Pater was one of the most fastidious of
literary
artists.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v14
But, even when he is wrong-headed, Henley
rarely fails to command respect and to provoke thought. At the
worst, he is piquant. He was generous in his criticism of con-
temporaries—with exceptions. As regards writers just before his
own time, he is enthusiastic about Dickens and Tennyson, but
cold about Thackeray. Henley's longer critical essays, which
have been gathered together in the collected edition of his works,
display the same characteristics. The most remarkable of them,
unquestionably, is the brilliant essay originally contributed to The
Centenary Burns. It is thorough in scholarship, it is admirably
written, it has every gift save that of love.
The nearest akin to literary critics were writers of the
aesthetic group, of whom John Ruskin was the greatest. Ruskin
,
is one of the most voluminous and, superficially viewed, one of
the most miscellaneous, of English writers. Verse and prose,
criticism-aesthetic, literary, social and political-economics,
autobiography, all are represented. The thought is sometimes
dressed in royal purple and adorned with gold embroidery, some-
times clothed as simply as ever was village maiden. In opinion,
again superficially viewed, he is one of the least consistent.
Convictions expressed with the utmost confidence in the first
edition of a book are scornfully renounced in the second. Yet,
Ruskin will never be understood unless the truth be grasped
that there is a unity underlying all his diversity, and that, in
spite of contradictions on this point and on that, no writer, in
essentials, is more consistent. There is evolution from the first
volume of Modern Painters to Fors Clavigera, and to the last
volume of Praeterita; but there is no fundamental change. Even
the gulf which seems to divide the concluding volume of Modern
Painters, with its analysis of leaf beauty and of cloud beauty,
from Unto this Last, with its discussion of the nature of wealth,
proves, on examination, to be no gulf at all.
Ruskin's father had good taste both in literature and in art,
and fostered these tastes in his son. To his mother was due that
familiar knowledge of the Bible which is shown in every one of
## p. 149 (#179) ############################################
111] · Ruskin's Early Writings 149
his works. She and her son read it together from beginning to
end, turning to Genesis again as soon as they had reached the
close of the Apocalypse. But there was a disadvantage as well
as an advantage in these intimate family relationships. In a
sense, Ruskin was never sui juris so long as his parents lived ;
and, affectionate as were his feelings for them, before the end he
had begun to chafe at their control as a thing almost intolerably
irksome. In his maturity, Ruskin became a heretic in religion
and a revolutionary in economics, while his father was orthodox
on both points.
In his youth, however, notwithstanding the mistake of over-
indulgence and excessive protective care, Ruskin gained enor-
mously from the devotion of his parents. The early journeys
.
of mingled business and pleasure in England supplied much food
for eye and mind; and, when Prout's Sketches in Flanders and
Germany suggested a longer tour, it was promptly undertaken.
Similar tours followed, year after year. If, when he went to Oxford
in 1837, Ruskin was ill equipped in respect of the ordinary sub-
jects of study, he already knew a great deal more than most of his
teachers about the things that, for him, were important. He had
laid deep and sure the foundations of Modern Painters, the first
volume of which was published in 1843; and repeated visits to
the continent in after years enriched him with materials for the
subsequent volumes, and for much of his other work as well.
Even before the appearance of the first volume of Modern
Painters, Ruskin was a practised writer. From 1834 onwards,
he was a fairly active contributor, in prose to Loudon's Magazine
of Natural History and Architectural Magazine, and in verse to
Friendship's Offering and The London Monthly Miscellany.
The verses, with the Newdigate prize poem Salsette and Ele-
phanta, and with later contributions to The Keepsake and other
compilations, were gathered together and reprinted more than half
a century after most of them were written. Not till after more
than ten years of effort did Ruskin finally make up his mind that,
though he could write fluent and melodious verse, he was not a poet.
The early prose pieces, being on the true line of development, are
of superior interest to the early verses. Some of these prose pieces
were included in On the old Road, and a complete series, The
Poetry of Architecture, was separately reprinted in 1892. Con-
sidering the boyish years of the writer, the early essays reveal, in
a very remarkable degree, the mature Ruskin. He liked to lay
a scientific foundation for his aesthetic theories; and the embryo
## p. 150 (#180) ############################################
150
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose [CH.
man of science is shown in the titles of three early papers-
Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhine,
Note on the Perforation of a Leaden Pipe by Rats and Facts
and Considerations on the Strata of Mont Blanc. Again, in The
Poetry of Architecture, some of the leading principles which were
afterwards developed in The Seven Lamps of Architecture and in
The Stones of Venice are already taught; and, above all, the
very
title of that early work asserts the central principle of all his
aesthetic writings. What he means by the poetry of architecture
is, he explains in the sub-title, 'the architecture of the nations of
Europe considered in its association with natural scenery and
national character. ' In Modern Painters, he declares that the
distinctive character of his writings is their bringing everything
to a root in human passion or human life. This distinctive
character, then, is present from the start; and no student of
Ruskin can doubt that it remains present to the end. When we
turn from substance to style, we find the same harmony between
these early essays and the best known of Ruskin's aesthetic
treatises. Alike in diction, in structure and cadence of sentences
and in the love of such ornaments as alliteration, the boy is father
to the man.
More remarkable, however, than any of the published articles,
as an anticipation of the future Ruskin, was a paper written, in
1836, in answer to a ribald criticism in Blackwood's Magazine of
the paintings exhibited by Turner in that year. As Turner 'never
moved in these matters, the paper was not then printed ; and,
when Ruskin came to write Praeterita, he could find no fragment
of it. But he there refers to it as 'the first chapter of Modern
Painters,' and the copy subsequently discovered, which is printed
in the library edition of his writings, proves that, at seventeen, he
was already, to a surprising degree, master of the principles he
enunciated in that work. The gradual expansion of the plan of
Modern Painters is highly characteristic of Ruskin. In con-
ception, at first, merely a pamphlet in answer to an objectionable
critique, it becomes a reasoned examination of a great artist,
and, finally, a treatise on art based upon such a view of art that
almost anything in heaven or earth becomes relevant. Systematic
it is not, although there is a show of system. Ruskin's mind was,
naturally, discursive, and it is fortunate that he was compelled to
follow the bent of his mind. The book would have been much
less rich than it is had it been really systematic. The success
of the first volume was so great, and the vistas of work which
## p. 151 (#181) ############################################
a
111]
Modern Painters
151
it opened out before him were so vast, that the general lines
of Ruskin's future activity were practically determined by it.
Seventeen years were to pass before Modern Painters itself
was finished. The journeys, year after year, through France to
Switzerland and Italy not only furnished materials for it, but
opened up ever new vistas. The Seven Lamps of Architecture
and The Stones of Venice were both by-works, undertaken and
carried through while it was still on hand. All three, in their
author's view, were educational works. Modern Painters was
conceived in a mood of black anger' at the ignorance and
insensitiveness of England; the author felt he had a mission to
dispel the ignorance and to pierce the insensitiveness. Archi-
tecture was as little understood as painting ; even those who were
trying to revive Gothic architecture showed, by their actions, that
they knew not what they did. Hence, to expound the nature of
Gothic was as essential for the spiritual welfare of the people as was
the vindication of Turner. Though Ruskin disappointed the hopes
of his parents, who had destined him for the church and who saw
in him a future bishop, he was all his life a preacher. The sense
of duty, growing ever deeper, compelled him to take up fresh
burdens. Thus, in 1850, he intervened on behalf of the pre-
Raphaelites, as, in 1843, he had intervened on behalf of Turner.
In the latter case, his aid was volunteered ; in the former, it was
sought; but, in both, it was given from the same sense of duty.
He, the man who had vision, was bound to remove the scales from
the eyes of the blind. He was all the more bound to the pre-
Raphaelites because, working, in the main, independently of him,
they were putting into practice in their painting the principles
which he was maintaining in his books. Hence, the letters to The
Times on the art of the brotherhood, and the subsequent pam-
phlet on pre-Raphaelitism. Academy Notes, in which, each year, ,
from 1855 to 1859, he somewhat pontifically instructed the faithful
what they must believe concerning contemporary art, were another
outcome of the same spirit. These, however, were strictly within
the province which Ruskin had made his own. Notes on the
Construction of Sheepfolds, issued in the same year with Pre-
Raphaelitism, was much more questionable in every respect.
Ruskin had no such authority in the sphere of theology as he had
in that of art, and the former work showed that he was altogether
incapable of gauging the practical difficulties in the way of a
re-union of the sects.
Yet another development of his activities is shown in the
## p. 152 (#182) ############################################
152
CH
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose [ch.
various series of lectures which he delivered during the sixth
and seventh decades of the nineteenth century, before his official
position as Slade professor of fine art at Oxford made lecturing
part of his business. Probably, the closer contact with his audience
as lecturer than as writer satisfied his hunger for sympathy. It was,
moreover, essential to get all the strength he could upon his side ;
for what with that infernal invention of steam, and gunpowder, I
think the fools may be a puff or barrel or two too many for us. '
He lectured, therefore, in order to enlist recruits in the army of
the wise which was to condense the steam into water and to pour it
upon the gunpowder. His lectures On Architecture and Painting
were delivered in Edinburgh in 1853; The Political Economy of
Art (afterwards included in A Joy for Ever) consisted of two
lectures delivered at Manchester in 1857; and in The Two
Paths were gathered together five lectures which are related by
unity of purpose, though they were delivered at different places.
These lectures were all directly concerned with Ruskin's primary
business, art; but the very title of the second course indicates
the change which was coming over him. He was half serious as
well as half playful when he wrote to Norton that he wanted to
give lectures in all manufacturing towns. He was approaching the
great dividing line of his work and life, which he crossed when,
in 1860, he published both the last volume of Modern Painters
and the five essays afterwards known by the title Unto this Last.
The last volume of Modern Painters had, for the most part,
been written in the winter of 1859–60. While it was passing
through the press, the author was already busy with his revo-
lutionary essays on economics, the first of which appeared in.
The Cornhill Magazine for August. The outcry against these
papers was so great that Thackeray, the editor, at the instance
of the publisher, intimated to Ruskin that the series must be
stopped. The same fate attended the series of essays contributed
in 1862–3, on the invitation of Froude, to Fraser's Magazine.
The fragment afterwards received the title Munera Pulveris. -
The strong opposition aroused by these papers was due, mainly,
to the heterodoxy of Ruskin's opinions. Writing when the
Manchester school was at the height of its power, he flatly
denied its gospel. But another cause operated to increase the
irritation which was felt against him. In the transition from
the criticism of art to the criticism of industry, Ruskin seemed
to break with his own past; and, while his countrymen were now
willing to listen to his exposition of the political economy of the
## p. 153 (#183) ############################################
111]
Ruskin's Economics
153
former, they asked impatiently what he knew about the political
economy of the latter. He had given ground for the question
by the statement in the preface to The Political Economy of Art
that he had never read any author on political economy, except
Adam Smith 1.
Ruskin had to create a public for his economics, as he had
created one for his aesthetic doctrine. But there was no break
and no inconsistency. Evolution there certainly was-an evolution
mainly from within, though influenced by Carlyle. The transition
from art to industry was the natural outcome of Ruskin's doctrine
of art as an expression of the whole life. He knew that life is
social, and he felt that the imperfections and the unreality of
modern art are intimately related to the ugliness of modern
industry. There was, from the first, much in his writings that
might have prepared a close student for the transition. He
had vigorously protested in The Seven Lamps of Architecture
against the uselessness of much of the toil to which the working
classes are condemned. In Modern Painters, he had distin-
guished the lower picturesque from the higher, and declared that
the essence of the difference between them lay in the fact that the
lower picturesque was heartless. Most clearly of all, the last
volume of Modern Painters revealed the drift of his thought.
There, he had condemned the modern monetary asceticism, con-
sisting in the refusal of pleasure and knowledge for the sake of
money’;—that is to say, that inverted asceticism which renounces
the kingdom of heaven in favour of this world, just as medieval
asceticism renounced this world in favour of the kingdom of
heaven; he had maintained that, if all physical exertion were
utilised, no man need ever work more than is good for him ; and,
after Carlyle, he had thrown out for the consideration of a mer-
cantile era the doctrine that the best work, whether of soldier or
sailor, or of spiritual teacher, or of writer or artist, was never
done for pay, but for nothing or for less than nothing—for death.
Just because the development was wholly natural, it proved to
be no mere passing phase. Henceforth, Ruskin's writings and his
practical work alike proclaim him an economist and social reformer
as well as a critic of art. On the practical side, the proof is plain
in the guild of St George; while among his writings there are,
from Unto this Last onwards, two great groups, one in which the
1
It seems probable that this statement was inaccurate, as Ruskin's annotated copy
of Mill's Political Economy is now in the British museum (Cook, vol. 11, p. 12, note 1).
But is there anything in the notes to show the date at which they were written?
## p. 154 (#184) ############################################
154
[CH.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
aesthetic element is most conspicuous, the other in which it is
subordinate to the economic. The increased prominence of the
latter element inevitably influenced Ruskin's style. After Unto
this Last, there is less gorgeousness; but the author's own high
opinion of that volume as a piece of English was justified.
During the years which followed Unto this Last, the conflict
in Ruskin's mind between the aesthetic and the social and economic
interests is unmistakable. On the whole, the latter triumph. The
Queen of the Air belongs to the domain of aesthetics, and so does
the report on the Turner drawings in the National Gallery. In
The Cestus of Aglaia, he laid down the laws of art for the use of
schools. But the laws of art prove to be very close to the laws of
morals; and, in The Ethics of the Dust, which treats of crystallo-
graphy, there is asserted a similarly close connection between
morals and science. In Sesame and Lilies, and in The Crown
of Wild Olive, the predominance of the social over the aesthetic
interest is very evident. The former became at once, as it still
remains, the most popular of all Ruskin's writings, partly, perhaps,
because of the elements of the fanciful and the sentimental in it.
Both these books were collections of lectures ; for Ruskin still
loved to meet an audience. He loved, also, at this time and for
years afterwards, to speak through the medium which brought him
into contact with the largest number. He entered into several news-
paper controversies. These letters to the editor' were afterwards
collected by an Oxford pupil, and published under the title Arrows
of the Chace—a volume full of paradox, but full, also, of sparkling
and memorable sayings. Of these letters, some belong to the
aesthetic, and others to the social, divisions of Ruskin's writings.
The remarkable series entitled Time and Tide by Weare and
Tyne belongs wholly to the social division ; and, apart from the
letters in Fors Clavigera, it was Ruskin's last important contri-
bution, in a direct way, to the subject. Afterwards, he tried in
a practical way, by the guild of St George, to further the ends
he had at heart.
The unfavourable reception of his economic theories had,
probably, caused some discouragement in Ruskin's mind. At
any rate, after Time and Tide and The Queen of the Air, he
turned to a study so far removed from economics as Greek
mythology. He also occupied himself with such tasks as the
production of catalogues of pictures. Then, in 1869, came his
appointment to the post of Slade professor of fine art at
Oxford ; an office to which he was again appointed in 1883.
## p. 155 (#185) ############################################
111]
Ruskin's Lectures.
Fors Clavigera 155
This (without at all extinguishing his social interests, which
were manifested in road-making, street-sweeping and tea-selling,
as well as in other less eccentric ways) gave a decisive impetus
to the aesthetic element in his mind; for the professorship
made aesthetics his business and his duty. He was a busy
and highly successful lecturer, delivering, in the year 1870, the
series afterwards published under the title Lectures on Art, in
which, after four introductory lectures of a general nature, he
dealt with painting; and that on sculpture, entitled Aratra
Pentelici. In the following year, he delivered his lectures On
Landscape, which were not published till 1897, and a much-
debated discourse entitled The Relation between Michael Angelo
and Tintoret. The violent exaggerations of this discourse evoked
vigorous repudiations from more than one authority on art, and
even put some strain upon Ruskin's relations with one or two of
his friends. Before the end of his first tenure of office, he had
delivered, in all, eleven courses of lectures. But, besides lecturing
and teaching through the eye and hand at Oxford, Ruskin con-
ceived it to be his duty to act as a sort of director general in
things of art to all who cared to learn from him ; hence, Mornings
in Florence and St Mark's Rest were conceived by him to be part
of the work of his chair.
Unfortunately for his own health, Ruskin was not content with
the tasks which his enthusiasm for art imposed upon him. Though
the professorship had breathed a new life into his work for art, it
left him still convinced that the problems raised by modern in-
dustry were of vital importance. The guild of St George was
conceived at this period, and, in 1871, he started Fors Clavigera.
By far the greater part of that extraordinary collection of letters,
the most comprehensive and the most characteristic of all Ruskin's
writings, was produced while he was still Slade professor. Every
phase of Ruskin is illustrated in it, except that of the master of
gorgeous English. For insight into the range of Ruskin's style, it
is only necessary to compare the first volume of Modern Painters
with Fors. All through his career, he had been moving consis-
tently, though with variations due to the nature of his theme,
towards greater simplicity. But the simplicity is still eloquent,
and, in Fors, it is wonderfully flexible ; for it has to be adapted
successively to every one of the author's interests and emotions.
Overstrain brought on, in the summer of 1878, a serious attack
of brain fever; and Ruskin never regained his old vigour. He
was active enough, and most discursively active. Science, art,
## p. 156 (#186) ############################################
156
[CH.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
theology, literary criticism, economics, are all treated with more
or less fullness in the writings of the next two or three years.
His re-election to the professorship at Oxford meant more lectures,
those entitled The Art of England and The Pleasures of Eng-
land; but the latter course clearly showed as it proceeded that his
mind, in some degree, had lost its balance. He resigned, once more,
and, for the remaining years of his life, he produced nothing of
importance except the admirable Praeterita. This was finished
in 1889. The years of life wbich still remained to him are best
described by the phrase which he himself applied to the closing
phase of Scott's life-jours de mort.
Ruskin is now passing through that period of depreciation
which seems to be the lot of all writers who, at any part of their
career, have been regarded with exaggerated admiration. Time
was when Ruskin was Sir Oracle on art; now, it is frequently
maintained that his principles are antiquated, that the world can
afford to forget him. It is curious that, in respect of his work as
economist and social reformer, opinion has moved in precisely the
opposite direction. Though probably few, either of statesmen or
of economists, would accept without large reservations the views
advocated by Ruskin, these views have influenced life and legisla-
tion; and those who bear in mind how closely the two sections of
his work were associated in his own mind will doubt whether
the aesthetic teaching can be entirely superseded. It was the
conviction that while life without industry is guilt, industry
without art is brutality, which drove Ruskin to examine the kind
of industry by which the modern world escapes guilt-only to fall
into brutality. At any rate, the intense humanity which inspires
all Ruskin's work, economic and aesthetic alike, can never become
antiquated. A false conception of aesthetic principle is fatal to
him who holds that art exists for art's sake, but not necessarily
to him who holds that the end of art is to raise life from brutality
to graciousness.
Nearly all our subsequent aesthetic criticism is derived from,
or more or less deeply influenced by, Ruskin. Benjamin Robert
Haydon stands quite apart from him. Though a far older man
than Ruskin, Haydon, as the author of printed works, comes after
him in chronological order; for, even Haydon's Lectures on
Painting and Design, the earliest of which was delivered in 1835,
was not published till near the close of his life; and the fascinating
Autobiography, which is his sole title to literary fame, was
## p. 157 (#187) ############################################
111] Haydon. Mrs Jameson. Symonds 157
posthumous. Ruskin's scathing judgment on Haydon as an artist
is well known. In Modern Painters, he singles out Haydon and
Barry as examples of the desire of greatness as such, or rather
of what appears great to indolence and vanity, and states that
nothing except disgrace and misguidance will ever be gathered
from such work' as theirs. Whether this be so or not, the Auto-
biography is entirely unaffected. It has that value which must
always belong to any sincere revelation of a human soul, and takes
a very high rank in that delightful class of books which Ruskin
himself afterwards enriched by his charming Praeterita. Haydon's
Autobiography is not, however, except in a very slight degree, a
work of aesthetic criticism, and he is connected with this group
rather through his paint-brush than through his pen.
It was otherwise with Anna Brownell Jameson. She, too, was
greatly senior to Ruskin, and had made a name as a miscellaneous
author while he was still a boy. The facility of her style makes
her volumes pleasant reading, and her analyses of Shakespeare's
heroines won, and have retained, as they deserve, considerable
popularity. But the very title of one of her works, The Loves of
the Poets, is suggestive of superficiality and popularity in the
less favourable sense; and the fact that, in her Characteristics of
Women, she, without qualification, ranks lady Macbeth as in-
tellectually the superior of her husband, proves the suspicion to be
well founded. She was in the field before Ruskin, but she was
deeply influenced by him, and her various books on different groups
of legends and legendary art bear his mark. Ruskin, however, in
Praeterita, has pronounced a characteristically candid and gently
satirical judgment upon her.
But it was in Ruskin's own university that the aesthetic school
took root, though its flowers and its fruit were not precisely what
he would have desired. The disciples never gave that weight to
ethics which the master desired, and, as time went on, they paid it
less, rather than more, attention. Of this group, John Addington
Symonds may be described as an outlying member, and his principal
work, Renaissance in Italy, illustrates the weakness of the school
to which he belonged. It is lacking in unity and is one-sided,
not only in the sense that it dwells upon art and passes lightly
over other factors in the history of the period, but, in the treat-
ment of art itself, emphasis is laid upon the emotional element at
the expense of the intellectual. Symonds's other works, likewise,
fall short of greatness. His poems are accomplished rather than
inspired. His literary monographs and criticisms do not rise
>
## p. 158 (#188) ############################################
158 Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
[CH.
much above the average of their kind; and, sometimes, as in
Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama, they are not
sufficiently thorough on the side of scholarship. Symonds's prose
style is nearly always too highwrought and too diffuse.
On a far higher plane of literature stands Walter Pater; but
he, though he was influenced by Ruskin, is singularly different
from the elder writer, and the difference sheds back a light upon
the master's theories. Ruskin, bowed with sorrows though he was,
remained unconquerably optimistic, and, so long as he was capable
of work, he laboured with even excessive hopefulness at schemes
of social regeneration. Pater retires from the dust of con-
flict into an artistic seclusion. The conclusion of his Studies
in the History of the Renaissance is, in the highest degree,
significant. Its teaching is that, to beings like men, beings under
sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve, the love
of art for art's sake is the highest form of wisdom. 'For art comes
to you, proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality
to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments'
sake. ' The Oscar Wilde development had not the good will of
Pater any more than that of Ruskin; but it logically follows from
Pater's principle.
Pater was one of the most fastidious of literary artists. By his
artistic theory he was driven to seek perfection of style. If art
for art's sake is the highest thing of all, if life is a series of
moments and its aim is to make each moment as exquisite as it
can be made, it follows that each sentence, in a sense, is an
end in itself. The result is a style beautiful indeed-at its best
very beautiful—but overlaboured. The purpose partly defeats
itself. The whole suffers from the excessive pains bestowed upon
the parts, and the reader shares the oppression felt by the writer.
Pater's literary career began with the essay entitled Winckel-
mann, which he contributed, in 1867, to The Westminster Review,
and this, with other papers contributed to periodicals, constituted
the volume which was published in 1873. In the second edition,
the conclusion which has been quoted above was omitted, because
Pater felt that it might mislead young men. It was, however,
subsequently restored; and the conceptions it indicates form the
substance of the fine romance, Marius the Epicurean, which shows
clearly that Pater's own epicureanism was of a very noble sort, but
which fails, like every form of epicureanism, to show why any one
kind of pleasure should be the pleasure of all. Imaginary
Portraits followed, and then Appreciations, Plato and Platonism
## p. 159 (#189) ############################################
111] Walter Pater. Hugh Miller 159
and the charming 'imaginary portrait,' The Child in the House.
This was the last volume published during Pater's life, but several
followed it posthumously. Pater gave a colour of his own to
everything he touched. His criticism reveals so much of himself
that the question is naturally suggested, whether it reveals as
much of the artist or the writer criticised. But it must be remem-
bered that the criticism that does not carry the atmosphere of
personality is a singularly dull affair; and, also, that Pater was un-
usually well endowed with both the emotional and the intellectual
gifts of the critic. There are few whose judgments are deserving
of closer attention.
While Pater represented the aesthetic movement in its most
earnest phase, Oscar Wilde gave utterance to its principles in
the language of persiflage. In verse and in prose, in lyrics, in
'trivial comedies for serious people' that sparkled with wit, in
essays often bright with raillery and occasionally weighty with
thought, he proved that he possessed a remarkably varied genius.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis are the product
of his tragic overthrow, and are well worth all that he had pre-
viously written.
Of the ill-defined genus miscellaneous prose, there is no
species more delightful than that of the essay in the stricter
sense of the word, the essay which is the expression of a mood
rather than, like Macaulay's, a fragment of history, or, like
Matthew Arnold's, a fragment of criticism. Quite a considerable
group of essayists in this stricter sense belongs to the Victorian
period. The eldest of the group were Hugh Miller and Robert
Chambers, both born in 1802, the one in the north, and the
other in the south, of Scotland, both, ultimately, editors in Edin-
burgh. The most valuable of Miller's contributions to journalism
have been gathered into books which have a coherence of their
own, like The Old Red Sandstone and the delightful auto-
biography My Schools and Schoolmasters; but much still remains
in the form of scattered essays, of which one volume was published
in 1862 and another in 1870. Science, however, on the one hand,
and religious controversy, on the other, absorbed most of Miller's
energy, and, though he was the greater writer of the two, left him
a smaller place, in this particular sphere, than Robert Chambers,
the founder, in conjunction with his elder brother William, of
Chambers's Journal. Both the brothers were busy writers, and
the younger had a gift of humour which served him in good stead
in the numerous essays which he contributed to his own journal.
a
## p. 160 (#190) ############################################
160
[ch.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
It was to Hugh Miller's journal The Witness that John Brown
contributed his first noteworthy paper. But, though Brown
became a man of letters, he never ceased to be a physician. He is
doctor in the medical sense as unalterably as Samuel Johnson is
doctor in the academic sense. It seems to have been partly by
accident, and partly through domestic insistence and encourage-
ment, that Brown gradually became a writer as well as a physician.
Hence, his entry was late and his production always remained
leisurely. His earliest paper in The Witness appeared in 1846,
and the total of his work fills only three small volumes. It is
fortunate for Brown's fame that the fact is so. His genius was
beautiful and delicate rather than robust, and the characteristic
charm of his essays is not of a sort that is susceptible of great
expansion or of indefinite repetition. The essayists of the personal
and confidential type are never voluminous writers. There is,
nevertheless, considerable variety in Brown's work. His papers
on medical subjects afford pleasant and profitable reading; he is
an excellent critic both of art and of literature; he shows great
sensitiveness to natural beauty and great power of describing
it. But he is happiest of all when he deals with the dog. Here,
he is not only unsurpassed but unequalled. The most deservedly
famous of all his writings is the beautiful story Rab and his
Friends. But he has delineated many dogs besides Rab, and
always admirably.
While Brown was born a citizen of the Scottish capital,
Alexander Smith only became a citizen by adoption. Though
seldom read, he is still known by name as one of the 'spasmodic'
poets; but, until lately, it was half forgotten that he was also a
skilful writer of prose, author of an extremely pleasant story, of
the most readable of guide-books, if A Summer in Skye may be
degraded by that description, and, above all, of Dreamthorp, one
of the finest volumes of essays since Lamb's. The friends who,
shortly after his death, predicted that he would take rank below
only a few of the greatest of British essayists, were not bad critics.
Smith had the temperament of the essayist and the clearest possible
understanding of the principles of the form of art which the
essayist attempts. Nowhere in our literature is there a better
exposition of the essay as conceived and written by Montaigne
than in the second essay of Dreamthorp, On the Writing of
Essays; and there are not many better examples of 'atmosphere
than the title essay.
On a much lower plane stand Smith's two contemporaries,
## p. 161 (#191) ############################################
111]
Robert Louis Stevenson
161
A. K. H. Boyd and John Skelton. Boyd first became widely
known through the volume of pleasant but garrulous and
unsubstantial essays entitled Recreations of a Country Parson,
which he had contributed to Fraser's Magazine. It was the
earliest of many volumes which continued to appear at short
intervals down to 1896, when The Last Years of St Andrews was
published. There was a stronger fibre in Skelton, whose pseu-
donym Shirley was subscribed to some of the most readable of
the papers contributed to Fraser's Magazine and Blackwood's
Magazine during the latter half of the nineteenth century. From
his earliest production Nugae Criticae to The Table Talk of
Shirley, Skelton showed great skill as an essayist, blending in a
rare degree the love of nature with the love of books, and im-
parting both to the reader through a style redolent of the writer's
own personality. Skelton was a historian as well as an essayist.
Though he is, perhaps, sometimes advocate rather than judge in
his essays and books on Mary queen of Scots, they who most
widely differ from him in opinion must be sensible of, and grateful
for, the charm of his presentation of the case.
Of all this group, the greatest was Robert Louis Stevenson?
Versatility was one of Stevenson’s most conspicuous qualities, for,
besides being the foremost essayist since Lamb and a master of
fiction, whether in the form of romance or in that of short
story, he was also a dramatist and a poet. The essay, however,
was the form in which he first gave promise of his future distinc-
tion, and the publication of Ordered South may be regarded as
his real entrance upon literature. Ordered South lifts the veil
from Stevenson's life and gives insight into conditions which
profoundly affected all his work. It is the essay of an invalid,
and an invalid Stevenson was destined to remain till the end.
But he was an invalid with the spirit of a robust adventurer.
A victim to tuberculosis, who, at times, could scarcely breathe
and who seemed to need all his energies in order merely to live,
he was a lover of the sea and a daring voyager, and, long after he
had reached manhood, still played, with tireless zest, a war-game
of his own invention. In his case, broken health did not quench,
but rather stimulated, the heroic in his nature. Hence, feeble as
was his hold on life, in forty-four years he accomplished far more
than the vast majority of those who live the full span in the en-
joyment of vigorous health. The body was weak, but the spirit
was indomitable. It was the eagerness of his spirit and his keen
1 See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. vi.
11
E. L. XIV.
CH. III.
## p. 162 (#192) ############################################
162
[CH.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
sympathy with men of action that saved Stevenson from the be-
setting sin of the artist in words, the temptation to subordinate
meaning to sound.
It was not until the publication of Treasure Island as a
separate volume in 1883 that Stevenson was generally recognised
as a great writer; but, prior to that, he had written and published
some short stories and many essays. The records of personal
experience which are embodied in An Inland Voyage and in
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes are essentially essays.
Fugitive papers were gathered into volumes, intimate and con-
fidential, as in Virginibus Puerisque, or critical, as in Familiar
Studies of Men and Books. Both in matter and in manner
they were excellent, but they did not make their author
famous. Other volumes, akin in spirit and substance, were
added in later years—fragments of autobiography and travel,
such as The Amateur Emigrant, The Silverado Squatters
and in the South Seas, and collections of miscellaneous
In
papers, such as Memories and Portraits and Across the Plains.
In all his work of this class Stevenson is easy, graceful and
friendly, except on occasion, when, as in A Christmas Sermon,
the tone is too lofty for these adjectives. But there, too, he
.
is intimate, and there, perhaps more clearly than anywhere
else, he reveals the moral interest which underlies most of
his work.
The body of short stories grew along with the essays, and
Stevenson was a master of story-craft no less than of essay-craft.
He never surpassed some of his earlier tales : The Pavilion
on the Links and Thrawn Janet both appeared before Treasure
Island. But, among English-speaking people, it is difficult to
make a great reputation out of short stories. The stories pub-
lished under the title The New Arabian Nights were supposed
to be responsible for the unpopularity and failure of London,
the periodical in which they originally appeared. Stevenson
might, therefore, have added masterpieces such as Markheim
and The Beach of Falesa, and still have remained obscure. But,
after Treasure Island, he was obscure no longer, and the brilliant
success of that excellent story for boys won readers for the essays
and the short stories who, save for it, would have paid no heed
to them. It made Stevenson a prosperous man, and did much
to determine the direction of his subsequent efforts. It was
followed by a series of romances—Kidnapped, with its sequel
Catriona, The Black Arrow, The Master of Ballantrae and
## p. 163 (#193) ############################################
111]
Stevenson,
Rands
163
others, down to his masterpiece Weir of Hermiston and the un-
finished St Ives. In these romances, Stevenson is at his best, like
Scott, when he is dealing with his native land ; but a comparison
with the Waverley novels shows that, fine as his work is, it falls
decidedly short of the greatest. Only in Weir of Hermiston does
he for a moment rival Scott. Stevenson was growing till he
died, and the wonderful creation of the old judge, one of the
best drawn characters in prose fiction, deepens the regret that
his days were numbered. Like Dickens, he had the excellent
habit of identifying himself with his characters, and this, no doubt,
explains his success. He acted their parts while he dictated, and
imitated their voices.
In other departments, Stevenson's work was less excellent.
The dramas wherein he collaborated with Henley were not very
successful ; but it must be added that their failure was largely
due to imperfect acquaintance with the conditions of the theatre.
Both writers were too highly gifted to produce work destitute of
literary merit, and Beau Austin, in particular, seems, from this
point of view, to deserve more success than it won.
Stevenson has been called the laureate of the nursery, but the
title has also been claimed for William Brighty Rands; and it
seems more justly to belong to the elder writer. Certainly,
Rands preceded Stevenson, and the latter has nothing finer than
Rands's 'Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World. From 1864
onwards, in Lilliput Levee, Lilliput Revels, Lilliput Lectures and
Lilliput Legends, in verse and in prose, Rands was second only to
Lewis Carroll and Juliana Horatia Ewing in the production of
those books about childhood and for childhood, which are among
the most striking features of recent English literature. He wrote
and wrote well, for adults as well as for children. His essays,
Tangled Talk, are, it is true, disappointing ; but his Chaucer's
England, though not a work of profound learning, is a very
interesting book; and his Henry Holbeach, Student in Life and
Philosophy, proves that he was a thinker as well as a skilful
writer. The uncertainty of the judgment of contemporaries is
vividly illustrated by the fact that this striking book passed
almost unnoticed and remains unknown except to students, while
Sir Arthur Helps's commonplace Friends in Council, which is also
the work of a student in life and philosophy,' won for its author
a high place among writers of the second grade. Helps attempted
history, the drama and prose fiction, as well as the dialogue on
social questions by which he won his fame. His histories are
a
11-2
## p. 164 (#194) ############################################
164
[CH.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
treated elsewhere? His dramas are forgotten. His Realmah
resembles the works of Disraeli in that it is partly political, but
it is not, like them, a document of historical significance. His
Brevia, a collection of short essays and aphorisms, makes con-
spicuous that lack of substance which is evident in Friends in
Council. This charge cannot be brought against the thought of
William Rathbone Greg, whose Creed of Christendom, in spite of
its sympathetic moderation, in 1851 fluttered the dove-cots of
orthodoxy. Enigmas of Life, fully twenty years later, testified
to his permanent interest in the ultimate problems of existence.
The expression is sometimes striking, but the principal charm of
the book arises from the atmosphere of sincerity which pervades
it. Greg was a philosophical politician, as well as a philosophical
student of religion ; and, in Rocks Ahead and Mistaken Aims
and attainable Ideals of the Artizan Classes, and in a number
of essays, he showed himself to be by no means easy in mind as to
the tendency of the times. Like Bagehot, he saw that democracy
was inevitable, and, like Bagehot, he felt that the problem how to
give the masses their due share of power without making them
all-powerful was still unsolved.
The nursery work of Rands links on, at one point, to the work
of Andrew Lang’, whose many-coloured fairy books were, of course,
not of his own composition, but gathered out of many lands and
many ages in the course of his studies in mythology and folk-lore.
Lang seemed to have all the necessary gifts of the essayist; yet,
already, his essays have lost somewhat of their flavour. Only now
and then, as in the lightly humorous philosophy of prefaces in the
preface to The Orange Fairy Book, does Lang strike the true
note firmly; and he has not enough of this quality to keep his
l
essays in permanent remembrance. He dissipated his powers and
attempted too much. Folk-lore, the occult, history, the Homeric
question, literary criticism—in all he was active. Under such
conditions, it was scarcely possible to be quite first-rate in any
department. Specialists in each could point out his mistakes;
but it remains much to his credit that he never failed to make
himself interesting. The fact that, whether right or wrong, he is
interesting in every page of his short sketch of English literature
is not the least striking illustration of this power.
Two 'rolling stones,' both of whom gathered moss, as the
elder hinted in the title of one of his books, were Laurence
i See, ante, chap. 11.
? See, ante, chap. II, and vol. XIII, chap. vi.
## p. 165 (#195) ############################################
IN]
Oliphant. Hearn
165
Oliphant and Lafcadio Hearn. Oliphant's books bear testimony
to his wanderings. His earliest volume dealt with Khatmanda ;
and his next, The Russian Shores of the Black Sea, caused him
to be consulted when the Crimean war broke out. In two wars,
he acted as correspondent of The Times. He was in Japan while
Japan was still in the medieval stage, and nearly lost his life in an
attack in which the weapon of the assailant was a two-handed
sword. So stirring a life afforded rich materials for various
lively narratives from his pen, and for the essays which were
gathered up near the close of his life in Episodes in a Life of
Adventure. But the most extraordinary episode of all was
Oliphant's subjection to the 'prophet' Thomas Lake Harris,
whom the disciple believed to be not only a prophet, but the
greatest poet of the age,' and to whom he surrendered the whole
of his property. One outcome of this discipleship was Sympneu-
mata, a singular book, the joint composition of Oliphant and his
wife, who both wrote, or believed that they wrote, under the
dictation of a spirit. Other products were of a very different
sort; for Oliphant seems to have united with this trait of enthu-
siasm a marked talent for business, which the prophet was shrewd
enough to employ for his own benefit. Hence, The Autobiography
of a Joint-Stock Company, in which Oliphant embodied the
knowledge he had gained of the methods of American financiers.
In the literary sense, however, Oliphant's most valuable work was
the satiric fiction Piccadilly, which shows him to have been a keen
observer and a penetrating critic of the society of his time.
Long afterwards, he returned to the realm of fiction in Altiora
Peto, and proved that he still retained his old fineness of touch.
Lafcadio Hearn began his career as a contributor to two
Cincinnati journals, but it was a subsequent residence at St Pierre,
Martinique, that gave him the materials for his first noteworthy
work, Two Years in the French West Indies. In this, he showed
that power to receive and faithfully to reproduce impressions,
which was his special gift; and his position in literature must
depend upon this gift as it was exercised in relation to Japan,
whither he migrated in 1891. Probably no one can instruct
the man of the west about what Japan was before the completion
of the process of modernisation so well as Hearn ; but that he
does so on the strength of mere impression is shown by the fact
that, though he married a Japanese wife, he could neither speak
to her or to his children in their own language, nor, after a residence
of fourteen years, so much as read a Japanese newspaper. What
a
## p. 166 (#196) ############################################
166
сн
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose [CH. III
is valuable in his work is not his reasoned opinions, but the feeling
produced in his soul by what he saw and heard ; and it is im-
portant to notice, as Gould insists, that what he saw was little
more than a blur of colour; for he was ‘probably the most myoptic
literary man that has existed. ' Hence, the best of the Japanese
books is the first, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, because in it
he was forced to rely almost wholly on impression. In his later
volumes, he reacts on the impressions and injures them. For this
reason, the latest, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, though
the most ambitious—for it is an attempt to present in one lordly
dish the cream of all he had learnt about Japan—is far from being
equal to those early glimpses. Besides scenes, Hearn produced
tales, both in America and in the Japanese period. He betrays
in them an unhealthy love of the gruesome; but he could, on
occasion, rise to a high level, as he proved by his masterpiece in
this form, the story of Karma.
While Oliphant and Hearn found their literary capital in the
distant and unfamiliar, the sphere of Richard Jefferies was, as the
title of one of his volumes indicates, the fields and the hedgerows
around us. His task was to show that the unfamiliar lay beneath
men's eyes. He belongs to the class of field naturalists like
White of Selborne, and, in days more recent than even those of
Jefferies, Denham Jordan, who is better known by his pen-name
'A Son of the Marshes. ' But Jefferies was more ambitious than they
and wider in his range. In Hodge and his Master, he deals with
the human element in rural life; but he does not show that complete
comprehension which he shows of beast and bird and flower. His
name first became familiar through The Gamekeeper at Home ;
and, for the ten years of life which remained to him, he was a
diligent writer. All who are qualified to judge, testify to his
accuracy of observation as recorded in volume after volume, down
to Field and Hedgerow, which appeared after his death ; but,
while the style is good, there is a marked tendency to catalogue
minute facts which, doubtless, have a value as natural history, but
hardly any from the point of view of literature. On the other
hand, a certain vein of poetry is present in all the works of
Jefferies. It is especially rich in Wood Magic, and it gives charm
to the fine spiritual autobiography, The Story of My Heart.
## p. 167 (#197) ############################################
CHAPTER IV
THE GROWTH OF JOURNALISM
To pass from the conditions recorded in the chapter entitled
'The Beginnings of English Journalism' to those with which
the close of the nineteenth century was familiar, is almost like
being carried on the magic carpet of oriental romance from the
middle of the Sahara to the bustling, electricity-lighted thorough-
fares of a modern European capital. The chapter to which
reference is made treats of the hand-written letter in which
some, more or less professional, observer, for the benefit of a
few known subscribers in the country, detailed whatever gossip
he was able to pick up in the taverns and streets of London. His
lineal descendants are still to be seen in the writers of the London
letter which figures in the columns of nearly every daily provincial
paper, and finds, latterly, a counterpart in several of the journals
established in London. The information in these London letters
differs, for the most part, from that which is to be obtained in
the ordinary news columns, and has nothing in common with the
reasoned leading article, in which is discussed the uppermost
political incident of the day. The chapter above referred to took
its readers from these manuscript letters through various experi-
ments in printed news-books and sheets of intelligence, issued by,
or in behalf of, groups of politicians, or news purveyors, to the
establishment of The London Gazette and the few occasional
journals which made their appearance towards the end of the
seventeenth century. The transition from a small pamphlet
containing some definite piece of news, and bearing an appropriate
title, to the sheet published periodically under a distinctive and
'regularly repeated name, carrying not one but a great variety of
collected items of news, was, in itself, great; but, when the change
was brought about, the convenience and attractiveness of it
ensured permanence.
i See, ante, vol. vii, chap. xv.
## p. 168 (#198) ############################################
168
[CH.
The Growth of Journalism
>
There was even a public ready for the news writer. Howell,
in his Familiar Letters, tells that the ploughman, the cobbler
and the porter would spare no effort to educate their children,
and the records of the university of Cambridge show numerous
instances of the sons of husbandmen being entered as students.
Apart, then, from the necessity to the merchant and trader of being
acquainted with current events, it is natural that the country,
as a whole, should wish to be supplied with news. Dr Johnson
characterised English common folk as more educated, politically,
than the people of other countries, and this because of the
popularity of newspapers. The extent of the influence of the
cheap newspaper in the early part of the eighteenth century is
shown by the petition of publishers against the legislation
described by Swift as ruining Grub street by the imposition
of a tax which extinguished all halfpenny newspapers and many
of the more highly priced. It was urged that halfpenny news-
papers were used very largely throughout the country as a means
of teaching children to read, and that, without them, there would
be a failure in this respect. In these conditions, statesmen could
not fail to recognise that the newspaper press might be made to
serve their purposes, and they did not hesitate to employ men of
marked ability and political knowledge to supplement or give
finish to the work of the professional inhabitants of Grub street.
For these higher services, payment was made, sometimes in coin-
Swift says that he refused £50 offered to him by Harley in 1710–11
-and, otherwise, by statę or church preferment, or by admission
to social comradeship. Publishers of newspapers, also, found it
to their profit to employ writers who could mix the useful with the
pleasant.
The growth of journalism in the eighteenth century was ex-
pedited by Palmer's establishment of a series of stage coaches,
leaving London at stated hours and carrying parcels as well as
passengers, distribution being thus much more rapid and regular
than when it depended upon the older waggon. Meanwhile, news-
papers had to struggle against the hand of authority. Prose-
cutions for libel were numerous, and daring writers had to stand in
the pillory, besides being imprisoned and fined. Parliament, in
especial, was jealous of the news collector; though, now and
again, some member might protest that the constituencies had a
right to know how their parliamentary representatives spoke and
voted, leading politicians and the houses, as a whole, resented,
i Section viii, Letter viri (circa 1646).
## p. 169 (#199) ############################################
IV] Eighteenth Century Newspapers 169
as breaches of privilege, any account of their proceedings, and
Cave, one of the earliest and most celebrated of parliamentary
reporters, recorded the discussions as if they took place in China,
referring to individual statesmen by entirely fictitious names,
which, like those employed in Gulliver's Travels, were, doubtless,
understood by very many readers. Nor were prosecutions for the
publication of parliamentary reports confined to London. Quite
early in the eighteenth century, some of the leading provincial
cities and boroughs could boast their own newspapers.
rarely fails to command respect and to provoke thought. At the
worst, he is piquant. He was generous in his criticism of con-
temporaries—with exceptions. As regards writers just before his
own time, he is enthusiastic about Dickens and Tennyson, but
cold about Thackeray. Henley's longer critical essays, which
have been gathered together in the collected edition of his works,
display the same characteristics. The most remarkable of them,
unquestionably, is the brilliant essay originally contributed to The
Centenary Burns. It is thorough in scholarship, it is admirably
written, it has every gift save that of love.
The nearest akin to literary critics were writers of the
aesthetic group, of whom John Ruskin was the greatest. Ruskin
,
is one of the most voluminous and, superficially viewed, one of
the most miscellaneous, of English writers. Verse and prose,
criticism-aesthetic, literary, social and political-economics,
autobiography, all are represented. The thought is sometimes
dressed in royal purple and adorned with gold embroidery, some-
times clothed as simply as ever was village maiden. In opinion,
again superficially viewed, he is one of the least consistent.
Convictions expressed with the utmost confidence in the first
edition of a book are scornfully renounced in the second. Yet,
Ruskin will never be understood unless the truth be grasped
that there is a unity underlying all his diversity, and that, in
spite of contradictions on this point and on that, no writer, in
essentials, is more consistent. There is evolution from the first
volume of Modern Painters to Fors Clavigera, and to the last
volume of Praeterita; but there is no fundamental change. Even
the gulf which seems to divide the concluding volume of Modern
Painters, with its analysis of leaf beauty and of cloud beauty,
from Unto this Last, with its discussion of the nature of wealth,
proves, on examination, to be no gulf at all.
Ruskin's father had good taste both in literature and in art,
and fostered these tastes in his son. To his mother was due that
familiar knowledge of the Bible which is shown in every one of
## p. 149 (#179) ############################################
111] · Ruskin's Early Writings 149
his works. She and her son read it together from beginning to
end, turning to Genesis again as soon as they had reached the
close of the Apocalypse. But there was a disadvantage as well
as an advantage in these intimate family relationships. In a
sense, Ruskin was never sui juris so long as his parents lived ;
and, affectionate as were his feelings for them, before the end he
had begun to chafe at their control as a thing almost intolerably
irksome. In his maturity, Ruskin became a heretic in religion
and a revolutionary in economics, while his father was orthodox
on both points.
In his youth, however, notwithstanding the mistake of over-
indulgence and excessive protective care, Ruskin gained enor-
mously from the devotion of his parents. The early journeys
.
of mingled business and pleasure in England supplied much food
for eye and mind; and, when Prout's Sketches in Flanders and
Germany suggested a longer tour, it was promptly undertaken.
Similar tours followed, year after year. If, when he went to Oxford
in 1837, Ruskin was ill equipped in respect of the ordinary sub-
jects of study, he already knew a great deal more than most of his
teachers about the things that, for him, were important. He had
laid deep and sure the foundations of Modern Painters, the first
volume of which was published in 1843; and repeated visits to
the continent in after years enriched him with materials for the
subsequent volumes, and for much of his other work as well.
Even before the appearance of the first volume of Modern
Painters, Ruskin was a practised writer. From 1834 onwards,
he was a fairly active contributor, in prose to Loudon's Magazine
of Natural History and Architectural Magazine, and in verse to
Friendship's Offering and The London Monthly Miscellany.
The verses, with the Newdigate prize poem Salsette and Ele-
phanta, and with later contributions to The Keepsake and other
compilations, were gathered together and reprinted more than half
a century after most of them were written. Not till after more
than ten years of effort did Ruskin finally make up his mind that,
though he could write fluent and melodious verse, he was not a poet.
The early prose pieces, being on the true line of development, are
of superior interest to the early verses. Some of these prose pieces
were included in On the old Road, and a complete series, The
Poetry of Architecture, was separately reprinted in 1892. Con-
sidering the boyish years of the writer, the early essays reveal, in
a very remarkable degree, the mature Ruskin. He liked to lay
a scientific foundation for his aesthetic theories; and the embryo
## p. 150 (#180) ############################################
150
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose [CH.
man of science is shown in the titles of three early papers-
Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhine,
Note on the Perforation of a Leaden Pipe by Rats and Facts
and Considerations on the Strata of Mont Blanc. Again, in The
Poetry of Architecture, some of the leading principles which were
afterwards developed in The Seven Lamps of Architecture and in
The Stones of Venice are already taught; and, above all, the
very
title of that early work asserts the central principle of all his
aesthetic writings. What he means by the poetry of architecture
is, he explains in the sub-title, 'the architecture of the nations of
Europe considered in its association with natural scenery and
national character. ' In Modern Painters, he declares that the
distinctive character of his writings is their bringing everything
to a root in human passion or human life. This distinctive
character, then, is present from the start; and no student of
Ruskin can doubt that it remains present to the end. When we
turn from substance to style, we find the same harmony between
these early essays and the best known of Ruskin's aesthetic
treatises. Alike in diction, in structure and cadence of sentences
and in the love of such ornaments as alliteration, the boy is father
to the man.
More remarkable, however, than any of the published articles,
as an anticipation of the future Ruskin, was a paper written, in
1836, in answer to a ribald criticism in Blackwood's Magazine of
the paintings exhibited by Turner in that year. As Turner 'never
moved in these matters, the paper was not then printed ; and,
when Ruskin came to write Praeterita, he could find no fragment
of it. But he there refers to it as 'the first chapter of Modern
Painters,' and the copy subsequently discovered, which is printed
in the library edition of his writings, proves that, at seventeen, he
was already, to a surprising degree, master of the principles he
enunciated in that work. The gradual expansion of the plan of
Modern Painters is highly characteristic of Ruskin. In con-
ception, at first, merely a pamphlet in answer to an objectionable
critique, it becomes a reasoned examination of a great artist,
and, finally, a treatise on art based upon such a view of art that
almost anything in heaven or earth becomes relevant. Systematic
it is not, although there is a show of system. Ruskin's mind was,
naturally, discursive, and it is fortunate that he was compelled to
follow the bent of his mind. The book would have been much
less rich than it is had it been really systematic. The success
of the first volume was so great, and the vistas of work which
## p. 151 (#181) ############################################
a
111]
Modern Painters
151
it opened out before him were so vast, that the general lines
of Ruskin's future activity were practically determined by it.
Seventeen years were to pass before Modern Painters itself
was finished. The journeys, year after year, through France to
Switzerland and Italy not only furnished materials for it, but
opened up ever new vistas. The Seven Lamps of Architecture
and The Stones of Venice were both by-works, undertaken and
carried through while it was still on hand. All three, in their
author's view, were educational works. Modern Painters was
conceived in a mood of black anger' at the ignorance and
insensitiveness of England; the author felt he had a mission to
dispel the ignorance and to pierce the insensitiveness. Archi-
tecture was as little understood as painting ; even those who were
trying to revive Gothic architecture showed, by their actions, that
they knew not what they did. Hence, to expound the nature of
Gothic was as essential for the spiritual welfare of the people as was
the vindication of Turner. Though Ruskin disappointed the hopes
of his parents, who had destined him for the church and who saw
in him a future bishop, he was all his life a preacher. The sense
of duty, growing ever deeper, compelled him to take up fresh
burdens. Thus, in 1850, he intervened on behalf of the pre-
Raphaelites, as, in 1843, he had intervened on behalf of Turner.
In the latter case, his aid was volunteered ; in the former, it was
sought; but, in both, it was given from the same sense of duty.
He, the man who had vision, was bound to remove the scales from
the eyes of the blind. He was all the more bound to the pre-
Raphaelites because, working, in the main, independently of him,
they were putting into practice in their painting the principles
which he was maintaining in his books. Hence, the letters to The
Times on the art of the brotherhood, and the subsequent pam-
phlet on pre-Raphaelitism. Academy Notes, in which, each year, ,
from 1855 to 1859, he somewhat pontifically instructed the faithful
what they must believe concerning contemporary art, were another
outcome of the same spirit. These, however, were strictly within
the province which Ruskin had made his own. Notes on the
Construction of Sheepfolds, issued in the same year with Pre-
Raphaelitism, was much more questionable in every respect.
Ruskin had no such authority in the sphere of theology as he had
in that of art, and the former work showed that he was altogether
incapable of gauging the practical difficulties in the way of a
re-union of the sects.
Yet another development of his activities is shown in the
## p. 152 (#182) ############################################
152
CH
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose [ch.
various series of lectures which he delivered during the sixth
and seventh decades of the nineteenth century, before his official
position as Slade professor of fine art at Oxford made lecturing
part of his business. Probably, the closer contact with his audience
as lecturer than as writer satisfied his hunger for sympathy. It was,
moreover, essential to get all the strength he could upon his side ;
for what with that infernal invention of steam, and gunpowder, I
think the fools may be a puff or barrel or two too many for us. '
He lectured, therefore, in order to enlist recruits in the army of
the wise which was to condense the steam into water and to pour it
upon the gunpowder. His lectures On Architecture and Painting
were delivered in Edinburgh in 1853; The Political Economy of
Art (afterwards included in A Joy for Ever) consisted of two
lectures delivered at Manchester in 1857; and in The Two
Paths were gathered together five lectures which are related by
unity of purpose, though they were delivered at different places.
These lectures were all directly concerned with Ruskin's primary
business, art; but the very title of the second course indicates
the change which was coming over him. He was half serious as
well as half playful when he wrote to Norton that he wanted to
give lectures in all manufacturing towns. He was approaching the
great dividing line of his work and life, which he crossed when,
in 1860, he published both the last volume of Modern Painters
and the five essays afterwards known by the title Unto this Last.
The last volume of Modern Painters had, for the most part,
been written in the winter of 1859–60. While it was passing
through the press, the author was already busy with his revo-
lutionary essays on economics, the first of which appeared in.
The Cornhill Magazine for August. The outcry against these
papers was so great that Thackeray, the editor, at the instance
of the publisher, intimated to Ruskin that the series must be
stopped. The same fate attended the series of essays contributed
in 1862–3, on the invitation of Froude, to Fraser's Magazine.
The fragment afterwards received the title Munera Pulveris. -
The strong opposition aroused by these papers was due, mainly,
to the heterodoxy of Ruskin's opinions. Writing when the
Manchester school was at the height of its power, he flatly
denied its gospel. But another cause operated to increase the
irritation which was felt against him. In the transition from
the criticism of art to the criticism of industry, Ruskin seemed
to break with his own past; and, while his countrymen were now
willing to listen to his exposition of the political economy of the
## p. 153 (#183) ############################################
111]
Ruskin's Economics
153
former, they asked impatiently what he knew about the political
economy of the latter. He had given ground for the question
by the statement in the preface to The Political Economy of Art
that he had never read any author on political economy, except
Adam Smith 1.
Ruskin had to create a public for his economics, as he had
created one for his aesthetic doctrine. But there was no break
and no inconsistency. Evolution there certainly was-an evolution
mainly from within, though influenced by Carlyle. The transition
from art to industry was the natural outcome of Ruskin's doctrine
of art as an expression of the whole life. He knew that life is
social, and he felt that the imperfections and the unreality of
modern art are intimately related to the ugliness of modern
industry. There was, from the first, much in his writings that
might have prepared a close student for the transition. He
had vigorously protested in The Seven Lamps of Architecture
against the uselessness of much of the toil to which the working
classes are condemned. In Modern Painters, he had distin-
guished the lower picturesque from the higher, and declared that
the essence of the difference between them lay in the fact that the
lower picturesque was heartless. Most clearly of all, the last
volume of Modern Painters revealed the drift of his thought.
There, he had condemned the modern monetary asceticism, con-
sisting in the refusal of pleasure and knowledge for the sake of
money’;—that is to say, that inverted asceticism which renounces
the kingdom of heaven in favour of this world, just as medieval
asceticism renounced this world in favour of the kingdom of
heaven; he had maintained that, if all physical exertion were
utilised, no man need ever work more than is good for him ; and,
after Carlyle, he had thrown out for the consideration of a mer-
cantile era the doctrine that the best work, whether of soldier or
sailor, or of spiritual teacher, or of writer or artist, was never
done for pay, but for nothing or for less than nothing—for death.
Just because the development was wholly natural, it proved to
be no mere passing phase. Henceforth, Ruskin's writings and his
practical work alike proclaim him an economist and social reformer
as well as a critic of art. On the practical side, the proof is plain
in the guild of St George; while among his writings there are,
from Unto this Last onwards, two great groups, one in which the
1
It seems probable that this statement was inaccurate, as Ruskin's annotated copy
of Mill's Political Economy is now in the British museum (Cook, vol. 11, p. 12, note 1).
But is there anything in the notes to show the date at which they were written?
## p. 154 (#184) ############################################
154
[CH.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
aesthetic element is most conspicuous, the other in which it is
subordinate to the economic. The increased prominence of the
latter element inevitably influenced Ruskin's style. After Unto
this Last, there is less gorgeousness; but the author's own high
opinion of that volume as a piece of English was justified.
During the years which followed Unto this Last, the conflict
in Ruskin's mind between the aesthetic and the social and economic
interests is unmistakable. On the whole, the latter triumph. The
Queen of the Air belongs to the domain of aesthetics, and so does
the report on the Turner drawings in the National Gallery. In
The Cestus of Aglaia, he laid down the laws of art for the use of
schools. But the laws of art prove to be very close to the laws of
morals; and, in The Ethics of the Dust, which treats of crystallo-
graphy, there is asserted a similarly close connection between
morals and science. In Sesame and Lilies, and in The Crown
of Wild Olive, the predominance of the social over the aesthetic
interest is very evident. The former became at once, as it still
remains, the most popular of all Ruskin's writings, partly, perhaps,
because of the elements of the fanciful and the sentimental in it.
Both these books were collections of lectures ; for Ruskin still
loved to meet an audience. He loved, also, at this time and for
years afterwards, to speak through the medium which brought him
into contact with the largest number. He entered into several news-
paper controversies. These letters to the editor' were afterwards
collected by an Oxford pupil, and published under the title Arrows
of the Chace—a volume full of paradox, but full, also, of sparkling
and memorable sayings. Of these letters, some belong to the
aesthetic, and others to the social, divisions of Ruskin's writings.
The remarkable series entitled Time and Tide by Weare and
Tyne belongs wholly to the social division ; and, apart from the
letters in Fors Clavigera, it was Ruskin's last important contri-
bution, in a direct way, to the subject. Afterwards, he tried in
a practical way, by the guild of St George, to further the ends
he had at heart.
The unfavourable reception of his economic theories had,
probably, caused some discouragement in Ruskin's mind. At
any rate, after Time and Tide and The Queen of the Air, he
turned to a study so far removed from economics as Greek
mythology. He also occupied himself with such tasks as the
production of catalogues of pictures. Then, in 1869, came his
appointment to the post of Slade professor of fine art at
Oxford ; an office to which he was again appointed in 1883.
## p. 155 (#185) ############################################
111]
Ruskin's Lectures.
Fors Clavigera 155
This (without at all extinguishing his social interests, which
were manifested in road-making, street-sweeping and tea-selling,
as well as in other less eccentric ways) gave a decisive impetus
to the aesthetic element in his mind; for the professorship
made aesthetics his business and his duty. He was a busy
and highly successful lecturer, delivering, in the year 1870, the
series afterwards published under the title Lectures on Art, in
which, after four introductory lectures of a general nature, he
dealt with painting; and that on sculpture, entitled Aratra
Pentelici. In the following year, he delivered his lectures On
Landscape, which were not published till 1897, and a much-
debated discourse entitled The Relation between Michael Angelo
and Tintoret. The violent exaggerations of this discourse evoked
vigorous repudiations from more than one authority on art, and
even put some strain upon Ruskin's relations with one or two of
his friends. Before the end of his first tenure of office, he had
delivered, in all, eleven courses of lectures. But, besides lecturing
and teaching through the eye and hand at Oxford, Ruskin con-
ceived it to be his duty to act as a sort of director general in
things of art to all who cared to learn from him ; hence, Mornings
in Florence and St Mark's Rest were conceived by him to be part
of the work of his chair.
Unfortunately for his own health, Ruskin was not content with
the tasks which his enthusiasm for art imposed upon him. Though
the professorship had breathed a new life into his work for art, it
left him still convinced that the problems raised by modern in-
dustry were of vital importance. The guild of St George was
conceived at this period, and, in 1871, he started Fors Clavigera.
By far the greater part of that extraordinary collection of letters,
the most comprehensive and the most characteristic of all Ruskin's
writings, was produced while he was still Slade professor. Every
phase of Ruskin is illustrated in it, except that of the master of
gorgeous English. For insight into the range of Ruskin's style, it
is only necessary to compare the first volume of Modern Painters
with Fors. All through his career, he had been moving consis-
tently, though with variations due to the nature of his theme,
towards greater simplicity. But the simplicity is still eloquent,
and, in Fors, it is wonderfully flexible ; for it has to be adapted
successively to every one of the author's interests and emotions.
Overstrain brought on, in the summer of 1878, a serious attack
of brain fever; and Ruskin never regained his old vigour. He
was active enough, and most discursively active. Science, art,
## p. 156 (#186) ############################################
156
[CH.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
theology, literary criticism, economics, are all treated with more
or less fullness in the writings of the next two or three years.
His re-election to the professorship at Oxford meant more lectures,
those entitled The Art of England and The Pleasures of Eng-
land; but the latter course clearly showed as it proceeded that his
mind, in some degree, had lost its balance. He resigned, once more,
and, for the remaining years of his life, he produced nothing of
importance except the admirable Praeterita. This was finished
in 1889. The years of life wbich still remained to him are best
described by the phrase which he himself applied to the closing
phase of Scott's life-jours de mort.
Ruskin is now passing through that period of depreciation
which seems to be the lot of all writers who, at any part of their
career, have been regarded with exaggerated admiration. Time
was when Ruskin was Sir Oracle on art; now, it is frequently
maintained that his principles are antiquated, that the world can
afford to forget him. It is curious that, in respect of his work as
economist and social reformer, opinion has moved in precisely the
opposite direction. Though probably few, either of statesmen or
of economists, would accept without large reservations the views
advocated by Ruskin, these views have influenced life and legisla-
tion; and those who bear in mind how closely the two sections of
his work were associated in his own mind will doubt whether
the aesthetic teaching can be entirely superseded. It was the
conviction that while life without industry is guilt, industry
without art is brutality, which drove Ruskin to examine the kind
of industry by which the modern world escapes guilt-only to fall
into brutality. At any rate, the intense humanity which inspires
all Ruskin's work, economic and aesthetic alike, can never become
antiquated. A false conception of aesthetic principle is fatal to
him who holds that art exists for art's sake, but not necessarily
to him who holds that the end of art is to raise life from brutality
to graciousness.
Nearly all our subsequent aesthetic criticism is derived from,
or more or less deeply influenced by, Ruskin. Benjamin Robert
Haydon stands quite apart from him. Though a far older man
than Ruskin, Haydon, as the author of printed works, comes after
him in chronological order; for, even Haydon's Lectures on
Painting and Design, the earliest of which was delivered in 1835,
was not published till near the close of his life; and the fascinating
Autobiography, which is his sole title to literary fame, was
## p. 157 (#187) ############################################
111] Haydon. Mrs Jameson. Symonds 157
posthumous. Ruskin's scathing judgment on Haydon as an artist
is well known. In Modern Painters, he singles out Haydon and
Barry as examples of the desire of greatness as such, or rather
of what appears great to indolence and vanity, and states that
nothing except disgrace and misguidance will ever be gathered
from such work' as theirs. Whether this be so or not, the Auto-
biography is entirely unaffected. It has that value which must
always belong to any sincere revelation of a human soul, and takes
a very high rank in that delightful class of books which Ruskin
himself afterwards enriched by his charming Praeterita. Haydon's
Autobiography is not, however, except in a very slight degree, a
work of aesthetic criticism, and he is connected with this group
rather through his paint-brush than through his pen.
It was otherwise with Anna Brownell Jameson. She, too, was
greatly senior to Ruskin, and had made a name as a miscellaneous
author while he was still a boy. The facility of her style makes
her volumes pleasant reading, and her analyses of Shakespeare's
heroines won, and have retained, as they deserve, considerable
popularity. But the very title of one of her works, The Loves of
the Poets, is suggestive of superficiality and popularity in the
less favourable sense; and the fact that, in her Characteristics of
Women, she, without qualification, ranks lady Macbeth as in-
tellectually the superior of her husband, proves the suspicion to be
well founded. She was in the field before Ruskin, but she was
deeply influenced by him, and her various books on different groups
of legends and legendary art bear his mark. Ruskin, however, in
Praeterita, has pronounced a characteristically candid and gently
satirical judgment upon her.
But it was in Ruskin's own university that the aesthetic school
took root, though its flowers and its fruit were not precisely what
he would have desired. The disciples never gave that weight to
ethics which the master desired, and, as time went on, they paid it
less, rather than more, attention. Of this group, John Addington
Symonds may be described as an outlying member, and his principal
work, Renaissance in Italy, illustrates the weakness of the school
to which he belonged. It is lacking in unity and is one-sided,
not only in the sense that it dwells upon art and passes lightly
over other factors in the history of the period, but, in the treat-
ment of art itself, emphasis is laid upon the emotional element at
the expense of the intellectual. Symonds's other works, likewise,
fall short of greatness. His poems are accomplished rather than
inspired. His literary monographs and criticisms do not rise
>
## p. 158 (#188) ############################################
158 Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
[CH.
much above the average of their kind; and, sometimes, as in
Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama, they are not
sufficiently thorough on the side of scholarship. Symonds's prose
style is nearly always too highwrought and too diffuse.
On a far higher plane of literature stands Walter Pater; but
he, though he was influenced by Ruskin, is singularly different
from the elder writer, and the difference sheds back a light upon
the master's theories. Ruskin, bowed with sorrows though he was,
remained unconquerably optimistic, and, so long as he was capable
of work, he laboured with even excessive hopefulness at schemes
of social regeneration. Pater retires from the dust of con-
flict into an artistic seclusion. The conclusion of his Studies
in the History of the Renaissance is, in the highest degree,
significant. Its teaching is that, to beings like men, beings under
sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve, the love
of art for art's sake is the highest form of wisdom. 'For art comes
to you, proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality
to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments'
sake. ' The Oscar Wilde development had not the good will of
Pater any more than that of Ruskin; but it logically follows from
Pater's principle.
Pater was one of the most fastidious of literary artists. By his
artistic theory he was driven to seek perfection of style. If art
for art's sake is the highest thing of all, if life is a series of
moments and its aim is to make each moment as exquisite as it
can be made, it follows that each sentence, in a sense, is an
end in itself. The result is a style beautiful indeed-at its best
very beautiful—but overlaboured. The purpose partly defeats
itself. The whole suffers from the excessive pains bestowed upon
the parts, and the reader shares the oppression felt by the writer.
Pater's literary career began with the essay entitled Winckel-
mann, which he contributed, in 1867, to The Westminster Review,
and this, with other papers contributed to periodicals, constituted
the volume which was published in 1873. In the second edition,
the conclusion which has been quoted above was omitted, because
Pater felt that it might mislead young men. It was, however,
subsequently restored; and the conceptions it indicates form the
substance of the fine romance, Marius the Epicurean, which shows
clearly that Pater's own epicureanism was of a very noble sort, but
which fails, like every form of epicureanism, to show why any one
kind of pleasure should be the pleasure of all. Imaginary
Portraits followed, and then Appreciations, Plato and Platonism
## p. 159 (#189) ############################################
111] Walter Pater. Hugh Miller 159
and the charming 'imaginary portrait,' The Child in the House.
This was the last volume published during Pater's life, but several
followed it posthumously. Pater gave a colour of his own to
everything he touched. His criticism reveals so much of himself
that the question is naturally suggested, whether it reveals as
much of the artist or the writer criticised. But it must be remem-
bered that the criticism that does not carry the atmosphere of
personality is a singularly dull affair; and, also, that Pater was un-
usually well endowed with both the emotional and the intellectual
gifts of the critic. There are few whose judgments are deserving
of closer attention.
While Pater represented the aesthetic movement in its most
earnest phase, Oscar Wilde gave utterance to its principles in
the language of persiflage. In verse and in prose, in lyrics, in
'trivial comedies for serious people' that sparkled with wit, in
essays often bright with raillery and occasionally weighty with
thought, he proved that he possessed a remarkably varied genius.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis are the product
of his tragic overthrow, and are well worth all that he had pre-
viously written.
Of the ill-defined genus miscellaneous prose, there is no
species more delightful than that of the essay in the stricter
sense of the word, the essay which is the expression of a mood
rather than, like Macaulay's, a fragment of history, or, like
Matthew Arnold's, a fragment of criticism. Quite a considerable
group of essayists in this stricter sense belongs to the Victorian
period. The eldest of the group were Hugh Miller and Robert
Chambers, both born in 1802, the one in the north, and the
other in the south, of Scotland, both, ultimately, editors in Edin-
burgh. The most valuable of Miller's contributions to journalism
have been gathered into books which have a coherence of their
own, like The Old Red Sandstone and the delightful auto-
biography My Schools and Schoolmasters; but much still remains
in the form of scattered essays, of which one volume was published
in 1862 and another in 1870. Science, however, on the one hand,
and religious controversy, on the other, absorbed most of Miller's
energy, and, though he was the greater writer of the two, left him
a smaller place, in this particular sphere, than Robert Chambers,
the founder, in conjunction with his elder brother William, of
Chambers's Journal. Both the brothers were busy writers, and
the younger had a gift of humour which served him in good stead
in the numerous essays which he contributed to his own journal.
a
## p. 160 (#190) ############################################
160
[ch.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
It was to Hugh Miller's journal The Witness that John Brown
contributed his first noteworthy paper. But, though Brown
became a man of letters, he never ceased to be a physician. He is
doctor in the medical sense as unalterably as Samuel Johnson is
doctor in the academic sense. It seems to have been partly by
accident, and partly through domestic insistence and encourage-
ment, that Brown gradually became a writer as well as a physician.
Hence, his entry was late and his production always remained
leisurely. His earliest paper in The Witness appeared in 1846,
and the total of his work fills only three small volumes. It is
fortunate for Brown's fame that the fact is so. His genius was
beautiful and delicate rather than robust, and the characteristic
charm of his essays is not of a sort that is susceptible of great
expansion or of indefinite repetition. The essayists of the personal
and confidential type are never voluminous writers. There is,
nevertheless, considerable variety in Brown's work. His papers
on medical subjects afford pleasant and profitable reading; he is
an excellent critic both of art and of literature; he shows great
sensitiveness to natural beauty and great power of describing
it. But he is happiest of all when he deals with the dog. Here,
he is not only unsurpassed but unequalled. The most deservedly
famous of all his writings is the beautiful story Rab and his
Friends. But he has delineated many dogs besides Rab, and
always admirably.
While Brown was born a citizen of the Scottish capital,
Alexander Smith only became a citizen by adoption. Though
seldom read, he is still known by name as one of the 'spasmodic'
poets; but, until lately, it was half forgotten that he was also a
skilful writer of prose, author of an extremely pleasant story, of
the most readable of guide-books, if A Summer in Skye may be
degraded by that description, and, above all, of Dreamthorp, one
of the finest volumes of essays since Lamb's. The friends who,
shortly after his death, predicted that he would take rank below
only a few of the greatest of British essayists, were not bad critics.
Smith had the temperament of the essayist and the clearest possible
understanding of the principles of the form of art which the
essayist attempts. Nowhere in our literature is there a better
exposition of the essay as conceived and written by Montaigne
than in the second essay of Dreamthorp, On the Writing of
Essays; and there are not many better examples of 'atmosphere
than the title essay.
On a much lower plane stand Smith's two contemporaries,
## p. 161 (#191) ############################################
111]
Robert Louis Stevenson
161
A. K. H. Boyd and John Skelton. Boyd first became widely
known through the volume of pleasant but garrulous and
unsubstantial essays entitled Recreations of a Country Parson,
which he had contributed to Fraser's Magazine. It was the
earliest of many volumes which continued to appear at short
intervals down to 1896, when The Last Years of St Andrews was
published. There was a stronger fibre in Skelton, whose pseu-
donym Shirley was subscribed to some of the most readable of
the papers contributed to Fraser's Magazine and Blackwood's
Magazine during the latter half of the nineteenth century. From
his earliest production Nugae Criticae to The Table Talk of
Shirley, Skelton showed great skill as an essayist, blending in a
rare degree the love of nature with the love of books, and im-
parting both to the reader through a style redolent of the writer's
own personality. Skelton was a historian as well as an essayist.
Though he is, perhaps, sometimes advocate rather than judge in
his essays and books on Mary queen of Scots, they who most
widely differ from him in opinion must be sensible of, and grateful
for, the charm of his presentation of the case.
Of all this group, the greatest was Robert Louis Stevenson?
Versatility was one of Stevenson’s most conspicuous qualities, for,
besides being the foremost essayist since Lamb and a master of
fiction, whether in the form of romance or in that of short
story, he was also a dramatist and a poet. The essay, however,
was the form in which he first gave promise of his future distinc-
tion, and the publication of Ordered South may be regarded as
his real entrance upon literature. Ordered South lifts the veil
from Stevenson's life and gives insight into conditions which
profoundly affected all his work. It is the essay of an invalid,
and an invalid Stevenson was destined to remain till the end.
But he was an invalid with the spirit of a robust adventurer.
A victim to tuberculosis, who, at times, could scarcely breathe
and who seemed to need all his energies in order merely to live,
he was a lover of the sea and a daring voyager, and, long after he
had reached manhood, still played, with tireless zest, a war-game
of his own invention. In his case, broken health did not quench,
but rather stimulated, the heroic in his nature. Hence, feeble as
was his hold on life, in forty-four years he accomplished far more
than the vast majority of those who live the full span in the en-
joyment of vigorous health. The body was weak, but the spirit
was indomitable. It was the eagerness of his spirit and his keen
1 See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. vi.
11
E. L. XIV.
CH. III.
## p. 162 (#192) ############################################
162
[CH.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
sympathy with men of action that saved Stevenson from the be-
setting sin of the artist in words, the temptation to subordinate
meaning to sound.
It was not until the publication of Treasure Island as a
separate volume in 1883 that Stevenson was generally recognised
as a great writer; but, prior to that, he had written and published
some short stories and many essays. The records of personal
experience which are embodied in An Inland Voyage and in
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes are essentially essays.
Fugitive papers were gathered into volumes, intimate and con-
fidential, as in Virginibus Puerisque, or critical, as in Familiar
Studies of Men and Books. Both in matter and in manner
they were excellent, but they did not make their author
famous. Other volumes, akin in spirit and substance, were
added in later years—fragments of autobiography and travel,
such as The Amateur Emigrant, The Silverado Squatters
and in the South Seas, and collections of miscellaneous
In
papers, such as Memories and Portraits and Across the Plains.
In all his work of this class Stevenson is easy, graceful and
friendly, except on occasion, when, as in A Christmas Sermon,
the tone is too lofty for these adjectives. But there, too, he
.
is intimate, and there, perhaps more clearly than anywhere
else, he reveals the moral interest which underlies most of
his work.
The body of short stories grew along with the essays, and
Stevenson was a master of story-craft no less than of essay-craft.
He never surpassed some of his earlier tales : The Pavilion
on the Links and Thrawn Janet both appeared before Treasure
Island. But, among English-speaking people, it is difficult to
make a great reputation out of short stories. The stories pub-
lished under the title The New Arabian Nights were supposed
to be responsible for the unpopularity and failure of London,
the periodical in which they originally appeared. Stevenson
might, therefore, have added masterpieces such as Markheim
and The Beach of Falesa, and still have remained obscure. But,
after Treasure Island, he was obscure no longer, and the brilliant
success of that excellent story for boys won readers for the essays
and the short stories who, save for it, would have paid no heed
to them. It made Stevenson a prosperous man, and did much
to determine the direction of his subsequent efforts. It was
followed by a series of romances—Kidnapped, with its sequel
Catriona, The Black Arrow, The Master of Ballantrae and
## p. 163 (#193) ############################################
111]
Stevenson,
Rands
163
others, down to his masterpiece Weir of Hermiston and the un-
finished St Ives. In these romances, Stevenson is at his best, like
Scott, when he is dealing with his native land ; but a comparison
with the Waverley novels shows that, fine as his work is, it falls
decidedly short of the greatest. Only in Weir of Hermiston does
he for a moment rival Scott. Stevenson was growing till he
died, and the wonderful creation of the old judge, one of the
best drawn characters in prose fiction, deepens the regret that
his days were numbered. Like Dickens, he had the excellent
habit of identifying himself with his characters, and this, no doubt,
explains his success. He acted their parts while he dictated, and
imitated their voices.
In other departments, Stevenson's work was less excellent.
The dramas wherein he collaborated with Henley were not very
successful ; but it must be added that their failure was largely
due to imperfect acquaintance with the conditions of the theatre.
Both writers were too highly gifted to produce work destitute of
literary merit, and Beau Austin, in particular, seems, from this
point of view, to deserve more success than it won.
Stevenson has been called the laureate of the nursery, but the
title has also been claimed for William Brighty Rands; and it
seems more justly to belong to the elder writer. Certainly,
Rands preceded Stevenson, and the latter has nothing finer than
Rands's 'Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World. From 1864
onwards, in Lilliput Levee, Lilliput Revels, Lilliput Lectures and
Lilliput Legends, in verse and in prose, Rands was second only to
Lewis Carroll and Juliana Horatia Ewing in the production of
those books about childhood and for childhood, which are among
the most striking features of recent English literature. He wrote
and wrote well, for adults as well as for children. His essays,
Tangled Talk, are, it is true, disappointing ; but his Chaucer's
England, though not a work of profound learning, is a very
interesting book; and his Henry Holbeach, Student in Life and
Philosophy, proves that he was a thinker as well as a skilful
writer. The uncertainty of the judgment of contemporaries is
vividly illustrated by the fact that this striking book passed
almost unnoticed and remains unknown except to students, while
Sir Arthur Helps's commonplace Friends in Council, which is also
the work of a student in life and philosophy,' won for its author
a high place among writers of the second grade. Helps attempted
history, the drama and prose fiction, as well as the dialogue on
social questions by which he won his fame. His histories are
a
11-2
## p. 164 (#194) ############################################
164
[CH.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
treated elsewhere? His dramas are forgotten. His Realmah
resembles the works of Disraeli in that it is partly political, but
it is not, like them, a document of historical significance. His
Brevia, a collection of short essays and aphorisms, makes con-
spicuous that lack of substance which is evident in Friends in
Council. This charge cannot be brought against the thought of
William Rathbone Greg, whose Creed of Christendom, in spite of
its sympathetic moderation, in 1851 fluttered the dove-cots of
orthodoxy. Enigmas of Life, fully twenty years later, testified
to his permanent interest in the ultimate problems of existence.
The expression is sometimes striking, but the principal charm of
the book arises from the atmosphere of sincerity which pervades
it. Greg was a philosophical politician, as well as a philosophical
student of religion ; and, in Rocks Ahead and Mistaken Aims
and attainable Ideals of the Artizan Classes, and in a number
of essays, he showed himself to be by no means easy in mind as to
the tendency of the times. Like Bagehot, he saw that democracy
was inevitable, and, like Bagehot, he felt that the problem how to
give the masses their due share of power without making them
all-powerful was still unsolved.
The nursery work of Rands links on, at one point, to the work
of Andrew Lang’, whose many-coloured fairy books were, of course,
not of his own composition, but gathered out of many lands and
many ages in the course of his studies in mythology and folk-lore.
Lang seemed to have all the necessary gifts of the essayist; yet,
already, his essays have lost somewhat of their flavour. Only now
and then, as in the lightly humorous philosophy of prefaces in the
preface to The Orange Fairy Book, does Lang strike the true
note firmly; and he has not enough of this quality to keep his
l
essays in permanent remembrance. He dissipated his powers and
attempted too much. Folk-lore, the occult, history, the Homeric
question, literary criticism—in all he was active. Under such
conditions, it was scarcely possible to be quite first-rate in any
department. Specialists in each could point out his mistakes;
but it remains much to his credit that he never failed to make
himself interesting. The fact that, whether right or wrong, he is
interesting in every page of his short sketch of English literature
is not the least striking illustration of this power.
Two 'rolling stones,' both of whom gathered moss, as the
elder hinted in the title of one of his books, were Laurence
i See, ante, chap. 11.
? See, ante, chap. II, and vol. XIII, chap. vi.
## p. 165 (#195) ############################################
IN]
Oliphant. Hearn
165
Oliphant and Lafcadio Hearn. Oliphant's books bear testimony
to his wanderings. His earliest volume dealt with Khatmanda ;
and his next, The Russian Shores of the Black Sea, caused him
to be consulted when the Crimean war broke out. In two wars,
he acted as correspondent of The Times. He was in Japan while
Japan was still in the medieval stage, and nearly lost his life in an
attack in which the weapon of the assailant was a two-handed
sword. So stirring a life afforded rich materials for various
lively narratives from his pen, and for the essays which were
gathered up near the close of his life in Episodes in a Life of
Adventure. But the most extraordinary episode of all was
Oliphant's subjection to the 'prophet' Thomas Lake Harris,
whom the disciple believed to be not only a prophet, but the
greatest poet of the age,' and to whom he surrendered the whole
of his property. One outcome of this discipleship was Sympneu-
mata, a singular book, the joint composition of Oliphant and his
wife, who both wrote, or believed that they wrote, under the
dictation of a spirit. Other products were of a very different
sort; for Oliphant seems to have united with this trait of enthu-
siasm a marked talent for business, which the prophet was shrewd
enough to employ for his own benefit. Hence, The Autobiography
of a Joint-Stock Company, in which Oliphant embodied the
knowledge he had gained of the methods of American financiers.
In the literary sense, however, Oliphant's most valuable work was
the satiric fiction Piccadilly, which shows him to have been a keen
observer and a penetrating critic of the society of his time.
Long afterwards, he returned to the realm of fiction in Altiora
Peto, and proved that he still retained his old fineness of touch.
Lafcadio Hearn began his career as a contributor to two
Cincinnati journals, but it was a subsequent residence at St Pierre,
Martinique, that gave him the materials for his first noteworthy
work, Two Years in the French West Indies. In this, he showed
that power to receive and faithfully to reproduce impressions,
which was his special gift; and his position in literature must
depend upon this gift as it was exercised in relation to Japan,
whither he migrated in 1891. Probably no one can instruct
the man of the west about what Japan was before the completion
of the process of modernisation so well as Hearn ; but that he
does so on the strength of mere impression is shown by the fact
that, though he married a Japanese wife, he could neither speak
to her or to his children in their own language, nor, after a residence
of fourteen years, so much as read a Japanese newspaper. What
a
## p. 166 (#196) ############################################
166
сн
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose [CH. III
is valuable in his work is not his reasoned opinions, but the feeling
produced in his soul by what he saw and heard ; and it is im-
portant to notice, as Gould insists, that what he saw was little
more than a blur of colour; for he was ‘probably the most myoptic
literary man that has existed. ' Hence, the best of the Japanese
books is the first, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, because in it
he was forced to rely almost wholly on impression. In his later
volumes, he reacts on the impressions and injures them. For this
reason, the latest, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, though
the most ambitious—for it is an attempt to present in one lordly
dish the cream of all he had learnt about Japan—is far from being
equal to those early glimpses. Besides scenes, Hearn produced
tales, both in America and in the Japanese period. He betrays
in them an unhealthy love of the gruesome; but he could, on
occasion, rise to a high level, as he proved by his masterpiece in
this form, the story of Karma.
While Oliphant and Hearn found their literary capital in the
distant and unfamiliar, the sphere of Richard Jefferies was, as the
title of one of his volumes indicates, the fields and the hedgerows
around us. His task was to show that the unfamiliar lay beneath
men's eyes. He belongs to the class of field naturalists like
White of Selborne, and, in days more recent than even those of
Jefferies, Denham Jordan, who is better known by his pen-name
'A Son of the Marshes. ' But Jefferies was more ambitious than they
and wider in his range. In Hodge and his Master, he deals with
the human element in rural life; but he does not show that complete
comprehension which he shows of beast and bird and flower. His
name first became familiar through The Gamekeeper at Home ;
and, for the ten years of life which remained to him, he was a
diligent writer. All who are qualified to judge, testify to his
accuracy of observation as recorded in volume after volume, down
to Field and Hedgerow, which appeared after his death ; but,
while the style is good, there is a marked tendency to catalogue
minute facts which, doubtless, have a value as natural history, but
hardly any from the point of view of literature. On the other
hand, a certain vein of poetry is present in all the works of
Jefferies. It is especially rich in Wood Magic, and it gives charm
to the fine spiritual autobiography, The Story of My Heart.
## p. 167 (#197) ############################################
CHAPTER IV
THE GROWTH OF JOURNALISM
To pass from the conditions recorded in the chapter entitled
'The Beginnings of English Journalism' to those with which
the close of the nineteenth century was familiar, is almost like
being carried on the magic carpet of oriental romance from the
middle of the Sahara to the bustling, electricity-lighted thorough-
fares of a modern European capital. The chapter to which
reference is made treats of the hand-written letter in which
some, more or less professional, observer, for the benefit of a
few known subscribers in the country, detailed whatever gossip
he was able to pick up in the taverns and streets of London. His
lineal descendants are still to be seen in the writers of the London
letter which figures in the columns of nearly every daily provincial
paper, and finds, latterly, a counterpart in several of the journals
established in London. The information in these London letters
differs, for the most part, from that which is to be obtained in
the ordinary news columns, and has nothing in common with the
reasoned leading article, in which is discussed the uppermost
political incident of the day. The chapter above referred to took
its readers from these manuscript letters through various experi-
ments in printed news-books and sheets of intelligence, issued by,
or in behalf of, groups of politicians, or news purveyors, to the
establishment of The London Gazette and the few occasional
journals which made their appearance towards the end of the
seventeenth century. The transition from a small pamphlet
containing some definite piece of news, and bearing an appropriate
title, to the sheet published periodically under a distinctive and
'regularly repeated name, carrying not one but a great variety of
collected items of news, was, in itself, great; but, when the change
was brought about, the convenience and attractiveness of it
ensured permanence.
i See, ante, vol. vii, chap. xv.
## p. 168 (#198) ############################################
168
[CH.
The Growth of Journalism
>
There was even a public ready for the news writer. Howell,
in his Familiar Letters, tells that the ploughman, the cobbler
and the porter would spare no effort to educate their children,
and the records of the university of Cambridge show numerous
instances of the sons of husbandmen being entered as students.
Apart, then, from the necessity to the merchant and trader of being
acquainted with current events, it is natural that the country,
as a whole, should wish to be supplied with news. Dr Johnson
characterised English common folk as more educated, politically,
than the people of other countries, and this because of the
popularity of newspapers. The extent of the influence of the
cheap newspaper in the early part of the eighteenth century is
shown by the petition of publishers against the legislation
described by Swift as ruining Grub street by the imposition
of a tax which extinguished all halfpenny newspapers and many
of the more highly priced. It was urged that halfpenny news-
papers were used very largely throughout the country as a means
of teaching children to read, and that, without them, there would
be a failure in this respect. In these conditions, statesmen could
not fail to recognise that the newspaper press might be made to
serve their purposes, and they did not hesitate to employ men of
marked ability and political knowledge to supplement or give
finish to the work of the professional inhabitants of Grub street.
For these higher services, payment was made, sometimes in coin-
Swift says that he refused £50 offered to him by Harley in 1710–11
-and, otherwise, by statę or church preferment, or by admission
to social comradeship. Publishers of newspapers, also, found it
to their profit to employ writers who could mix the useful with the
pleasant.
The growth of journalism in the eighteenth century was ex-
pedited by Palmer's establishment of a series of stage coaches,
leaving London at stated hours and carrying parcels as well as
passengers, distribution being thus much more rapid and regular
than when it depended upon the older waggon. Meanwhile, news-
papers had to struggle against the hand of authority. Prose-
cutions for libel were numerous, and daring writers had to stand in
the pillory, besides being imprisoned and fined. Parliament, in
especial, was jealous of the news collector; though, now and
again, some member might protest that the constituencies had a
right to know how their parliamentary representatives spoke and
voted, leading politicians and the houses, as a whole, resented,
i Section viii, Letter viri (circa 1646).
## p. 169 (#199) ############################################
IV] Eighteenth Century Newspapers 169
as breaches of privilege, any account of their proceedings, and
Cave, one of the earliest and most celebrated of parliamentary
reporters, recorded the discussions as if they took place in China,
referring to individual statesmen by entirely fictitious names,
which, like those employed in Gulliver's Travels, were, doubtless,
understood by very many readers. Nor were prosecutions for the
publication of parliamentary reports confined to London. Quite
early in the eighteenth century, some of the leading provincial
cities and boroughs could boast their own newspapers.
