0333672267_A_History_of_English_Literature

rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city: and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.’

At the climax, Rawdon discovers Becky compromisingly alone with her protector the Marquis of Steyne. ‘He tore the diamond ornament out of her breast, and flung it at Lord Steyne. It cut him on his bald forehead. Steyne wore the scar to his dying day.’ Becky claims she is innocent, ‘but who could tell what was truth which came from those lips; or if that corrupt heart was in this case pure?’ Further anticlimax follows: Steyne pre-empts Rawdon’s challenge to a duel by having the bankrupt gambler appointed Governor of Coventry Island, a fever spot. Becky pursues her luck in Paris and then in Pumpernickel, where she shows Amelia George Osborne’s letter proposing elopement, so that Amelia will marry the faithful Dobbin. Whether Becky was technically innocent and whether she had some feeling for Amelia are intriguing moral questions but less clear than the brevity of life and the rarity of goodness in Vanity Fair. In its spirited narrative, drama alternates with irony, feeling with cynicism, hilarity with sadness. Thackeray’s dash and wit create effects which are hard to define, but seem to be more moral and humane than he pretends, and curiously moving. His disillusioned exposure of conventional sentiment and morality implies that there are truer standards.

Mrs Lynn Lynton wrote that ‘Thackeray, who saw the faults and frailties of human nature so clearly, was the gentlesthearted, most generous, most loving of men. Dickens, whose whole mind went to almost morbid tenderness and sympathy, was infinitely less plastic, less self-giving, less personally sympathetic.’ Thomas Babington Macaulay made a different comparison: ‘Touching Thackeray and Dickens, my dear,/Two lines sum up critical drivel,/One lives on a countess’s sneer,/And one on a milliner’s snivel.’ The historian may have been piqued by their popularity.

Anthony Trollope

Like Thackeray, Anthony Trollope (1815-82) came down in the world and wrote. Each week he wrote 40 pages, each of 250 words, often while travelling for the Post Office by train or ship. His Autobiography says that he began a new novel the day after finishing the last. In twenty years his novels earned £68,939 17s. 5d., which he thought ‘comfortable, but not splendid’.

Trollope presents himself as a workman proud of his work, but his demystification

[p. 284]

of the business of writing upset the sensitive. He was robustly English, devoted to fox-hunting and cigars, taking his own bath with him on his travels. By 1900, when highbrows and middlebrows had drawn apart, aesthetes and intellectuals shrank from Trollope’s confidence. Yet Newman and George Eliot had admired him. His affectionate, temperate, good-humoured picture of an innocent rural social order has today a nostalgia which gilds its original charm. But Trollope was no naïf: he did not live in a cathedral close, and should not be confused with Septimus

Harding, Barchester’s Warden, still less with Archdeacon Grantly. Most of his books are set in London. He lived in Ireland for eighteen years, and travelled more than any other 19th-century writer, in Europe, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. He was a worker, a go-ahead civil servant and a moderate reformer, standing for Parliament as a Liberal in 1869.

A sample of Trollope’s comedy comes early in Barchester Towers. At the inaugural reception organized by his wife, the Evangelical Bishop Proudie is accosted by Bertie, the son of the Reverend Vesey Stanhope, whom the new bishop has recalled from long residence in Italy. Proudie, mistaking Bertie for an Italian Prince, is initially impressed: ‘There was just a twang of a foreign accent, and no more.’

‘Do you like Barchester on the whole?’ asked Bertie.

The bishop, looking dignified, said that he did like Barchester. ‘You’ve not been here very long, I believe,’ said Bertie.

‘No - not long,’ said the bishop, and tried again to make his way between the back of the sofa and a heavy rector, who was staring over it at the grimaces of the signora.

‘You weren’t a bishop before, were you?’

Dr Proudie explained that this was the first diocese he had held.

‘Ah - I thought so,’ said Bertie; ‘but you are changed about sometimes, a’nt you?’ ‘Translations are occasionally made,’ said Dr Proudie; ‘but not so frequently as in former days.’ ‘They’ve cut them all down to pretty nearly the same figure, haven’t they?’ said Bertie.

To this the bishop could not bring himself to make any answer, but again attempted to move the rector.

‘But the work, I suppose, is different?’ continued Bertie. ‘Is there much to do here, at Barchester?’ This was said exactly in the tone that a young Admiralty clerk might use in asking the same question of a brother acolyte at the Treasury.

‘The work of a bishop of the Church of England,’ said Dr Proudie, with considerable dignity, ‘is not easy. The responsibility which he has to bear is very great indeed.’

‘Is it?’ said Bertie, opening wide his wonderful blue eyes. ‘Well; I never was afraid of responsibility. I once had thoughts of being a bishop, myself.’

union painful, and called herself Mrs Lewes. George Eliot was loved by readers, including the Queen, but Mary Ann, or Marian, Evans was not asked to dinner. Gradually the great world came to call on her and Lewes on Sunday afternoons in their London home. Her beloved brother Isaac, however, never spoke to her; he wrote to her only when she married, after Lewes’s death in 1878. She died soon after.

The intellectual who had grown up on Walter Scott began to write stories herself, encouraged by Lewes. In a set of the Waverley novels which he gave her, Lewes described Scott as ‘her longest-venerated and best-loved Romancist’. When Scenes of Clerical Life appeared in 1857, ‘George Eliot’ was thought to be a clergyman, or a clergy wife. There followed Adam Bede

(1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-3), Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), Middlemarch

(1871-2), Daniel Deronda (1874-6), and the short story, ‘The Lifted Veil’. All but Deronda and Romola are rooted in provincial England; Romola is set in 15th-century Florence. At her death, Eliot was admired, even revered. After a reaction against the intellectuality of the later novels, she has been accounted one of the two or three great 19th-century novelists, and Middlemarch the classic Victorian realist novel.

The passage above from The Mill on the Floss suggests George Eliot’s commitment to the experience of living, accompanied by an earnest effort to understand its processes and convey its value. The final words ‘... the sunshine and the grass of the far-off years which still live in us and transform our perception into love’ echo Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. This formulation, which is also close to the mood of Tennyson’s In Memoriam and the terms of Arnold’s Dover Beach, trusts to a scientific metaphor: the sunlight stored in memory has transforming moral power. As value and meaning become problematic, the need to define them becomes urgent, and the vocabulary more complex, elaborate and provisional.

Dickens and Thackeray begin with Sketches, George Eliot with Scenes. Thereafter she named five of her seven novels after their protagonists, adopting the post-Romantic narrative mode of virtual autobiography, as in Oliver Twist. Dickens’s attack on social abuses draws its emotional power not from an accurate representation of the Yorkshire Board Schools but from the reader’s identification with the protagonist, a convention borrowed from romance, adventure and fantasy. After Byron, the Romantic protagonist is often transparently the author as hero and victim. Jane Eyre shows how hard it is to avoid vicarious self-pity in this mode, where protagonist, author and reader are all to share the same point of view and to pull together, a problem better managed in David Copperfield and better still in Great Expectations. George Eliot’s seven novels develop the strengths of the mode without entirely overcoming its weakness.

Adam Bede

In Adam Bede the pretty, vain Hetty Sorrell prefers the young squire Arthur to the worthy Adam, a carpenter. She is to marry Adam but finds herself pregnant, and kills

[p. 287]

the baby. Hanging is commuted to transportation after Arthur intervenes. In prison, Hetty is comforted by the Methodist preacher Dinah Morris, loved by Seth Bede. Seth stands aside to allow his brother Adam to marry her. This tragicomedy of moral choices is set in a quaintly idyllic rural society. Mrs Poyser, Hetty’s aunt, was thought a comic creation equal to Sam Weller. Sam’s creator, Dickens, was not taken in by George Eliot’s manly pseudonym: ‘no man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so like a woman’.

The Mill on the Floss

The narrator of The Mill on the Floss is Maggie Tulliver, who has a childhood like that of Mary Ann Evans: she is a sensitive, intelligent, awkward girl, chafing at the bonds of rural society, though its domesticities are again described in loving detail. The narrative in the passage quoted initially passes from ‘they’ (Tom and Maggie), to ‘we’ (who used to call robins ‘God’s

Illustration to George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), by

W. J. Allen. Tom and Maggie Tulliver foresee their fate.

birds’), into ‘I’ musing in a wood, and out again to ‘we’ the readers, Humanity. Third-person narrative melts into collective autobiography and normative reflection. The tale ends in catastrophe: Maggie saves her alienated brother Tom from a flood; they drown, reconciled in a final embrace. The ugly duckling has turned into a swan, but must die. We are to identify with Maggie in her stands against family prejudice and pride, and in the suffering caused her by the mutual attraction between her and Stephen Guest, a handsome youth engaged to her cousin. The drama is played out against the background of a ‘real’ social panorama, of painful choices between family, love and friendship. It is experienced through the acute sensibility of Maggie, seen above in richly reflective mode. The moral intelligence of the heroine-narrator’s commentary is characteristic of George Eliot’s fiction. In the catastrophe, Maggie lays down her life for her brother, a martyr to Christian family love. The moral is less bleak than those of Wordsworth’s peasant tragedies, Michael and ‘The Ruined Cottage’.

[p. 288]

Silas Marner

A Christian symbolic dimension dominates Silas Marner, The Weaver of Raveloe. Silas, falsely accused of theft, is excluded from his Protestant sect. His solitary pursuit of his craft makes him prosper, but one day his gold is stolen from his cottage. An orphan whose mother has died in the snow comes to his door; in bringing her up, he recovers happiness. This parable of redemptive love stands against a melodramatic narrative. The girl chooses to stay with Silas when the squire’s elder son acknowledges that he is her true father. His younger brother'’ body, found with the stolen gold in a drained pond, reminds him of the fate of the girl’s mother, whom he had never acknowledged. The rural comedy shrinks, and the themes play out more darkly as the chosen situation evolves.

Romola seems a departure. In a picturesquely historical Florence, with the Medici facing Savonarola and popular unrest, Tito, a plausible Greek, weaves an intrigue. Romola, however, is one of George Eliot’s sorely-tried heroines who finds her destiny in sacrifice. Noble in birth as well as character, this daughter of a blind old scholar is tricked into marriage by Tito; who betrays her, her father, and his own benefactor. A picture by Tintoretto is the source of Eliot’s next work, the dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy (1868).

After prose about Coventry, why Italy and poetry? George Eliot wrote poetry because she felt that her writing lacked symbolic power. Silas Marner shows her universalizing her concerns by using religious parable. Romola tries to elevate its theme by using a Florentine setting sanctified by art and literature. The result, however, is not grand tragedy but a historical novel based on research. The more authentically historical such a novel, the less the use of a remote or glamorous setting escapes the limits of documentary realism. Eliot’s research rebuilt the literal prison she was trying to escape.

Felix Holt, the Radical is the most dispensible of the English novels, a historical recreation of 1832, the eve of the Reform Bill. Esther chooses the austere idealist Felix rather than Harold Transome, the heir to the estate. By an expedient device of the Victorian stage, Esther turns out to be the true heir, and Harold’s father a mean lawyer.

Middlemarch

These experiments paved the way for Middlemarch, a major novel by any standard. The historical canvas is very wide. The several storylines of the multiple plot are traced from their beginnings, gradually combining into a drama which gathers intense human and moral interest. Themes emerge naturally out of believable families and marriages, and final outcomes do not depend upon gratuitous interventions from melodrama or authorial providence. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is set, like Felix Holt, in a Midlands manufacturing town towards 1832. It shows the attrition of ideals by experience. The young, unworldly and ardent Dorothea Brooke, against the advice of her uncle, sister and gentry connections, accepts the Reverend Dr Isaac Casaubon, a dry middle-aged scholar, aspiring to serve him in his life’s task, a ‘Key to All Mythologies’. Discovering that her husband is petty and that he is secretly unsure of his great work, and will never complete it, she pities and cares for him. He dies suddenly, leaving a will which shows his true meanness. The intelligent Dr Tertius Lydgate, a medical pioneer, has been trapped into marrying the town beauty, Rosamund Vincy, a manufacturer’s daughter hoping to rise out of Middle-

[p. 289]

march. She is not interested in his research but in the distinction of his social origins. Rosamund has a beautiful neck, good manners, a strong will, a small mind and a smaller heart. Established Middlemarch doctors make sure that Lydgate’s new ideas do not prosper; the young couple come close to giving up the fine house he has imprudently bought her - but are rescued by a loan. Lydgate, like Dorothea, is loyal to a selfish spouse.

Casaubon’s lively young cousin, Will Ladislaw, a friend of Lydgate, admires Dorothea, who is innocently friendly towards him. In his will, Casaubon forbids Dorothea to marry Ladislaw on pain of losing her inheritance. Fred, the immature brother of Rosamund, loves Mary Garth, daughter of a land agent, Caleb. The Garths’ home has the love and integrity George Eliot valued from her childhood. Mary is too sincerely religious to allow Fred to become a clergyman, a genteel profession, and Fred joins Caleb. to learn the land agent’s trade. Mrs Vincy’s sister is married to the banker Bulstrode, a Calvinist hypocrite, who before coming to Middlemarch and marrying Harriet Vincy, had made his pile by pawnbroking and receipt of stolen goods in London, marrying the boss’s widow and defrauding her grandson, lost and supposed dead, but still alive. This turns out to be Will Ladislaw. Bulstrode is blackmailed by Raffles, a reprobate, whom he allows to die by silently varying Dr Lydgate’s instructions. But Raffles had talked, and Lydgate has innocently accepted a loan from Bulstrode. When this reaches the gossips of Middlemarch, the doctor is ruined along with the banker. Mrs Bulstrode stands by her husband. These lives are baffled, but Dorothea gives up Casaubon’s money to marry Ladislaw.

We learn in a diminishing Finale that Fred and Mary marry and are good and happy and live to be old if not rich. ‘Lydgate’s hair never became white’: he takes a fashionable London practice which thrives, but ‘he always regarded himself as a failure’. Dying at fifty, he leaves Rosamund rich. She marries an elderly physician, regarding her happiness as ‘a reward’.

‘But it would be unjust not to tell, that she never uttered a word in depreciation of Dorothea, keeping in religious remembrance the generosity which had come to her aid in the sharpest crisis of her life.’ Will becomes a Liberal MP for Middlemarch, and Dorothea a wife, mother and minor benefactress - one who performs the ‘little, nameless, unremembered, acts/Of kindness and of love’ which Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey calls ‘that best portion of a good man’s life’. Dorothea is a good woman who lived in a society which did not allow her to make the great contribution her nature sought, a point made in the Prelude to Middlemarch with a comparison to the career of St Theresa of Avila, and repeated in the Finale:

Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

(Cyrus, founder of the Persian Empire, who released the Jews from captivity, was admired by Christians as well as by the classical author Plutarch. Mary Garth ‘wrote a little book for her boys, called Stories of Great Mere, taken from Plutarch’. Cyrus also diverted the Euphrates for irrigation.)

George Eliot’s temperate use of catastrophe and happy ending allow a rich if

[p. 290]

subdued realism in presentation and a satisfying realism of assessment: life is imperfect. By prevailing standards, the incidence of illegitimacy, mistaken identity, legacies, letters going astray, improbable coincidence and drownings (this author’s favoured form of natural disaster) is tiny; the lurid Raffles is a well-calculated exception. George Eliot moderates the excesses of sentiment and irony found in her more ‘Victorian’ predecessors. In structure and theme, her parallelling of unhappy marriages, with one woman finally repaying the other’s generosity with a helpful hint which makes a marriage, may owe something to Vanity Fair. The moral and mechanical complexities of a story with several continuing centres of interest are managed with steady clarity and subtlety. Here the comparison with Dickens is to George Eliot’s advantage. These complexities are more numerous than is suggested in the plot summary above, which leaves out Dorothea’s comical uncle, Brooke of Tipton, a confused candidate in the Liberal interest; her worldly sister Celia, conventionally married to Sir James Chettam; two gentry/clergy families, the Cadwalladers and the Farebrothers; and other relationships of family, class and business interest. The dense social web built up yields an extraordinarily rich representation of provincial life in middle England. The picture is also an analysis – ‘study’ in the subtitle has both senses - and the pettiness and prejudices of Middlemarch can be seen eventually to limit or stifle all but the Garths, whose worth is related not to the town but to the land, work, and the family. Their integrity is Christian in its derivation.

George Eliot’s running commentary does not please every reader. Some prefer novel as drama to novel as moral essay. Those who do not wish to be so explicitly guided will grant the quality and scope of her understanding. The insight into motive towards the end of Middlemarch produces wonderful writing. The steady pace, compared with Thackeray and Dickens, does not lessen interest in the evolving destinies of the Bulstrodes, of Dorothea and Lydgate, Rosamund and Ladislaw, the Garths. The mounting tension of the penultimate stages is dramatic or operatic, with the motives of the principals in full view. Human imperfection, even in the chilling instance of Casaubon, is presented with understanding, though he receives more sympathy from his wife than from his creator. Some critics think Dorothea too good, and Ladislaw less interesting than she finds him.

This English novel, however, has fewer blemishes than others of its scope in the 19th century. In 1874, the American Henry James (1843-1916), beginning his career as a novelist, noticed some, yet concluded that Middlemarch ‘sets a limit ... to the development of the old-fashioned English novel’. All the Victorian novels so far reviewed were old-fashionedly inclusive in their readership, though Middlemarch would strain the attention of some educated people today. The conscious procedures of James’s own art, following French examples, make George Eliot’s openness look solidly provincial. James’s handling of narrative propriety and of point-of-view is more discriminated. Yet he fully shared Eliot’s root concern with the future of innocence in a civilization growing ever more complex. He thought the old-fashioned English novels ‘loose and baggy monsters’. Yet there is always an appeal from art to life and human import. James’s refinement set a different limit to the development of the novel.

Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s last novel, has had a mixed reception. In order to save her family and herself from poverty, Gwendolen Harleth marries the rich Grandcourt, who has had children by a mistress known to Gwendolen. Grandcourt’s selfishness

[p. 291]

and his mistress’s reproaches isolate Gwendolen, who relies increasingly on the soulful Daniel Deronda - an idealist of a type dear to Eliot, who in the Preface to Middlemarch had dwelt on the modern problem of the martyr without a cause. Deronda turns out to be the son of a Jewish singer, who sacrificed him to her own career. When Grandcourt is drowned, Deronda marries Mirah, a young singer, and devotes himself, with Mirah’s brother Mordecai, to founding a Jewish national home in Israel. Many readers find that the Jewish theme is presented uncritically.

Daniel Deronda does not show English virtue and foreign duplicity, rather the reverse. Its international perspectives on the fate of idealists in a sophisticating world are those of Henry James and Conrad. After George Eliot’s death in 1880, the Novel’s achievements and audiences became more specialized, as common culture further diversified.

Nonsense prose and verse

Lewis Carroll

The rest of the 19th century is treated separately, but before leaving the Victorian uplands, mention must be made of a rare flower which grew there: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The author, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a deacon at Christ Church, Oxford, a mathematics don and a pioneer of portrait photography. Alice Liddell was the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, joint editor of the standard Greek dictionary. Alice was originally made up by Dodgson for her and her sisters while he was rowing them up the Thames in 1862, when she was ten. Alice’s adventures occur when in a dream she falls down a rabbit-hole. In a series of odd and threatening situations, creatures engage her in ‘curiouser and curiouser’ conversations and sing nonsensical songs. Alice’s unintimidated common sense saves her.

Children still like Alice’s fantasy, surprise, and logical and verbal jokes, as in ‘The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party’. The action often shows the absurd arrangements whereby large animals eat small ones (weeping in pity as they do so), and big people boss little people about without compunction. Adults enjoy the stream of riddles and logical games, such as ‘How do I know what I mean until I see what I say?’, and the Cheshire Cat’s grin, ‘which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.’

The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. An illustration by John Tenniel for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), showing Alice, the March Hare, the Dormouse and the Hatter.

[p. 292]

There are also verse parodies. Alice tries to repeat lsaac Watts’s ‘Against Idleness and Mischief’: ‘How doth the little busy bee/Improve each shining hour’. It comes out as ‘How doth the little crocodile/Improve its shining tail’, with a second verse;

How cheerfully he seems to grin,

How neatly spreads his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in,

With gently smiling jaws!

Further parodies are found in a sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), notably ‘Jabberwocky’, a version of a German Romantic ballad into mock Anglo-Saxon; ‘’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe ....’ Humpty Dumpty, a literary critic, explains:

‘“Brillig” means four o’clock in the afternoonthe time when you begin broiling things for dinner.’ ‘That’ll do very well,’ said Alice: ‘and “slithy”?’

‘Well, “slithy” means “lithe” and “slimy”. “Lithe” is the same as “active”. You see it’s like a portmanteau - there are two meanings packed up into one word.’

‘I see it now,’ Alice remarked thoughtfully: ‘and what are “toves”?’

‘Well, “toves” are something like badgers – they’re something like lizards – and they’re something like corkscrews.’

Another parody, ‘The White Knight’s Song’ (‘I’ll tell you everything I can;/There’s little to relate’) brings out the illogic of Wordsworth’s ballads. The Alice books, wonderfully illustrated by Tenniel, had a great success, and have entered the language. Unlike other Victorian children’s books, they teach no lessons.

Edward Lear

The gentler nonsense verse of Edward Lear (1812-88), a gifted watercolourist, has less logical bite and point than Carroll’s, more whimsy, and a melancholy charm.

He reads, but he cannot speak, Spanish,

He cannot abide ginger beer:

Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,

How pleasant to know Mr Lear!

Nonsense verse, England’s answer to French symbolism, thrived before the 19th century, but its flowering then may be the other side of Arnold’s proposition that ‘all great literature is, at bottom, a criticism of life’. Victorians also had more time for their children.

Further reading

Gaskell, E. Life of Charlotte Brootë, ed. E. Cleghorn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). Haight, G. George Eliot: A Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).

Wheeler, M. English Fiction of the Victorian Period, 2nd edn (Harlow: Longman, 1994).

[p. 293]

11. Late Victorian Literature: 1880 1900

Overview .

The last decades of the reign saw a disintegration of the middle ground of readership. Writers went along with or rose above a broadening mass market, as did Hardy and James respectively. These were major talents, but it was a period of transition without a central figure, although Wilde briefly took centre stage in a revival of literary theatre, with Shaw as the other leading figure. The old Victorian poets went on writing, but their juniors were retiring or minor, consciously aesthetic or consciously hearty. There was a new professional minor fiction, in Stevenson and Conan Doyle.

Differentiation

The two decades of 1880-1900, with the next decade, lie between the midVictorian uplands and the peaks of modernism. For a long time, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf hid their predecessors. If literary history is written by the victors, as with the Romantics and the Renaissance humanists, a longer view can bring revision. As the Modernist revolution revolves into the distance, and dust settles, it is easier to see origins in the eighties and nineties, and to try an evaluative sketch.

A sketch it is, for major writers are few. Confidence in the cultural stamina of the general reader, and in the direction of society, waned. Serious writers dealt with a middlebrow market by some simplification or specialization, or

else went into covert or open opposition to majority views, as some poets did. The first mass-circulation newspaper claiming to be the organ of democracy, the Daily Mail, began in 1896. Its owner bought The Times in 1908. ‘The newspaper is the roar of the machine’, declared W. B. Yeats. A less oracular truth is that paper and printing were cheaper and that new technology found a new market in the newly literate.

Thomas Hardy and Henry James

Drama revived, with Wilde and Shaw; poets shrank; sages went into aesthetics or

[p. 294]

resented his success as a novelist, which allowed him to build a house outside Dorchester, in which they spent many unhappy and childless years. James’s major novels are listed above; Hardy’s are taken later.

The gulf between Hardy and James indicates a trend. It is at this juncture, or disjuncture, that a weakening assent to gospel truths in the literal forms offered by the Protestant churches began to take effect in divergent and more partial ideals. In her novels George Eliot had kept her agnosticism quiet behind a Christian morality. Hardy, losing his beliefs suddenly, proclaimed his atheism, then his agnosticism. A churchgoer unable to forgive God for not existing, he also blamed God for a lack of compassion. James, too well-bred to mention the divine, shows a post-Calvinist interest in evil spirits, as does Stevenson, whom he admired. Many were taken up with spiritualism and the occult: W. B. Yeats, H. Rider Haggard, Andrew Lang, Arthur Conan Doyle, J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling. Many put their faith in secular politics: William Morris, founder of the Socialist League (and the Arts and Crafts movement), and George Bernard Shaw, a founder of the Fabian Society. After hearing

[p. 296]

Shaw speak, Oscar Wilde wrote The Soul of Man under Socialism, which is, however, a plea for artistic individualism. Some were strongly patriotic: W. E. Henley, Rudyard Kipling and Sir Henry Newbolt for England, others for a Celtic identity. As beliefs diverged, codes became important.

Aestheticism

The period saw a cult of beauty or Aestheticism, now remembered for the Decadent illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley (187298) and for the life of Oscar Wilde, imprisoned for homosexuality in 1895. It was not only or even chiefly a literary movement. Its importance lies not in the lifestyle of the Decadents, nor in their own work, but in a new idea: that literature was an art, and worth living for. This idea shaped the lives of Yeats, and of Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Keats’s Grecian Urn had said: ‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’, but Keats had weighed Beauty against ideas of the good life. Tennyson too adhered to the view that beauty served truth by making wisdom or noble conduct attractive. But the Aesthetes separated art from morality. They quoted from Walter Pater’s Conclusion to The Renaissance (1873) — ‘the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake’, a formula found in Theophile Gautier (1811-72), who had in 1835 denied that art could be useful.

Walter Pater

Ruskin’s lectures on beauty and the dignity of labour inspired the undergraduate Oscar Wilde to manual work on the roads. After Oxford, Wilde left work to William Morris and pursued beauty, taking his cue from Walter Pater, another Oxford don, who had turned Keats’s wish for a life of sensations rather than thoughts into a programme. The Conclusion to Pater’s The Renaissance contains this passage:

Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us - for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? ... To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

Oxford’s young men had heard of ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’ at their public schools. Their still largely clerical University wished to put ‘a Christian gentleman in every parish’. Ecstasy upon ecstasy was a new ideal. Which were ‘the finest senses’? The Conclusion was dropped in a second edition, shutting the stable door after the horse had gone, as ‘it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall’. Pater made his own idea clearer in Marius the Epicurean (1885), a historical novel commending an austere epicureanism in ‘the only great prose in modern English’ (W. B. Yeats), and very readably. Yet this austere critic’s discussion of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa breathes strange longings. Leonardo’s painting (also called La Gioconda, ‘The Smiling Lady’), Pater wrote, embodies ‘the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits....’

Matthew Arnold had said that it was the task of Criticism ‘to see the object as in

[p. 297]

itself it really is’. Taking Pater’s subjectivity to a logical conclusion, Wilde argued that ‘the highest Criticism’ aims ‘to see the object as in itself it really is not’ (The Critic as Artist, 1890), and indeed Leonardo’s lady and what Pater saw in her are not at all the same thing. Yet Yeats chose ‘She is older than the rocks’ as the first item in his Oxford Book of Modern English Verse in 1936 - a grandly perverse gesture. It is not verse, but for Yeats it was modern; he was eight when it was published.

Pacer relates art to life in ‘Style’, an essay in Appreciations (1889). Art must first be beautiful, then true:

I said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, that prose literature was the characteristic art of the nineteenth century, as others, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, have assigned that place to music. Music and prose literature are, in one sense, the opposite terms of art; the art of literature presenting to the imagination, through the intelligence, a range of interest, as free and various as those which music presents to it through sense. And certainly the tendency of what has been here said is to bring literature too under those conditions, by conformity to which music takes rank as the typically perfect art. If music be the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the expression, then literature, by finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the term to its import, will be but fulfilling the condition of all artistic quality in things everywhere, of all good art.