—or at

least weight—in his coarseness. His lapses were those proper to the one

good thing he really was, an Irish swashbuckler—a fighter. Some of the

Roman Emperors might have had the same luxuriousness and yet the same

courage. But the later decadents were far worse, especially the decadent

critics, the decadent illustrators—there were even decadent publishers.

And they utterly lost the light and reason of their existence: they were

masters of the clumsy and the incongruous. I will take only one example.

Aubrey Beardsley may be admired as an artist or no; he does not enter

into the scope of this book. But it is true that there is a certain

brief mood, a certain narrow aspect of life, which he renders to the

imagination rightly. It is mostly felt under white, deathly lights in

Piccadilly, with the black hollow of heaven behind shiny hats or painted

faces: a horrible impression that all mankind are masks. This being the

thing Beardsley could express (and the only thing he could express), it

is the solemn and awful fact that he was set down to illustrate Malory’s

Morte d’Arthur. There is no need to say more; taste, in the artist’s

sense, must have been utterly dead. They might as well have employed

Burne-Jones to illustrate Martin Chuzzlewit. It would not have been

more ludicrous than putting this portrayer of evil puppets, with their

thin lines like wire and their small faces like perverted children’s, to

trace against the grand barbaric forests the sin and the sorrow of

Lancelot.

To return to the chief of the decadents, I will not speak of the end of

the individual story: there was horror and there was expiation. And, as

my conscience goes at least, no man should say one word that could

weaken the horror—or the pardon. But there is one literary consequence

of the thing which must be mentioned, because it bears us on to that

much breezier movement which first began to break in upon all this

ghastly idleness—I mean the Socialist Movement. I do not mean “_De

Profundis_”; I do not think he had got to the real depths when he wrote

that book. I mean the one real thing he ever wrote: _The Ballad of

Reading Gaol_; in which we hear a cry for common justice and brotherhood

very much deeper, more democratic and more true to the real trend of the

populace to-day, than anything the Socialists ever uttered even in the

boldest pages of Bernard Shaw.

Before we pass on to the two expansive movements in which the Victorian

Age really ended, the accident of a distinguished artist is available

for estimating this somewhat cool and sad afternoon of the epoch at its

purest; not in lounging pessimism or luxurious aberrations, but in

earnest skill and a high devotion to letters. This change that had come,

like the change from a golden sunset to a grey twilight, can be very

adequately measured if we compare the insight and intricacy of Meredith

with the insight and intricacy of Mr. Henry James. The characters of

both are delicate and indisputable; but we must all have had a feeling

that the characters in Meredith are gods, but that the characters in

Henry James are ghosts. I do not mean that they are unreal: I believe in

ghosts. So does Mr. Henry James; he has written some of his very finest

literature about the little habits of these creatures. He is in the deep

sense of a dishonoured word, a Spiritualist if ever there was one. But

Meredith was a materialist as well. The difference is that a ghost is a

disembodied spirit; while a god (to be worth worrying about) must be an

embodied spirit. The presence of soul and substance together involves

one of the two or three things which most of the Victorians did not

understand—the thing called a sacrament. It is because he had a natural

affinity for this mystical materialism that Meredith, in spite of his

affectations, is a poet: and, in spite of his Victorian Agnosticism (or

ignorance) is a pious Pagan and not a mere Pantheist. Mr. Henry James is

at the other extreme. His thrill is not so much in symbol or mysterious

emblem as in the absence of interventions and protections between mind

and mind. It is not mystery: it is rather a sort of terror at knowing

too much. He lives in glass houses; he is akin to Maeterlinck in a

feeling of the nakedness of souls. None of the Meredithian things, wind

or wine or sex or stark nonsense, ever gets between Mr. James and his

prey. But the thing is a deficiency as well as a talent: we cannot but

admire the figures that walk about in his afternoon drawing-rooms; but

we have a certain sense that they are figures that have no faces.

For the rest, he is most widely known, or perhaps only most widely

chaffed, because of a literary style that lends itself to parody and is

a glorious feast for Mr. Max Beerbohm. It may be called The Hampered, or

Obstacle Race Style, in which one continually trips over commas and

relative clauses; and where the sense has to be perpetually qualified

lest it should mean too much. But such satire, however friendly, is in

some sense unfair to him; because it leaves out his sense of general

artistic design, which is not only high, but bold. This appears, I

think, most strongly in his short stories; in his long novels the reader

(or at least one reader) does get rather tired of everybody treating

everybody else in a manner which in real life would be an impossible

intellectual strain. But in his short studies there is the unanswerable

thing called real originality; especially in the very shape and point of

the tale. It may sound odd to compare him to Mr. Rudyard Kipling: but he

is like Kipling and also like Wells in this practical sense: that no one

ever wrote a story at all like the Mark of the Beast; no one ever

wrote a story at all like A Kink in Space: and in the same sense no

one ever wrote a story like The Great Good Place. It is alone in order

and species; and it is masterly. He struck his deepest note in that

terrible story, The Turn of the Screw; and though there is in the

heart of that horror a truth of repentance and religion, it is again

notable of the Victorian writers that the only supernatural note they

can strike assuredly is the tragic and almost the diabolic. Only Mr. Max

Beerbohm has been able to imagine Mr. Henry James writing about

Christmas.

Now upon this interregnum, this cold and brilliant waiting-room which

was Henry James at its highest and Wilde at its worst, there broke in

two positive movements, largely honest though essentially unhistoric and

profane, which were destined to crack up the old Victorian solidity past

repair. The first was Bernard Shaw and the Socialists: the second was

Rudyard Kipling and the Imperialists. I take the Socialists first not

because they necessarily came so in order of time, but because they were

less the note upon which the epoch actually ended.

William Morris, of whom we have already spoken, may be said to

introduce the Socialists, but rather in a social sense than a

philosophical. He was their friend, and in a sort of political way,

their father; but he was not their founder, for he would not have

believed a word of what they ultimately came to say. Nor is this the

conventional notion of the old man not keeping pace with the audacity of

the young. Morris would have been disgusted not with the wildness, but

the tameness of our tidy Fabians. He was not a Socialist, but he was a

Revolutionist; he didn’t know much more about what he was; but he knew

that. In this way, being a full-blooded fellow, he rather repeats the

genial sulkiness of Dickens. And if we take this fact about him first,

we shall find it a key to the whole movement of this time. For the one

dominating truth which overshadows everything else at this point is a

political and economic one. The Industrial System, run by a small class

of Capitalists on a theory of competitive contract, had been quite

honestly established by the early Victorians and was one of the primary

beliefs of Victorianism. The Industrial System, so run, had become

another name for hell. By Morris’s time and ever since, England has been

divided into three classes: Knaves, Fools, and Revolutionists.

History is full of forgotten controversies; and those who speak of

Socialism now have nearly all forgotten that for some time it was an

almost equal fight between Socialism and Anarchism for the leadership of

the exodus from Capitalism. It is here that Herbert Spencer comes in

logically, though not chronologically; also that much more interesting

man, Auberon Herbert. Spencer has no special place as a man of letters;

and a vastly exaggerated place as a philosopher. His real importance was

that he was very nearly an Anarchist. The indefinable greatness there is

about him after all, in spite of the silliest and smuggest limitations,

is in a certain consistency and completeness from his own point of

view. There is something mediæval, and therefore manful, about writing a

book about everything in the world. Now this simplicity expressed itself

in politics in carrying the Victorian worship of liberty to the most

ridiculous lengths; almost to the length of voluntary taxes and

voluntary insurance against murder. He tried, in short, to solve the

problem of the State by eliminating the State from it. He was resisted

in this by the powerful good sense of Huxley; but his books became

sacred books for a rising generation of rather bewildered rebels, who

thought we might perhaps get out of the mess if everybody did as he

liked.

Thus the Anarchists and Socialists fought a battle over the death-bed of

Victorian Industrialism; in which the Socialists (that is, those who

stood for increasing instead of diminishing the power of Government) won

a complete victory and have almost exterminated their enemy. The

Anarchist one meets here and there nowadays is a sad sight; he is

disappointed with the future, as well as with the past.

This victory of the Socialists was largely a literary victory; because

it was effected and popularised not only by a wit, but by a sincere wit;

and one who had the same sort of militant lucidity that Huxley had shown

in the last generation and Voltaire in the last century. A young Irish

journalist, impatient of the impoverished Protestantism and Liberalism

to which he had been bred, came out as the champion of Socialism not as

a matter of sentiment, but as a matter of common sense. The primary

position of Bernard Shaw towards the Victorian Age may be roughly

summarised thus: the typical Victorian said coolly: “Our system may not

be a perfect system, but it works.” Bernard Shaw replied, even more

coolly: “It may be a perfect system, for all I know or care. But it does

not work.” He and a society called the Fabians, which once exercised

considerable influence, followed this shrewd and sound strategic hint

to avoid mere emotional attack on the cruelty of Capitalism; and to

concentrate on its clumsiness, its ludicrous incapacity to do its own

work. This campaign succeeded, in the sense that while (in the educated

world) it was the Socialist who looked the fool at the beginning of that

campaign, it is the Anti-Socialist who looks the fool at the end of it.

But while it won the educated classes it lost the populace for ever. It

dried up those springs of blood and tears out of which all revolt must

come if it is to be anything but bureaucratic readjustment. We began

this book with the fires of the French Revolution still burning, but

burning low. Bernard Shaw was honestly in revolt in his own way: but it

was Bernard Shaw who trod out the last ember of the Great Revolution.

Bernard Shaw proceeded to apply to many other things the same sort of

hilarious realism which he thus successfully applied to the industrial

problem. He also enjoyed giving people a piece of his mind; but a piece

of his mind was a more appetising and less raw-looking object than a

piece of Hardy’s. There were many modes of revolt growing all around

him; Shaw supported them—and supplanted them. Many were pitting the

realism of war against the romance of war: they succeeded in making the

fight dreary and repulsive, but the book dreary and repulsive too. Shaw,

in Arms and the Man, did manage to make war funny as well as

frightful. Many were questioning the right of revenge or punishment; but

they wrote their books in such a way that the reader was ready to

release all mankind if he might revenge himself on the author. Shaw, in

Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, really showed at its best the merry

mercy of the pagan; that beautiful human nature that can neither rise to

penance nor sink to revenge. Many had proved that even the most

independent incomes drank blood out of the veins of the oppressed: but

they wrote it in such a style that their readers knew more about

depression than oppression. In Widowers’ Houses Shaw very nearly (but

not quite) succeeded in making a farce out of statistics. And the

ultimate utility of his brilliant interruption can best be expressed in

the very title of that play. When ages of essential European ethics have

said “widows’ houses,” it suddenly occurs to him to say “but what about

widowers’ houses?” There is a sort of insane equity about it which was

what Bernard Shaw had the power to give, and gave.

Out of the same social ferment arose a man of equally unquestionable

genius, Mr. H. G. Wells. His first importance was that he wrote great

adventure stories in the new world the men of science had discovered. He

walked on a round slippery world as boldly as Ulysses or Tom Jones had

worked on a flat one. Cyrano de Bergerac or Baron Munchausen, or other

typical men of science, had treated the moon as a mere flat silver

mirror in which Man saw his own image—the Man in the Moon. Wells

treated the moon as a globe, like our own; bringing forth monsters as

moonish as we are earthy. The exquisitely penetrating political and

social satire he afterwards wrote belongs to an age later than the

Victorian. But because, even from the beginning, his whole trend was

Socialist, it is right to place him here.

While the old Victorian ideas were being disturbed by an increasing

torture at home, they were also intoxicated by a new romance from

abroad. It did not come from Italy with Rossetti and Browning, or from

Persia with Fitzgerald: but it came from countries as remote, countries

which were (as the simple phrase of that period ran) “painted red” on

the map. It was an attempt to reform England through the newer nations;

by the criticism of the forgotten colonies, rather than of the forgotten

classes. Both Socialism and Imperialism were utterly alien to the

Victorian idea. From the point of view of a Victorian aristocrat like

Palmerston, Socialism would be the cheek of gutter snipes; Imperialism

would be the intrusion of cads. But cads are not alone concerned.

Broadly, the phase in which the Victorian epoch closed was what can only

be called the Imperialist phase. Between that and us stands a very

individual artist who must nevertheless be connected with that phase. As

I said at the beginning, Macaulay (or, rather, the mind Macaulay shared

with most of his powerful middle class) remains as a sort of pavement or

flat foundation under all the Victorians. They discussed the dogmas

rather than denied them. Now one of the dogmas of Macaulay was the dogma

of progress. A fair statement of the truth in it is not really so hard.

Investigation of anything naturally takes some little time. It takes

some time to sort letters so as to find a letter: it takes some time to

test a gas-bracket so as to find the leak; it takes some time to sift

evidence so as to find the truth. Now the curse that fell on the later

Victorians was this: that they began to value the time more than the

truth. One felt so secretarial when sorting letters that one never found

the letter; one felt so scientific in explaining gas that one never

found the leak; and one felt so judicial, so impartial, in weighing

evidence that one had to be bribed to come to any conclusion at all.

This was the last note of the Victorians: procrastination was called

progress.

Now if we look for the worst fruits of this fallacy we shall find them

in historical criticism. There is a curious habit of treating any one

who comes before a strong movement as the “forerunner” of that movement.

That is, he is treated as a sort of slave running in advance of a great

army. Obviously, the analogy really arises from St. John the Baptist,

for whom the phrase “forerunner” was rather peculiarly invented. Equally

obviously, such a phrase only applies to an alleged or real divine

event: otherwise the forerunner would be a founder. Unless Jesus had

been the Baptist’s God, He would simply have been his disciple.

Nevertheless the fallacy of the “forerunner” has been largely used in

literature. Thus men will call a universal satirist like Langland a

“morning star of the Reformation,” or some such rubbish; whereas the

Reformation was not larger, but much smaller than Langland. It was

simply the victory of one class of his foes, the greedy merchants, over

another class of his foes, the lazy abbots. In real history this

constantly occurs; that some small movement happens to favour one of the

million things suggested by some great man; whereupon the great man is

turned into the running slave of the small movement. Thus certain

sectarian movements borrowed the sensationalism without the

sacramentalism of Wesley. Thus certain groups of decadents found it

easier to imitate De Quincey’s opium than his eloquence. Unless we grasp

this plain common sense (that you or I are not responsible for what some

ridiculous sect a hundred years hence may choose to do with what we say)

the peculiar position of Stevenson in later Victorian letters cannot

begin to be understood. For he was a very universal man; and talked some

sense not only on every subject, but, so far as it is logically

possible, in every sense. But the glaring deficiencies of the Victorian

compromise had by that time begun to gape so wide that he was forced, by

mere freedom of philosophy and fancy, to urge the neglected things. And

yet this very urgency certainly brought on an opposite fever, which he

would not have liked if he had lived to understand it. He liked Kipling,

though with many healthy hesitations; but he would not have liked the

triumph of Kipling: which was the success of the politician and the

failure of the poet. Yet when we look back up the false perspective of

time, Stevenson does seem in a sense to have prepared that imperial and

downward path.

I shall not talk here, any more than anywhere else in this book, about

the “sedulous ape” business. No man ever wrote as well as Stevenson who

cared only about writing. Yet there is a sense, though a misleading one,

in which his original inspirations were artistic rather than purely

philosophical. To put the point in that curt covenanting way which he

himself could sometimes command, he thought it immoral to neglect

romance. The whole of his real position was expressed in that phrase of

one of his letters “our civilisation is a dingy ungentlemanly business:

it drops so much out of a man.” On the whole he concluded that what had

been dropped out of the man was the boy. He pursued pirates as Defoe

would have fled from them; and summed up his simplest emotions in that

touching cri de coeur “shall we never shed blood?” He did for the

penny dreadful what Coleridge had done for the penny ballad. He proved

that, because it was really human, it could really rise as near to

heaven as human nature could take it. If Thackeray is our youth,

Stevenson is our boyhood: and though this is not the most artistic

thing in him, it is the most important thing in the history of Victorian

art. All the other fine things he did were, for curious reasons, remote

from the current of his age. For instance, he had the good as well as

the bad of coming from a Scotch Calvinist’s house. No man in that age

had so healthy an instinct for the actuality of positive evil. In _The

Master of Ballantrae_ he did prove with a pen of steel, that the Devil

is a gentleman—but is none the less the Devil. It is also

characteristic of him (and of the revolt from Victorian respectability

in general) that his most blood-and-thunder sensational tale is also

that which contains his most intimate and bitter truth. _Dr. Jekyll and

Mr. Hyde_ is a double triumph; it has the outside excitement that

belongs to Conan Doyle with the inside excitement that belongs to Henry

James. Alas, it is equally characteristic of the Victorian time that

while nearly every Englishman has enjoyed the anecdote, hardly one

Englishman has seen the joke—I mean the point. You will find twenty

allusions to Jekyll and Hyde in a day’s newspaper reading. You will also

find that all such allusions suppose the two personalities to be equal,

neither caring for the other. Or more roughly, they think the book means

that man can be cloven into two creatures, good and evil. The whole stab

of the story is that man can’t: because while evil does not care for

good, good must care for evil. Or, in other words, man cannot escape

from God, because good is the God in man; and insists on omniscience.

This point, which is good psychology and also good theology and also

good art, has missed its main intention merely because it was also good

story-telling.

If the rather vague Victorian public did not appreciate the deep and

even tragic ethics with which Stevenson was concerned, still less were

they of a sort to appreciate the French finish and fastidiousness of his

style; in which he seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his

pen, like a man playing spillikins. But that style also had a quality

that could be felt; it had a military edge to it, an acies; and there

was a kind of swordsmanship about it. Thus all the circumstances led,

not so much to the narrowing of Stevenson to the romance of the fighting

spirit; but the narrowing of his influence to that romance. He had a

great many other things to say; but this was what we were willing to

hear: a reaction against the gross contempt for soldiering which had

really given a certain Chinese deadness to the Victorians. Yet another

circumstance thrust him down the same path; and in a manner not wholly

fortunate. The fact that he was a sick man immeasurably increases the

credit to his manhood in preaching a sane levity and pugnacious

optimism. But it also forbade him full familiarity with the actualities

of sport, war, or comradeship: and here and there his note is false in

these matters, and reminds one (though very remotely) of the mere

provincial bully that Henley sometimes sank to be.

For Stevenson had at his elbow a friend, an invalid like himself, a man

of courage and stoicism like himself; but a man in whom everything that

Stevenson made delicate and rational became unbalanced and blind. The

difference is, moreover, that Stevenson was quite right in claiming that

he could treat his limitation as an accident; that his medicines “did

not colour his life.” His life was really coloured out of a shilling

paint-box, like his toy-theatre: such high spirits as he had are the key

to him: his sufferings are not the key to him. But Henley’s sufferings

are the key to Henley; much must be excused him, and there is much to be

excused. The result was that while there was always a certain dainty

equity about Stevenson’s judgments, even when he was wrong, Henley

seemed to think that on the right side the wronger you were the better.

There was much that was feminine in him; and he is most understandable

when surprised in those little solitary poems which speak of emotions

mellowed, of sunset and a quiet end. Henley hurled himself into the new

fashion of praising Colonial adventure at the expense both of the

Christian and the republican traditions; but the sentiment did not

spread widely until the note was struck outside England in one of the

conquered countries; and a writer of Anglo-Indian short stories showed

the stamp of the thing called genius; that indefinable, dangerous and

often temporary thing.

For it is really impossible to criticise Rudyard Kipling as part of

Victorian literature, because he is the end of such literature. He has

many other powerful elements; an Indian element, which makes him

exquisitely sympathetic with the Indian; a vague Jingo influence which

makes him sympathetic with the man that crushes the Indian; a vague

journalistic sympathy with the men that misrepresent everything that has

happened to the Indian; but of the Victorian virtues, nothing.

All that was right or wrong in Kipling was expressed in the final

convulsion that he almost in person managed to achieve. The nearest that

any honest man can come to the thing called “impartiality” is to confess

that he is partial. I therefore confess that I think this last turn of

the Victorian Age was an unfortunate turn; much on the other side can be

said, and I hope will be said. But about the facts there can be no

question. The Imperialism of Kipling was equally remote from the

Victorian caution and the Victorian idealism: and our subject does quite

seriously end here. The world was full of the trampling of totally new

forces, gold was sighted from far in a sort of cynical romanticism: the

guns opened across Africa; and the great queen died.

---

Of what will now be the future of so separate and almost secretive an

adventure of the English, the present writer will not permit himself,

even for an instant, to prophesy. The Victorian Age made one or two

mistakes, but they were mistakes that were really useful; that is,

mistakes that were really mistaken. They thought that commerce outside a

country must extend peace: it has certainly often extended war. They

thought that commerce inside a country must certainly promote

prosperity; it has largely promoted poverty. But for them these were

experiments; for us they ought to be lessons. If we continue the

capitalist use of the populace—if we continue the capitalist use of

external arms, it will lie heavy on the living. The dishonour will not

be on the dead.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

After having surveyed the immense field presented in such a volume as

Mr. George Mair’s Modern English Literature in this series, or, more

fully, in the Cambridge History of Modern Literature, the later volume

of Chambers’ English Literature, Mr. Gosse’s _History of Modern

English Literature_, or Henry Morley’s _English Literature in the Reign

of Victoria_, the wise reader will choose some portion for closer study,

and will go straight to the originals before he has any further traffic

with critics or commentators, however able.

He will then need the aid of fuller biographies. Some Victorian Lives

are already classic, or nearly so, among them Sir G. Trevelyan’s

Macaulay, Forster’s Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell’s Charlotte Brontë,

Froude’s Carlyle, and Sir E. T. Cook’s Ruskin. With these may be

ranged the great Dictionary of National Biography. The “English Men of

Letters” Series includes H. D. Traill’s Coleridge, Ainger’s Lamb,

Trollope’s Thackeray, Leslie Stephen’s George Eliot, Herbert Paul’s

Matthew Arnold, Sir A. Lyall’s Tennyson, G. K. Chesterton’s _Robert

Browning_, and A. C. Benson’s Fitzgerald. At least two autobiographies

must be named, those of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, and, as

antidote to Newman’s Apologia, the gay self-revelations of Borrow, and

Jefferies’ Story of My Heart. Other considerable volumes are W. J.

Cross’s George Eliot, Lionel Johnson’s Art of Thomas Hardy, Mr. W. M.

Rossetti’s Dante G. Rossetti, Colvin’s R. L. Stevenson, J. W.

Mackail’s William Morris, Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,

Sir Leslie Stephen’s The Utilitarians, Buxton Forman’s _Our Living

Poets_, Edward Thomas’s Swinburne, Monypenny’s Disraeli, Dawson’s

Victorian Novelists, and Stedman’s Victorian Poets. The “Everyman”

Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature is useful for

dates.

The latter half of the second volume of Mr. F. A. Mumby’s _Letters of

Literary Men_ is devoted to the Victorian Age. There are fuller

collections of the Letters of Leigh Hunt, Thackeray, Dickens, the

Brownings, Fitzgerald, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, and more

recently the Letters of George Meredith, edited by his son.

Among the important critical writers of the period, Matthew Arnold

(Essays in Criticism, Study of Celtic Literature, etc.) stands

easily first. Others are John, now Lord, Morley (_Studies in

Literature_, etc.), Augustine Birrell (Obiter Dicta, Essays), W. E.

Henley (Views and Reviews), J. Addington Symonds (Essays), J.

Churton Collins, Richard Garnett, Stopford A. Brooke, George E. B.

Saintsbury (History of Criticism), R. H. Hutton (_Contemporary

Thought_), J. M. Robertson (Modern Humanists, Buckle, etc.), Frederic

Harrison (The Choice of Books, etc.), Andrew Lang, Walter Bagehot,

Edmund Gosse, Prof. Dowden, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir A. T. Quiller

Couch.

INDEX

Æsthetes, the, and Decadents, 218-27

Arnold, Matthew, 73-79, 87

Austen, Jane, 92, 105, 109

Bentham, 36

Blake, 20

Borrow, 151

Brontë, Charlotte, 92, 105, 110-14

----, Emily, 113

Browning, Elizabeth B., 176-82

----, R., 40-41, 159, 162-63

Byron, 22

Carlyle, 40, 49-62, 158

Carroll, Lewis, 153

Cobbett, 16-17, 88, 151

Coleridge, 20

Collins, Wilkie, 130, 132

Darwin, 38, 206-7, 209

De Quincey, 23-25, 65

Dickens, 40, 79-89, 100, 106, 119-23, 129, 131

Disraeli, 42, 135

Eliot, George, 92, 103-9, 157

Faber, 46

Fitzgerald, 192-95

French Revolution, Influence of, 18-21

Froude, 60, 62

Gaskell, Mrs., 94

Gilbert, 154

Hardy, Thomas, 138-39, 143-45

Hazlitt, 23

Henley, W. E., 247-48

Hood, Thomas, 25-27

Hughes, Tom, 73

Humour, Victorian, 152-55

Hunt, Leigh, 23

Huxley, 39-40, 205

Imperialism, 60, 239

James, Henry, 228-31

Keats, 20

Keble, 45

Kingsley, 40, 59, 64, 72, 134-35

Kipling, R., 60, 249-50

Lamb, 23

Landor, 23

Lear, Edward, 153

Literary temperament, the English, 13-16

Lytton, Bulwer, 135-37

Macaulay, 28-36, 55

Macdonald, George, 152

Maurice, F. D., 40, 73

Melbourne, Lord, 42

Meredith, George, 138-49, 228

Mill, J. S., 36-37, 55

Morris, Wm., 196-200, 232

Newman, 38, 40, 45-48, 78, 159

Novel, The Modern, 90-99

Oliphant, Mrs., 116-17

“Ouida,” 117

Oxford Movement, 42-45

Pater, Walter, 69-71

Patmore, 48, 201-2

Pre-Raphaelite School, 68, 72

Reade, Charles, 134

Rossetti, D. G. and C., 71, 188-91

Ruskin, 40, 62-8, 70, 158

Science, Victorian, 208-12

Shaw, G. B., 60, 235-38

Shelley, 22-23

Shorthouse, 149-50

Socialism, 60, 67, 122, 198, 227, 231-39

Spencer, Herbert, 75, 233-34

Stevenson, R. L., 243-49

Swinburne, 69, 159, 181-88

Tennyson, 40, 64, 160-69

Thackeray, 100, 110, 123-30, 158

Thompson, Francis, 48, 201, 202

Trollope, Anthony, 130, 132-33

Watson, Wm., 202

Wells, H. G., 238-39

Wilde, Oscar, 218-23

Women, Victorian, 91, 99, 104, 115-16, 140

CHAPTER I

THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE AND ITS ENEMIES

The previous literary life of this country had left vigorous many old

forces in the Victorian time, as in our time. Roman Britain and Mediæval

England are still not only alive but lively; for real development is not

leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from

a root. Even when we improve we never progress. For progress, the

metaphor from the road, implies a man leaving his home behind him: but

improvement means a man exalting the towers or extending the gardens of

his home. The ancient English literature was like all the several

literatures of Christendom, alike in its likeness, alike in its very

unlikeness. Like all European cultures, it was European; like all

European cultures, it was something more than European. A most marked

and unmanageable national temperament is plain in Chaucer and the

ballads of Robin Hood; in spite of deep and sometimes disastrous changes

of national policy, that note is still unmistakable in Shakespeare, in

Johnson and his friends, in Cobbett, in Dickens. It is vain to dream of

defining such vivid things; a national soul is as indefinable as a

smell, and as unmistakable. I remember a friend who tried impatiently to

explain the word “mistletoe” to a German, and cried at last, despairing,

“Well, you know holly—mistletoe’s the opposite!” I do not commend this

logical method in the comparison of plants or nations. But if he had

said to the Teuton, “Well, you know Germany—England’s the

opposite”—the definition, though fallacious, would not have been wholly

false. England, like all Christian countries, absorbed valuable elements

from the forests and the rude romanticism of the North; but, like all

Christian countries, it drank its longest literary draughts from the

classic fountains of the ancients: nor was this (as is so often loosely

thought) a matter of the mere “Renaissance.” The English tongue and

talent of speech did not merely flower suddenly into the gargantuan

polysyllables of the great Elizabethans; it had always been full of the

popular Latin of the Middle Ages. But whatever balance of blood and

racial idiom one allows, it is really true that the only suggestion that

gets near the Englishman is to hint how far he is from the German. The

Germans, like the Welsh, can sing perfectly serious songs perfectly

seriously in chorus: can with clear eyes and clear voices join together

in words of innocent and beautiful personal passion, for a false maiden

or a dead child. The nearest one can get to defining the poetic temper

of Englishmen is to say that they couldn’t do this even for beer. They

can sing in chorus, and louder than other Christians: but they must have

in their songs something, I know not what, that is at once shamefaced

and rowdy. If the matter be emotional, it must somehow be also broad,

common and comic, as “Wapping Old Stairs” and “Sally in Our Alley.” If

it be patriotic, it must somehow be openly bombastic and, as it were,

indefensible, like “Rule Britannia” or like that superb song (I never

knew its name, if it has one) that records the number of leagues from

Ushant to the Scilly Isles. Also there is a tender love-lyric called “O

Tarry Trousers” which is even more English than the heart of _The

Midsummer Night’s Dream_. But our greatest bards and sages have often

shown a tendency to rant it and roar it like true British sailors; to

employ an extravagance that is half conscious and therefore half

humorous. Compare, for example, the rants of Shakespeare with the rants

of Victor Hugo. A piece of Hugo’s eloquence is either a serious triumph

or a serious collapse: one feels the poet is offended at a smile. But

Shakespeare seems rather proud of talking nonsense: I never can read

that rousing and mounting description of the storm, where it comes to—

“Who take the ruffian billows by the top,

Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them

With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds.”

without seeing an immense balloon rising from the ground, with

Shakespeare grinning over the edge of the car, and saying, “You can’t

stop me: I am above reason now.” That is the nearest we can get to the

general national spirit, which we have now to follow through one brief

and curious but very national episode.

Three years before the young queen was crowned, William Cobbett was

buried at Farnham. It may seem strange to begin with this great

neglected name, rather than the old age of Wordsworth or the young death

of Shelley. But to any one who feels literature as human, the empty

chair of Cobbett is more solemn and significant than the throne. With

him died the sort of democracy that was a return to Nature, and which

only poets and mobs can understand. After him Radicalism is urban—and

Toryism suburban. Going through green Warwickshire, Cobbett might have

thought of the crops and Shelley of the clouds. But Shelley would have

called Birmingham what Cobbett called it—a hell-hole. Cobbett was one

with after Liberals in the ideal of Man under an equal law, a citizen of

no mean city. He differed from after Liberals in strongly affirming that

Liverpool and Leeds are mean cities.

It is no idle Hibernianism to say that towards the end of the eighteenth

century the most important event in English history happened in France.

It would seem still more perverse, yet it would be still more precise,

to say that the most important event in English history was the event

that never happened at all—the English Revolution on the lines of the

French Revolution. Its failure was not due to any lack of fervour or

even ferocity in those who would have brought it about: from the time

CAPITOLO I

IL COMPROMESSO VITTORIANO E I SUOI NEMICI

La precedente vita letteraria di questo paese aveva lasciato vigorose molte antiche

forze nel tempo vittoriano, come nel nostro tempo. La Britannia romana e la medievale

Inghilterra sono tuttora non solo vive, ma vivaci; giacché il vero sviluppo non consiste

nel lasciarsi le cose alle spalle, come lungo una strada, bensì nel trarne vita, come da

una radice. Anche quando miglioriamo, non progrediamo mai. Poiché il progresso, la

metafora tratta dalla strada, implica un uomo che si lascia la casa alle spalle: ma

il miglioramento significa un uomo che innalza le torri o amplia i giardini della

sua casa. L’antica letteratura inglese era simile a tutte le varie

letterature della Cristianità, affini nella loro somiglianza, affini nella loro stessa

dissomiglianza. Come tutte le culture europee, era europea; come tutte

le culture europee, era qualcosa di più che europea. Un temperamento nazionale spiccatissimo

e indomabile è manifesto in Chaucer e nelle

ballate di Robin Hood; nonostante mutamenti profondi e talora disastrosi

della politica nazionale, quella nota è ancora inconfondibile in Shakespeare, in

Johnson e i suoi amici, in Cobbett, in Dickens. È vano sognare di

definire cose così vivide; un’anima nazionale è indefinibile quanto un

odore, e altrettanto inconfondibile. Ricordo un amico che cercò con impazienza di

spiegare la parola «mistletoe» a un tedesco, e alla fine gridò, disperato:

«Be’, sai, l’holly… il mistletoe ne è l’opposto!» Non raccomando questo

metodo logico nel paragone di piante o nazioni. Ma se egli avesse

detto al Teutone: «Be’, conosci la Germania — l’Inghilterra ne è

l’opposto» — la definizione, per quanto fallace, non sarebbe stata del tutto

falsa. L’Inghilterra, come tutti i paesi cristiani, assorbì elementi preziosi

dalle foreste e dal rude romanticismo del Nord; ma, come tutti

i paesi cristiani, attinse i suoi più lunghi sorsi letterari dalle

classiche fonti degli antichi: né ciò fu (come tanto spesso vagamente

si crede) una faccenda del mero «Rinascimento». La lingua inglese e il

talento oratorio non sbocciarono d’improvviso soltanto nei gargantueschi

polisillabi dei grandi elisabettiani; era sempre stata colma del

latino popolare del Medioevo. Ma qualunque equilibrio di sangue e

idioma razziale si conceda, è davvero vero che l’unico suggerimento che

si avvicini all’inglese è accennare a quanto egli sia lontano dal tedesco. I

Tedeschi, come i Gallesi, sanno cantare canti perfettamente seri con perfetta

serietà in coro: sanno con occhi chiari e voci chiare unirsi insieme

in parole di innocente e bella passione personale, per una falsa fanciulla

o un bambino morto. Il più che ci si possa avvicinare a definire il temperamento poetico

degli inglesi è dire che non saprebbero farlo neppure per la birra. Sanno

cantare in coro, e più forte degli altri cristiani: ma devono avere

nei loro canti qualcosa, non so cosa, che è a un tempo vergognoso

e chiassoso. Se la materia è emotiva, deve in qualche modo essere anche ampia,

comune e comica, come «Wapping Old Stairs» e «Sally in Our Alley». Se

è patriottica, deve in qualche modo essere apertamente ampollosa e, per così dire,

indifendibile, come «Rule Britannia» o come quel superbo canto (non ne

seppi mai il nome, se ne ha uno) che registra il numero di leghe da

Ushant alle isole Scilly. Vi è anche una tenera amore-lirica intitolata «O

Tarry Trousers», che è persino più inglese del cuore del _Sogno di una

notte di mezza estate_. Ma i nostri più grandi bardi e saggi hanno spesso

mostrato una tendenza a declamarlo e a ruggirlo come veri marinai britannici; a

impiegare una stravaganza che è per metà consapevole e perciò per metà

umoristica. Si confrontino, per esempio, le tirate di Shakespeare con le tirate

di Victor Hugo. Un brano dell’eloquenza di Hugo è o un trionfo serio

o un serio crollo: si sente che il poeta è offeso da un sorriso. Ma

Shakespeare sembra piuttosto fiero di dire sciocchezze: non riesco mai a leggere

quella eccitante e crescente descrizione della tempesta, quando giunge a—

«che afferrano per la cima i flutti ribaldi,

arricciando i loro capi mostruosi, e impiccandoli

con assordante clamore alle nubi sdrucciolevoli.»

senza vedere un immenso pallone levarsi da terra, con

Shakespeare che sogghigna oltre il bordo della navicella, e dice: «Non potete

fermarmi: ora sono al di sopra della ragione.» Questo è il più che possiamo avvicinarci allo

spirito nazionale generale, che ora dobbiamo seguire attraverso un breve

e curioso ma assai nazionale episodio.

Tre anni prima che la giovane regina fosse incoronata, William Cobbett fu

sepolto a Farnham. Può sembrare strano cominciare con questo grande

nome trascurato, anziché con la vecchiaia di Wordsworth o la giovane morte

di Shelley. Ma a chiunque senta la letteratura come umana, la vuota

sedia di Cobbett è più solenne e significativa del trono. Con

lui morì quella sorta di democrazia che era un ritorno alla Natura, e che

solo i poeti e le folle possono comprendere. Dopo di lui il Radicalismo è urbano — e

il Torismo suburbano. Attraversando la verde Warwickshire, Cobbett avrebbe potuto

pensare ai raccolti e Shelley alle nuvole. Ma Shelley avrebbe

chiamato Birmingham come la chiamava Cobbett — un antro infernale. Cobbett era uno

con i Liberali successivi nell’ideale dell’Uomo sotto una legge uguale, cittadino di

nessuna vile città. Differiva dai Liberali successivi nell’affermare con forza che

Liverpool e Leeds sono città vili.

Non è un ozioso ibernianismo dire che verso la fine del diciottesimo

secolo l’evento più importante della storia inglese accadde in Francia.

Sembrerebbe ancora più perverso, eppure sarebbe ancora più preciso,

dire che l’evento più importante della storia inglese fu l’evento

che non accadde mai affatto — la Rivoluzione inglese sul modello della

Rivoluzione francese. Il suo fallimento non fu dovuto a mancanza di fervore o

perfino di ferocia in coloro che l’avrebbero attuata: dal tempo

when the first shout went up for Wilkes to the time when the last

Luddite fires were quenched in a cold rain of rationalism, the spirit of

Cobbett, of rural republicanism, of English and patriotic democracy,

burned like a beacon. The revolution failed because it was foiled by

another revolution; an aristocratic revolution, a victory of the rich

over the poor. It was about this time that the common lands were finally

enclosed; that the more cruel game laws were first established; that

England became finally a land of landlords instead of common

land-owners. I will not call it a Tory reaction; for much of the worst

of it (especially of the land-grabbing) was done by Whigs; but we may

certainly call it Anti-Jacobin. Now this fact, though political, is not

only relevant but essential to everything that concerned literature. The

upshot was that though England was full of the revolutionary ideas,

nevertheless there was no revolution. And the effect of this in turn was

that from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the

nineteenth the spirit of revolt in England took a wholly literary form.

In France it was what people did that was wild and elemental; in England

it was what people wrote. It is a quaint comment on the notion that the

English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were

rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

It has been well and wittily said (as illustrating the mildness of

English and the violence of French developments) that the same Gospel of

Rousseau which in France produced the Terror, in England produced

Sandford and Merton. But people forget that in literature the English

were by no means restrained by Mr. Barlow; and that if we turn from

politics to art, we shall find the two parts peculiarly reversed. It

would be equally true to say that the same eighteenth-century

emancipation which in France produced the pictures of David, in England

produced the pictures of Blake. There never were, I think, men who gave

to the imagination so much of the sense of having broken out into the

very borderlands of being, as did the great English poets of the

romantic or revolutionary period; than Coleridge in the secret sunlight

of the Antarctic, where the waters were like witches’ oils; than Keats

looking out of those extreme mysterious casements upon that ultimate

sea. The heroes and criminals of the great French crisis would have been

quite as incapable of such imaginative independence as Keats and

Coleridge would have been incapable of winning the battle of Wattignies.

In Paris the tree of liberty was a garden tree, clipped very correctly;

and Robespierre used the razor more regularly than the guillotine.

Danton, who knew and admired English literature, would have cursed

freely over Kubla Khan; and if the Committee of Public Safety had not

already executed Shelley as an aristocrat, they would certainly have

locked him up for a madman. Even Hébert (the one really vile

Revolutionist), had he been reproached by English poets with worshipping

the Goddess of Reason, might legitimately have retorted that it was

rather the Goddess of Unreason that they set up to be worshipped.

Verbally considered, Carlyle’s French Revolution was more

revolutionary than the real French Revolution: and if Carrier, in an

exaggerative phrase, empurpled the Loire with carnage, Turner almost

literally set the Thames on fire.

This trend of the English Romantics to carry out the revolutionary idea

not savagely in works, but very wildly indeed in words, had several

results; the most important of which was this. It started English

literature after the Revolution with a sort of bent towards independence

and eccentricity, which in the brighter wits became individuality, and

in the duller ones, Individualism. English Romantics, English Liberals,

were not public men making a republic, but poets, each seeing a vision.

The lonelier version of liberty was a sort of aristocratic anarchism in

Byron and Shelley; but though in Victorian times it faded into much

milder prejudices and much more bourgeois crotchets, England retained

from that twist a certain odd separation and privacy. England became

much more of an island than she had ever been before. There fell from

her about this time, not only the understanding of France or Germany,

but to her own long and yet lingering disaster, the understanding of

Ireland. She had not joined in the attempt to create European democracy;

nor did she, save in the first glow of Waterloo, join in the

counter-attempt to destroy it. The life in her literature was still, to

a large extent, the romantic liberalism of Rousseau, the free and humane

truisms that had refreshed the other nations, the return to Nature and

to natural rights. But that which in Rousseau was a creed, became in

Hazlitt a taste and in Lamb little more than a whim. These latter and

their like form a group at the beginning of the nineteenth century of

those we may call the Eccentrics: they gather round Coleridge and his

decaying dreams or linger in the tracks of Keats and Shelley and Godwin;

Lamb with his bibliomania and creed of pure caprice, the most unique of

all geniuses; Leigh Hunt with his Bohemian impecuniosity; Landor with

his tempestuous temper, throwing plates on the floor; Hazlitt with his

bitterness and his low love affair; even that healthier and happier

Bohemian, Peacock. With these, in one sense at least, goes De Quincey.

He was, unlike most of these embers of the revolutionary age in letters,

a Tory; and was attached to the political army which is best represented

in letters by the virile laughter and leisure of Wilson’s _Noctes

Ambrosianæ_. But he had nothing in common with that environment. It

remained for some time as a Tory tradition, which balanced the cold and

da quando il primo grido si levò per Wilkes fino al tempo in cui gli ultimi

fuochi luddisti furono spenti in una fredda pioggia di razionalismo, lo spirito di

Cobbett, del repubblicanesimo rurale, dell’inglese e patriottica democrazia,

arse come un faro. La rivoluzione fallì perché fu sventata da

un’altra rivoluzione; una rivoluzione aristocratica, una vittoria dei ricchi

sui poveri. Fu press’a poco in questo tempo che le terre comuni furono infine

recintate; che le più crudeli leggi sulla caccia furono per la prima volta istituite; che

l’Inghilterra divenne infine un paese di proprietari terrieri anziché di comuni

possessori della terra. Non la chiamerò una reazione tory; giacché gran parte del peggio

di essa (specialmente l’accaparramento della terra) fu opera dei Whig; ma possiamo

di certo chiamarla anti-giacobina. Ora questo fatto, benché politico, non è

soltanto rilevante ma essenziale a tutto ciò che riguardò la letteratura. Il

risultato fu che, benché l’Inghilterra fosse colma di idee rivoluzionarie,

tuttavia non vi fu rivoluzione. E l’effetto di ciò a sua volta fu

che dalla metà del diciottesimo secolo alla metà del

diciannovesimo lo spirito di rivolta in Inghilterra prese forma tutta letteraria.

In Francia era ciò che la gente faceva a essere selvaggio ed elementare; in Inghilterra

era ciò che la gente scriveva. È un curioso commento all’idea che gli

inglesi siano pratici e i francesi meri visionari, che noi fossimo

ribelli nelle arti mentre essi erano ribelli nelle armi.

È stato ben detto e con arguzia (a illustrare la mitezza degli

sviluppi inglesi e la violenza di quelli francesi) che lo stesso Vangelo di

Rousseau che in Francia produsse il Terrore, in Inghilterra produsse

Sandford e Merton. Ma si dimentica che in letteratura gli inglesi

non furono affatto trattenuti dal signor Barlow; e che se passiamo dalla

politica all’arte, troveremo le due parti singolarmente rovesciate. Sarebbe

egualmente vero dire che la stessa emancipazione settecentesca

che in Francia produsse i dipinti di David, in Inghilterra

produsse i dipinti di Blake. Non vi furono mai, io credo, uomini che diedero

all’immaginazione tanto senso di essere irrotti nelle

estreme terre di confine dell’essere, quanto i grandi poeti inglesi del

periodo romantico o rivoluzionario; come Coleridge nella segreta luce solare

dell’Antartico, dove le acque erano come oli di streghe; come Keats

che guardava fuori da quelle estreme misteriose bifore su quel remoto

mare. Gli eroi e i criminali della grande crisi francese sarebbero stati

incapaci di tale indipendenza immaginativa quanto Keats e

Coleridge sarebbero stati incapaci di vincere la battaglia di Wattignies.

A Parigi l’albero della libertà era un albero da giardino, potato assai correttamente;

e Robespierre usò il rasoio più regolarmente della ghigliottina.

Danton, che conosceva e ammirava la letteratura inglese, avrebbe imprecato

liberamente contro Kubla Khan; e se il Comitato di Salute Pubblica non avesse

già giustiziato Shelley come aristocratico, di certo l’avrebbe

rinchiuso come pazzo. Perfino Hébert (l’unico Rivoluzionario davvero

vile), rimproverato dai poeti inglesi di adorare

la Dea della Ragione, avrebbe potuto legittimamente ribattere che era

piuttosto la Dea dell’Irragionevolezza quella che essi erigevano ad oggetto d’adorazione.

Considerata sul piano verbale, la Rivoluzione francese di Carlyle era più

rivoluzionaria della vera Rivoluzione francese: e se Carrier, con una

frase esagerata, imporporò la Loira di carneficina, Turner quasi

letteralmente diede fuoco al Tamigi (fuoco).

Questa tendenza dei Romantici inglesi ad attuare l’idea rivoluzionaria

non ferocemente nelle opere, ma davvero assai selvaggiamente nelle parole, ebbe parecchi

risultati; il più importante dei quali fu questo. Avviò la letteratura

inglese dopo la Rivoluzione con una sorta di inclinazione all’indipendenza

e all’eccentricità, che negli ingegni più brillanti divenne individualità, e

in quelli più ottusi, individualismo. I Romantici inglesi, i Liberali inglesi,

non erano uomini pubblici che facevano una repubblica, ma poeti, ciascuno che vedeva una visione.

La versione più solitaria della libertà era una sorta di anarchismo aristocratico in

Byron e Shelley; ma benché in età vittoriana si sbiadisse in pregiudizi assai

più miti e in ghiribizzi assai più borghesi, l’Inghilterra conservò

da quella torsione una certa strana separatezza e riservatezza. L’Inghilterra divenne

molto più un’isola di quanto fosse mai stata prima. Le venne meno

verso questo tempo non solo la comprensione della Francia o della Germania,

ma, a sua lunga e ancor perdurante rovina, la comprensione

dell’Irlanda. Non aveva preso parte al tentativo di creare una democrazia europea;

né prese parte, salvo nel primo bagliore di Waterloo, al

contro-tentativo di distruggerla. La vita nella sua letteratura era ancora, in

larga misura, il liberalismo romantico di Rousseau, i liberi e umani

luoghi comuni che avevano ristorato le altre nazioni, il ritorno alla Natura e

ai diritti naturali. Ma ciò che in Rousseau era un credo, divenne in

Hazlitt un gusto e in Lamb poco più di un capriccio. Questi ultimi e

i loro simili formano un gruppo, all’inizio del diciannovesimo secolo, di

coloro che possiamo chiamare gli Eccentrici: si raccolgono intorno a Coleridge e ai suoi

sogni in decadenza, o indugiano sulle tracce di Keats e Shelley e Godwin;

Lamb con la sua bibliomania e il suo credo di puro capriccio, il più unico di

tutti i geni; Leigh Hunt con la sua bohémienne impecuniosità; Landor con

il suo temperamento tempestoso, che scagliava piatti sul pavimento; Hazlitt con la sua

amarezza e la sua meschina relazione d’amore; perfino quel più sano e più felice

bohémien, Peacock. Con costoro, in un senso almeno, va De Quincey.

Egli era, a differenza della maggior parte di questi tizzoni dell’età rivoluzionaria delle lettere,

un tory; ed era legato a quell’esercito politico che è meglio rappresentato

nelle lettere dal viril riso e dall’ozio delle _Noctes

Ambrosianæ_ di Wilson. Ma nulla aveva in comune con quell’ambiente. Esso

rimase per qualche tempo come una tradizione tory, che bilanciava il freddo e

brilliant aristocracy of the Whigs. It lived on the legend of Trafalgar;

the sense that insularity was independence; the sense that anomalies are

as jolly as family jokes; the general sense that old salts are the salt

of the earth. It still lives in some old songs about Nelson or Waterloo,

which are vastly more pompous and vastly more sincere than the cockney

cocksureness of later Jingo lyrics. But it is hard to connect De Quincey

with it; or, indeed, with anything else. De Quincey would certainly have

been a happier man, and almost certainly a better man, if he had got

drunk on toddy with Wilson, instead of getting calm and clear (as he

himself describes) on opium, and with no company but a book of German

metaphysics. But he would hardly have revealed those wonderful vistas

and perspectives of prose, which permit one to call him the first and

most powerful of the decadents: those sentences that lengthen out like

nightmare corridors, or rise higher and higher like impossible eastern

pagodas. He was a morbid fellow, and far less moral than Burns; for when

Burns confessed excess he did not defend it. But he has cast a gigantic

shadow on our literature, and was as certainly a genius as Poe. Also he

had humour, which Poe had not. And if any one still smarting from the

pinpricks of Wilde or Whistler, wants to convict them of plagiarism in

their “art for art” epigrams—he will find most of what they said said

better in Murder as One of the Fine Arts.

One great man remains of this elder group, who did their last work only

under Victoria; he knew most of the members of it, yet he did not belong

to it in any corporate sense. He was a poor man and an invalid, with

Scotch blood and a strong, though perhaps only inherited, quarrel with

the old Calvinism; by name Thomas Hood. Poverty and illness forced him

to the toils of an incessant jester; and the revolt against gloomy

religion made him turn his wit, whenever he could, in the direction of

a defence of happier and humaner views. In the long great roll that

includes Homer and Shakespeare, he was the last great man who really

employed the pun. His puns were not all good (nor were Shakespeare’s),

but the best of them were a strong and fresh form of art. The pun is

said to be a thing of two meanings; but with Hood there were three

meanings, for there was also the abstract truth that would have been

there with no pun at all. The pun of Hood is underrated, like the “wit”

of Voltaire, by those who forget that the words of Voltaire were not

pins, but swords. In Hood at his best the verbal neatness only gives to

the satire or the scorn a ring of finality such as is given by rhyme.

For rhyme does go with reason, since the aim of both is to bring things

to an end. The tragic necessity of puns tautened and hardened Hood’s

genius; so that there is always a sort of shadow of that sharpness

across all his serious poems, falling like the shadow of a sword.

“Sewing at once with a double thread a shroud as well as a shirt”—“We

thought her dying when she slept, and sleeping when she died”—“Oh God,

that bread should be so dear and flesh and blood so cheap”—none can

fail to note in these a certain fighting discipline of phrase, a

compactness and point which was well trained in lines like “A

cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms.” In France he

would have been a great epigrammatist, like Hugo. In England he is a

punster.

There was nothing at least in this group I have loosely called the

Eccentrics that disturbs the general sense that all their generation was

part of the sunset of the great revolutionary poets. This fading glamour

affected England in a sentimental and, to some extent, a snobbish

direction; making men feel that great lords with long curls and whiskers

were naturally the wits that led the world. But it affected England also

negatively and by reaction; for it associated such men as Byron with

superiority, but not with success. The English middle classes were led

to distrust poetry almost as much as they admired it. They could not

believe that either vision at the one end or violence at the other could

ever be practical. They were deaf to that great warning of Hugo: “You

say the poet is in the clouds; but so is the thunderbolt.” Ideals

exhausted themselves in the void; Victorian England, very unwisely,

would have no more to do with idealists in politics. And this, chiefly,

because there had been about these great poets a young and splendid

sterility; since the pantheist Shelley was in fact washed under by the

wave of the world, or Byron sank in death as he drew the sword for

Hellas.

The chief turn of nineteenth-century England was taken about the time

when a footman at Holland House opened a door and announced “Mr.

Macaulay.” Macaulay’s literary popularity was representative and it was

deserved; but his presence among the great Whig families marks an

epoch. He was the son of one of the first “friends of the negro,” whose

honest industry and philanthropy were darkened by a religion of sombre

smugness, which almost makes one fancy they loved the negro for his

colour, and would have turned away from red or yellow men as needlessly

gaudy. But his wit and his politics (combined with that dropping of the

Puritan tenets but retention of the Puritan tone which marked his class

and generation), lifted him into a sphere which was utterly opposite to

that from which he came. This Whig world was exclusive; but it was not

narrow. It was very difficult for an outsider to get into it; but if he

did get into it he was in a much freer atmosphere than any other in

England. Of those aristocrats, the Old Guard of the eighteenth century,

many denied God, many defended Bonaparte, and nearly all sneered at the

L’aristocrazia brillante dei Whig: viveva sulla leggenda di Trafalgar;

La sensazione che l’isolamento fosse indipendenza; la sensazione che le anomalie siano…

allegri come le barzellette di famiglia; la sensazione generale che i vecchi marinai siano il sale della terra

della terra. Vive ancora in alcune vecchie canzoni su Nelson o Waterloo,

che sono molto più pomposi e molto più sinceri del cockney

La sicumera delle ultime canzoni jingoistiche. Ma è difficile collegarla a De Quincey

Con esso; o, per la verità, con qualsiasi altra cosa. Anche De Quincey lo avrebbe sicuramente…

Sarei stato un uomo più felice e quasi certamente migliore se fossi riuscito

Ubriachi di toddy con Wilson, invece di diventare calmi e lucidi (come lui

Descrive se stesso sull’oppio e senza compagnia se non un libro di tedesco

Metafisica. Ma difficilmente avrebbe rivelato quelle meravigliose vedute

e prospettive della prosa che gli permettono di essere chiamato il primo e

I più potenti tra i decadenti: quelle frasi che si allungano come…

corridoi da incubo, o si innalzano sempre più in alto come impossibili orientali

Pagode. Era un tipo morboso e molto meno morale di Burns; infatti, quando

Burns confessò l’eccesso ma non lo difese. Eppure ha gettato un’ombra gigantesca

La ombra sulla nostra letteratura era certamente un genio come Poe. Anche lui

aveva l’umorismo, che Poe non aveva. E se qualcuno ancora risentito per il

Punture di spillo di Wilde o Whistler, vuole condannarli per plagio

I loro epigrammi «arte per l’arte» - troverà la maggior parte di ciò che dissero

meglio ne “L’omicidio come una delle belle arti”.

Un grande uomo rimane di questo gruppo più anziano, che ha fatto il loro ultimo lavoro solo

Sotto Vittoria: conosceva la maggior parte dei membri, ma non ne faceva parte

In senso collettivo. Era un uomo povero e malato, con

sangue scozzese e una forte, sebbene forse solo ereditata, contesa con

il vecchio calvinismo; di nome Thomas Hood. La povertà e la malattia lo costrinsero

alle fatiche di un buffone instancabile e alla rivolta contro la malinconia

La religione lo spinse a indirizzare il suo ingegno, ogni volta che poteva, nella direzione di…

Una difesa di vedute più felici e umane. Nell’ampia gamma che

Includeva Omero e Shakespeare: fu l’ultimo grande uomo che davvero…

utilizzò il gioco di parole. I suoi giochi di parole non erano tutti buoni (né lo erano quelli di Shakespeare)

Ma i migliori erano una forma d’arte forte e fresca. Il gioco di parole è

Si dice che abbia due significati, ma con Hood ce ne sono tre

significati, poiché c’era anche la verità astratta che sarebbe stata

Là senza alcun gioco di parole. Il gioco di parole di Hood è sottovalutato, come l’ingegno

Di Voltaire, da chi dimentica che le parole di Voltaire non erano

spilli, ma spade. Nella migliore vena di Hood la precisione verbale non fa che conferire

la satira o il disprezzo un alone di definitività come quello conferito dalla rima.

La rima va d’accordo con la ragione, poiché lo scopo di entrambe è riunire le cose

Alla fine: la tragica necessità di giochi di parole ha reso rigido e duro Hood

genio; così che c’è sempre una specie di ombra di quella acutezza

attraverso tutti i suoi seri poemi, cadendo come l’ombra di una spada.

“Cucire contemporaneamente con un filo doppio una veste funebre e una camicia” — “Noi

Pensava che stesse morendo quando dormiva e dormisse quando morì» - «Oh Dio,

che il pane sia così caro e la carne e il sangue così a buon mercato» - nessuno può

Non notare in questi una certa disciplina combattiva di frase, un

la compattezza e la precisione che erano state ben addestrate in versi come “A

“La palla di cannone gli ha mozzato le gambe, così ha deposto le armi”. In Francia lui

Sarebbe stato un grande epigrammista come Hugo; in Inghilterra è un…

giocatore di parole.

In questo gruppo che ho chiamato liberamente non c’era nulla

Gli eccentrici che disturbano l’idea generale della loro generazione

Parte del tramonto dei grandi poeti rivoluzionari. Questo fascino che svanisce

influenzò l’Inghilterra in modo sentimentale e, fino a un certo punto, snobistico

Direzione: far sentire gli uomini che i grandi signori con lunghi riccioli e baffi…

Erano naturalmente gli spiritosi che guidavano il mondo, ma influenzò anche l’Inghilterra

Negativamente e per reazione; perché associava uomini come Byron con…

superiorità, ma non con successo. Le classi medie inglesi furono condotte

Diffidare della poesia quasi quanto la ammiravano. Non potevano

Credere che sia la visione da un lato o la violenza dall’altro possano

Siate sempre pratici. Erano sordi al grande avvertimento di Hugo: “Voi

Dicono che il poeta sia tra le nuvole, ma anche il fulmine lo è. Ideali

si sono esauriti nel vuoto; l’Inghilterra vittoriana, molto imprudentemente,

Non avrebbe più nulla a che fare con gli idealisti in politica. E questo, principalmente,

Perché intorno a questi grandi poeti c’era un giovane e splendido…

Sterilità: poiché lo sciacallo panteista fu infine travolto

onda del mondo, o Byron affondò nella morte mentre sguainava la spada per

Ellade.

La svolta principale dell’Inghilterra del diciannovesimo secolo avvenne circa all’epoca

quando un valletto alla Holland House aprì una porta e annunciò «Mr.

Macaulay: la sua popolarità letteraria era rappresentativa e lo era

meritato; ma la sua presenza tra le grandi famiglie whig segna un…

Epoca. Era figlio di uno dei primi “amici del negro”, il cui

L’industria onesta e la filantropia furono offuscate da una religione tetra

La sicurezza che quasi fa pensare che amassero il negro per…

Colore, e avrebbe distolto lo sguardo da uomini rossi o gialli come inutili

Gaudioso. Ma il suo spirito e la sua politica (uniti a quel modo di lasciar cadere le cose)

Principi puritani ma conservazione del tono puritano che caratterizzava la sua classe

e generazione), lo elevò in una sfera completamente opposta a

Quello da cui proveniva. Questo mondo whig era esclusivo, ma non lo era

stretto. Era molto difficile per un esterno entrarci, ma se ci riusciva

Entrò in un’atmosfera molto più libera di qualsiasi altra

L’Inghilterra degli aristocratici, la Vecchia Guardia del XVIII secolo

Molti negarono Dio, molti difesero Napoleone e quasi tutti derisero il…

Royal Family. Nor did wealth or birth make any barriers for those once

within this singular Whig world. The platform was high, but it was

level. Moreover the upstart nowadays pushes himself by wealth: but the

Whigs could choose their upstarts. In that world Macaulay found Rogers,

with his phosphorescent and corpse-like brilliancy; there he found

Sydney Smith, bursting with crackers of common sense, an admirable old

heathen; there he found Tom Moore, the romantic of the Regency, a

shortened shadow of Lord Byron. That he reached this platform and

remained on it is, I say, typical of a turning-point in the century. For

the fundamental fact of early Victorian history was this: the decision

of the middle classes to employ their new wealth in backing up a sort of

aristocratical compromise, and not (like the middle class in the French

Revolution) insisting on a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme.

It went along with the decision of the aristocracy to recruit itself

more freely from the middle class. It was then also that Victorian

“prudery” began: the great lords yielded on this as on Free Trade.

These two decisions have made the doubtful England of to-day; and

Macaulay is typical of them; he is the bourgeois in Belgravia. The

alliance is marked by his great speeches for Lord Grey’s Reform Bill: it

is marked even more significantly in his speech against the Chartists.

Cobbett was dead.

Macaulay makes the foundation of the Victorian age in all its very

English and unique elements: its praise of Puritan politics and

abandonment of Puritan theology; its belief in a cautious but perpetual

patching up of the Constitution; its admiration for industrial wealth.

But above all he typifies the two things that really make the Victorian

Age itself, the cheapness and narrowness of its conscious formulæ; the

richness and humanity of its unconscious tradition. There were two

Macaulays, a rational Macaulay who was generally wrong, and a romantic

Macaulay who was almost invariably right. All that was small in him

derives from the dull parliamentarism of men like Sir James Mackintosh;

but all that was great in him has much more kinship with the festive

antiquarianism of Sir Walter Scott.

As a philosopher he had only two thoughts; and neither of them is true.

The first was that politics, as an experimental science, must go on

improving, along with clocks, pistols or penknives, by the mere

accumulation of experiment and variety. He was, indeed, far too

strong-minded a man to accept the hazy modern notion that the soul in

its highest sense can change: he seems to have held that religion can

never get any better and that poetry rather tends to get worse. But he

did not see the flaw in his political theory; which is that unless the

soul improves with time there is no guarantee that the accumulations of

experience will be adequately used. Figures do not add themselves up;

birds do not label or stuff themselves; comets do not calculate their

own courses; these things are done by the soul of man. And if the soul

of man is subject to other laws, is liable to sin, to sleep, to

anarchism or to suicide, then all sciences including politics may fall

as sterile and lie as fallow as before man’s reason was made. Macaulay

seemed sometimes to talk as if clocks produced clocks, or guns had

families of little pistols, or a penknife littered like a pig. The other

view he held was the more or less utilitarian theory of toleration; that

we should get the best butcher whether he was a Baptist or a

Muggletonian, and the best soldier whether he was a Wesleyan or an

Irvingite. The compromise worked well enough in an England Protestant in

bulk; but Macaulay ought to have seen that it has its limitations. A

good butcher might be a Baptist; he is not very likely to be a Buddhist.

A good soldier might be a Wesleyan; he would hardly be a Quaker. For the

rest, Macaulay was concerned to interpret the seventeenth century in

terms of the triumph of the Whigs as champions of public rights; and he

upheld this one-sidedly but not malignantly in a style of rounded and

ringing sentences, which at its best is like steel and at its worst like

tin.

This was the small conscious Macaulay; the great unconscious Macaulay

was very different. His noble enduring quality in our literature is

this: that he truly had an abstract passion for history; a warm, poetic

and sincere enthusiasm for great things as such; an ardour and appetite

for great books, great battles, great cities, great men. He felt and

used names like trumpets. The reader’s greatest joy is in the writer’s

own joy, when he can let his last phrase fall like a hammer on some

resounding name like Hildebrand or Charlemagne, on the eagles of Rome or

the pillars of Hercules. As with Walter Scott, some of the best things

in his prose and poetry are the surnames that he did not make. And it is

remarkable to notice that this romance of history, so far from making

him more partial or untrustworthy, was the only thing that made him

moderately just. His reason was entirely one-sided and fanatical. It

was his imagination that was well-balanced and broad. He was

monotonously certain that only Whigs were right; but it was necessary

that Tories should at least be great, that his heroes might have foemen

worthy of their steel. If there was one thing in the world he hated it

was a High Church Royalist parson; yet when Jeremy Collier the Jacobite

priest raises a real banner, all Macaulay’s blood warms with the mere

prospect of a fight. “It is inspiriting to see how gallantly the

solitary outlaw advances to attack enemies formidable separately, and,

it might have been thought, irresistible when combined; distributes his

swashing blows right and left among Wycherley, Congreve and Vanbrugh,

Famiglia Reale. Né la ricchezza o la nascita creavano barriere per coloro che erano una volta

dentro questo singolare mondo whig. La piattaforma era alta, ma era

pianeggiante. Inoltre l’arrivista oggigiorno si spinge avanti con la ricchezza: ma i

Whig potevano scegliersi i loro arrivisti. In quel mondo Macaulay trovò Rogers,

con la sua brillantezza fosforescente e cadaverica; là trovò

Sydney Smith, scoppiettante di petardi di buon senso, un ammirevole vecchio

pagano; là trovò Tom Moore, il romantico della Reggenza, un’

accorciata ombra di Lord Byron. Che egli abbia raggiunto questa piattaforma e

vi sia rimasto è, io dico, tipico di una svolta del secolo. Poiché

il fatto fondamentale della prima storia vittoriana fu questo: la decisione

delle classi medie di impiegare la loro nuova ricchezza per sostenere una sorta di

compromesso aristocratico, e non (come la classe media nella Rivoluzione

francese) di insistere su una tabula rasa e un chiaro programma democratico.

Andò di pari passo con la decisione dell’aristocrazia di reclutarsi

più liberamente dalla classe media. Fu allora anche che ebbe inizio la

«pruderie» vittoriana: i grandi lord cedettero su questo come sul Libero Scambio.

Queste due decisioni hanno fatto l’incerta Inghilterra di oggi; e

Macaulay ne è tipico; egli è il borghese a Belgravia. L’

alleanza è segnata dai suoi grandi discorsi per il Bill di Riforma di Lord Grey: è

segnata ancor più significativamente nel suo discorso contro i Cartisti.

Cobbett era morto.

Macaulay costituisce il fondamento dell’età vittoriana in tutti i suoi elementi assai

inglesi e unici: la sua lode della politica puritana e

l’abbandono della teologia puritana; la sua fede in un cauto ma perpetuo

rattoppare la Costituzione; la sua ammirazione per la ricchezza industriale.

Ma soprattutto egli incarna le due cose che davvero fanno l’Età

Vittoriana stessa, la meschinità e ristrettezza delle sue formule consapevoli; la

ricchezza e umanità della sua tradizione inconscia. Vi furono due

Macaulay, un Macaulay razionale che aveva generalmente torto, e un Macaulay

romantico che aveva quasi invariabilmente ragione. Tutto ciò che era piccolo in lui

deriva dal grigio parlamentarismo di uomini come Sir James Mackintosh;

ma tutto ciò che era grande in lui ha assai maggiore affinità con il festoso

antiquariato di Sir Walter Scott.

Come filosofo aveva solo due pensieri; e nessuno dei due è vero.

Il primo era che la politica, come scienza sperimentale, dovesse continuare a

migliorare, insieme agli orologi, alle pistole o ai temperini, per il mero

accumulo di esperimenti e varietà. Egli era, in verità, uomo di mente troppo

salda per accettare la nebulosa nozione moderna che l’anima, nel

suo senso più alto, possa mutare: sembra aver ritenuto che la religione non possa

mai migliorare e che la poesia tenda piuttosto a peggiorare. Ma egli

non vide la crepa nella sua teoria politica; ossia che, a meno che l’

anima non migliori col tempo, non v’è garanzia che gli accumuli di

esperienza saranno adeguatamente usati. Le cifre non si sommano da sole;

gli uccelli non si etichettano né si impagliano da sé; le comete non calcolano i

propri corsi; queste cose sono fatte dall’anima dell’uomo. E se l’anima

dell’uomo è soggetta ad altre leggi, è passibile di peccato, di sonno, di

anarchia o di suicidio, allora tutte le scienze compresa la politica possono cadere

sterili e giacere incolte come prima che la ragione dell’uomo fosse creata. Macaulay

sembrava talora parlare come se gli orologi producessero orologi, o i fucili avessero

famiglie di piccole pistole, o un temperino figliasse come un maiale. L’altra

opinione che sosteneva era la teoria più o meno utilitaristica della tolleranza; che

dovremmo avere il miglior macellaio, fosse egli un Battista o un

Muggletoniano, e il miglior soldato, fosse egli un Wesleyano o un

Irvingita. Il compromesso funzionava abbastanza bene in un’Inghilterra protestante nella

sua massa; ma Macaulay avrebbe dovuto vedere che ha i suoi limiti. Un

buon macellaio potrebbe essere un Battista; è assai poco probabile che sia un Buddista.

Un buon soldato potrebbe essere un Wesleyano; difficilmente sarebbe un Quacchero. Per il

resto, Macaulay si occupò di interpretare il diciassettesimo secolo in

termini del trionfo dei Whig come campioni dei diritti pubblici; ed egli

sostenne ciò unilateralmente ma non malignamente in uno stile di frasi tornite e

squillanti, che nel suo meglio è come l’acciaio e nel suo peggio come

lo stagno.

Questo era il piccolo Macaulay consapevole; il grande Macaulay inconscio

era assai diverso. La sua nobile e duratura qualità nella nostra letteratura è

questa: che egli ebbe davvero una passione astratta per la storia; un caldo, poetico

e sincero entusiasmo per le grandi cose in quanto tali; un ardore e un appetito

per i grandi libri, le grandi battaglie, le grandi città, i grandi uomini. Egli sentiva e

usava i nomi come trombe. La più grande gioia del lettore è nella gioia

stessa dello scrittore, quando egli può lasciar cadere la sua ultima frase come un martello su qualche

nome risonante come Ildebrando o Carlomagno, sulle aquile di Roma o

sulle colonne d’Ercole. Come in Walter Scott, alcune delle cose migliori

nella sua prosa e poesia sono i cognomi che egli non inventò. Ed è

notevole osservare che questo romanzesco della storia, lungi dal renderlo

più parziale o inattendibile, fu l’unica cosa che lo rese

moderatamente giusto. La sua ragione era del tutto unilaterale e fanatica. Era

la sua immaginazione a essere ben equilibrata e ampia. Egli era

monotonamente certo che solo i Whig avessero ragione; ma era necessario

che i Tory fossero almeno grandi, affinché i suoi eroi potessero avere nemici

degni del loro acciaio. Se v’era una cosa al mondo che egli odiava era

un parroco realista dell’Alta Chiesa; eppure quando Jeremy Collier, il

prete giacobita, leva un vero vessillo, tutto il sangue di Macaulay si riscalda al mero

pronostico di una battaglia. «È esaltante vedere con quanto valore il

solitario fuorilegge avanzi ad attaccare nemici formidabili separatamente, e,

si sarebbe potuto pensare, irresistibili quando uniti; distribuisce i suoi

fendenti a destra e a manca tra Wycherley, Congreve e Vanbrugh,

treads the wretched D’Urfey down in the dirt beneath his feet; and

strikes with all his strength full at the towering crest of Dryden.”

That is exactly where Macaulay is great; because he is almost Homeric.

The whole triumph turns upon mere names; but men are commanded by

names. So his poem on the Armada is really a good geography book gone

mad; one sees the map of England come alive and march and mix under the

eye.

The chief tragedy in the trend of later literature may be expressed by

saying that the smaller Macaulay conquered the larger. Later men had

less and less of that hot love of history he had inherited from Scott.

They had more and more of that cold science of self-interests which he

had learnt from Bentham.

The name of this great man, though it belongs to a period before the

Victorian, is, like the name of Cobbett, very important to it. In

substance Macaulay accepted the conclusions of Bentham; though he

offered brilliant objections to all his arguments. In any case the soul

of Bentham (if he had one) went marching on, like John Brown; and in the

central Victorian movement it was certainly he who won. John Stuart Mill

was the final flower of that growth. He was himself fresh and delicate

and pure; but that is the business of a flower. Though he had to preach

a hard rationalism in religion, a hard competition in economics, a hard

egoism in ethics, his own soul had all that silvery sensitiveness that

can be seen in his fine portrait by Watts. He boasted none of that

brutal optimism with which his friends and followers of the Manchester

School expounded their cheery negations. There was about Mill even a

sort of embarrassment; he exhibited all the wheels of his iron universe

rather reluctantly, like a gentleman in trade showing ladies over his

factory. There shone in him a beautiful reverence for women, which is

all the more touching because, in his department, as it were, he could

only offer them so dry a gift as the Victorian Parliamentary Franchise.

Now in trying to describe how the Victorian writers stood to each other,

we must recur to the very real difficulty noted at the beginning: the

difficulty of keeping the moral order parallel with the chronological

order. For the mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and

not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will

occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect.

Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated:

notions will be first defined long after they are dead. It is no good

getting the almanac to look up moonshine; and most literature in this

sense is moonshine. Thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it

were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus

Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet

delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no

one can understand tradition, or even history, who has not some

tenderness for anachronism.

Now for the great part of the Victorian era the utilitarian tradition

which reached its highest in Mill held the centre of the field; it was

the philosophy in office, so to speak. It sustained its march of

codification and inquiry until it had made possible the great victories

of Darwin and Huxley and Wallace. If we take Macaulay at the beginning

of the epoch and Huxley at the end of it, we shall find that they had

much in common. They were both square-jawed, simple men, greedy of

controversy but scornful of sophistry, dead to mysticism but very much

alive to morality; and they were both very much more under the influence

of their own admirable rhetoric than they knew. Huxley, especially, was

much more a literary than a scientific man. It is amusing to note that

when Huxley was charged with being rhetorical, he expressed his horror

of “plastering the fair face of truth with that pestilent cosmetic,

rhetoric,” which is itself about as well-plastered a piece of rhetoric

as Ruskin himself could have managed. The difference that the period had

developed can best be seen if we consider this: that while neither was

of a spiritual sort, Macaulay took it for granted that common sense

required some kind of theology, while Huxley took it for granted that

common sense meant having none. Macaulay, it is said, never talked about

his religion: but Huxley was always talking about the religion he hadn’t

got.

But though this simple Victorian rationalism held the centre, and in a

certain sense was the Victorian era, it was assailed on many sides,

and had been assailed even before the beginning of that era. The rest of

the intellectual history of the time is a series of reactions against

it, which come wave after wave. They have succeeded in shaking it, but

not in dislodging it from the modern mind. The first of these was the

Oxford Movement; a bow that broke when it had let loose the flashing

arrow that was Newman. The second reaction was one man; without teachers

or pupils—Dickens. The third reaction was a group that tried to create

a sort of new romantic Protestantism, to pit against both Reason and

Rome—Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Maurice—perhaps Tennyson. Browning

also was at once romantic and Puritan; but he belonged to no group, and

worked against materialism in a manner entirely his own. Though as a boy

he bought eagerly Shelley’s revolutionary poems, he did not think of

becoming a revolutionary poet. He concentrated on the special souls of

men; seeking God in a series of private interviews. Hence Browning,

great as he is, is rather one of the Victorian novelists than wholly of

the Victorian poets. From Ruskin, again, descend those who may be called

the Pre-Raphaelites of prose and poetry.

It is really with this rationalism triumphant, and with the romance of

calpesta il misero D’Urfey nel fango sotto i suoi piedi; e

colpisce con tutta la sua forza in pieno la torreggiante cresta di Dryden.»

È esattamente lì che Macaulay è grande; perché è quasi omerico.

L’intero trionfo poggia su meri nomi; ma gli uomini sono comandati dai

nomi. Così il suo poema sull’Armada è in realtà un buon libro di geografia impazzito;

si vede la mappa dell’Inghilterra prendere vita e marciare e mescolarsi sotto l’

occhio.

La principale tragedia nell’evoluzione della letteratura più tarda può esprimersi

dicendo che il Macaulay minore vinse il maggiore. Gli uomini più tardi ebbero

sempre meno di quel caldo amore della storia che egli aveva ereditato da Scott.

Ebbero sempre più di quella fredda scienza dell’interesse di sé che egli

aveva appreso da Bentham.

Il nome di questo grande uomo, benché appartenga a un periodo anteriore a quello

vittoriano, è, come il nome di Cobbett, assai importante per esso. In

sostanza Macaulay accettò le conclusioni di Bentham; benché

offrisse brillanti obiezioni a tutti i suoi argomenti. In ogni caso l’anima

di Bentham (se ne aveva una) continuò a marciare, come John Brown; e nel

movimento vittoriano centrale fu certamente lui a vincere. John Stuart Mill

fu il fiore finale di quella crescita. Egli stesso era fresco e delicato

e puro; ma questo è il compito di un fiore. Benché dovesse predicare

un duro razionalismo in religione, una dura competizione in economia, un duro

egoismo in etica, la sua stessa anima aveva tutta quella argentea sensibilità che

si può vedere nel suo bel ritratto di Watts. Egli non vantava nulla di quel

brutale ottimismo con cui i suoi amici e seguaci della Scuola di

Manchester esponevano le loro allegre negazioni. V’era in Mill perfino una

sorta di imbarazzo; egli mostrava tutte le ruote del suo ferreo universo

piuttosto a malincuore, come un gentiluomo nel commercio che fa visitare a delle dame la sua

fabbrica. Splendeva in lui una bella reverenza per le donne, che è

tanto più commovente perché, nel suo dipartimento, per così dire, egli poteva

offrir loro soltanto un dono così arido come il Suffragio Parlamentare vittoriano.

Ora, nel tentare di descrivere come gli scrittori vittoriani stessero l’uno rispetto all’altro,

dobbiamo ricorrere alla ben reale difficoltà notata all’inizio: la

difficoltà di mantenere l’ordine morale parallelo a quello cronologico

ordine. Poiché la mente si muove per istinti, associazioni, premonizioni e

non per date fisse o processi compiuti. Azione e reazione

avverranno simultaneamente: o la causa sarà in effetti trovata dopo l’effetto.

Gli errori saranno osteggiati prima di essere stati propriamente promulgati:

le nozioni saranno per la prima volta definite molto dopo che sono morte. Non serve a nulla

far consultare l’almanacco per cercare chiari di luna; e gran parte della letteratura in questo

senso è chiaro di luna. Così Wordsworth si ritrasse nel Torismo, per così

dire, da un estremo shelleyano di panteismo ancora disincarnato. Così

Newman calò la ferrea spada del dogma per parare un colpo non ancora

vibrato, che veniva dalla clava di Darwin. Per questa ragione nessuno

può comprendere la tradizione, e neppure la storia, se non ha qualche

tenerezza per l’anacronismo.

Ora, per gran parte dell’era vittoriana la tradizione utilitaristica

che raggiunse il suo apice in Mill tenne il centro del campo; era

la filosofia al governo, per così dire. Sostenne la sua marcia di

codificazione e indagine finché non ebbe reso possibili le grandi vittorie

di Darwin e Huxley e Wallace. Se prendiamo Macaulay all’inizio

dell’epoca e Huxley alla sua fine, troveremo che avevano

molto in comune. Erano entrambi uomini dalla mascella squadrata, semplici, avidi di

controversia ma sprezzanti del sofisma, morti al misticismo ma assai

vivi alla moralità; ed erano entrambi assai più sotto l’influenza

della propria ammirevole retorica di quanto sapessero. Huxley, specialmente, era

assai più un uomo di lettere che di scienza. È divertente notare che

quando Huxley fu accusato di essere retorico, egli espresse il proprio orrore

del «impiastricciare il bel volto della verità con quel pestilenziale cosmetico,

la retorica», che è di per sé un pezzo di retorica altrettanto ben impiastricciato

di quanto lo stesso Ruskin avrebbe saputo confezionare. La differenza che il periodo aveva

sviluppato si vede meglio se consideriamo questo: che, sebbene nessuno dei due fosse

di indole spirituale, Macaulay dava per scontato che il buon senso

richiedesse qualche sorta di teologia, mentre Huxley dava per scontato che

il buon senso significasse non averne alcuna. Macaulay, si dice, non parlava mai

della sua religione: ma Huxley parlava sempre della religione che non

aveva.

Ma benché questo semplice razionalismo vittoriano tenesse il centro, e in un

certo senso fosse l’era vittoriana, esso fu assalito da molti lati,

ed era stato assalito perfino prima dell’inizio di quell’era. Il resto della

storia intellettuale del tempo è una serie di reazioni contro

di esso, che vengono ondata dopo ondata. Sono riuscite a scuoterlo, ma

non a scalzarlo dalla mente moderna. La prima di queste fu il

Movimento di Oxford; un arco che si spezzò quando ebbe scoccato la folgorante

freccia che fu Newman. La seconda reazione fu un uomo solo; senza maestri

né allievi — Dickens. La terza reazione fu un gruppo che cercò di creare

una sorta di nuovo Protestantesimo romantico, da opporre sia alla Ragione sia a

Roma — Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Maurice — forse Tennyson. Browning

fu anch’egli a un tempo romantico e Puritano; ma non apparteneva ad alcun gruppo, e

operò contro il materialismo in una maniera tutta sua. Benché da ragazzo

comprasse avidamente le rivoluzionarie poesie di Shelley, non pensò di

diventare un poeta rivoluzionario. Si concentrò sulle anime particolari degli

uomini; cercando Dio in una serie di colloqui privati. Perciò Browning,

per grande che sia, è piuttosto uno dei romanzieri vittoriani che interamente dei

poeti vittoriani. Da Ruskin, di nuovo, discendono coloro che possono chiamarsi

i Preraffaelliti della prosa e della poesia.

È davvero con questo razionalismo trionfante, e con il romanzesco di

these various attacks on it, that the study of Victorian literature

begins and proceeds. Bentham was already the prophet of a powerful sect;

Macaulay was already the historian of an historic party, before the true

Victorian epoch began. The middle classes were emerging in a state of

damaged Puritanism. The upper classes were utterly pagan. Their clear

and courageous testimony remains in those immortal words of Lord

Melbourne, who had led the young queen to the throne and long stood

there as her protector. “No one has more respect for the Christian

religion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding it into

private life----” What was pure paganism in the politics of Melbourne

became a sort of mystical cynicism in the politics of Disraeli; and is

well mirrored in his novels—for he was a man who felt at home in

mirrors. With every allowance for aliens and eccentrics and all the

accidents that must always eat the edges of any systematic

circumference, it may still be said that the Utilitarians held the fort.

Of the Oxford Movement what remains most strongly in the Victorian Epoch

centres round the challenge of Newman, its one great literary man. But

the movement as a whole had been of great significance in the very

genesis and make up of the society: yet that significance is not quite

easy immediately to define. It was certainly not æsthetic ritualism;

scarcely one of the Oxford High Churchmen was what we should call a

Ritualist. It was certainly not a conscious reaching out towards Rome:

except on a Roman Catholic theory which might explain all our unrests by

that dim desire. It knew little of Europe, it knew nothing of Ireland,

to which any merely Roman Catholic revulsion would obviously have

turned. In the first instance, I think, the more it is studied, the more

it would appear that it was a movement of mere religion as such. It was

not so much a taste for Catholic dogma, but simply a hunger for dogma.

For dogma means the serious satisfaction of the mind. Dogma does not

mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought. It was a revolt

against the Victorian spirit in one particular aspect of it; which may

roughly be called (in a cosy and domestic Victorian metaphor) having

your cake and eating it too. It saw that the solid and serious

Victorians were fundamentally frivolous—because they were

fundamentally inconsistent.

A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes’ intelligent

talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So

long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a

shape. Mahomet created, when he forbade wine but allowed five wives: he

created a very big thing, which we have still to deal with. The first

French Republic created, when it affirmed property and abolished

peerages; France still stands like a square, four-sided building which

Europe has besieged in vain. The men of the Oxford Movement would have

been horrified at being compared either with Moslems or Jacobins. But

their sub-conscious thirst was for something that Moslems and Jacobins

had and ordinary Anglicans had not: the exalted excitement of

consistency. If you were a Moslem you were not a Bacchanal. If you were

a Republican you were not a peer. And so the Oxford men, even in their

first and dimmest stages, felt that if you were a Churchman you were not

a Dissenter. The Oxford Movement was, out of the very roots of its

being, a rational movement; almost a rationalist movement. In that it

differed sharply from the other reactions that shook the Utilitarian

compromise; the blinding mysticism of Carlyle, the mere manly

emotionalism of Dickens. It was an appeal to reason: reason said that if

a Christian had a feast day he must have a fast day too. Otherwise, all

days ought to be alike; and this was that very Utilitarianism against

which their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault.

This idea, even by reason of its reason, narrowed into a sort of sharp

spear, of which the spear blade was Newman. It did forget many of the

other forces that were fighting on its side. But the movement could

boast, first and last, many men who had this eager dogmatic quality:

Keble, who spoilt a poem in order to recognise a doctrine; Faber, who

told the rich, almost with taunts, that God sent the poor as eagles to

strip them; Froude, who with Newman announced his return in the arrogant

motto of Achilles. But the greater part of all this happened before what

is properly our period; and in that period Newman, and perhaps Newman

alone, is the expression and summary of the whole school. It was

certainly in the Victorian Age, and after his passage to Rome, that

Newman claimed his complete right to be in any book on modern English

literature. This is no place for estimating his theology: but one point

about it does clearly emerge. Whatever else is right, the theory that

Newman went over to Rome to find peace and an end of argument, is quite

unquestionably wrong. He had far more quarrels after he had gone over to

Rome. But, though he had far more quarrels, he had far fewer

compromises: and he was of that temper which is tortured more by

compromise than by quarrel. He was a man at once of abnormal energy and

abnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written

the Apologia. If he sometimes seemed to skin his enemies alive, it was

because he himself lacked a skin. In this sense his Apologia is a

triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in this

sense he does indeed (to use his own expression) vanquish not his

accuser but his judges. Many men would shrink from recording all their

cold fits and hesitations and prolonged inconsistencies: I am sure it

was the breath of life to Newman to confess them, now that he had done

with them for ever. His _Lectures on the Present Position of English

questi vari attacchi ad esso, che lo studio della letteratura vittoriana

comincia e procede. Bentham era già il profeta di una potente setta;

Macaulay era già lo storico di un partito storico, prima che la vera

epoca vittoriana cominciasse. Le classi medie stavano emergendo in uno stato di

puritanesimo guasto. Le classi alte erano del tutto pagane. La loro chiara

e coraggiosa testimonianza rimane in quelle immortali parole di Lord

Melbourne, che aveva condotto la giovane regina al trono e a lungo vi rimase

come suo protettore. «Nessuno ha più rispetto di me per la religione

cristiana; ma davvero, quando si tratta di introdurla nella

vita privata——» Ciò che era puro paganesimo nella politica di Melbourne

divenne una sorta di mistico cinismo nella politica di Disraeli; ed è

ben rispecchiato nei suoi romanzi — poiché egli era un uomo che si sentiva a casa tra gli

specchi. Con ogni concessione per estranei ed eccentrici e tutti gli

accidenti che devono sempre corrodere i bordi di qualunque sistematica

circonferenza, si può ancora dire che gli Utilitaristi tennero il forte.

Del Movimento di Oxford ciò che rimane più fortemente nell’Epoca Vittoriana

si accentra intorno alla sfida di Newman, il suo unico grande letterato. Ma

il movimento nel suo insieme era stato di grande significato nella stessa

genesi e costituzione della società: eppure quel significato non è del tutto

facile da definire immediatamente. Non era certamente ritualismo estetico;

a stento uno degli uomini dell’Alta Chiesa di Oxford era ciò che chiameremmo un

Ritualista. Non era certamente un consapevole protendersi verso Roma:

salvo in base a una teoria cattolica romana che potrebbe spiegare tutte le nostre inquietudini con

quel confuso desiderio. Sapeva poco dell’Europa, non sapeva nulla dell’Irlanda,

verso la quale qualunque repulsione meramente cattolica romana si sarebbe ovviamente

rivolta. In prima istanza, io credo, quanto più lo si studia, tanto più

apparirebbe che fu un movimento di mera religione in quanto tale. Non era

tanto un gusto per il dogma cattolico, ma semplicemente una fame di dogma.

Poiché il dogma significa la seria soddisfazione della mente. Il dogma non

significa l’assenza del pensiero, ma la fine del pensiero. Fu una rivolta

contro lo spirito vittoriano in un suo aspetto particolare; che può

grosso modo chiamarsi (con una accogliente e domestica metafora vittoriana) avere

la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca. Vide che i solidi e seri

Vittoriani erano fondamentalmente frivoli — perché erano

fondamentalmente incoerenti.

Un uomo che fa la professione di un qualsiasi credo che valga dieci minuti d’intelligente

conversazione è sempre un uomo che guadagna qualcosa e rinuncia a qualcosa. Finché

fa entrambe le cose, può creare: poiché sta tracciando un contorno e una

forma. Maometto creò, quando proibì il vino ma concesse cinque mogli: egli

creò una cosa assai grande, con la quale abbiamo ancora a che fare. La prima

Repubblica francese creò, quando affermò la proprietà e abolì i

titoli nobiliari; la Francia sta ancora come un edificio quadrato, dai quattro lati, che

l’Europa ha assediato invano. Gli uomini del Movimento di Oxford sarebbero stati

inorriditi all’essere paragonati sia ai Musulmani sia ai Giacobini. Ma

la loro sete subconscia era per qualcosa che i Musulmani e i Giacobini

avevano e i comuni Anglicani non avevano: l’esaltata eccitazione della

coerenza. Se eri un Musulmano non eri un Baccante. Se eri

un Repubblicano non eri un pari. E così gli uomini di Oxford, anche nei loro

primi e più fiochi stadi, sentirono che se eri un uomo di Chiesa non eri

un Dissidente. Il Movimento di Oxford fu, dalle radici stesse del suo

essere, un movimento razionale; quasi un movimento razionalista. In ciò

differiva nettamente dalle altre reazioni che scossero il compromesso

Utilitarista; l’accecante misticismo di Carlyle, il mero virile

emozionalismo di Dickens. Fu un appello alla ragione: la ragione diceva che se

un cristiano aveva un giorno di festa doveva avere anche un giorno di digiuno. Altrimenti, tutti

i giorni sarebbero dovuti essere uguali; e questo era proprio quell’Utilitarismo contro

il quale il loro Movimento di Oxford fu il primo e più razionale assalto.

Questa idea, proprio in virtù della sua ragione, si assottigliò in una sorta di acuta

lancia, la cui punta era Newman. Dimenticò molte delle

altre forze che combattevano dalla sua parte. Ma il movimento poté

vantare, dal primo all’ultimo, molti uomini che ebbero questa fervida qualità dogmatica:

Keble, che rovinò una poesia per riconoscere una dottrina; Faber, che

disse ai ricchi, quasi con scherno, che Dio mandava i poveri come aquile a

spogliarli; Froude, che con Newman annunciò il suo ritorno con l’arrogante

motto di Achille. Ma la maggior parte di tutto questo accadde prima di ciò che

è propriamente il nostro periodo; e in quel periodo Newman, e forse Newman

soltanto, è l’espressione e il riassunto dell’intera scuola. Fu

certamente nell’Età Vittoriana, e dopo il suo passaggio a Roma, che

Newman rivendicò il suo pieno diritto a essere in qualunque libro sulla moderna letteratura

inglese. Questo non è il luogo per valutare la sua teologia: ma un punto

su di essa emerge chiaramente. Qualunque altra cosa sia giusta, la teoria che

Newman passò a Roma per trovare la pace e la fine della disputa, è del tutto

indubitabilmente falsa. Ebbe assai più liti dopo essere passato a

Roma. Ma, benché avesse assai più liti, ebbe assai meno

compromessi: ed era di quel temperamento che è torturato più dal

compromesso che dalla lite. Era un uomo a un tempo di anormale energia e

anormale sensibilità: nessuno senza quella combinazione avrebbe potuto scrivere

l’Apologia. Se talvolta sembrava scorticare vivi i suoi nemici, era

perché egli stesso era privo di pelle. In questo senso la sua Apologia è un

trionfo assai al di là dell’effimera accusa su cui fu fondata; in questo

senso egli davvero (per usare la sua stessa espressione) vince non il suo

accusatore ma i suoi giudici. Molti uomini rifuggirebbero dal registrare tutti i loro

freddi accessi ed esitazioni e prolungate incoerenze: sono certo che

fu il respiro della vita per Newman confessarle, ora che aveva finito

con esse per sempre. Le sue _Lezioni sull’attuale posizione degli inglesi

Catholics_, practically preached against a raging mob, rise not only

higher but happier, as his instant unpopularity increases. There is

something grander than humour, there is fun, in the very first lecture

about the British Constitution as explained to a meeting of Russians.

But always his triumphs are the triumphs of a highly sensitive man: a

man must feel insults before he can so insultingly and splendidly

avenge them. He is a naked man, who carries a naked sword. The quality

of his literary style is so successful that it succeeds in escaping

definition. The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionate

patience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap.

But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I have

said: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing

irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise. So far as the

present purpose is concerned, his protest died with him: he left few

imitators and (it may easily be conceived) no successful imitators. The

suggestion of him lingers on in the exquisite Elizabethan perversity of

Coventry Patmore; and has later flamed out from the shy volcano of

Francis Thompson. Otherwise (as we shall see in the parallel case of

Ruskin’s Socialism) he has no followers in his own age: but very many in

ours.

The next group of reactionaries or romantics or whatever we elect to

call them, gathers roughly around one great name. Scotland, from which

had come so many of those harsh economists who made the first Radical

philosophies of the Victorian Age, was destined also to fling forth (I

had almost said to spit forth) their fiercest and most extraordinary

enemy. The two primary things in Thomas Carlyle were his early Scotch

education and his later German culture. The first was in almost all

respects his strength; the latter in some respects his weakness. As an

ordinary lowland peasant, he inherited the really valuable historic

property of the Scots, their independence, their fighting spirit, and

their instinctive philosophic consideration of men merely as men. But he

was not an ordinary peasant. If he had laboured obscurely in his village

till death, he would have been yet locally a marked man; a man with a

wild eye, a man with an air of silent anger; perhaps a man at whom

stones were sometimes thrown. A strain of disease and suffering ran

athwart both his body and his soul. In spite of his praise of silence,

it was only through his gift of utterance that he escaped madness. But

while his fellow-peasants would have seen this in him and perhaps mocked

it, they would also have seen something which they always expect in such

men, and they would have got it: vision, a power in the mind akin to

second sight. Like many ungainly or otherwise unattractive Scotchmen, he

was a seer. By which I do not mean to refer so much to his

transcendental rhapsodies about the World-soul or the Nature-garment or

the Mysteries and Eternities generally, these seem to me to belong more

to his German side and to be less sincere and vital. I mean a real power

of seeing things suddenly, not apparently reached by any process; a

grand power of guessing. He saw the crowd of the new States General,

Danton with his “rude flattened face,” Robespierre peering mistily

through his spectacles. He saw the English charge at Dunbar. He

guessed that Mirabeau, however dissipated and diseased, had something

sturdy inside him. He guessed that Lafayette, however brave and

victorious, had nothing inside him. He supported the lawlessness of

Cromwell, because across two centuries he almost physically felt the

feebleness and hopelessness of the moderate Parliamentarians. He said a

word of sympathy for the universally vituperated Jacobins of the

Mountain, because through thick veils of national prejudice and

misrepresentation, he felt the impossibility of the Gironde. He was

wrong in denying to Scott the power of being inside his characters: but

he really had a good deal of that power himself. It was one of his

innumerable and rather provincial crotchets to encourage prose as

against poetry. But, as a matter of fact, he himself was much greater

considered as a kind of poet than considered as anything else; and the

central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

He first emerged, as it were, as a student and disciple of Goethe. The

connection was not wholly fortunate. With much of what Goethe really

stood for he was not really in sympathy; but in his own obstinate way,

he tried to knock his idol into shape instead of choosing another. He

pushed further and further the extravagances of a vivid but very

unbalanced and barbaric style, in the praise of a poet who really

represented the calmest classicism and the attempt to restore a Hellenic

equilibrium in the mind. It is like watching a shaggy Scandinavian

decorating a Greek statue washed up by chance on his shores. And while

the strength of Goethe was a strength of completion and serenity, which

Carlyle not only never found but never even sought, the weaknesses of

Goethe were of a sort that did not draw the best out of Carlyle. The one

civilised element that the German classicists forgot to put into their

beautiful balance was a sense of humour. And great poet as Goethe was,

there is to the last something faintly fatuous about his half

sceptical, half sentimental self-importance; a Lord Chamberlain of

teacup politics; an earnest and elderly flirt; a German of the Germans.

Now Carlyle had humour; he had it in his very style, but it never got

into his philosophy. His philosophy largely remained a heavy Teutonic

idealism, absurdly unaware of the complexity of things; as when he

perpetually repeated (as with a kind of flat-footed stamping) that

cattolici_, praticamente predicate contro una folla infuriata, si elevano non solo

più in alto ma più felici, man mano che cresce la sua istantanea impopolarità. V’è

qualcosa di più grandioso dell’umorismo, v’è spasso, nella primissima lezione

sulla Costituzione britannica quale spiegata a un’assemblea di Russi.

Ma sempre i suoi trionfi sono i trionfi di un uomo altamente sensibile: un

uomo deve sentire gli insulti prima di poterli vendicare in modo così insolente e

splendido. Egli è un uomo nudo, che porta una nuda spada. La qualità

del suo stile letterario è così riuscita che riesce a sfuggire alla

definizione. La qualità della sua logica è quella di una lunga ma appassionata

pazienza, che attende finché non ha fissato tutti gli angoli di una trappola di ferro.

Ma la qualità del suo commento morale all’epoca rimane ciò che ho

detto: una protesta della razionalità della religione contro la crescente

irrazionalità del mero conforto e compromesso vittoriano. Per quanto riguarda il

presente scopo, la sua protesta morì con lui: lasciò pochi

imitatori e (lo si può facilmente immaginare) nessun imitatore riuscito. Il

suggerimento di lui indugia ancora nella squisita perversità elisabettiana di

Coventry Patmore; e in seguito è divampato dal timido vulcano di

Francis Thompson. Per il resto (come vedremo nel caso parallelo del

Socialismo di Ruskin) egli non ha seguaci nella propria epoca: ma moltissimi nella

nostra.

Il gruppo successivo di reazionari o romantici o comunque scegliamo di

chiamarli, si raccoglie grosso modo intorno a un grande nome. La Scozia, dalla quale

erano venuti tanti di quei ruvidi economisti che fecero le prime Radicali

filosofie dell’Età Vittoriana, era destinata anche a scagliar fuori (avrei

quasi detto a sputar fuori) il loro più feroce e straordinario

nemico. Le due cose primarie in Thomas Carlyle furono la sua prima educazione

scozzese e la sua più tarda cultura tedesca. La prima fu quasi sotto ogni

rispetto la sua forza; la seconda sotto certi rispetti la sua debolezza. Come

comune contadino delle pianure, egli ereditò la proprietà storica davvero

preziosa degli Scozzesi, la loro indipendenza, il loro spirito combattivo, e

la loro istintiva considerazione filosofica degli uomini meramente come uomini. Ma egli

non era un comune contadino. Se avesse faticato oscuramente nel suo villaggio

fino alla morte, sarebbe stato pur sempre localmente un uomo segnato; un uomo con un

occhio selvaggio, un uomo con un’aria di silenziosa ira; forse un uomo contro cui

talvolta si scagliavano pietre. Una vena di malattia e sofferenza corse

di traverso sia al suo corpo sia alla sua anima. Nonostante la sua lode del silenzio,

fu solo attraverso il suo dono della parola che egli sfuggì alla follia. Ma

mentre i suoi compaesani contadini avrebbero visto questo in lui e forse l’avrebbero

deriso, avrebbero anche visto qualcosa che essi sempre si aspettano in tali

uomini, e l’avrebbero ottenuto: la visione, un potere della mente affine alla

seconda vista. Come molti sgraziati o altrimenti poco attraenti Scozzesi, egli

era un veggente. Con ciò non intendo riferirmi tanto alle sue

rapsodie trascendentali sull’Anima del Mondo o sulla veste della Natura o

sui Misteri e sulle Eternità in generale, che mi sembrano appartenere più

al suo lato tedesco ed essere meno sincere e vitali. Intendo un vero potere

di veder le cose all’improvviso, non raggiunte apparentemente da alcun processo; un

grande potere di indovinare. Egli vide la folla dei nuovi Stati Generali,

Danton col suo «rude volto appiattito», Robespierre che scrutava nebbiosamente

attraverso i suoi occhiali. Egli vide la carica inglese a Dunbar. Egli

indovinò che Mirabeau, per quanto dissipato e malato, avesse qualcosa di

robusto dentro di sé. Egli indovinò che Lafayette, per quanto valoroso e

vittorioso, non avesse nulla dentro di sé. Sostenne l’illegalità di

Cromwell, perché attraverso due secoli egli quasi fisicamente sentiva la

debolezza e la disperazione dei moderati Parlamentari. Disse una

parola di simpatia per gli universalmente vituperati Giacobini della

Montagna, perché attraverso spessi veli di pregiudizio nazionale e

travisamento, egli sentiva l’impossibilità della Gironda. Ebbe

torto nel negare a Scott il potere di essere dentro i suoi personaggi: ma

egli stesso possedeva davvero buona parte di quel potere. Era uno dei suoi

innumerevoli e piuttosto provinciali ghiribizzi incoraggiare la prosa contro

la poesia. Ma, di fatto, egli stesso era assai più grande

considerato come una specie di poeta che considerato come qualsiasi altra cosa; e l’

idea centrale della poesia è l’idea di indovinare giusto, come un bambino.

Egli emerse dapprima, per così dire, come studioso e discepolo di Goethe. La

connessione non fu del tutto fortunata. Con molto di ciò che Goethe realmente

rappresentava egli non era davvero in sintonia; ma nel suo ostinato modo,

cercò di battere il suo idolo dandogli forma invece di sceglierne un altro. Egli

spinse sempre più oltre le stravaganze di uno stile vivido ma assai

sbilanciato e barbarico, nella lode di un poeta che realmente

rappresentava il più calmo classicismo e il tentativo di restaurare un ellenico

equilibrio nella mente. È come guardare un irsuto Scandinavo

che decora una statua greca gettata per caso sulle sue rive. E mentre

la forza di Goethe era una forza di compiutezza e serenità, che

Carlyle non solo non trovò mai ma non cercò nemmeno mai, le debolezze di

Goethe erano di una sorta che non traeva il meglio da Carlyle. L’unico

elemento civile che i classicisti tedeschi dimenticarono di mettere nel loro

bell’equilibrio era il senso dell’umorismo. E per grande poeta che Goethe fosse,

v’è fino all’ultimo qualcosa di lievemente fatuo nella sua metà

scettica, metà sentimentale importanza di sé; un Lord Ciambellano di

politica da tazza di tè; un serio e attempato cascamorto; un Tedesco dei Tedeschi.

Ora, Carlyle aveva umorismo; l’aveva nel suo stesso stile, ma non entrò mai

nella sua filosofia. La sua filosofia rimase in gran parte un pesante idealismo teutonico,

assurdamente inconsapevole della complessità delle cose; come quando egli

ripeteva perpetuamente (con una sorta di scalpitio dal piede piatto) che

people ought to tell the truth; apparently supposing, to quote

Stevenson’s phrase, that telling the truth is as easy as blind hookey.

Yet, though his general honesty is unquestionable, he was by no means

one of those who will give up a fancy under the shock of a fact. If by

sheer genius he frequently guessed right, he was not the kind of man to

admit easily that he had guessed wrong. His version of Cromwell’s filthy

cruelties in Ireland, or his impatient slurring over of the most

sinister riddle in the morality of Frederick the Great—these passages

are, one must frankly say, disingenuous. But it is, so to speak, a

generous disingenuousness; the heat and momentum of sincere admirations,

not the shuffling fear and flattery of the constitutional or patriotic

historian. It bears most resemblance to the incurable prejudices of a

woman.

For the rest there hovered behind all this transcendental haze a certain

presence of old northern paganism; he really had some sympathy with the

vast vague gods of that moody but not unmanly Nature-worship which seems

to have filled the darkness of the North before the coming of the Roman

Eagle or the Christian Cross. This he combined, allowing for certain

sceptical omissions, with the grisly Old Testament God he had heard

about in the black Sabbaths of his childhood; and so promulgated

(against both Rationalists and Catholics) a sort of heathen Puritanism:

Protestantism purged of its evidences of Christianity.

His great and real work was the attack on Utilitarianism: which did real

good, though there was much that was muddled and dangerous in the

historical philosophy which he preached as an alternative. It is his

real glory that he was the first to see clearly and say plainly the

great truth of our time; that the wealth of the state is not the

prosperity of the people. Macaulay and the Mills and all the regular run

of the Early Victorians, took it for granted that if Manchester was

getting richer, we had got hold of the key to comfort and progress.

Carlyle pointed out (with stronger sagacity and humour than he showed on

any other question) that it was just as true to say that Manchester was

getting poorer as that it was getting richer: or, in other words, that

Manchester was not getting richer at all, but only some of the less

pleasing people in Manchester. In this matter he is to be noted in

connection with national developments much later; for he thus became the

first prophet of the Socialists. Sartor Resartus is an admirable

fantasia; The French Revolution is, with all its faults, a really

fine piece of history; the lectures on Heroes contain some masterly

sketches of personalities. But I think it is in Past and Present, and

the essay on Chartism, that Carlyle achieves the work he was chosen by

gods and men to achieve; which possibly might not have been achieved by

a happier or more healthy-minded man. He never rose to more deadly irony

than in such macabre descriptions as that of the poor woman proving

her sisterhood with the rich by giving them all typhoid fever; or that

perfect piece of badinage about “Overproduction of Shirts”; in which

he imagines the aristocrats claiming to be quite clear of this offence.

“Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse us of overproduction? We

take the Heavens and the Earth to witness that we have produced nothing

at all… He that accuses us of producing, let him show himself. Let

him say what and when.” And he never wrote so sternly and justly as when

he compared the “divine sorrow” of Dante with the “undivine sorrow” of

Utilitarianism, which had already come down to talking about the

breeding of the poor and to hinting at infanticide. This is a

representative quarrel; for if the Utilitarian spirit reached its

highest point in Mill, it certainly reached its lowest point in Malthus.

One last element in the influence of Carlyle ought to be mentioned;

because it very strongly dominated his disciples—especially Kingsley,

and to some extent Tennyson and Ruskin. Because he frowned at the

cockney cheerfulness of the cheaper economists, they and others

represented him as a pessimist, and reduced all his azure infinities to

a fit of the blues. But Carlyle’s philosophy, more carefully considered,

will be found to be dangerously optimist rather than pessimist. As a

thinker Carlyle is not sad, but recklessly and rather unscrupulously

satisfied. For he seems to have held the theory that good could not be

definitely defeated in this world; and that everything in the long run

finds its right level. It began with what we may call the “Bible of

History” idea: that all affairs and politics were a clouded but unbroken

revelation of the divine. Thus any enormous and unaltered human

settlement—as the Norman Conquest or the secession of America—we must

suppose to be the will of God. It lent itself to picturesque treatment;

and Carlyle and the Carlyleans were above all things picturesque. It

gave them at first a rhetorical advantage over the Catholic and other

older schools. They could boast that their Creator was still creating;

that he was in Man and Nature, and was not hedged round in a Paradise or

imprisoned in a pyx. They could say their God had not grown too old for

war: that He was present at Gettysburg and Gravelotte as much as at

Gibeon and Gilboa. I do not mean that they literally said these

particular things: they are what I should have said had I been bribed to

defend their position. But they said things to the same effect: that

what manages finally to happen, happens for a higher purpose. Carlyle

said the French Revolution was a thing settled in the eternal councils

to be; and therefore (and not because it was right) attacking it was

“fighting against God.” And Kingsley even carried the principle so far

la gente dovrebbe dire la verità; supponendo apparentemente, per citare

la frase di Stevenson, che dire la verità sia facile come il gioco della mosca cieca.

Eppure, benché la sua onestà generale sia indubitabile, egli non era affatto

uno di quelli che rinunciano a un capriccio sotto l’urto di un fatto. Se per

puro genio egli indovinava spesso giusto, non era il tipo d’uomo da

ammettere facilmente di aver indovinato male. La sua versione delle immonde

crudeltà di Cromwell in Irlanda, o il suo impaziente sorvolare sul più

sinistro enigma nella moralità di Federico il Grande — questi passi

sono, bisogna francamente dirlo, disonesti. Ma è, per così dire, una

generosa disonestà; il calore e lo slancio di sincere ammirazioni,

non la strisciante paura e adulazione dello storico costituzionale o

patriottico. Somiglia soprattutto agli inguaribili pregiudizi di una

donna.

Per il resto aleggiava dietro tutta questa foschia trascendentale una certa

presenza dell’antico paganesimo nordico; egli aveva davvero qualche simpatia per gli

sconfinati vaghi dèi di quel cupo ma non poco virile culto della Natura che sembra

aver riempito le tenebre del Nord prima della venuta dell’Aquila

romana o della Croce cristiana. Ciò egli combinò, tenuto conto di certe

scettiche omissioni, con il macabro Dio dell’Antico Testamento di cui aveva sentito

parlare nei neri Sabbath della sua infanzia; e così promulgò

(contro sia i Razionalisti sia i Cattolici) una sorta di puritanesimo pagano:

il Protestantesimo purgato delle sue prove del Cristianesimo.

La sua grande e reale opera fu l’attacco all’Utilitarismo: che fece un vero

bene, benché vi fosse molto di confuso e pericoloso nella

filosofia storica che egli predicava come alternativa. È sua

vera gloria che egli fu il primo a vedere chiaramente e dire apertamente la

grande verità del nostro tempo; che la ricchezza dello Stato non è la

prosperità del popolo. Macaulay e i Mill e tutto il consueto corso

dei primi Vittoriani, davano per scontato che se Manchester

diventava più ricca, avevamo afferrato la chiave del conforto e del progresso.

Carlyle fece notare (con più forte sagacia e umorismo di quanto ne mostrasse su

qualsiasi altra questione) che era altrettanto vero dire che Manchester

stava diventando più povera quanto che stava diventando più ricca: o, in altre parole, che

Manchester non stava diventando affatto più ricca, ma solo alcune delle meno

gradevoli persone di Manchester. In questa faccenda egli è da notare in

connessione con sviluppi nazionali assai più tardi; poiché così divenne il

primo profeta dei Socialisti. Sartor Resartus è un’ammirevole

fantasia; La Rivoluzione francese è, con tutti i suoi difetti, un davvero

bel pezzo di storia; le lezioni sugli Eroi contengono alcuni magistrali

schizzi di personalità. Ma io penso che sia in Passato e presente, e

nel saggio sul Cartismo, che Carlyle compie l’opera per cui fu scelto da

dèi e uomini a compiere; che forse non avrebbe potuto essere compiuta da

un uomo più felice o dalla mente più sana. Egli non si elevò mai a più letale ironia

che in certe macabre descrizioni come quella della povera donna che prova

la sua sorellanza con i ricchi contagiando loro tutti il tifo; o quel

perfetto pezzo di badinage sulla «Sovrapproduzione di Camicie»; nel quale

egli immagina gli aristocratici che pretendono di essere del tutto immuni da questo reato.

«Volete scambiarvi accuse, volete accusare noi di sovrapproduzione? Noi

prendiamo il Cielo e la Terra a testimoni che non abbiamo prodotto nulla

affatto… Chi ci accusa di produrre, si mostri. Che

dica cosa e quando.» E non scrisse mai così severamente e giustamente come quando

paragonò la «divina afflizione» di Dante con l’«indivina afflizione» dell’

Utilitarismo, che era già sceso a discorrere sulla

riproduzione dei poveri e ad accennare all’infanticidio. Questa è una

lite rappresentativa; poiché se lo spirito utilitarista raggiunse il suo

punto più alto in Mill, raggiunse certamente il suo punto più basso in Malthus.

Un ultimo elemento nell’influenza di Carlyle dovrebbe essere menzionato;

perché dominò assai fortemente i suoi discepoli — specialmente Kingsley,

e in qualche misura Tennyson e Ruskin. Poiché egli aggrottava le sopracciglia alla

cockney allegria dei più dozzinali economisti, essi e altri

lo rappresentarono come un pessimista, e ridussero tutte le sue azzurre infinità a

un accesso di malinconia. Ma la filosofia di Carlyle, considerata più attentamente,

si troverà essere pericolosamente ottimista anziché pessimista. Come

pensatore Carlyle non è triste, ma temerariamente e piuttosto senza scrupoli

soddisfatto. Poiché sembra aver sostenuto la teoria che il bene non potesse essere

definitivamente sconfitto in questo mondo; e che ogni cosa alla lunga

trovi il suo giusto livello. Cominciò con ciò che possiamo chiamare l’idea della «Bibbia della

Storia»: che tutte le vicende e la politica fossero una velata ma ininterrotta

rivelazione del divino. Così qualunque enorme e immutato

assetto umano — come la Conquista normanna o la secessione dell’America — dobbiamo

supporre essere la volontà di Dio. Si prestava a un trattamento pittoresco;

e Carlyle e i Carlyleani erano soprattutto pittoreschi. Esso

diede loro dapprima un vantaggio retorico sulle scuole cattoliche e altre

più antiche. Potevano vantarsi che il loro Creatore stesse ancora creando;

che egli fosse nell’Uomo e nella Natura, e non fosse recintato in un Paradiso o

imprigionato in una pisside. Potevano dire che il loro Dio non era divenuto troppo vecchio per la

guerra: che egli era presente a Gettysburg e Gravelotte tanto quanto a

Gibeon e Gilboa. Non intendo che essi letteralmente dicessero queste

cose particolari: sono ciò che io avrei detto se fossi stato pagato per

difendere la loro posizione. Ma dicevano cose dello stesso tenore: che

ciò che riesce infine ad accadere, accade per un fine più alto. Carlyle

diceva che la Rivoluzione francese era una cosa stabilita negli eterni consigli

perché fosse; e perciò (e non perché fosse giusta) attaccarla era

«combattere contro Dio». E Kingsley portò perfino il principio tanto oltre

as to tell a lady she should remain in the Church of England mainly

because God had put her there. But in spite of its superficial

spirituality and encouragement, it is not hard to see how such a

doctrine could be abused. It practically comes to saying that God is on

the side of the big battalions—or at least, of the victorious ones.

Thus a creed which set out to create conquerors would only corrupt

soldiers; corrupt them with a craven and unsoldierly worship of success:

and that which began as the philosophy of courage ends as the philosophy

of cowardice. If, indeed, Carlyle were right in saying that right is

only “rightly articulated” might, men would never articulate or move in

any way. For no act can have might before it is done: if there is no

right, it cannot rationally be done at all. This element, like the

Anti-Utilitarian element, is to be kept in mind in connection with after

developments: for in this Carlyle is the first cry of Imperialism, as

(in the other case) of Socialism: and the two babes unborn who stir at

the trumpet are Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Kipling also

carries on from Carlyle the concentration on the purely Hebraic parts of

the Bible. The fallacy of this whole philosophy is that if God is indeed

present at a modern battle, He may be present not as on Gilboa but

Golgotha.

Carlyle’s direct historical worship of strength and the rest of it was

fortunately not very fruitful; and perhaps lingered only in Froude the

historian. Even he is more an interruption than a continuity. Froude

develops rather the harsher and more impatient moral counsels of his

master than like Ruskin the more romantic and sympathetic. He carries on

the tradition of Hero Worship: but carries far beyond Carlyle the

practice of worshipping people who cannot rationally be called heroes.

In this matter that eccentric eye of the seer certainly helped Carlyle:

in Cromwell and Frederick the Great there was at least something

self-begotten, original or mystical; if they were not heroes they were

at least demigods or perhaps demons. But Froude set himself to the

praise of the Tudors, a much lower class of people; ill-conditioned

prosperous people who merely waxed fat and kicked. Such strength as

Henry VIII had was the strength of a badly trained horse that bolts, not

of any clear or courageous rider who controls him. There is a sort of

strong man mentioned in Scripture who, because he masters himself, is

more than he that takes a city. There is another kind of strong man

(known to the medical profession) who cannot master himself; and whom it

may take half a city to take alive. But for all that he is a low

lunatic, and not a hero; and of that sort were too many of the heroes

whom Froude attempted to praise. A kind of instinct kept Carlyle from

over-praising Henry VIII; or that highly cultivated and complicated

liar, Queen Elizabeth. Here, the only importance of this is that one of

Carlyle’s followers carried further that “strength” which was the real

weakness of Carlyle. I have heard that Froude’s life of Carlyle was

unsympathetic; but if it was so it was a sort of parricide. For the

rest, like Macaulay, he was a picturesque and partisan historian: but,

like Macaulay (and unlike the craven scientific historians of to-day) he

was not ashamed of being partisan or of being picturesque. Such studies

as he wrote on the Elizabethan seamen and adventurers, represent very

triumphantly the sort of romance of England that all this school was

attempting to establish; and link him up with Kingsley and the rest.

Ruskin may be very roughly regarded as the young lieutenant of Carlyle

in his war on Utilitarian Radicalism: but as an individual he presents

many and curious divergences. In the matter of style, he enriched

English without disordering it. And in the matter of religion (which

was the key of this age as of every other) he did not, like Carlyle, set

up the romance of the great Puritans as a rival to the romance of the

Catholic Church. Rather he set up and worshipped all the arts and

trophies of the Catholic Church as a rival to the Church itself. None

need dispute that he held a perfectly tenable position if he chose to

associate early Florentine art with a Christianity still comparatively

pure, and such sensualities as the Renaissance bred with the corruption

of a Papacy. But this does not alter, as a merely artistic fact, the

strange air of ill-ease and irritation with which Ruskin seems to tear

down the gargoyles of Amiens or the marbles of Venice, as things of

which Europe is not worthy; and take them away with him to a really

careful museum, situated dangerously near Clapham. Many of the great men

of that generation, indeed, had a sort of divided mind; an ethical

headache which was literally a “splitting headache”; for there was a

schism in the sympathies. When these men looked at some historic

object, like the Catholic Church or the French Revolution, they did not

know whether they loved or hated it most. Carlyle’s two eyes were out of

focus, as one may say, when he looked at democracy: he had one eye on

Valmy and the other on Sedan. In the same way, Ruskin had a strong right

hand that wrote of the great mediæval minsters in tall harmonies and

traceries as splendid as their own; and also, so to speak, a weak and

feverish left hand that was always fidgeting and trying to take the pen

away—and write an evangelical tract about the immorality of foreigners.

Many of their contemporaries were the same. The sea of Tennyson’s mind

was troubled under its serene surface. The incessant excitement of

Kingsley, though romantic and attractive in many ways, was a great deal

more like Nervous Christianity than Muscular Christianity. It would be

come dire a una signora che dovrebbe rimanere nella Chiesa d’Inghilterra principalmente

perché Dio ve l’aveva collocata. Ma nonostante la sua superficiale

spiritualità e il suo incoraggiamento, non è difficile vedere come una simile

dottrina possa essere abusata. In pratica equivale a dire che Dio sta

dalla parte dei grossi battaglioni—o almeno di quelli vittoriosi.

Così un credo che si proponeva di creare conquistatori non farebbe che corrompere

i soldati; corromperli con un vile e poco soldatesco culto del successo:

e ciò che era cominciato come la filosofia del coraggio finisce come la filosofia

della codardia. Se davvero Carlyle avesse ragione nel dire che il diritto è

solo forza «rettamente articolata», gli uomini non articolerebbero né si muoverebbero mai in

alcun modo. Poiché nessun atto può avere forza prima d’essere compiuto: se non c’è

diritto, non può razionalmente essere compiuto affatto. Questo elemento, come quello

anti-utilitarista, va tenuto a mente in relazione a sviluppi

successivi: poiché in ciò Carlyle è il primo grido dell’Imperialismo, come

(nell’altro caso) del Socialismo: e i due bimbi non nati che si agitano al

suono della tromba sono il signor Bernard Shaw e il signor Rudyard Kipling. Anche Kipling

prosegue da Carlyle la concentrazione sulle parti puramente ebraiche della

Bibbia. La fallacia di tutta questa filosofia è che se Dio è davvero

presente a una battaglia moderna, potrebbe esservi presente non come sul Gelboe ma come sul

Golgota.

Il diretto culto storico della forza di Carlyle, e tutto il resto, fu

fortunatamente poco fecondo; e forse indugiò soltanto in Froude lo

storico. Persino lui è più un’interruzione che una continuità. Froude

sviluppa piuttosto i più aspri e impazienti consigli morali del suo

maestro, anziché, come Ruskin, quelli più romantici e comprensivi. Egli prosegue

la tradizione del culto dell’Eroe: ma spinge assai oltre Carlyle la

pratica di venerare persone che non possono razionalmente dirsi eroi.

In questa faccenda quell’occhio eccentrico del veggente aiutò certamente Carlyle:

in Cromwell e in Federico il Grande c’era almeno qualcosa

di generato da sé, di originale o di mistico; se non erano eroi erano

almeno semidei o forse demoni. Ma Froude si dedicò alla

lode dei Tudor, una categoria assai più bassa di gente; individui malaccorti,

gente prospera che non fece altro che ingrassare e sparar calci. Tanta forza quanta

Enrico VIII aveva era la forza di un cavallo mal domato che s’imbizzarrisce, non

quella di un cavaliere lucido o coraggioso che lo governa. C’è una specie di

uomo forte menzionato nella Scrittura che, poiché domina sé stesso, è

più di colui che prende una città. C’è un altro tipo di uomo forte

(noto alla professione medica) che non sa dominare sé stesso; e che

può richiedere mezza città per essere preso vivo. Ma con tutto ciò è un basso

pazzo, e non un eroe; e di quella risma erano troppi degli eroi

che Froude tentò di lodare. Una sorta di istinto trattenne Carlyle dal

lodare troppo Enrico VIII; o quella coltissima e complicata

bugiarda, la Regina Elisabetta. Qui, l’unica importanza di ciò è che uno dei

seguaci di Carlyle spinse oltre quella «forza» che era la vera

debolezza di Carlyle. Ho sentito dire che la biografia di Carlyle scritta da Froude fosse

poco benevola; ma se così fu, fu una specie di parricidio. Per il

resto, come Macaulay, egli fu uno storico pittoresco e partigiano: ma,

come Macaulay (e a differenza dei vili storici scientifici d’oggi) egli

non si vergognava d’essere partigiano né di essere pittoresco. Studi come quelli

che scrisse sui marinai e avventurieri elisabettiani rappresentano assai

trionfalmente quella specie di romanticismo dell’Inghilterra che tutta questa scuola

cercava di affermare; e lo collegano a Kingsley e agli altri.

Ruskin può essere considerato, molto grossolanamente, il giovane luogotenente di Carlyle

nella sua guerra al Radicalismo utilitarista: ma come individuo presenta

molte e curiose divergenze. In fatto di stile, egli arricchì

l’inglese senza scomporlo. E in fatto di religione (che

fu la chiave di quest’età come di ogni altra) non eresse, come Carlyle,

il romanticismo dei grandi Puritani a rivale del romanticismo della

Chiesa cattolica. Piuttosto eresse e venerò tutte le arti e i

trofei della Chiesa cattolica a rivali della Chiesa stessa. Nessuno

ha bisogno di contestare che egli tenesse una posizione perfettamente sostenibile se sceglieva di

associare l’arte fiorentina delle origini a un cristianesimo ancora relativamente

puro, e sensualità come quelle che il Rinascimento generò con la corruzione

di un Papato. Ma ciò non muta, come mero fatto artistico, la

strana aria di disagio e d’irritazione con cui Ruskin sembra strappare

le gargolle di Amiens o i marmi di Venezia, come cose di

cui l’Europa non è degna; e portarseli via in un museo davvero

accurato, situato pericolosamente vicino a Clapham. Molti dei grandi uomini

di quella generazione, in verità, avevano una sorta di mente divisa; un’emicrania

etica che era letteralmente un’«emicrania che spacca la testa»; poiché c’era uno

scisma nelle simpatie. Quando questi uomini guardavano qualche oggetto

storico, come la Chiesa cattolica o la Rivoluzione francese, non

sapevano se lo amassero o l’odiassero di più. I due occhi di Carlyle erano fuori

fuoco, per così dire, quando guardava la democrazia: aveva un occhio su

Valmy e l’altro su Sedan. Allo stesso modo, Ruskin aveva una forte mano destra

che scriveva delle grandi cattedrali medievali in alte armonie e

trafori splendidi quanto i loro; e anche, per così dire, una debole e

febbrile mano sinistra che si agitava di continuo e cercava di togliergli la penna

—per scrivere un opuscolo evangelico sull’immoralità degli stranieri.

Molti dei loro contemporanei erano uguali. Il mare della mente di Tennyson

era agitato sotto la sua serena superficie. L’incessante eccitazione di

Kingsley, per quanto romantica e attraente per molti versi, somigliava assai

più a un cristianesimo Nervoso che a un cristianesimo Muscolare. Sarebbe

quite unfair to say of Ruskin that there was any major inconsistency

between his mediæval tastes and his very unmediæval temper: and minor

inconsistencies do not matter in anybody. But it is not quite unfair to

say of him that he seemed to want all parts of the Cathedral except the

altar.

As an artist in prose he is one of the most miraculous products of the

extremely poetical genius of England. The length of a Ruskin sentence is

like that length in the long arrow that was boasted of by the drawers of

the long bow. He draws, not a cloth-yard shaft but a long lance to his

ear: he shoots a spear. But the whole goes light as a bird and straight

as a bullet. There is no Victorian writer before him to whom he even

suggests a comparison, technically considered, except perhaps De

Quincey; who also employed the long rich rolling sentence that, like a

rocket, bursts into stars at the end. But De Quincey’s sentences, as I

have said, have always a dreamy and insecure sense about them, like the

turret on toppling turret of some mad sultan’s pagoda. Ruskin’s sentence

branches into brackets and relative clauses as a straight strong tree

branches into boughs and bifurcations, rather shaking off its burden

than merely adding to it. It is interesting to remember that Ruskin

wrote some of the best of these sentences in the attempt to show that he

did understand the growth of trees, and that nobody else did—except

Turner, of course. It is also (to those acquainted with his perverse and

wild rhetorical prejudices) even more amusing to remember that if a

Ruskin sentence (occupying one or two pages of small print) does not

remind us of the growth of a tree, the only other thing it does remind

of is the triumphant passage of a railway train.

Ruskin left behind him in his turn two quite separate streams of

inspiration. The first and more practical was concerned, like Carlyle’s

Chartism, with a challenge to the social conclusions of the orthodox

economists. He was not so great a man as Carlyle, but he was a much more

clear-headed man; and the point and stab of his challenge still really

stands and sticks, like a dagger in a dead man. He answered the theory

that we must always get the cheapest labour we can, by pointing out that

we never do get the cheapest labour we can, in any matter about which we

really care twopence. We do not get the cheapest doctor. We either get a

doctor who charges nothing or a doctor who charges a recognised and

respectable fee. We do not trust the cheapest bishop. We do not allow

admirals to compete. We do not tell generals to undercut each other on

the eve of a war. We either employ none of them or we employ all of them

at an official rate of pay. All this was set out in the strongest and

least sentimental of his books, Unto this Last; but many suggestions

of it are scattered through Sesame and Lilies, _The Political Economy

of Art_, and even Modern Painters. On this side of his soul Ruskin

became the second founder of Socialism. The argument was not by any

means a complete or unconquerable weapon, but I think it knocked out

what little remained of the brains of the early Victorian rationalists.

It is entirely nonsensical to speak of Ruskin as a lounging æsthete, who

strolled into economics, and talked sentimentalism. In plain fact,

Ruskin was seldom so sensible and logical (right or wrong) as when he

was talking about economics. He constantly talked the most glorious

nonsense about landscape and natural history, which it was his business

to understand. Within his own limits, he talked the most cold common

sense about political economy, which was no business of his at all.

On the other side of his literary soul, his mere unwrapping of the

wealth and wonder of European art, he set going another influence,

earlier and vaguer than his influence on Socialism. He represented what

was at first the Pre-Raphaelite School in painting, but afterwards a

much larger and looser Pre-Raphaelite School in poetry and prose. The

word “looser” will not be found unfair if we remember how Swinburne and

all the wildest friends of the Rossettis carried this movement forward.

They used the mediæval imagery to blaspheme the mediæval religion.

Ruskin’s dark and doubtful decision to accept Catholic art but not

Catholic ethics had borne rapid or even flagrant fruit by the time that

Swinburne, writing about a harlot, composed a learned and sympathetic

and indecent parody on the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.

With the poets I deal in another part of this book; but the influence of

Ruskin’s great prose touching art criticism can best be expressed in the

name of the next great prose writer on such subjects. That name is

Walter Pater: and the name is the full measure of the extent to which

Ruskin’s vague but vast influence had escaped from his hands. Pater

eventually joined the Church of Rome (which would not have pleased

Ruskin at all), but it is surely fair to say of the mass of his work

that its moral tone is neither Puritan nor Catholic, but strictly and

splendidly Pagan. In Pater we have Ruskin without the prejudices, that

is, without the funny parts. I may be wrong, but I cannot recall at this

moment a single passage in which Pater’s style takes a holiday or in

which his wisdom plays the fool. Newman and Ruskin were as careful and

graceful stylists as he. Newman and Ruskin were as serious, elaborate,

and even academic thinkers as he. But Ruskin let himself go about

railways. Newman let himself go about Kingsley. Pater cannot let himself

go for the excellent reason that he wants to stay: to stay at the point

where all the keenest emotions meet, as he explains in the splendid

peroration of The Renaissance. The only objection to being where all

the keenest emotions meet is that you feel none of them.

In this sense Pater may well stand for a substantial summary of the

del tutto ingiusto dire di Ruskin che vi fosse una grave incoerenza

tra i suoi gusti medievali e il suo temperamento assai poco medievale: e le minori

incoerenze non contano in nessuno. Ma non è del tutto ingiusto

dire di lui che pareva volere tutte le parti della Cattedrale tranne l’

altare.

Come artista della prosa egli è uno dei più miracolosi prodotti dello

straordinariamente poetico genio dell’Inghilterra. La lunghezza di una frase di Ruskin è

simile a quella lunghezza della lunga freccia di cui si vantavano i tenditori dell’

arco lungo. Egli tende, non uno strale d’una iarda ma una lunga lancia fino all’

orecchio: scaglia un giavellotto. Ma il tutto va lieve come un uccello e dritto

come una pallottola. Non c’è scrittore vittoriano prima di lui a cui egli anche solo

suggerisca un paragone, tecnicamente considerato, tranne forse De

Quincey; il quale pure usava la lunga, ricca e ondeggiante frase che, come un

razzo, esplode in stelle alla fine. Ma le frasi di De Quincey, come ho

detto, hanno sempre un che di sognante e malfermo, come la

torretta su torretta traballante della pagoda di qualche folle sultano. La frase di Ruskin

si dirama in parentesi e proposizioni relative come un albero dritto e forte

si dirama in rami e biforcazioni, scrollandosi di dosso il proprio peso

più che semplicemente accrescerlo. È interessante ricordare che Ruskin

scrisse alcune delle migliori di queste frasi nel tentativo di mostrare che egli

sì comprendeva la crescita degli alberi, e che nessun altro la comprendeva—tranne

Turner, naturalmente. È anche (per chi conosce i suoi perversi e

sfrenati pregiudizi retorici) ancora più divertente ricordare che se una

frase di Ruskin (che occupa una o due pagine a caratteri minuti) non

ci ricorda la crescita di un albero, l’unica altra cosa che ci ricorda

è il trionfante passaggio di un treno.

Ruskin lasciò dietro di sé, a sua volta, due correnti d’ispirazione affatto

distinte. La prima e più pratica riguardava, come il

Cartismo di Carlyle, una sfida alle conclusioni sociali degli ortodossi

economisti. Non fu un uomo così grande come Carlyle, ma fu un uomo assai più

lucido; e la punta e il colpo della sua sfida ancora davvero

reggono e si conficcano, come un pugnale in un morto. Egli rispose alla teoria

che dobbiamo sempre procurarci la manodopera più a buon mercato possibile, facendo notare che

non ci procuriamo mai la manodopera più a buon mercato possibile, in nessuna faccenda che davvero ci

importi un soldo. Non ci prendiamo il medico più a buon mercato. O prendiamo un

medico che non chiede nulla o un medico che chiede una parcella riconosciuta e

rispettabile. Non ci fidiamo del vescovo più a buon mercato. Non permettiamo agli

ammiragli di concorrere. Non diciamo ai generali di ribassarsi a vicenda alla

vigilia di una guerra. O non ne impieghiamo nessuno o li impieghiamo tutti

a una tariffa ufficiale di paga. Tutto ciò fu esposto nel più forte e

meno sentimentale dei suoi libri, Unto this Last; ma molti spunti

di esso sono sparsi in Sesame and Lilies, _The Political Economy

of Art_, e persino in Modern Painters. Da questo lato della sua anima Ruskin

divenne il secondo fondatore del Socialismo. L’argomento non era in alcun

modo un’arma completa o invincibile, ma credo che facesse saltare

quel poco che restava del cervello dei primi razionalisti vittoriani.

È del tutto insensato parlare di Ruskin come di un esteta ozioso, che

capitò per caso nell’economia, e sciorinò sentimentalismi. In pura verità,

Ruskin fu di rado così assennato e logico (a torto o a ragione) come quando

parlava di economia. Diceva di continuo le più gloriose

sciocchezze sul paesaggio e sulla storia naturale, che era suo compito

comprendere. Entro i propri limiti, diceva il più freddo buon

senso sull’economia politica, che non era affatto compito suo.

Dall’altro lato della sua anima letteraria, il suo semplice dischiudere la

ricchezza e la meraviglia dell’arte europea, egli avviò un’altra influenza,

più precoce e più vaga della sua influenza sul Socialismo. Egli rappresentò ciò che

fu dapprima la Scuola preraffaellita in pittura, ma poi una

assai più ampia e sciolta Scuola preraffaellita in poesia e in prosa. La

parola «sciolta» non parrà ingiusta se ricordiamo come Swinburne e

tutti i più sfrenati amici dei Rossetti portarono avanti questo movimento.

Essi usarono l’immaginario medievale per bestemmiare la religione medievale.

L’oscura e dubbia decisione di Ruskin di accettare l’arte cattolica ma non

l’etica cattolica aveva dato rapido, anzi flagrante, frutto nel tempo in cui

Swinburne, scrivendo di una meretrice, compose una dotta, benevola

e indecente parodia delle Litanie della Beata Vergine.

Dei poeti mi occupo in un’altra parte di questo libro; ma l’influenza della

grande prosa di Ruskin in materia di critica d’arte si esprime meglio nel

nome del successivo grande prosatore su tali argomenti. Quel nome è

Walter Pater: e il nome è la piena misura del grado in cui

la vaga ma vasta influenza di Ruskin era sfuggita dalle sue mani. Pater

finì con l’entrare nella Chiesa di Roma (il che non sarebbe affatto piaciuto

a Ruskin), ma è certo giusto dire della gran massa della sua opera

che il suo tono morale non è né puritano né cattolico, ma rigorosamente e

splendidamente pagano. In Pater abbiamo Ruskin senza i pregiudizi, cioè

senza le parti buffe. Posso sbagliarmi, ma non riesco a rammentare in questo

momento un solo passo in cui lo stile di Pater si prenda una vacanza o in

cui la sua saggezza faccia il buffone. Newman e Ruskin furono stilisti attenti e

aggraziati quanto lui. Newman e Ruskin furono pensatori seri, elaborati,

e persino accademici quanto lui. Ma Ruskin si lasciava andare a proposito delle

ferrovie. Newman si lasciava andare a proposito di Kingsley. Pater non può lasciarsi

andare per l’eccellente ragione che vuole restare: restare nel punto

dove tutte le più acute emozioni si incontrano, come egli spiega nella splendida

perorazione di The Renaissance. L’unica obiezione allo stare dove tutte

le più acute emozioni si incontrano è che non se ne prova nessuna.

In questo senso Pater può bene rappresentare un sostanziale riassunto della

æsthetes, apart from the purely poetical merits of men like Rossetti and

Swinburne. Like Swinburne and others he first attempted to use mediæval

tradition without trusting it. These people wanted to see Paganism

through Christianity: because it involved the incidental amusement of

seeing through Christianity itself. They not only tried to be in all

ages at once (which is a very reasonable ambition, though not often

realised), but they wanted to be on all sides at once: which is

nonsense. Swinburne tries to question the philosophy of Christianity in

the metres of a Christmas carol: and Dante Rossetti tries to write as if

he were Christina Rossetti. Certainly the almost successful summit of

all this attempt is Pater’s superb passage on the Mona Lisa; in which he

seeks to make her at once a mystery of good and a mystery of evil. The

philosophy is false; even evidently false, for it bears no fruit to-day.

There never was a woman, not Eve herself in the instant of temptation,

who could smile the same smile as the mother of Helen and the mother of

Mary. But it is the high-water mark of that vast attempt at an

impartiality reached through art: and no other mere artist ever rose so

high again.

Apart from this Ruskinian offshoot through Pre-Raphaelitism into what

was called Æstheticism, the remains of the inspiration of Carlyle fill a

very large part in the Victorian life, but not strictly so large a part

in the Victorian literature. Charles Kingsley was a great publicist; a

popular preacher; a popular novelist; and (in two cases at least) a very

good novelist. His Water Babies is really a breezy and roaring freak;

like a holiday at the seaside—a holiday where one talks natural history

without taking it seriously. Some of the songs in this and other of his

works are very real songs: notably, “When all the World is Young, Lad,”

which comes very near to being the only true defence of marriage in the

controversies of the nineteenth century. But when all this is allowed,

no one will seriously rank Kingsley, in the really literary sense, on

the level of Carlyle or Ruskin, Tennyson or Browning, Dickens or

Thackeray: and if such a place cannot be given to him, it can be given

even less to his lusty and pleasant friend, Tom Hughes, whose

personality floats towards the frankness of the Boy’s Own Paper; or to

his deep, suggestive metaphysical friend Maurice, who floats rather

towards The Hibbert Journal. The moral and social influence of these

things is not to be forgotten: but they leave the domain of letters. The

voice of Carlyle is not heard again in letters till the coming of

Kipling and Henley.

One other name of great importance should appear here, because it cannot

appear very appropriately anywhere else: the man hardly belonged to the

same school as Ruskin and Carlyle, but fought many of their battles, and

was even more concentrated on their main task—the task of convicting

liberal bourgeois England of priggishness and provinciality. I mean,

of course, Matthew Arnold. Against Mill’s “liberty” and Carlyle’s

“strength” and Ruskin’s “nature,” he set up a new presence and entity

which he called “culture,” the disinterested play of the mind through

the sifting of the best books and authorities. Though a little dandified

in phrase, he was undoubtedly serious and public-spirited in intention.

He sometimes talked of culture almost as if it were a man, or at least a

church (for a church has a sort of personality): some may suspect that

culture was a man, whose name was Matthew Arnold. But Arnold was not

only right but highly valuable. If we have said that Carlyle was a man

that saw things, we may add that Arnold was chiefly valuable as a man

who knew things. Well as he was endowed intellectually, his power came

more from information than intellect. He simply happened to know certain

things, that Carlyle didn’t know, that Kingsley didn’t know, that Huxley

and Herbert Spencer didn’t know: that England didn’t know. He knew that

England was a part of Europe: and not so important a part as it had been

the morning after Waterloo. He knew that England was then (as it is now)

an oligarchical State, and that many great nations are not. He knew

that a real democracy need not live and does not live in that perpetual

panic about using the powers of the State, which possessed men like

Spencer and Cobden. He knew a rational minimum of culture and common

courtesy could exist and did exist throughout large democracies. He knew

the Catholic Church had been in history “the Church of the multitude”:

he knew it was not a sect. He knew that great landlords are no more a

part of the economic law than nigger-drivers: he knew that small owners

could and did prosper. He was not so much the philosopher as the man of

the world: he reminded us that Europe was a society while Ruskin was

treating it as a picture gallery. He was a sort of Heaven-sent courier.

His frontal attack on the vulgar and sullen optimism of Victorian

utility may be summoned up in the admirable sentence, in which he asked

the English what was the use of a train taking them quickly from

Islington to Camberwell, if it only took them “from a dismal and

illiberal life in Islington to a dismal and illiberal life in

Camberwell?”

His attitude to that great religious enigma round which all these great

men were grouped as in a ring, was individual and decidedly curious. He

seems to have believed that a “Historic Church,” that is, some

established organisation with ceremonies and sacred books, etc., could

be perpetually preserved as a sort of vessel to contain the spiritual

ideas of the age, whatever those ideas might happen to be. He clearly

seems to have contemplated a melting away of the doctrines of the Church

and even of the meaning of the words: but he thought a certain need in

Esteti, al di là dei meriti puramente poetici di uomini come Rossetti e

Swinburne: come lui e altri, inizialmente cercò di utilizzare il medievale

La tradizione senza fidarsi di essa. Queste persone volevano vedere il paganesimo

attraverso il cristianesimo: perché comportava l’intrattenimento occasionale di

vedendo attraverso la stessa cristianità. Non solo cercarono di essere in tutti

età contemporaneamente (che è un’aspirazione molto ragionevole, sebbene non frequente

si resero conto), ma volevano essere ovunque contemporaneamente: il che è

assurdità. Swinburne cerca di mettere in discussione la filosofia del Cristianesimo in

i metri di un canto natalizio: e Rossetti cerca di scrivere come se fosse un canto natalizio.

Se fosse stata Christina Rossetti. Senza dubbio il quasi riuscito apice di

Questo tentativo è il superbo passaggio di Pater sulla Gioconda; in cui egli

cerca di renderla al contempo un mistero del bene e un mistero del male.

La filosofia è falsa; anzi, evidentemente falsa, perché oggi non porta alcun frutto.

Non è mai esistita una donna, nemmeno Eva stessa nell’istante della tentazione,

chi potrebbe sorridere lo stesso sorriso della madre di Elena e della madre di

Maria. Ma è il punto più alto di quell’enorme tentativo di un

l’imparzialità raggiunta attraverso l’arte: e nessun altro semplice artista è mai salito così in alto.

alto di nuovo.

A parte questo ramo ruskiniano attraverso il pre-raffaellismo in ciò che

Si chiamava Estetismo, i resti dell’ispirazione di Carlyle riempiono un…

una parte molto grande nella vita vittoriana, ma non così grande rigorosamente

Nella letteratura vittoriana: Charles Kingsley, un grande pubblicista

Predicatore popolare; un romanziere popolare; e (almeno in due casi) un uomo molto

Buon romanziere. I suoi “Bambini d’acqua” sono davvero una fresca e fragorosa stravaganza;

come una vacanza al mare - una vacanza in cui si parla di storia naturale

senza prendere sul serio. Alcune delle canzoni in questo e altri suoi

le opere sono canzoni molto vere: in particolare, “Quando il mondo è giovane, ragazzo,”

che si avvicina molto a essere l’unica vera difesa del matrimonio nel

Controversie del XIX secolo. Ma anche ammettendo tutto ciò,

Nessuno classificherà seriamente Kingsley, nel vero senso letterario, tra i

Il livello di Carlyle o Ruskin, Tennyson o Browning, Dickens o…

Thackeray: e se un posto del genere non può essere dato a lui, può essere dato

ancora meno al suo amico vivace e piacevole, Tom Hughes, il cui

La personalità fluttua verso la sincerità del “Boy’s Own Paper”; oppure

Il suo profondo e suggestivo amico metafisico Maurice, che galleggia piuttosto

Verso “The Hibbert Journal”. L’influenza morale e sociale di queste…

Cose da non dimenticare: ma escono dal dominio delle lettere.

La voce di Carlyle non si sente più nelle lettere fino all’arrivo di…

Kipling e Henley.

Un altro nome di grande importanza dovrebbe apparire qui, perché non può

Apparire molto appropriatamente altrove: l’uomo non apparteneva quasi alla

Stessa scuola di Ruskin e Carlyle, ma combatté molte delle loro battaglie

Era ancora più concentrato sul loro compito principale: quello di condannare

L’Inghilterra liberale borghese di presunzione e provincialismo. Intendo dire,

Naturalmente, Matthew Arnold. Contro la “libertà” di Mill e Carlyle

con “forza” e la “natura” di Ruskin, ha creato una nuova presenza ed entità

Quello che chiamava “cultura”, il gioco disinteressato della mente attraverso

La selezione dei migliori libri e autori, anche se un po’ eleganti.

Nelle sue parole era senza dubbio serio e animato da spirito pubblico nelle intenzioni.

A volte parlava di cultura quasi come se fosse un uomo, o almeno una…

La Chiesa (perché una chiesa ha una specie di personalità): alcuni potrebbero sospettare che…

La cultura era un uomo di nome Matthew Arnold. Ma Arnold non era…

Non solo giusto ma estremamente prezioso. Se abbiamo detto che Carlyle era un uomo

Quello che vedeva le cose; possiamo aggiungere che Arnold era soprattutto prezioso come uomo

chi sapeva le cose. Beh, dato che era dotato intellettualmente, il suo potere proveniva

Più per informazione che per intelligenza. Semplicemente gli è capitato di conoscere certe cose.

Cose che Carlyle non sapeva, che Kingsley non sapeva, che Huxley

E Herbert Spencer non lo sapeva: che l’Inghilterra non lo sapesse. Lui lo sapeva.

L’Inghilterra era parte dell’Europa, ma non così importante come un tempo

La mattina dopo Waterloo. Sapeva che l’Inghilterra era allora (come lo è ora)

Uno Stato oligarchico e che molte grandi nazioni non lo sono. Egli sapeva

che una vera democrazia non ha bisogno di vivere e non vive in quel perpetuo

Panicca per l’uso dei poteri dello Stato da parte di persone come

Spencer e Cobden: conosceva un minimo razionale di cultura e senso comune

La cortesia poteva e poteva esistere in grandi democrazie. Egli sapeva

la Chiesa Cattolica era stata nella storia «la Chiesa della moltitudine»:

Sapeva che non era una setta. Sapeva che i grandi proprietari terrieri non sono più di…

Parte della legge economica più dei capisquadra: sapeva che i piccoli proprietari…

Poteva e prosperava. Non era tanto il filosofo quanto l’uomo di…

Il mondo: ci ha ricordato che l’Europa era una società mentre Ruskin era

trattandola come una galleria d’arte. Era una specie di corriere mandato dal Cielo.

Il suo attacco frontale all’ottimismo volgare e cupo vittoriano

L’utilità può essere riassunta nella splendida frase con cui chiedeva

L’inglese: qual era l’utilità di un treno che li portava velocemente da…

Da Islington a Camberwell, se li avesse portati solo “da un luogo triste e

Vita non liberale a Islington e una vita tetra e non liberale a

«Camberwell?»

Il suo atteggiamento verso quel grande enigma religioso intorno al quale ruotano tutte queste grandi…

Gli uomini erano raggruppati come in un anello, era individuale e decisamente curioso. Lui

sembra aver creduto in una «Chiesa storica», cioè qualcosa

Organizzazione consolidata con cerimonie e libri sacri, ecc., potrebbe

conservato per sempre come un contenitore spirituale

Le idee dell’epoca, qualunque esse siano. Egli chiaramente

sembra aver contemplato una dissoluzione delle dottrine della Chiesa

e anche del significato delle parole: ma pensava che ci fosse un certo bisogno in

man would always be best satisfied by public worship and especially by

the great religious literatures of the past. He would embalm the body

that it might often be revisited by the soul—or souls. Something of the

sort has been suggested by Dr. Coit and others of the ethical societies

in our own time. But while Arnold would loosen the theological bonds of

the Church, he would not loosen the official bonds of the State. You

must not disestablish the Church: you must not even leave the Church:

you must stop inside it and think what you choose. Enemies might say

that he was simply trying to establish and endow Agnosticism. It is

fairer and truer to say that unconsciously he was trying to restore

Paganism: for this State Ritualism without theology, and without much

belief, actually was the practice of the ancient world. Arnold may have

thought that he was building an altar to the Unknown God; but he was

really building it to Divus Cæsar.

As a critic he was chiefly concerned to preserve criticism itself; to

set a measure to praise and blame and support the classics against the

fashions. It is here that it is specially true of him, if of no writer

else, that the style was the man. The most vital thing he invented was a

new style: founded on the patient unravelling of the tangled Victorian

ideas, as if they were matted hair under a comb. He did not mind how

elaborately long he made a sentence, so long as he made it clear. He

would constantly repeat whole phrases word for word in the same

sentence, rather than risk ambiguity by abbreviation. His genius showed

itself in turning this method of a laborious lucidity into a peculiarly

exasperating form of satire and controversy. Newman’s strength was in a

sort of stifled passion, a dangerous patience of polite logic and then:

“Cowards! if I advanced a step you would run away: it is not you I fear.

Di me terrent, et Jupiter hostis.” If Newman seemed suddenly to fly

into a temper, Carlyle seemed never to fly out of one. But Arnold kept a

smile of heart-broken forbearance, as of the teacher in an idiot school,

that was enormously insulting. One trick he often tried with success. If

his opponent had said something foolish, like “the destiny of England is

in the great heart of England,” Arnold would repeat the phrase again and

again until it looked more foolish than it really was. Thus he recurs

again and again to “the British College of Health in the New Road” till

the reader wants to rush out and burn the place down. Arnold’s great

error was that he sometimes thus wearied us of his own phrases, as well

as of his enemies’.

These names are roughly representative of the long series of protests

against the cold commercial rationalism which held Parliament and the

schools through the earlier Victorian time, in so far as those protests

were made in the name of neglected intellect, insulted art, forgotten

heroism and desecrated religion. But already the Utilitarian citadel had

been more heavily bombarded on the other side by one lonely and

unlettered man of genius.

The rise of Dickens is like the rising of a vast mob. This is not only

because his tales are indeed as crowded and populous as towns: for truly

it was not so much that Dickens appeared as that a hundred Dickens

characters appeared. It is also because he was the sort of man who has

the impersonal impetus of a mob: what Poe meant when he truly said that

popular rumour, if really spontaneous, was like the intuition of the

individual man of genius. Those who speak scornfully of the ignorance of

the mob do not err as to the fact itself; their error is in not seeing

that just as a crowd is comparatively ignorant, so a crowd is

comparatively innocent. It will have the old and human faults; but it is

not likely to specialise in the special faults of that particular

society: because the effort of the strong and successful in all ages is

to keep the poor out of society. If the higher castes have developed

some special moral beauty or grace, as they occasionally do (for

instance, mediæval chivalry), it is likely enough, of course, that the

mass of men will miss it. But if they have developed some perversion or

over-emphasis, as they much more often do (for instance, the Renaissance

poisoning), then it will be the tendency of the mass of men to miss that

too. The point might be put in many ways; you may say if you will that

the poor are always at the tail of the procession, and that whether they

are morally worse or better depends on whether humanity as a whole is

proceeding towards heaven or hell. When humanity is going to hell, the

poor are always nearest to heaven.

Dickens was a mob—and a mob in revolt; he fought by the light of

nature; he had not a theory, but a thirst. If any one chooses to offer

the cheap sarcasm that his thirst was largely a thirst for milk-punch, I

am content to reply with complete gravity and entire contempt that in a

sense this is perfectly true. His thirst was for things as humble, as

human, as laughable as that daily bread for which we cry to God. He had

no particular plan of reform; or, when he had, it was startlingly petty

and parochial compared with the deep, confused clamour of comradeship

and insurrection that fills all his narrative. It would not be gravely

unjust to him to compare him to his own heroine, Arabella Allen, who

“didn’t know what she did like,” but who (when confronted with Mr. Bob

Sawyer) “did know what she didn’t like.” Dickens did know what he didn’t

like. He didn’t like the Unrivalled Happiness which Mr. Roebuck praised;

the economic laws that were working so faultlessly in Fever Alley; the

wealth that was accumulating so rapidly in Bleeding Heart Yard. But,

above all, he didn’t like the mean side of the Manchester philosophy:

l’uomo sarebbe sempre appagato al meglio dal culto pubblico e specialmente dalle

grandi letterature religiose del passato. Egli imbalsamerebbe il corpo

affinché potesse essere spesso rivisitato dall’anima—o dalle anime. Qualcosa del

genere è stato suggerito dal Dr. Coit e da altri delle società etiche

del nostro tempo. Ma mentre Arnold allenterebbe i vincoli teologici della

Chiesa, non allenterebbe i vincoli ufficiali dello Stato. Non si

deve separare la Chiesa dallo Stato: non si deve nemmeno lasciare la Chiesa:

si deve restare al suo interno e pensare ciò che si vuole. I nemici potrebbero dire

che egli cercava semplicemente di istituire e dotare l’Agnosticismo. È

più giusto e più vero dire che inconsciamente egli cercava di restaurare il

Paganesimo: poiché questo Ritualismo di Stato senza teologia, e senza molta

fede, era in realtà la pratica del mondo antico. Arnold può aver

pensato di innalzare un altare al Dio Ignoto; ma in

realtà lo innalzava a Divus Cæsar.

Come critico egli si preoccupava soprattutto di preservare la critica stessa; di

porre una misura alla lode e al biasimo e di sostenere i classici contro le

mode. È qui che è particolarmente vero di lui, se di nessun altro

scrittore, che lo stile era l’uomo. La cosa più vitale che inventò fu un

nuovo stile: fondato sul paziente districare le aggrovigliate idee

vittoriane, come fossero capelli arruffati sotto un pettine. Non gli importava quanto

elaboratamente lunga rendesse una frase, purché la rendesse chiara. Egli

ripeteva di continuo intere frasi parola per parola nella stessa

proposizione, piuttosto che rischiare l’ambiguità con l’abbreviazione. Il suo genio si

manifestava nel trasformare questo metodo di una laboriosa lucidità in una forma

particolarmente esasperante di satira e polemica. La forza di Newman era in una

sorta di passione soffocata, una pericolosa pazienza di cortese logica e poi:

«Codardi! se avanzassi di un passo scappereste via: non siete voi che temo.

Di me terrent, et Jupiter hostis.» Se Newman sembrava andare all’improvviso

in collera, Carlyle non sembrava mai uscirne. Ma Arnold serbava un

sorriso di tolleranza accorata, come del maestro in una scuola per idioti,

che era enormemente offensivo. Un trucco che spesso tentava con successo. Se

il suo avversario aveva detto qualcosa di sciocco, come «il destino dell’Inghilterra è

nel gran cuore dell’Inghilterra», Arnold ripeteva la frase ancora e

ancora finché non appariva più sciocca di quanto realmente fosse. Così ritorna

ancora e ancora al «British College of Health in New Road» finché

il lettore vuole precipitarsi fuori e dar fuoco al posto. Il grande

errore di Arnold fu che talvolta ci stancava così delle sue proprie frasi, non meno

che di quelle dei suoi nemici.

Questi nomi sono grossolanamente rappresentativi della lunga serie di proteste

contro il freddo razionalismo commerciale che tenne il Parlamento e le

scuole per tutto il primo periodo vittoriano, in quanto quelle proteste

furono fatte in nome dell’intelletto trascurato, dell’arte insultata, dell’

eroismo dimenticato e della religione profanata. Ma già la cittadella utilitarista era

stata bombardata più pesantemente dall’altro lato da un solitario e

illetterato uomo di genio.

L’ascesa di Dickens è come l’insorgere di una vasta folla. E ciò non solo

perché i suoi racconti sono davvero affollati e popolosi come città: giacché in verità

non fu tanto che apparve Dickens quanto che apparvero cento personaggi

di Dickens. È anche perché egli era quel tipo d’uomo che possiede

l’impersonale impeto di una folla: ciò che Poe intendeva quando disse con verità che

la voce popolare, se davvero spontanea, era come l’intuizione del

singolo uomo di genio. Coloro che parlano con disprezzo dell’ignoranza della

folla non errano quanto al fatto in sé; il loro errore sta nel non vedere

che, così come una moltitudine è relativamente ignorante, così una moltitudine è

relativamente innocente. Avrà gli antichi e umani difetti; ma non è

probabile che si specializzi nei difetti particolari di quella particolare

società: perché lo sforzo dei forti e dei fortunati in ogni epoca è

di tenere i poveri fuori dalla società. Se le caste superiori hanno sviluppato

qualche particolare bellezza o grazia morale, come talvolta fanno (per

esempio, la cavalleria medievale), è abbastanza probabile, naturalmente, che la

massa degli uomini se la lasci sfuggire. Ma se hanno sviluppato qualche perversione o

eccesso, come assai più spesso fanno (per esempio, l’avvelenamento del

Rinascimento), allora sarà la tendenza della massa degli uomini a lasciarsi sfuggire anche

quello. Il punto si può porre in molti modi; si può dire, se si vuole, che

i poveri sono sempre in coda alla processione, e che l’essere essi

moralmente peggiori o migliori dipende dal fatto se l’umanità nel suo insieme

proceda verso il cielo o verso l’inferno. Quando l’umanità va all’inferno, i

poveri sono sempre i più vicini al cielo.

Dickens era una folla—e una folla in rivolta; combatté alla luce della

natura; non aveva una teoria, ma una sete. Se qualcuno vuole offrire

il facile sarcasmo che la sua sete fosse in gran parte sete di ponce al latte, io

mi accontento di rispondere con completa gravità e intero disprezzo che in un certo

senso ciò è perfettamente vero. La sua sete era di cose umili, umane e

risibili quanto quel pane quotidiano che imploriamo da Dio. Non aveva

alcun piano particolare di riforma; o, quando l’aveva, era sorprendentemente meschino

e parrocchiale a paragone del profondo, confuso clamore di cameratismo

e insurrezione che riempie tutta la sua narrativa. Non sarebbe gravemente

ingiusto verso di lui paragonarlo alla sua stessa eroina, Arabella Allen, che

«non sapeva ciò che le piaceva», ma che (posta di fronte al signor Bob

Sawyer) «sapeva ciò che non le piaceva». Dickens sapeva bene ciò che non gli

piaceva. Non gli piaceva l’Impareggiabile Felicità che il signor Roebuck lodava;

le leggi economiche che funzionavano così impeccabilmente in Fever Alley; la

ricchezza che si accumulava così rapidamente in Bleeding Heart Yard. Ma,

soprattutto, non gli piaceva il lato gretto della filosofia di Manchester:

the preaching of an impossible thrift and an intolerable temperance. He

hated the implication that because a man was a miser in Latin he must

also be a miser in English. And this meanness of the Utilitarians had

gone very far—infecting many finer minds who had fought the

Utilitarians. In the Edinburgh Review, a thing like Malthus could be

championed by a man like Macaulay.

The twin root facts of the revolution called Dickens are these: first,

that he attacked the cold Victorian compromise; second, that he

attacked it without knowing he was doing it—certainly without knowing

that other people were doing it. He was attacking something which we

will call Mr. Gradgrind. He was utterly unaware (in any essential sense)

that any one else had attacked Mr. Gradgrind. All the other attacks had

come from positions of learning or cultured eccentricity of which he was

entirely ignorant, and to which, therefore (like a spirited fellow), he

felt a furious hostility. Thus, for instance, he hated that Little

Bethel to which Kit’s mother went: he hated it simply as Kit hated it.

Newman could have told him it was hateful, because it had no root in

religious history; it was not even a sapling sprung of the seed of some

great human and heathen tree: it was a monstrous mushroom that grows in

the moonshine and dies in the dawn. Dickens knew no more of religious

history than Kit; he simply smelt the fungus, and it stank. Thus, again,

he hated that insolent luxury of a class counting itself a comfortable

exception to all mankind; he hated it as Kate Nickleby hated Sir

Mulberry Hawke—by instinct. Carlyle could have told him that all the

world was full of that anger against the impudent fatness of the few.

But when Dickens wrote about Kate Nickleby, he knew about as much of the

world—as Kate Nickleby. He did write The Tale of Two Cities long

afterwards; but that was when he had been instructed by Carlyle. His

first revolutionism was as private and internal as feeling sea-sick.

Thus, once more, he wrote against Mr. Gradgrind long before he created

him. In The Chimes, conceived in quite his casual and charitable

season, with the Christmas Carol and the Cricket on the Hearth, he

hit hard at the economists. Ruskin, in the same fashion, would have told

him that the worst thing about the economists was that they were not

economists: that they missed many essential things even in economics.

But Dickens did not know whether they were economists or not: he only

knew that they wanted hitting. Thus, to take a last case out of many,

Dickens travelled in a French railway train, and noticed that this

eccentric nation provided him with wine that he could drink and

sandwiches he could eat, and manners he could tolerate. And remembering

the ghastly sawdust-eating waiting-rooms of the North English railways,

he wrote that rich chapter in Mugby Junction. Matthew Arnold could

have told him that this was but a part of the general thinning down of

European civilisation in these islands at the edge of it; that for two

or three thousand years the Latin society has learnt how to drink wine,

and how not to drink too much of it. Dickens did not in the least

understand the Latin society: but he did understand the wine. If (to

prolong an idle but not entirely false metaphor) we have called Carlyle

a man who saw and Arnold a man who knew, we might truly call Dickens a

man who tasted, that is, a man who really felt. In spite of all the

silly talk about his vulgarity, he really had, in the strict and

serious sense, good taste. All real good taste is gusto—the power of

appreciating the presence—or the absence—of a particular and positive

pleasure. He had no learning; he was not misled by the label on the

bottle—for that is what learning largely meant in his time. He opened

his mouth and shut his eyes and saw what the Age of Reason would give

him. And, having tasted it, he spat it out.

I am constrained to consider Dickens here among the fighters; though I

ought (on the pure principles of Art) to be considering him in the

chapter which I have allotted to the story-tellers. But we should get

the whole Victorian perspective wrong, in my opinion at least, if we did

not see that Dickens was primarily the most successful of all the

onslaughts on the solid scientific school; because he did not attack

from the standpoint of extraordinary faith, like Newman; or the

standpoint of extraordinary inspiration, like Carlyle; or the standpoint

of extraordinary detachment or serenity, like Arnold; but from the

standpoint of quite ordinary and quite hearty dislike. To give but one

instance more, Matthew Arnold, trying to carry into England constructive

educational schemes which he could see spread like a clear railway map

all over the Continent, was much badgered about what he really thought

was wrong with English middle-class education. Despairing of

explaining to the English middle class the idea of high and central

public instruction, as distinct from coarse and hole-and-corner private

instruction, he invoked the aid of Dickens. He said the English

middle-class school was the sort of school where Mr. Creakle sat, with

his buttered toast and his cane. Now Dickens had probably never seen any

other kind of school—certainly he had never understood the systematic

State Schools in which Arnold had learnt his lesson. But he saw the cane

and the buttered toast, and he knew that it was all wrong. In this

sense, Dickens, the great romanticist, is truly the great realist also.

For he had no abstractions: he had nothing except realities out of which

to make a romance.

With Dickens, then, re-arises that reality with which I began and which

(curtly, but I think not falsely) I have called Cobbett. In dealing with

fiction as such, I shall have occasion to say wherein Dickens is weaker

and stronger than that England of the eighteenth century: here it is

sufficient to say that he represents the return of Cobbett in this vital

sense; that he is proud of being the ordinary man. No one can understand

the thousand caricatures by Dickens who does not understand that he is

comparing them all with his own common sense. Dickens, in the bulk,

liked the things that Cobbett had liked; what is perhaps more to the

point, he hated the things that Cobbett had hated; the Tudors, the

lawyers, the leisurely oppression of the poor. Cobbett’s fine fighting

journalism had been what is nowadays called “personal,” that is, it

supposed human beings to be human. But Cobbett was also personal in the

less satisfactory sense; he could only multiply monsters who were

exaggerations of his enemies or exaggerations of himself. Dickens was

personal in a more godlike sense; he could multiply persons. He could

create all the farce and tragedy of his age over again, with creatures

unborn to sin and creatures unborn to suffer. That which had not been

achieved by the fierce facts of Cobbett, the burning dreams of Carlyle,

the white-hot proofs of Newman, was really or very nearly achieved by a

crowd of impossible people. In the centre stood that citadel of atheist

industrialism: and if indeed it has ever been taken, it was taken by the

rush of that unreal army.

la predica di un’impossibile parsimonia e di un’intollerabile temperanza. Egli

odiava l’implicazione che, poiché un uomo era avaro in latino, dovesse

esserlo anche in inglese. E questa grettezza degli Utilitaristi era

andata assai lontano—contagiando molte menti più fini che avevano combattuto gli

Utilitaristi. Nella Edinburgh Review, una cosa come Malthus poteva essere

sostenuta da un uomo come Macaulay.

I due fatti radicali gemelli della rivoluzione chiamata Dickens sono questi: primo,

che egli attaccò il freddo compromesso vittoriano; secondo, che lo

attaccò senza sapere che lo stava facendo—certo senza sapere

che altri lo stavano facendo. Egli attaccava qualcosa che noi

chiameremo il signor Gradgrind. Era del tutto ignaro (in ogni senso essenziale)

che qualcun altro avesse attaccato il signor Gradgrind. Tutti gli altri attacchi erano

venuti da posizioni di dottrina o di colta eccentricità di cui egli era

interamente ignaro, e verso le quali, perciò (da tipo focoso), egli

provava una furiosa ostilità. Così, per esempio, odiava quella Little

Bethel a cui andava la madre di Kit: la odiava semplicemente come la odiava Kit.

Newman avrebbe potuto dirgli che era odiosa, perché non aveva radice nella

storia religiosa; non era neppure un arboscello spuntato dal seme di qualche

grande albero umano e pagano: era un mostruoso fungo che cresce al

chiaro di luna e muore all’alba. Dickens non ne sapeva di

storia religiosa più di Kit; egli semplicemente fiutò il fungo, e puzzava. Così, di nuovo,

egli odiava quell’insolente lusso di una classe che si riteneva una comoda

eccezione a tutto il genere umano; lo odiava come Kate Nickleby odiava Sir

Mulberry Hawke—per istinto. Carlyle avrebbe potuto dirgli che tutto il

mondo era pieno di quella collera contro l’impudente pinguedine dei pochi.

Ma quando Dickens scriveva di Kate Nickleby, sapeva del mondo press’a poco

quanto—Kate Nickleby. Scrisse bensì The Tale of Two Cities molto

tempo dopo; ma fu quando era stato istruito da Carlyle. Il suo

primo rivoluzionarismo era privato e interiore quanto il mal di mare.

Così, ancora una volta, scrisse contro il signor Gradgrind molto prima di

crearlo. In The Chimes, concepito in una sua stagione del tutto casuale e

caritatevole, insieme al Christmas Carol e al Cricket on the Hearth, egli

colpì duramente gli economisti. Ruskin, allo stesso modo, gli avrebbe

detto che la cosa peggiore degli economisti era che non erano

economisti: che mancavano molte cose essenziali persino in economia.

Ma Dickens non sapeva se fossero economisti o no: sapeva soltanto

che meritavano d’essere colpiti. Così, per prendere un ultimo caso fra molti,

Dickens viaggiò su un treno francese, e notò che questa

eccentrica nazione gli forniva un vino che poteva bere e

panini che poteva mangiare, e modi che poteva tollerare. E ricordando

le orribili sale d’attesa da mangiar segatura delle ferrovie del Nord Inghilterra,

scrisse quel ricco capitolo in Mugby Junction. Matthew Arnold avrebbe

potuto dirgli che questo era solo una parte del generale assottigliarsi della

civiltà europea in queste isole ai suoi margini; che per due

o tremila anni la società latina ha imparato come bere il vino,

e come non berne troppo. Dickens non capiva minimamente

la società latina: ma capiva bene il vino. Se (per

prolungare un’oziosa ma non del tutto falsa metafora) abbiamo chiamato Carlyle

un uomo che vide e Arnold un uomo che seppe, potremmo davvero chiamare Dickens un

uomo che assaggiò, cioè un uomo che davvero sentì. Nonostante tutte le

sciocche chiacchiere sulla sua volgarità, egli aveva davvero, nel senso stretto e

serio, buon gusto. Ogni vero buon gusto è gusto—il potere di

apprezzare la presenza—o l’assenza—di un particolare e positivo

piacere. Non aveva dottrina; non si lasciava ingannare dall’etichetta sulla

bottiglia—poiché è questo che la dottrina significava in gran parte nel suo tempo. Aprì

la bocca e chiuse gli occhi e vide ciò che l’Età della Ragione gli avrebbe

dato. E, dopo averlo assaggiato, lo sputò.

Sono costretto a considerare qui Dickens fra i combattenti; benché io

dovrei (per i puri principi dell’Arte) considerarlo nel

capitolo che ho assegnato ai narratori. Ma ci faremmo

un’idea sbagliata dell’intera prospettiva vittoriana, almeno a mio parere, se non

vedessimo che Dickens fu anzitutto il più riuscito di tutti gli

assalti alla solida scuola scientifica; perché egli non attaccò

dal punto di vista di una straordinaria fede, come Newman; o dal

punto di vista di una straordinaria ispirazione, come Carlyle; o dal punto di vista

di uno straordinario distacco o serenità, come Arnold; ma dal

punto di vista di un’avversione del tutto ordinaria e del tutto schietta. Per dare un solo

esempio in più, Matthew Arnold, cercando di introdurre in Inghilterra costruttivi

piani educativi che vedeva estendersi come una limpida mappa ferroviaria

per tutto il Continente, fu molto assillato su ciò che pensava davvero

ci fosse di sbagliato nell’istruzione della classe media inglese. Disperando di

spiegare alla classe media inglese l’idea di un’alta e centrale

istruzione pubblica, distinta dalla rozza e clandestina istruzione

privata, egli invocò l’aiuto di Dickens. Disse che la scuola inglese

della classe media era quel tipo di scuola dove sedeva il signor Creakle, con

il suo pane imburrato e la sua canna. Ora, Dickens probabilmente non aveva mai visto alcun

altro tipo di scuola—certo non aveva mai compreso le sistematiche

Scuole di Stato in cui Arnold aveva appreso la sua lezione. Ma vide la canna

e il pane imburrato, e sapeva che era tutto sbagliato. In questo

senso, Dickens, il grande romantico, è davvero anche il grande realista.

Poiché non aveva astrazioni: non aveva nulla se non realtà con cui

fare un romanzo.

Con Dickens, dunque, risorge quella realtà con cui ho cominciato e che

(sbrigativamente, ma credo non falsamente) ho chiamato Cobbett. Trattando della

narrativa in quanto tale, avrò occasione di dire in che cosa Dickens è più debole

e più forte di quell’Inghilterra del Settecento: qui è

sufficiente dire che egli rappresenta il ritorno di Cobbett in questo vitale

senso; che è fiero di essere l’uomo comune. Nessuno può comprendere

le mille caricature di Dickens se non comprende che egli le

paragona tutte al proprio buon senso. Dickens, nel complesso,

amava le cose che Cobbett aveva amato; ciò che è forse più

pertinente, odiava le cose che Cobbett aveva odiato; i Tudor, gli

avvocati, la placida oppressione dei poveri. Il bel giornalismo battagliero di Cobbett

era stato ciò che oggi si chiama «personale», cioè

supponeva che gli esseri umani fossero umani. Ma Cobbett era personale anche nel

senso meno soddisfacente; sapeva solo moltiplicare mostri che erano

esagerazioni dei suoi nemici o esagerazioni di sé stesso. Dickens era

personale in un senso più divino; sapeva moltiplicare persone. Sapeva

creare da capo tutta la farsa e la tragedia della sua età, con creature

non nate a peccare e creature non nate a soffrire. Ciò che non era stato

conseguito dai feroci fatti di Cobbett, dai brucianti sogni di Carlyle,

dalle incandescenti prove di Newman, fu davvero o quasi conseguito da una

folla di persone impossibili. Al centro sorgeva quella cittadella dell’industrialismo

ateo: e se davvero è mai stata presa, fu presa dall’

assalto di quell’esercito irreale.

CHAPTER II

THE GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS

The Victorian novel was a thing entirely Victorian; quite unique and

suited to a sort of cosiness in that country and that age. But the novel

itself, though not merely Victorian, is mainly modern. No clear-headed

person wastes his time over definitions, except where he thinks his own

definition would probably be in dispute. I merely say, therefore, that

when I say “novel,” I mean a fictitious narrative (almost invariably,

but not necessarily, in prose) of which the essential is that the story

is not told for the sake of its naked pointedness as an anecdote, or for

the sake of the irrelevant landscapes and visions that can be caught up

in it, but for the sake of some study of the difference between human

beings. There are several things that make this mode of art unique. One

of the most conspicuous is that it is the art in which the conquests of

woman are quite beyond controversy. The proposition that Victorian women

have done well in politics and philosophy is not necessarily an untrue

proposition; but it is a partisan proposition. I never heard that many

women, let alone men, shared the views of Mary Wollstonecraft; I never

heard that millions of believers flocked to the religion tentatively

founded by Miss Frances Power Cobbe. They did, undoubtedly, flock to

Mrs. Eddy; but it will not be unfair to that lady to call her following

a sect, and not altogether unreasonable to say that such insane

exceptions prove the rule. Nor can I at this moment think of a single

modern woman writing on politics or abstract things, whose work is of

undisputed importance; except perhaps Mrs. Sidney Webb, who settles

things by the simple process of ordering about the citizens of a state,

as she might the servants in a kitchen. There has been, at any rate, no

writer on moral or political theory that can be mentioned, without

seeming comic, in the same breath with the great female novelists. But

when we come to the novelists, the women have, on the whole, equality;

and certainly, in some points, superiority. Jane Austen is as strong in

her own way as Scott is in his. But she is, for all practical purposes,

never weak in her own way—and Scott very often is. Charlotte Brontë

dedicated Jane Eyre to the author of Vanity Fair. I should hesitate

to say that Charlotte Brontë’s is a better book than Thackeray’s, but I

think it might well be maintained that it is a better story. All sorts

of inquiring asses (equally ignorant of the old nature of woman and the

new nature of the novel) whispered wisely that George Eliot’s novels

were really written by George Lewes. I will cheerfully answer for the

fact that, if they had been written by George Lewes, no one would ever

have read them. Those who have read his book on Robespierre will have

no doubt about my meaning. I am no idolater of George Eliot; but a man

who could concoct such a crushing opiate about the most exciting

occasion in history certainly did not write The Mill on the Floss.

This is the first fact about the novel, that it is the introduction of a

new and rather curious kind of art; and it has been found to be

peculiarly feminine, from the first good novel by Fanny Burney to the

last good novel by Miss May Sinclair. The truth is, I think, that the

modern novel is a new thing; not new in its essence (for that is a

philosophy for fools), but new in the sense that it lets loose many of

the things that are old. It is a hearty and exhaustive overhauling of

that part of human existence which has always been the woman’s province,

or rather kingdom; the play of personalities in private, the real

difference between Tommy and Joe. It is right that womanhood should

specialise in individuals, and be praised for doing so; just as in the

Middle Ages she specialised in dignity and was praised for doing so.

People put the matter wrong when they say that the novel is a study of

human nature. Human nature is a thing that even men can understand.

Human nature is born of the pain of a woman; human nature plays at

peep-bo when it is two and at cricket when it is twelve; human nature

earns its living and desires the other sex and dies. What the novel

deals with is what women have to deal with; the differentiations, the

twists and turns of this eternal river. The key of this new form of art,

which we call fiction, is sympathy. And sympathy does not mean so much

feeling with all who feel, but rather suffering with all who suffer. And

it was inevitable, under such an inspiration, that more attention should

be given to the awkward corners of life than to its even flow. The very

promising domestic channel dug by the Victorian women, in books like

Cranford, by Mrs. Gaskell, would have got to the sea, if they had been

left alone to dig it. They might have made domesticity a fairyland.

Unfortunately another idea, the idea of imitating men’s cuffs and

collars and documents, cut across this purely female discovery and

destroyed it.

It may seem mere praise of the novel to say it is the art of sympathy

and the study of human variations. But indeed, though this is a good

thing, it is not universally good. We have gained in sympathy; but we

have lost in brotherhood. Old quarrels had more equality than modern

exonerations. Two peasants in the Middle Ages quarrelled about their two

fields. But they went to the same church, served in the same semi-feudal

militia, and had the same morality, which ever might happen to be

breaking it at the moment. The very cause of their quarrel was the cause

of their fraternity; they both liked land. But suppose one of them a

teetotaler who desired the abolition of hops on both farms; suppose the

CAPITOLO II

I GRANDI ROMANZIERI VITTORIANI

Il romanzo vittoriano fu una cosa interamente vittoriana; del tutto unica e

adatta a una sorta d’intimità di quel paese e di quell’età. Ma il romanzo

in sé, per quanto non meramente vittoriano, è principalmente moderno. Nessuna persona

assennata spreca il proprio tempo in definizioni, tranne quando pensa che la propria

definizione sarebbe probabilmente contestata. Dico dunque soltanto che,

quando dico «romanzo», intendo una narrazione fittizia (quasi sempre,

ma non necessariamente, in prosa) di cui l’essenziale è che la storia

non è narrata per amore della sua nuda arguzia d’aneddoto, né per

amore degli irrilevanti paesaggi e visioni che vi si possono cogliere

dentro, ma per amore di qualche studio della differenza tra gli esseri

umani. Ci sono parecchie cose che rendono unico questo modo d’arte. Una

delle più cospicue è che è l’arte in cui le conquiste della

donna sono del tutto fuori discussione. La proposizione che le donne vittoriane

abbiano fatto bene in politica e in filosofia non è necessariamente una proposizione

falsa; ma è una proposizione di parte. Non ho mai sentito che molte

donne, figuriamoci gli uomini, condividessero le idee di Mary Wollstonecraft; non ho mai

sentito che milioni di fedeli accorressero alla religione tentativamente

fondata da Miss Frances Power Cobbe. Accorsero, indubbiamente, a

Mrs. Eddy; ma non sarà ingiusto verso quella signora chiamare il suo seguito

una setta, né del tutto irragionevole dire che tali folli

eccezioni confermano la regola. Né riesco in questo momento a pensare a una sola

donna moderna che scriva di politica o di cose astratte, la cui opera sia di

indiscussa importanza; salvo forse Mrs. Sidney Webb, che risolve le

cose col semplice procedimento di comandare a bacchetta i cittadini di uno Stato,

come farebbe con i domestici in una cucina. Non c’è stato, in ogni caso, alcuno

scrittore di teoria morale o politica che possa essere menzionato, senza

parere comico, nello stesso respiro con le grandi romanziere. Ma

quando arriviamo ai romanzieri, le donne hanno, nel complesso, parità;

e certo, in alcuni punti, superiorità. Jane Austen è forte, a suo

modo, quanto lo è Scott al suo. Ma essa, a tutti gli effetti pratici,

non è mai debole a suo modo—e Scott molto spesso lo è. Charlotte Brontë

dedicò Jane Eyre all’autore di Vanity Fair. Esiterei

a dire che quello di Charlotte Brontë sia un libro migliore di quello di Thackeray, ma

credo si possa bene sostenere che sia una storia migliore. Ogni sorta

di asini indagatori (ugualmente ignari dell’antica natura della donna e della

nuova natura del romanzo) sussurravano saggiamente che i romanzi di George Eliot

fossero in realtà scritti da George Lewes. Risponderò allegramente del

fatto che, se fossero stati scritti da George Lewes, nessuno li avrebbe mai

letti. Coloro che hanno letto il suo libro su Robespierre non avranno

alcun dubbio sul mio significato. Non sono un idolatra di George Eliot; ma un uomo

che poté confezionare un oppiaceo tanto schiacciante sulla più eccitante

occasione della storia certamente non scrisse The Mill on the Floss.

Questo è il primo fatto riguardo al romanzo, che esso è l’introduzione di un

nuovo e piuttosto curioso genere d’arte; e si è scoperto che è

peculiarmente femminile, dal primo buon romanzo di Fanny Burney all’

ultimo buon romanzo di Miss May Sinclair. La verità è, credo, che il

romanzo moderno è una cosa nuova; non nuova nella sua essenza (poiché quella è una

filosofia da sciocchi), ma nuova nel senso che scioglie molte

delle cose che sono antiche. È una cordiale ed esauriente revisione di

quella parte dell’esistenza umana che è sempre stata la provincia della donna,

o piuttosto il suo regno; il gioco delle personalità in privato, la vera

differenza tra Tommy e Joe. È giusto che la femminilità si

specializzi negli individui, e sia lodata per averlo fatto; proprio come nel

Medioevo si specializzò nella dignità e fu lodata per averlo fatto.

La gente pone male la questione quando dice che il romanzo è uno studio della

natura umana. La natura umana è una cosa che persino gli uomini possono comprendere.

La natura umana nasce dal dolore di una donna; la natura umana gioca a

cucù quando ha due anni e a cricket quando ne ha dodici; la natura umana

si guadagna da vivere e desidera l’altro sesso e muore. Ciò di cui il romanzo

si occupa è ciò di cui le donne devono occuparsi; le differenziazioni, le

svolte e i giri di questo eterno fiume. La chiave di questa nuova forma d’arte,

che chiamiamo narrativa, è la simpatia. E simpatia non significa tanto

sentire con tutti coloro che sentono, quanto piuttosto soffrire con tutti coloro che soffrono. E

era inevitabile, sotto una tale ispirazione, che maggiore attenzione fosse

data agli scomodi angoli della vita che al suo scorrere uniforme. Il

promettentissimo canale domestico scavato dalle donne vittoriane, in libri come

Cranford, di Mrs. Gaskell, sarebbe giunto al mare, se le si fosse

lasciate sole a scavarlo. Avrebbero potuto fare della domesticità un paese delle fate.

Sfortunatamente un’altra idea, l’idea di imitare i polsini e i

colletti e i documenti degli uomini, tagliò trasversalmente questa scoperta puramente femminile e la

distrusse.

Può sembrare mera lode del romanzo dire che è l’arte della simpatia

e lo studio delle variazioni umane. Ma in verità, per quanto ciò sia una buona

cosa, non è universalmente buono. Abbiamo guadagnato in simpatia; ma abbiamo

perduto in fratellanza. Le antiche liti avevano più uguaglianza delle moderne

assoluzioni. Due contadini nel Medioevo litigavano per i loro due

campi. Ma andavano alla stessa chiesa, servivano nella stessa milizia semi-feudale,

e avevano la stessa moralità, quale che fosse in quel momento a

infrangerla. La causa stessa della loro lite era la causa

della loro fraternità; a entrambi piaceva la terra. Ma si supponga uno di loro

astemio che desiderasse l’abolizione del luppolo in entrambe le fattorie; si supponga l’

other a vegetarian who desired the abolition of chickens on both farms:

and it is at once apparent that a quarrel of quite a different kind

would begin; and that in that quarrel it would not be a question of

farmer against farmer, but of individual against individual. This

fundamental sense of human fraternity can only exist in the presence of

positive religion. Man is merely man only when he is seen against the

sky. If he is seen against any landscape, he is only a man of that land.

If he is seen against any house, he is only a householder. Only where

death and eternity are intensely present can human beings fully feel

their fellowship. Once the divine darkness against which we stand is

really dismissed from the mind (as it was very nearly dismissed in the

Victorian time) the differences between human beings become

overpoweringly plain; whether they are expressed in the high caricatures

of Dickens or the low lunacies of Zola.

This can be seen in a sort of picture in the Prologue of the _Canterbury

Tales_; which is already pregnant with the promise of the English novel.

The characters there are at once graphically and delicately

differentiated; the Doctor with his rich cloak, his careful meals, his

coldness to religion; the Franklin, whose white beard was so fresh that

it recalled the daisies, and in whose house it snowed meat and drink;

the Summoner, from whose fearful face, like a red cherub’s, the children

fled, and who wore a garland like a hoop; the Miller with his short red

hair and bagpipes and brutal head, with which he could break down a

door; the Lover who was as sleepless as a nightingale; the Knight, the

Cook, the Clerk of Oxford. Pendennis or the Cook, M. Mirabolant, is

nowhere so vividly varied by a few merely verbal strokes. But the great

difference is deeper and more striking. It is simply that Pendennis

would never have gone riding with a cook at all. Chaucer’s knight rode

with a cook quite naturally; because the thing they were all seeking

together was as much above knighthood as it was above cookery. Soldiers

and swindlers and bullies and outcasts, they were all going to the

shrine of a distant saint. To what sort of distant saint would Pendennis

and Colonel Newcome and Mr. Moss and Captain Costigan and Ridley the

butler and Bayham and Sir Barnes Newcome and Laura and the Duchess

d’Ivry and Warrington and Captain Blackball and Lady Kew travel,

laughing and telling tales together?

The growth of the novel, therefore, must not be too easily called an

increase in the interest in humanity. It is an increase in the interest

in the things in which men differ; much fuller and finer work had been

done before about the things in which they agree. And this intense

interest in variety had its bad side as well as its good; it has rather

increased social distinctions in a serious and spiritual sense. Most of

the oblivion of democracy is due to the oblivion of death. But in its

own manner and measure, it was a real advance and experiment of the

European mind, like the public art of the Renaissance or the fairyland

of physical science explored in the nineteenth century. It was a more

unquestionable benefit than these: and in that development women played

a peculiar part, English women especially, and Victorian women most of

all.

It is perhaps partly, though certainly not entirely, this influence of

the great women writers that explains another very arresting and

important fact about the emergence of genuinely Victorian fiction. It

had been by this time decided, by the powers that had influence (and by

public opinion also, at least in the middle-class sense), that certain

verbal limits must be set to such literature. The novel must be what

some would call pure and others would call prudish; but what is not,

properly considered, either one or the other: it is rather a more or

less business proposal (right or wrong) that every writer shall draw the

line at literal physical description of things socially concealed. It

was originally merely verbal; it had not, primarily, any dream of

purifying the topic or the moral tone. Dickens and Thackeray claimed

very properly the right to deal with shameful passions and suggest their

shameful culminations; Scott sometimes dealt with ideas positively

horrible—as in that grand Glenallan tragedy which is as appalling as

the OEdipus or The Cenci. None of these great men would have

tolerated for a moment being talked to (as the muddle-headed amateur

censors talk to artists to-day) about “wholesome” topics and suggestions

“that cannot elevate.” They had to describe the great battle of good and

evil and they described both; but they accepted a working Victorian

compromise about what should happen behind the scenes and what on the

stage. Dickens did not claim the license of diction Fielding might have

claimed in repeating the senile ecstasies of Gride (let us say) over his

purchased bride: but Dickens does not leave the reader in the faintest

doubt about what sort of feelings they were; nor is there any reason why

he should. Thackeray would not have described the toilet details of the

secret balls of Lord Steyne: he left that to Lady Cardigan. But no one

who had read Thackeray’s version would be surprised at Lady Cardigan’s.

But though the great Victorian novelists would not have permitted the

impudence of the suggestion that every part of their problem must be

wholesome and innocent in itself, it is still tenable (I do not say it

is certain) that by yielding to the Philistines on this verbal

compromise, they have in the long run worked for impurity rather than

purity. In one point I do certainly think that Victorian Bowdlerism did

pure harm. This is the simple point that, nine times out of ten, the

altro un vegetariano che desiderasse l’abolizione dei polli in entrambe le fattorie:

ed è subito evidente che comincerebbe una lite di tutt’altro

genere; e che in quella lite non si tratterebbe di

fattore contro fattore, ma di individuo contro individuo. Questo

fondamentale senso della fraternità umana può esistere solo alla presenza di una

religione positiva. L’uomo è semplicemente uomo solo quando lo si vede contro il

cielo. Se lo si vede contro un qualsiasi paesaggio, è solo un uomo di quella terra.

Se lo si vede contro una qualsiasi casa, è solo un capofamiglia. Solo dove

la morte e l’eternità sono intensamente presenti gli esseri umani possono sentire appieno

il loro cameratismo. Una volta che l’oscurità divina contro cui ci ergiamo è

davvero scacciata dalla mente (come fu quasi del tutto scacciata nel

periodo vittoriano) le differenze tra gli esseri umani diventano

prepotentemente evidenti; siano esse espresse nelle alte caricature

di Dickens o nelle basse follie di Zola.

Ciò si può vedere in una sorta di quadro nel Prologo dei _Canterbury

Tales_; che è già gravido della promessa del romanzo inglese.

I personaggi vi sono a un tempo graficamente e delicatamente

differenziati; il Medico col suo ricco mantello, i suoi pasti accurati, la sua

freddezza verso la religione; il Franklin, la cui barba bianca era così fresca che

richiamava le margherite, e nella cui casa nevicavano carne e bevande;

l’Accusatore, dalla cui faccia spaventosa, come di rosso cherubino, i bambini

fuggivano, e che portava una ghirlanda come un cerchio; il Mugnaio coi suoi corti rossi

capelli e la cornamusa e la testa brutale, con cui poteva sfondare una

porta; l’Amante insonne come un usignolo; il Cavaliere, il

Cuoco, il Chierico di Oxford. Pendennis o il Cuoco, M. Mirabolant, non è

in nessun luogo così vividamente variato da pochi tratti meramente verbali. Ma la grande

differenza è più profonda e più sorprendente. È semplicemente che Pendennis

non sarebbe mai andato affatto a cavallo con un cuoco. Il cavaliere di Chaucer cavalcava

con un cuoco con tutta naturalezza; perché la cosa che tutti insieme cercavano

era tanto al di sopra della cavalleria quanto al di sopra dell’arte culinaria. Soldati

e truffatori e bulli e reietti, andavano tutti al

santuario di un santo lontano. A quale sorta di santo lontano viaggerebbero Pendennis

e il colonnello Newcome e il signor Moss e il capitano Costigan e Ridley il

maggiordomo e Bayham e Sir Barnes Newcome e Laura e la Duchessa

d’Ivry e Warrington e il capitano Blackball e Lady Kew,

ridendo e raccontandosi storie insieme?

La crescita del romanzo, perciò, non deve essere troppo facilmente definita un

accrescimento dell’interesse per l’umanità. È un accrescimento dell’interesse

per le cose in cui gli uomini differiscono; un’opera assai più piena e più fine era stata

fatta prima intorno alle cose in cui essi concordano. E questo intenso

interesse per la varietà ebbe il suo lato cattivo oltre che quello buono; ha piuttosto

accresciuto le distinzioni sociali in senso serio e spirituale. Gran parte

dell’oblio della democrazia è dovuta all’oblio della morte. Ma a suo

modo e nella sua misura, fu un reale progresso ed esperimento della

mente europea, come l’arte pubblica del Rinascimento o il paese delle fate

della scienza fisica esplorato nell’Ottocento. Fu un beneficio più

indiscutibile di questi: e in quello sviluppo le donne ebbero

una parte peculiare, le donne inglesi specialmente, e le donne vittoriane più di

tutte.

È forse in parte, benché certo non interamente, questa influenza delle

grandi scrittrici che spiega un altro fatto assai avvincente e

importante circa l’emergere di una narrativa genuinamente vittoriana. Era

stato ormai per quel tempo deciso, dai poteri che avevano influenza (e dall’

opinione pubblica pure, almeno nel senso della classe media), che certi

limiti verbali dovessero essere posti a tale letteratura. Il romanzo doveva essere ciò che

alcuni chiamerebbero puro e altri chiamerebbero pudibondo; ma che non è,

a ben considerare, né l’uno né l’altro: è piuttosto una più o

meno pratica proposta (a torto o a ragione) che ogni scrittore tracci il

limite alla descrizione fisica letterale di cose socialmente celate. Era

in origine meramente verbale; non aveva, primariamente, alcun sogno di

purificare l’argomento o il tono morale. Dickens e Thackeray rivendicarono

assai giustamente il diritto di trattare passioni vergognose e di suggerirne i

vergognosi culmini; Scott talvolta trattò idee positivamente

orribili—come in quella grandiosa tragedia di Glenallan che è spaventosa quanto

l’Edipo o The Cenci. Nessuno di questi grandi uomini avrebbe

tollerato per un istante di sentirsi parlare (come gli sconclusionati censori

dilettanti parlano oggi agli artisti) di argomenti «salubri» e di suggestioni

«che non possono elevare». Dovevano descrivere la grande battaglia del bene e del

male e le descrissero entrambe; ma accettarono un pratico compromesso

vittoriano su ciò che dovesse accadere dietro le quinte e ciò che sulla

scena. Dickens non rivendicò quella licenza di dizione che Fielding avrebbe potuto

rivendicare nel riferire le estasi senili di Gride (poniamo) sulla sua

sposa comprata: ma Dickens non lascia il lettore nel più tenue

dubbio su quale sorta di sentimenti fossero; né c’è alcuna ragione per cui

dovrebbe esserci. Thackeray non avrebbe descritto i dettagli di toeletta dei

balli segreti di Lord Steyne: lasciò quello a Lady Cardigan. Ma nessuno

che avesse letto la versione di Thackeray sarebbe stato sorpreso da quella di Lady Cardigan.

Ma benché i grandi romanzieri vittoriani non avrebbero permesso l’

impudenza della pretesa che ogni parte del loro problema dovesse essere

salubre e innocente in sé, è ancora sostenibile (non dico che sia

certo) che, cedendo ai Filistei su questo compromesso

verbale, essi hanno alla lunga operato per l’impurità piuttosto che per la

purezza. Su un punto certamente penso che il bowdlerismo vittoriano fece

puro danno. È il semplice punto che, nove volte su dieci, la

coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the

word that excuses it. A common evasion, for instance, substitutes for

the word that brands self-sale as the essential sin, a word which weakly

suggests that it is no more wicked than walking down the street. The

great peril of such soft mystifications is that extreme evils (they

that are abnormal even by the standard of evil) have a very long start.

Where ordinary wrong is made unintelligible, extraordinary wrong can

count on remaining more unintelligible still; especially among those who

live in such an atmosphere of long words. It is a cruel comment on the

purity of the Victorian Age, that the age ended (save for the bursting

of a single scandal) in a thing being everywhere called “Art,” “The

Greek Spirit,” “The Platonic Ideal” and so on—which any navvy mending

the road outside would have stamped with a word as vile and as vulgar as

it deserved.

This reticence, right or wrong, may have been connected with the

participation of women with men in the matter of fiction. It is an

important point: the sexes can only be coarse separately. It was

certainly also due, as I have already suggested, to the treaty between

the rich bourgeoisie and the old aristocracy, which both had to make,

for the common and congenial purpose of keeping the English people

down. But it was due much more than this to a general moral atmosphere

in the Victorian Age. It is impossible to express that spirit except by

the electric bell of a name. It was latitudinarian, and yet it was

limited. It could be content with nothing less than the whole cosmos:

yet the cosmos with which it was content was small. It is false to say

it was without humour: yet there was something by instinct unsmiling in

it. It was always saying solidly that things were “enough”; and proving

by that sharpness (as of the shutting of a door) that they were not

enough. It took, I will not say its pleasures, but even its

emancipations, sadly. Definitions seem to escape this way and that in

the attempt to locate it as an idea. But every one will understand me if

I call it George Eliot.

I begin with this great woman of letters for both the two reasons

already mentioned. She represents the rationalism of the old Victorian

Age at its highest. She and Mill are like two great mountains at the end

of that long, hard chain which is the watershed of the Early Victorian

time. They alone rise high enough to be confused among the clouds—or

perhaps confused among the stars. They certainly were seeking truth, as

Newman and Carlyle were; the slow slope of the later Victorian vulgarity

does not lower their precipice and pinnacle. But I begin with this name

also because it emphasises the idea of modern fiction as a fresh and

largely a female thing. The novel of the nineteenth century was female;

as fully as the novel of the eighteenth century was male. It is quite

certain that no woman could have written Roderick Random. It is not

quite so certain that no woman could have written Esmond. The strength

and subtlety of woman had certainly sunk deep into English letters when

George Eliot began to write.

Her originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power

in fiction as well or better than she. Charlotte Brontë, understood

along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The

latter comes into our present consideration only as that most

exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an

unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the

complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all

the after women went about looking for their brains. She could describe

a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Brontë could do.

She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what

she did not know—like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished

world before the great progressive age of which I write.

One of the characteristics of the central Victorian spirit was a

tendency to substitute a certain more or less satisfied seriousness for

the extremes of tragedy and comedy. This is marked by a certain change

in George Eliot; as it is marked by a certain limitation or moderation

in Dickens. Dickens was the People, as it was in the eighteenth century

and still largely is, in spite of all the talk for and against Board

School Education: comic, tragic, realistic, free-spoken, far looser in

words than in deeds. It marks the silent strength and pressure of the

spirit of the Victorian middle class that even to Dickens it never

occurred to revive the verbal coarseness of Smollett or Swift. The other

proof of the same pressure is the change in George Eliot. She was not a

genius in the elemental sense of Dickens; she could never have been

either so strong or so soft. But she did originally represent some of

the same popular realities: and her first books (at least as compared

with her latest) were full of sound fun and bitter pathos. Mr. Max

Beerbohm has remarked (in his glorious essay called Ichabod, I think),

that Silas Marner would not have forgotten his miserliness if George

Eliot had written of him in her maturity. I have a great regard for Mr.

Beerbohm’s literary judgments; and it may be so. But if literature

means anything more than a cold calculation of the chances, if there is

in it, as I believe, any deeper idea of detaching the spirit of life

from the dull obstacles of life, of permitting human nature really to

reveal itself as human, if (to put it shortly) literature has anything

on earth to do with being interesting—then I think we would rather

have a few more Marners than that rich maturity that gave us the

analysed dust-heaps of Daniel Deronda.

parola volgare è la parola che condanna un male e la parola raffinata la

parola che lo scusa. Una comune evasione, per esempio, sostituisce alla

parola che bolla la vendita di sé come il peccato essenziale, una parola che debolmente

suggerisce che non è più malvagia che camminare per strada. Il

grande pericolo di simili molli mistificazioni è che i mali estremi (quelli

che sono anormali persino secondo il metro del male) hanno un lunghissimo vantaggio.

Dove il male ordinario è reso inintelligibile, il male straordinario può

contare di rimanere ancor più inintelligibile; specialmente fra coloro che

vivono in una simile atmosfera di paroloni. È un crudele commento alla

purezza dell’età vittoriana, che l’età si concluse (salvo lo scoppio

di un solo scandalo) col vedere una cosa chiamata ovunque «Arte», «Lo

Spirito greco», «L’Ideale platonico» e così via—che un qualsiasi sterratore che riparava

la strada fuori avrebbe bollato con una parola vile e volgare quanto

meritava.

Questa reticenza, a torto o a ragione, può essere stata connessa alla

partecipazione delle donne insieme agli uomini in materia di narrativa. È un

punto importante: i sessi possono essere volgari solo separatamente. Fu

certamente anche dovuta, come ho già suggerito, al trattato tra

la ricca borghesia e la vecchia aristocrazia, che entrambe dovettero stringere,

per il comune e congeniale scopo di tenere il popolo inglese

sottomesso. Ma fu dovuta assai più di questo a una generale atmosfera morale

dell’età vittoriana. È impossibile esprimere quello spirito se non con

il campanello elettrico di un nome. Era latitudinario, eppure era

limitato. Non poteva accontentarsi di nulla di meno dell’intero cosmo:

eppure il cosmo di cui si accontentava era piccolo. È falso dire

che fosse privo di umorismo: eppure c’era per istinto qualcosa di non sorridente in

esso. Diceva sempre solidamente che le cose erano «sufficienti»; e provava

con quella asprezza (come del chiudersi di una porta) che non erano

sufficienti. Prendeva, non dirò i suoi piaceri, ma persino le sue

emancipazioni, con tristezza. Le definizioni paiono sfuggire di qua e di là nel

tentativo di collocarlo come idea. Ma tutti mi capiranno se

lo chiamo George Eliot.

Comincio con questa grande donna di lettere per entrambe le due ragioni

già menzionate. Ella rappresenta il razionalismo della vecchia età

vittoriana al suo culmine. Lei e Mill sono come due grandi montagne all’estremità

di quella lunga, dura catena che è lo spartiacque del primo

periodo vittoriano. Essi soli si levano abbastanza alti da confondersi tra le nubi—o

forse confusi tra le stelle. Cercavano certamente la verità, come

la cercavano Newman e Carlyle; il lento pendio della più tarda volgarità vittoriana

non abbassa il loro precipizio e il loro pinnacolo. Ma comincio con questo nome

anche perché sottolinea l’idea della narrativa moderna come cosa fresca e

in gran parte femminile. Il romanzo dell’Ottocento fu femminile;

tanto pienamente quanto il romanzo del Settecento fu maschile. È del tutto

certo che nessuna donna avrebbe potuto scrivere Roderick Random. Non è

poi così certo che nessuna donna avrebbe potuto scrivere Esmond. La forza

e la sottigliezza della donna erano certo penetrate a fondo nelle lettere inglesi quando

George Eliot cominciò a scrivere.

Le sue antesignane e persino le sue contemporanee avevano mostrato la potenza femminile

nella narrativa tanto bene o meglio di lei. Charlotte Brontë, intesa

secondo i suoi propri istinti, fu altrettanto grande; Jane Austen fu più grande. La

seconda entra nella nostra presente considerazione solo come quella cosa più

esasperante, un ideale non raggiunto. È come lasciare una

fortezza non conquistata alle spalle. Nessuna donna in seguito ha catturato il

completo buon senso di Jane Austen. Ella sapeva tenere la testa a posto, mentre tutte

le donne successive andavano in giro cercando il proprio cervello. Sapeva descrivere

un uomo con freddezza; cosa che né George Eliot né Charlotte Brontë sapevano fare.

Sapeva ciò che sapeva, come un sano dogmatico: non sapeva ciò

che non sapeva—come un sano agnostico. Ma ella appartiene a un mondo

svanito prima della grande età progressiva di cui scrivo.

Una delle caratteristiche del centrale spirito vittoriano era una

tendenza a sostituire una certa serietà più o meno soddisfatta agli

estremi della tragedia e della commedia. Ciò è segnato da un certo mutamento

in George Eliot; come è segnato da una certa limitazione o moderazione

in Dickens. Dickens era il Popolo, quale era nel Settecento

e ancora in gran parte è, malgrado tutte le chiacchiere pro e contro l’istruzione delle Board

School pubbliche: comico, tragico, realistico, di linguaggio libero, assai più sciolto nelle

parole che nei fatti. Segna la silenziosa forza e pressione dello

spirito della classe media vittoriana il fatto che persino a Dickens non

venne mai in mente di far rivivere la volgarità verbale di Smollett o Swift. L’altra

prova della stessa pressione è il mutamento in George Eliot. Non fu un

genio nel senso elementare di Dickens; non avrebbe mai potuto essere

né così forte né così delicata. Ma in origine rappresentò davvero alcune

delle stesse realtà popolari: e i suoi primi libri (almeno a paragone

con gli ultimi) erano pieni di sano spasso e di amaro pathos. Il signor Max

Beerbohm ha osservato (nel suo glorioso saggio intitolato Ichabod, credo),

che Silas Marner non avrebbe dimenticato la propria avarizia se George

Eliot avesse scritto di lui nella sua maturità. Ho grande stima per i

giudizi letterari del signor Beerbohm; e può darsi che sia così. Ma se la letteratura

significa qualcosa di più di un freddo calcolo delle probabilità, se c’è

in essa, come credo, una qualche più profonda idea di distaccare lo spirito della vita

dai grigi ostacoli della vita, di permettere alla natura umana di davvero

rivelarsi come umana, se (per dirla in breve) la letteratura ha qualcosa

al mondo a che fare con l’essere interessante—allora credo che preferiremmo

avere qualche Marner in più di quella ricca maturità che ci diede i

analizzati cumuli di polvere di Daniel Deronda.

In her best novels there is real humour, of a cool sparkling sort; there

is a strong sense of substantial character that has not yet degenerated

into psychology; there is a great deal of wisdom, chiefly about women;

indeed there is almost every element of literature except a certain

indescribable thing called glamour; which was the whole stock-in-trade

of the Brontës, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp clambers amid rotten

wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray when Esmond with his

melancholy eyes wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues

of Castlewood. Of this quality (which some have called, but hastily, the

essential of literature) George Eliot had not little but nothing. Her

air is bright and intellectually even exciting; but it is like the air

of a cloudless day on the parade at Brighton. She sees people clearly,

but not through an atmosphere. And she can conjure up storms in the

conscious, but not in the subconscious mind.

It is true (though the idea should not be exaggerated) that this

deficiency was largely due to her being cut off from all those

conceptions that had made the fiction of a Muse; the deep idea that

there are really demons and angels behind men. Certainly the increasing

atheism of her school spoilt her own particular imaginative talent: she

was far less free when she thought like Ladislaw than when she thought

like Casaubon. It also betrayed her on a matter specially requiring

common sense; I mean sex. There is nothing that is so profoundly false

as rationalist flirtation. Each sex is trying to be both sexes at once;

and the result is a confusion more untruthful than any conventions. This

can easily be seen by comparing her with a greater woman who died before

the beginning of our present problem. Jane Austen was born before those

bonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by the

Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that

Jane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austen

may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth

that was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing his

faults, says, “I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice

though not in theory,” he gets nearer to a complete confession of the

intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the

Brontës’ heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot’s. Jane

Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her

later rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of small

nationalities.

The Brontës suggest themselves here; because their superficial

qualities, the qualities that can be seized upon in satire, were in this

an exaggeration of what was, in George Eliot, hardly more than an

omission. There was perhaps a time when Mr. Rawjester was more widely

known than Mr. Rochester. And certainly Mr. Rochester (to adopt the

diction of that other eminent country gentleman, Mr. Darcy) was simply

individualistic not only in practice, but in theory. Now any one may be

so in practice: but a man who is simply individualistic in theory must

merely be an ass. Undoubtedly the Brontës exposed themselves to some

misunderstanding by thus perpetually making the masculine creature much

more masculine than he wants to be. Thackeray (a man of strong though

sleepy virility) asked in his exquisite plaintive way: “Why do our lady

novelists make the men bully the women?” It is, I think, unquestionably

true that the Brontës treated the male as an almost anarchic thing

coming in from outside nature; much as people on this planet regard a

comet. Even the really delicate and sustained comedy of Paul Emanuel is

not quite free from this air of studying something alien. The reply may

be made that the women in men’s novels are equally fallacious. The reply

is probably just.

What the Brontës really brought into fiction was exactly what Carlyle

brought into history; the blast of the mysticism of the North. They were

of Irish blood settled on the windy heights of Yorkshire; in that

country where Catholicism lingered latest, but in a superstitious form;

where modern industrialism came earliest and was more superstitious

still. The strong winds and sterile places, the old tyranny of barons

and the new and blacker tyranny of manufacturers, has made and left that

country a land of barbarians. All Charlotte Brontë’s earlier work is

full of that sullen and unmanageable world; moss-troopers turned

hurriedly into miners; the last of the old world forced into supporting

the very first crudities of the new. In this way Charlotte Brontë

represents the Victorian settlement in a special way. The Early

Victorian Industrialism is to George Eliot and to Charlotte Brontë,

rather as the Late Victorian Imperialism would have been to Mrs. Humphry

Ward in the centre of the empire and to Miss Olive Schreiner at the edge

of it. The real strength there is in characters like Robert Moore, when

he is dealing with anything except women, is the romance of industry in

its first advance: a romance that has not remained. On such fighting

frontiers people always exaggerate the strong qualities the masculine

sex does possess, and always add a great many strong qualities that it

does not possess. That is, briefly, all the reason in the Brontës on

this special subject: the rest is stark unreason. It can be most clearly

seen in that sister of Charlotte Brontë’s who has achieved the real

feat of remaining as a great woman rather than a great writer. There is

really, in a narrow but intense way, a tradition of Emily Brontë: as

there is a tradition of St. Peter or Dr. Johnson. People talk as if they

had known her, apart from her works. She must have been something more

Nei suoi romanzi migliori c’è vero umorismo, di una specie fresca e scintillante; c’è

un forte senso del carattere sostanziale che non è ancora degenerato

in psicologia; c’è una gran quantità di saggezza, soprattutto intorno alle donne;

anzi vi si trova quasi ogni elemento della letteratura tranne una certa

cosa indescrivibile chiamata glamour; che era l’intero capitale

delle Brontë, che avvertiamo in Dickens quando Quilp si arrampica tra il legno marcio

presso il desolato fiume; e perfino in Thackeray quando Esmond con i suoi

occhi malinconici vaga come un corvo scuro per i tetri viali

di Castlewood. Di questa qualità (che alcuni hanno chiamato, ma frettolosamente, l’

essenza della letteratura) George Eliot non aveva poco, ma nulla. La sua

aria è luminosa e intellettualmente perfino eccitante; ma è come l’aria

di una giornata senza nubi sulla passeggiata di Brighton. Vede le persone con chiarezza,

ma non attraverso un’atmosfera. E sa evocare tempeste nella

mente cosciente, ma non in quella subconscia.

È vero (benché l’idea non vada esagerata) che questa

carenza era in gran parte dovuta al suo essere tagliata fuori da tutte quelle

concezioni che avevano fatto della narrativa una Musa; l’idea profonda che

dietro gli uomini ci siano davvero demoni e angeli. Certamente il crescente

ateismo della sua scuola guastò il suo particolare talento immaginativo: era

assai meno libera quando pensava come Ladislaw che quando pensava

come Casaubon. La tradì anche in una materia che richiede specialmente

buon senso; intendo il sesso. Non c’è nulla di così profondamente falso

come il corteggiamento razionalista. Ciascun sesso cerca di essere entrambi i sessi in una volta;

e il risultato è una confusione più menzognera di qualsiasi convenzione. Ciò

si può facilmente vedere paragonandola a una donna più grande morta prima

dell’inizio del nostro problema presente. Jane Austen nacque prima che quei

vincoli che (ci si dice) proteggevano la donna dalla verità, fossero infranti dalle

Brontë o elaboratamente sciolti da George Eliot. Eppure resta il fatto che

Jane Austen sapeva molto di più sugli uomini di entrambe. Jane Austen

può essere stata protetta dalla verità: ma ben poco della verità

fu protetto da lei. Quando Darcy, confessando infine i suoi

difetti, dice: «Sono stato un essere egoista per tutta la vita, in pratica

benché non in teoria», si avvicina a una completa confessione del

maschio intelligente più di quanto sia mai stato anche solo accennato dalle cadute byroniane degli

eroi delle Brontë o dalle elaborate discolpe di George Eliot. Jane

Austen, certo, coprì un campo infinitamente più piccolo di qualsiasi sua

rivale successiva; ma ho sempre creduto nella vittoria delle piccole

nazionalità.

Le Brontë si suggeriscono qui; perché le loro qualità

superficiali, le qualità che si possono cogliere nella satira, erano in questo

un’esagerazione di ciò che era, in George Eliot, poco più di un’

omissione. Vi fu forse un tempo in cui il signor Rawjester era più largamente

conosciuto del signor Rochester. E certamente il signor Rochester (per adottare la

dizione di quell’altro eminente gentiluomo di campagna, il signor Darcy) era semplicemente

individualista non solo in pratica, ma in teoria. Ora chiunque può esserlo

in pratica: ma un uomo che è semplicemente individualista in teoria dev’

essere soltanto un asino. Senza dubbio le Brontë si esposero a qualche

malinteso col fare così perpetuamente la creatura maschile molto

più maschile di quanto voglia essere. Thackeray (uomo di forte benché

sonnolenta virilità) domandò nel suo squisito modo lamentoso: «Perché le nostre

romanziere fanno tiranneggiare le donne dagli uomini?» È, credo, indubitabilmente

vero che le Brontë trattavano il maschio come una cosa quasi anarchica

che entra da fuori la natura; press’a poco come le genti di questo pianeta considerano una

cometa. Perfino la commedia davvero delicata e sostenuta di Paul Emanuel non è

del tutto libera da quest’aria di studiare qualcosa di estraneo. Si può

replicare che le donne nei romanzi degli uomini sono ugualmente fallaci. La replica

è probabilmente giusta.

Ciò che le Brontë portarono davvero nella narrativa fu esattamente ciò che Carlyle

portò nella storia; la folata del misticismo del Nord. Erano

di sangue irlandese stabilitosi sulle ventose alture dello Yorkshire; in quel

paese dove il cattolicesimo indugiò più a lungo, ma in forma superstiziosa;

dove l’industrialismo moderno giunse prima ed era ancora più

superstizioso. I forti venti e i luoghi sterili, l’antica tirannia dei baroni

e la nuova e più nera tirannia dei fabbricanti, hanno fatto e lasciato quel

paese una terra di barbari. Tutta l’opera più antica di Charlotte Brontë è

piena di quel mondo cupo e ingovernabile; predoni di brughiera mutati

in fretta in minatori; gli ultimi del vecchio mondo costretti a sostenere

le primissime crudezze del nuovo. In questo modo Charlotte Brontë

rappresenta l’assetto vittoriano in un modo speciale. Il primo

industrialismo vittoriano sta a George Eliot e a Charlotte Brontë,

press’a poco come il tardo imperialismo vittoriano sarebbe stato per la signora Humphry

Ward al centro dell’impero e per la signorina Olive Schreiner al suo margine

estremo. La vera forza che vi è in personaggi come Robert Moore, quando

tratta di qualsiasi cosa tranne le donne, è il romanzesco dell’industria nel

suo primo avanzare: un romanzesco che non è rimasto. Su tali frontiere di

battaglia le genti esagerano sempre le forti qualità che il sesso maschile

davvero possiede, e aggiungono sempre moltissime forti qualità che esso

non possiede. Questa è, in breve, tutta la ragione che è nelle Brontë su

questo speciale soggetto: il resto è pura irragione. Lo si può vedere più chiaramente

in quella sorella di Charlotte Brontë che ha compiuto la vera

impresa di restare come grande donna piuttosto che come grande scrittrice. C’è

davvero, in un modo angusto ma intenso, una tradizione di Emily Brontë: come

c’è una tradizione di san Pietro o del dottor Johnson. La gente ne parla come se l’

avesse conosciuta, a prescindere dalle sue opere. Dev’essere stata qualcosa di più

than an original person; perhaps an origin. But so far as her written

works go she enters English letters only as an original person—and

rather a narrow one. Her imagination was sometimes superhuman—always

inhuman. Wuthering Heights might have been written by an eagle. She is

the strongest instance of these strong imaginations that made the other

sex a monster: for Heathcliffe fails as a man as catastrophically as he

succeeds as a demon. I think Emily Brontë was further narrowed by the

broadness of her religious views; but never, of course, so much as

George Eliot.

In any case, it is Charlotte Brontë who enters Victorian literature. The

shortest way of stating her strong contribution is, I think, this: that

she reached the highest romance through the lowest realism. She did not

set out with Amadis of Gaul in a forest or with Mr. Pickwick in a comic

club. She set out with herself, with her own dingy clothes, and

accidental ugliness, and flat, coarse, provincial household; and

forcibly fused all such muddy materials into a spirited fairy-tale. If

the first chapters on the home and school had not proved how heavy and

hateful sanity can be, there would really be less point in the

insanity of Mr. Rochester’s wife—or the not much milder insanity of

Mrs. Rochester’s husband. She discovered the secret of hiding the

sensational in the commonplace: and Jane Eyre remains the best of her

books (better even than Villette) because while it is a human document

written in blood, it is also one of the best blood-and-thunder detective

stories in the world.

But while Emily Brontë was as unsociable as a storm at midnight, and

while Charlotte Brontë was at best like that warmer and more domestic

thing, a house on fire—they do connect themselves with the calm of

George Eliot, as the forerunners of many later developments of the

feminine advance. Many forerunners (if it comes to that) would have felt

rather ill if they had seen the things they foreran. This notion of a

hazy anticipation of after history has been absurdly overdone: as when

men connect Chaucer with the Reformation; which is like connecting Homer

with the Syracusan Expedition. But it is to some extent true that all

these great Victorian women had a sort of unrest in their souls. And the

proof of it is that (after what I will claim to call the healthier time

of Dickens and Thackeray) it began to be admitted by the great Victorian

men. If there had not been something in that irritation, we should

hardly have had to speak in these pages of Diana of the Crossways or

of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. To what this strange and very local sex

war has been due I shall not ask, because I have no answer. That it was

due to votes or even little legal inequalities about marriage, I feel

myself here too close to realities even to discuss. My own guess is that

it has been due to the great neglect of the military spirit by the male

Victorians. The woman felt obscurely that she was still running her

mortal risk, while the man was not still running his. But I know nothing

about it; nor does anybody else.

In so short a book on so vast, complex and living a subject, it is

impossible to drop even into the second rank of good authors, whose name

is legion; but it is impossible to leave that considerable female force

in fiction which has so largely made the very nature of the modern

novel, without mentioning two names which almost brought that second

rank up to the first rank. They were at utterly opposite poles. The one

succeeded by being a much mellower and more Christian George Eliot; the

other succeeded by being a much more mad and unchristian Emily Brontë.

But Mrs. Oliphant and the author calling herself “Ouida” both forced

themselves well within the frontier of fine literature. _The Beleaguered

City_ is literature in its highest sense; the other works of its author

tend to fall into fiction in its best working sense. Mrs. Oliphant was

infinitely saner in that city of ghosts than the cosmopolitan Ouida ever

was in any of the cities of men. Mrs. Oliphant would never have dared to

discover, either in heaven or hell, such a thing as a hairbrush with its

back encrusted with diamonds. But though Ouida was violent and weak

where Mrs. Oliphant might have been mild and strong, her own triumphs

were her own. She had a real power of expressing the senses through her

style; of conveying the very heat of blue skies or the bursting of

palpable pomegranates. And just as Mrs. Oliphant transfused her more

timid Victorian tales with a true and intense faith in the Christian

mystery—so Ouida, with infinite fury and infinite confusion of

thought, did fill her books with Byron and the remains of the French

Revolution. In the track of such genius there has been quite an

accumulation of true talent as in the children’s tales of Mrs. Ewing,

the historical tales of Miss Yonge, the tales of Mrs. Molesworth, and so

on. On a general review I do not think I have been wrong in taking the

female novelists first. I think they gave its special shape, its

temporary twist, to the Victorian novel.

Nevertheless it is a shock (I almost dare to call it a relief) to come

back to the males. It is the more abrupt because the first name that

must be mentioned derives directly from the mere maleness of the Sterne

and Smollett novel. I have already spoken of Dickens as the most homely

and instinctive, and therefore probably the heaviest, of all the

onslaughts made on the central Victorian satisfaction. There is

therefore the less to say of him here, where we consider him only as a

novelist; but there is still much more to say than can even conceivably

be said. Dickens, as we have stated, inherited the old comic, rambling

che una persona originale; forse un’origine. Ma per quanto vanno le sue opere

scritte, ella entra nelle lettere inglesi soltanto come persona originale — e

piuttosto angusta. La sua immaginazione era talvolta sovrumana — sempre

inumana. Cime tempestose potrebbe essere stato scritto da un’aquila. È

l’esempio più forte di queste forti immaginazioni che fecero dell’altro

sesso un mostro: poiché Heathcliff fallisce come uomo tanto catastroficamente quanto

riesce come demone. Credo che Emily Brontë fu ulteriormente ristretta dall’

ampiezza delle sue vedute religiose; ma mai, certo, tanto quanto

George Eliot.

In ogni caso, è Charlotte Brontë che entra nella letteratura vittoriana. Il

modo più breve di enunciare il suo forte contributo è, credo, questo: che

ella raggiunse il più alto romanzesco attraverso il più basso realismo. Non prese

le mosse da Amadigi di Gaula in una foresta né dal signor Pickwick in un comico

circolo. Prese le mosse da se stessa, dai propri abiti squallidi, e

dalla bruttezza casuale, e dalla piatta, rozza, provinciale casa; e

fuse a forza tutti quei materiali fangosi in una fiaba animosa. Se

i primi capitoli sulla casa e sulla scuola non avessero dimostrato quanto pesante e

odiosa possa essere la sanità mentale, vi sarebbe davvero meno senso nella

follia della moglie del signor Rochester — o nella follia non molto più mite del

marito della signora Rochester. Ella scoprì il segreto di nascondere il

sensazionale nell’ordinario: e Jane Eyre resta il migliore dei suoi

libri (migliore perfino di Villette) perché, mentre è un documento umano

scritto nel sangue, è anche una delle migliori storie a sangue e tuoni poliziesche

del mondo.

Ma mentre Emily Brontë era insocievole come una tempesta a mezzanotte, e

mentre Charlotte Brontë era al meglio come quella cosa più calda e più domestica,

una casa in fiamme — esse si collegano davvero alla calma di

George Eliot, come le precorritrici di molti più tardi sviluppi dell’

avanzata femminile. Molte precorritrici (se è per questo) si sarebbero sentite

piuttosto male se avessero visto le cose che precorrevano. Questa nozione di una

nebulosa anticipazione della storia successiva è stata assurdamente esagerata: come quando

gli uomini collegano Chaucer alla Riforma; il che è come collegare Omero

alla spedizione siracusana. Ma è in qualche misura vero che tutte

queste grandi donne vittoriane avevano una sorta di inquietudine nell’anima. E la

prova di ciò è che (dopo quel che mi arrischierò a chiamare il più sano tempo

di Dickens e Thackeray) cominciò a essere ammessa dai grandi uomini

vittoriani. Se non ci fosse stato qualcosa in quell’irritazione, difficilmente

avremmo dovuto parlare in queste pagine di Diana of the Crossways o

di Tess dei d’Urberville. A che cosa questa strana e assai locale guerra

dei sessi sia dovuta non chiederò, perché non ho risposta. Che fosse

dovuta ai voti o perfino a piccole ineguaglianze legali intorno al matrimonio, mi sento

qui troppo vicino alle realtà perfino per discuterne. La mia congettura è che

sia stata dovuta al grande trascurare dello spirito militare da parte dei maschi

vittoriani. La donna sentiva oscuramente di correre ancora il suo

rischio mortale, mentre l’uomo non correva più il suo. Ma non ne so nulla;

né lo sa alcun altro.

In un libro così breve su un soggetto così vasto, complesso e vivo, è

impossibile scendere anche solo nel secondo rango dei buoni autori, il cui nome

è legione; ma è impossibile lasciare quella considerevole forza femminile

nella narrativa che ha così largamente fatto la natura stessa del moderno

romanzo, senza menzionare due nomi che quasi portarono quel secondo

rango al primo rango. Erano a poli del tutto opposti. L’una

riuscì con l’essere una George Eliot assai più matura e più cristiana; l’

altra riuscì con l’essere una Emily Brontë assai più folle e non cristiana.

Ma la signora Oliphant e l’autrice che si faceva chiamare «Ouida» si spinsero entrambe

bene entro la frontiera della bella letteratura. _The Beleaguered

City_ è letteratura nel suo senso più alto; le altre opere della sua autrice

tendono a cadere nella narrativa nel suo miglior senso operativo. La signora Oliphant fu

infinitamente più assennata in quella città di fantasmi di quanto la cosmopolita Ouida sia mai

stata in una qualsiasi delle città degli uomini. La signora Oliphant non avrebbe mai osato

scoprire, né in cielo né in inferno, una cosa quale una spazzola per capelli col

dorso incrostato di diamanti. Ma benché Ouida fosse violenta e debole

dove la signora Oliphant poteva essere mite e forte, i suoi trionfi

erano suoi propri. Ella aveva un vero potere di esprimere i sensi attraverso il suo

stile; di rendere il calore stesso dei cieli azzurri o lo scoppiare di

palpabili melagrane. E proprio come la signora Oliphant infuse i suoi più

timidi racconti vittoriani con una vera e intensa fede nel mistero

cristiano — così Ouida, con infinita furia e infinita confusione di

pensiero, riempì i suoi libri di Byron e dei resti della Rivoluzione

francese. Sulla scia di tale genio vi è stato un notevole

accumulo di vero talento, come nei racconti per bambini della signora Ewing,

nei racconti storici della signorina Yonge, nei racconti della signora Molesworth, e così

via. In una rassegna generale non credo di aver sbagliato nel prendere le

romanziere donne per prime. Credo che diedero la sua speciale forma, la sua

temporanea piega, al romanzo vittoriano.

Nondimeno è uno shock (quasi oso chiamarlo un sollievo) tornare

ai maschi. È tanto più brusco perché il primo nome che

va menzionato deriva direttamente dalla mera mascolinità di quello di Sterne

e Smollett, il romanzo. Ho già parlato di Dickens come del più casalingo

e istintivo, e perciò probabilmente il più pesante, di tutti gli

assalti mossi contro la centrale soddisfazione vittoriana. C’è

perciò meno da dire di lui qui, dove lo consideriamo soltanto come

romanziere; ma c’è ancora molto più da dire di quanto si possa perfino concepibilmente

dire. Dickens, come abbiamo affermato, ereditò il vecchio romanzo comico, divagante,

novel from Smollett and the rest. Dickens, as we have also stated,

consented to expurgate that novel. But when all origins and all

restraints have been defined and allowed for, the creature that came out

was such as we shall not see again. Smollett was coarse; but Smollett

was also cruel. Dickens was frequently horrible; he was never cruel. The

art of Dickens was the most exquisite of arts: it was the art of

enjoying everybody. Dickens, being a very human writer, had to be a very

human being; he had his faults and sensibilities in a strong degree; and

I do not for a moment maintain that he enjoyed everybody in his daily

life. But he enjoyed everybody in his books: and everybody has enjoyed

everybody in those books even till to-day. His books are full of baffled

villains stalking out or cowardly bullies kicked downstairs. But the

villains and the cowards are such delightful people that the reader

always hopes the villain will put his head through a side window and

make a last remark; or that the bully will say one thing more, even from

the bottom of the stairs. The reader really hopes this; and he cannot

get rid of the fancy that the author hopes so too. I cannot at the

moment recall that Dickens ever killed a comic villain, except Quilp,

who was deliberately made even more villainous than comic. There can be

no serious fears for the life of Mr. Wegg in the muckcart; though Mr.

Pecksniff fell to be a borrower of money, and Mr. Mantalini to turning a

mangle, the human race has the comfort of thinking they are still alive:

and one might have the rapture of receiving a begging letter from Mr.

Pecksniff, or even of catching Mr. Mantalini collecting the washing, if

one always lurked about on Monday mornings. This sentiment (the true

artist will be relieved to hear) is entirely unmoral. Mrs. Wilfer

deserved death much more than Mr. Quilp, for she had succeeded in

poisoning family life persistently, while he was (to say the least of

it) intermittent in his domesticity. But who can honestly say he does

not hope Mrs. Wilfer is still talking like Mrs. Wilfer—especially if it

is only in a book? This is the artistic greatness of Dickens, before and

after which there is really nothing to be said. He had the power of

creating people, both possible and impossible, who were simply precious

and priceless people; and anything subtler added to that truth really

only weakens it.

The mention of Mrs. Wilfer (whom the heart is loth to leave) reminds one

of the only elementary ethical truth that is essential in the study of

Dickens. That is that he had broad or universal sympathies in a sense

totally unknown to the social reformers who wallow in such phrases.

Dickens (unlike the social reformers) really did sympathise with every

sort of victim of every sort of tyrant. He did truly pray for all who

are desolate and oppressed. If you try to tie him to any cause narrower

than that Prayer Book definition, you will find you have shut out half

his best work. If, in your sympathy for Mrs. Quilp, you call Dickens the

champion of downtrodden woman, you will suddenly remember Mr. Wilfer,

and find yourself unable to deny the existence of downtrodden man. If in

your sympathy for Mr. Rouncewell you call Dickens the champion of a

manly middle-class Liberalism against Chesney Wold, you will suddenly

remember Stephen Blackpool—and find yourself unable to deny that Mr.

Rouncewell might be a pretty insupportable cock on his own dung-hill. If

in your sympathy for Stephen Blackpool you call Dickens a Socialist (as

does Mr. Pugh), and think of him as merely heralding the great

Collectivist revolt against Victorian Individualism and Capitalism,

which seemed so clearly to be the crisis at the end of this epoch—you

will suddenly remember the agreeable young Barnacle at the

Circumlocution Office: and you will be unable, for very shame, to

assert that Dickens would have trusted the poor to a State Department.

Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of men in the weak

modern way; he was the brotherhood of men, and knew it was a brotherhood

in sin as well as in aspiration. And he was not only larger than the old

factions he satirised; he was larger than any of our great social

schools that have gone forward since he died.

The seemingly quaint custom of comparing Dickens and Thackeray existed

in their own time, and no one will dismiss it with entire disdain who

remembers that the Victorian tradition was domestic and genuine, even

when it was hoodwinked and unworldly. There must have been some reason

for making this imaginary duel between two quite separate and quite

amiable acquaintances. And there is, after all, some reason for it. It

is not, as was once cheaply said, that Thackeray went in for truth, and

Dickens for mere caricature. There is a huge accumulation of truth,

down to the smallest detail, in Dickens: he seems sometimes a mere

mountain of facts. Thackeray, in comparison, often seems quite careless

and elusive; almost as if he did not quite know where all his characters

were. There is a truth behind the popular distinction; but it lies much

deeper. Perhaps the best way of stating it is this: that Dickens used

reality, while aiming at an effect of romance; while Thackeray used the

loose language and ordinary approaches of romance, while aiming at an

effect of reality. It was the special and splendid business of Dickens

to introduce us to people who would have been quite incredible if he had

not told us so much truth about them. It was the special and not less

splendid task of Thackeray to introduce us to people whom we knew

already. Paradoxically, but very practically, it followed that his

romanzo da Smollett e dagli altri. Dickens, come pure abbiamo affermato,

acconsentì a espurgare quel romanzo. Ma quando tutte le origini e tutte le

restrizioni sono state definite e messe in conto, la creatura che ne uscì

fu tale quale non rivedremo più. Smollett era rozzo; ma Smollett

era anche crudele. Dickens era spesso orribile; non era mai crudele. L’

arte di Dickens era la più squisita delle arti: era l’arte di

godere di ognuno. Dickens, essendo uno scrittore molto umano, doveva essere un essere

molto umano; aveva i suoi difetti e le sue sensibilità in forte grado; e

non sostengo neppure per un momento che godesse di ognuno nella sua vita

quotidiana. Ma godeva di ognuno nei suoi libri: e ognuno ha goduto di

ognuno in quei libri fin ancor oggi. I suoi libri sono pieni di malvagi

sconcertati che escono impettiti o di codardi bulli buttati giù per le scale. Ma i

malvagi e i codardi sono gente così deliziosa che il lettore

spera sempre che il malvagio cacci la testa da una finestra laterale e

faccia un’ultima osservazione; o che il bullo dica ancora una cosa, anche dal

fondo delle scale. Il lettore lo spera davvero; e non riesce a

liberarsi dalla fantasia che anche l’autore lo speri. Non riesco al

momento a ricordare che Dickens abbia mai ucciso un malvagio comico, tranne Quilp,

che fu deliberatamente reso ancor più malvagio che comico. Non vi possono

essere seri timori per la vita del signor Wegg nel carro del letame; benché il signor

Pecksniff sia caduto a fare l’accattone di denaro, e il signor Mantalini a girare un

mangano, la razza umana ha il conforto di pensarli ancora vivi:

e si potrebbe avere il rapimento di ricevere una lettera di questua dal signor

Pecksniff, o perfino di sorprendere il signor Mantalini a raccogliere il bucato, se

si stesse sempre in agguato al mattino del lunedì. Questo sentimento (il vero

artista sarà sollevato d’udirlo) è del tutto amorale. La signora Wilfer

meritava la morte assai più del signor Quilp, poiché era riuscita a

avvelenare la vita familiare con costanza, mentre lui era (per dire il meno)

intermittente nella sua domesticità. Ma chi può onestamente dire di non

sperare che la signora Wilfer parli ancora come la signora Wilfer — specie se ciò

è soltanto in un libro? Questa è l’artistica grandezza di Dickens, prima e

dopo la quale non c’è davvero nulla da dire. Egli aveva il potere di

creare persone, tanto possibili quanto impossibili, che erano semplicemente preziose

e inestimabili; e qualsiasi cosa più sottile aggiunta a quella verità davvero

non fa che indebolirla.

La menzione della signora Wilfer (che il cuore è restio a lasciare) rammenta

l’unica elementare verità etica che è essenziale nello studio di

Dickens. Ed è che egli ebbe simpatie ampie o universali in un senso

del tutto ignoto ai riformatori sociali che si crogiolano in tali frasi.

Dickens (a differenza dei riformatori sociali) davvero simpatizzò con ogni

sorta di vittima di ogni sorta di tiranno. Egli pregò veramente per tutti coloro che

sono desolati e oppressi. Se provi a legarlo a una qualsiasi causa più angusta

di quella definizione del libro di preghiere, scoprirai di aver escluso metà

della sua opera migliore. Se, nella tua simpatia per la signora Quilp, chiami Dickens il

campione della donna calpestata, ricorderai d’un tratto il signor Wilfer,

e ti troverai incapace di negare l’esistenza dell’uomo calpestato. Se

nella tua simpatia per il signor Rouncewell chiami Dickens il campione di un

virile liberalismo borghese contro Chesney Wold, ricorderai d’un tratto

Stephen Blackpool — e ti troverai incapace di negare che il signor

Rouncewell potrebbe essere un gallo assai insopportabile sul proprio letamaio. Se

nella tua simpatia per Stephen Blackpool chiami Dickens un socialista (come

fa il signor Pugh), e lo pensi come mero araldo della grande

rivolta collettivista contro l’individualismo e il capitalismo vittoriani,

che pareva così chiaramente essere la crisi alla fine di quest’epoca — ti

ricorderai d’un tratto del gradevole giovane Barnacle all’

Ufficio delle Circonlocuzioni: e sarai incapace, per pura vergogna, di

affermare che Dickens avrebbe affidato i poveri a un Dipartimento di Stato.

Dickens non credette semplicemente nella fratellanza degli uomini alla debole

maniera moderna; egli era la fratellanza degli uomini, e sapeva che era una fratellanza

nel peccato tanto quanto nell’aspirazione. E non era soltanto più grande delle vecchie

fazioni che satireggiava; era più grande di qualsiasi delle nostre grandi scuole

sociali che sono andate avanti da quando egli morì.

Il costume apparentemente bizzarro di paragonare Dickens e Thackeray esisteva

al loro proprio tempo, e nessuno lo scarterà con intero disdegno se

ricorda che la tradizione vittoriana era domestica e genuina, perfino

quando era ingannata e distaccata dal mondo. Doveva esserci qualche ragione

per fare questo duello immaginario tra due conoscenze del tutto separate e del tutto

amabili. E c’è, dopo tutto, qualche ragione. Non

è, come una volta si disse a buon mercato, che Thackeray puntasse sulla verità, e

Dickens sulla mera caricatura. C’è un enorme accumulo di verità,

fin nel più piccolo dettaglio, in Dickens: talvolta pare una mera

montagna di fatti. Thackeray, in confronto, spesso pare del tutto sbadato

ed elusivo; quasi come se non sapesse bene dove fossero tutti i suoi personaggi.

C’è una verità dietro la distinzione popolare; ma essa giace assai

più profonda. Forse il modo migliore di enunciarla è questo: che Dickens usò

la realtà, mirando a un effetto di romanzesco; mentre Thackeray usò il

linguaggio sciolto e gli approcci ordinari del romanzesco, mirando a un

effetto di realtà. Fu lo speciale e splendido compito di Dickens

introdurci a persone che sarebbero state del tutto incredibili se egli non

ci avesse detto tanta verità su di loro. Fu lo speciale e non meno

splendido compito di Thackeray introdurci a persone che già

conoscevamo. Paradossalmente, ma assai praticamente, ne seguiva che le sue

introductions were the longer of the two. When we hear of Aunt Betsy

Trotwood, we vividly envisage everything about her, from her gardening

gloves to her seaside residence, from her hard, handsome face to her

tame lunatic laughing at the bedroom window. It is all so minutely true

that she must be true also. We only feel inclined to walk round the

English coast until we find that particular garden and that particular

aunt. But when we turn from the aunt of Copperfield to the uncle of

Pendennis, we are more likely to run round the coast trying to find a

watering-place where he isn’t than one where he is. The moment one sees

Major Pendennis, one sees a hundred Major Pendennises. It is not a

matter of mere realism. Miss Trotwood’s bonnet and gardening tools and

cupboard full of old-fashioned bottles are quite as true in the

materialistic way as the Major’s cuffs and corner table and toast and

newspaper. Both writers are realistic: but Dickens writes realism in

order to make the incredible credible. Thackeray writes it in order to

make us recognise an old friend. Whether we shall be pleased to meet the

old friend is quite another matter: I think we should be better pleased

to meet Miss Trotwood, and find, as David Copperfield did, a new friend,

a new world. But we recognise Major Pendennis even when we avoid him.

Henceforth Thackeray can count on our seeing him from his wig to his

well-blacked boots whenever he chooses to say “Major Pendennis paid a

call.” Dickens, on the other hand, had to keep up an incessant

excitement about his characters; and no man on earth but he could have

kept it up.

It may be said, in approximate summary, that Thackeray is the novelist

of memory—of our memories as well as his own. Dickens seems to expect

all his characters, like amusing strangers arriving at lunch: as if they

gave him not only pleasure, but surprise. But Thackeray is everybody’s

past—is everybody’s youth. Forgotten friends flit about the passages of

dreamy colleges and unremembered clubs; we hear fragments of unfinished

conversations, we see faces without names for an instant, fixed for ever

in some trivial grimace: we smell the strong smell of social cliques

now quite incongruous to us; and there stir in all the little rooms at

once the hundred ghosts of oneself.

For this purpose Thackeray was equipped with a singularly easy and

sympathetic style, carved in slow soft curves where Dickens hacked out

his images with a hatchet. There was a sort of avuncular indulgence

about his attitude; what he called his “preaching” was at worst a sort

of grumbling, ending with the sentiment that boys will be boys and that

there’s nothing new under the sun. He was not really either a cynic or a

censor morum; but (in another sense than Chaucer’s) a gentle pardoner:

having seen the weaknesses he is sometimes almost weak about them. He

really comes nearer to exculpating Pendennis or Ethel Newcome than any

other author, who saw what he saw, would have been. The rare wrath of

such men is all the more effective; and there are passages in _Vanity

Fair_ and still more in The Book of Snobs, where he does make the

dance of wealth and fashion look stiff and monstrous, like a Babylonian

masquerade. But he never quite did it in such a way as to turn the

course of the Victorian Age.

It may seem strange to say that Thackeray did not know enough of the

world; yet this was the truth about him in large matters of the

philosophy of life, and especially of his own time. He did not know the

way things were going: he was too Victorian to understand the Victorian

epoch. He did not know enough ignorant people to have heard the news. In

one of his delightful asides he imagines two little clerks commenting

erroneously on the appearance of Lady Kew or Sir Brian Newcome in the

Park, and says: “How should Jones and Brown, who are not, _vous

comprenez, du monde_, understand these mysteries?” But I think Thackeray

knew quite as little about Jones and Brown as they knew about Newcome

and Kew; his world was le monde. Hence he seemed to take it for

granted that the Victorian compromise would last; while Dickens (who

knew his Jones and Brown) had already guessed that it would not.

Thackeray did not realise that the Victorian platform was a moving

platform. To take but one instance, he was a Radical like Dickens; all

really representative Victorians, except perhaps Tennyson, were

Radicals. But he seems to have thought of all reform as simple and

straightforward and all of a piece; as if Catholic Emancipation, the New

Poor Law, Free Trade and the Factory Acts and Popular Education were all

parts of one almost self-evident evolution of enlightenment. Dickens,

being in touch with the democracy, had already discovered that the

country had come to a dark place of divided ways and divided counsels.

In Hard Times he realised Democracy at war with Radicalism; and

became, with so incompatible an ally as Ruskin, not indeed a Socialist,

but certainly an anti-Individualist. In Our Mutual Friend he felt the

strength of the new rich, and knew they had begun to transform the

aristocracy, instead of the aristocracy transforming them. He knew that

Veneering had carried off Twemlow in triumph. He very nearly knew what

we all know to-day: that, so far from it being possible to plod along

the progressive road with more votes and more Free Trade, England must

either sharply become very much more democratic or as rapidly become

very much less so.

There gathers round these two great novelists a considerable group of

good novelists, who more or less mirror their mid-Victorian mood. Wilkie

Collins may be said to be in this way a lesser Dickens and Anthony

Trollope a lesser Thackeray. Wilkie Collins is chiefly typical of his

introduzioni erano le più lunghe delle due. Quando udiamo della zia Betsy

Trotwood, immaginiamo vividamente ogni cosa di lei, dai suoi guanti da

giardinaggio alla sua residenza in riva al mare, dal suo viso duro e avvenente al suo

docile pazzo che ride alla finestra della camera. È tutto così minuziosamente vero

che ella dev’essere vera anch’essa. Ci sentiamo soltanto inclini a fare il giro della

costa inglese finché non troviamo quel particolare giardino e quella particolare

zia. Ma quando ci volgiamo dalla zia di Copperfield allo zio di

Pendennis, è più probabile che corriamo intorno alla costa cercando di trovare un

luogo di villeggiatura dove egli non sia piuttosto che uno dove sia. Nel momento in cui si vede

il Maggiore Pendennis, se ne vedono cento di Maggiori Pendennis. Non è una

questione di mero realismo. La cuffia della signorina Trotwood e gli attrezzi da giardino e la

credenza piena di bottiglie all’antica sono altrettanto veri, in modo

materialistico, quanto i polsini del Maggiore e il tavolino d’angolo e il pane tostato e il

giornale. Entrambi gli scrittori sono realistici: ma Dickens scrive realismo per

rendere l’incredibile credibile. Thackeray lo scrive per

farci riconoscere un vecchio amico. Se saremo lieti d’incontrare il

vecchio amico è tutt’altra questione: credo che saremmo più lieti

d’incontrare la signorina Trotwood, e di trovare, come fece David Copperfield, un nuovo amico,

un nuovo mondo. Ma riconosciamo il Maggiore Pendennis anche quando lo evitiamo.

D’ora in poi Thackeray può contare sul fatto che lo vedremo dalla parrucca ai suoi

stivali ben lustrati ogni volta che sceglie di dire «Il Maggiore Pendennis ha fatto una

visita». Dickens, d’altro canto, doveva mantenere un incessante

eccitamento intorno ai suoi personaggi; e nessun uomo sulla terra fuorché lui avrebbe potuto

mantenerlo.

Si può dire, in approssimativo compendio, che Thackeray è il romanziere

della memoria — delle nostre memorie tanto quanto delle sue. Dickens sembra aspettarsi

tutti i suoi personaggi, come divertenti estranei che arrivano a pranzo: come se

gli dessero non solo piacere, ma sorpresa. Ma Thackeray è il passato di ognuno —

è la giovinezza di ognuno. Amici dimenticati svolazzano per i corridoi di

sognanti collegi e circoli non ricordati; udiamo frammenti di conversazioni

incompiute, vediamo per un istante volti senza nomi, fissati per sempre

in qualche banale smorfia: fiutiamo il forte odore di cricche sociali

ormai del tutto incongrue a noi; e si agitano insieme in tutte le stanzette

d’un colpo i cento fantasmi di se stessi.

A questo scopo Thackeray era dotato di uno stile singolarmente facile e

simpatetico, intagliato in lente e morbide curve là dove Dickens sbozzava

le sue immagini con un’accetta. C’era una sorta di indulgenza da zio

nel suo atteggiamento; ciò che egli chiamava il suo «predicare» era, al peggio, una sorta

di brontolio, che finiva col sentimento che i ragazzi saranno ragazzi e che

non c’è nulla di nuovo sotto il sole. Non era davvero né un cinico né un

censor morum; ma (in un senso diverso da quello di Chaucer) un gentile perdonatore:

avendo visto le debolezze, è talvolta quasi debole verso di esse. Egli

arriva davvero più vicino a discolpare Pendennis o Ethel Newcome di quanto qualsiasi

altro autore, che avesse visto ciò che egli vide, sarebbe stato. La rara ira di

tali uomini è tanto più efficace; e ci sono passi in _La fiera

delle vanità_ e ancor più in The Book of Snobs, dove egli fa sì che la

danza della ricchezza e della moda appaia rigida e mostruosa, come una mascherata

babilonese. Ma non lo fece mai del tutto in modo tale da mutare il

corso dell’età vittoriana.

Può sembrare strano dire che Thackeray non conoscesse abbastanza del

mondo; eppure questa era la verità su di lui nelle grandi questioni della

filosofia della vita, e specialmente del suo proprio tempo. Egli non sapeva la

direzione in cui le cose stavano andando: era troppo vittoriano per comprendere l’epoca

vittoriana. Non conosceva abbastanza gente ignorante da aver udito le notizie. In

uno dei suoi deliziosi incisi immagina due piccoli impiegati che commentano

erroneamente l’apparizione di Lady Kew o di Sir Brian Newcome nel

Parco, e dice: «Come dovrebbero Jones e Brown, che non sono, _vous

comprenez, du monde_, comprendere questi misteri?» Ma credo che Thackeray

sapesse tanto poco di Jones e Brown quanto essi sapevano di Newcome

e Kew; il suo mondo era le monde. Perciò sembrava dare per

scontato che il compromesso vittoriano sarebbe durato; mentre Dickens (che

conosceva i suoi Jones e Brown) aveva già intuito che non sarebbe durato.

Thackeray non si rendeva conto che la piattaforma vittoriana era una piattaforma

in movimento. Per prendere un solo esempio, era un radicale come Dickens; tutti

i vittoriani davvero rappresentativi, tranne forse Tennyson, erano

radicali. Ma pare che avesse pensato a ogni riforma come semplice e

diretta e tutta d’un pezzo; come se l’emancipazione cattolica, la nuova

legge sui poveri, il libero scambio e le leggi sulle fabbriche e l’istruzione popolare fossero tutti

parti di un’evoluzione dell’illuminismo quasi auto-evidente. Dickens,

essendo in contatto con la democrazia, aveva già scoperto che il

paese era giunto a un luogo oscuro di vie divise e di consigli divisi.

In Tempi difficili egli colse la democrazia in guerra con il radicalismo; e

divenne, con un alleato così incompatibile come Ruskin, non certo un socialista,

ma di sicuro un anti-individualista. In Il nostro comune amico egli sentì la

forza dei nuovi ricchi, e seppe che avevano cominciato a trasformare l’

aristocrazia, invece che l’aristocrazia trasformare loro. Sapeva che

Veneering aveva portato via Twemlow in trionfo. Sapeva quasi ciò che

tutti noi sappiamo oggi: che, lungi dall’essere possibile arrancare lungo

la strada progressista con più voti e più libero scambio, l’Inghilterra deve

o bruscamente divenire assai più democratica o altrettanto rapidamente divenire

assai meno tale.

Si raccoglie intorno a questi due grandi romanzieri un considerevole gruppo di

buoni romanzieri, che più o meno rispecchiano il loro umore metà-vittoriano. Wilkie

Collins si può dire sia in questo modo un Dickens minore e Anthony

Trollope un Thackeray minore. Wilkie Collins è principalmente tipico del suo

time in this respect: that while his moral and religious conceptions

were as mechanical as his carefully constructed fictitious conspiracies,

he nevertheless informed the latter with a sort of involuntary mysticism

which dealt wholly with the darker side of the soul. For this was one

of the most peculiar of the problems of the Victorian mind. The idea of

the supernatural was perhaps at as low an ebb as it had ever

been—certainly much lower than it is now. But in spite of this, and in

spite of a certain ethical cheeriness that was almost de rigueur—the

strange fact remains that the only sort of supernaturalism the

Victorians allowed to their imaginations was a sad supernaturalism. They

might have ghost stories, but not saints’ stories. They could trifle

with the curse or unpardoning prophecy of a witch, but not with the

pardon of a priest. They seem to have held (I believe erroneously) that

the supernatural was safest when it came from below. When we think (for

example) of the uncountable riches of religious art, imagery, ritual and

popular legend that has clustered round Christmas through all the

Christian ages, it is a truly extraordinary thing to reflect that

Dickens (wishing to have in The Christmas Carol a little happy

supernaturalism by way of a change) actually had to make up a mythology

for himself. Here was one of the rare cases where Dickens, in a real and

human sense, did suffer from the lack of culture. For the rest, Wilkie

Collins is these two elements: the mechanical and the mystical; both

very good of their kind. He is one of the few novelists in whose case it

is proper and literal to speak of his “plots.” He was a plotter; he went

about to slay Godfrey Ablewhite as coldly and craftily as the Indians

did. But he also had a sound though sinister note of true magic; as in

the repetition of the two white dresses in The Woman in White; or of

the dreams with their double explanations in Armadale. His ghosts do

walk. They are alive; and walk as softly as Count Fosco, but as solidly.

Finally, The Moonstone is probably the best detective tale in the

world.

Anthony Trollope, a clear and very capable realist, represents rather

another side of the Victorian spirit of comfort; its leisureliness, its

love of detail, especially of domestic detail; its love of following

characters and kindred from book to book and from generation to

generation. Dickens very seldom tried this latter experiment, and then

(as in Master Humphrey’s Clock) unsuccessfully; those magnesium blazes

of his were too brilliant and glaring to be indefinitely prolonged. But

Thackeray was full of it; and we often feel that the characters in _The

Newcomes_ or Philip might legitimately complain that their talk and

tale are being perpetually interrupted and pestered by people out of

other books. Within his narrower limits, Trollope was a more strict and

masterly realist than Thackeray, and even those who would call his

personages “types” would admit that they are as vivid as characters. It

was a bustling but a quiet world that he described: politics before the

coming of the Irish and the Socialists; the Church in the lull between

the Oxford Movement and the modern High Anglican energy. And it is

notable in the Victorian spirit once more that though his clergymen are

all of them real men and many of them good men, it never really occurs

to us to think of them as the priests of a religion.

Charles Reade may be said to go along with these; and Disraeli and even

Kingsley; not because these three very different persons had anything

particular in common, but because they all fell short of the first rank

in about the same degree. Charles Reade had a kind of cold coarseness

about him, not morally but artistically, which keeps him out of the best

literature as such: but he is of importance to the Victorian development

in another way; because he has the harsher and more tragic note that has

come later in the study of our social problems. He is the first of the

angry realists. Kingsley’s best books may be called boys’ books. There

is a real though a juvenile poetry in Westward Ho! and though that

narrative, historically considered, is very much of a lie, it is a good,

thundering honest lie. There are also genuinely eloquent things in

Hypatia, and a certain electric atmosphere of sectarian excitement

that Kingsley kept himself in, and did know how to convey. He said he

wrote the book in his heart’s blood. This is an exaggeration, but there

is a truth in it; and one does feel that he may have relieved his

feelings by writing it in red ink. As for Disraeli, his novels are able

and interesting considered as everything except novels, and are an

important contribution precisely because they are written by an alien

who did not take our politics so seriously as Trollope did. They are

important again as showing those later Victorian changes which men like

Thackeray missed. Disraeli did do something towards revealing the

dishonesty of our politics—even if he had done a good deal towards

bringing it about.

Between this group and the next there hovers a figure very hard to

place; not higher in letters than these, yet not easy to class with

them; I mean Bulwer Lytton. He was no greater than they were; yet

somehow he seems to take up more space. He did not, in the ultimate

reckoning, do anything in particular: but he was a figure; rather as

Oscar Wilde was later a figure. You could not have the Victorian Age

without him. And this was not due to wholly superficial things like his

dandyism, his dark, sinister good looks and a great deal of the mere

polished melodrama that he wrote. There was something in his all-round

interests; in the variety of things he tried; in his half-aristocratic

tempo in questo rispetto: che, mentre le sue concezioni morali e religiose

erano meccaniche quanto le sue accuratamente costruite cospirazioni fittizie,

egli tuttavia informò queste ultime con una sorta d’involontario misticismo

che trattava interamente il lato più oscuro dell’anima. Poiché questo era uno

dei più peculiari dei problemi della mente vittoriana. L’idea del

soprannaturale era forse a una marea tanto bassa quanto lo fosse mai

stata — certo assai più bassa di quanto sia ora. Ma a dispetto di ciò, e a

dispetto di una certa allegria etica che era quasi de rigueur — il

fatto strano resta che l’unica sorta di soprannaturalismo che i

vittoriani concedevano alle loro immaginazioni era un triste soprannaturalismo. Potevano

avere storie di fantasmi, ma non storie di santi. Potevano gingillarsi

con la maledizione o l’imperdonante profezia di una strega, ma non con il

perdono di un sacerdote. Pare che ritenessero (credo erroneamente) che

il soprannaturale fosse più sicuro quando veniva dal basso. Quando pensiamo (per

esempio) alle incalcolabili ricchezze d’arte religiosa, immaginario, rituale e

leggenda popolare che si sono raccolte intorno al Natale attraverso tutte le

età cristiane, è cosa davvero straordinaria riflettere che

Dickens (desiderando avere in Canto di Natale un po’ di lieto

soprannaturalismo per cambiare) dovette in realtà inventare una mitologia

per sé. Ecco uno dei rari casi in cui Dickens, in un senso reale e

umano, soffrì davvero della mancanza di cultura. Per il resto, Wilkie

Collins è questi due elementi: il meccanico e il mistico; entrambi

molto buoni nel loro genere. È uno dei pochi romanzieri nel cui caso è

proprio e letterale parlare dei suoi «intrighi». Era un intrigante; si

adoperò per uccidere Godfrey Ablewhite con la freddezza e l’astuzia con cui gli indiani

lo fecero. Ma ebbe anche una salda benché sinistra nota di vera magia; come nella

ripetizione delle due vesti bianche in La donna in bianco; o dei

sogni con le loro doppie spiegazioni in Armadale. I suoi fantasmi

camminano davvero. Sono vivi; e camminano tanto lievemente quanto il Conte Fosco, ma tanto solidamente.

Infine, La pietra di luna è probabilmente il miglior racconto poliziesco del

mondo.

Anthony Trollope, un realista chiaro e assai capace, rappresenta piuttosto

un altro lato dello spirito vittoriano di agiatezza; la sua lentezza, il suo

amore per il dettaglio, specialmente per il dettaglio domestico; il suo amore di seguire

personaggi e parentele da libro a libro e da generazione a

generazione. Dickens tentò assai di rado quest’ultimo esperimento, e allora

(come in Master Humphrey’s Clock) senza successo; quelle sue fiammate di magnesio

erano troppo brillanti e abbaglianti per essere indefinitamente prolungate. Ma

Thackeray ne era pieno; e spesso sentiamo che i personaggi in _The

Newcomes_ o Philip potrebbero legittimamente lamentarsi che i loro discorsi e

racconti sono perpetuamente interrotti e molestati da gente proveniente da

altri libri. Entro i suoi limiti più angusti, Trollope fu un realista più rigoroso e

magistrale di Thackeray, e perfino coloro che chiamerebbero i suoi

personaggi «tipi» ammetterebbero che sono vividi quanto caratteri. Era

un mondo affaccendato ma quieto quello che descrisse: la politica prima

della venuta degli irlandesi e dei socialisti; la Chiesa nella quiete tra

il Movimento di Oxford e la moderna energia dell’Alta Chiesa anglicana. Ed è

notevole nello spirito vittoriano ancora una volta che, benché i suoi ecclesiastici siano

tutti uomini reali e molti di essi buoni uomini, non ci accade mai davvero

di pensarli come i sacerdoti di una religione.

Charles Reade si può dire vada insieme a questi; e Disraeli e perfino

Kingsley; non perché queste tre persone assai diverse avessero qualcosa

di particolare in comune, ma perché tutte restarono al di sotto del primo rango

press’a poco nello stesso grado. Charles Reade aveva una sorta di fredda rozzezza

in sé, non moralmente ma artisticamente, che lo tiene fuori dalla migliore

letteratura in quanto tale: ma è d’importanza per lo sviluppo vittoriano

in un altro modo; perché ha la nota più aspra e più tragica che è

venuta più tardi nello studio dei nostri problemi sociali. È il primo degli

adirati realisti. I migliori libri di Kingsley si possono chiamare libri per ragazzi. C’è

una vera benché giovanile poesia in Westward Ho! e benché quella

narrazione, storicamente considerata, sia in gran parte una menzogna, è una buona,

fragorosa, onesta menzogna. Ci sono anche cose genuinamente eloquenti in

Ipazia, e una certa elettrica atmosfera di eccitamento settario

in cui Kingsley si mantenne, e che seppe rendere. Disse di aver

scritto il libro nel sangue del suo cuore. Questa è un’esagerazione, ma c’è

una verità in essa; e si sente davvero che egli può aver sollevato i suoi

sentimenti scrivendolo con inchiostro rosso. Quanto a Disraeli, i suoi romanzi sono abili

e interessanti considerati come tutto tranne che romanzi, e sono un

importante contributo precisamente perché sono scritti da un estraneo

che non prese la nostra politica tanto sul serio quanto la prese Trollope. Sono

importanti di nuovo perché mostrano quei più tardi mutamenti vittoriani che uomini come

Thackeray mancarono. Disraeli fece davvero qualcosa verso il rivelare la

disonestà della nostra politica — anche se aveva fatto parecchio verso il

portarla in essere.

Tra questo gruppo e il prossimo aleggia una figura assai difficile da

collocare; non più alta nelle lettere di questi, eppure non facile da classare con

loro; intendo Bulwer Lytton. Non era più grande di quanto fossero essi; eppure

in qualche modo pare occupare più spazio. Non fece, nel definitivo

conto, nulla di particolare: ma era una figura; press’a poco come

Oscar Wilde fu più tardi una figura. Non si poteva avere l’età vittoriana

senza di lui. E ciò non era dovuto a cose del tutto superficiali come il suo

dandismo, il suo scuro, sinistro bell’aspetto e gran parte del mero

levigato melodramma che scrisse. C’era qualcosa nei suoi interessi

a tutto campo; nella varietà di cose che tentò; nella sua semi-aristocratica

swagger as poet and politician, that made him in some ways a real

touchstone of the time. It is noticeable about him that he is always

turning up everywhere and that he brings other people out, generally in

a hostile spirit. His Byronic and almost Oriental ostentation was used

by the young Thackeray as something on which to sharpen his new razor of

Victorian common sense. His pose as a dilettante satirist inflamed the

execrable temper of Tennyson, and led to those lively comparisons to a

bandbox and a lion in curlpapers. He interposed the glove of warning and

the tear of sensibility between us and the proper ending of _Great

Expectations_. Of his own books, by far the best are the really charming

comedies about The Caxtons and Kenelm Chillingly; none of his other

works have a high literary importance now, with the possible exception

of A Strange Story; but his Coming Race is historically interesting

as foreshadowing those novels of the future which were afterwards such a

weapon of the Socialists. Lastly, there was an element indefinable about

Lytton, which often is in adventurers; which amounts to a suspicion that

there was something in him after all. It rang out of him when he said to

the hesitating Crimean Parliament: “Destroy your Government and save

your army.”

With the next phase of Victorian fiction we enter a new world; the

later, more revolutionary, more continental, freer but in some ways

weaker world in which we live to-day. The subtle and sad change that

was passing like twilight across the English brain at this time is very

well expressed in the fact that men have come to mention the great name

of Meredith in the same breath as Mr. Thomas Hardy. Both writers,

doubtless, disagreed with the orthodox religion of the ordinary English

village. Most of us have disagreed with that religion until we made the

simple discovery that it does not exist. But in any age where ideas

could be even feebly disentangled from each other, it would have been

evident at once that Meredith and Hardy were, intellectually speaking,

mortal enemies. They were much more opposed to each other than Newman

was to Kingsley; or than Abelard was to St. Bernard. But then they

collided in a sceptical age, which is like colliding in a London fog.

There can never be any clear controversy in a sceptical age.

Nevertheless both Hardy and Meredith did mean something; and they did

mean diametrically opposite things. Meredith was perhaps the only man

in the modern world who has almost had the high honour of rising out of

the low estate of a Pantheist into the high estate of a Pagan. A Pagan

is a person who can do what hardly any person for the last two thousand

years could do: a person who can take Nature naturally. It is due to

Meredith to say that no one outside a few of the great Greeks has ever

taken Nature so naturally as he did. And it is also due to him to say

that no one outside Colney Hatch ever took Nature so unnaturally as it

was taken in what Mr. Hardy has had the blasphemy to call Wessex Tales.

This division between the two points of view is vital; because the turn

of the nineteenth century was a very sharp one; by it we have reached

the rapids in which we find ourselves to-day.

Meredith really is a Pantheist. You can express it by saying that God is

the great All: you can express it much more intelligently by saying that

Pan is the great god. But there is some sense in it, and the sense is

this: that some people believe that this world is sufficiently good at

bottom for us to trust ourselves to it without very much knowing why. It

is the whole point in most of Meredith’s tales that there is something

behind us that often saves us when we understand neither it nor

ourselves. He sometimes talked mere intellectualism about women: but

that is because the most brilliant brains can get tired. Meredith’s

brain was quite tired when it wrote some of its most quoted and least

interesting epigrams: like that about passing Seraglio Point, but not

doubling Cape Turk. Those who can see Meredith’s mind in that are with

those who can see Dickens’ mind in Little Nell. Both were chivalrous

pronouncements on behalf of oppressed females: neither has any earthly

meaning as ideas.

But what Meredith did do for women was not to emancipate them (which

means nothing) but to express them, which means a great deal. And he

often expressed them right, even when he expressed himself wrong. Take,

for instance, that phrase so often quoted: “Woman will be the last thing

civilised by man.” Intellectually it is something worse than false; it

is the opposite of what he was always attempting to say. So far from

admitting any equality in the sexes, it logically admits that a man may

use against a woman any chains or whips he has been in the habit of

using against a tiger or a bear. He stood as the special champion of

female dignity: but I cannot remember any author, Eastern or Western,

who has so calmly assumed that man is the master and woman merely the

material, as Meredith really does in this phrase. Any one who knows a

free woman (she is generally a married woman) will immediately be

inclined to ask two simple and catastrophic questions, first: “Why

should woman be civilised?” and, second: “Why, if she is to be

civilised, should she be civilised by man?” In the mere intellectualism

of the matter, Meredith seems to be talking the most brutal sex

mastery: he, at any rate, has not doubled Cape Turk, nor even passed

Seraglio Point. Now why is it that we all really feel that this

Meredithian passage is not so insolently masculine as in mere logic it

would seem? I think it is for this simple reason: that there is

something about Meredith making us feel that it is not woman he

disbelieves in, but civilisation. It is a dark undemonstrated feeling

spavalderia come poeta e politico, che lo rese per certi versi una vera

pietra di paragone del tempo. È notevole in lui che egli spunta sempre

dappertutto e che fa emergere le altre persone, generalmente in

spirito ostile. La sua byroniana e quasi orientale ostentazione fu usata

dal giovane Thackeray come qualcosa su cui affilare il suo nuovo rasoio di

buon senso vittoriano. La sua posa da satirico dilettante infiammò l’

esecrabile carattere di Tennyson, e condusse a quei vivaci paragoni a una

cappelliera e a un leone in bigodini. Egli interpose il guanto dell’avvertimento e

la lacrima della sensibilità tra noi e il proprio finale di _Grandi

speranze_. Dei suoi propri libri, di gran lunga i migliori sono le davvero incantevoli

commedie su The Caxtons e Kenelm Chillingly; nessuna delle sue altre

opere ha un’alta importanza letteraria ora, con la possibile eccezione

di A Strange Story; ma il suo Coming Race è storicamente interessante

come prefigurazione di quei romanzi del futuro che furono in seguito una tale

arma dei socialisti. Da ultimo, c’era un elemento indefinibile in

Lytton, che spesso è negli avventurieri; che equivale al sospetto che

ci fosse in lui qualcosa dopo tutto. Risuonò da lui quando disse al

esitante parlamento crimeano: «Distruggete il vostro Governo e salvate

il vostro esercito».

Con la prossima fase della narrativa vittoriana entriamo in un nuovo mondo; il

più tardo, più rivoluzionario, più continentale, più libero ma per certi versi

più debole mondo in cui viviamo oggi. Il sottile e triste mutamento che

passava come un crepuscolo attraverso il cervello inglese a questo tempo è assai

bene espresso nel fatto che gli uomini sono giunti a menzionare il grande nome

di Meredith nello stesso respiro del signor Thomas Hardy. Entrambi gli scrittori,

senza dubbio, dissentivano dalla religione ortodossa dell’ordinario villaggio

inglese. La maggior parte di noi ha dissentito da quella religione finché non abbiamo fatto la

semplice scoperta che essa non esiste. Ma in qualsiasi età in cui le idee

potessero essere anche debolmente districate l’una dall’altra, sarebbe stato

evidente subito che Meredith e Hardy erano, intellettualmente parlando,

nemici mortali. Erano molto più opposti l’uno all’altro di quanto Newman

lo fosse a Kingsley; o di quanto Abelardo lo fosse a san Bernardo. Ma allora

si scontrarono in un’età scettica, che è come scontrarsi in una nebbia di Londra.

Non può mai esserci alcuna chiara controversia in un’età scettica.

Nondimeno tanto Hardy quanto Meredith significavano davvero qualcosa; e

significavano cose diametralmente opposte. Meredith fu forse l’unico uomo

nel mondo moderno che ha quasi avuto l’alto onore di sollevarsi dalla

bassa condizione di panteista all’alta condizione di pagano. Un pagano

è una persona che può fare ciò che quasi nessuna persona negli ultimi duemila

anni poté fare: una persona che sa prendere la natura naturalmente. Si deve a

Meredith dire che nessuno fuori di alcuni dei grandi greci ha mai

preso la natura così naturalmente come lui. Ed è anche dovuto a lui dire

che nessuno fuori di Colney Hatch ha mai preso la natura così innaturalmente come essa

fu presa in ciò che il signor Hardy ha avuto la bestemmia di chiamare Racconti del Wessex.

Questa divisione tra i due punti di vista è vitale; perché la svolta

del diciannovesimo secolo fu assai netta; per essa abbiamo raggiunto

le rapide in cui ci troviamo oggi.

Meredith è davvero un panteista. Lo si può esprimere dicendo che Dio è

il grande Tutto: lo si può esprimere assai più intelligentemente dicendo che

Pan è il grande dio. Ma c’è un qualche senso in ciò, e il senso è

questo: che alcuni credono che questo mondo sia sufficientemente buono in

fondo perché ci affidiamo a esso senza sapere troppo il perché. È

l’intero punto nella maggior parte dei racconti di Meredith che c’è qualcosa

dietro di noi che spesso ci salva quando non comprendiamo né esso né

noi stessi. Egli talvolta parlò di mero intellettualismo intorno alle donne: ma

ciò è perché i cervelli più brillanti possono stancarsi. Il cervello di

Meredith era del tutto stanco quando scrisse alcuni dei suoi più citati e meno

interessanti epigrammi: come quello sul passare Seraglio Point, ma non

doppiare Cape Turk. Coloro che sanno vedere la mente di Meredith in ciò sono con

coloro che sanno vedere la mente di Dickens in Little Nell. Entrambe erano cavalleresche

dichiarazioni a favore delle femmine oppresse: nessuna delle due ha alcun terreno

significato come idee.

Ma ciò che Meredith fece davvero per le donne non fu emanciparle (il che

non significa nulla) ma esprimerle, il che significa moltissimo. Ed egli

spesso le espresse giustamente, perfino quando espresse se stesso ingiustamente. Prendi,

per esempio, quella frase così spesso citata: «La donna sarà l’ultima cosa

civilizzata dall’uomo». Intellettualmente è qualcosa di peggio che falso; è

l’opposto di ciò che egli tentava sempre di dire. Lungi

dall’ammettere alcuna eguaglianza nei sessi, ammette logicamente che un uomo possa

usare contro una donna qualsiasi catena o frusta abbia avuto l’abitudine di

usare contro una tigre o un orso. Egli si ergeva come speciale campione della

dignità femminile: ma non riesco a ricordare alcun autore, orientale o occidentale,

che abbia così pacatamente assunto che l’uomo sia il padrone e la donna meramente la

materia, come Meredith fa davvero in questa frase. Chiunque conosca una

donna libera (è generalmente una donna sposata) sarà immediatamente

incline a porre due domande semplici e catastrofiche, primo: «Perché

la donna dovrebbe essere civilizzata?» e, secondo: «Perché, se dev’essere

civilizzata, dovrebbe essere civilizzata dall’uomo?» Nel mero intellettualismo

della materia, Meredith sembra parlare il più brutale dominio

sessuale: egli, in ogni caso, non ha doppiato Cape Turk, né perfino passato

Seraglio Point. Ora perché è che tutti noi sentiamo davvero che questo

passo meredithiano non è così insolentemente maschile come in mera logica

sembrerebbe? Credo sia per questa semplice ragione: che c’è

qualcosa in Meredith che ci fa sentire che non è la donna in cui egli

non crede, ma la civiltà. È un oscuro, indimostrato sentimento

that Meredith would really be rather sorry if woman were civilised by

man—or by anything else. When we have got that, we have got the real

Pagan—the man that does believe in Pan.

It is proper to put this philosophic matter first, before the æsthetic

appreciation of Meredith, because with Meredith a sort of passing bell

has rung and the Victorian orthodoxy is certainly no longer safe.

Dickens and Carlyle, as we have said, rebelled against the orthodox

compromise: but Meredith has escaped from it. Cosmopolitanism,

Socialism, Feminism are already in the air; and Queen Victoria has

begun to look like Mrs. Grundy. But to escape from a city is one thing:

to choose a road is another. The free-thinker who found himself outside

the Victorian city, found himself also in the fork of two very different

naturalistic paths. One of them went upwards through a tangled but

living forest to lonely but healthy hills: the other went down to a

swamp. Hardy went down to botanise in the swamp, while Meredith climbed

towards the sun. Meredith became, at his best, a sort of daintily

dressed Walt Whitman: Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding

and blaspheming over the village idiot. It is largely because the

free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they

want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their

small but sincere movement has failed.

For the duel is deadly; and any agnostic who wishes to be anything more

than a Nihilist must sympathise with one version of nature or the

other. The God of Meredith is impersonal; but he is often more healthy

and kindly than any of the persons. That of Thomas Hardy is almost made

personal by the intense feeling that he is poisonous. Nature is always

coming in to save Meredith’s women; Nature is always coming in to betray

and ruin Hardy’s. It has been said that if God had not existed it would

have been necessary to invent Him. But it is not often, as in Mr.

Hardy’s case, that it is necessary to invent Him in order to prove how

unnecessary (and undesirable) He is. But Mr. Hardy is anthropomorphic

out of sheer atheism. He personifies the universe in order to give it a

piece of his mind. But the fight is unequal for the old philosophical

reason: that the universe had already given Mr. Hardy a piece of its

mind to fight with. One curious result of this divergence in the two

types of sceptic is this: that when these two brilliant novelists break

down or blow up or otherwise lose for a moment their artistic

self-command, they are both equally wild, but wild in opposite

directions. Meredith shows an extravagance in comedy which, if it were

not so complicated, every one would call broad farce. But Mr. Hardy has

the honour of inventing a new sort of game, which may be called the

extravagance of depression. The placing of the weak lover and his new

love in such a place that they actually see the black flag announcing

that Tess has been hanged is utterly inexcusable in art and probability;

it is a cruel practical joke. But it is a practical joke at which even

its author cannot brighten up enough to laugh.

But it is when we consider the great artistic power of these two

writers, with all their eccentricities, that we see even more clearly

that free-thought was, as it were, a fight between finger-posts. For it

is the remarkable fact that it was the man who had the healthy and manly

outlook who had the crabbed and perverse style; it was the man who had

the crabbed and perverse outlook who had the healthy and manly style.

The reader may well have complained of paradox when I observed above

that Meredith, unlike most neo-Pagans, did in his way take Nature

naturally. It may be suggested, in tones of some remonstrance, that

things like “though pierced by the cruel acerb,” or “thy fleetingness is

bigger in the ghost,” or “her gabbling grey she eyes askant,” or “sheer

film of the surface awag” are not taking Nature naturally. And this is

true of Meredith’s style, but it is not true of his spirit; nor even,

apparently, of his serious opinions. In one of the poems I have quoted

he actually says of those who live nearest to that Nature he was always

praising—

“Have they but held her laws and nature dear,

They mouth no sentence of inverted wit”;

which certainly was what Meredith himself was doing most of the time.

But a similar paradox of the combination of plain tastes with twisted

phrases can also be seen in Browning. Something of the same can be seen

in many of the cavalier poets. I do not understand it: it may be that

the fertility of a cheerful mind crowds everything, so that the tree is

entangled in its own branches; or it may be that the cheerful mind cares

less whether it is understood or not; as a man is less articulate when

he is humming than when he is calling for help.

Certainly Meredith suffers from applying a complex method to men and

things he does not mean to be complex; nay, honestly admires for being

simple. The conversations between Diana and Redworth fail of their full

contrast because Meredith can afford the twopence for Diana coloured,

but cannot afford the penny for Redworth plain. Meredith’s ideals were

neither sceptical nor finicky: but they can be called insufficient. He

had, perhaps, over and above his honest Pantheism two convictions

profound enough to be called prejudices. He was probably of Welsh

blood, certainly of Celtic sympathies, and he set himself more swiftly

though more subtly than Ruskin or Swinburne to undermining the enormous

complacency of John Bull. He also had a sincere hope in the strength of

womanhood, and may be said, almost without hyperbole, to have begotten

gigantic daughters. He may yet suffer for his chivalric interference as

che Meredith sarebbe davvero piuttosto dispiaciuto se la donna fosse civilizzata dall’

uomo — o da qualsiasi altra cosa. Quando abbiamo colto ciò, abbiamo colto il vero

pagano — l’uomo che crede davvero in Pan.

È proprio porre questa materia filosofica per prima, prima dell’estetico

apprezzamento di Meredith, perché con Meredith una sorta di campana a morto

ha suonato e l’ortodossia vittoriana non è certo più al sicuro.

Dickens e Carlyle, come abbiamo detto, si ribellarono contro l’ortodosso

compromesso: ma Meredith ne è fuggito. Cosmopolitismo,

socialismo, femminismo sono già nell’aria; e la Regina Vittoria ha

cominciato a somigliare alla signora Grundy. Ma fuggire da una città è una cosa:

scegliere una strada è un’altra. Il libero pensatore che si trovò fuori dalla

città vittoriana, si trovò anche al bivio di due assai diversi

sentieri naturalistici. Uno di essi saliva attraverso una intricata ma

viva foresta verso solitarie ma salubri colline: l’altro scendeva a una

palude. Hardy scese a botanizzare nella palude, mentre Meredith saliva

verso il sole. Meredith divenne, al suo meglio, una sorta di Walt Whitman

vestito con delicatezza: Hardy divenne una sorta di ateo di villaggio che rimugina

e bestemmia sull’idiota del villaggio. È in gran parte perché i

liberi pensatori, come scuola, hanno appena deciso se

vogliono essere più ottimisti o più pessimisti del cristianesimo che il loro

piccolo ma sincero movimento è fallito.

Poiché il duello è mortale; e ogni agnostico che desideri essere qualcosa di più

di un nichilista deve simpatizzare con una versione della natura o con l’

altra. Il Dio di Meredith è impersonale; ma è spesso più salubre

e benigno di qualsiasi delle persone. Quello di Thomas Hardy è quasi reso

personale dall’intenso sentimento che egli è velenoso. La natura viene sempre

a salvare le donne di Meredith; la natura viene sempre a tradire

e rovinare quelle di Hardy. È stato detto che se Dio non fosse esistito sarebbe

stato necessario inventarlo. Ma non è spesso, come nel caso del signor

Hardy, che sia necessario inventarlo per provare quanto

non necessario (e non desiderabile) Egli sia. Ma il signor Hardy è antropomorfico

per puro ateismo. Personifica l’universo per dirgliene

quattro. Ma la lotta è ineguale per la vecchia ragione filosofica:

che l’universo aveva già dato al signor Hardy un pezzo del suo

cervello con cui combattere. Un curioso risultato di questa divergenza nei due

tipi di scettico è questo: che quando questi due brillanti romanzieri crollano

o esplodono o altrimenti perdono per un momento il loro artistico

auto-controllo, sono entrambi ugualmente sfrenati, ma sfrenati in direzioni

opposte. Meredith mostra una stravaganza nella commedia che, se non fosse

così complicata, tutti chiamerebbero larga farsa. Ma il signor Hardy ha

l’onore d’inventare una nuova sorta di gioco, che si può chiamare la

stravaganza della depressione. Il collocare il debole amante e il suo nuovo

amore in un tal luogo che essi vedono in effetti la nera bandiera che annuncia

che Tess è stata impiccata è del tutto inescusabile nell’arte e nella probabilità;

è un crudele scherzo. Ma è uno scherzo al quale perfino

il suo autore non riesce a rasserenarsi abbastanza da ridere.

Ma è quando consideriamo la grande potenza artistica di questi due

scrittori, con tutte le loro eccentricità, che vediamo ancor più chiaramente

che il libero pensiero fu, per così dire, una lotta tra segnavia. Poiché

è il notevole fatto che fu l’uomo che aveva la salubre e virile

visione ad avere lo stile arcigno e perverso; fu l’uomo che aveva

l’arcigna e perversa visione ad avere lo stile salubre e virile.

Il lettore può bene essersi lamentato di paradosso quando ho osservato sopra

che Meredith, a differenza della maggior parte dei neopagani, prese a suo modo la natura

naturalmente. Si può suggerire, in toni di qualche rimostranza, che

cose come «though pierced by the cruel acerb», o «thy fleetingness is

bigger in the ghost», o «her gabbling grey she eyes askant», o «sheer

film of the surface awag» non prendono la natura naturalmente. E questo è

vero dello stile di Meredith, ma non è vero del suo spirito; né perfino,

apparentemente, delle sue serie opinioni. In una delle poesie che ho citato

egli dice in effetti di coloro che vivono più vicini a quella Natura che egli sempre

lodava —

«Purché abbiano tenuto care le sue leggi e la natura,

non pronunciano sentenza alcuna d’arguzia rovesciata»;

il che certamente era ciò che Meredith stesso stava facendo per la maggior parte del tempo.

Ma un simile paradosso della combinazione di gusti semplici con frasi

contorte si può vedere anche in Browning. Qualcosa di uguale si può vedere

in molti dei poeti cavalier. Non lo comprendo: può essere che

la fertilità di una mente allegra affolli ogni cosa, sicché l’albero è

impigliato nei propri rami; o può essere che la mente allegra si curi

meno se sia compresa o no; come un uomo è meno articolato quando

canticchia che quando invoca aiuto.

Certamente Meredith soffre dell’applicare un metodo complesso a uomini e

cose che non intende siano complesse; anzi, onestamente ammira per essere

semplici. Le conversazioni tra Diana e Redworth mancano del loro pieno

contrasto perché Meredith può permettersi i due soldi per Diana a colori,

ma non può permettersi il soldo per Redworth in bianco. Gli ideali di Meredith non erano

né scettici né schizzinosi: ma si possono chiamare insufficienti. Egli

aveva, forse, oltre e al di sopra del suo onesto panteismo due convinzioni

abbastanza profonde da chiamarsi pregiudizi. Era probabilmente di gallese

sangue, certo di simpatie celtiche, e si dispose più rapidamente

benché più sottilmente di Ruskin o Swinburne a minare l’enorme

compiacenza di John Bull. Aveva anche una sincera speranza nella forza della

femminilità, e si può dire, quasi senza iperbole, che abbia generato

figlie gigantesche. Egli può ancora soffrire per la sua cavalleresca interferenza come

many champions do. I have little doubt that when St. George had killed

the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess. But certainly neither

of these two vital enthusiasms touched the Victorian trouble. The

disaster of the modern English is not that they are not Celtic, but that

they are not English. The tragedy of the modern woman is not that she is

not allowed to follow man, but that she follows him far too slavishly.

This conscious and theorising Meredith did not get very near his problem

and is certainly miles away from ours. But the other Meredith was a

creator; which means a god. That is true of him which is true of so

different a man as Dickens, that all one can say of him is that he is

full of good things. A reader opening one of his books feels like a

schoolboy opening a hamper which he knows to have somehow cost a hundred

pounds. He may be more bewildered by it than by an ordinary hamper; but

he gets the impression of a real richness of thought; and that is what

one really gets from such riots of felicity as Evan Harrington or

Harry Richmond. His philosophy may be barren, but he was not. And the

chief feeling among those that enjoy him is a mere wish that more people

could enjoy him too.

I end here upon Hardy and Meredith; because this parting of the ways to

open optimism and open pessimism really was the end of the Victorian

peace. There are many other men, very nearly as great, on whom I might

delight to linger: on Shorthouse, for instance, who in one way goes with

Mrs. Browning or Coventry Patmore. I mean that he has a wide culture,

which is called by some a narrow religion. When we think what even the

best novels about cavaliers have been (written by men like Scott or

Stevenson) it is a wonderful thing that the author of John Inglesant

could write a cavalier romance in which he forgot Cromwell but

remembered Hobbes. But Shorthouse is outside the period in fiction in

the same sort of way in which Francis Thompson is outside it in poetry.

He did not accept the Victorian basis. He knew too much.

There is one more matter that may best be considered here, though

briefly: it illustrates the extreme difficulty of dealing with the

Victorian English in a book like this, because of their eccentricity;

not of opinions, but of character and artistic form. There are several

great Victorians who will not fit into any of the obvious categories I

employ; because they will not fit into anything, hardly into the world

itself. Where Germany or Italy would relieve the monotony of mankind by

paying serious respect to an artist, or a scholar, or a patriotic

warrior, or a priest—it was always the instinct of the English to do it

by pointing out a Character. Dr. Johnson has faded as a poet or a

critic, but he survives as a Character. Cobbett is neglected

(unfortunately) as a publicist and pamphleteer, but he is remembered as

a Character. Now these people continued to crop up through the Victorian

time; and each stands so much by himself that I shall end these pages

with a profound suspicion that I have forgotten to mention a Character

of gigantic dimensions. Perhaps the best example of such eccentrics is

George Borrow; who sympathised with unsuccessful nomads like the gipsies

while every one else sympathised with successful nomads like the Jews;

who had a genius like the west wind for the awakening of wild and casual

friendships and the drag and attraction of the roads. But whether George

Borrow ought to go into the section devoted to philosophers, or the

section devoted to novelists, or the section devoted to liars, nobody

else has ever known, even if he did.

But the strongest case of this Victorian power of being abruptly

original in a corner can be found in two things: the literature meant

merely for children and the literature meant merely for fun. It is true

that these two very Victorian things often melted into each other (as

was the way of Victorian things), but not sufficiently to make it safe

to mass them together without distinction. Thus there was George

Macdonald, a Scot of genius as genuine as Carlyle’s; he could write

fairy-tales that made all experience a fairy-tale. He could give the

real sense that every one had the end of an elfin thread that must at

last lead them into Paradise. It was a sort of optimist Calvinism. But

such really significant fairy-tales were accidents of genius. Of the

Victorian Age as a whole it is true to say that it did discover a new

thing; a thing called Nonsense. It may be doubted whether this thing was

really invented to please children. Rather it was invented by old

people trying to prove their first childhood, and sometimes succeeding

only in proving their second. But whatever else the thing was, it was

English and it was individual. Lewis Carroll gave mathematics a holiday:

he carried logic into the wild lands of illogicality. Edward Lear, a

richer, more romantic and therefore more truly Victorian buffoon,

improved the experiment. But the more we study it, the more we shall, I

think, conclude that it reposed on something more real and profound in

the Victorians than even their just and exquisite appreciation of

children. It came from the deep Victorian sense of humour.

It may appear, because I have used from time to time the only possible

phrases for the case, that I mean the Victorian Englishman to appear as

a blockhead, which means an unconscious buffoon. To all this there is a

final answer: that he was also a conscious buffoon—and a successful

one. He was a humorist; and one of the best humorists in Europe. That

which Goethe had never taught the Germans, Byron did manage to teach the

English—the duty of not taking him seriously. The strong and shrewd

Victorian humour appears in every slash of the pencil of Charles Keene;

in every undergraduate inspiration of Calverley or “Q.” or J. K. S. They

had largely forgotten both art and arms: but the gods had left them

laughter.

But the final proof that the Victorians were alive by this laughter, can

be found in the fact they could manage and master for a moment even the

cosmopolitan modern theatre. They could contrive to put “The Bab

Ballads” on the stage. To turn a private name into a public epithet is a

thing given to few: but the word “Gilbertian” will probably last longer

than the name Gilbert.

It meant a real Victorian talent; that of exploding unexpectedly and

almost, as it seemed, unintentionally. Gilbert made good jokes by the

thousand; but he never (in his best days) made the joke that could

possibly have been expected of him. This is the last essential of the

Victorian. Laugh at him as a limited man, a moralist, conventionalist,

an opportunist, a formalist. But remember also that he was really a

humorist; and may still be laughing at you.

come fanno molti campioni. Ho pochi dubbi che, quando San Giorgio ebbe ucciso

il drago, avesse una gran paura della principessa. Ma di certo nessuno

di questi due vitali entusiasmi toccava il problema vittoriano. Il

disastro degli inglesi moderni non è che non siano celtici, ma che

non siano inglesi. La tragedia della donna moderna non è che non le sia

consentito di seguire l’uomo, ma che lo segua in modo troppo servile.

Questo Meredith consapevole e teorizzante non si avvicinò molto al suo problema

ed è certamente lontano miglia dal nostro. Ma l’altro Meredith era un

creatore; il che significa un dio. Di lui è vero ciò che è vero di un uomo tanto

diverso come Dickens: che tutto ciò che se ne può dire è che è

colmo di cose buone. Un lettore che apra uno dei suoi libri si sente come uno

scolaro che apre un cesto di leccornie che sa essere costato, in qualche modo, cento

sterline. Può esserne più sconcertato che da un cesto ordinario; ma

ne ricava l’impressione di una vera ricchezza di pensiero; ed è questo ciò che

si ricava davvero da simili tripudi di felicità come Evan Harrington o

Harry Richmond. La sua filosofia può essere sterile, ma egli non lo era. E il

sentimento principale tra coloro che lo apprezzano è il semplice desiderio che più persone

potessero apprezzarlo anch’esse.

Concludo qui su Hardy e Meredith; perché questo separarsi delle strade verso

l’ottimismo dichiarato e il pessimismo dichiarato fu davvero la fine della

pace vittoriana. Vi sono molti altri uomini, quasi altrettanto grandi, sui quali potrei

indugiare con diletto: su Shorthouse, per esempio, che per un verso si accompagna a

Mrs. Browning o a Coventry Patmore. Intendo dire che ha una cultura ampia,

che da alcuni è detta una religione angusta. Quando pensiamo a cosa sono stati persino i

migliori romanzi sui cavalieri (scritti da uomini come Scott o

Stevenson), è una cosa meravigliosa che l’autore di John Inglesant

abbia potuto scrivere un romanzo cavalleresco in cui dimenticava Cromwell ma

ricordava Hobbes. Ma Shorthouse è fuori dal periodo, nella narrativa,

nello stesso modo in cui Francis Thompson ne è fuori nella poesia.

Non accettava le fondamenta vittoriane. Sapeva troppo.

C’è un’altra questione che conviene considerare qui, sia pure

brevemente: essa illustra l’estrema difficoltà di trattare gli

inglesi vittoriani in un libro come questo, a causa della loro eccentricità;

non di opinioni, ma di carattere e di forma artistica. Vi sono parecchi

grandi vittoriani che non rientrano in nessuna delle ovvie categorie che

impiego; perché non rientrano in nulla, a stento nel mondo

stesso. Là dove la Germania o l’Italia alleggerirebbero la monotonia dell’umanità

tributando serio rispetto a un artista, o a uno studioso, o a un guerriero

patriottico, o a un sacerdote… fu sempre istinto degli inglesi farlo

additando un Tipo. Il dottor Johnson è sbiadito come poeta o come

critico, ma sopravvive come Tipo. Cobbett è trascurato

(purtroppo) come pubblicista e pamphlettista, ma è ricordato come

un Tipo. Ora, queste persone continuarono a spuntare per tutto il

tempo vittoriano; e ciascuno sta talmente per conto proprio che concluderò queste pagine

con il profondo sospetto di aver dimenticato di menzionare un Tipo

di dimensioni gigantesche. Forse il miglior esempio di simili eccentrici è

George Borrow; che simpatizzava con i nomadi senza fortuna come gli zingari

mentre tutti gli altri simpatizzavano con i nomadi di successo come gli ebrei;

che aveva un genio simile al vento di ponente per il risveglio di amicizie selvagge e

casuali e per il richiamo e l’attrazione delle strade. Ma se George

Borrow debba andare nella sezione dedicata ai filosofi, o nella

sezione dedicata ai romanzieri, o nella sezione dedicata ai bugiardi, nessun

altro l’ha mai saputo, ammesso che lo sapesse lui.

Ma il caso più forte di questa capacità vittoriana di essere bruscamente

originali in un angolo si può trovare in due cose: la letteratura destinata

puramente ai bambini e la letteratura destinata puramente al divertimento. È vero

che queste due cose tanto vittoriane spesso si fondevano l’una nell’altra (come

era il modo delle cose vittoriane), ma non a sufficienza da rendere sicuro

accorparle insieme senza distinzione. Così vi fu George

Macdonald, uno scozzese di genio autentico quanto quello di Carlyle; sapeva scrivere

fiabe che facevano di ogni esperienza una fiaba. Sapeva dare la

reale sensazione che ognuno tenesse il capo di un filo fatato che alla fine doveva

condurlo in Paradiso. Era una sorta di calvinismo ottimista. Ma

fiabe davvero tanto significative erano accidenti del genio. Dell’

età vittoriana nel suo insieme è vero dire che scoprì davvero una cosa

nuova; una cosa chiamata Nonsense. Si può dubitare che questa cosa sia stata

davvero inventata per dilettare i bambini. Piuttosto fu inventata da persone

anziane che cercavano di provare la loro prima infanzia, e talvolta riuscivano

solo a provare la seconda. Ma qualunque altra cosa fosse, era

inglese ed era individuale. Lewis Carroll concesse una vacanza alla matematica:

portò la logica nelle terre selvagge dell’illogicità. Edward Lear, un

buffone più ricco, più romantico e perciò più autenticamente vittoriano,

perfezionò l’esperimento. Ma più lo studiamo, più, credo,

concluderemo che esso poggiava su qualcosa di più reale e profondo nei

vittoriani perfino del loro giusto e squisito apprezzamento dei

bambini. Proveniva dal profondo senso dell’umorismo vittoriano.

Può sembrare, poiché di tempo in tempo ho usato le uniche possibili

espressioni adatte al caso, che io voglia far apparire l’inglese vittoriano come

uno zuccone, il che significa un buffone inconsapevole. A tutto ciò c’è una

risposta definitiva: che egli era anche un buffone consapevole… e per giunta un buffone

di successo. Era un umorista; e uno dei migliori umoristi d’Europa. Ciò

che Goethe non aveva mai insegnato ai tedeschi, Byron riuscì a insegnarlo agli

inglesi… il dovere di non prenderlo sul serio. Il forte e sagace

umorismo vittoriano appare in ogni sferzata di matita di Charles Keene;

in ogni ispirazione goliardica di Calverley o di «Q.» o di J. K. S. Essi

avevano largamente dimenticato tanto l’arte quanto le armi: ma gli dèi avevano lasciato loro

il riso.

Ma la prova definitiva che i vittoriani erano vivi grazie a questo riso, si

può trovare nel fatto che seppero governare e dominare per un momento persino il

cosmopolita teatro moderno. Riuscirono a mettere in scena «The Bab

Ballads». Trasformare un nome privato in un epiteto pubblico è cosa

concessa a pochi: ma la parola «gilbertiano» durerà probabilmente più a lungo

del nome Gilbert.

Significava un vero talento vittoriano; quello di esplodere inaspettatamente e

quasi, a quanto pareva, involontariamente. Gilbert faceva buone battute a

migliaia; ma non fece mai (nei suoi giorni migliori) la battuta che ci si

sarebbe potuti aspettare da lui. Questo è l’ultimo tratto essenziale del

vittoriano. Ridete di lui come di un uomo limitato, un moralista, un conformista,

un opportunista, un formalista. Ma ricordate anche che egli era davvero un

umorista; e potrebbe ancora ridere di voi.

CHAPTER III

THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS

What was really unsatisfactory in Victorian literature is something much

easier to feel than to state. It was not so much a superiority in the

men of other ages to the Victorian men. It was a superiority of

Victorian men to themselves. The individual was unequal. Perhaps that is

why the society became unequal: I cannot say. They were lame giants; the

strongest of them walked on one leg a little shorter than the other. A

great man in any age must be a common man, and also an uncommon man.

Those that are only uncommon men are perverts and sowers of pestilence.

But somehow the great Victorian man was more and less than this. He was

at once a giant and a dwarf. When he has been sweeping the sky in

circles infinitely great, he suddenly shrivels into something

indescribably small. There is a moment when Carlyle turns suddenly from

a high creative mystic to a common Calvinist. There are moments when

George Eliot turns from a prophetess into a governess. There are also

moments when Ruskin turns into a governess, without even the excuse of

sex. But in all these cases the alteration comes as a thing quite abrupt

and unreasonable. We do not feel this acute angle anywhere in Homer or

in Virgil or in Chaucer or in Shakespeare or in Dryden; such things as

they knew they knew. It is no disgrace to Homer that he had not

discovered Britain; or to Virgil that he had not discovered America; or

to Chaucer that he had not discovered the solar system; or to Dryden

that he had not discovered the steam-engine. But we do most frequently

feel, with the Victorians, that the very vastness of the number of

things they know illustrates the abrupt abyss of the things they do not

know. We feel, in a sort of way, that it is a disgrace to a man like

Carlyle when he asks the Irish why they do not bestir themselves and

re-forest their country: saying not a word about the soaking up of every

sort of profit by the landlords which made that and every other Irish

improvement impossible. We feel that it is a disgrace to a man like

Ruskin when he says, with a solemn visage, that building in iron is ugly

and unreal, but that the weightiest objection is that there is no

mention of it in the Bible; we feel as if he had just said he could find

no hair-brushes in Habakkuk. We feel that it is a disgrace to a man

like Thackeray when he proposes that people should be forcibly prevented

from being nuns, merely because he has no fixed intention of becoming a

nun himself. We feel that it is a disgrace to a man like Tennyson,

when he talks of the French revolutions, the huge crusades that had

recreated the whole of his civilisation, as being “no graver than a

schoolboy’s barring out.” We feel that it is a disgrace to a man like

Browning to make spluttering and spiteful puns about the names Newman,

Wiseman, and Manning. We feel that it is a disgrace to a man like

Newman when he confesses that for some time he felt as if he couldn’t

come in to the Catholic Church, because of that dreadful Mr. Daniel

O’Connell, who had the vulgarity to fight for his own country. We feel

that it is a disgrace to a man like Dickens, when he makes a blind

brute and savage out of a man like St. Dunstan; it sounds as if it were

not Dickens talking but Dombey. We feel it is a disgrace to a man like

Swinburne, when he has a Jingo fit and calls the Boer children in the

concentration camps “Whelps of treacherous dams whom none save we have

spared to starve and slay”: we feel that Swinburne, for the first time,

really has become an immoral and indecent writer. All this is a certain

odd provincialism peculiar to the English in that great century: they

were in a kind of pocket; they appealed to too narrow a public opinion;

I am certain that no French or German men of the same genius made such

remarks. Renan was the enemy of the Catholic Church; but who can imagine

Renan writing of it as Kingsley or Dickens did? Taine was the enemy of

the French Revolution; but who can imagine Taine talking about it as

Tennyson or Newman talked? Even Matthew Arnold, though he saw this peril

and prided himself on escaping it, did not altogether escape it. There

must be (to use an Irishism) something shallow in the depths of any man

who talks about the Zeitgeist as if it were a living thing.

But this defect is very specially the key to the case of the two great

Victorian poets, Tennyson and Browning; the two spirited or beautiful

tunes, so to speak, to which the other events marched or danced. It was

especially so of Tennyson, for a reason which raises some of the most

real problems about his poetry. Tennyson, of course, owed a great deal

to Virgil. There is no question of plagiarism here; a debt to Virgil is

like a debt to Nature. But Tennyson was a provincial Virgil. In such

passages as that about the schoolboy’s barring out he might be called a

suburban Virgil. I mean that he tried to have the universal balance of

all the ideas at which the great Roman had aimed: but he hadn’t got hold

of all the ideas to balance. Hence his work was not a balance of truths,

like the universe. It was a balance of whims; like the British

Constitution. It is intensely typical of Tennyson’s philosophical temper

that he was almost the only Poet Laureate who was not ludicrous. It is

not absurd to think of Tennyson as tuning his harp in praise of Queen

Victoria: that is, it is not absurd in the same sense as Chaucer’s harp

hallowed by dedication to Richard II or Wordsworth’s harp hallowed by

dedication to George IV is absurd. Richard’s court could not properly

appreciate either Chaucer’s daisies or his “devotion.” George IV would

not have gone pottering about Helvellyn in search of purity and the

simple annals of the poor. But Tennyson did sincerely believe in the

Victorian compromise; and sincerity is never undignified. He really did

CAPITOLO III

I GRANDI POETI VITTORIANI

Ciò che era davvero insoddisfacente nella letteratura vittoriana è qualcosa assai più facile

da sentire che da enunciare. Non si trattava tanto di una superiorità

degli uomini di altre epoche sugli uomini vittoriani. Era una superiorità

degli uomini vittoriani su se stessi. L’individuo era diseguale. Forse è

per questo che la società divenne diseguale: non saprei dire. Erano

giganti zoppi; il più forte di loro camminava su una gamba un poco

più corta dell’altra. Un grande uomo, in qualunque epoca, deve essere

un uomo comune, e insieme un uomo non comune.

Coloro che sono soltanto uomini non comuni sono pervertiti e seminatori di pestilenza.

Ma in qualche modo il grande uomo vittoriano era più e meno di questo. Era

a un tempo un gigante e un nano. Quando ha spazzato il cielo in

cerchi infinitamente grandi, d’improvviso si raggrinzisce in qualcosa

di indescrivibilmente piccolo. Vi è un momento in cui Carlyle si volge di colpo

da alto mistico creatore a comune calvinista. Vi sono momenti in cui

George Eliot si volge da profetessa a governante. Vi sono anche

momenti in cui Ruskin si muta in governante, senza nemmeno la scusante

del sesso. Ma in tutti questi casi il mutamento sopraggiunge come cosa affatto brusca

e irragionevole. Non avvertiamo mai questo angolo acuto in Omero o

in Virgilio o in Chaucer o in Shakespeare o in Dryden; le cose che

sapevano, le sapevano. Non è vergogna per Omero non aver

scoperto la Britannia; o per Virgilio non aver scoperto l’America; o

per Chaucer non aver scoperto il sistema solare; o per Dryden

non aver scoperto la macchina a vapore. Ma sentiamo assai spesso,

con i vittoriani, che la vastità stessa del numero delle cose che

sanno mette in luce l’improvviso abisso delle cose che non

sanno. Sentiamo, in un certo modo, che è una vergogna per un uomo

come Carlyle chiedere agli irlandesi perché non si diano da fare a

rimboschire il loro paese: senza dire una parola sull’assorbimento di ogni

sorta di profitto da parte dei proprietari terrieri, che rendeva quel

miglioramento e ogni altro miglioramento irlandese impossibile. Sentiamo che è una vergogna per un uomo come

Ruskin dire, con volto solenne, che costruire in ferro è brutto

e irreale, ma che l’obiezione più grave è che non se ne fa

menzione nella Bibbia; sentiamo come se avesse appena detto di non trovare

spazzole per capelli in Abacuc. Sentiamo che è una vergogna per un uomo

come Thackeray proporre che alla gente si impedisca con la forza

di farsi monaca, solo perché egli non ha alcun fermo proposito di diventare

monaco lui stesso. Sentiamo che è una vergogna per un uomo come Tennyson,

quando parla delle rivoluzioni francesi, le immense crociate che avevano

ricreato l’intera sua civiltà, come «non più gravi

dell’ammutinamento di uno scolaro». Sentiamo che è una vergogna per un uomo come

Browning fare calembour balbettanti e maligni sui nomi di Newman,

Wiseman e Manning. Sentiamo che è una vergogna per un uomo come

Newman confessare che per qualche tempo gli parve di non poter

entrare nella Chiesa cattolica, a causa di quel terribile signor Daniel

O’Connell, che aveva la volgarità di battersi per il proprio paese. Sentiamo

che è una vergogna per un uomo come Dickens fare un bruto cieco

e selvaggio di un uomo come san Dunstano; suona come se a parlare

non fosse Dickens ma Dombey. Sentiamo che è una vergogna per un uomo come

Swinburne, quando ha un accesso di sciovinismo e chiama i bambini boeri nei

campi di concentramento «cuccioli di madri infide, che nessuno tranne noi ha

risparmiato per lasciarli morir di fame e ucciderli»: sentiamo che Swinburne, per la prima volta,

è davvero diventato uno scrittore immorale e indecente. Tutto ciò è un certo

bizzarro provincialismo peculiare degli inglesi in quel grande secolo: erano

in una sorta di sacca; si appellavano a un’opinione pubblica troppo ristretta;

sono certo che nessun francese o tedesco del medesimo genio fece tali

osservazioni. Renan era il nemico della Chiesa cattolica; ma chi può immaginare

Renan scriverne come fecero Kingsley o Dickens? Taine era il nemico della

Rivoluzione francese; ma chi può immaginare Taine parlarne come

ne parlarono Tennyson o Newman? Perfino Matthew Arnold, benché scorgesse questo pericolo

e si vantasse di sfuggirvi, non vi sfuggì del tutto. Vi

deve essere (per usare un irlandesismo) qualcosa di poco profondo nelle profondità di ogni uomo che parla dello Zeitgeist come se fosse una cosa viva.

Ma questo difetto è specialissimamente la chiave del caso dei due grandi

poeti vittoriani, Tennyson e Browning; le due arie spiritose o belle,

per così dire, al cui suono gli altri eventi marciavano o danzavano. Ciò valeva

soprattutto per Tennyson, per una ragione che solleva alcuni dei problemi più

reali riguardo alla sua poesia. Tennyson, s’intende, doveva molto

a Virgilio. Qui non è questione di plagio; un debito verso Virgilio è

come un debito verso la Natura. Ma Tennyson era un Virgilio provinciale. In

passi come quello sull’ammutinamento dello scolaro potrebbe essere chiamato un

Virgilio suburbano. Voglio dire che egli cercò di avere l’equilibrio universale di

tutte le idee a cui aveva mirato il grande Romano: ma non aveva afferrato

tutte le idee da equilibrare. Perciò la sua opera non era un equilibrio di verità,

come l’universo. Era un equilibrio di capricci; come la Costituzione britannica.

È intensamente tipico del temperamento filosofico di Tennyson che egli fosse quasi l’unico

Poeta Laureato a non essere ridicolo. Non è assurdo pensare a Tennyson mentre accorda la sua arpa in lode della Regina

Vittoria: cioè, non è assurdo nello stesso senso in cui è assurda l’arpa di Chaucer

consacrata dalla dedica a Riccardo II o l’arpa di Wordsworth consacrata dalla

dedica a Giorgio IV. Riccardo e la sua corte non potevano apprezzare

come si deve né le margherite di Chaucer né la sua «devozione». Giorgio IV

non sarebbe andato ad aggirarsi su Helvellyn in cerca di purezza e dei

semplici annali dei poveri. Ma Tennyson credeva sinceramente nel

compromesso vittoriano; e la sincerità non è mai priva di dignità. Egli

davvero

hold a great many of the same views as Queen Victoria, though he was

gifted with a more fortunate literary style. If Dickens is Cobbett’s

democracy stirring in its grave, Tennyson is the exquisitely ornamental

extinguisher on the flame of the first revolutionary poets. England has

settled down; England has become Victorian. The compromise was

interesting, it was national and for a long time it was successful:

there is still a great deal to be said for it. But it was as freakish

and unphilosophic, as arbitrary and untranslatable, as a beggar’s

patched coat or a child’s secret language. Now it is here that Browning

had a certain odd advantage over Tennyson; which has, perhaps, somewhat

exaggerated his intellectual superiority to him. Browning’s eccentric

style was more suitable to the poetry of a nation of eccentrics; of

people for the time being removed far from the centre of intellectual

interests. The hearty and pleasant task of expressing one’s intense

dislike of something one doesn’t understand is much more poetically

achieved by saying, in a general way “Grrr—you swine!” than it is by

laboured lines such as “the red fool-fury of the Seine.” We all feel

that there is more of the man in Browning here; more of Dr. Johnson or

Cobbett. Browning is the Englishman taking himself wilfully, following

his nose like a bull-dog, going by his own likes and dislikes. We cannot

help feeling that Tennyson is the Englishman taking himself

seriously—an awful sight. One’s memory flutters unhappily over a

certain letter about the Papal Guards written by Sir Willoughby

Patterne. It is here chiefly that Tennyson suffers by that very

Virgilian loveliness and dignity of diction which he put to the service

of such a small and anomalous national scheme. Virgil had the best news

to tell as well as the best words to tell it in. His world might be

sad; but it was the largest world one could live in before the coming of

Christianity. If he told the Romans to spare the vanquished and to war

down the mighty, at least he was more or less well informed about who

were mighty and who were vanquished. But when Tennyson wrote verses

like—

“Of freedom in her regal seat,

Of England; not the schoolboy heat,

The blind hysterics of the Celt”

he quite literally did not know one word of what he was talking about;

he did not know what Celts are, or what hysterics are, or what freedom

was, or what regal was or even of what England was—in the living Europe

of that time.

His religious range was very much wider and wiser than his political;

but here also he suffered from treating as true universality a thing

that was only a sort of lukewarm local patriotism. Here also he

suffered by the very splendour and perfection of his poetical powers. He

was quite the opposite of the man who cannot express himself; the

inarticulate singer who dies with all his music in him. He had a great

deal to say; but he had much more power of expression than was wanted

for anything he had to express. He could not think up to the height of

his own towering style.

For whatever else Tennyson was, he was a great poet; no mind that feels

itself free, that is, above the ebb and flow of fashion, can feel

anything but contempt for the later effort to discredit him in that

respect. It is true that, like Browning and almost every other Victorian

poet, he was really two poets. But it is just to him to insist that in

his case (unlike Browning’s) both the poets were good. The first is more

or less like Stevenson in metre; it is a magical luck or skill in the

mere choice of words. “Wet sands marbled with moon and cloud”—“Flits by

the sea-blue bird of March”—“Leafless ribs and iron horns”—“When the

long dun wolds are ribbed with snow”—in all these cases one word is the

keystone of an arch which would fall into ruin without it. But there are

other strong phrases that recall not Stevenson but rather their common

master, Virgil—“Tears from the depths of some divine despair”—“There

is fallen a splendid tear from the passion-flower at the gate”—“Was a

great water; and the moon was full”—“God made Himself an awful rose of

dawn.” These do not depend on a word but on an idea: they might even be

translated. It is also true, I think, that he was first and last a lyric

poet. He was always best when he expressed himself shortly. In long

poems he had an unfortunate habit of eventually saying very nearly the

opposite of what he meant to say. I will take only two instances of what

I mean. In the Idylls of the King, and in In Memoriam (his two

sustained and ambitious efforts), particular phrases are always flashing

out the whole fire of the truth; the truth that Tennyson meant. But

owing to his English indolence, his English aristocratic

irresponsibility, his English vagueness in thought, he always managed to

make the main poem mean exactly what he did not mean. Thus, these two

lines which simply say that

“Lancelot was the first in tournament,

But Arthur mightiest in the battle-field”

do really express what he meant to express about Arthur being after all

“the highest, yet most human too; not Lancelot, nor another.” But as his

hero is actually developed, we have exactly the opposite impression;

that poor old Lancelot, with all his faults, was much more of a man than

Arthur. He was a Victorian in the bad as well as the good sense; he

could not keep priggishness out of long poems. Or again, take the case

of In Memoriam. I will quote one verse (probably incorrectly) which

has always seemed to me splendid, and which does express what the whole

poem should express—but hardly does.

condivideva moltissime delle stesse opinioni della Regina Vittoria, benché fosse

dotato di uno stile letterario più fortunato. Se Dickens è la

democrazia di Cobbett che si agita nella sua tomba, Tennyson è lo squisitamente ornato

spegnitoio sulla fiamma dei primi poeti rivoluzionari. L’Inghilterra si è

assestata; l’Inghilterra è divenuta vittoriana. Il compromesso era

interessante, era nazionale e per lungo tempo ebbe successo:

c’è ancora molto da dire in suo favore. Ma era tanto bizzarro

e antifilosofico, tanto arbitrario e intraducibile, quanto il

cappotto rattoppato di un mendicante o il linguaggio segreto di un bambino. Ora è qui che Browning

aveva un certo strano vantaggio su Tennyson; il che ha, forse, in qualche

modo esagerato la sua superiorità intellettuale su di lui. L’eccentrico

stile di Browning si addiceva meglio alla poesia di una nazione di eccentrici; di

gente per il momento rimossa lontano dal centro degli interessi

intellettuali. Il cordiale e piacevole compito di esprimere il proprio intenso

disgusto per qualcosa che non si comprende è assai più poeticamente

raggiunto dicendo, in modo generico «Grrr—porco!» di quanto non lo sia con

versi laboriosi come «la rossa furia folle della Senna». Tutti sentiamo

che qui c’è più dell’uomo in Browning; più del Dr. Johnson o di

Cobbett. Browning è l’inglese che si prende ostinatamente, seguendo

il proprio naso come un bull-dog, andando dietro alle proprie simpatie e antipatie. Non possiamo

fare a meno di sentire che Tennyson è l’inglese che si prende

sul serio—uno spettacolo terribile. La memoria svolazza infelice attorno a una

certa lettera sulle Guardie Papali scritta da Sir Willoughby

Patterne. È qui soprattutto che Tennyson soffre per quella stessa

virgiliana bellezza e dignità di dizione che pose al servizio

di un disegno nazionale così angusto e anomalo. Virgilio aveva la migliore notizia

da raccontare tanto bene quanto le migliori parole per dirla. Il suo mondo poteva essere

triste; ma era il mondo più vasto in cui si potesse vivere prima dell’avvento del

Cristianesimo. Se diceva ai Romani di risparmiare i vinti e di far guerra

ai potenti, almeno era più o meno bene informato su chi

fosse potente e chi fosse vinto. Ma quando Tennyson scrisse versi

come—

«Della Libertà nel suo seggio regale,

Dell’Inghilterra; non l’ardore da scolaretto,

Le cieche isterie del Celta»

egli letteralmente non sapeva una parola di ciò di cui parlava;

non sapeva cosa siano i Celti, o cosa sia l’isteria, o cosa fosse la Libertà

, o cosa fosse regale o persino cosa fosse l’Inghilterra—nell’Europa viva

di quel tempo.

La sua portata religiosa era assai più ampia e saggia di quella politica;

ma anche qui soffrì per aver trattato come vera universalità una cosa

che era soltanto una sorta di tiepido patriottismo locale. Anche qui

soffrì per lo splendore stesso e la perfezione dei suoi poteri poetici. Egli

era esattamente l’opposto dell’uomo che non sa esprimersi; il

cantore inarticolato che muore con tutta la sua musica dentro. Aveva molto

da dire; ma aveva assai più potere espressivo di quanto ne servisse

per qualunque cosa avesse da esprimere. Non riusciva a pensare all’altezza del

proprio stile torreggiante.

Qualunque altra cosa Tennyson fosse, era un grande poeta; nessuna mente che si senta

libera, cioè al di sopra del flusso e riflusso della moda, può provare

altro che disprezzo per il tardo tentativo di screditarlo sotto quel

rispetto. È vero che, come Browning e quasi ogni altro poeta

vittoriano, egli era in realtà due poeti. Ma gli si rende giustizia insistendo che nel

suo caso (a differenza di Browning) entrambi i poeti erano buoni. Il primo è più

o meno simile a Stevenson nel metro; è una magica fortuna o abilità nella

mera scelta delle parole. «Umide sabbie marezzate di luna e nube»—«Guizza

l’uccello azzurro-mare di Marzo»—«Coste spoglie e corna di ferro»—«Quando i

lunghi bruni colli sono solcati di neve»—in tutti questi casi una parola è la

chiave di volta di un arco che senza di essa crollerebbe in rovina. Ma vi sono

altre frasi vigorose che richiamano non Stevenson ma piuttosto il loro comune

maestro, Virgilio—«Lacrime dal profondo di qualche divina disperazione»—«È

caduta una splendida lacrima dalla passiflora presso il cancello»—«Era una

grande acqua; e la luna era piena»—«Dio fece di Sé una terribile rosa di

alba». Queste non dipendono da una parola ma da un’idea: potrebbero persino essere

tradotte. È pur vero, credo, che egli fu dal principio alla fine un lirico

poeta. Dava sempre il meglio quando si esprimeva in breve. Nei lunghi

poemi aveva la sfortunata abitudine di finire col dire quasi esattamente l’

opposto di ciò che intendeva dire. Prenderò solo due esempi di ciò che

intendo. Negli Idylls of the King, e in In Memoriam (i suoi due

sforzi sostenuti e ambiziosi), particolari frasi fanno sempre balenare

l’intero fuoco della verità; la verità che Tennyson intendeva. Ma

a causa della sua indolenza inglese, della sua aristocratica

irresponsabilità inglese, della sua inglese vaghezza di pensiero, riusciva sempre a

far sì che il poema principale significasse esattamente ciò che non intendeva. Così, questi due

versi che dicono semplicemente che

«Lancillotto era il primo nel torneo,

Ma Artù il più possente sul campo di battaglia»

esprimono davvero ciò che intendeva esprimere su Artù che è dopotutto

«il più alto, eppure anche il più umano; non Lancillotto, né altri». Ma via via che il suo

eroe viene effettivamente sviluppato, abbiamo esattamente l’impressione opposta;

che il povero vecchio Lancillotto, con tutti i suoi difetti, era molto più uomo di

Artù. Egli fu un vittoriano nel senso cattivo così bene come in quello buono; non

riusciva a tenere la pedanteria fuori dai lunghi poemi. Oppure, di nuovo, si prenda il caso

di In Memoriam. Citerò un verso (probabilmente in modo inesatto) che

mi è sempre parso splendido, e che esprime davvero ciò che l’intero

poema dovrebbe esprimere—ma a stento esprime.

“That we may lift from out the dust,

A voice as unto him that hears

A cry above the conquered years

Of one that ever works, and trust.”

The poem should have been a cry above the conquered years. It might well

have been that if the poet could have said sharply at the end of it, as

a pure piece of dogma, “I’ve forgotten every feature of the man’s face:

I know God holds him alive.” But under the influence of the mere

leisurely length of the thing, the reader does rather receive the

impression that the wound has been healed only by time; and that the

victor hours can boast that this is the man that loved and lost, but

all he was is overworn. This is not the truth; and Tennyson did not

intend it for the truth. It is simply the result of the lack of

something militant, dogmatic and structural in him: whereby he could not

be trusted with the trail of a very long literary process without

entangling himself like a kitten playing cat’s-cradle.

Browning, as above suggested, got on much better with eccentric and

secluded England because he treated it as eccentric and secluded; a

place where one could do what one liked. To a considerable extent he did

do what he liked; arousing not a few complaints; and many doubts and

conjectures as to why on earth he liked it. Many comparatively

sympathetic persons pondered upon what pleasure it could give any man to

write Sordello or rhyme “end-knot” to “offend not.” Nevertheless he

was no anarchist and no mystagogue; and even where he was defective, his

defect has commonly been stated wrongly. The two chief charges against

him were a contempt for form unworthy of an artist, and a poor pride in

obscurity. The obscurity is true, though not, I think, the pride in it;

but the truth about this charge rather rises out of the truth about the

other. The other charge is not true. Browning cared very much for form;

he cared very much for style. You may not happen to like his style; but

he did. To say that he had not enough mastery over form to express

himself perfectly like Tennyson or Swinburne is like criticising the

griffin of a mediæval gargoyle without even knowing that it is a

griffin; treating it as an infantile and unsuccessful attempt at a

classical angel. A poet indifferent to form ought to mean a poet who did

not care what form he used as long as he expressed his thoughts. He

might be a rather entertaining sort of poet; telling a smoking-room

story in blank verse or writing a hunting-song in the Spenserian stanza;

giving a realistic analysis of infanticide in a series of triolets; or

proving the truth of Immortality in a long string of limericks. Browning

certainly had no such indifference. Almost every poem of Browning,

especially the shortest and most successful ones, was moulded or graven

in some special style, generally grotesque, but invariably deliberate.

In most cases whenever he wrote a new song he wrote a new kind of song.

The new lyric is not only of a different metre, but of a different

shape. No one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as

that horrible one beginning “John, Master of the Temple of God,” with

its weird choruses and creepy prose directions. No one, not even

Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as Pisgah-sights. No

one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _Time’s

Revenges_. No one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same

style as Meeting at Night and Parting at Morning. No one, not even

Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _The Flight of the

Duchess_, or in the same style as The Grammarian’s Funeral, or in the

same style as A Star, or in the same style as that astounding lyric

which begins abruptly “Some people hang pictures up.” These metres and

manners were not accidental; they really do suit the sort of spiritual

experiment Browning was making in each case. Browning, then, was not

chaotic; he was deliberately grotesque. But there certainly was, over

and above this grotesqueness, a perversity and irrationality about the

man which led him to play the fool in the middle of his own poems; to

leave off carving gargoyles and simply begin throwing stones. His

curious complicated puns are an example of this: Hood had used the pun

to make a sentence or a sentiment especially pointed and clear. In

Browning the word with two meanings seems to mean rather less, if

anything, than the word with one. It also applies to his trick of

setting himself to cope with impossible rhymes. It may be fun, though it

is not poetry, to try rhyming to ranunculus; but even the fun

presupposes that you do rhyme to it; and I will affirm, and hold under

persecution, that “Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle-us” does not rhyme to

it.

The obscurity, to which he must in a large degree plead guilty, was,

curiously enough, the result rather of the gay artist in him than the

deep thinker. It is patience in the Browning students; in Browning it

was only impatience. He wanted to say something comic and energetic and

he wanted to say it quick. And, between his artistic skill in the

fantastic and his temperamental turn for the abrupt, the idea sometimes

flashed past unseen. But it is quite an error to suppose that these are

the dark mines containing his treasure. The two or three great and true

things he really had to say he generally managed to say quite simply.

Thus he really did want to say that God had indeed made man and woman

one flesh; that the sex relation was religious in this real sense that

even in our sin and despair we take it for granted and expect a sort of

virtue in it. The feelings of the bad husband about the good wife, for

instance, are about as subtle and entangled as any matter on this earth;

and Browning really had something to say about them. But he said it in

some of the plainest and most unmistakable words in all literature; as

lucid as a flash of lightning. “Pompilia, will you let them murder me?”

Or again, he did really want to say that death and such moral terrors

were best taken in a military spirit; he could not have said it more

simply than: “I was ever a fighter; one fight more, the best and the

last.” He did really wish to say that human life was unworkable unless

immortality were implied in it every other moment; he could not have

said it more simply: “leave now to dogs and apes; Man has for ever.” The

obscurities were not merely superficial, but often covered quite

superficial ideas. He was as likely as not to be most unintelligible of

all in writing a compliment in a lady’s album. I remember in my boyhood

(when Browning kept us awake like coffee) a friend reading out the poem

about the portrait to which I have already referred, reading it in that

rapid dramatic way in which this poet must be read. And I was profoundly

puzzled at the passage where it seemed to say that the cousin

disparaged the picture, “while John scorns ale.” I could not think what

this sudden teetotalism on the part of John had to do with the affair,

but I forgot to ask at the time and it was only years afterwards that,

looking at the book, I found it was “John’s corns ail,” a very

Browningesque way of saying he winced. Most of Browning’s obscurity is

of that sort—the mistakes are almost as quaint as misprints—and the

Browning student, in that sense, is more a proof reader than a disciple.

For the rest his real religion was of the most manly, even the most

boyish sort. He is called an optimist; but the word suggests a

calculated contentment which was not in the least one of his vices. What

he really was was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure

rather than a scheme. He did not explain evil, far less explain it away;

he enjoyed defying it. He was a troubadour even in theology and

metaphysics: like the Jongleurs de Dieu of St. Francis. He may be said

to have serenaded heaven with a guitar, and even, so to speak, tried to

climb there with a rope ladder. Thus his most vivid things are the

red-hot little love lyrics, or rather, little love dramas. He did one

really original and admirable thing: he managed the real details of

modern love affairs in verse, and love is the most realistic thing in

the world. He substituted the street with the green blind for the faded

garden of Watteau, and the “blue spirt of a lighted match” for the

monotony of the evening star.

Before leaving him it should be added that he was fitted to deepen the

Victorian mind, but not to broaden it. With all his Italian sympathies

and Italian residence, he was not the man to get Victorian England out

of its provincial rut: on many things Kingsley himself was not so

narrow. His celebrated wife was wider and wiser than he in this sense;

for she was, however one-sidedly, involved in the emotions of central

European politics. She defended Louis Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel; and

intelligently, as one conscious of the case against them both. As to

why it now seems simple to defend the first Italian King, but absurd to

defend the last French Emperor—well, the reason is sad and simple. It

is concerned with certain curious things called success and failure, and

I ought to have considered it under the heading of The Book of Snobs.

But Elizabeth Barrett, at least, was no snob: her political poems have

rather an impatient air, as if they were written, and even published,

rather prematurely—just before the fall of her idol. These old

political poems of hers are too little read to-day; they are amongst the

most sincere documents on the history of the times, and many modern

blunders could be corrected by the reading of them. And Elizabeth

Barrett had a strength really rare among women poets; the strength of

the phrase. She excelled in her sex, in epigram, almost as much as

Voltaire in his. Pointed phrases like: “Martyrs by the pang without the

palm”—or “Incense to sweeten a crime and myrrh to embitter a curse,”

these expressions, which are witty after the old fashion of the conceit,

came quite freshly and spontaneously to her quite modern mind. But the

first fact is this, that these epigrams of hers were never so true as

when they turned on one of the two or three pivots on which contemporary

Europe was really turning. She is by far the most European of all the

English poets of that age; all of them, even her own much greater

husband, look local beside her. Tennyson and the rest are nowhere. Take

any positive political fact, such as the final fall of Napoleon.

Tennyson wrote these profoundly foolish lines—

“He thought to quell the stubborn hearts of oak

Madman!”

as if the defeat of an English regiment were a violation of the laws of

Nature. Mrs. Browning knew no more facts about Napoleon, perhaps, than

Tennyson did; but she knew the truth. Her epigram on Napoleon’s fall is

in one line

“And kings crept out again to feel the sun.”

Talleyrand would have clapped his horrible old hands at that. Her

instinct about the statesman and the soldier was very like Jane Austen’s

instinct for the gentleman and the man. It is not unnoticeable that as

Miss Austen spent most of her life in a village, Miss Barrett spent most

of her life on a sofa. The godlike power of guessing seems (for some

reason I do not understand) to grow under such conditions. Unfortunately

Mrs. Browning was like all the other Victorians in going a little lame,

as I have roughly called it, having one leg shorter than the other. But

her case was, in one sense, extreme. She exaggerated both ways. She was

e Browning aveva davvero qualcosa da dire su di loro. Ma lo disse con

alcune delle parole più semplici e inequivocabili di tutta la letteratura; così

limpide come un lampo di folgore. «Pompilia, lascerai che mi uccidano?»

Oppure ancora, egli voleva davvero dire che la morte e simili terrori morali

si affrontano meglio con spirito militare; non avrebbe potuto dirlo più

semplicemente di così: «Fui sempre un combattente; un’altra battaglia, la migliore e

l’ultima.» Voleva davvero dire che la vita umana è impraticabile a meno che

l’immortalità non vi sia implicata in ogni istante; non avrebbe potuto

dirlo più semplicemente: «lascia l’ora ai cani e alle scimmie; l’Uomo ha l’eterno.» Le

oscurità non erano meramente superficiali, ma spesso ricoprivano idee del tutto

superficiali. Era assai probabile che risultasse più incomprensibile che mai

proprio nel vergare un complimento nell’album di una signora. Ricordo che nella mia fanciullezza

(quando Browning ci teneva svegli come il caffè) un amico leggeva ad alta voce la poesia

sul ritratto cui ho già accennato, leggendola in quel

modo rapido e drammatico con cui questo poeta va letto. E rimasi profondamente

sconcertato dal passo in cui pareva dire che il cugino

disprezzava il quadro, «while John scorns ale». Non riuscivo a immaginare cosa

avesse a che fare con la faccenda quell’improvviso astinenzismo da parte di John,

ma dimenticai di chiederlo sul momento e fu solo anni dopo che,

guardando il libro, scoprii che era «John’s corns ail», un modo assai

browninghiano di dire che ebbe un sussulto. Gran parte dell’oscurità di Browning è

di quel genere — gli errori sono quasi bizzarri come refusi — e lo

studioso di Browning, in tal senso, è più un correttore di bozze che un discepolo.

Per il resto la sua vera religione era del tipo più virile, anzi del più

fanciullesco. Lo si dice ottimista; ma la parola suggerisce una

compiacenza calcolata che non era minimamente uno dei suoi vizi. Ciò

che egli era davvero era un romantico. Offriva il cosmo come un’avventura

piuttosto che come un disegno. Non spiegava il male, tanto meno lo spiegava via;

si dilettava a sfidarlo. Era un trovatore persino in teologia e

metafisica: come i Jongleurs de Dieu di San Francesco. Si può dire

che abbia dato la serenata al cielo con una chitarra, e persino, per così dire, tentato di

arrampicarvisi con una scala di corda. Così le sue cose più vivide sono le

roventi piccole liriche d’amore, o meglio, piccoli drammi d’amore. Fece una

cosa davvero originale e ammirevole: seppe trattare i dettagli reali delle

moderne faccende d’amore in versi, e l’amore è la cosa più realistica

del mondo. Sostituì la strada dalla persiana verde allo sbiadito

giardino di Watteau, e il «getto azzurro di un fiammifero acceso» alla

monotonia della stella della sera.

Prima di lasciarlo va aggiunto che egli era atto ad approfondire la

mente vittoriana, ma non ad allargarla. Con tutte le sue simpatie italiane

e la sua residenza in Italia, non era l’uomo capace di far uscire l’Inghilterra vittoriana

dal suo solco provinciale: su molte cose lo stesso Kingsley non era così

angusto. La sua celebre moglie fu più ampia e più saggia di lui in questo senso;

poiché era, per quanto unilateralmente, coinvolta nelle emozioni della politica dell’Europa

centrale. Difese Luigi Napoleone e Vittorio Emanuele; e

intelligentemente, da persona consapevole delle ragioni contro entrambi. Quanto al

perché oggi paia semplice difendere il primo Re italiano, ma assurdo

difendere l’ultimo Imperatore francese — ebbene, la ragione è triste e semplice. Ha

a che fare con certe curiose cose chiamate successo e fallimento, e

avrei dovuto trattarne sotto il titolo di The Book of Snobs.

Ma Elizabeth Barrett, almeno, non era una snob: le sue poesie politiche hanno

un’aria piuttosto impaziente, come se fossero state scritte, e persino pubblicate,

un po’ prematuramente — proprio prima della caduta del suo idolo. Queste vecchie

poesie politiche sono oggi troppo poco lette; sono tra i

documenti più sinceri sulla storia di quei tempi, e molti

errori moderni potrebbero essere corretti dalla loro lettura. Ed Elizabeth

Barrett aveva una forza davvero rara tra le poetesse; la forza della

frase. Eccelleva, nel suo sesso, nell’epigramma, quasi quanto

Voltaire nel proprio. Frasi taglienti come: «Martiri per lo spasimo senza la

palma» — o «Incenso per addolcire un delitto e mirra per amareggiare una maledizione»,

queste espressioni, argute alla vecchia maniera del concetto,

sgorgavano fresche e spontanee dalla sua mente affatto moderna. Ma il

primo dato è questo, che questi suoi epigrammi non erano mai tanto veri come

quando vertevano su uno dei due o tre perni su cui l’Europa contemporanea

davvero ruotava. È di gran lunga la più europea di tutti i

poeti inglesi di quell’epoca; tutti loro, persino il suo assai più grande

marito, appaiono provinciali accanto a lei. Tennyson e gli altri sono nulla. Si prenda

un qualsiasi fatto politico concreto, come la caduta finale di Napoleone.

Tennyson scrisse questi versi profondamente sciocchi —

«Pensò di domare i tenaci cuori di quercia

Folle!»

come se la sconfitta di un reggimento inglese fosse una violazione delle leggi di

Natura. La signora Browning conosceva forse su Napoleone non più fatti di

quanti ne conoscesse Tennyson; ma conosceva la verità. Il suo epigramma sulla caduta di Napoleone è

in un solo verso

«E i re sgusciarono di nuovo fuori a sentire il sole.»

Talleyrand avrebbe battuto le sue orribili vecchie mani a quel verso. Il suo

istinto per lo statista e il soldato somigliava molto all’istinto di Jane Austen

per il gentiluomo e l’uomo. Non è irrilevante che, come

Miss Austen trascorse gran parte della vita in un villaggio, Miss Barrett trascorse gran parte

della sua vita su un divano. Il divino potere di indovinare pare (per qualche

ragione che non comprendo) crescere in tali condizioni. Purtroppo

la signora Browning era come tutti gli altri vittoriani nell’andare un po’ zoppa,

come rozzamente l’ho definito, avendo una gamba più corta dell’altra. Ma

il suo caso era, in un certo senso, estremo. Esagerava in entrambe le direzioni. Era

too strong and too weak, or (as a false sex philosophy would express it)

too masculine and too feminine. I mean that she hit the centre of

weakness with almost the same emphatic precision with which she hit the

centre of strength. She could write finally of the factory wheels

“grinding life down from its mark,” a strong and strictly true

observation. Unfortunately she could also write of Euripides “with his

droppings of warm tears.” She could write in A Drama of Exile, a

really fine exposition, touching the later relation of Adam and the

animals: unfortunately the tears were again turned on at the wrong

moment at the main; and the stage direction commands a silence, only

broken by the dropping of angel’s tears. How much noise is made by

angel’s tears? Is it a sound of emptied buckets, or of garden hose, or

of mountain cataracts? That is the sort of question which Elizabeth

Barrett’s extreme love of the extreme was always tempting people to ask.

Yet the question, as asked, does her a heavy historical injustice; we

remember all the lines in her work which were weak enough to be called

“womanly,” we forget the multitude of strong lines that are strong

enough to be called “manly”; lines that Kingsley or Henley would have

jumped for joy to print in proof of their manliness. She had one of the

peculiar talents of true rhetoric, that of a powerful concentration. As

to the critic who thinks her poetry owed anything to the great poet who

was her husband, he can go and live in the same hotel with the man who

can believe that George Eliot owed anything to the extravagant

imagination of Mr. George Henry Lewes. So far from Browning inspiring or

interfering, he did not in one sense interfere enough. Her real

inferiority to him in literature is that he was consciously while she

was unconsciously absurd.

It is natural, in the matter of Victorian moral change, to take

Swinburne as the next name here. He is the only poet who was also, in

the European sense, on the spot; even if, in the sense of the Gilbertian

song, the spot was barred. He also knew that something rather crucial

was happening to Christendom; he thought it was getting unchristened. It

is even a little amusing, indeed, that these two Pro-Italian poets

almost conducted a political correspondence in rhyme. Mrs. Browning

sternly reproached those who had ever doubted the good faith of the King

of Sardinia, whom she acclaimed as being truly a king. Swinburne,

lyrically alluding to her as “Sea-eagle of English feather,” broadly

hinted that the chief blunder of that wild fowl had been her support of

an autocratic adventurer: “calling a crowned man royal, that was no more

than a king.” But it is not fair, even in this important connection, to

judge Swinburne by Songs Before Sunrise. They were songs before a

sunrise that has never turned up. Their dogmatic assertions have for a

long time past stared starkly at us as nonsense. As, for instance, the

phrase “Glory to Man in the Highest, for man is the master of things”;

after which there is evidently nothing to be said, except that it is

not true. But even where Swinburne had his greater grip, as in that

grave and partly just poem Before a Crucifix, Swinburne, the most

Latin, the most learned, the most largely travelled of the Victorians,

still knows far less of the facts than even Mrs. Browning. The whole of

the poem, Before a Crucifix, breaks down by one mere mistake. It

imagines that the French or Italian peasants who fell on their knees

before the Crucifix did so because they were slaves. They fell on their

knees because they were free men, probably owning their own farms.

Swinburne could have found round about Putney plenty of slaves who had

no crucifixes: but only crucifixions.

When we come to ethics and philosophy, doubtless we find Swinburne in

full revolt, not only against the temperate idealism of Tennyson, but

against the genuine piety and moral enthusiasm of people like Mrs.

Browning. But here again Swinburne is very English, nay, he is very

Victorian, for his revolt is illogical. For the purposes of intelligent

insurrection against priests and kings, Swinburne ought to have

described the natural life of man, free and beautiful, and proved from

this both the noxiousness and the needlessness of such chains.

Unfortunately Swinburne rebelled against Nature first and then tried to

rebel against religion for doing exactly the same thing that he had

done. His songs of joy are not really immoral; but his songs of sorrow

are. But when he merely hurls at the priest the assertion that flesh is

grass and life is sorrow, he really lays himself open to the restrained

answer, “So I have ventured, on various occasions, to remark.” When he

went forth, as it were, as the champion of pagan change and pleasure, he

heard uplifted the grand choruses of his own Atalanta, in his rear,

refusing hope.

The splendid diction that blazes through the whole of that drama, that

still dances exquisitely in the more lyrical Poems and Ballads, makes

some marvellous appearances in Songs Before Sunrise, and then mainly

falters and fades away, is, of course, the chief thing about Swinburne.

The style is the man; and some will add that it does not, thus

unsupported, amount to much of a man. But the style itself suffers some

injustice from those who would speak thus. The views expressed are often

quite foolish and often quite insincere; but the style itself is a

manlier and more natural thing than is commonly made out. It is not in

the least languorous or luxurious or merely musical and sensuous, as one

would gather from both the eulogies and the satires, from the conscious

and the unconscious imitations. On the contrary, it is a sort of

troppo forte e troppo debole, o (come si esprimerebbe una falsa filosofia dei sessi)

troppo maschile e troppo femminile. Intendo dire che colpì il centro della

debolezza con quasi la stessa enfatica precisione con cui colpì il

centro della forza. Sapeva scrivere, alla fine, delle ruote di fabbrica

che «macinano la vita riducendola sotto il suo segno», osservazione forte e rigorosamente

vera. Purtroppo sapeva anche scrivere di Euripide «con le sue

gocce di calde lacrime». Sapeva scrivere, in A Drama of Exile, una

esposizione davvero pregevole, che tocca la relazione posteriore fra Adamo e gli

animali: purtroppo le lacrime furono di nuovo aperte al momento

sbagliato dalla conduttura; e la didascalia scenica ordina un silenzio, rotto soltanto

dal cadere delle lacrime d’angelo. Quanto rumore fanno

le lacrime d’angelo? È un suono di secchi svuotati, o di tubo da giardino, o

di cateratte montane? È questo il genere di domanda a cui l’estremo

amore di Elizabeth Barrett per l’estremo spingeva sempre la gente a chiedere.

Eppure la domanda, così posta, le fa una grave ingiustizia storica; noi

ricordiamo tutti i versi della sua opera abbastanza deboli da essere detti

«femminei», e dimentichiamo la moltitudine di versi forti tanto forti

da poter essere detti «virili»; versi che Kingsley o Henley avrebbero

accolto con gioia dandoli alle stampe a prova della propria virilità. Ella aveva uno dei

peculiari talenti della vera retorica, quello di una potente concentrazione. Quanto

al critico che pensa che la sua poesia dovesse qualcosa al grande poeta che

era suo marito, costui può andare a vivere nello stesso albergo dell’uomo che

può credere che George Eliot dovesse qualcosa alla stravagante

immaginazione del signor George Henry Lewes. Tanto poco Browning la ispirò o

interferì, che in un certo senso non interferì abbastanza. La sua vera

inferiorità rispetto a lui in letteratura è che egli fu consapevolmente, mentre ella fu

inconsapevolmente assurda.

È naturale, nella questione del mutamento morale vittoriano, prendere

Swinburne come nome successivo. È il solo poeta che fu anche, nel

senso europeo, sul posto; anche se, nel senso della

canzone gilbertiana, il posto era interdetto. Anch’egli sapeva che qualcosa di piuttosto cruciale

stava accadendo alla Cristianità; pensava che si stesse scristianizzando.

È perfino un poco divertente, in verità, che questi due poeti filo-italiani

conducessero quasi una corrispondenza politica in rima. La signora Browning

rimproverava severamente coloro che avessero mai dubitato della buona fede del re

di Sardegna, che ella acclamava come veramente un re. Swinburne,

alludendo liricamente a lei come «Aquila di mare dalla piuma inglese», lasciò ampiamente

intendere che il principale abbaglio di quel selvatico volatile fosse stato il suo sostegno a

un avventuriero autocratico: «chiamare regale un uomo coronato, non era più

che un re». Ma non è giusto, nemmeno in questo importante contesto,

giudicare Swinburne dai Songs Before Sunrise. Erano canti prima di un’

alba che non è mai spuntata. Le loro dogmatiche asserzioni ci hanno per

lungo tempo fissati crudamente come pura insensatezza. Come, per esempio, la

frase «Gloria all’Uomo nell’alto dei cieli, poiché l’uomo è il padrone delle cose»;

dopo la quale evidentemente non c’è nulla da dire, se non che

non è vera. Ma perfino là dove Swinburne ebbe la sua presa maggiore, come in quel

grave e in parte giusto poema Before a Crucifix, Swinburne, il più

latino, il più dotto, il più largamente viaggiato dei vittoriani,

conosce ancora assai meno dei fatti perfino della signora Browning. L’intero

poema, Before a Crucifix, crolla per un solo mero errore. Esso

immagina che i contadini francesi o italiani che caddero in ginocchio

dinanzi al Crocifisso lo facessero perché erano schiavi. Caddero in

ginocchio perché erano uomini liberi, probabilmente proprietari delle proprie fattorie.

Swinburne avrebbe potuto trovare nei dintorni di Putney schiavi in gran numero che non avevano

crocifissi: ma soltanto crocifissioni.

Quando veniamo all’etica e alla filosofia, senza dubbio troviamo Swinburne in

piena rivolta, non solo contro il temperato idealismo di Tennyson, ma

contro la genuina pietà e l’entusiasmo morale di persone come la signora

Browning. Ma anche qui Swinburne è molto inglese, anzi, è molto

vittoriano, giacché la sua rivolta è illogica. Ai fini di un’intelligente

insurrezione contro preti e re, Swinburne avrebbe dovuto

descrivere la vita naturale dell’uomo, libera e bella, e provare da

ciò tanto la nocività quanto la superfluità di tali catene.

Purtroppo Swinburne si ribellò dapprima contro la Natura e poi tentò di

ribellarsi contro la religione per aver fatto esattamente la stessa cosa che egli aveva

fatto. I suoi canti di gioia non sono davvero immorali; ma i suoi canti di dolore

lo sono. Ma quando si limita a scagliare contro il prete l’asserzione che la carne è

erba e la vita è dolore, si espone davvero alla pacata

risposta: «Così ho osato, in varie occasioni, osservare». Quando egli

si fece avanti, per così dire, come campione del mutamento e del piacere pagani,

udì levarsi i grandi cori della sua stessa Atalanta, alle sue spalle,

che rifiutavano la speranza.

La splendida dizione che divampa attraverso tutto quel dramma, che

danza ancora squisitamente nei più lirici Poems and Ballads, compie

alcune meravigliose apparizioni nei Songs Before Sunrise, e poi per lo più

vacilla e si spegne, è, naturalmente, la cosa principale riguardo a Swinburne.

Lo stile è l’uomo; e alcuni aggiungeranno che esso non, così

privo di sostegno, ammonta a granché come uomo. Ma lo stile stesso subisce una certa

ingiustizia da parte di coloro che parlerebbero così. Le vedute espresse sono spesso

piuttosto sciocche e spesso piuttosto insincere; ma lo stile stesso è una cosa

più virile e più naturale di quanto comunemente si faccia credere. Non è nel

minimo languido o lussuoso o meramente musicale e sensuale, come si

potrebbe dedurre tanto dagli elogi quanto dalle satire, dalle consapevoli

e inconsapevoli imitazioni. Al contrario, è una sorta di

fighting and profane parody of the Old Testament; and its lines are made

of short English words like the short Roman swords. The first line of

one of his finest poems, for instance, runs, “I have lived long enough

to have seen one thing, that love hath an end.” In that sentence only

one small “e” gets outside the monosyllable. Through all his

interminable tragedies, he was fondest of lines like—

“If ever I leave off to honour you

God give me shame; I were the worst churl born.”

The dramas were far from being short and dramatic; but the words really

were. Nor was his verse merely smooth; except his very bad verse, like

“the lilies and languors of virtue, to the raptures and roses of vice,”

which both, in cheapness of form and foolishness of sentiment, may be

called the worst couplet in the world’s literature. In his real poetry

(even in the same poem) his rhythm and rhyme are as original and

ambitious as Browning; and the only difference between him and Browning

is, not that he is smooth and without ridges, but that he always crests

the ridge triumphantly and Browning often does not—

“On thy bosom though many a kiss be,

There are none such as knew it of old.

Was it Alciphron once or Arisbe,

Male ringlets or feminine gold,

That thy lips met with under the statue

Whence a look shot out sharp after thieves

From the eyes of the garden-god at you

Across the fig-leaves.”

Look at the rhymes in that verse, and you will see they are as stiff a

task as Browning’s: only they are successful. That is the real strength

of Swinburne—a style. It was a style that nobody could really imitate;

and least of all Swinburne himself, though he made the attempt all

through his later years. He was, if ever there was one, an inspired

poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover

who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes.

With Swinburne we step into the circle of that later Victorian influence

which was very vaguely called Æsthetic. Like all human things, but

especially Victorian things, it was not only complex but confused.

Things in it that were at one on the emotional side were flatly at war

on the intellectual. In the section of the painters, it was the allies

or pupils of Ruskin, pious, almost painfully exact, and copying mediæval

details rather for their truth than their beauty. In the section of the

poets it was pretty loose, Swinburne being the leader of the revels. But

there was one great man who was in both sections, a painter and a poet,

who may be said to bestride the chasm like a giant. It is in an odd and

literal sense true that the name of Rossetti is important here, for the

name implies the nationality. I have loosely called Carlyle and the

Brontës the romance from the North; the nearest to a general definition

of the Æsthetic movement is to call it the romance from the South. It is

that warm wind that had never blown so strong since Chaucer, standing in

his cold English April, had smelt the spring in Provence. The Englishman

has always found it easier to get inspiration from the Italians than

from the French; they call to each other across that unconquered castle

of reason. Browning’s Englishman in Italy, Browning’s _Italian in

England_, were both happier than either would have been in France.

Rossetti was the Italian in England, as Browning was the Englishman in

Italy; and the first broad fact about the artistic revolution Rossetti

wrought is written when we have written his name. But if the South lets

in warmth or heat, it also lets in hardness. The more the orange tree is

luxuriant in growth, the less it is loose in outline. And it is exactly

where the sea is slightly warmer than marble that it looks slightly

harder. This, I think, is the one universal power behind the Æsthetic

and Pre-Raphaelite movements, which all agreed in two things at least:

strictness in the line and strength, nay violence, in the colour.

Rossetti was a remarkable man in more ways than one; he did not succeed

in any art; if he had he would probably never have been heard of. It was

his happy knack of half failing in both the arts that has made him a

success. If he had been as good a poet as Tennyson, he would have been a

poet who painted pictures. If he had been as good a painter as

Burne-Jones, he would have been a painter who wrote poems. It is odd to

note on the very threshold of the extreme art movement that this great

artist largely succeeded by not defining his art. His poems were too

pictorial. His pictures were too poetical. That is why they really

conquered the cold satisfaction of the Victorians, because they did mean

something, even if it was a small artistic thing.

Rossetti was one with Ruskin, on the one hand, and Swinburne on the

other, in reviving the decorative instinct of the Middle Ages. While

Ruskin, in letters only, praised that decoration Rossetti and his

friends repeated it. They almost made patterns of their poems. That

frequent return of the refrain which was foolishly discussed by

Professor Nordau was, in Rossetti’s case, of such sadness as sometimes

to amount to sameness. The criticism on him, from a mediæval point of

view, is not that he insisted on a chorus, but that he could not insist

on a jolly chorus. Many of his poems were truly mediæval, but they would

have been even more mediæval if he could ever have written such a

refrain as “Tally Ho!” or even “Tooral-ooral” instead of “Tall Troy’s on

fire.” With Rossetti goes, of course, his sister, a real poet, though

she also illustrated that Pre-Raphaelite’s conflict of views that

covered their coincidence of taste. Both used the angular outlines, the

burning transparencies, the fixed but still unfathomable symbols of the

combattiva e profana parodia dell’Antico Testamento; e i suoi versi sono fatti

di brevi parole inglesi come le brevi spade romane. Il primo verso di

una delle sue poesie più belle, per esempio, recita: «Ho vissuto abbastanza a lungo

da aver visto una cosa: che l’amore ha una fine». In quella frase soltanto

una piccola «e» esce dal monosillabo. In tutte le sue

interminabili tragedie, egli prediligeva versi come—

«Se mai cessassi di onorarti

Dio mi copra di vergogna; sarei il peggior villano mai nato».

I drammi erano tutt’altro che brevi e drammatici; ma le parole davvero

lo erano. Né il suo verso era semplicemente levigato; salvo i suoi versi pessimi, come

«i gigli e i languori della virtù, ai rapimenti e alle rose del vizio»,

che, per dozzinalità di forma e sciocchezza di sentimento, può

essere detto il peggior distico della letteratura mondiale. Nella sua vera poesia

(persino nella stessa poesia) il suo ritmo e la sua rima sono originali e

ambiziosi quanto quelli di Browning; e l’unica differenza tra lui e Browning

è, non che egli sia levigato e senza asperità, ma che egli sempre valica

il crinale trionfalmente, mentre Browning spesso no—

«Sul tuo seno, per quanti baci vi siano,

non ve n’è alcuno come quelli che un tempo lo conobbero.

Fu Alcifrone un tempo, o Arisbe,

riccioli virili od oro femmineo,

ciò che le tue labbra incontrarono sotto la statua

donde uno sguardo saettò acuto dietro ai ladri

dagli occhi del dio del giardino verso di te

attraverso le foglie di fico».

Guardate le rime di quei versi, e vedrete che sono un compito tanto arduo

quanto quelli di Browning: solo che riescono. Questa è la vera forza

di Swinburne—uno stile. Era uno stile che nessuno poteva davvero imitare;

e meno di tutti Swinburne stesso, benché ne facesse il tentativo per

tutti i suoi anni più tardi. Egli fu, se mai ve ne fu uno, un poeta

ispirato. Non lo credo la specie più alta di poeta. E non si scopre mai

chi sia un poeta ispirato finché l’ispirazione non se ne va.

Con Swinburne entriamo nel cerchio di quella più tarda influenza vittoriana

che fu assai vagamente detta Estetica. Come tutte le cose umane, ma

specialmente le cose vittoriane, essa non era soltanto complessa ma confusa.

Ciò che in essa era concorde sul versante emotivo era apertamente in guerra

su quello intellettuale. Nella sezione dei pittori, erano gli alleati

o allievi di Ruskin, devoti, quasi penosamente esatti, che copiavano i particolari medievali

più per la loro verità che per la loro bellezza. Nella sezione dei

poeti era piuttosto sciolta, essendo Swinburne il capofila dei bagordi. Ma

vi era un grande uomo che stava in entrambe le sezioni, un pittore e un poeta,

di cui si può dire che scavalchi l’abisso come un gigante. È in senso curioso e

letterale vero che il nome di Rossetti è qui importante, poiché il

nome implica la nazionalità. Ho vagamente chiamato Carlyle e le

Brontë il romanticismo del Nord; la definizione generale più prossima

del movimento Estetico è chiamarlo il romanticismo del Sud. È

quel caldo vento che non aveva più soffiato così forte da quando Chaucer, ritto nel

suo freddo aprile inglese, aveva fiutato la primavera in Provenza. L’inglese

ha sempre trovato più facile trarre ispirazione dagli italiani che

dai francesi; essi si richiamano a vicenda attraverso quell’inespugnato castello

della ragione. L’Inglese in Italia di Browning, l’_Italiano in

Inghilterra_ di Browning, furono entrambi più felici di quanto ciascuno sarebbe stato in Francia.

Rossetti era l’italiano in Inghilterra, come Browning era l’inglese in

Italia; e il primo grande fatto riguardo alla rivoluzione artistica che Rossetti

operò è scritto quando abbiamo scritto il suo nome. Ma se il Sud lascia

entrare tepore o calore, lascia entrare anche durezza. Quanto più l’arancio è

lussureggiante nella crescita, tanto meno è sfumato nel contorno. Ed è proprio

là dove il mare è appena più caldo del marmo che esso appare appena

più duro. Questa, credo, è l’unica forza universale dietro i movimenti Estetico

e Preraffaellita, che concordavano almeno in due cose:

rigore nella linea e forza, anzi violenza, nel colore.

Rossetti era un uomo notevole per più di un aspetto; non riuscì

in nessuna arte; se ci fosse riuscito, probabilmente non se ne sarebbe mai sentito parlare. Fu

il suo felice talento di fallire a metà in entrambe le arti che ne ha fatto un

successo. Se fosse stato un poeta valente quanto Tennyson, sarebbe stato un

poeta che dipingeva quadri. Se fosse stato un pittore valente quanto

Burne-Jones, sarebbe stato un pittore che scriveva poesie. È curioso

notare, sulla soglia stessa del movimento artistico estremo, che questo grande

artista riuscì in gran parte proprio non definendo la sua arte. Le sue poesie erano troppo

pittoriche. I suoi quadri erano troppo poetici. Ecco perché essi davvero

conquistarono la fredda soddisfazione dei vittoriani, perché significavano

qualcosa, foss’anche una piccola cosa artistica.

Rossetti era all’unisono con Ruskin, da un lato, e con Swinburne

dall’altro, nel far rivivere l’istinto decorativo del Medioevo. Mentre

Ruskin, solo a parole, lodava quella decorazione, Rossetti e i suoi

amici la ripetevano. Facevano quasi delle loro poesie dei motivi ornamentali. Quel

frequente ritorno del ritornello che fu scioccamente discusso dal

professor Nordau era, nel caso di Rossetti, di una tale tristezza da

sfiorare talora la monotonia. La critica che gli si muove, da un punto di vista

medievale, non è che egli insistesse su un coro, ma che non sapeva insistere

su un coro gaio. Molte delle sue poesie erano davvero medievali, ma lo

sarebbero state ancor più se egli avesse mai saputo scrivere un

ritornello come «Tally Ho!» o persino «Tooral-ooral» invece di «L’alta Troia è in

fiamme». Con Rossetti va, naturalmente, sua sorella, una vera poetessa, benché

anch’ella illustrasse quel conflitto di vedute preraffaellita che

copriva la loro coincidenza di gusto. Entrambi usavano i contorni angolosi, le

brucianti trasparenze, i fissi ma pur imperscrutabili simboli del

great mediæval civilisation; but Rossetti used the religious imagery (on

the whole) irreligiously, Christina Rossetti used it religiously but (on

the whole) so to make it seem a narrower religion.

One poet, or, to speak more strictly, one poem, belongs to the same

general atmosphere and impulse as Swinburne; the free but languid

atmosphere of later Victorian art. But this time the wind blew from

hotter and heavier gardens than the gardens of Italy. Edward

Fitzgerald, a cultured eccentric, a friend of Tennyson, produced what

professed to be a translation of the Persian poet Omar, who wrote

quatrains about wine and roses and things in general. Whether the

Persian original, in its own Persian way, was greater or less than this

version I must not discuss here, and could not discuss anywhere. But it

is quite clear that Fitzgerald’s work is much too good to be a good

translation. It is as personal and creative a thing as ever was written;

and the best expression of a bad mood, a mood that may, for all I know,

be permanent in Persia, but was certainly at this time particularly

fashionable in England. In the technical sense of literature it is one

of the most remarkable achievements of that age; as poetical as

Swinburne and far more perfect. In this verbal sense its most arresting

quality is a combination of something haunting and harmonious that flows

by like a river or a song, with something else that is compact and

pregnant like a pithy saying picked out in rock by the chisel of some

pagan philosopher. It is at once a tune that escapes and an inscription

that remains. Thus, alone among the reckless and romantic verses that

first rose in Coleridge or Keats, it preserves something also of the wit

and civilisation of the eighteenth century. Lines like “a Muezzin from

the tower of darkness cries,” or “Their mouths are stopped with dust”

are successful in the same sense as “Pinnacled dim in the intense inane”

or “Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.” But—

“Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before

I swore; but was I sober when I swore?”

is equally successful in the same sense as—

“Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer

And without sneering teach the rest to sneer.”

It thus earned a right to be considered the complete expression of that

scepticism and sensual sadness into which later Victorian literature was

more and more falling away: a sort of bible of unbelief. For a cold fit

had followed the hot fit of Swinburne, which was of a feverish sort: he

had set out to break down without having, or even thinking he had, the

rudiments of rebuilding in him; and he effected nothing national even in

the way of destruction. The Tennysonians still walked past him as primly

as a young ladies’ school—the Browningites still inked their eyebrows

and minds in looking for the lost syntax of Browning; while Browning

himself was away looking for God, rather in the spirit of a truant boy

from their school looking for birds’ nests. The nineteenth-century

sceptics did not really shake the respectable world and alter it, as the

eighteenth-century sceptics had done; but that was because the

eighteenth-century sceptics were something more than sceptics, and

believed in Greek tragedies, in Roman laws, in the Republic. The

Swinburnian sceptics had nothing to fight for but a frame of mind; and

when ordinary English people listened to it, they came to the conclusion

that it was a frame of mind they would rather hear about than

experience. But these later poets did, so to speak, spread their soul in

all the empty spaces; weaker brethren, disappointed artists, unattached

individuals, very young people, were sapped or swept away by these

songs; which, so far as any particular sense in them goes, were almost

songs without words. It is because there is something which is after all

indescribably manly, intellectual, firm about Fitzgerald’s way of

phrasing the pessimism that he towers above the slope that was tumbling

down to the decadents. But it is still pessimism, a thing unfit for a

white man; a thing like opium, that may often be a poison and sometimes

a medicine, but never a food for us, who are driven by an inner command

not only to think but to live, not only to live but to grow, and not

only to grow but to build.

And, indeed, we see the insufficiency of such sad extremes even in the

next name among the major poets; we see the Swinburnian parody of

mediævalism, the inverted Catholicism of the decadents, struggling to

get back somehow on its feet. The æsthetic school had, not quite

unjustly, the name of mere dilettanti. But it is fair to say that in the

next of them, a workman and a tradesman, we already feel something of

that return to real issues leading up to the real revolts that broke up

Victorianism at last. In the mere art of words, indeed, William Morris

carried much further than Swinburne or Rossetti the mere imitation of

stiff mediæval ornament. The other mediævalists had their modern

moments; which were (if they had only known it) much more mediæval than

their mediæval moments. Swinburne could write—

“We shall see Buonaparte the bastard

Kick heels with his throat in a rope.”

One has an uneasy feeling that William Morris would have written

something like—

“And the kin of the ill king Bonaparte

Hath a high gallows for all his part.”

Rossetti could, for once in a way, write poetry about a real woman and

call her “Jenny.” One has a disturbed suspicion that Morris would have

called her “Jehanne.”

But all that seems at first more archaic and decorative about Morris

really arose from the fact that he was more virile and real than either

Swinburne or Rossetti. It arose from the fact that he really was, what

grande civiltà medievale; ma Rossetti usò le immagini religiose (nel

complesso) in modo irreligioso, Christina Rossetti le usò religiosamente ma (nel

complesso) così da farla sembrare una religione più angusta.

Un poeta, o, per dire con maggior rigore, una poesia, appartiene alla stessa

atmosfera e allo stesso impulso generale di Swinburne; la libera ma languida

atmosfera dell’arte tardo-vittoriana. Ma questa volta il vento soffiava da

giardini più caldi e più gravi che i giardini d’Italia. Edward

Fitzgerald, un eccentrico colto, un amico di Tennyson, produsse quello che

professava di essere una traduzione del poeta persiano Omar, che scrisse

quartine su vino e rose e cose in generale. Se

l’originale persiano, nel suo modo tutto persiano, fosse maggiore o minore di questa

versione non devo discuterlo qui, né potrei discuterlo altrove. Ma è

del tutto chiaro che l’opera di Fitzgerald è troppo buona per essere una buona

traduzione. È una cosa personale e creativa quanto mai se ne scrissero;

e la migliore espressione di un cattivo umore, un umore che può, per quanto ne so,

essere permanente in Persia, ma era certamente in quel tempo particolarmente

di moda in Inghilterra. Nel senso tecnico della letteratura è uno

dei più notevoli risultati di quell’epoca; poetico quanto

Swinburne e assai più perfetto. In questo senso verbale la sua qualità più

avvincente è una combinazione di qualcosa di ossessivo e armonioso che scorre

via come un fiume o una canzone, con qualcos’altro di compatto e

denso come una sentenza incisiva scavata nella roccia dallo scalpello di qualche

filosofo pagano. È a un tempo una melodia che sfugge e un’iscrizione

che rimane. Così, sola tra i versi sconsiderati e romantici che

per primi sorsero in Coleridge o Keats, essa conserva anche qualcosa dell’arguzia

e della civiltà del Settecento. Versi come «un muezzin dalla

torre delle tenebre grida», o «Le loro bocche sono turate di polvere»

riescono nello stesso senso di «Guglia fioca nell’intenso vuoto»

o «Per verdeggianti tenebre e tortuosi sentieri muscosi». Ma—

«Davvero, davvero, il pentimento spesso in passato

giurai; ma ero sobrio quando giurai?»

riesce ugualmente nello stesso senso di—

«Condanna con tiepida lode, assenti con cortese sogghigno,

e senza sghignazzare insegna agli altri a sghignazzare.»

Si guadagnò così il diritto di essere considerata la compiuta espressione di quello

scetticismo e di quella sensuale tristezza in cui la tarda letteratura vittoriana andava

sempre più decadendo: una sorta di bibbia dell’incredulità. Poiché un accesso di freddo

era seguito all’accesso di caldo di Swinburne, che era di specie febbrile: egli

si era messo a demolire senza avere, né pur credendo di avere, i

rudimenti del ricostruire in sé; e non compì nulla di nazionale nemmeno nel

modo della distruzione. I tennysoniani gli passavano ancora accanto compassati

come un collegio di signorine—i browninghiani ancora s’inchiostravano le ciglia

e la mente cercando la perduta sintassi di Browning; mentre Browning

stesso se n’era andato in cerca di Dio, piuttosto nello spirito di un ragazzo scappato

dalla loro scuola in cerca di nidi d’uccelli. Gli scettici del diciannovesimo

secolo non scossero davvero il rispettabile mondo e non lo mutarono, come avevano

fatto gli scettici del Settecento; ma ciò accadeva perché gli

scettici del Settecento erano qualcosa di più che scettici, e

credevano nelle tragedie greche, nelle leggi romane, nella Repubblica. Gli

scettici swinburniani non avevano per cui combattere se non uno stato d’animo; e

quando la gente comune inglese vi prestava orecchio, giungeva alla conclusione

che era uno stato d’animo di cui preferiva sentir parlare piuttosto che

farne esperienza. Ma questi poeti più tardi sparsero, per così dire, la loro anima in

tutti gli spazi vuoti; fratelli più deboli, artisti delusi, individui

sciolti, persone giovanissime, venivano scalzati o travolti da queste

canzoni; le quali, per quanto attiene a un qualche senso particolare in esse, erano quasi

canzoni senza parole. È perché c’è qualcosa che è dopo tutto

indescrivibilmente virile, intellettuale, fermo nel modo di Fitzgerald di

formulare il pessimismo, che egli torreggia sopra il pendio che precipitava

giù verso i decadenti. Ma è pur sempre pessimismo, cosa non degna di un

uomo bianco; una cosa come l’oppio, che può spesso essere un veleno e talvolta

una medicina, ma mai un cibo per noi, che siamo spinti da un comando interiore

non solo a pensare ma a vivere, non solo a vivere ma a crescere, e non

solo a crescere ma a costruire.

E, in verità, vediamo l’insufficienza di simili tristi estremi anche nel

nome successivo tra i maggiori poeti; vediamo la parodia swinburniana del

medievalismo, il cattolicesimo rovesciato dei decadenti, che si sforza di

rimettersi in qualche modo in piedi. La scuola estetica ebbe, non del tutto

ingiustamente, il nome di meri dilettanti. Ma è giusto dire che nel

successivo di loro, un artigiano e un bottegaio, sentiamo già qualcosa di

quel ritorno a questioni reali che condusse alle vere rivolte che infransero

infine il vittorianesimo. Nella pura arte delle parole, invero, William Morris

spinse assai più oltre di Swinburne o Rossetti la mera imitazione del

rigido ornamento medievale. Gli altri medievalisti ebbero i loro momenti

moderni; che erano (se solo l’avessero saputo) assai più medievali dei

loro momenti medievali. Swinburne sapeva scrivere—

«Vedremo Buonaparte il bastardo

scalciare coi talloni, la gola in un cappio.»

Si ha l’inquieta sensazione che William Morris avrebbe scritto

qualcosa come—

«E la stirpe del malvagio re Bonaparte

ha un’alta forca per tutta la sua parte.»

Rossetti seppe, per una volta tanto, scrivere poesia su una donna reale e

chiamarla «Jenny». Si ha il turbato sospetto che Morris l’avrebbe

chiamata «Jehanne».

Ma tutto ciò che dapprima appare più arcaico e decorativo in Morris

in realtà scaturiva dal fatto che egli era più virile e reale sia di

Swinburne sia di Rossetti. Scaturiva dal fatto che egli era realmente ciò che

he so often called himself, a craftsman. He had enough masculine

strength to be tidy: that is, after the masculine manner, tidy about his

own trade. If his poems were too like wallpapers, it was because he

really could make wallpapers. He knew that lines of poetry ought to be

in a row, as palings ought to be in a row; and he knew that neither

palings nor poetry looks any the worse for being simple or even severe.

In a sense Morris was all the more creative because he felt the hard

limits of creation as he would have felt them if he were not working in

words but in wood; and if he was unduly dominated by the mere

conventions of the mediævals, it was largely because they were (whatever

else they were) the very finest fraternity of free workmen the world is

ever likely to see.

The very things that were urged against Morris are in this sense part of

his ethical importance; part of the more promising and wholesome turn he

was half unconsciously giving to the movement of modern art. His hazier

fellow-Socialists blamed him because he made money; but this was at

least in some degree because he made other things to make money: it was

part of the real and refreshing fact that at last an æsthete had

appeared who could make something. If he was a capitalist, at least he

was what later capitalists cannot or will not be—something higher than

a capitalist, a tradesman. As compared with aristocrats like Swinburne

or aliens like Rossetti, he was vitally English and vitally Victorian.

He inherits some of that paradoxical glory which Napoleon gave

reluctantly to a nation of shopkeepers. He was the last of that nation;

he did not go out golfing: like that founder of the artistic shopman,

Samuel Richardson, “he kept his shop, and his shop kept him.” The

importance of his Socialism can easily be exaggerated. Among other

lesser points, he was not a Socialist; he was a sort of Dickensian

anarchist. His instinct for titles was always exquisite. It is part of

his instinct of decoration: for on a page the title always looks

important and the printed mass of matter a mere dado under it. And no

one had ever nobler titles than The Roots of the Mountains or _The

Wood at the End of the World_. The reader feels he hardly need read the

fairy-tale because the title is so suggestive. But, when all is said, he

never chose a better title than that of his social Utopia, _News from

Nowhere_. He wrote it while the last Victorians were already embarked on

their bold task of fixing the future—of narrating to-day what has

happened to-morrow. They named their books by cold titles suggesting

straight corridors of marble—titles like Looking Backward. But Morris

was an artist as well as an anarchist. News from Nowhere is an

irresponsible title; and it is an irresponsible book. It does not

describe the problem solved; it does not describe wealth either wielded

by the State or divided equally among the citizens. It simply describes

an undiscovered country where every one feels good-natured all day. That

he could even dream so is his true dignity as a poet. He was the first

of the Æsthetes to smell mediævalism as a smell of the morning; and not

as a mere scent of decay.

With him the poetry that had been peculiarly Victorian practically

ends; and, on the whole, it is a happy ending. There are many other

minor names of major importance; but for one reason or other they do not

derive from the schools that had dominated this epoch as such. Thus

Thompson, the author of The City of Dreadful Night, was a fine poet;

but his pessimism combined with a close pugnacity does not follow any of

the large but loose lines of the Swinburnian age. But he was a great

person—he knew how to be democratic in the dark. Thus Coventry Patmore

was a much greater person. He was bursting with ideas, like

Browning—and truer ideas as a rule. He was as eccentric and florid and

Elizabethan as Browning; and often in moods and metres that even

Browning was never wild enough to think of. No one will ever forget the

first time he read Patmore’s hint that the cosmos is a thing that God

made huge only “to make dirt cheap”; just as nobody will ever forget the

sudden shout he uttered when he first heard Mrs. Todgers asked for the

rough outline of a wooden leg. These things are not jokes, but

discoveries. But the very fact that Patmore was, as it were, the

Catholic Browning, keeps him out of the Victorian atmosphere as such.

The Victorian English simply thought him an indecent sentimentalist, as

they did all the hot and humble religious diarists of Italy or Spain.

Something of the same fate followed the most powerful of that last

Victorian group who were called “Minor Poets.” They numbered many other

fine artists: notably Mr. William Watson, who is truly Victorian in that

he made a manly attempt to tread down the decadents and return to the

right reason of Wordsworth—

“I have not paid the world

The evil and the insolent courtesy

Of offering it my baseness as a gift.”

But none of them were able even to understand Francis Thompson; his

sky-scraping humility, his mountains of mystical detail, his occasional

and unashamed weakness, his sudden and sacred blasphemies. Perhaps the

shortest definition of the Victorian Age is that he stood outside it.

come così spesso si definiva, un artigiano. Aveva sufficiente forza virile

per essere ordinato: ordinato, cioè, alla maniera maschile, nel proprio

mestiere. Se le sue poesie somigliavano troppo a carte da parati, era perché

sapeva davvero fabbricare carte da parati. Sapeva che i versi di una poesia devono stare

in fila, come devono stare in fila i pali di uno steccato; e sapeva che né

i pali né la poesia scapitano nulla a essere semplici o perfino severi.

In un certo senso Morris era tanto più creativo in quanto sentiva i duri

limiti della creazione come li avrebbe sentiti se avesse lavorato non con

le parole ma con il legno; e se era eccessivamente dominato dalle semplici

convenzioni dei medievali, ciò dipendeva in gran parte dal fatto che essi erano (qualunque

altra cosa fossero) la più nobile confraternita di liberi artigiani che il mondo

abbia mai probabilità di vedere.

Le stesse cose che venivano rimproverate a Morris sono in questo senso parte

della sua importanza etica; parte della svolta più promettente e sana che egli

imprimeva, per metà inconsapevolmente, al movimento dell’arte moderna. I suoi più confusi

compagni socialisti lo biasimavano perché faceva denaro; ma ciò accadeva

almeno in qualche misura perché faceva altre cose per fare denaro: era

parte del fatto reale e ristoratore che finalmente un esteta era

comparso capace di fabbricare qualcosa. Se era un capitalista, almeno era

ciò che i capitalisti più tardi non possono o non vogliono essere: qualcosa di più alto di

un capitalista, un bottegaio. In confronto agli aristocratici come Swinburne

o agli stranieri come Rossetti, era vitalmente inglese e vitalmente vittoriano.

Egli eredita qualcosa di quella gloria paradossale che Napoleone concesse

a malincuore a una nazione di bottegai. Fu l’ultimo di quella nazione;

non andava a giocare a golf: come quel fondatore del bottegaio artistico,

Samuel Richardson, «teneva la sua bottega, e la sua bottega teneva lui». L’

importanza del suo socialismo può facilmente essere esagerata. Fra altri

punti minori, egli non era un socialista; era una sorta di anarchico

dickensiano. Il suo istinto per i titoli fu sempre squisito. È parte del

suo istinto decorativo: perché su una pagina il titolo appare sempre

importante, e la massa stampata del testo un mero zoccolo sotto di esso. E nessuno

ebbe mai titoli più nobili di Le Radici delle Montagne o _Il

Bosco ai Confini del Mondo_. Il lettore sente di non aver quasi bisogno di leggere la

fiaba, tanto è suggestivo il titolo. Ma, a conti fatti, egli

non scelse mai titolo migliore di quello della sua utopia sociale, _Notizie da

Nessun Luogo_. Lo scrisse mentre gli ultimi vittoriani si erano già imbarcati

nell’ardita impresa di fissare il futuro: di narrare oggi ciò che è

accaduto domani. Essi intitolavano i loro libri con titoli freddi che evocavano

diritti corridoi di marmo: titoli come Uno sguardo al passato. Ma Morris

era un artista oltre che un anarchico. Notizie da Nessun Luogo è un

titolo irresponsabile; ed è un libro irresponsabile. Non

descrive il problema risolto; non descrive la ricchezza né amministrata

dallo Stato né divisa equamente fra i cittadini. Descrive semplicemente

un paese inesplorato dove ognuno si sente di buon umore tutto il giorno. Che

egli potesse anche solo sognare così è la sua vera dignità di poeta. Fu il primo

degli esteti a fiutare il medievalismo come un odore del mattino; e non

come un mero sentore di decadenza.

Con lui la poesia che era stata peculiarmente vittoriana praticamente

finisce; e, nel complesso, è un lieto fine. Vi sono molti altri

nomi minori di importanza maggiore; ma per una ragione o per l’altra essi non

derivano dalle scuole che avevano dominato questa epoca in quanto tali. Così

Thompson, l’autore di La Città della Notte Tremenda, era un fine poeta;

ma il suo pessimismo, unito a una serrata combattività, non segue alcuna delle

ampie ma slegate linee dell’età swinburniana. Ma era una grande

persona: sapeva essere democratico nel buio. Così Coventry Patmore

era una persona ben più grande. Traboccava di idee, come

Browning, e di idee più vere, di norma. Era eccentrico e florido ed

elisabettiano quanto Browning; e spesso in stati d’animo e metri che perfino

Browning non fu mai tanto ardito da concepire. Nessuno dimenticherà mai la

prima volta che lesse l’accenno di Patmore secondo cui il cosmo è una cosa che Dio

fece enorme soltanto «per rendere il fango a buon mercato»; proprio come nessuno dimenticherà mai il

grido improvviso che emise quando udì per la prima volta la signora Todgers chiedere il

rozzo profilo di una gamba di legno. Queste cose non sono scherzi, ma

scoperte. Ma il fatto stesso che Patmore fosse, per così dire, il

Browning cattolico, lo tiene fuori dall’atmosfera vittoriana in quanto tale.

Gli inglesi vittoriani lo giudicarono semplicemente un indecente sentimentale, come

giudicarono tutti gli ardenti e umili diaristi religiosi d’Italia o di Spagna.

Qualcosa della medesima sorte toccò al più potente di quell’ultimo

gruppo vittoriano che fu detto dei «Poeti Minori». Essi annoveravano molti altri

fini artisti: in particolare il signor William Watson, che è veramente vittoriano in quanto

tentò virilmente di calpestare i decadenti e di tornare alla

retta ragione di Wordsworth—

«Non ho reso al mondo

La malvagia e insolente cortesia

di offrirgli la mia bassezza in dono.»

Ma nessuno di loro riuscì nemmeno a comprendere Francis Thompson; la sua

umiltà che sfiora il cielo, le sue montagne di dettaglio mistico, la sua occasionale

e spudorata debolezza, le sue improvvise e sacre bestemmie. Forse la

più breve definizione dell’età vittoriana è che egli ne stette fuori.

CHAPTER IV

THE BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE

If it be curiously and carefully considered it will, I think, appear

more and more true that the struggle between the old spiritual theory

and the new material theory in England ended simply in a deadlock; and a

deadlock that has endured. It is still impossible to say absolutely that

England is a Christian country or a heathen country; almost exactly as

it was impossible when Herbert Spencer began to write. Separate elements

of both sorts are alive, and even increasingly alive. But neither the

believer nor the unbeliever has the impudence to call himself the

Englishman. Certainly the great Victorian rationalism has succeeded in

doing a damage to religion. It has done what is perhaps the worst of all

damages to religion. It has driven it entirely into the power of the

religious people. Men like Newman, men like Coventry Patmore, men who

would have been mystics in any case, were driven back upon being much

more extravagantly religious than they would have been in a religious

country. Men like Huxley, men like Kingsley, men like most Victorian

men, were equally driven back on being irreligious; that is, on doubting

things which men’s normal imagination does not necessarily doubt. But

certainly the most final and forcible fact is that this war ended like

the battle of Sheriffmuir, as the poet says; they both did fight, and

both did beat, and both did run away. They have left to their

descendants a treaty that has become a dull torture. Men may believe in

immortality, and none of the men know why. Men may not believe in

miracles, and none of the men know why. The Christian Church had been

just strong enough to check the conquest of her chief citadels. The

rationalist movement had been just strong enough to conquer some of her

outposts, as it seemed, for ever. Neither was strong enough to expel the

other; and Victorian England was in a state which some call liberty and

some call lockjaw.

But the situation can be stated another way. There came a time, roughly

somewhere about 1880, when the two great positive enthusiasms of Western

Europe had for the time exhausted each other—Christianity and the

French Revolution. About that time there used to be a sad and not

unsympathetic jest going about to the effect that Queen Victoria might

very well live longer than the Prince of Wales. Somewhat in the same

way, though the republican impulse was hardly a hundred years old and

the religious impulse nearly two thousand, yet as far as England was

concerned, the old wave and the new seemed to be spent at the same time.

On the one hand Darwin, especially through the strong journalistic

genius of Huxley, had won a very wide spread though an exceedingly

vague victory. I do not mean that Darwin’s own doctrine was vague; his

was merely one particular hypothesis about how animal variety might have

arisen; and that particular hypothesis, though it will always be

interesting, is now very much the reverse of secure. But it is only in

the strictly scientific world and among strictly scientific men that

Darwin’s detailed suggestion has largely broken down. The general public

impression that he had entirely proved his case (whatever it was) was

early arrived at, and still remains. It was and is hazily associated

with the negation of religion. But (and this is the important point) it

was also associated with the negation of democracy. The same

Mid-Victorian muddle-headedness that made people think that “evolution”

meant that we need not admit the supremacy of God, also made them think

that “survival” meant that we must admit the supremacy of men. Huxley

had no hand in spreading these fallacies; he was a fair fighter; and he

told his own followers, who spoke thus, most emphatically not to play

the fool. He said most strongly that his or any theory of evolution left

the old philosophical arguments for a creator, right or wrong, exactly

where they were before. He also said most emphatically that any one who

used the argument of Nature against the ideal of justice or an equal

law, was as senseless as a gardener who should fight on the side of the

ill weeds merely because they grew apace. I wish, indeed, that in such a

rude summary as this, I had space to do justice to Huxley as a literary

man and a moralist. He had a live taste and talent for the English

tongue, which he devoted to the task of keeping Victorian rationalism

rational. He did not succeed. As so often happens when a rather

unhealthy doubt is in the atmosphere, the strongest words of their great

captain could not keep the growing crowds of agnostics back from the

most hopeless and inhuman extremes of destructive thought. Nonsense not

yet quite dead about the folly of allowing the unfit to survive began

to be more and more wildly whispered. Such helpless specimens of

“advanced thought” are, of course, quite as inconsistent with Darwinism

as they are with democracy or with any other intelligent proposition

ever offered. But these unintelligent propositions were offered; and the

ultimate result was this rather important one: that the harshness of

Utilitarianism began to turn into downright tyranny. That beautiful

faith in human nature and in freedom which had made delicate the dry air

of John Stuart Mill; that robust, romantic sense of justice which had

redeemed even the injustices of Macaulay—all that seemed slowly and

sadly to be drying up. Under the shock of Darwinism all that was good in

the Victorian rationalism shook and dissolved like dust. All that was

bad in it abode and clung like clay. The magnificent emancipation

evaporated; the mean calculation remained. One could still calculate in

clear statistical tables, how many men lived, how many men died. One

CAPITOLO IV

LA ROTTURA DEL COMPROMESSO

Se lo si considera con curiosità e attenzione, apparirà, credo,

sempre più vero che la lotta tra la vecchia teoria spirituale

e la nuova teoria materiale, in Inghilterra, si concluse semplicemente in un punto morto; e un

punto morto che è perdurato. È tuttora impossibile dire in modo assoluto che

l’Inghilterra sia un paese cristiano o un paese pagano; quasi esattamente come

era impossibile quando Herbert Spencer cominciò a scrivere. Elementi distinti

di entrambe le specie sono vivi, e anzi sempre più vivi. Ma né il

credente né il miscredente ha la sfrontatezza di dirsi

l’inglese. Di certo il grande razionalismo vittoriano è riuscito a

arrecare un danno alla religione. Ha fatto ciò che è forse il peggiore di tutti i

danni alla religione. L’ha spinta interamente in potere delle

persone religiose. Uomini come Newman, uomini come Coventry Patmore, uomini che

sarebbero stati mistici in ogni caso, furono respinti verso una religiosità assai più

stravagante di quella che avrebbero avuto in un paese

religioso. Uomini come Huxley, uomini come Kingsley, uomini come la maggior parte dei

vittoriani, furono parimenti respinti verso l’irreligiosità; cioè verso il

dubitare di cose di cui la normale immaginazione non necessariamente dubita. Ma

di certo il fatto più definitivo e cogente è che questa guerra finì come

la battaglia di Sheriffmuir, come dice il poeta; entrambi combatterono, ed

entrambi vinsero, ed entrambi fuggirono. Hanno lasciato ai loro

discendenti un trattato che è divenuto una sorda tortura. Gli uomini possono credere nell’

immortalità, e nessuno di loro sa perché. Gli uomini possono non credere nei

miracoli, e nessuno di loro sa perché. La Chiesa cristiana era stata

giusto abbastanza forte da arrestare la conquista delle sue principali cittadelle. Il

movimento razionalista era stato giusto abbastanza forte da conquistarne alcuni

avamposti, a quanto pareva, per sempre. Nessuno dei due fu abbastanza forte da espellere

l’altro; e l’Inghilterra vittoriana si trovava in uno stato che alcuni chiamano libertà e

altri chiamano tetano.

Ma la situazione può essere descritta in un altro modo. Venne un tempo, all’incirca

intorno al 1880, in cui i due grandi entusiasmi positivi dell’Europa occidentale

si erano per il momento esauriti a vicenda: il cristianesimo e la

Rivoluzione francese. Intorno a quel tempo circolava una battuta triste e non

priva di simpatia, secondo cui la regina Vittoria avrebbe potuto

benissimo vivere più a lungo del Principe di Galles. In modo alquanto simile, nello stesso

modo, sebbene l’impulso repubblicano avesse appena un centinaio d’anni e

quello religioso quasi duemila, tuttavia, per quanto riguardava l’Inghilterra,

la vecchia ondata e la nuova parevano esaurirsi nel medesimo tempo.

Da un lato Darwin, specialmente attraverso il vigoroso genio giornalistico

di Huxley, aveva ottenuto una vittoria assai largamente diffusa, benché

oltremodo vaga. Non intendo dire che la dottrina di Darwin fosse vaga; la

sua era soltanto una particolare ipotesi su come la varietà animale potesse essere

sorta; e quella particolare ipotesi, per quanto sarà sempre

interessante, è ora tutt’altro che sicura. Ma è soltanto in

quel mondo strettamente scientifico e fra gli uomini strettamente scientifici che

il dettagliato suggerimento di Darwin è in gran parte crollato. L’impressione del pubblico generale,

che egli avesse interamente provato la sua tesi (qualunque fosse), fu

raggiunta presto, e tuttora permane. Fu ed è confusamente associata

alla negazione della religione. Ma (e questo è il punto importante)

fu anche associata alla negazione della democrazia. La medesima

confusione mentale medio-vittoriana che faceva credere alla gente che «evoluzione»

significasse che non dobbiamo ammettere la supremazia di Dio, faceva loro credere anche

che «sopravvivenza» significasse che dobbiamo ammettere la supremazia degli uomini. Huxley

non ebbe parte nel diffondere queste fallacie; era un leale combattente; e

disse ai propri seguaci, che parlavano così, con la massima enfasi di non fare

gli sciocchi. Affermò con la massima forza che la sua, o qualsiasi teoria dell’evoluzione, lasciava

i vecchi argomenti filosofici a favore di un creatore, giusti o sbagliati, esattamente

dov’erano prima. Affermò anche con la massima enfasi che chiunque

usasse l’argomento della Natura contro l’ideale di giustizia o di una legge uguale,

era insensato quanto un giardiniere che combattesse dalla parte delle

male erbe soltanto perché crescevano rigogliose. Vorrei, in verità, che in un così

rozzo riassunto come questo avessi spazio per rendere giustizia a Huxley come uomo di lettere

e moralista. Aveva un vivo gusto e talento per la lingua inglese,

che dedicò al compito di mantenere razionale il razionalismo

vittoriano. Non vi riuscì. Come tanto spesso accade quando un alquanto

malsano dubbio è nell’aria, le parole più forti del loro grande

capitano non poterono trattenere le crescenti folle di agnostici dai

più disperati e disumani estremi del pensiero distruttivo. Sciocchezze non

ancora del tutto morte sulla follia di permettere agli inadatti di sopravvivere cominciarono

a essere sussurrate in modo sempre più sfrenato. Simili impotenti esemplari di

«pensiero avanzato» sono, naturalmente, tanto incoerenti col darwinismo

quanto lo sono con la democrazia o con qualsiasi altra intelligente proposizione

mai offerta. Ma queste proposizioni non intelligenti furono offerte; e il

risultato ultimo fu questo, alquanto importante: che l’asprezza

dell’utilitarismo cominciò a mutarsi in vera e propria tirannia. Quella bella

fede nella natura umana e nella libertà che aveva reso delicata l’aria arida

di John Stuart Mill; quel robusto, romantico senso di giustizia che aveva

riscattato perfino le ingiustizie di Macaulay: tutto ciò pareva lentamente e

tristemente inaridirsi. Sotto l’urto del darwinismo tutto ciò che vi era di buono nel

razionalismo vittoriano vacillò e si dissolse come polvere. Tutto ciò che vi era di

cattivo rimase e si attaccò come argilla. La magnifica emancipazione

evaporò; rimase il gretto calcolo. Si poteva ancora calcolare in

chiare tavole statistiche quanti uomini vivessero, quanti uomini morissero. Uno

must not ask how they lived; for that is politics. One must not ask how

they died; for that is religion. And religion and politics were ruled

out of all the Later Victorian debating clubs; even including the

debating club at Westminster. What third thing they were discussing,

which was neither religion nor politics, I do not know. I have tried the

experiment of reading solidly through a vast number of their records and

reviews and discussions; and still I do not know. The only third thing I

can think of to balance religion and politics is art; and no one well

acquainted with the debates at St. Stephen’s will imagine that the art

of extreme eloquence was the cause of the confusion. None will maintain

that our political masters are removed from us by an infinite artistic

superiority in the choice of words. The politicians know nothing of

politics, which is their own affair: they know nothing of religion,

which is certainly not their affair: it may legitimately be said that

they have to do with nothing; they have reached that low and last level

where a man knows as little about his own claim, as he does about his

enemies’. In any case there can be no doubt about the effect of this

particular situation on the problem of ethics and science. The duty of

dragging truth out by the tail or the hind leg or any other corner one

can possibly get hold of, a perfectly sound duty in itself, had somehow

come into collision with the older and larger duty of knowing something

about the organism and ends of a creature; or, in the everyday phrase,

being able to make head or tail of it. This paradox pursued and

tormented the Victorians. They could not or would not see that humanity

repels or welcomes the railway-train, simply according to what people

come by it. They could not see that one welcomes or smashes the

telephone, according to what words one hears in it. They really seem to

have felt that the train could be a substitute for its own passengers;

or the telephone a substitute for its own voice.

In any case it is clear that a change had begun to pass over scientific

inquiry, of which we have seen the culmination in our own day. There had

begun that easy automatic habit, of science as an oiled and

smooth-running machine, that habit of treating things as obviously

unquestionable, when, indeed, they are obviously questionable. This

began with vaccination in the Early Victorian Age; it extended to the

early licence of vivisection in its later age; it has found a sort of

fitting foolscap, or crown of crime and folly, in the thing called

Eugenics. In all three cases the point was not so much that the pioneers

had not proved their case; it was rather that, by an unexpressed rule of

respectability, they were not required to prove it. This rather abrupt

twist of the rationalistic mind in the direction of arbitrary power,

certainly weakened the Liberal movement from within. And meanwhile it

was being weakened by heavy blows from without.

There is a week that is the turn of the year; there was a year that was

the turn of the century. About 1870 the force of the French Revolution

faltered and fell: the year that was everywhere the death of Liberal

ideas: the year when Paris fell: the year when Dickens died. While the

new foes of freedom, the sceptics and scientists, were damaging

democracy in ideas, the old foes of freedom, the emperors and the kings,

were damaging her more heavily in arms. For a moment it almost seemed

that the old Tory ring of iron, the Holy Alliance, had recombined

against France. But there was just this difference: that the Holy

Alliance was now not arguably, but almost avowedly, an Unholy Alliance.

It was an alliance between those who still thought they could deny the

dignity of man and those who had recently begun to have a bright hope of

denying even the dignity of God. Eighteenth-century Prussia was

Protestant and probably religious. Nineteenth-century Prussia was almost

utterly atheist. Thus the old spirit of liberty felt itself shut up at

both ends, that which was called progressive and that which was called

reactionary: barricaded by Bismarck with blood and iron and by Darwin by

blood and bones. The enormous depression which infects many excellent

people born about this time, probably has this cause.

It was a great calamity that the freedom of Wilkes and the faith of Dr.

Johnson fought each other. But it was an even worse calamity that they

practically killed each other. They killed each other almost

simultaneously, like Herminius and Mamilius. Liberalism (in Newman’s

sense) really did strike Christianity through headpiece and through

head; that is, it did daze and stun the ignorant and ill-prepared

intellect of the English Christian. And Christianity did smite

Liberalism through breastplate and through breast; that is, it did

succeed, through arms and all sorts of awful accidents, in piercing more

or less to the heart of the Utilitarian—and finding that he had none.

Victorian Protestantism had not head enough for the business; Victorian

Radicalism had not heart enough for the business. Down fell they dead

together, exactly as Macaulay’s Lay says, and still stood all who saw

them fall almost until the hour at which I write.

This coincident collapse of both religious and political idealism

produced a curious cold air of emptiness and real subconscious

agnosticism such as is extremely unusual in the history of mankind. It

is what Mr. Wells, with his usual verbal delicacy and accuracy, spoke of

as that ironical silence that follows a great controversy. It is what

people less intelligent than Mr. Wells meant by calling themselves _fin

de siècle_; though, of course, rationally speaking, there is no more

reason for being sad towards the end of a hundred years than towards the

non deve chiedere come vissero; perché questo è politica. Non si deve chiedere come

morirono; perché questo è religione. E religione e politica furono bandite

da tutti i circoli di dibattito del tardo periodo vittoriano; compreso perfino il

circolo di dibattito di Westminster. Quale terza cosa stessero discutendo,

che non fosse né religione né politica, non lo so. Ho tentato l’

esperimento di leggere con costanza attraverso un vasto numero dei loro verbali e delle loro

riviste e discussioni; e tuttora non lo so. L’unica terza cosa che

riesco a immaginare per bilanciare religione e politica è l’arte; e nessuno bene

al corrente dei dibattiti a St. Stephen immaginerà che l’arte

dell’estrema eloquenza sia stata la causa della confusione. Nessuno sosterrà

che i nostri padroni politici siano da noi separati da un’infinita superiorità artistica

nella scelta delle parole. I politici non sanno nulla di

politica, che è affar loro: non sanno nulla di religione,

che di certo non è affar loro: si può legittimamente dire che

non hanno a che fare con nulla; hanno raggiunto quell’infimo e ultimo livello

in cui un uomo sa altrettanto poco della propria pretesa quanto di quella dei suoi

nemici. In ogni caso non vi può essere alcun dubbio sull’effetto di questa

particolare situazione sul problema dell’etica e della scienza. Il dovere di

trascinar fuori la verità per la coda o per la zampa posteriore o per qualunque altro lembo si

riesca ad afferrare, dovere di per sé perfettamente sano, era in qualche modo

entrato in collisione col più antico e più ampio dovere di sapere qualcosa

dell’organismo e dei fini di una creatura; o, nella frase d’ogni giorno,

di riuscirne a cavare capo o coda. Questo paradosso perseguitò e

tormentò i vittoriani. Non potevano o non volevano vedere che l’umanità

respinge o accoglie il treno ferroviario semplicemente a seconda di chi

arriva con esso. Non potevano vedere che si accoglie o si fracassa il

telefono a seconda di quali parole vi si odono. Sembra davvero che

abbiano sentito che il treno potesse essere un sostituto dei propri passeggeri;

o il telefono un sostituto della propria voce.

In ogni caso è chiaro che un mutamento aveva cominciato a passare sull’indagine scientifica,

di cui abbiamo visto il culmine ai giorni nostri. Aveva avuto

inizio quell’abitudine facile e automatica, della scienza come una

macchina oliata e scorrevole, quell’abitudine a trattare le cose come ovviamente

indiscutibili, quando, in verità, sono ovviamente discutibili. Ciò

cominciò con la vaccinazione nella prima età vittoriana; si estese alla

precoce licenza della vivisezione nella sua età più tarda; ha trovato una sorta di

appropriato berretto d’asino, o corona di delitto e follia, nella cosa chiamata

Eugenetica. In tutti e tre i casi il punto non era tanto che i pionieri

non avessero provato la loro tesi; era piuttosto che, per una regola inespressa di

rispettabilità, non era loro richiesto di provarla. Questa alquanto brusca

torsione della mente razionalistica in direzione del potere arbitrario,

indebolì di certo il movimento liberale dall’interno. E nel frattempo esso

veniva indebolito da pesanti colpi dall’esterno.

Vi è una settimana che è lo snodo dell’anno; vi fu un anno che fu

lo snodo del secolo. Intorno al 1870 la forza della Rivoluzione francese

vacillò e cadde: l’anno che fu ovunque la morte delle idee liberali:

l’anno in cui cadde Parigi: l’anno in cui morì Dickens. Mentre i

nuovi nemici della libertà, gli scettici e gli scienziati, danneggiavano

la democrazia nelle idee, i vecchi nemici della libertà, gli imperatori e i re,

la danneggiavano più pesantemente nelle armi. Per un momento parve quasi

che il vecchio cerchio di ferro dei Tory, la Santa Alleanza, si fosse ricomposto

contro la Francia. Ma vi era proprio questa differenza: che la Santa

Alleanza era ora non tanto discutibilmente, quanto quasi dichiaratamente, un’Empia Alleanza.

Era un’alleanza tra coloro che ancora credevano di poter negare la

dignità dell’uomo e coloro che di recente avevano cominciato a nutrire una luminosa speranza di

negare perfino la dignità di Dio. La Prussia del Settecento era

protestante e probabilmente religiosa. La Prussia dell’Ottocento era quasi

interamente atea. Così il vecchio spirito di libertà si sentì rinchiuso a

entrambe le estremità, quella che si chiamava progressista e quella che si chiamava

reazionaria: barricato da Bismarck col sangue e col ferro, e da Darwin col

sangue e con le ossa. L’enorme depressione che affligge molte eccellenti

persone nate intorno a questo tempo ha probabilmente questa causa.

Fu una grande calamità che la libertà di Wilkes e la fede del dottor

Johnson si combattessero a vicenda. Ma fu una calamità ancor peggiore che essi

si uccidessero praticamente a vicenda. Si uccisero l’un l’altro quasi

simultaneamente, come Erminio e Mamilio. Il liberalismo (nel senso di Newman)

colpì davvero il cristianesimo attraverso l’elmo e attraverso

il capo; cioè stordì e tramortì l’ignorante e impreparato

intelletto del cristiano inglese. E il cristianesimo percosse

il liberalismo attraverso la corazza e attraverso il petto; cioè

riuscì, per mezzo delle armi e di ogni sorta di terribili accidenti, a trafiggere più

o meno fino al cuore l’utilitarista, e a scoprire che non ne aveva.

Il protestantesimo vittoriano non ebbe testa a sufficienza per l’impresa; il

radicalismo vittoriano non ebbe cuore a sufficienza per l’impresa. Caddero morti

insieme, esattamente come dice il Lay di Macaulay, e restarono ancora in piedi tutti coloro che li videro

cadere, quasi fino all’ora in cui scrivo.

Questo coincidente crollo dell’idealismo tanto religioso quanto politico

produsse una curiosa fredda aria di vuoto e di reale subconscio

agnosticismo, quale è estremamente insolito nella storia dell’umanità. È

ciò che il signor Wells, con la sua consueta delicatezza e precisione verbale, chiamò

quel silenzio ironico che segue una grande controversia. È ciò che

persone meno intelligenti del signor Wells intendevano chiamandosi _fin

de siècle_; sebbene, naturalmente, razionalmente parlando, non vi sia più

ragione di essere tristi verso la fine di cento anni che verso la

end of five hundred fortnights. There was no arithmetical autumn, but

there was a spiritual one. And it came from the fact suggested in the

paragraphs above; the sense that man’s two great inspirations had

failed him together. The Christian religion was much more dead in the

eighteenth century than it was in the nineteenth century. But the

republican enthusiasm was also much more alive. If their scepticism was

cold, and their faith even colder, their practical politics were wildly

idealistic; and if they doubted the kingdom of heaven, they were

gloriously credulous about the chances of it coming on earth. In the

same way the old pagan republican feeling was much more dead in the

feudal darkness of the eleventh or twelfth centuries, than it was even a

century later; but if creative politics were at their lowest, creative

theology was almost at its highest point of energy.

The modern world, in fact, had fallen between two stools. It had fallen

between that austere old three-legged stool which was the tripod of the

cold priestess of Apollo; and that other mystical and mediæval stool

that may well be called the Stool of Repentance. It kept neither of the

two values as intensely valuable. It could not believe in the bonds that

bound men; but, then, neither could it believe in the men they bound. It

was always restrained in its hatred of slavery by a half remembrance of

its yet greater hatred of liberty. They were almost alone, I think, in

thus carrying to its extreme the negative attitude already noted in Miss

Arabella Allen. Anselm would have despised a civic crown, but he would

not have despised a relic. Voltaire would have despised a relic; but he

would not have despised a vote. We hardly find them both despised till

we come to the age of Oscar Wilde.

These years that followed on that double disillusionment were like one

long afternoon in a rich house on a rainy day. It was not merely that

everybody believed that nothing would happen; it was also that everybody

believed that anything happening was even duller than nothing happening.

It was in this stale atmosphere that a few flickers of the old

Swinburnian flame survived; and were called Art. The great men of the

older artistic movement did not live in this time; rather they lived

through it. But this time did produce an interregnum of art that had a

truth of its own; though that truth was near to being only a consistent

lie.

The movement of those called Æsthetes (as satirised in Patience) and

the movement of those afterwards called Decadents (satirised in Mr.

Street’s delightful Autobiography of a Boy) had the same captain; or

at any rate the same bandmaster. Oscar Wilde walked in front of the

first procession wearing a sunflower, and in front of the second

procession wearing a green carnation. With the æsthetic movement and its

more serious elements, I deal elsewhere; but the second appearance of

Wilde is also connected with real intellectual influences, largely

negative, indeed, but subtle and influential. The mark in most of the

arts of this time was a certain quality which those who like it would

call “uniqueness of aspect,” and those who do not like it “not quite

coming off.” I mean the thing meant something from one standpoint; but

its mark was that the smallest change of standpoint made it unmeaning

and unthinkable—a foolish joke. A beggar painted by Rembrandt is as

solid as a statue, however roughly he is sketched in; the soul can walk

all round him like a public monument. We see he would have other

aspects; and that they would all be the aspects of a beggar. Even if one

did not admit the extraordinary qualities in the painting, one would

have to admit the ordinary qualities in the sitter. If it is not a

masterpiece it is a man. But a nocturne by Whistler of mist on the

Thames is either a masterpiece or it is nothing; it is either a nocturne

or a nightmare of childish nonsense. Made in a certain mood, viewed

through a certain temperament, conceived under certain conventions, it

may be, it often is, an unreplaceable poem, a vision that may never be

seen again. But the moment it ceases to be a splendid picture it ceases

to be a picture at all. Or, again, if Hamlet is not a great tragedy it

is an uncommonly good tale. The people and the posture of affairs would

still be there even if one thought that Shakespeare’s moral attitude was

wrong. Just as one could imagine all the other sides of Rembrandt’s

beggar, so, with the mind’s eye (Horatio), one can see all four sides of

the castle of Elsinore. One might tell the tale from the point of view

of Laërtes or Claudius or Polonius or the gravedigger; and it would

still be a good tale and the same tale. But if we take a play like

Pelléas and Mélisande, we shall find that unless we grasp the

particular fairy thread of thought the poet rather hazily flings to us,

we cannot grasp anything whatever. Except from one extreme poetic point

of view, the thing is not a play; it is not a bad play, it is a mass of

clotted nonsense. One whole act describes the lovers going to look for a

ring in a distant cave when they both know they have dropped it down a

well. Seen from some secret window on some special side of the soul’s

turret, this might convey a sense of faerie futility in our human life.

But it is quite obvious that unless it called forth that one kind of

sympathy, it would call forth nothing but laughter and rotten eggs. In

the same play the husband chases his wife with a drawn sword, the wife

remarking at intervals “I am not gay.” Now there may really be an idea

in this; the idea of human misfortune coming most cruelly upon the

optimism of innocence; that the lonely human heart says, like a child at

fine di cinquecento quindicine. Non vi fu alcun autunno aritmetico, ma

ve ne fu uno spirituale. Ed esso nacque dal fatto suggerito nei

paragrafi precedenti; il sentimento che le due grandi ispirazioni dell’uomo lo

avessero abbandonato insieme. La religione cristiana era assai più morta nel

Settecento di quanto lo fosse nell’Ottocento. Ma l’

entusiasmo repubblicano era anche assai più vivo. Se il loro scetticismo era

freddo, e la loro fede ancor più fredda, la loro politica pratica era sfrenatamente

idealistica; e se dubitavano del regno dei cieli, erano

gloriosamente creduli sulle possibilità che esso venisse sulla terra. Allo

stesso modo l’antico sentimento repubblicano pagano era assai più morto nelle

tenebre feudali dell’undicesimo o del dodicesimo secolo di quanto lo fosse anche un

secolo dopo; ma se la politica creativa era al suo minimo, la creativa

teologia era quasi al suo punto più alto di energia.

Il mondo moderno, in effetti, era caduto fra due sgabelli. Era caduto

fra quell’austero vecchio sgabello a tre gambe che era il tripode della

fredda sacerdotessa di Apollo; e quell’altro sgabello mistico e medievale

che ben può essere chiamato lo Sgabello del Pentimento. Non tenne nessuno dei

due valori come intensamente prezioso. Non poteva credere nei vincoli che

legavano gli uomini; ma, d’altra parte, non poteva credere negli uomini che essi legavano. Era

sempre trattenuto nel suo odio della schiavitù da un mezzo ricordo del

suo odio ancor più grande della libertà. Furono quasi soli, credo, nel

portare così all’estremo l’atteggiamento negativo già notato nella signorina

Arabella Allen. Anselmo avrebbe disprezzato una corona civica, ma

non avrebbe disprezzato una reliquia. Voltaire avrebbe disprezzato una reliquia; ma

non avrebbe disprezzato un voto. Difficilmente li troviamo entrambi disprezzati finché

non giungiamo all’età di Oscar Wilde.

Quegli anni che seguirono a quella duplice disillusione furono come un

lungo pomeriggio in una ricca casa in un giorno di pioggia. Non era soltanto che

tutti credevano che nulla sarebbe accaduto; era anche che tutti

credevano che qualunque cosa accadesse fosse ancor più tediosa del nulla che accade.

Fu in questa atmosfera stantia che alcuni bagliori dell’antica

fiamma swinburniana sopravvissero; e furono chiamati Arte. I grandi uomini del

più antico movimento artistico non vissero in questo tempo; piuttosto lo

attraversarono. Ma questo tempo produsse davvero un interregno d’arte che ebbe una

verità propria; sebbene quella verità fosse vicina a essere soltanto una coerente

menzogna.

Il movimento di coloro che furono detti Esteti (come satireggiati in Patience) e

il movimento di coloro che furono poi detti Decadenti (satireggiati nella deliziosa

Autobiografia di un Ragazzo del signor Street) ebbero lo stesso capitano; o

comunque lo stesso capobanda. Oscar Wilde camminava in testa alla

prima processione portando un girasole, e in testa alla seconda

processione portando un garofano verde. Del movimento estetico e dei suoi

elementi più seri mi occupo altrove; ma la seconda apparizione di

Wilde è connessa anche a reali influenze intellettuali, in gran parte

negative, invero, ma sottili e influenti. Il tratto della maggior parte delle

arti di questo tempo era una certa qualità che coloro cui piace

chiamerebbero «unicità d’aspetto», e coloro cui non piace «non del tutto

riuscita». Voglio dire che la cosa significava qualcosa da un punto di vista; ma

il suo tratto era che il più piccolo mutamento di punto di vista la rendeva priva di senso

e impensabile: uno sciocco scherzo. Un mendicante dipinto da Rembrandt è tanto

solido quanto una statua, per quanto rozzamente sia abbozzato; l’anima può girare

tutt’intorno a lui come attorno a un monumento pubblico. Vediamo che avrebbe altri

aspetti; e che sarebbero tutti gli aspetti di un mendicante. Anche se

non si ammettessero le straordinarie qualità del dipinto, si

dovrebbero ammettere le ordinarie qualità del soggetto. Se non è un

capolavoro, è un uomo. Ma un notturno di Whistler, con la nebbia sul

Tamigi, o è un capolavoro o è nulla; o è un notturno

o un incubo di puerile insensatezza. Realizzato in un certo stato d’animo, visto

attraverso un certo temperamento, concepito sotto certe convenzioni, esso

può essere, e spesso è, un poema insostituibile, una visione che forse non si

vedrà mai più. Ma nel momento in cui cessa di essere uno splendido quadro, cessa

di essere del tutto un quadro. O, ancora, se l’Amleto non è una grande tragedia,

è un racconto insolitamente buono. I personaggi e la disposizione delle cose

sarebbero ancora lì anche se si pensasse che l’atteggiamento morale di Shakespeare fosse

errato. Proprio come si potrebbero immaginare tutti gli altri lati del

mendicante di Rembrandt, così, con l’occhio della mente (Orazio), si possono vedere tutti e quattro i lati

del castello di Elsinore. Si potrebbe narrare la storia dal punto di vista

di Laerte o di Claudio o di Polonio o del becchino; e sarebbe

pur sempre un buon racconto e il medesimo racconto. Ma se prendiamo un dramma come

Pelléas e Mélisande, scopriremo che, a meno di afferrare il

particolare filo fatato di pensiero che il poeta ci getta piuttosto vagamente,

non possiamo afferrare proprio nulla. Se non da un estremo punto poetico

di vista, la cosa non è un dramma; non è un dramma cattivo, è una massa di

grumosa insensatezza. Un intero atto descrive gli amanti che vanno a cercare un

anello in una lontana grotta pur sapendo entrambi di averlo lasciato cadere in un

pozzo. Vista da qualche segreta finestra, da qualche lato speciale della anima e della sua

torretta, ciò potrebbe trasmettere un senso di fatata futilità nella nostra vita umana.

Ma è del tutto ovvio che, a meno di suscitare quell’unica specie di

simpatia, non susciterebbe altro che risa e uova marce. Nel

medesimo dramma il marito insegue la moglie con una spada sguainata, mentre la moglie

osserva a intervalli «Non sono allegra». Ora, può davvero esservi un’idea

in ciò; l’idea della sventura umana che si abbatte più crudelmente sull’

ottimismo dell’innocenza; che il solitario cuore umano dice, come un bambino a

a party, “I am not enjoying myself as I thought I should.” But it is

plain that unless one thinks of this idea (and of this idea only) the

expression is not in the least unsuccessful pathos; it is very broad and

highly successful farce. Maeterlinck and the decadents, in short, may

fairly boast of being subtle; but they must not mind if they are called

narrow.

This is the spirit of Wilde’s work and of most of the literary work done

in that time and fashion. It is, as Mr. Arthur Symons said, an attitude;

but it is an attitude in the flat, not in the round; not a statue, but

the cardboard king in a toy-theatre, which can only be looked at from

the front. In Wilde’s own poetry we have particularly a perpetually

toppling possibility of the absurd; a sense of just falling too short or

just going too far. “Plant lilies at my head” has something wrong about

it; something silly that is not there in—

“And put a grey stone at my head”

in the old ballad. But even where Wilde was right, he had a way of being

right with this excessive strain on the reader’s sympathy (and gravity)

which was the mark of all these men with a “point of view.” There is a

very sound sonnet of his in which he begins by lamenting mere anarchy,

as hostile to the art and civilisation that were his only gods; but ends

by saying—

“And yet

These Christs that die upon the barricades

God knows that I am with them—in some ways.”

Now that is really very true; that is the way a man of wide reading and

worldly experience, but not ungenerous impulses, does feel about the

mere fanatic, who is at once a nuisance to humanity and an honour to

human nature. Yet who can read that last line without feeling that Wilde

is poised on the edge of a precipice of bathos; that the phrase comes

very near to being quite startlingly silly. It is as in the case of

Maeterlinck, let the reader move his standpoint one inch nearer the

popular standpoint, and there is nothing for the thing but harsh,

hostile, unconquerable mirth. Somehow the image of Wilde lolling like an

elegant leviathan on a sofa, and saying between the whiffs of a scented

cigarette that martyrdom is martyrdom in some respects, has seized on

and mastered all more delicate considerations in the mind. It is unwise

in a poet to goad the sleeping lion of laughter.

In less dexterous hands the decadent idea, what there was of it, went

entirely to pieces, which nobody has troubled to pick up. Oddly enough

(unless this be always the Nemesis of excess) it began to be

insupportable in the very ways in which it claimed specially to be

subtle and tactful; in the feeling for different art-forms, in the

welding of subject and style, in the appropriateness of the epithet and

the unity of the mood. Wilde himself wrote some things that were not

immorality, but merely bad taste; not the bad taste of the conservative

suburbs, which merely means anything violent or shocking, but real bad

taste; as in a stern subject treated in a florid style; an over-dressed

woman at a supper of old friends; or a bad joke that nobody had time to

laugh at. This mixture of sensibility and coarseness in the man was very

curious; and I for one cannot endure (for example) his sensual way of

speaking of dead substances, satin or marble or velvet, as if he were

stroking a lot of dogs and cats. But there was a sort of power—or at

least weight—in his coarseness. His lapses were those proper to the one

good thing he really was, an Irish swashbuckler—a fighter. Some of the

Roman Emperors might have had the same luxuriousness and yet the same

courage. But the later decadents were far worse, especially the decadent

critics, the decadent illustrators—there were even decadent publishers.

And they utterly lost the light and reason of their existence: they were

masters of the clumsy and the incongruous. I will take only one example.

Aubrey Beardsley may be admired as an artist or no; he does not enter

into the scope of this book. But it is true that there is a certain

brief mood, a certain narrow aspect of life, which he renders to the

imagination rightly. It is mostly felt under white, deathly lights in

Piccadilly, with the black hollow of heaven behind shiny hats or painted

faces: a horrible impression that all mankind are masks. This being the

thing Beardsley could express (and the only thing he could express), it

is the solemn and awful fact that he was set down to illustrate Malory’s

Morte d’Arthur. There is no need to say more; taste, in the artist’s

sense, must have been utterly dead. They might as well have employed

Burne-Jones to illustrate Martin Chuzzlewit. It would not have been

more ludicrous than putting this portrayer of evil puppets, with their

thin lines like wire and their small faces like perverted children’s, to

trace against the grand barbaric forests the sin and the sorrow of

Lancelot.

To return to the chief of the decadents, I will not speak of the end of

the individual story: there was horror and there was expiation. And, as

my conscience goes at least, no man should say one word that could

weaken the horror—or the pardon. But there is one literary consequence

of the thing which must be mentioned, because it bears us on to that

much breezier movement which first began to break in upon all this

ghastly idleness—I mean the Socialist Movement. I do not mean “_De

Profundis_”; I do not think he had got to the real depths when he wrote

that book. I mean the one real thing he ever wrote: _The Ballad of

Reading Gaol_; in which we hear a cry for common justice and brotherhood

very much deeper, more democratic and more true to the real trend of the

populace to-day, than anything the Socialists ever uttered even in the

a una festa, «Non mi sto divertendo come pensavo che avrei dovuto». Ma è

evidente che, a meno di pensare a questa idea (e a questa idea soltanto), l’

espressione non è affatto un pathos malriuscito; è assai ampia e

altamente riuscita farsa. Maeterlinck e i decadenti, in breve, possono

a buon diritto vantarsi di essere sottili; ma non devono dispiacersi se vengono detti

ristretti.

Questo è lo spirito dell’opera di Wilde e della maggior parte del lavoro letterario compiuto

in quel tempo e in quella foggia. È, come disse il signor Arthur Symons, un atteggiamento;

ma è un atteggiamento in piano, non in tondo; non una statua, ma

il re di cartone in un teatrino di giocattoli, che può essere guardato soltanto di

fronte. Nella poesia stessa di Wilde abbiamo particolarmente una perpetuamente

vacillante possibilità dell’assurdo; un senso di cadere appena troppo corto o di

andare appena troppo oltre. «Piantate gigli al mio capo» ha in sé qualcosa di sbagliato;

qualcosa di sciocco che non è presente in—

«E ponete una grigia pietra al mio capo»

nell’antica ballata. Ma anche là dove Wilde aveva ragione, aveva un modo di essere

nel giusto con questa eccessiva tensione sulla simpatia (e sulla gravità) del lettore

che era il tratto di tutti questi uomini con un «punto di vista». Vi è un

suo assai valido sonetto in cui egli comincia deplorando la mera anarchia,

come ostile all’arte e alla civiltà che erano i suoi soli dèi; ma finisce

col dire—

«Eppure

Questi Cristi che muoiono sulle barricate

Dio sa che io sono con loro—in certi modi.»

Ora questo è davvero verissimo; è così che un uomo di vaste letture ed

esperienza mondana, ma non privo di generosi impulsi, sente il

mero fanatico, che è al tempo stesso un fastidio per l’umanità e un onore per la

natura umana. Eppure chi può leggere quell’ultimo verso senza sentire che Wilde

è in bilico sull’orlo di un precipizio di bathos; che la frase è

assai vicina a essere quasi sconcertantemente sciocca. È come nel caso di

Maeterlinck: si sposti il lettore di un pollice più vicino al

punto di vista popolare, e non resta per la cosa altro che un’aspra,

ostile, inconquistabile ilarità. In qualche modo l’immagine di Wilde adagiato come un

elegante leviatano su un divano, e che dice fra le boccate di una profumata

sigaretta che il martirio è martirio sotto certi aspetti, ha afferrato

e dominato ogni più delicata considerazione nella mente. È imprudente

in un poeta pungolare il leone addormentato del riso.

In mani meno destre l’idea decadente, per quel poco che ve n’era, andò

interamente in pezzi, che nessuno si è preso la briga di raccogliere. Stranamente

(a meno che questa non sia sempre la Nemesi dell’eccesso) essa cominciò a

divenire insopportabile proprio in quei modi in cui pretendeva particolarmente di essere

sottile e delicata; nel sentimento delle diverse forme d’arte, nella

fusione di soggetto e stile, nell’appropriatezza dell’epiteto e

nell’unità dello stato d’animo. Wilde stesso scrisse alcune cose che non erano

immoralità, ma soltanto cattivo gusto; non il cattivo gusto dei conservatori

sobborghi, che significa soltanto qualsiasi cosa violenta o scioccante, ma vero cattivo

gusto; come in un austero soggetto trattato in stile florido; una troppo agghindata

donna a una cena di vecchi amici; o una cattiva battuta di cui nessuno ebbe il tempo di

ridere. Questa mistura di sensibilità e rozzezza nell’uomo era assai

curiosa; e io, per parte mia, non posso sopportare (per esempio) il suo modo sensuale di

parlare di sostanze morte, raso o marmo o velluto, come se stesse

accarezzando un mucchio di cani e gatti. Ma vi era una sorta di potenza—o almeno

di peso—nella sua rozzezza. Le sue cadute erano quelle proprie all’unica

buona cosa che egli davvero era, uno spaccone irlandese—un combattente. Alcuni

imperatori romani avrebbero potuto avere la stessa lussureggiante mollezza e tuttavia lo stesso

coraggio. Ma i decadenti più tardi furono assai peggiori, specialmente i decadenti

critici, gli illustratori decadenti—vi furono perfino editori decadenti.

Ed essi persero interamente la luce e la ragione della loro esistenza: erano

maestri del goffo e dell’incongruo. Prenderò un solo esempio.

Aubrey Beardsley può essere ammirato come artista o no; egli non rientra

nell’ambito di questo libro. Ma è vero che vi è un certo

breve stato d’animo, un certo ristretto aspetto della vita, che egli rende all’

immaginazione rettamente. Lo si avverte per lo più sotto bianche, mortali luci a

Piccadilly, con il nero incavo del cielo dietro cappelli lucidi o volti dipinti:

una orribile impressione che tutta l’umanità sia fatta di maschere. Essendo questa la

cosa che Beardsley sapeva esprimere (e l’unica cosa che sapesse esprimere),

è il solenne e terribile fatto che egli fu incaricato di illustrare la

Morte d’Arthur di Malory. Non c’è bisogno di dire di più; il gusto, nel senso dell’artista,

doveva essere del tutto morto. Avrebbero fatto altrettanto bene a impiegare

Burne-Jones per illustrare Martin Chuzzlewit. Non sarebbe stato

più ridicolo che mettere questo ritrattista di malvagi burattini, con le loro

linee sottili come fil di ferro e i loro piccoli volti come di bambini pervertiti, a

tracciare contro le grandi barbariche foreste il peccato e il dolore di

Lancillotto.

Per tornare al capo dei decadenti, non parlerò della fine della

vicenda individuale: vi fu orrore e vi fu espiazione. E, almeno per quanto riguarda

la mia coscienza, nessuno dovrebbe dire una sola parola che possa

indebolire l’orrore—o il perdono. Ma vi è una conseguenza letteraria

della cosa che va menzionata, perché ci conduce a quel

movimento assai più vivace che per primo cominciò a irrompere in tutta questa

spettrale oziosità—intendo il Movimento Socialista. Non intendo il «_De

Profundis_»; non credo che egli fosse giunto alle vere profondità quando scrisse

quel libro. Intendo l’unica cosa vera che egli abbia mai scritto: _La Ballata del

Carcere di Reading_; in cui udiamo un grido di comune giustizia e fratellanza

assai più profondo, più democratico e più fedele alla reale tendenza del

popolo di oggi, di qualsiasi cosa i socialisti abbiano mai proferito perfino nelle

boldest pages of Bernard Shaw.

Before we pass on to the two expansive movements in which the Victorian

Age really ended, the accident of a distinguished artist is available

for estimating this somewhat cool and sad afternoon of the epoch at its

purest; not in lounging pessimism or luxurious aberrations, but in

earnest skill and a high devotion to letters. This change that had come,

like the change from a golden sunset to a grey twilight, can be very

adequately measured if we compare the insight and intricacy of Meredith

with the insight and intricacy of Mr. Henry James. The characters of

both are delicate and indisputable; but we must all have had a feeling

that the characters in Meredith are gods, but that the characters in

Henry James are ghosts. I do not mean that they are unreal: I believe in

ghosts. So does Mr. Henry James; he has written some of his very finest

literature about the little habits of these creatures. He is in the deep

sense of a dishonoured word, a Spiritualist if ever there was one. But

Meredith was a materialist as well. The difference is that a ghost is a

disembodied spirit; while a god (to be worth worrying about) must be an

embodied spirit. The presence of soul and substance together involves

one of the two or three things which most of the Victorians did not

understand—the thing called a sacrament. It is because he had a natural

affinity for this mystical materialism that Meredith, in spite of his

affectations, is a poet: and, in spite of his Victorian Agnosticism (or

ignorance) is a pious Pagan and not a mere Pantheist. Mr. Henry James is

at the other extreme. His thrill is not so much in symbol or mysterious

emblem as in the absence of interventions and protections between mind

and mind. It is not mystery: it is rather a sort of terror at knowing

too much. He lives in glass houses; he is akin to Maeterlinck in a

feeling of the nakedness of souls. None of the Meredithian things, wind

or wine or sex or stark nonsense, ever gets between Mr. James and his

prey. But the thing is a deficiency as well as a talent: we cannot but

admire the figures that walk about in his afternoon drawing-rooms; but

we have a certain sense that they are figures that have no faces.

For the rest, he is most widely known, or perhaps only most widely

chaffed, because of a literary style that lends itself to parody and is

a glorious feast for Mr. Max Beerbohm. It may be called The Hampered, or

Obstacle Race Style, in which one continually trips over commas and

relative clauses; and where the sense has to be perpetually qualified

lest it should mean too much. But such satire, however friendly, is in

some sense unfair to him; because it leaves out his sense of general

artistic design, which is not only high, but bold. This appears, I

think, most strongly in his short stories; in his long novels the reader

(or at least one reader) does get rather tired of everybody treating

everybody else in a manner which in real life would be an impossible

intellectual strain. But in his short studies there is the unanswerable

thing called real originality; especially in the very shape and point of

the tale. It may sound odd to compare him to Mr. Rudyard Kipling: but he

is like Kipling and also like Wells in this practical sense: that no one

ever wrote a story at all like the Mark of the Beast; no one ever

wrote a story at all like A Kink in Space: and in the same sense no

one ever wrote a story like The Great Good Place. It is alone in order

and species; and it is masterly. He struck his deepest note in that

terrible story, The Turn of the Screw; and though there is in the

heart of that horror a truth of repentance and religion, it is again

notable of the Victorian writers that the only supernatural note they

can strike assuredly is the tragic and almost the diabolic. Only Mr. Max

Beerbohm has been able to imagine Mr. Henry James writing about

Christmas.

Now upon this interregnum, this cold and brilliant waiting-room which

was Henry James at its highest and Wilde at its worst, there broke in

two positive movements, largely honest though essentially unhistoric and

profane, which were destined to crack up the old Victorian solidity past

repair. The first was Bernard Shaw and the Socialists: the second was

Rudyard Kipling and the Imperialists. I take the Socialists first not

because they necessarily came so in order of time, but because they were

less the note upon which the epoch actually ended.

William Morris, of whom we have already spoken, may be said to

introduce the Socialists, but rather in a social sense than a

philosophical. He was their friend, and in a sort of political way,

their father; but he was not their founder, for he would not have

believed a word of what they ultimately came to say. Nor is this the

conventional notion of the old man not keeping pace with the audacity of

the young. Morris would have been disgusted not with the wildness, but

the tameness of our tidy Fabians. He was not a Socialist, but he was a

Revolutionist; he didn’t know much more about what he was; but he knew

that. In this way, being a full-blooded fellow, he rather repeats the

genial sulkiness of Dickens. And if we take this fact about him first,

we shall find it a key to the whole movement of this time. For the one

dominating truth which overshadows everything else at this point is a

political and economic one. The Industrial System, run by a small class

of Capitalists on a theory of competitive contract, had been quite

honestly established by the early Victorians and was one of the primary

beliefs of Victorianism. The Industrial System, so run, had become

another name for hell. By Morris’s time and ever since, England has been

divided into three classes: Knaves, Fools, and Revolutionists.

più audaci pagine di Bernard Shaw.

Prima di passare ai due espansivi movimenti in cui l’età vittoriana

davvero si concluse, il caso di un insigne artista è disponibile

per valutare questo alquanto freddo e triste pomeriggio dell’epoca nella sua

forma più pura; non nel pessimismo indolente o nelle aberrazioni lussuose, ma in

un’onesta perizia e in un’alta devozione alle lettere. Questo mutamento sopravvenuto,

come il mutamento da un dorato tramonto a un grigio crepuscolo, può essere assai

adeguatamente misurato se confrontiamo l’acume e l’intricatezza di Meredith

con l’acume e l’intricatezza del signor Henry James. I personaggi di

entrambi sono delicati e indiscutibili; ma tutti dobbiamo aver avuto la sensazione

che i personaggi di Meredith siano dèi, mentre i personaggi di

Henry James siano fantasmi. Non intendo che siano irreali: io credo nei

fantasmi. Così pure il signor Henry James; egli ha scritto parte della sua più fine

letteratura intorno alle piccole abitudini di queste creature. Egli è, nel senso profondo

di una parola disonorata, uno Spiritista se mai ve ne fu uno. Ma

Meredith era anche un materialista. La differenza è che un fantasma è uno

spirito disincarnato; mentre un dio (per meritare che ce ne curiamo) dev’essere uno

spirito incarnato. La presenza dell’anima e della sostanza insieme implica

una delle due o tre cose che la maggior parte dei vittoriani non

comprese—la cosa chiamata sacramento. È perché aveva una naturale

affinità per questo mistico materialismo che Meredith, malgrado le sue

affettazioni, è un poeta: e, malgrado il suo agnosticismo vittoriano (o

ignoranza), è un pio pagano e non un mero panteista. Il signor Henry James è

all’altro estremo. Il suo brivido non sta tanto nel simbolo o nel misterioso

emblema quanto nell’assenza di interventi e protezioni fra mente

e mente. Non è mistero: è piuttosto una sorta di terrore nel sapere

troppo. Egli vive in case di vetro; è affine a Maeterlinck in un

sentimento della nudità delle anime. Nessuna delle cose meredithiane, vento

o vino o sesso o pura assurdità, si frappone mai fra il signor James e la sua

preda. Ma la cosa è una deficienza oltre che un talento: non possiamo che

ammirare le figure che si aggirano nei suoi pomeridiani salotti; ma

abbiamo una certa sensazione che siano figure prive di volto.

Per il resto, egli è assai largamente conosciuto, o forse soltanto assai largamente

canzonato, a causa di uno stile letterario che si presta alla parodia ed è

un glorioso banchetto per il signor Max Beerbohm. Lo si può chiamare lo Stile Impacciato, o

della Corsa a Ostacoli, in cui si inciampa di continuo in virgole e

proposizioni relative; e dove il senso dev’essere perpetuamente qualificato

per timore che significhi troppo. Ma tale satira, per quanto amichevole, è in

qualche modo ingiusta con lui; perché tralascia il suo senso del disegno artistico generale,

che non è soltanto alto, ma ardito. Ciò appare, io

credo, con più forza nei suoi racconti brevi; nei suoi lunghi romanzi il lettore

(o almeno un lettore) si stanca alquanto del vedere ciascuno trattare

ogni altro in un modo che nella vita reale sarebbe un’impossibile

tensione intellettuale. Ma nei suoi brevi studi vi è quella cosa incontrovertibile

chiamata reale originalità; specialmente nella forma stessa e nel punto

del racconto. Può sembrare strano paragonarlo al signor Rudyard Kipling: ma egli

è come Kipling e anche come Wells in questo senso pratico: che nessuno

scrisse mai un racconto per nulla simile al Marchio della Bestia; nessuno

scrisse mai un racconto per nulla simile a Una Piega nello Spazio: e nello stesso senso

nessuno scrisse mai un racconto come Il Gran Buon Luogo. Esso è solo nell’ordine

e nella specie; ed è magistrale. Egli colpì la sua nota più profonda in quel

terribile racconto, Il Giro di Vite; e sebbene vi sia nel

cuore di quell’orrore una verità di pentimento e di religione, è ancora

notevole degli scrittori vittoriani che l’unica nota soprannaturale che essi

sappiano colpire con sicurezza sia la tragica e quasi la diabolica. Solo il signor Max

Beerbohm è stato capace di immaginare il signor Henry James scrivere del

Natale.

Ora su questo interregno, questa fredda e brillante sala d’attesa che

era Henry James al suo massimo e Wilde al suo peggio, irruppero

due movimenti positivi, in gran parte onesti sebbene essenzialmente astorici e

profani, che erano destinati a incrinare la vecchia solidità vittoriana in modo

irrimediabile. Il primo fu Bernard Shaw e i socialisti: il secondo fu

Rudyard Kipling e gli imperialisti. Prendo per primi i socialisti non

perché necessariamente venissero così nell’ordine del tempo, ma perché furono

meno la nota su cui l’epoca davvero si concluse.

Di William Morris, di cui abbiamo già parlato, si può dire che

introduca i socialisti, ma piuttosto in senso sociale che

filosofico. Fu loro amico, e in una sorta di modo politico,

loro padre; ma non fu loro fondatore, perché non avrebbe

creduto una parola di ciò che essi finirono col dire. Né questa è la

convenzionale nozione del vecchio che non tiene il passo con l’audacia dei

giovani. Morris sarebbe stato disgustato non dalla sfrenatezza, ma

dalla mitezza dei nostri ordinati fabiani. Non era un socialista, ma era un

rivoluzionario; non sapeva molto di più su ciò che era; ma sapeva

quello. In tal modo, essendo un uomo di pieno sangue, egli ripete piuttosto la

geniale scontrosità di Dickens. E se prendiamo per primo questo fatto sul suo conto,

lo troveremo una chiave dell’intero movimento di questo tempo. Poiché l’unica

dominante verità che a questo punto adombra ogni altra cosa è

politica ed economica. Il Sistema Industriale, gestito da una piccola classe

di capitalisti su una teoria del contratto competitivo, era stato del tutto

onestamente istituito dai primi vittoriani ed era una delle credenze primarie

del vittorianesimo. Il Sistema Industriale, così gestito, era divenuto

un altro nome per l’inferno. Al tempo di Morris e da allora in poi, l’Inghilterra è stata

divisa in tre classi: Furfanti, Sciocchi e Rivoluzionari.

History is full of forgotten controversies; and those who speak of

Socialism now have nearly all forgotten that for some time it was an

almost equal fight between Socialism and Anarchism for the leadership of

the exodus from Capitalism. It is here that Herbert Spencer comes in

logically, though not chronologically; also that much more interesting

man, Auberon Herbert. Spencer has no special place as a man of letters;

and a vastly exaggerated place as a philosopher. His real importance was

that he was very nearly an Anarchist. The indefinable greatness there is

about him after all, in spite of the silliest and smuggest limitations,

is in a certain consistency and completeness from his own point of

view. There is something mediæval, and therefore manful, about writing a

book about everything in the world. Now this simplicity expressed itself

in politics in carrying the Victorian worship of liberty to the most

ridiculous lengths; almost to the length of voluntary taxes and

voluntary insurance against murder. He tried, in short, to solve the

problem of the State by eliminating the State from it. He was resisted

in this by the powerful good sense of Huxley; but his books became

sacred books for a rising generation of rather bewildered rebels, who

thought we might perhaps get out of the mess if everybody did as he

liked.

Thus the Anarchists and Socialists fought a battle over the death-bed of

Victorian Industrialism; in which the Socialists (that is, those who

stood for increasing instead of diminishing the power of Government) won

a complete victory and have almost exterminated their enemy. The

Anarchist one meets here and there nowadays is a sad sight; he is

disappointed with the future, as well as with the past.

This victory of the Socialists was largely a literary victory; because

it was effected and popularised not only by a wit, but by a sincere wit;

and one who had the same sort of militant lucidity that Huxley had shown

in the last generation and Voltaire in the last century. A young Irish

journalist, impatient of the impoverished Protestantism and Liberalism

to which he had been bred, came out as the champion of Socialism not as

a matter of sentiment, but as a matter of common sense. The primary

position of Bernard Shaw towards the Victorian Age may be roughly

summarised thus: the typical Victorian said coolly: “Our system may not

be a perfect system, but it works.” Bernard Shaw replied, even more

coolly: “It may be a perfect system, for all I know or care. But it does

not work.” He and a society called the Fabians, which once exercised

considerable influence, followed this shrewd and sound strategic hint

to avoid mere emotional attack on the cruelty of Capitalism; and to

concentrate on its clumsiness, its ludicrous incapacity to do its own

work. This campaign succeeded, in the sense that while (in the educated

world) it was the Socialist who looked the fool at the beginning of that

campaign, it is the Anti-Socialist who looks the fool at the end of it.

But while it won the educated classes it lost the populace for ever. It

dried up those springs of blood and tears out of which all revolt must

come if it is to be anything but bureaucratic readjustment. We began

this book with the fires of the French Revolution still burning, but

burning low. Bernard Shaw was honestly in revolt in his own way: but it

was Bernard Shaw who trod out the last ember of the Great Revolution.

Bernard Shaw proceeded to apply to many other things the same sort of

hilarious realism which he thus successfully applied to the industrial

problem. He also enjoyed giving people a piece of his mind; but a piece

of his mind was a more appetising and less raw-looking object than a

piece of Hardy’s. There were many modes of revolt growing all around

him; Shaw supported them—and supplanted them. Many were pitting the

realism of war against the romance of war: they succeeded in making the

fight dreary and repulsive, but the book dreary and repulsive too. Shaw,

in Arms and the Man, did manage to make war funny as well as

frightful. Many were questioning the right of revenge or punishment; but

they wrote their books in such a way that the reader was ready to

release all mankind if he might revenge himself on the author. Shaw, in

Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, really showed at its best the merry

mercy of the pagan; that beautiful human nature that can neither rise to

penance nor sink to revenge. Many had proved that even the most

independent incomes drank blood out of the veins of the oppressed: but

they wrote it in such a style that their readers knew more about

depression than oppression. In Widowers’ Houses Shaw very nearly (but

not quite) succeeded in making a farce out of statistics. And the

ultimate utility of his brilliant interruption can best be expressed in

the very title of that play. When ages of essential European ethics have

said “widows’ houses,” it suddenly occurs to him to say “but what about

widowers’ houses?” There is a sort of insane equity about it which was

what Bernard Shaw had the power to give, and gave.

Out of the same social ferment arose a man of equally unquestionable

genius, Mr. H. G. Wells. His first importance was that he wrote great

adventure stories in the new world the men of science had discovered. He

walked on a round slippery world as boldly as Ulysses or Tom Jones had

worked on a flat one. Cyrano de Bergerac or Baron Munchausen, or other

typical men of science, had treated the moon as a mere flat silver

mirror in which Man saw his own image—the Man in the Moon. Wells

treated the moon as a globe, like our own; bringing forth monsters as

La storia è piena di controversie dimenticate; e coloro che parlano di

socialismo hanno ora quasi tutti dimenticato che per qualche tempo fu una

lotta quasi pari tra socialismo e anarchismo per la guida

dell’esodo dal capitalismo. È qui che Herbert Spencer entra

logicamente, sebbene non cronologicamente; e anche quell’uomo assai più interessante,

Auberon Herbert. Spencer non ha alcun posto speciale come uomo di lettere;

e un posto enormemente esagerato come filosofo. La sua vera importanza fu

che era quasi un anarchico. L’indefinibile grandezza che vi è

in lui, dopo tutto, malgrado le più sciocche e compiaciute limitazioni,

sta in una certa coerenza e completezza dal suo proprio punto di

vista. Vi è qualcosa di medievale, e perciò di virile, nello scrivere un

libro su ogni cosa al mondo. Ora questa semplicità si espresse

in politica nel portare il culto vittoriano della libertà alle più

ridicole lunghezze; quasi fino alle imposte volontarie e

all’assicurazione volontaria contro l’omicidio. Cercò, in breve, di risolvere il

problema dello Stato eliminandone lo Stato. Vi si oppose

in ciò il potente buon senso di Huxley; ma i suoi libri divennero

libri sacri per una nascente generazione di ribelli piuttosto sconcertati, i quali

pensavano che forse potremmo uscire dal pasticcio se ognuno facesse come gli

pare.

Così gli anarchici e i socialisti combatterono una battaglia sul letto di morte dell’

industrialismo vittoriano; nella quale i socialisti (cioè coloro che

si battevano per accrescere invece che diminuire il potere del Governo) riportarono

una completa vittoria e hanno quasi sterminato il loro nemico. L’

anarchico che s’incontra qua e là oggigiorno è un triste spettacolo; è

deluso del futuro, oltre che del passato.

Questa vittoria dei socialisti fu in gran parte una vittoria letteraria; perché

fu compiuta e resa popolare non soltanto da un arguto, ma da un arguto sincero;

e da uno che aveva la stessa sorta di militante lucidità che Huxley aveva mostrato

nella generazione precedente e Voltaire nel secolo precedente. Un giovane irlandese

giornalista, insofferente del depauperato protestantesimo e liberalismo

in cui era stato allevato, si fece avanti come campione del socialismo non come

questione di sentimento, ma come questione di buon senso. La

posizione primaria di Bernard Shaw verso l’età vittoriana può essere così

sommariamente riassunta: il tipico vittoriano diceva freddamente: «Il nostro sistema può non

essere un sistema perfetto, ma funziona». Bernard Shaw replicava, ancor più

freddamente: «Può essere un sistema perfetto, per quanto ne so o me ne importa. Ma non

funziona». Egli e una società chiamata dei fabiani, che un tempo esercitò

considerevole influenza, seguirono questo accorto e valido suggerimento strategico

di evitare il mero attacco emotivo alla crudeltà del capitalismo; e di

concentrarsi sulla sua goffaggine, sulla sua ridicola incapacità di svolgere il proprio

lavoro. Questa campagna riuscì, nel senso che mentre (nel mondo

colto) era il socialista a fare la figura dello sciocco all’inizio di quella

campagna, è l’antisocialista a fare la figura dello sciocco alla fine di essa.

Ma mentre conquistò le classi colte, perse il popolo per sempre.

Prosciugò quelle sorgenti di sangue e di lacrime da cui ogni rivolta deve

scaturire se vuol essere qualcosa di più di un riassestamento burocratico. Cominciammo

questo libro coi fuochi della Rivoluzione francese ancora ardenti, ma

ardenti fiocamente. Bernard Shaw era onestamente in rivolta a modo suo: ma fu

Bernard Shaw a calpestare l’ultima brace della Grande Rivoluzione.

Bernard Shaw procedette ad applicare a molte altre cose la stessa sorta di

ilare realismo che egli così con successo applicò al problema

industriale. Gli piaceva anche dire alla gente il fatto suo; ma un pezzo

della sua mente era un oggetto più appetitoso e dall’aspetto meno crudo di un

pezzo di quella di Hardy. Vi erano molti modi di rivolta che crescevano tutt’intorno a

lui; Shaw li sostenne—e li soppiantò. Molti contrapponevano il

realismo della guerra al romanticismo della guerra: riuscirono a rendere il

combattimento tetro e ripugnante, ma anche il libro tetro e ripugnante. Shaw,

in Le armi e l’uomo, riuscì a rendere la guerra buffa oltre che

spaventosa. Molti mettevano in dubbio il diritto della vendetta o della punizione; ma

scrivevano i loro libri in modo tale che il lettore era pronto a

liberare tutta l’umanità purché potesse vendicarsi dell’autore. Shaw, in

La conversione del Capitano Brassbound, mostrò davvero al suo meglio l’allegra

misericordia del pagano; quella bella natura umana che non sa né elevarsi alla

penitenza né sprofondare nella vendetta. Molti avevano dimostrato che perfino le più

indipendenti rendite bevevano sangue dalle vene degli oppressi: ma

lo scrivevano in uno stile tale che i loro lettori sapevano più della

depressione che dell’oppressione. In Le case dei vedovi Shaw quasi (ma

non del tutto) riuscì a fare una farsa della statistica. E l’

utilità ultima della sua brillante interruzione si può meglio esprimere nel

titolo stesso di quel dramma. Quando epoche di essenziale etica europea hanno

detto «le case delle vedove», gli viene d’un tratto in mente di dire «ma che dire delle

case dei vedovi?». Vi è una sorta di folle equità in ciò, che era

quanto Bernard Shaw ebbe il potere di dare, e diede.

Dallo stesso fermento sociale sorse un uomo di genio del pari

indiscutibile, il signor H. G. Wells. La sua prima importanza fu che scrisse grandi

racconti d’avventura nel nuovo mondo che gli uomini di scienza avevano scoperto.

Camminò su un mondo tondo e sdrucciolevole con la stessa audacia con cui Ulisse o Tom Jones avevano

operato su uno piatto. Cyrano de Bergerac o il barone di Münchhausen, o altri

tipici uomini di scienza, avevano trattato la luna come un mero piatto d’argento

specchio in cui l’Uomo vedeva la propria immagine—l’Uomo nella Luna. Wells

trattò la luna come un globo, simile al nostro; facendo sorgere mostri quali

moonish as we are earthy. The exquisitely penetrating political and

social satire he afterwards wrote belongs to an age later than the

Victorian. But because, even from the beginning, his whole trend was

Socialist, it is right to place him here.

While the old Victorian ideas were being disturbed by an increasing

torture at home, they were also intoxicated by a new romance from

abroad. It did not come from Italy with Rossetti and Browning, or from

Persia with Fitzgerald: but it came from countries as remote, countries

which were (as the simple phrase of that period ran) “painted red” on

the map. It was an attempt to reform England through the newer nations;

by the criticism of the forgotten colonies, rather than of the forgotten

classes. Both Socialism and Imperialism were utterly alien to the

Victorian idea. From the point of view of a Victorian aristocrat like

Palmerston, Socialism would be the cheek of gutter snipes; Imperialism

would be the intrusion of cads. But cads are not alone concerned.

Broadly, the phase in which the Victorian epoch closed was what can only

be called the Imperialist phase. Between that and us stands a very

individual artist who must nevertheless be connected with that phase. As

I said at the beginning, Macaulay (or, rather, the mind Macaulay shared

with most of his powerful middle class) remains as a sort of pavement or

flat foundation under all the Victorians. They discussed the dogmas

rather than denied them. Now one of the dogmas of Macaulay was the dogma

of progress. A fair statement of the truth in it is not really so hard.

Investigation of anything naturally takes some little time. It takes

some time to sort letters so as to find a letter: it takes some time to

test a gas-bracket so as to find the leak; it takes some time to sift

evidence so as to find the truth. Now the curse that fell on the later

Victorians was this: that they began to value the time more than the

truth. One felt so secretarial when sorting letters that one never found

the letter; one felt so scientific in explaining gas that one never

found the leak; and one felt so judicial, so impartial, in weighing

evidence that one had to be bribed to come to any conclusion at all.

This was the last note of the Victorians: procrastination was called

progress.

Now if we look for the worst fruits of this fallacy we shall find them

in historical criticism. There is a curious habit of treating any one

who comes before a strong movement as the “forerunner” of that movement.

That is, he is treated as a sort of slave running in advance of a great

army. Obviously, the analogy really arises from St. John the Baptist,

for whom the phrase “forerunner” was rather peculiarly invented. Equally

obviously, such a phrase only applies to an alleged or real divine

event: otherwise the forerunner would be a founder. Unless Jesus had

been the Baptist’s God, He would simply have been his disciple.

Nevertheless the fallacy of the “forerunner” has been largely used in

literature. Thus men will call a universal satirist like Langland a

“morning star of the Reformation,” or some such rubbish; whereas the

Reformation was not larger, but much smaller than Langland. It was

simply the victory of one class of his foes, the greedy merchants, over

another class of his foes, the lazy abbots. In real history this

constantly occurs; that some small movement happens to favour one of the

million things suggested by some great man; whereupon the great man is

turned into the running slave of the small movement. Thus certain

sectarian movements borrowed the sensationalism without the

sacramentalism of Wesley. Thus certain groups of decadents found it

easier to imitate De Quincey’s opium than his eloquence. Unless we grasp

this plain common sense (that you or I are not responsible for what some

ridiculous sect a hundred years hence may choose to do with what we say)

the peculiar position of Stevenson in later Victorian letters cannot

begin to be understood. For he was a very universal man; and talked some

sense not only on every subject, but, so far as it is logically

possible, in every sense. But the glaring deficiencies of the Victorian

compromise had by that time begun to gape so wide that he was forced, by

mere freedom of philosophy and fancy, to urge the neglected things. And

yet this very urgency certainly brought on an opposite fever, which he

would not have liked if he had lived to understand it. He liked Kipling,

though with many healthy hesitations; but he would not have liked the

triumph of Kipling: which was the success of the politician and the

failure of the poet. Yet when we look back up the false perspective of

time, Stevenson does seem in a sense to have prepared that imperial and

downward path.

I shall not talk here, any more than anywhere else in this book, about

the “sedulous ape” business. No man ever wrote as well as Stevenson who

cared only about writing. Yet there is a sense, though a misleading one,

in which his original inspirations were artistic rather than purely

philosophical. To put the point in that curt covenanting way which he

himself could sometimes command, he thought it immoral to neglect

romance. The whole of his real position was expressed in that phrase of

one of his letters “our civilisation is a dingy ungentlemanly business:

it drops so much out of a man.” On the whole he concluded that what had

been dropped out of the man was the boy. He pursued pirates as Defoe

would have fled from them; and summed up his simplest emotions in that

touching cri de coeur “shall we never shed blood?” He did for the

penny dreadful what Coleridge had done for the penny ballad. He proved

that, because it was really human, it could really rise as near to

lunatici quanto noi siamo terreni. La squisitamente penetrante e politica

satira sociale che egli scrisse in seguito appartiene a un’età posteriore a quella

vittoriana. Ma poiché, fin dal principio, tutta la sua inclinazione fu

socialista, è giusto collocarlo qui.

Mentre le vecchie idee vittoriane venivano turbate da un crescente

tormento in patria, venivano anche inebriate da un nuovo romanticismo proveniente

dall’estero. Non veniva dall’Italia con Rossetti e Browning, né dalla

Persia con Fitzgerald: ma veniva da paesi altrettanto remoti, paesi

che erano (secondo la semplice espressione di quel periodo) «dipinti di rosso» sulla

carta geografica. Era un tentativo di riformare l’Inghilterra attraverso le nazioni più nuove;

mediante la critica delle colonie dimenticate, piuttosto che delle dimenticate

classi. Tanto il socialismo quanto l’imperialismo erano del tutto estranei all’

idea vittoriana. Dal punto di vista di un aristocratico vittoriano come

Palmerston, il socialismo sarebbe la sfrontatezza degli straccioni di strada; l’imperialismo

sarebbe l’intrusione dei villani. Ma non sono i villani i soli coinvolti.

In generale, la fase in cui l’epoca vittoriana si chiuse fu ciò che può soltanto

essere chiamata la fase imperialista. Tra quella e noi si erge un

artista assai singolare che nondimeno va collegato a quella fase. Come

ho detto all’inizio, Macaulay (o, piuttosto, la mente che Macaulay condivideva

con gran parte della sua potente classe media) rimane come una sorta di lastricato o

piatta fondazione sotto tutti i vittoriani. Essi discutevano i dogmi

piuttosto che negarli. Ora, uno dei dogmi di Macaulay era il dogma

del progresso. Un’equa formulazione della verità che vi è contenuta non è poi così difficile.

Investigare qualsiasi cosa richiede naturalmente un po’ di tempo. Ci vuole

un po’ di tempo per ordinare le lettere così da trovarne una: ci vuole un po’ di tempo per

provare un braccio a gas così da trovare la perdita; ci vuole un po’ di tempo per vagliare

le prove così da trovare la verità. Ora, la maledizione che colpì i più tardi

vittoriani fu questa: che cominciarono a stimare il tempo più della

verità. Ci si sentiva così segretariali nell’ordinare le lettere che non si trovava mai

la lettera; ci si sentiva così scientifici nello spiegare il gas che non si

trovava mai la perdita; e ci si sentiva così giudiziosi, così imparziali, nel pesare

le prove che bisognava essere corrotti per giungere a una qualsiasi conclusione.

Questa fu l’ultima nota dei vittoriani: la procrastinazione veniva chiamata

progresso.

Ora, se cerchiamo i frutti peggiori di questa fallacia, li troveremo

nella critica storica. Vi è una curiosa abitudine di trattare chiunque

venga prima di un forte movimento come il «precursore» di quel movimento.

Cioè, viene trattato come una sorta di schiavo che corre in avanti a un grande

esercito. Ovviamente, l’analogia nasce in realtà da san Giovanni Battista,

per il quale l’espressione «precursore» fu piuttosto peculiarmente inventata. Altrettanto

ovviamente, una tale espressione si applica solo a un evento divino, presunto o reale:

altrimenti il precursore sarebbe un fondatore. Se Gesù non fosse stato

il Dio del Battista, sarebbe stato semplicemente il suo discepolo.

Nondimeno la fallacia del «precursore» è stata largamente usata in

letteratura. Così si chiamerà un satirico universale come Langland una

«stella del mattino della Riforma», o qualche altra simile sciocchezza; mentre la

Riforma non fu più grande, ma molto più piccola di Langland. Fu

semplicemente la vittoria di una classe dei suoi nemici, i mercanti avidi, su

un’altra classe dei suoi nemici, gli abati pigri. Nella storia reale ciò

accade di continuo; che qualche piccolo movimento venga a favorire una delle

milioni di cose suggerite da qualche grande uomo; e allora il grande uomo viene

trasformato nello schiavo corrente del piccolo movimento. Così certi

movimenti settari presero in prestito il sensazionalismo senza il

sacramentalismo di Wesley. Così certi gruppi di decadenti trovarono

più facile imitare l’oppio di De Quincey che la sua eloquenza. Se non cogliamo

questo semplice buon senso (che io o voi non siamo responsabili di ciò che qualche

setta ridicola, tra cent’anni, potrà scegliere di fare con ciò che diciamo)

la peculiare posizione di Stevenson nelle lettere tardo-vittoriane non può

cominciare a essere compresa. Poiché egli fu un uomo assai universale; e disse cose

sensate non solo su ogni argomento, ma, per quanto sia logicamente

possibile, in ogni senso. Ma le evidenti carenze del compromesso

vittoriano avevano a quel tempo cominciato a spalancarsi tanto che egli fu costretto, per

mera libertà di filosofia e fantasia, a perorare le cose trascurate. E

tuttavia questa stessa urgenza portò certamente una febbre opposta, che egli

non avrebbe gradito se fosse vissuto per comprenderla. Egli amava Kipling,

sebbene con molte salutari esitazioni; ma non avrebbe gradito il

trionfo di Kipling: che fu il successo del politico e il

fallimento del poeta. Eppure, quando volgiamo lo sguardo indietro lungo la falsa prospettiva del

tempo, Stevenson sembra davvero, in un certo senso, aver preparato quel cammino imperiale e

discendente.

Non parlerò qui, più che altrove in questo libro, della

faccenda della «scimmia solerte». Nessun uomo scrisse mai così bene come Stevenson

curandosi solo dello scrivere. Eppure vi è un senso, benché fuorviante,

in cui le sue ispirazioni originarie furono artistiche piuttosto che puramente

filosofiche. Per dirla in quel modo brusco e da Covenanter che egli

stesso sapeva talvolta padroneggiare, riteneva immorale trascurare

il romanticismo. Tutta la sua vera posizione era espressa in quella frase di

una delle sue lettere: «la nostra civiltà è una faccenda squallida e ignobile:

lascia cadere tanto da un uomo». Nel complesso concluse che ciò che era

stato lasciato cadere dall’uomo era il fanciullo. Inseguiva i pirati come Defoe

sarebbe fuggito da loro; e riassumeva le sue più semplici emozioni in quel

toccante cri de coeur: «non verseremo mai sangue?». Fece per il

penny dreadful ciò che Coleridge aveva fatto per la penny ballad. Dimostrò

che, essendo davvero umano, poteva davvero elevarsi tanto vicino a

heaven as human nature could take it. If Thackeray is our youth,

Stevenson is our boyhood: and though this is not the most artistic

thing in him, it is the most important thing in the history of Victorian

art. All the other fine things he did were, for curious reasons, remote

from the current of his age. For instance, he had the good as well as

the bad of coming from a Scotch Calvinist’s house. No man in that age

had so healthy an instinct for the actuality of positive evil. In _The

Master of Ballantrae_ he did prove with a pen of steel, that the Devil

is a gentleman—but is none the less the Devil. It is also

characteristic of him (and of the revolt from Victorian respectability

in general) that his most blood-and-thunder sensational tale is also

that which contains his most intimate and bitter truth. _Dr. Jekyll and

Mr. Hyde_ is a double triumph; it has the outside excitement that

belongs to Conan Doyle with the inside excitement that belongs to Henry

James. Alas, it is equally characteristic of the Victorian time that

while nearly every Englishman has enjoyed the anecdote, hardly one

Englishman has seen the joke—I mean the point. You will find twenty

allusions to Jekyll and Hyde in a day’s newspaper reading. You will also

find that all such allusions suppose the two personalities to be equal,

neither caring for the other. Or more roughly, they think the book means

that man can be cloven into two creatures, good and evil. The whole stab

of the story is that man can’t: because while evil does not care for

good, good must care for evil. Or, in other words, man cannot escape

from God, because good is the God in man; and insists on omniscience.

This point, which is good psychology and also good theology and also

good art, has missed its main intention merely because it was also good

story-telling.

If the rather vague Victorian public did not appreciate the deep and

even tragic ethics with which Stevenson was concerned, still less were

they of a sort to appreciate the French finish and fastidiousness of his

style; in which he seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his

pen, like a man playing spillikins. But that style also had a quality

that could be felt; it had a military edge to it, an acies; and there

was a kind of swordsmanship about it. Thus all the circumstances led,

not so much to the narrowing of Stevenson to the romance of the fighting

spirit; but the narrowing of his influence to that romance. He had a

great many other things to say; but this was what we were willing to

hear: a reaction against the gross contempt for soldiering which had

really given a certain Chinese deadness to the Victorians. Yet another

circumstance thrust him down the same path; and in a manner not wholly

fortunate. The fact that he was a sick man immeasurably increases the

credit to his manhood in preaching a sane levity and pugnacious

optimism. But it also forbade him full familiarity with the actualities

of sport, war, or comradeship: and here and there his note is false in

these matters, and reminds one (though very remotely) of the mere

provincial bully that Henley sometimes sank to be.

For Stevenson had at his elbow a friend, an invalid like himself, a man

of courage and stoicism like himself; but a man in whom everything that

Stevenson made delicate and rational became unbalanced and blind. The

difference is, moreover, that Stevenson was quite right in claiming that

he could treat his limitation as an accident; that his medicines “did

not colour his life.” His life was really coloured out of a shilling

paint-box, like his toy-theatre: such high spirits as he had are the key

to him: his sufferings are not the key to him. But Henley’s sufferings

are the key to Henley; much must be excused him, and there is much to be

excused. The result was that while there was always a certain dainty

equity about Stevenson’s judgments, even when he was wrong, Henley

seemed to think that on the right side the wronger you were the better.

There was much that was feminine in him; and he is most understandable

when surprised in those little solitary poems which speak of emotions

mellowed, of sunset and a quiet end. Henley hurled himself into the new

fashion of praising Colonial adventure at the expense both of the

Christian and the republican traditions; but the sentiment did not

spread widely until the note was struck outside England in one of the

conquered countries; and a writer of Anglo-Indian short stories showed

the stamp of the thing called genius; that indefinable, dangerous and

often temporary thing.

For it is really impossible to criticise Rudyard Kipling as part of

Victorian literature, because he is the end of such literature. He has

many other powerful elements; an Indian element, which makes him

exquisitely sympathetic with the Indian; a vague Jingo influence which

makes him sympathetic with the man that crushes the Indian; a vague

journalistic sympathy with the men that misrepresent everything that has

happened to the Indian; but of the Victorian virtues, nothing.

All that was right or wrong in Kipling was expressed in the final

convulsion that he almost in person managed to achieve. The nearest that

any honest man can come to the thing called “impartiality” is to confess

that he is partial. I therefore confess that I think this last turn of

the Victorian Age was an unfortunate turn; much on the other side can be

said, and I hope will be said. But about the facts there can be no

question. The Imperialism of Kipling was equally remote from the

Victorian caution and the Victorian idealism: and our subject does quite

seriously end here. The world was full of the trampling of totally new

forces, gold was sighted from far in a sort of cynical romanticism: the

guns opened across Africa; and the great queen died.

il cielo così come la natura umana poteva accoglierlo. Se Thackeray è la nostra giovinezza,

Stevenson è la nostra fanciullezza: e per quanto questa non sia la cosa più artistica

che è in lui, è la cosa più importante nella storia dell’arte

vittoriana. Tutte le altre belle cose che fece erano, per curiose ragioni, remote

dalla corrente della sua epoca. Per esempio, ebbe il bene tanto quanto

il male di provenire da una casa calvinista scozzese. Nessun uomo in quell’epoca

ebbe un istinto tanto sano per la realtà del male positivo. In _The

Master of Ballantrae_ dimostrò, con penna d’acciaio, che il Diavolo

è un gentiluomo—ma non per questo è meno il Diavolo. È anche

caratteristico di lui (e della rivolta contro la rispettabilità vittoriana

in generale) che il suo racconto sensazionale più di sangue e tuoni è anche

quello che contiene la sua verità più intima e amara. _Dr. Jekyll and

Mr. Hyde_ è un doppio trionfo; ha l’eccitazione esteriore che

appartiene a Conan Doyle unita all’eccitazione interiore che appartiene a Henry

James. Ahimè, è ugualmente caratteristico dell’epoca vittoriana che

mentre quasi ogni inglese ha goduto dell’aneddoto, a stento un

inglese ne ha colto lo scherzo—voglio dire il punto. Troverete venti

allusioni a Jekyll e Hyde nella lettura dei giornali di una giornata. Troverete anche

che tutte queste allusioni suppongono che le due personalità siano pari,

senza che l’una si curi dell’altra. O, più grossolanamente, pensano che il libro significhi

che l’uomo possa essere scisso in due creature, buona e malvagia. Tutta la stoccata

del racconto è che l’uomo non può: perché mentre il male non si cura del

bene, il bene deve curarsi del male. O, in altre parole, l’uomo non può sfuggire

a Dio, perché il bene è il Dio nell’uomo; e reclama l’onniscienza.

Questo punto, che è buona psicologia e anche buona teologia e anche

buona arte, ha mancato la sua intenzione principale semplicemente perché era anche buona

arte del narrare.

Se il pubblico vittoriano, piuttosto vago, non apprezzò la profonda e

persino tragica etica di cui Stevenson si occupava, ancor meno erano

di natura tale da apprezzare la francese rifinitura e ricercatezza del suo

stile; nel quale sembrava raccogliere la parola giusta sulla punta della sua

penna, come chi gioca agli sciangài. Ma quello stile aveva anche una qualità

che si poteva sentire; aveva un taglio militare, un acies; e vi

era in esso una sorta di scherma. Così tutte le circostanze condussero,

non tanto al restringimento di Stevenson al romanzo dello spirito

combattivo; quanto al restringimento della sua influenza a quel romanzo. Aveva

moltissime altre cose da dire; ma questo era ciò che eravamo disposti ad

ascoltare: una reazione contro il grossolano disprezzo per il mestiere delle armi che aveva

davvero dato una certa cinese inerzia ai vittoriani. Un’altra ancora

circostanza lo spinse lungo la medesima via; e in un modo non del tutto

fortunato. Il fatto che fosse un uomo malato accresce incommensurabilmente il

merito della sua virilità nel predicare una sana leggerezza e un combattivo

ottimismo. Ma gli vietò anche una piena familiarità con le realtà

dello sport, della guerra o del cameratismo: e qua e là la sua nota è falsa in

queste materie, e ricorda (per quanto assai remotamente) il mero

gradasso provinciale che Henley talvolta si abbassava a essere.

Poiché Stevenson aveva al suo fianco un amico, un invalido come lui, un uomo

di coraggio e stoicismo come lui; ma un uomo in cui tutto ciò che

Stevenson rendeva delicato e razionale diveniva squilibrato e cieco. La

differenza è, inoltre, che Stevenson aveva pienamente ragione nel sostenere che

poteva trattare la propria limitazione come un accidente; che le sue medicine «non

coloravano la sua vita». La sua vita era davvero colorata da una scatola di colori da uno

scellino, come il suo teatrino di cartone: l’allegria che possedeva è la chiave

per lui: le sue sofferenze non sono la chiave per lui. Ma le sofferenze di Henley

sono la chiave per Henley; molto gli si deve scusare, e vi è molto da

scusare. Il risultato fu che, mentre vi era sempre una certa delicata

equità nei giudizi di Stevenson, anche quando aveva torto, Henley

sembrava pensare che, dalla parte giusta, più avevi torto meglio era.

Vi era molto di femminile in lui; ed è più comprensibile

quando lo si sorprende in quelle piccole solitarie poesie che parlano di emozioni

raddolcite, di tramonto e di una fine quieta. Henley si gettò nella nuova

moda di lodare l’avventura coloniale a spese tanto della

tradizione cristiana quanto di quella repubblicana; ma il sentimento non

si diffuse largamente finché la nota non fu suonata fuori d’Inghilterra, in uno dei

paesi conquistati; e uno scrittore di racconti anglo-indiani mostrò

l’impronta di quella cosa chiamata genio; quella cosa indefinibile, pericolosa e

spesso temporanea.

Poiché è davvero impossibile criticare Rudyard Kipling come parte della

letteratura vittoriana, perché egli è la fine di tale letteratura. Ha

molti altri potenti elementi; un elemento indiano, che lo rende

squisitamente solidale con l’indiano; una vaga influenza sciovinista che lo

rende solidale con l’uomo che schiaccia l’indiano; una vaga

simpatia giornalistica con gli uomini che travisano tutto ciò che è

accaduto all’indiano; ma delle virtù vittoriane, nulla.

Tutto ciò che vi era di giusto o di sbagliato in Kipling si espresse nella convulsione

finale che egli quasi di persona riuscì a realizzare. Il massimo a cui

qualsiasi uomo onesto può avvicinarsi alla cosa chiamata «imparzialità» è confessare

di essere parziale. Confesso dunque di ritenere che quest’ultima svolta dell’

Età vittoriana fu una svolta sciagurata; molto si può dire a favore del contrario,

e spero sarà detto. Ma sui fatti non vi può essere alcuna

questione. L’imperialismo di Kipling era ugualmente remoto dalla

cautela vittoriana e dall’idealismo vittoriano: e il nostro soggetto finisce qui

assai seriamente. Il mondo era pieno del calpestio di forze del tutto nuove,

l’oro fu avvistato da lontano in una sorta di cinico romanticismo: i

cannoni tuonarono attraverso l’Africa; e la grande regina morì.

---

Of what will now be the future of so separate and almost secretive an

adventure of the English, the present writer will not permit himself,

even for an instant, to prophesy. The Victorian Age made one or two

mistakes, but they were mistakes that were really useful; that is,

mistakes that were really mistaken. They thought that commerce outside a

country must extend peace: it has certainly often extended war. They

thought that commerce inside a country must certainly promote

prosperity; it has largely promoted poverty. But for them these were

experiments; for us they ought to be lessons. If we continue the

capitalist use of the populace—if we continue the capitalist use of

external arms, it will lie heavy on the living. The dishonour will not

be on the dead.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

After having surveyed the immense field presented in such a volume as

Mr. George Mair’s Modern English Literature in this series, or, more

fully, in the Cambridge History of Modern Literature, the later volume

of Chambers’ English Literature, Mr. Gosse’s _History of Modern

English Literature_, or Henry Morley’s _English Literature in the Reign

of Victoria_, the wise reader will choose some portion for closer study,

and will go straight to the originals before he has any further traffic

with critics or commentators, however able.

He will then need the aid of fuller biographies. Some Victorian Lives

are already classic, or nearly so, among them Sir G. Trevelyan’s

Macaulay, Forster’s Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell’s Charlotte Brontë,

Froude’s Carlyle, and Sir E. T. Cook’s Ruskin. With these may be

ranged the great Dictionary of National Biography. The “English Men of

Letters” Series includes H. D. Traill’s Coleridge, Ainger’s Lamb,

Trollope’s Thackeray, Leslie Stephen’s George Eliot, Herbert Paul’s

Matthew Arnold, Sir A. Lyall’s Tennyson, G. K. Chesterton’s _Robert

Browning_, and A. C. Benson’s Fitzgerald. At least two autobiographies

must be named, those of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, and, as

antidote to Newman’s Apologia, the gay self-revelations of Borrow, and

Jefferies’ Story of My Heart. Other considerable volumes are W. J.

Cross’s George Eliot, Lionel Johnson’s Art of Thomas Hardy, Mr. W. M.

Rossetti’s Dante G. Rossetti, Colvin’s R. L. Stevenson, J. W.

Mackail’s William Morris, Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,

Sir Leslie Stephen’s The Utilitarians, Buxton Forman’s _Our Living

Poets_, Edward Thomas’s Swinburne, Monypenny’s Disraeli, Dawson’s

Victorian Novelists, and Stedman’s Victorian Poets. The “Everyman”

Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature is useful for

dates.

The latter half of the second volume of Mr. F. A. Mumby’s _Letters of

Literary Men_ is devoted to the Victorian Age. There are fuller

collections of the Letters of Leigh Hunt, Thackeray, Dickens, the

Brownings, Fitzgerald, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, and more

recently the Letters of George Meredith, edited by his son.

Among the important critical writers of the period, Matthew Arnold

(Essays in Criticism, Study of Celtic Literature, etc.) stands

easily first. Others are John, now Lord, Morley (_Studies in

Literature_, etc.), Augustine Birrell (Obiter Dicta, Essays), W. E.

Henley (Views and Reviews), J. Addington Symonds (Essays), J.

Churton Collins, Richard Garnett, Stopford A. Brooke, George E. B.

Saintsbury (History of Criticism), R. H. Hutton (_Contemporary

Thought_), J. M. Robertson (Modern Humanists, Buckle, etc.), Frederic

Harrison (The Choice of Books, etc.), Andrew Lang, Walter Bagehot,

Edmund Gosse, Prof. Dowden, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir A. T. Quiller

Couch.

INDEX

Æsthetes, the, and Decadents, 218-27

Arnold, Matthew, 73-79, 87

Austen, Jane, 92, 105, 109

Bentham, 36

Blake, 20

Borrow, 151

Brontë, Charlotte, 92, 105, 110-14

----, Emily, 113

Browning, Elizabeth B., 176-82

----, R., 40-41, 159, 162-63

Byron, 22

Carlyle, 40, 49-62, 158

Carroll, Lewis, 153

Cobbett, 16-17, 88, 151

Coleridge, 20

Collins, Wilkie, 130, 132

Darwin, 38, 206-7, 209

De Quincey, 23-25, 65

Dickens, 40, 79-89, 100, 106, 119-23, 129, 131

Disraeli, 42, 135

Eliot, George, 92, 103-9, 157

Faber, 46

Fitzgerald, 192-95

French Revolution, Influence of, 18-21

Froude, 60, 62

Gaskell, Mrs., 94

Gilbert, 154

Hardy, Thomas, 138-39, 143-45

Hazlitt, 23

Henley, W. E., 247-48

Hood, Thomas, 25-27

Hughes, Tom, 73

Humour, Victorian, 152-55

Hunt, Leigh, 23

Huxley, 39-40, 205

Imperialism, 60, 239

James, Henry, 228-31

Keats, 20

Keble, 45

Kingsley, 40, 59, 64, 72, 134-35

Kipling, R., 60, 249-50

Lamb, 23

Landor, 23

Lear, Edward, 153

Literary temperament, the English, 13-16

Lytton, Bulwer, 135-37

Macaulay, 28-36, 55

Macdonald, George, 152

Maurice, F. D., 40, 73

Melbourne, Lord, 42

Meredith, George, 138-49, 228

Mill, J. S., 36-37, 55

Morris, Wm., 196-200, 232

Newman, 38, 40, 45-48, 78, 159

Novel, The Modern, 90-99

Oliphant, Mrs., 116-17

“Ouida,” 117

Oxford Movement, 42-45

Pater, Walter, 69-71

Patmore, 48, 201-2

Pre-Raphaelite School, 68, 72

Reade, Charles, 134

Rossetti, D. G. and C., 71, 188-91

Ruskin, 40, 62-8, 70, 158

Science, Victorian, 208-12

Shaw, G. B., 60, 235-38

Shelley, 22-23

Shorthouse, 149-50

Socialism, 60, 67, 122, 198, 227, 231-39

Spencer, Herbert, 75, 233-34

Stevenson, R. L., 243-49

Swinburne, 69, 159, 181-88

Tennyson, 40, 64, 160-69

Thackeray, 100, 110, 123-30, 158

Thompson, Francis, 48, 201, 202

Trollope, Anthony, 130, 132-33

Watson, Wm., 202

Wells, H. G., 238-39

Wilde, Oscar, 218-23

Women, Victorian, 91, 99, 104, 115-16, 140

---

Su quale sarà ormai il futuro di un’avventura degli Inglesi tanto separata

e quasi segreta, chi scrive non si permetterà,

neppure per un istante, di profetizzare. L’età vittoriana commise uno o due

errori, ma furono errori davvero utili; ossia,

errori davvero errati. Credettero che il commercio al di fuori di un

paese dovesse estendere la pace: di certo ha spesso esteso la guerra. Credettero

che il commercio all’interno di un paese dovesse senz’altro promuovere

la prosperità; ha in larga misura promosso la povertà. Ma per loro questi furono

esperimenti; per noi dovrebbero essere lezioni. Se noi continuiamo l’uso

capitalistico della popolazione — se noi continuiamo l’uso capitalistico delle

armi esterne, esso peserà gravemente sui vivi. Il disonore non

sarà sui morti.

NOTA BIBLIOGRAFICA

Dopo aver passato in rassegna l’immenso campo presentato in un volume come

Modern English Literature del sig. George Mair in questa collana, o, più

ampiamente, nella Cambridge History of Modern Literature, il volume più recente

della English Literature di Chambers, la _History of Modern

English Literature_ del sig. Gosse, o la _English Literature in the Reign

of Victoria_ di Henry Morley, il lettore avveduto sceglierà qualche porzione per uno studio più ravvicinato,

e andrà dritto agli originali prima di avere ulteriori commerci

con critici o commentatori, per quanto abili.

Avrà poi bisogno dell’aiuto di biografie più ampie. Alcune Lives vittoriane

sono già classiche, o quasi, tra esse il Macaulay di Sir G. Trevelyan,

il Dickens di Forster, la Charlotte Brontë della sig.ra Gaskell,

il Carlyle di Froude, e il Ruskin di Sir E. T. Cook. A queste si può

affiancare il grande Dictionary of National Biography. La collana “English Men of

Letters” comprende il Coleridge di H. D. Traill, il Lamb di Ainger,

il Thackeray di Trollope, il George Eliot di Leslie Stephen, di Herbert Paul

il Matthew Arnold, il Tennyson di Sir A. Lyall, il _Robert

Browning_ di G. K. Chesterton, e il Fitzgerald di A. C. Benson. Almeno due autobiografie

vanno nominate, quelle di Herbert Spencer e John Stuart Mill, e, come

antidoto all’Apologia di Newman, le gaie auto-rivelazioni di Borrow, e

lo Story of My Heart di Jefferies. Altri volumi considerevoli sono W. J.

Cross col suo George Eliot, l’Art of Thomas Hardy di Lionel Johnson, il sig. W. M.

Rossetti col Dante G. Rossetti, Colvin con R. L. Stevenson, J. W.

Mackail col William Morris, Holman Hunt col Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,

i The Utilitarians di Sir Leslie Stephen, gli _Our Living

Poets_ di Buxton Forman, lo Swinburne di Edward Thomas, il Disraeli di Monypenny, i Victorian Novelists di Dawson,

e i Victorian Poets di Stedman. La collana “Everyman” con lo

Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature è utile per

le date.

La seconda metà del secondo volume dei _Letters of

Literary Men_ del sig. F. A. Mumby è dedicata all’età vittoriana. Vi sono più ampie

raccolte delle Letters di Leigh Hunt, Thackeray, Dickens, i

Browning, Fitzgerald, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, e più

di recente le Letters of George Meredith, curate dal figlio.

Tra gli importanti scrittori critici del periodo, Matthew Arnold

(Essays in Criticism, Study of Celtic Literature, ecc.) occupa

senz’altro il primo posto. Altri sono John, ora Lord, Morley (_Studies in

Literature_, ecc.), Augustine Birrell (Obiter Dicta, Essays), W. E.

Henley (Views and Reviews), J. Addington Symonds (Essays), J.

Churton Collins, Richard Garnett, Stopford A. Brooke, George E. B.

Saintsbury (History of Criticism), R. H. Hutton (_Contemporary

Thought_), J. M. Robertson (Modern Humanists, Buckle, ecc.), Frederic

Harrison (The Choice of Books, ecc.), Andrew Lang, Walter Bagehot,

Edmund Gosse, il prof. Dowden, Sir Walter Raleigh, e Sir A. T. Quiller

Couch.

INDICE

Esteti, gli, e Decadenti, 218-27

Arnold, Matthew, 73-79, 87

Austen, Jane, 92, 105, 109

Bentham, 36

Blake, 20

Borrow, 151

Brontë, Charlotte, 92, 105, 110-14

----, Emily, 113

Browning, Elizabeth B., 176-82

----, R., 40-41, 159, 162-63

Byron, 22

Carlyle, 40, 49-62, 158

Carroll, Lewis, 153

Cobbett, 16-17, 88, 151

Coleridge, 20

Collins, Wilkie, 130, 132

Darwin, 38, 206-7, 209

De Quincey, 23-25, 65

Dickens, 40, 79-89, 100, 106, 119-23, 129, 131

Disraeli, 42, 135

Eliot, George, 92, 103-9, 157

Faber, 46

Fitzgerald, 192-95

Rivoluzione francese, Influenza della, 18-21

Froude, 60, 62

Gaskell, sig.ra, 94

Gilbert, 154

Hardy, Thomas, 138-39, 143-45

Hazlitt, 23

Henley, W. E., 247-48

Hood, Thomas, 25-27

Hughes, Tom, 73

Umorismo, vittoriano, 152-55

Hunt, Leigh, 23

Huxley, 39-40, 205

Imperialismo, 60, 239

James, Henry, 228-31

Keats, 20

Keble, 45

Kingsley, 40, 59, 64, 72, 134-35

Kipling, R., 60, 249-50

Lamb, 23

Landor, 23

Lear, Edward, 153

Temperamento letterario, l’inglese, 13-16

Lytton, Bulwer, 135-37

Macaulay, 28-36, 55

Macdonald, George, 152

Maurice, F. D., 40, 73

Melbourne, Lord, 42

Meredith, George, 138-49, 228

Mill, J. S., 36-37, 55

Morris, Wm., 196-200, 232

Newman, 38, 40, 45-48, 78, 159

Romanzo, Il moderno, 90-99

Oliphant, sig.ra, 116-17

“Ouida,” 117

Movimento di Oxford, 42-45

Pater, Walter, 69-71

Patmore, 48, 201-2

Scuola preraffaellita, 68, 72

Reade, Charles, 134

Rossetti, D. G. e C., 71, 188-91

Ruskin, 40, 62-8, 70, 158

Scienza, vittoriana, 208-12

Shaw, G. B., 60, 235-38

Shelley, 22-23

Shorthouse, 149-50

Socialismo, 60, 67, 122, 198, 227, 231-39

Spencer, Herbert, 75, 233-34

Stevenson, R. L., 243-49

Swinburne, 69, 159, 181-88

Tennyson, 40, 64, 160-69

Thackeray, 100, 110, 123-30, 158

Thompson, Francis, 48, 201, 202

Trollope, Anthony, 130, 132-33

Watson, Wm., 202

Wells, H. G., 238-39

Wilde, Oscar, 218-23

Donne, vittoriane, 91, 99, 104, 115-16, 140