No More Learning

The posthumous novel Persuasion was begun in the spring or
summer of 1815 and finished in July 1816, the last two chapters
being written a little later, to take the place of the original last
chapter, which did not satisfy the author. Then she put the
manuscript by ; and her ill-health and death caused it to remain un-
published. Signs of failing energy and spirits have been observed
by some in Persuasion. The interpolated story told to Anne
Eliot by Mrs Smith may be admitted to be dull, for Jane Austen ;
and some weight may be attached to her statement that Anne
Eliot was 'almost too good for me. ' The tone of the novel, as a
whole, is graver and tenderer than that of any of the other five;
but woven in with its gravity and tenderness is the most delicate
and mellow of all Jane Austen's humour. Such imperfections
as the novel may have may be interpreted with equal fairness
as signs of growth rather than of decay. Jane Austen, was
changing her tone, and had not yet completely mastered the new
conditions. Whether Anne Eliot was 'too good' for her or not,
she achieved the difficult feat of making her interesting from start
to finish
The same may be said of captain Wentworth. In
himself, he is an interesting personage ; but, in Persuasion, Jane
Austen accomplishes more perfectly than in any other of her
novels the task of revealing the interest which lies in the inter-
play of ordinary persons.
All the characters in Persuasion are
less sharply accentuated than those in the other novels. In Sir
Walter Eliot and Miss Eliot, Mrs Clay and Mr and Mrs Charles
Musgrave, Jane Austen is making milder fun than usual of less
prominent 'humours' than usual. The charm of the novel lies in
.


## p. 241 (#265) ############################################

x] The Novel of Character 241
the luminous reactions of one character upon another, and of all
upon each ; and, considering its difference from the other novels, it
suggests that Jane Austen, had she lived, would have excelled
in fiction of another kind than that which she had hitherto
practised.
From one point of view, then, Persuasion may be regarded
as Jane Austen’s most characteristic novel. If it lacks the sharp
wit and the high spirits of Pride and Prejudice, and the wide
scope of Mansfield Park, it reveals more than they do of the
interest which the seeing eye may find in ordinary people. Therein
lies Jane Austen’s individual quality. We have seen how conscious
she was of her peculiar bent, and how resolute to keep to it. Maria
Edgeworth, as Scott remarked, can offer us higher life, more
romantic incident and broader comedy. Of romance, Jane Austen
has none, either in character or in setting. The rocks and streams,
the forests and castles, which form the furniture of the romantics,
have no place in her novels. This was due to no want of appre-
ciation of natural beauty. The opening of chapter ix of Sense
and Sensibility would be sufficient to prove the contrary. Elinor,
Marianne and Edward's talk on the picturesque in chapter XVIII
of the same novel reveals once more the justice, the Greek sense
and balance, that determine all Jane Austen's work; and, in
chapter VIII of Mansfield Park, we find her giving the capital
example of her principle. The party approaching Sotherton dis-
cusses its appearance ; yet, the prominent interest of the scene is
not the picturesqueness of Sotherton, but the relation of Sotherton
and of its owner, Mr Rushworth, to the hopes and fears of women
among the visitors. In her reaction from romance, Jane Austen
dispensed with all aids borrowed from romance. The fall of Louisa
Musgrave from the steps on the Cobb at Lyme Regis (an incident
strictly consonant with the character and aims of Louisa); the
fall of Marianne on the hill at Barton ; the sudden return of Sir
Thomas Bertram to Mansfield park—these are the most exciting
incidents in the six novels. The very elopements are contem-
plated indirectly, and used, not for their own dramatic force, but
for their effect upon the lives of others than the runaways.
Character, not incident, was Jane Austen's aim; and, of character,
whether in itself marked, or interesting only in its interactions,
she found enough in the narrow circle and the humdrum life
encountered by her immediate view. Humdrum, it certainly was.
During Jane Austen’s working years, while England was fighting
for existence or newly triumphant, while the prince regent
16
E, L. XII,
CH. X.


## p. 242 (#266) ############################################

242
[ch.
Jane Austen
was in the hey-day of his luxury and while revolutionary ideas
were winning for poets and reformers present shame and future
glory, there can have been no lack of bright colour and sharp
contrast in life. Local humours, ripe and rich in the days of
Fielding, can hardly have been planed away by the action of the
growing refinement. Jane Austen, as novelist, is blind to all this
multicoloured life. There are no extremes, social or other, in her
books. The peasantry is scarcely mentioned ; of noblemen, there
is not one. Of set purpose, she keeps her eye fixed upon the
manners of a small circle of country gentlefolk, who seem to
have nothing to do but to pay calls, picnic, take walks, drive out,
talk and dance. Of dancing, Jane Austen herself was fond;
private theatricals are considered a little too heady an amuse-
ment for that circle. It is a world of idle men-her clergy are
frequently absentees—and of unoccupied women, not one of
whom is remarkable for any fineness or complexity of dis-
position or intellect, or for any strong peculiarity of circum-
stance. She shows, moreover, no ardent moral purpose or
intellectual passion which might lend force where force was not
to be found ; she never uses her characters as pegs for ethical or
metaphysical doctrines. Newman remarked of her that she had
not a dream of the high catholic roos. There are no great
passions in her stories. She rarely appeals to her reader's
emotions, and never by means of the characters that she most
admires or likes. It may be said that, on the whole, she appears
to trust and to value love—it was observed by Whately that all
Anne Eliot's troubles arose from her not yielding to her
youthful love for Wentworth—but, beyond that, it would be
unsafe to go.
With these limitations, natural and chosen, and out of these
unpromising materials, Jane Austen composed novels that come
near to artistic perfection. Her greatest gift was that sense of
balance and proportion to which reference has been already made.
To everything that she saw, she applied this touchstone of good
sense. Next came her extraordinarily perspicacious and sensitive
understanding, not of women only, but of men as well. Not-
withstanding her sheltered life and the moderate amount of her
learning, she saw deeply and clearly to the springs of action, and
understood the finest shades of feeling and motive. She was
sensitive to the slightest deviation from the standard of good
breeding and good sense ; and any deviation (there can be no
doubt of it) appealed to her sense of fun. Gossip by Miss Mitford


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x]
Her Discrimination
243
and, perhaps, others, brought her a reputation for acerbity and
spleen. She reveals scarcely a hint of either in her writings ; she is
scrupulously fair even to Mrs Norris and to Mr Collins. Her
attitude as satirist is best explained by a quotation from chapter XI
of Pride and Prejudice. Says Darcy :
The wisest and the best of men-nay, the wisest and best of their
actions-may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life
is a joke.
'Certainly,' replied Elizabeth—there are such people, but I hope I am
not one of them. I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and
nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at
them whenever I can. '
And her sense of fun was proportioned to the follies which
diverted her. Gross humours she disliked in other writers'
novels, and never attempted in her own. With the sharpest and
most delicate of wit, as deft in expression as it was subtle in
perception, she diverted herself and her readers with the fine
shades of folly in a circle of which the rudest member might be
called refined. Her fun, moreover, was always fair, always good-
tempered and always maintained in relation to her standard of
good sense and good manners. To her delicate perception and
her fairness, combined, is due what Whately called her Shake-
spearean discrimination in fools. Mr Collins could not be con-
fused with Mr Elton, nor Lucy Steele with Mrs Elton, nor the
proud Miss Eliot with the proud Misses Bertram. Jane Austen
clings to her fairness even when it seems to tell against her
favourite characters. She makes Fanny Price unhappy in her
parents' home at Portsmouth, where a feebler novelist would have
attempted to show her heroine in a light purely favourable; she
attributes to Emma Woodhouse innumerable little failings. This
just and consistent fidelity to character plays a large part in the
subtlety of her discrimination, not only in fools but in less
obviously diverting people. Her clarity of imaginative vision, and
her fidelity to what she saw with it, make her characters real.
Imagine Elizabeth Bennet, Elinor Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse
to be living women today, and at a first meeting in a drawing-
room we might not know which was which. After seeing them
through Jane Austen's eyes, we know them as thoroughly as we
know the characters of Shakespeare ; for, like Shakespeare, she
knew all about the creatures of her observation and imagination.
It is not only that she could tell her family and friends particulars
of their lives which did not appear in the novels, or that she left
their natures so plain that later writers may amuse themselves by
16--2


## p. 244 (#268) ############################################

244
[CH. X
Jane Austen
continuing their histories? They are seen in the round, and are
true, in the smallest details, to the particular nature.
Modest as she was, and working purposely in a very restricted
field, Jane Austen set herself a very high artistic aim. To imagine
and express personages, not types; to develop and preserve their
characters with strict fidelity; to reveal them not by external
analysis but by narrative in which they should appear to reveal
themselves; to attain, in the construction of her novels, as near
as might be, to a perfection of form that should be the outcome of
the interaction of the natures and motives in the story: these
were her aims, and these aims she achieved, perhaps, with more
consistency and more completeness than any other novelist except,
it may be, de Maupassant. In the earlier novels, her wit diverts
her readers with its liveliness ; her later work shows a tenderer,
graver outlook and a deepening of her study of character.
Through all alike, there runs the endearing charm of a shrewd
mind and a sweet nature.
1 Cf. Brinton, Sybil G. , Old Friends and New Fancies, 1913.


## p. 245 (#269) ############################################

CHAPTER XI
LESSER NOVELISTS
2
JANE AUSTEN did not found any school ; and her artistic
strictness is not shown by any of her contemporaries or immediate
successors. Several among them, especially women writers, took
advantage of the new fields which she had opened to fiction;
but, in most cases, the influence of the earlier and less regular
novel is evident, and perhaps the influence of a period full of con-
trasts and extremes. In the novels of Susan Edmondstone Ferrier
there is something of the rough sarcasm of Smollett, mingled with
a strong didactic flavour and with occasional displays of sentiment
that may be due to Mackenzie. To her personal friend Scott, she
may have owed something in her studies of Scottish life, but
Maria Edgeworth was her principal model. Her first novel,
Marriage, was written in 1810, though it was not published till
1818, when it appeared anonymously. Marriage is full of vigorous
work. The studies of the highland family into which an English
lady of aristocratic birth and selfish temper marries by elope-
ment are spirited and humourous; but the story rambles on through
a good many years; and the character of Lady Juliana, poor,
proud and worldly, is but a thin thread on which to hang the tale
of three generations. The Inheritance, published in 1824, has
more unity. Destiny, published in 1831, is chiefly remarkable for
the character of McDow, the minister. To compare McDow with
Mr Collins is to see the difference between Jane Austen and
Susan Ferrier; but the latter, with her coarse workmanship
succeeds in achieving a picture full of humour. The novel becomes
very sentimental and strained towards the close, a criticism which,
also, holds true of The Inheritance; but Susan Ferrier was a
novelist of power, whose work is still fresh and interesting.
Coarse as her workmanship may be compared with that of
Jane Austen, it is refined and delicate by the side of that of a re-
markable woman, Frances, the mother of Anthony and Augustus, Adolphers. !
1


## p. 246 (#270) ############################################

246
[CH.
Lesser Novelists
Trollope. Mrs Trollope's best work was done in middle-age,
and may be found in two novels, The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837)
and The Widow Barnaby (1838). The Vicar of Wrexhill is
a book of virulent malignity, in which the chief character is a
clergyman of evangelical beliefs. He is licentious, suave, cold and
cruel; and the force with which his vices are shown to be mingled
with his religion could only have been displayed by a novelist of
courageous and powerful mind. Be the character possible or im-
possible, it is throughout credible in the reading; and Mrs
Trollope never permits her reader to escape from the terror which
the man and his deeds arouse. The Widow Barnaby is written
in more humourous mood. The chief character is the buxom widow
of a country apothecary, who poses as a woman of fortune.
Vulgar, selfish and cruel, she is still a source of constant delight
to readers who have stomached coarser things in Smollett.
Rough as Mrs Trollope's work is, and crude, especially in the
drawing of minor characters, her power and her directness remain
unmatched by any English author of her sex, save Aphra Behn.
There is something, perhaps, of Jane Austen's influence to be
traced in the novels of Catherine Grace Gore. Mrs Gore, like
Mrs Trollope, was a very prolific worker. Her reputation has
suffered at Thackeray's hands. From Lords and Liveries, by
the author of Dukes and Déjeuners, Heart and Diamonds,
Marchionesses and Milliners, one of Thackeray's Novels by
Eminent Hands, it might be imagined that Mrs Gore was
nothing but a novelist of 'high life. ' True, she liked to give her
characters titles of nobility; and that was exactly the feature
in her work which would attract Thackeray's notice. But, in
Mrs Armytage, or Female Domination (1836) and in Mothers
and Daughters (1831) there is considerable ability. In Mothers
and Daughters may be traced clearly an attempt to follow Jane
Austen in fidelity to life and in unity of form and matter ; and
the study of the heartless ‘society' mother, Lady Maria Willingham,
is a more finely-painted piece of work than Susan Ferrier's more
extravagantly designed Lady Juliana Douglas. In Mrs Armytage,
Mrs Gore came nearest to being a novelist of the first rank. The
chief character in this tale of landed gentry in Yorkshire is a
woman of heroic and domineering temper, whose rather weak-
willed son has married the pretty daughter of a vulgar betting-
Broad contrasts, like that between Mrs Armytage and the
coarse and good-hearted relatives of her daughter-in-law, and
fine contrasts like that between Mrs Armytage and her son, are


## p. 247 (#271) ############################################

XI]
247
Mrs Gore. Mary Shelley
contrived with a sincere but not too subtle art, so as to throw
into relief the nature of this terrible and oppressive but, never-
theless, majestic woman. In all the unhappiness that she causes,
she is never altogether hateful; but, at the close, the author
refrains from exaggerating her punishment. The book shows a
fitness and justice that make it comparable to the work of Jane
Austen, though it is quite unlike that work in its gravity, its
didactic tone and its use of incident.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the poet, scarcely survives now as
a novelist, although Ethel Churchill, her last and best attempt in
fiction (1837), may take its place among the second-rate novels of
the day. So, too, may the Granby (1826) of Thomas Henry Lister.
Lister was a rather ladylike novelist, which, perhaps, accounts for
the erroneous attribution to him of Mrs Cradock’s novel, Hulse
House. But there is good work in Granby, with its fine, manly
hero and its baseborn, reckless, but not unattractive villain.
Lister moves easily among titles of nobility, and, in the course
of this story, presents us with an aristocratic coxcomb whom it
is difficult not to regard as a perverted Darcy. Lister is clever at
smart conversation, which seems to have been much valued in
its own day, however tiresome it may appear now; and he
succeeds in conveying an impression of a real world, inhabited by
real people. He has his interest, therefore, for the student of
external manners.
Meanwhile, the novel of terror, of which Jane Austen bad
made fun in Northanger Abbey, continued to flourish, though in a
modified form; and women were prominent among those who
wrote this kind of fiction. It was a woman, and a woman of
a later period in its history, who produced the finest work of
genius to be found in this class of writings, Frankenstein, or The
Modern Prometheus (1818).
Its author, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, has left on record the
circumstances of its production. With her husband, Byron and
Polidori, she occupied part of a wet summer in Switzerland in
reading volumes of ghost stories translated from German into
French. Byron suggested that each member of the party should
write a ghost story. Mary Shelley waited long for an idea. Con-
versations between Shelley and Byron about the experiments of
Darwin and the principle of life at length suggested to her the
subject of Frankenstein.
At first I thought but of a few pages or of a short tale; but Shelley urged
me to develop the idea at greater length. I certainly did not owe the


## p. 248 (#272) ############################################

248
[CH.
Lesser Novelists
suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my
husband, and yet but for his incitement it would never have taken the form
in which it was presented to the world. From this declaration I must except
the preface. As far as I can recollect, it was entirely written by him.
It has been held, nevertheless, that Mary Shelley, unaided, was
incapable of writing so fine a story. 'Nothing,' wrote Richard
Garnett, 'but an absolute magnetising of her brain by Shelley's
can account for her having risen so far above her usual self as in
Frankenstein. Comparison of Frankenstein with a later work by
Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826), may, perhaps, temper that
judgment. The Last Man is a much longer work than Franken-
stein. It describes the destruction, spread over many years, of
the entire human race, all but one man, by an epidemic disease.
The book shows many signs of effort and labour. The imaginative
faculty often runs wild, and often flags. The social and political
foresight displayed is but feeble. The work is unequal and extra-
vagant. Yet, in The Last Man, there are indubitable traces of
the power that created Frankenstein ; and, if Mary Shelley, working
in unhappy days at a task too comprehensive for her strength,
could produce such a book as The Last Man, there is no reason
for doubting her capacity, while in stimulating society and amid
inspiring conversation, to reach the imaginative height of
Frankenstein. To a modern reader, the introductory part, which
relates to the Englishmen who met Frankenstein in the Polar
seas, seems too long and elaborate ; when the story becomes
confined to Frankenstein and the monster that he created, the
form is as pure as the matter is engrossing. And, unlike most
tales of terror, Frankenstein is entirely free from anything absurd.
The intellectual, no less than the emotional, level is maintained
throughout. In Mary Shelley's other principal novels, Valperga
(1823), a romance of medieval Italy, to which her father Godwin
gave some finishing touches, and Lodore (1835), a partly auto-
biographical story, there is clear evidence of a strong imagination
and no little power of emotional writing, though both lack sustained
mastery.
Frankenstein is founded upon scientific research, as if the time
had come when it was necessary to give some rational basis to the
terror which novel-readers had been content to accept for its own
sake. A later writer, Catherine Crowe, went further than Mary
Shelley in this direction. Mrs Crowe not only delighted in ghosts
and similar occasions of terror; in The Night Side of Nature
(1848), she attempted to find a scientific, or, as we should now call


## p. 249 (#273) ############################################

XI]
Catherine Crowe. George Croly 249
6
it, a psychic' explanation of such things; and the result is an
engaging volume of mingled story and speculation. In her two
novels, Adventures of Susan Hopley; or Circumstantial Evidence
(1841) and The Story of Lilly Dawson (1847), the horrors owe
but little to the supernatural. Robberies, murders and abductions
are the chief ingredients. Mrs Crowe had some power of imagina-
tion, or, rather, perhaps, of ingenuity in spinning tales of crime.
But her work is very ragged. She introduces so many characters
and so many unrelated episodes, that any skill which she may
show in weaving them together at the close of the book comes too
late to console the still bewildered reader.
Though the fiction of George Croly deals but little with the
supernatural, it has, on one side, a distinct affinity with the
novel of terror. The principal aim of his chief novel, Salathiel
(1829), is to overwhelm the reader with monstrous visions of
terror and dismay. The theme of the story is the destruction of
Jerusalem by the Romans under Titus; and here, as in Marston
(1846), a romance of the French revolution and the subsequent
European warfare, Croly touches, on another side, the historical
novelists. But he has not more affinity with Scott than with
Mrs Radcliffe. His models are two : Byron, from whom he takes
the character of his heroes, persons who do terrific deeds and
seldom cease complaining of their dark and tragic fate; and
De Quincey, on whom he modelled his prose. Often turgid, often
extravagant, often vulgar in its display, like that of his exemplar,
Croly's prose not seldom succeeds in impressing the reader by its
weight and volume; and he had a large vision of his subject.
A dash of humour might have made him a great novelist. Yet it
will remain strange that anyone writing historical romances in the
heyday of the fame of Walter Scott could write so wholly unlike
Scott as did Croly. The difference between them was due partly
to a sturdy and pugnacious independence in Croly of which there
is much further evidence in his life and writings.
Another cause must be sought for the difference between
Scott and George Payne Rainsford James. As a historical novelist,
James was a professed follower of Scott. In the preface to the
third edition of his first novel, Richelieu (1829), James relates
how be sent the MS to Scott, who, after keeping it for some
months, returned it with a letter full of kindness and encourage-
ment. Without a particle of Scott's genius, James was a quick,
patient, indefatigable worker. He poured forth historical novel
after historical novel, all conscientiously accurate in historical


## p. 250 (#274) ############################################

250
Lesser Novelists
[CH.
fact, all dressed in well-invented incident, all diffuse and pompous in
style, and all lifeless, humourless and characterless. James fell an
easy victim to Thackeray's gift for parody; but the modern reader
will wonder why Thackeray took the trouble to parody James,
unless it were that the task was agreeably easy and that James's
popularity was worth a shaft of ridicule.
There is far more life and spirit about another author of
fiction half-historical, half-terrific, who also owed not a little
to the encouragement of Scott. William Harrison Ainsworth
has kept some of his popularity, while that of James has faded,
because Ainsworth, as little able as was James to unite
history with the study of character, had a vigorous imagina-
tion and wrote with gusto. Rookwood (1834), Jack Sheppard
(1839), The Tower of London (1840), Guy Fawkes (1841), Old
St Paul's (1841), The Lancashire Witches (1848), The South Sea
Bubble (1868): these and others in a very long list of romances
can still delight many grown men as well as boys, thanks to
their energetic movement and their vivid though rough style of
narration.
The coming of Scott did not suffice to divert certain older
channels of fiction that were still, if feebly, flowing. And, in the
work of Frederick Marryat, a stream that had sprung from Smollett
a
received a sudden access of volume and power. At one time, it
was customary to regard captain Marryat as a genial amateur,
a sea-captain who wrote sea-stories for boys. The fact that, from
1806 to 1830, Marryat served actively and ably in the navy did not
prevent him from being a novelist of very near the first rank.
He had little mastery over the construction of plot; his satire (as
exhibited, for instance, in Mr Easy's expositions of the doctrines
of liberty) is very thin and shallow. But, in the deft delineation of
oddity of character he is worthy of mention with Sterne or with
Dickens; and, in the narration of stirring incident, he was un-
rivalled in his day. Indeed, excepting Walter Scott, Marryat was
the only novelist of his period who might lay claim to eminence. To
read the novels of his prime: Peter Simple (1834), Mr Midship-
man Easy (1836), Japhet in search of a Father (1836) or Jacob
Faithful (1837), is to find a rich humour, a wide knowledge of
men and things, intense and telling narrative, an artistic re-
straint which forbids extravagance or exaggeration and an all but
Tolstoy-like power over detail. Within his narrower limits,
captain Marryat, at his best, is a choicer artist than Defoe, whom,
in many points, he resembles-among others, in having had his


## p. 251 (#275) ############################################

XI]
Marryat. Hook
251
mal
Jaze
Jana
un
.
kr
Tle 1
finest work regarded, for a time, as merely reading for boys. ' From
that implied reproach, Marryat's best novels, like Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe, have, ultimately, escaped.
Indeed, the stories that Marryat
himself intended for boys–Masterman Ready (1841), The Settlers
in Canada (1844) and others are found to have qualities that make
them welcome to grown men. In Marryat, there are touches here
and there of the lower humour of Smollett, but these occur
almost entirely in his early work, written before he had learned
his business as novelist'. His mind, moreover, was finer in
quality than that of another writer, to whom, doubtless, he owed
something, Theodore Hook.
Of Hook's fiction, it is difficult to write. It had a wide
influence; and it is of little value. It lacks all the higher
;
qualities, but suggested possibilities to many a later writer. The
nine volumes of Hook's novels, Sayings and Doings (1826–9),
were, in their own day, very popular: to a modern reader, even
the best of them, Gervase Skinner, seems flimsy, vulgar and
trivial. However, there is a lively spirit in them; and Hook's
value to English fiction seems to lie in his very freedom and
'modernity. He reminded fiction—for, indeed, she seemed to
have forgotten what Fielding had made clear-that all life was her
province. He showed that it was possible to be 'up-to-date,' free
(and also easy), without degrading the art; thus, he opened a way
to minds like Marryat's which had a truer originality and a fresher
vision. Before long, Dickens was to appear, to make supreme
use of the lately won liberty.
Before this chapter is brought to a close, two Scottish
novelists should not be left without mention. John Galt, in The
Ayrshire Legatees, The Entail and The Annals of the Parish,
gave admirably minute and real studies of rural life in Scotland,
full of strong delineation of character and forcible detail. As
imaginative pictures of homely life under perfectly known con-
ditions, Galt's novels occupy an important place in fiction. The
fame of the Waverley novels tempted him later to compete
with Scott in historical fiction, in which he succeeded but mode-
rately.
David Macbeth Moir wrote for his friend, Galt, the last
chapters of a novel, The Last of the Lairds, and was the author
of The Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith (1828), a
partly satirical, and very amusing, study of humble Scottish
* In connection with Marryat and the sea-novel two other writers of the time are
worth mention : William Nugent Glascock and Frank Chamier.
Tot
.
I
rah
rith
T:
ind
it
be
nie
oslanced


## p. 252 (#276) ############################################

252
Lesser Novelists
[CH. XI
character, so shrewdly observed and neatly set down that the
reader regrets its interruption by the interpolated romance The
Curate of Suverdsio.
The period, as a whole, was productive of no great fiction, and
of very little that can be considered first-rate. Neither Scott nor
Jane Austen inspired any eminent follower; and the time, in spite
of an immense production of romances and novels, did little more
than keep the art of fiction alive till the coming of Dickens
and of Thackeray.


## p. 253 (#277) ############################################

CHAPTER XII
THE OXFORD MOVEMENT
THE remarkable influence which affected English religion in
the middle of the nineteenth century could not have failed to
affect English literature. But the one stood apart from the other
in a way unusual in English history. At the age of the reforma-
tion, at the time of the Laudian movement under Charles I and
in the time of the later Caroline divines, religious literature
occupied a prominent, sometimes a commanding, position in the
eyes of all who were alive to the currents of public life. It is true
that the great dramatic literature of Elizabeth's day was concerned
very little with the wranglings of divines; but no record of the
literary giants of those days could omit the name of Hooker,
whose influence on English prose was immense. Jeremy Taylor
was a great man of letters, and, in Dryden's day, theological
questions were the staple of many a discussion which might
appear to belong to pure literature. But the Oxford movement
seemed, throughout almost its whole course, to stand apart from the
literature of the day. Men went on for a long time thinking and
writing in other fields of learning as if there were no such persons
as Newman and Keble and Pusey; or, like Carlyle, dismissed them
contemptuously from their thoughts as having but the brain of
rabbits. Only very gradually was the persistence of their work
felt outside religious or academic circles; and, to the end, there
was not more than one of their writers who seriously affected the
current of English letters. Mark Pattison, long after 'the Trac-
tarian infatuation' had ceased to influence him, complained that
there was ‘no proper public for either' theology or church history.
But, none the less, the Oxford movement, as it came to be called,
formed a most important epoch in literature: yet, for a long while
it stood apart, as philosophy commonly does, from the ordinary
work of men who wrote and men who read.
Nor was it, at least till late in its progress, affected by foreign


## p. 254 (#278) ############################################

254 The Oxford Movement [ch.
influences. James Anthony Froude, who, at one time, had run
hotfoot with the movement, said, in later life, that its whole history,
if not that of the English church, would have been different if
Newman had known German; and the extremely superficial gene-
ralisation has been widely accepted. It would be more true to
say that with the German theology of the period, its theorising, its
sentimentalism and its haste, the tractarian leaders had no affinity.
Those who knew it, such as Pusey and Hugh James Rose, believed
that they saw through and beyond it. The other leaders at least
knew what its principles were, and decisively rejected them. Of
Italian theology, on the other hand, there was practically none;
but the religious aspect of Manzoni's I promessi Sposi at one
time deeply affected Newman. The great French catholic writers
gradually became known to the English leaders. Newman paid
great attention to the church in France. French devotional
books were translated and edited in great abundance, by Pusey
and others, after 1845, and some of the later disciples of the school,
such as Liddon, owed a great deal to the French manner and
method. But, for the most part, tractarian literature was insular
and had its roots deep in the past. The catholic influences which
affected it belonged to the early, not the modern, church.
Yet, it is impossible to study the Oxford movement without
seeing that it was essentially one with the romantic movement
which had re-created the literature of Germany and France.
In France, Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme had been
the signal for a reaction, in the world of letters, in favour of
Christianity; and Joseph de Maistre, who had most powerfully
supported it, looked on the church of England with consider-
able favour. Later, the career of Lamennais was followed with
great interest in England, and Newman had deep sympathy on
many points with Lacordaire. Nor was the movement without its
affinities with Germany. The spiritual romanticism of Schiller,
and the genius of the great Goethe on its medieval side, appealed,
at least through English disciples and copyists, to some of the
feelings which gave strength to the Oxford movement. From
Goethe to Walter Scott is an easy step: he turned men's minds,
said Newman, in the direction of the middle ages, and the Oxford
leaders themselves knew how much they owed to the Wizard of
the North. Behind their severity there was a vein of noble senti-
ment akin to his. Keble even, when he traced the influence that
Scott had exercised in substituting his manly realities for the
flimsy, enervating literature which peopled the shelves of those


## p. 255 (#279) ############################################

X11]
255
Tractarianism and Politics
who read chiefly for amusement, allowed himself to wonder what
might have happened if this gifted writer had become the poet of
the Church in as eminent a sense as he was the poet of the Border
and of Highland chivalry.
The tractarians shared, with Scott at least, the understanding
delight in a noble past; and the bizarre and critical genius of
Peacock was, also, by their side. The liberalism which he
abhorred was to them, too, the great enemy. For a certain
political kinship in the early tractarians must not be ignored.
Later developments have caused a distinction to be drawn
between the liberalism which Keble denounced and the party
which, in Gladstone, had for leader one of the most devout
disciples of the Oxford movement. But the whigs were believed
to be, and historically had been, an anti-church party; and, though
the liberalism which the Oxford writers opposed was not actually
the whig party, it was, in many of its principles, closely allied to
that party, and ultimately absorbed the party's members into its
fold and under its name. Tractarianism was certainly not a tory
movement, but it was opposed to liberalism in all its aspects; and
it soon shed from among its supporters those who, even if, like
J. A. Froude, they remained conservative in some political
principles, found themselves, when, like Arthur Clough and Mark
Pattison, they looked deep into their hearts, to be fundamentally
liberal and 'progressive. To the philosophy of conservatism the
Oxford leaders were much indebted. Dean Church says that the
Oriel men disliked Coleridge'as a misty thinker'; but, in the
ideas which influenced them, apart from their strictly theological
expression, they were undoubtedly, to some extent, his debtors;
though Newman recognised that what, to him, were funda-
mental-'the church, sacraments, doctrines, etc. '—were, to the
philosopher, rather symbols than truths. And, in the region
of pure poetry, there was much in their thought which was in
sympathy with Wordsworth in his loftiest moods.
But all this, though it may illustrate the origin, the character
and the affinities of the Oxford movement, tells nothing as to
its direct antecedents. Of these, it may suffice to say that the
tractarians represented and continued a tradition which, though it
had been submerged, had never died: a tradition of unity with
the great Caroline divines and the theologians whom they had
taken for their models. If this, in churchmanship as well as in
literary expression, had become 'high and dry' among those who,
in the early nineteenth century, might be regarded as its direct


## p. 256 (#280) ############################################

256 The Oxford Movement [CH.
representatives, there were others in whom the continuity of
thought is unmistakable. Dean Church says:
:
Higher ideas of the Church than the popular and political notion of it, higher
conceptions of it than those of the ordinary evangelical theology-echoes of
the meditations of a remarkable Irishman, Mr Alexander Knox—had in many
quarters attracted attention in the works and sermons of his disciple, Bishop
Jebb, though it was not till the movement had taken shape that their full
significance was realised 1.
Knox had himself said, in 1816, that 'the Old High Church race
is worn out'; and the excellent Thomas Sikes, rector of Guils-
borough, set himself to teach a neglectful generation the doctrine
of 'one Catholic and Apostolic Church. '
'He used to say,' says the biographer of his friend Joshua Watson, 'that
wherever he went he saw many signs of earnest minds among the clergy of
his time, and those who were then rising into public notice; but whether
owing to the security of our civil establishment or a false charity to dissent,
one great truth appeared by common agreement to bave been suppressed.
The Article itself involved ritual, discipline, orders, and sacred ordinances
generally, and its exclusion tended to the subversion of all2?
And it was this teaching which it was the main work of the writers
of Tracts for the Times to revive.
"We all concurred most heartily,' says one of them, 'in the necessity of
impressing on people that the Church was more than a merely human in-
stitution; that it bad privileges, sacraments, a ministry, ordained by Christ;
that it was a matter of the highest obligation to remain united to the Church. '
The date at which the movement definitely began was the
month of July 1833. On the 14th, John Keble, fellow of Oriel,
professor of poetry, and curate to his father in a little village
on the border of the Cotswolds, a man whose academic career
had been one of most unusual distinction, preached before
the judges of assize at Oxford a sermon on national apostasy,
in which he denounced the liberal and Erastian tendencies of the
age. He was a tory, no doubt : James Mozley notes how, as
poetry professor, he gave a lecture 'proving Homer to be a tory
(shall we say conservative? ) and finally stating reasons why it
was that all real poets were tories. ' But the ideas of his sermon
were far from political: they were an appeal to the nation on behalf
of its very deepest religious needs. And the day on which it was
preached was ever kept by Newman as the birthday of the new
movement. A few days later, there met at the rectory of Hadleigh
in Suffolk a company of like-minded men, under the presidency
of the rector, Hugh James Rose, a Cambridge scholar, to whom the
Oxonians looked for light and leading—the one commanding
1 The Oxford Movement, pp. 28, 29. ? Churton's Life of Joshua Watson, I. 51.


## p. 257 (#281) ############################################

XII] Richard Hurrell Froude 257
a
figure and very lovable man that the frightened and discomfited
church people were now rallying round. To him, five years later,
Newman dedicated some sermons as to one 'who, when hearts were
failing, bade us stir up the gift that was in us and betake ourselves
to our true mother. ' It may be well to give a brief sketch of the
history of the movement thus opened before we consider the
position of its leaders in English literature.
A petition to the archbishop of Canterbury followed these Ar anden vise
first steps; and then began in September the issue of Tracts for
the Times, 'on the privileges of the Church and against Popery and
Dissent,' as a private memorandum of advertisement states.
A word as to the prominent members of the party which
brought out the tracts. John Keble not only had academic
distinction, but was the writer of a book of sacred poems which
had won an almost unparalleled success. The Christian Year was
published anonymously in 1827; but its authorship was no secret.
John Henry Newman, also a fellow of Oriel, was vicar of St Mary's,
the university, as well as a parish, church at Oxford. He had
returned from a holiday, marred by illness, abroad, in the month
of the assize sermon and the meeting at Hadleigh. With him
had travelled his friend and brother-fellow, Richard Hurrell
Froude, who had been Keble's pupil in the Cotswolds. Both felt,
as Newman said later, that 'the true and primary author' of the
movement was John Keble. Newman was coming to share many
of his opinions; Froude was his ardent disciple.
The wanderings in the Mediterranean, undertaken for Froude's
health, had been a formative time in the life of Newman. He
had left England when the church was threatened with disesta-
blishment by the whig party. "The bill for the suppression of the
Irish sees was in progress,' he said; 'I had fierce thoughts against
the liberals. In the hour of battle, he turned to poetry, and he
wrote, while he was away, more than half the poems of his life'.
At Rome, the two friends began Lyra Apostolica, poems con-
tributed to The British Magazine, and collected in a single volume
in 1836. The ring of battle is in the book.
The Ark of God is in the field,
Like clouds around, the alien armies sweep;
Each by his spear, beneath his shield,
In cold and dew the anointed warriors sleep.
Oh dream no more of quiet life2!
1 About four-fifths, if we exclude The Dream of Gerontius. Ward, W. , Life of
Newman, 1. 57.
* Lyra Apostolica (ed. Beeching, H. C. , undated), p. 77.
6
E. L. XII.
CH. XII.
17


## p. 258 (#282) ############################################

258
The Oxford Movement [CH.
The first of the tracts was Newman's own, Thoughts on the
Ministerial Commission, respectfully addressed to the Clergy ;
and all the early tracts sounded the same notes of stress and
danger and appeal. Other writers joined, some of them men of
great power, and worthy to be leaders in a great cause; but
perhaps in Newman and Froude alone was there the indubitable
touch of real genius. Of Froude, those who knew him best said,
when he had passed away, before the movement had reached more
than its initial stages, that 'men with all their health and strength
about them might gaze on his attenuated form, struck with a
certain awe of wonderment at the brightness of his wit, the
intenseness of his mental vision, and the iron strength of his
argument. ' His Remains (1838 and 1839) show the daring of
his spirit, the directness, if narrowness, of his vision and the
sympathy with which he appreciated the history of the church's
past. His analysis and summary of the letters of Becket is
remarkable for the time at which it was written and has not a
few points of enduring value. In 1834, the tract writers were
joined by Edward Bouverie Pusey, regius professor of Hebrew
since 1828, a scholar of eminence who was already of great
weight in the university and the church. Newman said of his
accession to the movement that ‘he was able to give a name,
a fame, and a personality to what was without him a sort of
mob. ' Tract no. 18, Thoughts on the Benefits of the System of
Fasting enjoined by our Church was issued with his initials.
Isaac Williams, who was with him and Newman when it was
agreed that he should contribute, says that the initials were added
to show that he was in no way responsible for the other tracts;
but the Record newspaper took them as showing his sanction, and
the nickname 'Puseyite' was soon affixed to all the writers and
their friends, and it stuck.
The tracts were now well launched, and those who wrote them
were a coherent body, with common aims and something of a
common style in English writing: intensely serious, unaffected,
without the slightest ornament or rhetoric, but dignified and, in
later issues, reflecting in the language the weight and elaboration
of the argument. John William Bowden, William Palmer, Arthur
Philip Perceval, Isaac Williams were others who added each a
distinctive character to the general impression; and the last of
these was a genuine poet and the master of a singularly limpid
and attractive prose style.
In a few words, the history of the movement of which the tracts


## p. 259 (#283) ############################################

X1] Newman at St Mary's 259
were the chief literary output may be told. A great impetus was
given by the preaching of Newman at St Mary's, of which an
immortal description exists by John Campbell Shairp, who became
principal of the United college at St Andrews and professor of
poetry at Oxford. The English church had produced many great
preachers since the reformation. Men had hung on the words
of Donne, had crowded to hear Stillingfleet and Tillotson; but
no man had ever moved others so deeply by such simple means
as Newman. All was quiet, restrained, subdued; the voice soft,
almost monotonous, the eyes hardly ever lifted from the paper;
but old truths were touched into life, when he spoke of 'Unreal
Words,' of the ‘Individuality of the Soul,' of the 'Invisible World,
and again of 'warfare the condition of victory,' the Cross of Christ
the measure of the world,' or 'the Christian Church a home for
the lonely. The sermons gave to every cause which Newman
supported a following of enthusiastic supporters. In 1836, the
strength of the party was shown in the attack on Hampden
when he was made regius professor of divinity. Efforts of Roman
catholics in England under a new leader (Wiseman) were also met
by Newman in lectures on Romanism and popular protestantism;
in tract 71, he condemned the Roman form of various Christian
doctrines; and the witness of the ancient church was collected in a
series, begun in 1836 and lasting some forty years, of translations en-
titled Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, anterior to the Division
of East and West. Yet, other influences were already at work.
An important addition to the company of friends proved eventually
to be an impulse towards Rome. With Frederick Oakeley and
Frederick Faber, came a man of much greater power, William
George Ward, fellow of Balliol, a dialectician of extraordinary
skill, an ebullient humourist and, as a friend, full of devotion and
charm. But the book which had attracted him was the first
severe blow the movement received. It was the first two volumes
of Literary Remains of Richard Hurrell Froude (1838), and its
unsparing condemnation of the reformers and the reformation
alienated many supporters, alarmed those ignorant of history
and turned the mass of the public into bitter opponents. Already,
the school of liberalism in theology had attacked the tracts,
Arnold using as violent language against the Oxford malignants'
as was ever used against Wesley, and declaring that their work
was to change sense into silliness and holiness into formality and
hypocrisy. Still, recruits crowded to the banner of the tractarians.
Newman succeeded to the editorship of the famous British Critic,
2
17--2


## p. 260 (#284) ############################################

260
[CH.
The Oxford Movement
6
a literary magazine whose importance dated from the days of the
younger Pitt. It seemed as if the friends stood firmly in con-
servative ways. Behind them was the figure of that wonderful
old scholar, theologian and tory, Martin Joseph Routh (1755—
1854), president of Magdalen, reserved, as Newman wrote in 1838,
'to report to a forgetful generation what was the theology of their
fathers. ' But, already the new accessions had cut into the original
movement at an angle, fallen across its line of thought and then
set about turning that line in its own direction. Tract 87, by
Isaac Williams, On reserve in communicating religious knowledge,
more by its title, probably—for all who did not read it, and some
who did, entirely misunderstood it—than by its contents, alarmed
many, and the author was easily defeated when he stood for the
Oxford professorship of poetry. It was war now, and war within
the field of English letters. Newman, in tract 90, repeated the
argument of Sta. Clara in Charles I's time that the XXXIX
Articles could not historically be directed against the council of
Trent and were at least patient of an interpretation accordant
with the theology of the catholic church. Such an argument
.
was familiar enough and could only alarm the ignorant. But
this it effectually did. The heads of houses awoke from torpor,
and, except the patriarch president of Magdalen, and the rector
of Exeter, under the influence of four college tutors (one of whom,
Archibald Campbell Tait, of Balliol, lived to become archbishop of
Canterbury), condemned the tract in March 1841. Bishops 'charged'
against the author, and, at the same time, the English church seemed
committed to an agreement with Prussian protestantism in the
creation of a bishopric for Jerusalem. And then Newman himself
received a serious blow to his own intellectual stability. The con-
fidence of his studies in the history of the early church was abruptly
broken by an article in The Dublin Review, September 1839,
on the Donatists, written by Wiseman, the leader of the new
and dominant party among the English Roman catholics. Other
points in the story of ancient heresies seemed to him to look
the same way. The 'palmary words' of St Augustine, securus
judicat orbis terrarum, struck him in a new light. The bishops'
condemnation weighed heavily on him, and he began to feel that
he could not remain in a church which did not allow his sense
of the Articles. Early in 1842, he left Oxford and went to live
three miles away, but still in his parish, at Littlemore. He
resigned his living in September 1843 and withdrew into lay
communion. His last sermon, a lament of singular beauty for the


## p. 261 (#285) ############################################

XII] The Secession of Newman
261
church of England, was preached at Littlemore, on 25 September
1843. Already, a sermon by Pusey, which a little knowledge of
seventeenth century theology would have shown never to have
travelled beyond the limits of the Caroline divines, had been
condemned by the heads of houses, without a hearing or any
statement of reasons. And, to add to the disasters which beset
the tractarians, the irrepressible W. G. Ward published a heavy
and exasperating book, The Ideal of a Christian Church. He
gloried in the 'most joyful, most wonderful, most unexpected,
sight! we find the whole cycle of Roman doctrine gradually
possessing numbers of English churchmen. ' On 13 February
1845, the movement reached its crisis at Oxford. Convocation,
attended by more than a thousand members of the university, the
most famous as well as the most obscure, condemned the book
and deprived the author of his degrees. A proposal to censure
tract 90 was defeated by the veto of the proctors. The scene, of
passion and humour and snowballs, has often been described; and
Edward Freeman, in later years the historian of the Norman con-
quest, set it to verse after the style of Macaulay's Virginia. It was,
as R. W. Church, then junior proctor, wrote in after years, ‘not only
the final defeat and conclusion of the first stage of the movement.
It was the birthday of the modern Liberalism of Oxford. ' On
9 October, Newman was received into the church of Rome.
From that moment, the story ceases to be picturesque or
passionate. Those in whom the original principles of the Oxford
leaders had been firmly rooted, Keble and Pusey, Isaac Williams
and Charles Marriott, Richard Church and James Mozley, remained
to teach to the next generation the doctrines for which they had
suffered. The movement took its place in the history of the
English church.
It passed away from Oxford. Part of its influence went Rome-
wards with Newman. Part remained, with the two stalwarts
among its first leaders, to leaven the life of the whole church of
England. Keble died in 1866, having written nothing which
achieved the popularity of The Christian Year; but, till the last
there remained much of the grace and sober sweetness of his early
manner in all that he wrote. Pusey lived till 16 September 1882,
when he had survived all his first associates, except Newman, and
most of their first disciples.