How many times do I love, again? Of evening rain Unravelled from the tumbling main And threading the eye of a yellow star :- FROM HORNE'S "ORION." At length, when night came folding round the scene, And golden lights grew red and terrible, Flashed torch and spear, while reed-pipes deeper blew And timbrels groaned and jangled to the tones Of high-sustaining horns, then, round the blaze, Over the level space and up the hills, Six Giants held portentous dance, nor ceased Till one by one in bare Bacchante arms, Brimful of nectar, helplessly they rolled Deep down oblivion. Sleep absorbed their souls. In 1825 Macaulay In prose more vigorous influences were at work. marked an epoch in criticism by contributing to the Edinburgh Review his elaborate article on Milton, the earliest example in English of the modern étude, or monograph in miniature, which has since become so popular a province of letters. When our period closes, Macaulay is a Cabinet minister. His career as an essayist was mainly prior to 1840, at which date he had shown himself neither ballad-writer nor historian. In his famous reviews he created. a species of literature, partly biographical, partly critical, which had an unrivalled effect in raising the average of cultivation. Countless readers found in the pages of Macaulay's Essays their earliest stimulus to independent thought and the humane study of letters. Carlyle, five years the senior of Macaulay, had been much slower in reaching the great mass of the public. His graceful Life of Schiller (1825) having failed to achieve a world-wide sensation, Carlyle deliberately and most successfully set himself to insist upon attention by Hartley Coleridge After a Portrait in the possession of Ernest Hartley Coleridge, Esq. adopting a style of extreme eccentricity, full of Germanisms, violently abrupt and tortuously parenthetical, a lingo which had to be learned like a foreign language. In the reception ultimately given to Sartor Resartus (1834) he was assured of the success of his stratagem, and he continued, to his son. Sonnet. that Long have I known thee as thon auf in song And long injoyed the perfume that thalas From the pure soul! a lodour sweet entails souls Ary Dermarones in thon att this flout along The stream of life to join the passive theang Of shades and echoes that and memory's Life from this flowing we hear not at we see not seem, Faith, more not ammot اطعة ben If Passion. Fancy Of eminent advantage, to write, not in English, but in Carlylese for the remainder of his life. The names crowd upon us as we endeavour to distinguish what literature was when Queen Victoria ascended the throne. Marryat was at the climax of his rapidly won nautical fame; the cavaliers of G. P. R. James riding down innumerable lonely roads; the first Lord Lytton was in the midst of the series of his elaborately heroical romances, not cast in gold, perhaps, but richly parcel-gilt; Disraeli had just culminated in Henrietta Temple. Such were the forces which up to 1840 were the most active in purely popular literature. None of them, perhaps, was of the highest order either in imagination or in style, but each in his own way was repeating and emphasising the lesson of the romantic revolution of 1798. CHAPTER III THE EARLY VICTORIAN AGE 1840-1870 IN spite of the interesting elements which we have just endeavoured to indicate, the history of English literature between 1825 and 1840 was comparatively uneventful. The romantic revolution was complete the new spirit had penetrated every corner of literary production, and the various strains introduced from Germany, from Celtic sources, from the resuscitated study of natural landscape, from the habit of contemplating radical changes in political, religious, and social ideas, had settled down into an accepted intellectual attitude, which itself threatened to become humdrum and conventional. But this menace of a new classicism passed away under the mental storm and stress which culminated in 1848 in a second and less radical revolution on the lines of that which was then half a century old. This was a revolution which had, in English literature, the effect of unsettling nothing that was valuable in the new romantic tradition, but of scouring it, as it were, of the dust and cobwebs which were beginning to cloud its surface, and of polishing it to the reflection of more brilliant and delicate aspects of nature. In this second revival of thought and active expression the practice of publishing books grew with a celerity which baffles so succinct a chronicle as ours. It becomes, therefore, impossible from this point forwards to discuss with any approach to detail the careers of any but the most prominent authors. All that we can now hope to do is to show in some degree what was the general trend and what were the main branches of this refreshed and giant body of literature. Between the accession of Queen Victoria and the breaking out of the war with Russia the profession of letters flourished in this country as it had never done before. It is noticeable that in the first years of the century the men of genius are sharply distinguished from the herd of negligible men of talent. We recognise some ten or twelve names so far isolated from all the rest that, with little injustice, criticism may concentrate its attention on these alone. But in the second revival this was not the case; the gradations are infinitely slow, and a sort of accomplished cleverness, highly baffling to the comparative critic, brings us down from the summit, along innumerable slopes and invidiously gentle 200 |
