English Thought in the Nineteenth Century

LITERATURE

THE 19TH CENTURY

"English Thought in the Nineteenth Century:" By D. C. Somervell. London: Methuen & Co.

The farther we recede from a great historic period the better are we able to Judge of its character and achievements, and the thirty years which have elapsed since the close of the 19th century is a long enough stretch of time to admit of an estimate of the value of its contribution to the story of civilisation. As the title states, it is with English thought alone that the author is concerned, but who would minimise the debt which human development owes, to English thought? The philosophers, scientists, publicists, and litterateurs, certainly fill no small space in the intellectual life of the period, and as Mr. Somervell's pages show, he is not gravelled for lack of matter. His difficulty, indeed, has been to compress into less than 250 pages the mass of thought accumulated in a century. As the 19th century was closely connected in respect of opinions with the 18th, he was forced to disregard what he calls the accidents of our decimal system of numeration," and, as 1800 marks no distinct stage in the progress of thought, and as the death of Queen Victoria really does mark such a stage, to treat the century as beginning with the French Revolution in 1789 and ending in 1901. In English literature the Revolution gave a stimulus to the Romantic movement, which came to its full growth and splendor in the writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Lamb, and De Quincey in England:—

The fundamental impulse of the Romantic movement can be found in a simple phrase—the "call of the wild." Rousseau was the first great prophet of the Romantic movement, and his books (which were written in the middle of the 18th century) are continually contrasting civilisation with Nature, to the great disadvantage of the former. Rousseau was, incidentally, keenly alive to the beauty of wild scenery, but the nature of his political treatise is a kind of garden of Eden, out of which man has mistakenly strayed, and to which he must find his way back. The Revolution was an exposition in political terms of the Romantic movement, a quest after some mysterious rights of the natural man. Since the Romantic movement missed its ideal in politics, it passed into poetry, art, and music, and inspired the wild dreams of Shelley, the sunsets of Turner, and the solemn splendors of the later works of Beethoven. Wordsworth was intoxicated by the Revolution, and only financial pressure exerted from home prevented him from throwing in his lot with the Girondin party. The later course of the Revolution, culminating in the military tyranny of Napoleon disillusioned him. He ended in mere negation, deploring the Reform Bill as heartily as Scott, and doubting like a Tory extremist, whether popular education will not do more harm than good. As Hazlitt said, he missed the road to Utopia, and lighted in Old Sarum. Coleridge's early manhood, like Wordsworth's, was tarred with the revolutionary brush, for he planned with his brother-in-law, Southey, to find an ideal Pantisocratic (all-equal) community in the United States. His best poems belong to the realm of the unfettered imagination; though it would be possible, on the strength of its final stanzas, to connect "The Ancient Mariner" with the humanitarian movement. Coleridge's brother-in-law, Southey, started life, like himself, full of revolutionary ardor, and in later years, when he entered the opposite camp, his enemies unkindly published a play "Wat Tyler." written by him in his undergraduate days, glorifying rebellion. His sycophantic ode on the death of George III. was savagely attacked by Byron, who composed an alternative "Vision of Judgment," probably the most blasphemous poem of any merit in our language. Byron and Shelley, who came later, classed the revolution as among accidental events, leaving unaffected the essential gospel of the revolutionists. They both died young, revolutionists of a sort to the last. Byron holds that man is naturally good, and is only made bad by civilisation. Among his heroes are Cain, who first broke the sixth Commandment, and Don Juan, who held the the record as a breaker of the seventh. Byron's first speech in the House of Lords was a defiant defence of the Luddite rioters. Byron was a great satirist, but not a great poet. Shelley was a great poet, who has inspired enthusiasm even more possibly than greater poets, and it is certain his philosophy has colored the outlook of life for many people. He fashioned a figure of Man triumphant over God and civilisation.

Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower,
Even in its tender bud.

As Mr. Brailsford says, the history of the French Revolution so far as concerns Britain, begins with a sermon and ends with a poem, the sermon being Dr. Richard Price's discourse on the fall of the Bastille and the poem Shelley's "Hellas."

The Second Period

So much for the first of the three parts into which Mr. Somervell divides his work. The middle period saw the Realist School exerting itself with powerful effect, especially in the domain of fiction. Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant in France, Turgeniev, Tolstoi, and Dostoieffsky in Russia, Sudermann in Germany, Bjornson and Ibsen in Norway, D'Annunzio in Italy, and many others created a body of literature strikingly unlike that of the romantic school. In Britain the new movement showed itself partially in Thackeray, and more fully later on in Hardy, Gissing, and Kipling. Another conspicuous feature of this middle term was the extraordinary ascendency gained by the novel over all other forms of imaginative literature. In the early years of the century the greatest writers were the poets. Later they were the novelists, who, disdaining dreams, painted life as they found it:—

There is hardly a single writer of fiction who could not be proved to be at least a reflector, if not a direct exponent, of some phase of the thought of his generation. It is not fanciful to connect the political activities which in the later forties centred in the problem of controlling hours and conditions of work in factories with the contemporaneous publication of four notable novels dealing with industrial life:—Disraeli's "Sybil" (1845), Mrs. Gaskell's "Mary Barton" (1848), Charlotte Bronte's "Shirley" 1849), and Kingsley's "Alton Locke" (1851). Of all Victorian novelists, Anthony Trollope has come to be recognised as the most faithful recorder of ordinary life and manners. "The Chronicles of Barsetshire" are tales of the imaginary provincial diocese. Trollope's sympathies are with the old high-and-dry school. In the first novel we see the amiable "warden" of the ancient alms houses ejected from his comfortable sinecure owing to the misguided agitation of a young Benthamite reformer of abuses, and the results are unfortunate for all concerned. In the second novel, "Barchester Towers," the comfortable old bishop has died, and is succeeded not, as he should have been, by his son, the Archdeacon, but by the evangelical Dr. Groudie, who is ruled by his wife and his chaplain, Mr. Slope, a Uriah Heep in holy orders. As for Trollope's political novels, they suggest that for him Parliament was little more than the best of clubs and debating societies. His political novels are very pleasant, but their politics are purely formal. If Trollope has a lesson for Victorian thought it is that, judging by moral standards, the period was a fairly placid one. But the greatest popular writer of the middle decades was, of course, Charles Dickens. Though be amassed wealth, he never abandoned his belief that a curse rests on riches, and a blessing on poverty. Dickens was a man of great public spirit, wide interests, and close observation, but he had no theories as to how the abuses he exposed could best be rectified. That he belonged neither to the orthodox school of thought, the utilitarian, nor to the opposition, is shown by his being claimed by both. Chesterton calls him the prince of anti-Benthamites; Sir Henry Maine, a great lawyer and political philosopher, in his day. wrote in his "Popular Government" —"It does not seem to me a fantastic assertion that the ideas of one of the great novelists of the last generation may be traced to Bentham," the novelist being Dickens.

The Third Period

With the death of Dickens we are brought to the third period of the century, which in fiction may be called the psycho-analytical. Never before in fiction were the sexes more assiduous in analysing each other's souls. The century was heralded by a crusade of expurgation in respect of fiction. The careful avoidance of all direct allusion to the physical side of sexual relations is described as a product of evangelicism. which took a strong hold of the early Victorian public. Thackeray, in the preface, to "Pendennis," warned his readers that, the spirit of the age being what it was, they must not expect to find in his pages the whole truth about the life of a young man as they would find it, for example, in Fielding's "Tom Jones." All that, we are told, was changed towards the end of the 19th century. Just as restraints on the use of "swear words" were discarded, so in sexual matters there was a general kicking over of the traces all round. A generation brought up on evangelical principles were invited to solace their declining years with "The Yellow Aster," "The Sunless Heart," and other stories by women, to say nothing of "The Woman Who Did," "Tess of the D'Urbervilles." and similar examples of what male writers could do in the same class of literature. Apart from sex matters, liberties were taken with religious orthodoxy by distinguished novelists like Meredith and Hardy, whom Mr. Somervell brackets as typical ''pagans." Meredith is described as in one respect the first of English moderns, having been the forerunner of the psychoanalytical school of novelists:—

Meredith is pagan, but his paganism has the serenity of one who, having never had faith, has never lost it, and bears no grudge against it. As the previous generation had paired Dickens with Thackeray, so the later Victorians paired Thomas Hardy, the "Wessex" novelist, with Meredith. All Hardy's novels were written before the end of the 19th century. There is a difference in outlook between the novelists. Meredith is an optimist, Hardy a pessimist. Meredith held, like Wordsworth, that it is possible for man to be in tune with Nature. To Hardy, man is in Huxley's phrase, "Nature's rebellious son." Man has risen above Nature's plan without disentangling himself from her claims. Nature holds man by the chain of sex. All Hardy's novels are love tragedies. For Hardy, as for Meredith, Nature is Providence, but for Hardy it is a malign Providence, and the Christian religion, with its pretence that Providence is not malign, is supremely irritating to him. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," probably the greatest, and certainly the most popular of the Hardy novels is full of anti-Christian innuendo. Its author is the only great Victorian for whom Chesterton has no toleration: for him, Hardy is "a sort of village atheist, brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot." Hardy and Meredith were representatives of their period, and ours, too, in that they were concerned with the fundamental problems of existence. The present age has been abused as one of mere pleasure seeking. But never was there an age when more persons were actively concerned in promoting, in one way or another, the general welfare of society. Such immersion in the practical may make us, by comparison with our fathers, somewhat uninteresting, both to ourselves and posterity, but it should, protect us from a too sweeping accusation of frivolity.

The Advertiser 21 June 1930,