If his
reputation is, even now, below his deserts, it is probably because
## p.
reputation is, even now, below his deserts, it is probably because
## p.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v14
Though far from
reckless in the guidance of the counsels of his party, as a speaker,
the 'Rupert of debate,' as Bulwer Lytton called him in The New
Timon, was, beyond doubt, one of the most splendid, as he was
one of the most impetuous, foemen in the field. His oratory was,
E. L. XIV.
CH. II.
9
## p. 130 (#160) ############################################
130
[CH.
Political Orators
however, under the control of a well-trained taste', and free from
the artifices of rhetoric. While his vivacity caused him, at sixty,
to be thought one of the cleverest young men in parliament, he
was occasionally accused of a levity of tone recalling other contests
than those of the political arena. The earl of Derby's colleague, the
earl of Ellenborough, remained one of the foremost orators of the
house of lords, even after he had resigned the presidency of the
board of control in 1858. He was a man of brilliant gifts ; but his
oratory reflects the masterfulness of disposition which he had
most prominently displayed as governor-general of India.
In the revolt against Peel, of which the house of commons
was, necessarily, the chief scene, the leading parts were played
by lord George Bentinck and Disraeli. Lord George had made
a high-minded sacrifice of his interest in the turf, and, during
his short political career, proved a very effective, if not always
highly refined, speaker, who took great trouble with facts and
figures. The parliamentary career of Benjamin Disraeli, first earl
of Beaconsfield, really began with those attacks upon Peel which
left their mark upon the political history of the country. They,
also, left their mark upon his style of oratory, which, after, at
first, deriving its significance from its invective, retained the
original seasoning even when it was applied to the unfolding or
defence of a positive policy. Disraeli's power of sarcasm (which no
orator ever more successfully heightened by scornfulness of manner
and by mimicry of gesture) was, however, only one of the gifts
conspicuous in a long succession of speeches—some delivered,
as it were, at bay, some, in the moment of triumph. None of
these gifts was more assiduously cultivated by their possessor
than the imaginative faculty, with which he was sumptuously
endowed and which, in great matters and in small, though in
imperial, in preference to 'parochial,' questions, he constantly
turned to the fullest account, but always with consummate dis-
crimination and often, as it was said, 'behind a mask. Thus,
the splendour of his ideals, which, in his younger days, had been
largely associated with fantastic conceptions or racial traditions,
became, in the end, one of the most valuable of his political ways
and means, took captive queen and country, and, for a time, made
the world listen to his eloquence as to the messages of an oracle.
Among the politicians to whom the name of Peelites clung
even after their leader had passed away, Sir James Graham,
who, at first, was regarded as their leader and who, at one time,
1 As to his translation of the Iliad, see, ante, vol. XII, p. 334.
## p. 131 (#161) ############################################
1]
Granville, Devonshire.
.
Cobden
131
seemed likely to rise to a foremost position in the conduct of
affairs, was a fine speaker, though rather inclined to pompousness,
and the best in the house on financial and economical subjects
(William Huskisson, whose knowledge of these had been most
valuable to Peel, was without oratorical power). But, with all
his ability and statesmanlike insight, he could not gain the full
confidence of his contemporaries, perhaps because he seemed to
be without perfect trust in himself. The most brilliant (except
one) of his political associates, Sidney Herbert, afterwards first
lord Herbert of Lea, died before his oratorical and other gifts
had secured to him the highest political honours.
Among ministers whose attention was chiefly, though, in
neither case, exclusively, given to foreign affairs, the earl of
Clarendon and earl Granville were the most conspicuous; they
were alike men of great personal charm and accomplished
speakers, skilled in the art of diplomatic composition and in
the use of forms and turns of courteous speech, an art which has
often been missing in English statesmen who lacked their cosmo-
politan training. To these qualifications, Granville, whose unselfish
services were of the utmost value to his chief, added that of a
popular vein, which won him many friends outside the foreign
offices of Europe, and made him singularly winning as an orator.
During many a long year of party conflict, Gladstone had no more
loyal adjutant than the marquis of Hartington, afterwards duke
of Devonshire, who possessed in a degree never surpassed the
power, invaluable in debate, of bringing home to friends and
opponents the absolute sincerity of his utterances.
Inseparably linked together in political history, and most of
all by the isolation in which the pair found themselves at more
than one stage of their political career, are the great radical
names of Cobden and Bright. From the days when the elder
of them, Richard Cobden, first entered parliament, in order there
to prosecute, with a single-mindedness as complete as that of the
platform, the campaign for cheapening the food of the people,
an absorbing care for the condition of the people, remained, from
first to last, the note of his oratory, and of the remarkable
political writings in which he gave occasional expression to his
principles. In all his deliverances, he is found transparently
sincere, perfectly definite in purpose and as free from ad cap-
tandum devices as any orator who has commanded the applause
of vast popular audiences or has conquered the attention of
a vigilantly antipathetic house of commons. His persuasiveness,
9-2
## p. 132 (#162) ############################################
132
Political Orators
[ch.
which Bright described as irresistible, was based on a ground-
work of facts, and their logic convinced his hearers, as his
imperturbable sureness of himself showed them to have con-
vinced the speaker. Although a self-taught orator as well as
politician, Cobden was not wholly without a literary sense the
notorious reference to the Ilissus was a mere bit of mischief;
but, neither fancy nor humour, nor even the deeper movements
of indignation, entered much into the spirit of his speeches,
which, penetrating to the kernel of the matter, scattered all the
mistakes and false doctrines by which it was enveloped. In the
Corn law meetings, he left it to his indefatigable coadjutor
William Johnson Fox (Browning's far-sighted friend), who was
always intent upon the interests of the working classes, to draw
touching pictures of the social suffering which the leaguers were
seeking to remedy. Even his antagonism to war, to which he
gave thoughtful expression long before he inveighed against the
concrete example of the conflict with Russia, rested, primarily,
on other than humanitarian grounds. He was not an enthusiast
in either love or hate, and could believe in the sincerity of
others-even of Palmerston-as he was absolutely sincere him-
self. John Bright_Cobden's comrade in the earliest and most
unequivocally successful phase of their public lives, and in their
opposition to a national war which reason and conscience made
them deem unjust, but virtually without his steadfast associate's
support in the long campaign for that extension of the franchise
on which modern democracy is based—was, beyond all doubt, one
of the greatest orators of his own or any other age of English life.
The individuality which mirrored itself in his eloquence, and the
ascendancy which it exercised, were those of genius. Although
he insisted on yielding to Fox, who spoke less frequently and with
more elaboration of art, the palm of orator of the anti-Corn-law
league, he displayed, even in this early period of his life, those
qualities which gradually developed into majestic grandeur. In
many respects, the simplest of men, and an adherent of many
of the homely ways of his community, he seemed to tower among
those around him by an unquestioned, half-heroic, dignity of
personality and presence. The arts of flattery were as strange
to his oratory as they were to his daily converse ; and irony aud
sarcasm seemed alien to the pure truthfulness of his nature. He
was well-read—though not, perhaps, in the common sense of the
phrase. His mind was steeped in the Bible; in his loftier flights,
he seemed to be breathing the atmosphere of the Old Testament;
## p. 133 (#163) ############################################
II]
John Bright. Robert Lowe
133
the thoughts and cadences of Milton were ever on his lips;
and he was familiar with a few other great writers capable of
inspiring noble passages of his eloquence. Solemn reproof, lofty
appeal, sympathy with woe and awe of the divine all these are
to be found in his speeches, where they touch the heights and
depths of human feeling. Of himself, unlike many great orators,
he says little; but the whole history of his public life reveals itself
in his speeches on free trade, or peace and reform, on Ireland,
on India and on that great transatlantic republic whose cause
he upheld, by the side of John Stuart Mill, in the critical hour.
His oratory resembled his life in the grandeur of its simplicity-
hardly a gesture to heighten the effect of the magical voice, only
an occasional sally of wit or humour to relieve the earnestness in
which moral force was naturally blended with human-kindness,
and the whole a self-consistent and unfaltering advance, and a
repose on the heights, when they had been reached, of prophetic
faith. Milton, he said, had taught him, when in his youth he was
beginning to think about public affairs, that true eloquence is
'but the serious and hearty love of truth? '; and the precept,
from first to last, shone like a beacon on his path.
A place of his own among the political orators of his day
must be assigned to Robert Lowe, afterwards viscount Sherbrooke,
a liberal in the general tendency of his ideas and texture of his
intellect, but raised to the height of his political influence and
oratorical renown as the protagonist of the struggle against
democratic reform, with Edward Horsman as the second spokesman
of the Cave (1866–7). In Lowe's speeches, as in his conversation
(his writings were few), bis academical training found very distinct
expression, though antithetically mixed with a stinging wit and
with a knowledge of registration and administration taught by
eight years of colonial, followed by a long and varied home,
experience of parliamentary and official life. But the intrinsic
power of his oratory was such as to enable him to fight with un-
paralleled effect the battle on which he had chosen to enter against
what he called the sentimental, the fatalistic and the aggressive
or compulsory democracy, as represented by Mill, Gladstone and
Bright; and his brief autobiography remains to illustrate the
nature of his wit, under which all sentiment withered away.
In this enumeration, we must pass by those whose public life was
mainly occupied with questions, whether of foreign or home policy,
which did not reach their solution in the nineteenth century and
1 Cf. Trevelyan, G. M. , The Life of John Bright (1913), p. 386.
## p. 134 (#164) ############################################
134
[CH.
Political Orators
some of which remain unsolved at the present day? Among
these were, on the conservative side, at least one statesman of com-
manding personality—Robert Cecil, third marquis of Salisbury-
who, without ever quite laying aside the 'fouts' and 'gibes' of less
responsible days, and often, seemingly, careless of the immediate
effect of indiscretions which would have shaken the trust in the
self-control of a lesser man, impressed large audiences as well
as the discerning few with his fitness to guide the vessel of state
through storms or shoals.
The life of Joseph Chamberlain ended only yesterday, but
in the chief campaign which it was pot given to him to carry
to an issue, he had exercised too potent an influence upon the
future of the British empire to make it easy to pass by his name
in silence in the present connection. But the whole of his parlia-
mentary career, shortened as it was by physical failure, falls outside
the limits within which we judge it right to confine this chapter.
On the other hand, the main transactions and interests of two
generations of the national history seem to gather themselves
into the threescore years of the public career of William Ewart
Gladstone, and into the oratory which gives expression to every
stage and aspect of it; though it is only the earlier portion of that
career on which we can here dwell. Brought up, as he said, in
his native Liverpool under the shadow of the name of Canning,
welcomed at the outset of his parliamentary life by Peel, the
most talented member of Aberdeen’s new ministry of all the
talents, wooed by the tories and indispensable to the whigs,
and head of four successive administrations, he ended as the
chosen chief of the democracy which he had helped to call into
life. To very few other great statesmen of any age has it been
given so indissolubly to unite with his name and fame as a states-
man those of the orator who expounded, commended and placed
on record the chief undertakings of his political genius—unless,
indeed, it be thought fit to compare him to the master-spirit who
of old both perfected and controlled the Attic democracy. In
the year before Gladstone's death, he made the remark that, as to
politics, the basis of his mind was laid principally in finance and
in philanthropy-no very strange combination if, by the side
of some of the most brilliant triumphs of his oratory, the series
of budget speeches, be placed his ardent efforts on behalf of the
Of some distinguished divines, lawyers and men of letters whose parliamentary
oratory added to their renown, the names will be found in other chapters, and in the
bibliography.
## p. 135 (#165) ############################################
II] William Ewart Gladstone
135
suffering Christian subjects of the Turk. But the saying cannot
be accepted as adequately indicating either his chief intellectual
interests or all the most vitalising elements of his inexhaustible
eloquence. On the threshold of manhood, the bent of his mind
had been towards the clerical profession; and for some time he
continued to contemplate secular affairs ‘chiefly as a means of
being useful in church affairs. ' When, six years after entering
parliament, he produced his celebrated book entitled The State in
its Relations with the Church (1838), he took his stand on the
principle that the state must have one religion, and that must, of
course, be the religion which it had recognised as the true. From
this view, he gradually passed to the acceptance of freedom of
religious opinion, coupled with the conviction that the preservation
of truth may be left in other hands than ours, and thus fulfilled
Sheil's prophecy that the champion of free trade would become
the advocate of the most unrestricted liberty of thought. But,
even after he had ceased to stand forth as the champion of the
church he loved, religious feeling continued to be the woof that
crossed the warp of his noblest and most stirring eloquence.
Nor, again, is it possible, in considering the characteristics
of bis oratory, to mistake the extraordinary fineness of its texture,
or to refuse to attribute this, in part, to the congenial dialectical
training of a singularly subtle mind. Gladstone was a classical
scholar, whose imagination delighted to feed on Homer', and whom
a stronger intellectual affinity had familiarised with the pearls of
Vergilian diction; while, among modern literatures, he loved the
Italian with a fervency that inspired in him his earliest incursion
into the domain of foreign affairs and his first endeavours on behalf
of oppressed national aspirations. But he could not be called
either a man of letters, or thoroughly trained in the methods of
scholarship. On the other hand, he was, as a logician, trained in
the use of the whole armoury of the schools, and employed it
habitually and without effort. It was a humorous criticism which,
in the days of his still incomplete economic conversion, described
one of his speeches as consisting of arguments for free trade and
of parentheses in favour of protection; but, in his later, as well as
in his earlier, days, he thoroughly understood, and applied with
consummate skill, the defensive side of the science of debate,
including the use of reservation. No doubt he had what may be
described as the excesses of some of his qualities, and there was
1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. II, p. 19 (speech on Affirmation bill).
2 Cf. ante, vol. XII, p. 334.
## p. 136 (#166) ############################################
136
Political Orators
[CH.
point in the advice of his intimate friend Sir Thomas Acland
that, in speaking on the Jewish emancipation question (1847), he
should be as little as possible like Maurice, and more like the
duke of Wellington.
Those who think of Gladstone as an impassioned orator are
apt to overlook the fact that, in the earlier part of his career,
he very rarely gave occasion for being thus described; indeed, his
platform triumphs belong almost exclusively to his later life, and
his ascendancy in the house of commons had not been gained by
carrying it away, but by convincing it—at times, as it were, in
spite of itself. The gifts of voice and personality remained with
him almost to the last—the magic voice of which, after his great
budget speech of 1860, he was admonished to take care not
to destroy the colour, and the personality which disdained all the
small animosities of political conflict. And, with these, he retained
the lucidity of arrangement and exposition which rendered his
most complicated statements of facts and figures not only intel-
ligible but enjoyable—a gift which had been the most notable
quality of his middle period. To these, had, in his latter days,
been added, in fullest measure, the animating influence of indig-
nation and the prophetic note of aspirations for the future. Of few
great political orators of modern times has there been preserved
so luxuriant a store of recorded eloquence.
Gladstone, whose title to be regarded as the foremost political
orator of his century few will be disposed to dispute, was, also,
in this country, at all events, the most effective of political
pamphleteers. Thrice, above all, in the course of his life he inter-
vened in this way in the course of European politics—for his two
Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen (on the state prosecutions of the
Neapolitan government, 1851); his Vatican Decrees in their
Bearing on Civil Allegiance (1874), with its sequel Vaticanism
(1875), and his Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East
(1876), followed by Lessons in Massacre (1877), sensibly affected
the development of some of the most important political problems
of the times. Nor were these the only occasions on which it
seemed to him expedient to address a wider public than could be
reached by the actual accents of his voice or the reports of his
speeches; and, even after the greatest catastrophe of his political
life, the defeat of the Irish Home Rule bill of 1886, and the ratifi-
cation of this result by an adverse general election, he sat down
to compose a double-barrelled pamphlet on the Irish question.
## p. 137 (#167) ############################################
11]
Political Pamphlets
137
Gladstone's pamphlets do not stand alone as memorable expressions
of opinion put forth by noted British politicians in the nineteenth
century. To those dating from the period which may be held to close
with the deaths of Cobbett and Godwin (1835 and 1836), there is no
necessity for returning here? . The following period had its new
themes, in addition to the old, connected with political reform, re-
ligious freedom and economic progress, and with the support of the
expanding struggle for the claims of nationalities. So early as 1836,
Cobden published the earliest pair of a long series of pamphlets, of
which the second, provoked by the ‘indiscretions' of David Urqu-
hart, brought to a head in a pamphlet by that truculent ex-diplo-
matist, ably combated any attempt at armed intervention against
the eastern policy of Russia. Cobden's pamphlets deserve a notable
place in our political literature, and, among the large number of
publications of this kind produced by the French invasion panic of
1852—3, his 1792 and 1853 was a protest of much more than
passing significance. Bright was capable of writing vigorous
public letters; but his pen was not a favourite weapon with
him as it was with Cobden and with W. J. Fox. Bright's chief
adversary in the battle of franchise, Lowe, was born and bred
a pamphleteer. He had taken up arms against the famous tract
which brought to a close the most notable series of religious
pamphlets known to our literature; and, during his sojourn in
Australia, he contributed to the discussion of the land question in
that continent a luminous address which went to the very root of
the problem (1847). But, on his return to England, his political
activity as a pamphleteer soon merged into that of a journalist.
And such (to conclude this brief note) might seem, with excep-
tions which almost prove the rule, to be the inevitable tendency in
this later age of political writing designed to produce an immediate
effect. Journalism has not destroyed the pamphlet; but the greater
part of its activity has for some time seemed to be absorbed by an
organised form of publication which provides both writers and
readers with opportunities that are at once more rapid, more facile
and more commanding. The future only can show whether the
irrepressible desire of individual opinion to find wholly inde-
pendent expression, together with the recurrence of great crises
in which every voice capable of making itself heard finds solace
and encouragement in accomplishing this, will suffice to keep alive
a form associated with many great names in our literature as well
as with many important or interesting epochs of our history.
1 Cf. , ante, vol. XI, chap. II.
## p. 138 (#168) ############################################
CHAPTER III
CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE
JOHN RUSKIN AND OTHERS
THE critical and miscellaneous prose of the Victorian age is a
somewhat unmanageable subject, both because of its volume and
because of its variety. Classification is extremely difficult. There
are some writers who must clearly be ranked as literary critics
and others who, for want of a better word, may be said to belong
to the aesthetic school. Others, again, because of that charming
note of personal friendliness for which Lamb is supreme, may be
described as essayists par excellence. But how are we to classify
Borrow; or Lafcadio Hearn, the interpreter of Japan? And is
there any one class which will hold at once the author of Modern
Painters and the author of Munera Pulveris?
The line of which the evolution is clearest is that of literary
critics, and it will be convenient to treat first those who can be
classified under this head.
The critics of the Victorian age inherited from Lamb, Coleridge,
Hazlitt and Carlyle a tradition which was certainly more whole-
some than that which had prevailed in the days of Gifford and
Jeffrey; and, thanks to this tradition, criticism grew decidedly
more urbane. The oldest of this group by many years was Abraham
Hayward, who is now, perhaps, best known as author of The Art
of Dining, a volume made up, like much of Hayward's work, of
contributions to periodicals written long before their separate
publication. But Hayward began with work of a widely different
sort-a very good prose translation of Faust; and he never
abandoned his interest in Goethe. Near the end of his life, he
himself published a volume on the poet whom he had begun by
translating. He was interested in other foreign writers also, and
contributed to The Edinburgh Review articles on the countess
Hahn-Hahn and on Stendhal, at a time when these authors
were hardly known in England. Hayward could draw a good
biographical sketch or build up a very readable article out of
## p. 139 (#169) ############################################
CH. 11] Brimley. Dallas
139
anecdotes, just as he made his reputation in society from the same
materials; and his articles on contemporaries, such as those on
Sydney Smith and Samuel Rogers, are valuable for their personal
reminiscences. He could also construct an ingenious argument,
as in his More about Junius. But, for critical principles, we
search his works in vain. Somewhat akin to Hayward in his love
of anecdote, though inferior to him, was John Doran, the pleasant
author of Knights and their Days and Their Majesties' Servants.
The latter contains much information, but seems to have no clear
end in view, and has little depth of scholarship.
Doran's reputation among contemporaries is evidence that the
level of criticism about the middle of the nineteenth century was
low. It was, however, soon to be raised. Ruskin, who, inciden-
tally, is a critic of literature as well as of painting, published his
first volume of real weight in 1843. The Germ, the organ of the
pre-Raphaelites, appeared in 18501. And Matthew Arnold's earliest
critical essay was prefixed to his Poems of 1853. That stirring of
the spirit which their appearance indicated was shown, also, in the
critical work of George Brimley, whose feeble health, resulting in
an early death, alone prevented him from winning a great name.
His most notable criticism, and the only one to which he affixed
his name, was the essay on Tennyson which appeared in Cambridge
Essays in 1855. Though he is less than just to Tennyson's Poems
of 1830, holding that they ‘scarcely reach the altitudes of common
sense,' and condemning the 'perverse, unreal treatment' in the
poems inscribed with the names of women, yet, with perfect com-
prehension, he traces the evolution of Tennyson's art from 1830
to 1842. While none of the other essays can rank with that on
Tennyson, they are generally right in tone and substance.
In the case of Brimley, principles are rather implied than
stated; they are to be inferred from his judgments on particular
works. The attempts in English to make the statement of a
principle the main object have been few and incomplete; but,
among the few, that of Eneas Sweetland Dallas deserves honourable
mention. Both by blood and by training, Dallas was drawn
towards a philosophical treatment of his subject, for he was of
Scottish parentage, and he studied at Edinburgh under Sir William
Hamilton. His journalistic career carried him, at times, far enough
away from philosophy; but, when he had leisure to write a volume,
his thoughts took a philosophic cast-both in the somewhat
immature Poetics, an Essay on Poetry, and in that unhappily
See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. v.
a
## p. 140 (#170) ############################################
140
[CH.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
named book, The Gay Science. How he came to write, also, the
pseudonymous Kettner's Book of the Table, a Manual of Cookery, it
is not altogether easy to understand. The Gay Science is, certainly,
one of the most remarkable works of its class that we possess. It
is, first of all, lucid both in thought and in style; and it is suggestive
in a very rare degree. The preface proclaims that the author's
purpose is 'to settle the first principles of Criticism. ' But, while
Dallas feels himself to be a pioneer, he is not unconscious of the
limits of his actual achievement, and admits that he has done little
more than lay down the groundwork of a science. It must be
remembered that his design was never carried to completion; there
were to have been four volumes, but only two were written. The
incurable English distrust of system condemned the book to oblivion.
The Gay Science is psychological from the foundation, and, in more
points than one, anticipates by a generation the development of
opinion. In nothing is this anticipation more remarkable than in
Dallas's view of what is now called the subliminary self. This, he
holds, lies at the root of all art. Aristotle's theory that art is
imitation, is, in his opinion, false, and ‘has transmitted an heredi-
tary squint to criticism. ' What art does is not to imitate what
any eye can see, but, rather, to bring into clear vision what is
first apprehended only by 'the hidden soul. ' Art has to do with
pleasure, but not alone with the pleasure which the sensual man
recognises as such ; there is hidden pleasure, as well as a hidden
soul. It is everywhere the subliminary self which is active in art,
and the subliminary self to which true art appeals. Dallas prided
himself most of all on his analysis of imagination, and imagination
he pronounced to be ‘but another name for the automatic action
of the mind or any of its faculties. Everywhere, then, The Gay
Science moves in the region of ideas. Dallas has a refreshing
confidence that there is a cause for everything in art as well as in
physical science : a cause, for example, why the earlier poets of
modern civilisation delight most of all in sunrise, while those of
the nineteenth century delight in sunset. This is clearly an im-
portation, through Hamilton, of the German spirit; and, if Dallas
appears to be guilty of that excess with which he charged German
criticism that it is 'all idea '-it must be remembered that his
work is incomplete, and that the unwritten concluding volumes
would have redressed the balance.
On a lower plane stood James Hannay, who had ended a naval,
and begun a literary, career before he was twenty. It was not
unnatural that his experience in the navy should suggest the
6
## p. 141 (#171) ############################################
111]
Bagehot. Hutton
141
a
possibility that he might follow in the steps of Marryat, and
Singleton Fontenoy and a collection of short stories are based
upon that experience. But the knowledge of a boy could furnish
no such groundwork as Marryat's long years of storm and battle.
Hannay turned, rather, to criticism, and, in the essays contributed
to The Quarterly Review, which were afterwards reprinted, as
well as in the lectures entitled Satire and Satirists, he showed
taste and judgment.
About the same time, both Walter Bagehot and Richard Holt
Hutton began to write. They were associated for nine years as
joint editors of The National Review; and Hutton's fine memoir
of his colleague bears testimony to the closeness of their friendship.
Of the two, Hutton, though far the less gifted, was, as a literary
critic, the more influential; for Bagehot was, essentially, a publicist,
and his Literary Studies, a collection of papers contributed to
The National Review from the early fifties onwards, are little
more than a by-product; while, in Hutton's case, notwithstanding
the theological inclinations shown in a volume on cardinal Newman,
in Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought and in one of the
volumes of Essays, Theological and Literary, the critical element
is the most important. Yet, Hutton is rarely free from some
preoccupation which is not purely literary. His personal tastes,
first of all, were theological; and, in literature, he most willingly
dealt with writers in whom some theological interest was either
latent or explicit. It was partly, at least, this that made him the
consistent though discriminating admirer of the verse of Matthew
Arnold. He detected that undertone in Arnold to which critics
indifferent to such interests have been deaf. On the other hand,
this preoccupation narrowed Hutton's range. To purely aesthetic
considerations he was not highly sensitive, and his criticisms are
not, intrinsically, of very great value. But Hutton was more than
himself. For over thirty years he was one of the editors of The
Spectator ; in no small degree he impressed upon that journal his
own character; and, in estimating his significance, heed must be
paid to the great influence it wielded under his control.
Bagehot was an editor, too; but the most important part of his
editorial career was that in which he conducted The Economist.
It thus emphasises his work as economist and publicist rather
than his work as literary critic, and readers will grieve or rejoice
according to their taste. Undoubtedly, Bagehot had gifts
that would have secured great success in either sphere.
If his
reputation is, even now, below his deserts, it is probably because
## p. 142 (#172) ############################################
142
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose [CH.
his interests were varied and his energies, in consequence, dis-
sipated. He is at once biographer, critic, economist and publicist.
In his critical essays, the keen incisive phrases, the humour, the
penetrating analyses of character, the touches of philosophy, give
the impression of the presence of a great man. Bagehot was
never content to play upon the surface, he sought to penetrate to
the principle underneath. He had the qualifications requisite to
make him what Dallas called a systematic critic. But, as he did
not choose to concentrate himself upon literature, his criticism,
though brilliant, remains fragmentary. In Biographical Studies,
another collection of contributions to periodicals, Bagehot's
interest in politics comes into the foreground. Even in his
literary essays it could not be entirely suppressed: there is, for
example, an analysis of the forms of social organisation in the
paper on Sterne and Thackeray. In other respects, his bio-
graphical sketches show much the same qualities as his literary
essays; and the resemblance is all the closer because his
critical essays largely depend for their effect upon insight into
character. When Bagehot wrote about Shakespeare, he chose,
characteristically enough, to lay emphasis on the man, rather than
on the poet or the playwright. In Biographical Studies, there
are the same short crisp sentences that we find in Literary Studies,
the same epigrammatic point, the same humour, the same abound-
ing life, the same easy, sometimes colloquial, diction.
But it was to his work as economist and as publicist that
Bagehot gave the greatest part of his strength. He is at his best
in Lombard Street and in The English Constitution? Some, it is
true, have set Physics and Politics above either. But Physics
and Politics has not worn so well as the other two; its con-
temporary influence was due, not exclusively to its intrinsic
merits, but, partly, to a deft application of the conception of evolu-
tion to political society, an application which seemed more original
than it really was. Yet, the other two books might have been
expected to show the more serious signs of wear. The laws of
human society at large are more stable than the forms of a given
constitution; and political economy has been largely revolu-
tionised since Bagehot wrote. Even the most conservative is now
more socialistic than would have seemed possible to Bagehot and
to the vast majority of his contemporaries. But, in spite of this,
Lombard Street and The English Constitution are almost as fresh
as they were at first. The reason is that they are descriptive
1 See, ante, chap. I.
## p. 143 (#173) ############################################
111]
Leslie Stephen
143
of an actual state of affairs. No change which has taken place,
or which may take place, in the organisation of the money market
can invalidate Bagehot's lively and entertaining analysis of the
money market of his day. The facts were open to all, yet no one
knew how to interpret them till Bagehot, in Lombard Street,
showed the way. So, too, of The English Constitution. It is not
a history, but a philosophical discussion. Stubbs and Hallam and
May tell the story of three stages of the growth of the constitu-
tion ; Bagehot appraises the actual values of the elements of the
constitution. It was a work no less difficult, no less valuable, than
that of the historian, but it called for a gift of a different sort :
not the gift of research but that of speculative insight; not
learning, but philosophy. Bagehot is comparable, not to Stubbs,
but to Burke; and, while he is inferior to the great Irishman,
;
there is no other writer of English to whom, on this his special
ground, he need yield the palm. It needed a great mind to penetrate
the hollowness of the theory of checks and balances, and to
discover that a board of gentlemen with no legal status possesses
more real power than either king or lords or commons.
Sir Leslie Stephen showed a similar diversity of interests. The
first volume that bore his name was the collection of agreeable
essays on mountaineering entitled The Playground of Europe ;
but he had already published anonymously a series of humorous
and satirical Sketches from Cambridge, and, under initials, a grave
statement of the case for the North in the United States civil
war. Yet another vein is opened in Essays on Free Thinking
and Plain Speaking ; for Stephen was one of the numerous
men of letters who were troubled by the difficulty of reconciling
modern thought and the discoveries of modern science with tradi-
tional beliefs. Before this volume appeared, however, Stephen
had become editor of The Cornhill Magazine, a post which he
held from 1871 till 1882, when he assumed the still heavier burden
of editing The Dictionary of National Biography. Stephen
seems to have felt, at times, that editorial work was drudgery;
but, at least, as contributor to The Cornhill Magazine, he had a
free hand; and the three series of Hours in a Library made up of
his articles may fairly be taken to show him at his best as a critic.
On the other hand, the plan of the great Dictionary necessarily
limited his freedom, and the 378 articles covering 1000 pages
which he contributed to it must be read with this consideration
in view. They are, essentially, biographical, and only incidentally
critical. The necessity of thus conforming to a plan, however,
## p. 144 (#174) ############################################
144
[Ch.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
meant to Stephen by no means what it would have meant to such
a critic as Coleridge or as Arnold. That his natural bent was
towards biography is shown not only in his Studies of a Biographer,
but in all his fine contributions to the two series of English Men
of Letters,' and, above all, in the admirable monograph on Johnson.
Stephen's most ambitious and weightiest books, however, lie out-
side the sphere both of literary criticism and of biography.
They are contributions to philosophy, History of English Thought
in the Eighteenth Century and The English Utilitarians—and
have been considered elsewhere in the present volumel Like the
fine essay, An Agnostic's Apology, they reveal Stephen as a
rationalist, and suggest an explanation of his limits as a critic.
His ear was keen for what is heard in literature, but a little
dull to what is overheard ; and, so, he is apt to be warmer in
writing about the school of Pope than he is when he deals with
the romantic poets.
The tendency of periodicals, the contributions to which, until
recently, have been unsigned, has been to make the literary life,
for a time, flow, as it were, underground. Thus, Leslie Stephen
was nearly forty before his name became familiar to the public
outside literary circles. Though Richard Garnett was a younger
man by several years, a different mode of publication gave him
a status in literature earlier than Stephen. He sought fame first
as a poet; but, though he had a true lyrical gift, it was neither
very strong nor very original ; and, so, the poetical strain in him
does better service in imparting an aroma to his criticism than
when it impels him to write verse. He was a master of the art of
writing literary biography, and nothing of the same kind shows
a defter touch than his unpretending but masterly primer on
Coleridge or his monograph on Carlyle. The most original of his
works is The Twilight of the Gods, a collection of singular tales in
which he shows an unexpected power of sarcasm.
Perhaps the most remarkable instance of the tendency of the
periodical to submerge the man of letters is afforded by Theodore
Watts-Dunton, a richly gifted critic, a poet and a romancer, who
was yet practically unknown by name outside literary circles until
he was nearly sixty, and whose earliest independent publication
appeared when he was sixty-five. A great mass of valuable
criticism is still and, it may be feared, will remain, buried in The
Athenaeum. But his admirable article on poetry contributed to
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, and that entitled The Renascence
i See, ante, chap. I.
## p. 145 (#175) ############################################
11] Watts-Dunton. Borrow 145
of Wonder in Poetry in Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English
Literature, are enough to prove that Watts-Dunton had in rare
fullness the qualities which go to make a great critic. He had
scholarship, refined taste and a firm grasp of principles ; and they
are all generously used for the purpose of securing recognition for
rising genius. No one did more pioneer work in criticism than he.
Nor were Watts-Dunton's gifts limited to criticism : he had the
gift of poetry and the gift of the romancer; and he put both at the
service of the gypsies whom he had studied for many years-
the first in The Coming of Love and the second in Aylwin.
A less conspicuous instance of submergence in the periodical
is offered by Sidney T. Irwin, who is more likely to be remembered
by the short and slight memoir prefixed to the letters of the
Manx poet Thomas Edward Brown, than by articles contributed
to magazines and reviews, though these show a gift of keen
appreciation as well as of happy expression.
His interest in gypsies brought Watts-Dunton into touch with
George Borrow and with Francis Hindes Groome. It was Borrow
who first gave gypsies a citizenship in literature, though his
knowledge of them, as of many other things, seems to have been
wide and general rather than exact. Watts-Dunton's authority
is conclusive, and he declares that Borrow's first-hand knowledge
of gypsy life was superficial compared with Hindes Groome's;
yet Borrow made gypsies live in the English mind as neither
Hindes Groome did in his absurdly named and ill-constructed
Romany novel Kriegspiel, nor Watts-Dunton in Aylwin.
In a loose sense, Borrow might be called a scholar, since he knew
many languages, and spoke and wrote them freely. He was
a traveller, and has told the story of his travels with extraordinary
verve. He has written books that read wonderfully like picaresque
stories; but, in these, Wahrheit is so mingled with Dichtung that
they stand in a class by themselves. On the whole, it seems best
to regard him as one of the most remarkable of autobiographers.
What is autobiography? ' he asked. “Is it a mere record of the
incidents of a man's life, or is it a picture of the man himself-his
character, his soul ? ' If, as seems reasonable, we take this to be
applicable to Lavengro and The Romany Rye, it links together
the works of Borrow that really matter—these two and The Bible
in Spain. In the last, no doubt, there is more precise truth of fact,
but it is at least possible that there is more perfect sincerity in the
less literally true books. The correspondence between Borrow and
1 The Athenaeum, 22 February 1902.
E. L. XIV.
10
CH. III.
## p. 146 (#176) ############################################
146 Critical and Miscellaneous Prose [CH.
the Bible society, for which he worked, gives evidence that, some-
times, there was friction between that society and its extraordinary
colporteur. In The Bible in Spain, the adventures ring true; but,
though there can be no doubt as to Borrow's hatred of popery and
his consequent zeal, of a sort, for protestantism, the piety is, by no
means, so convincing. Alike in this book and in the two gypsy
tales, Borrow is unsurpassed for graphic power. In Wild Wales,
he shows the same gift, though not quite in the same degree.
Essentially, he is a man of the open air ; and few have equalled
him in the art of transporting the reader's spirit into the wilder-
ness, while his body sits by the fireplace. His books are planless,
as picaresque books are apt to be. Events succeed one another;
they are not consequent upon one another. But, nevertheless,
the books are held together by the personality of the author;
and it is the sense of his personality, in addition to that sense of
the open air already mentioned, which makes Borrow eminently
readable. By reason of these gifts, Borrow, in the literary sense,
is far superior to Hindes Groome. Yet the latter was a very
skilful literary craftsman. His sketch of Edward FitzGerald throws
a pleasant light on an interesting character, and his paper on his
own father, A Suffolk Parson, is rich with racy local anecdotes.
What neither Kriegspiel nor In Gypsy Tents could impart was
that sense of abounding vitality which sparkles in every page
of Borrow.
The Romany group has diverted our attention, for the moment,
from the literary critics of the period. Among these, in the latter
part of the nineteenth century, William Minto held a respectable
position in the second rank; but his writings hardly rise above
the level of good journey-work. Henry Duff Traill', a man of
higher and more varied gifts, was among those whom the pressure
of journalism deprived of the fame which he had the capacity to
win. In addition to a considerable critical faculty, which is
attested by his monographs on Coleridge and Sterne, and by the
essays entitled The New Fiction, he had the happy knack of
writing light satirical verse, one volume of which, Saturday Songs,
by its title commemorates his connection with The Saturday
Review. He also wrote on constitutional and political questions.
In The New Lucian and in Number Twenty, he gave rein to his
imagination, and, in the former, he reaches his highest point in
pure literature. It was a bold conception, that of writing new
dialogues of the dead; and to say that Traill completely succeeded
1 See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. VI.
## p. 147 (#177) ############################################
III]
Dowden. Henley
147
would be very high praise. He did not. Sometimes his opinions
seem to get between him and the character he delineates.
Nevertheless, the book shows not merely ability but genius. It
is always well written, frequently witty and sometimes eloquent.
There remain two critics who may be taken as specially
representative, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the
one of academic, and the other of non-academic, criticism.
Edward Dowden was for many years the most widely known of
the former group, and William Ernest Henley' was the most
highly gifted and the most influential of the latter. Both were
something more than critics ; but what, for the present purpose,
may be called the extraneous activities of Dowden were of far less
importance than Henley's; for Dowden's graceful and accomplished
verse is light in the balance against Henley's virile and varied
poetry. And, except for one venture into the realm of the muses,
Dowden, until his death remained, what his earliest and best
known book proclaimed him to be, a critic. It is rarely that
a young man wins fame with a single effort, as Dowden did
with Shakespeare. . . his Mind and Art; and still more rarely
does a first book remain, at the end of a long and active
literary career, the best known and the best liked. This ready
acceptance and this permanent fame were due, partly, to the
merits of the book, and, partly, to the wide interest felt in Shake-
speare. There was plenty of Shakespearean criticism even half
a century ago; but it was mostly of what Dallas called the
editorial class. Dowden supplied something different and higher
-a thoughtful interpretation of the spirit of Shakespeare's work.
It was expressed, too, in a style lucid and attractive, though not
free from the faults which, long afterwards, were pointed out in
Matthew Arnold's pungent essay on Dowden's Life of Shelley.
For the rest, his numerous essays are invariably scholarly, and
they usually show that insight which a genial sympathy gives.
The point where Dowden is weak is just that where Henley
is peculiarly strong. No recent critic has been more boldly, and
even defiantly, original; none has expressed himself in more striking
phrases. Perhaps his greatest service, as a writer of prose, was
that he taught the power of incisiveness to a generation which
was prone to lose itself in words. His criticisms in Views and
Reviews, alike in the section devoted to literature and in that
devoted to art, are brief-vignettes rather than full-length
portraits—but they are pregnant. He plunges at once in medias
1 See, ante, vol. xm, chap. VI.
10-2
## p. 148 (#178) ############################################
148
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose [CH.
res, and expresses his views in such a way that, whether the
reader agrees with him or differs from him, he can be in no doubt
as to the meaning. Sometimes, his views are startling, and even
demonstrably false, as when he declares that 'the great First Cause
of Romanticism was Napoleon’; sometimes, probably, they are
inspired by a spirit of mischief or are drawn from him by the
lure of alliteration. 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.
reckless in the guidance of the counsels of his party, as a speaker,
the 'Rupert of debate,' as Bulwer Lytton called him in The New
Timon, was, beyond doubt, one of the most splendid, as he was
one of the most impetuous, foemen in the field. His oratory was,
E. L. XIV.
CH. II.
9
## p. 130 (#160) ############################################
130
[CH.
Political Orators
however, under the control of a well-trained taste', and free from
the artifices of rhetoric. While his vivacity caused him, at sixty,
to be thought one of the cleverest young men in parliament, he
was occasionally accused of a levity of tone recalling other contests
than those of the political arena. The earl of Derby's colleague, the
earl of Ellenborough, remained one of the foremost orators of the
house of lords, even after he had resigned the presidency of the
board of control in 1858. He was a man of brilliant gifts ; but his
oratory reflects the masterfulness of disposition which he had
most prominently displayed as governor-general of India.
In the revolt against Peel, of which the house of commons
was, necessarily, the chief scene, the leading parts were played
by lord George Bentinck and Disraeli. Lord George had made
a high-minded sacrifice of his interest in the turf, and, during
his short political career, proved a very effective, if not always
highly refined, speaker, who took great trouble with facts and
figures. The parliamentary career of Benjamin Disraeli, first earl
of Beaconsfield, really began with those attacks upon Peel which
left their mark upon the political history of the country. They,
also, left their mark upon his style of oratory, which, after, at
first, deriving its significance from its invective, retained the
original seasoning even when it was applied to the unfolding or
defence of a positive policy. Disraeli's power of sarcasm (which no
orator ever more successfully heightened by scornfulness of manner
and by mimicry of gesture) was, however, only one of the gifts
conspicuous in a long succession of speeches—some delivered,
as it were, at bay, some, in the moment of triumph. None of
these gifts was more assiduously cultivated by their possessor
than the imaginative faculty, with which he was sumptuously
endowed and which, in great matters and in small, though in
imperial, in preference to 'parochial,' questions, he constantly
turned to the fullest account, but always with consummate dis-
crimination and often, as it was said, 'behind a mask. Thus,
the splendour of his ideals, which, in his younger days, had been
largely associated with fantastic conceptions or racial traditions,
became, in the end, one of the most valuable of his political ways
and means, took captive queen and country, and, for a time, made
the world listen to his eloquence as to the messages of an oracle.
Among the politicians to whom the name of Peelites clung
even after their leader had passed away, Sir James Graham,
who, at first, was regarded as their leader and who, at one time,
1 As to his translation of the Iliad, see, ante, vol. XII, p. 334.
## p. 131 (#161) ############################################
1]
Granville, Devonshire.
.
Cobden
131
seemed likely to rise to a foremost position in the conduct of
affairs, was a fine speaker, though rather inclined to pompousness,
and the best in the house on financial and economical subjects
(William Huskisson, whose knowledge of these had been most
valuable to Peel, was without oratorical power). But, with all
his ability and statesmanlike insight, he could not gain the full
confidence of his contemporaries, perhaps because he seemed to
be without perfect trust in himself. The most brilliant (except
one) of his political associates, Sidney Herbert, afterwards first
lord Herbert of Lea, died before his oratorical and other gifts
had secured to him the highest political honours.
Among ministers whose attention was chiefly, though, in
neither case, exclusively, given to foreign affairs, the earl of
Clarendon and earl Granville were the most conspicuous; they
were alike men of great personal charm and accomplished
speakers, skilled in the art of diplomatic composition and in
the use of forms and turns of courteous speech, an art which has
often been missing in English statesmen who lacked their cosmo-
politan training. To these qualifications, Granville, whose unselfish
services were of the utmost value to his chief, added that of a
popular vein, which won him many friends outside the foreign
offices of Europe, and made him singularly winning as an orator.
During many a long year of party conflict, Gladstone had no more
loyal adjutant than the marquis of Hartington, afterwards duke
of Devonshire, who possessed in a degree never surpassed the
power, invaluable in debate, of bringing home to friends and
opponents the absolute sincerity of his utterances.
Inseparably linked together in political history, and most of
all by the isolation in which the pair found themselves at more
than one stage of their political career, are the great radical
names of Cobden and Bright. From the days when the elder
of them, Richard Cobden, first entered parliament, in order there
to prosecute, with a single-mindedness as complete as that of the
platform, the campaign for cheapening the food of the people,
an absorbing care for the condition of the people, remained, from
first to last, the note of his oratory, and of the remarkable
political writings in which he gave occasional expression to his
principles. In all his deliverances, he is found transparently
sincere, perfectly definite in purpose and as free from ad cap-
tandum devices as any orator who has commanded the applause
of vast popular audiences or has conquered the attention of
a vigilantly antipathetic house of commons. His persuasiveness,
9-2
## p. 132 (#162) ############################################
132
Political Orators
[ch.
which Bright described as irresistible, was based on a ground-
work of facts, and their logic convinced his hearers, as his
imperturbable sureness of himself showed them to have con-
vinced the speaker. Although a self-taught orator as well as
politician, Cobden was not wholly without a literary sense the
notorious reference to the Ilissus was a mere bit of mischief;
but, neither fancy nor humour, nor even the deeper movements
of indignation, entered much into the spirit of his speeches,
which, penetrating to the kernel of the matter, scattered all the
mistakes and false doctrines by which it was enveloped. In the
Corn law meetings, he left it to his indefatigable coadjutor
William Johnson Fox (Browning's far-sighted friend), who was
always intent upon the interests of the working classes, to draw
touching pictures of the social suffering which the leaguers were
seeking to remedy. Even his antagonism to war, to which he
gave thoughtful expression long before he inveighed against the
concrete example of the conflict with Russia, rested, primarily,
on other than humanitarian grounds. He was not an enthusiast
in either love or hate, and could believe in the sincerity of
others-even of Palmerston-as he was absolutely sincere him-
self. John Bright_Cobden's comrade in the earliest and most
unequivocally successful phase of their public lives, and in their
opposition to a national war which reason and conscience made
them deem unjust, but virtually without his steadfast associate's
support in the long campaign for that extension of the franchise
on which modern democracy is based—was, beyond all doubt, one
of the greatest orators of his own or any other age of English life.
The individuality which mirrored itself in his eloquence, and the
ascendancy which it exercised, were those of genius. Although
he insisted on yielding to Fox, who spoke less frequently and with
more elaboration of art, the palm of orator of the anti-Corn-law
league, he displayed, even in this early period of his life, those
qualities which gradually developed into majestic grandeur. In
many respects, the simplest of men, and an adherent of many
of the homely ways of his community, he seemed to tower among
those around him by an unquestioned, half-heroic, dignity of
personality and presence. The arts of flattery were as strange
to his oratory as they were to his daily converse ; and irony aud
sarcasm seemed alien to the pure truthfulness of his nature. He
was well-read—though not, perhaps, in the common sense of the
phrase. His mind was steeped in the Bible; in his loftier flights,
he seemed to be breathing the atmosphere of the Old Testament;
## p. 133 (#163) ############################################
II]
John Bright. Robert Lowe
133
the thoughts and cadences of Milton were ever on his lips;
and he was familiar with a few other great writers capable of
inspiring noble passages of his eloquence. Solemn reproof, lofty
appeal, sympathy with woe and awe of the divine all these are
to be found in his speeches, where they touch the heights and
depths of human feeling. Of himself, unlike many great orators,
he says little; but the whole history of his public life reveals itself
in his speeches on free trade, or peace and reform, on Ireland,
on India and on that great transatlantic republic whose cause
he upheld, by the side of John Stuart Mill, in the critical hour.
His oratory resembled his life in the grandeur of its simplicity-
hardly a gesture to heighten the effect of the magical voice, only
an occasional sally of wit or humour to relieve the earnestness in
which moral force was naturally blended with human-kindness,
and the whole a self-consistent and unfaltering advance, and a
repose on the heights, when they had been reached, of prophetic
faith. Milton, he said, had taught him, when in his youth he was
beginning to think about public affairs, that true eloquence is
'but the serious and hearty love of truth? '; and the precept,
from first to last, shone like a beacon on his path.
A place of his own among the political orators of his day
must be assigned to Robert Lowe, afterwards viscount Sherbrooke,
a liberal in the general tendency of his ideas and texture of his
intellect, but raised to the height of his political influence and
oratorical renown as the protagonist of the struggle against
democratic reform, with Edward Horsman as the second spokesman
of the Cave (1866–7). In Lowe's speeches, as in his conversation
(his writings were few), bis academical training found very distinct
expression, though antithetically mixed with a stinging wit and
with a knowledge of registration and administration taught by
eight years of colonial, followed by a long and varied home,
experience of parliamentary and official life. But the intrinsic
power of his oratory was such as to enable him to fight with un-
paralleled effect the battle on which he had chosen to enter against
what he called the sentimental, the fatalistic and the aggressive
or compulsory democracy, as represented by Mill, Gladstone and
Bright; and his brief autobiography remains to illustrate the
nature of his wit, under which all sentiment withered away.
In this enumeration, we must pass by those whose public life was
mainly occupied with questions, whether of foreign or home policy,
which did not reach their solution in the nineteenth century and
1 Cf. Trevelyan, G. M. , The Life of John Bright (1913), p. 386.
## p. 134 (#164) ############################################
134
[CH.
Political Orators
some of which remain unsolved at the present day? Among
these were, on the conservative side, at least one statesman of com-
manding personality—Robert Cecil, third marquis of Salisbury-
who, without ever quite laying aside the 'fouts' and 'gibes' of less
responsible days, and often, seemingly, careless of the immediate
effect of indiscretions which would have shaken the trust in the
self-control of a lesser man, impressed large audiences as well
as the discerning few with his fitness to guide the vessel of state
through storms or shoals.
The life of Joseph Chamberlain ended only yesterday, but
in the chief campaign which it was pot given to him to carry
to an issue, he had exercised too potent an influence upon the
future of the British empire to make it easy to pass by his name
in silence in the present connection. But the whole of his parlia-
mentary career, shortened as it was by physical failure, falls outside
the limits within which we judge it right to confine this chapter.
On the other hand, the main transactions and interests of two
generations of the national history seem to gather themselves
into the threescore years of the public career of William Ewart
Gladstone, and into the oratory which gives expression to every
stage and aspect of it; though it is only the earlier portion of that
career on which we can here dwell. Brought up, as he said, in
his native Liverpool under the shadow of the name of Canning,
welcomed at the outset of his parliamentary life by Peel, the
most talented member of Aberdeen’s new ministry of all the
talents, wooed by the tories and indispensable to the whigs,
and head of four successive administrations, he ended as the
chosen chief of the democracy which he had helped to call into
life. To very few other great statesmen of any age has it been
given so indissolubly to unite with his name and fame as a states-
man those of the orator who expounded, commended and placed
on record the chief undertakings of his political genius—unless,
indeed, it be thought fit to compare him to the master-spirit who
of old both perfected and controlled the Attic democracy. In
the year before Gladstone's death, he made the remark that, as to
politics, the basis of his mind was laid principally in finance and
in philanthropy-no very strange combination if, by the side
of some of the most brilliant triumphs of his oratory, the series
of budget speeches, be placed his ardent efforts on behalf of the
Of some distinguished divines, lawyers and men of letters whose parliamentary
oratory added to their renown, the names will be found in other chapters, and in the
bibliography.
## p. 135 (#165) ############################################
II] William Ewart Gladstone
135
suffering Christian subjects of the Turk. But the saying cannot
be accepted as adequately indicating either his chief intellectual
interests or all the most vitalising elements of his inexhaustible
eloquence. On the threshold of manhood, the bent of his mind
had been towards the clerical profession; and for some time he
continued to contemplate secular affairs ‘chiefly as a means of
being useful in church affairs. ' When, six years after entering
parliament, he produced his celebrated book entitled The State in
its Relations with the Church (1838), he took his stand on the
principle that the state must have one religion, and that must, of
course, be the religion which it had recognised as the true. From
this view, he gradually passed to the acceptance of freedom of
religious opinion, coupled with the conviction that the preservation
of truth may be left in other hands than ours, and thus fulfilled
Sheil's prophecy that the champion of free trade would become
the advocate of the most unrestricted liberty of thought. But,
even after he had ceased to stand forth as the champion of the
church he loved, religious feeling continued to be the woof that
crossed the warp of his noblest and most stirring eloquence.
Nor, again, is it possible, in considering the characteristics
of bis oratory, to mistake the extraordinary fineness of its texture,
or to refuse to attribute this, in part, to the congenial dialectical
training of a singularly subtle mind. Gladstone was a classical
scholar, whose imagination delighted to feed on Homer', and whom
a stronger intellectual affinity had familiarised with the pearls of
Vergilian diction; while, among modern literatures, he loved the
Italian with a fervency that inspired in him his earliest incursion
into the domain of foreign affairs and his first endeavours on behalf
of oppressed national aspirations. But he could not be called
either a man of letters, or thoroughly trained in the methods of
scholarship. On the other hand, he was, as a logician, trained in
the use of the whole armoury of the schools, and employed it
habitually and without effort. It was a humorous criticism which,
in the days of his still incomplete economic conversion, described
one of his speeches as consisting of arguments for free trade and
of parentheses in favour of protection; but, in his later, as well as
in his earlier, days, he thoroughly understood, and applied with
consummate skill, the defensive side of the science of debate,
including the use of reservation. No doubt he had what may be
described as the excesses of some of his qualities, and there was
1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. II, p. 19 (speech on Affirmation bill).
2 Cf. ante, vol. XII, p. 334.
## p. 136 (#166) ############################################
136
Political Orators
[CH.
point in the advice of his intimate friend Sir Thomas Acland
that, in speaking on the Jewish emancipation question (1847), he
should be as little as possible like Maurice, and more like the
duke of Wellington.
Those who think of Gladstone as an impassioned orator are
apt to overlook the fact that, in the earlier part of his career,
he very rarely gave occasion for being thus described; indeed, his
platform triumphs belong almost exclusively to his later life, and
his ascendancy in the house of commons had not been gained by
carrying it away, but by convincing it—at times, as it were, in
spite of itself. The gifts of voice and personality remained with
him almost to the last—the magic voice of which, after his great
budget speech of 1860, he was admonished to take care not
to destroy the colour, and the personality which disdained all the
small animosities of political conflict. And, with these, he retained
the lucidity of arrangement and exposition which rendered his
most complicated statements of facts and figures not only intel-
ligible but enjoyable—a gift which had been the most notable
quality of his middle period. To these, had, in his latter days,
been added, in fullest measure, the animating influence of indig-
nation and the prophetic note of aspirations for the future. Of few
great political orators of modern times has there been preserved
so luxuriant a store of recorded eloquence.
Gladstone, whose title to be regarded as the foremost political
orator of his century few will be disposed to dispute, was, also,
in this country, at all events, the most effective of political
pamphleteers. Thrice, above all, in the course of his life he inter-
vened in this way in the course of European politics—for his two
Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen (on the state prosecutions of the
Neapolitan government, 1851); his Vatican Decrees in their
Bearing on Civil Allegiance (1874), with its sequel Vaticanism
(1875), and his Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East
(1876), followed by Lessons in Massacre (1877), sensibly affected
the development of some of the most important political problems
of the times. Nor were these the only occasions on which it
seemed to him expedient to address a wider public than could be
reached by the actual accents of his voice or the reports of his
speeches; and, even after the greatest catastrophe of his political
life, the defeat of the Irish Home Rule bill of 1886, and the ratifi-
cation of this result by an adverse general election, he sat down
to compose a double-barrelled pamphlet on the Irish question.
## p. 137 (#167) ############################################
11]
Political Pamphlets
137
Gladstone's pamphlets do not stand alone as memorable expressions
of opinion put forth by noted British politicians in the nineteenth
century. To those dating from the period which may be held to close
with the deaths of Cobbett and Godwin (1835 and 1836), there is no
necessity for returning here? . The following period had its new
themes, in addition to the old, connected with political reform, re-
ligious freedom and economic progress, and with the support of the
expanding struggle for the claims of nationalities. So early as 1836,
Cobden published the earliest pair of a long series of pamphlets, of
which the second, provoked by the ‘indiscretions' of David Urqu-
hart, brought to a head in a pamphlet by that truculent ex-diplo-
matist, ably combated any attempt at armed intervention against
the eastern policy of Russia. Cobden's pamphlets deserve a notable
place in our political literature, and, among the large number of
publications of this kind produced by the French invasion panic of
1852—3, his 1792 and 1853 was a protest of much more than
passing significance. Bright was capable of writing vigorous
public letters; but his pen was not a favourite weapon with
him as it was with Cobden and with W. J. Fox. Bright's chief
adversary in the battle of franchise, Lowe, was born and bred
a pamphleteer. He had taken up arms against the famous tract
which brought to a close the most notable series of religious
pamphlets known to our literature; and, during his sojourn in
Australia, he contributed to the discussion of the land question in
that continent a luminous address which went to the very root of
the problem (1847). But, on his return to England, his political
activity as a pamphleteer soon merged into that of a journalist.
And such (to conclude this brief note) might seem, with excep-
tions which almost prove the rule, to be the inevitable tendency in
this later age of political writing designed to produce an immediate
effect. Journalism has not destroyed the pamphlet; but the greater
part of its activity has for some time seemed to be absorbed by an
organised form of publication which provides both writers and
readers with opportunities that are at once more rapid, more facile
and more commanding. The future only can show whether the
irrepressible desire of individual opinion to find wholly inde-
pendent expression, together with the recurrence of great crises
in which every voice capable of making itself heard finds solace
and encouragement in accomplishing this, will suffice to keep alive
a form associated with many great names in our literature as well
as with many important or interesting epochs of our history.
1 Cf. , ante, vol. XI, chap. II.
## p. 138 (#168) ############################################
CHAPTER III
CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE
JOHN RUSKIN AND OTHERS
THE critical and miscellaneous prose of the Victorian age is a
somewhat unmanageable subject, both because of its volume and
because of its variety. Classification is extremely difficult. There
are some writers who must clearly be ranked as literary critics
and others who, for want of a better word, may be said to belong
to the aesthetic school. Others, again, because of that charming
note of personal friendliness for which Lamb is supreme, may be
described as essayists par excellence. But how are we to classify
Borrow; or Lafcadio Hearn, the interpreter of Japan? And is
there any one class which will hold at once the author of Modern
Painters and the author of Munera Pulveris?
The line of which the evolution is clearest is that of literary
critics, and it will be convenient to treat first those who can be
classified under this head.
The critics of the Victorian age inherited from Lamb, Coleridge,
Hazlitt and Carlyle a tradition which was certainly more whole-
some than that which had prevailed in the days of Gifford and
Jeffrey; and, thanks to this tradition, criticism grew decidedly
more urbane. The oldest of this group by many years was Abraham
Hayward, who is now, perhaps, best known as author of The Art
of Dining, a volume made up, like much of Hayward's work, of
contributions to periodicals written long before their separate
publication. But Hayward began with work of a widely different
sort-a very good prose translation of Faust; and he never
abandoned his interest in Goethe. Near the end of his life, he
himself published a volume on the poet whom he had begun by
translating. He was interested in other foreign writers also, and
contributed to The Edinburgh Review articles on the countess
Hahn-Hahn and on Stendhal, at a time when these authors
were hardly known in England. Hayward could draw a good
biographical sketch or build up a very readable article out of
## p. 139 (#169) ############################################
CH. 11] Brimley. Dallas
139
anecdotes, just as he made his reputation in society from the same
materials; and his articles on contemporaries, such as those on
Sydney Smith and Samuel Rogers, are valuable for their personal
reminiscences. He could also construct an ingenious argument,
as in his More about Junius. But, for critical principles, we
search his works in vain. Somewhat akin to Hayward in his love
of anecdote, though inferior to him, was John Doran, the pleasant
author of Knights and their Days and Their Majesties' Servants.
The latter contains much information, but seems to have no clear
end in view, and has little depth of scholarship.
Doran's reputation among contemporaries is evidence that the
level of criticism about the middle of the nineteenth century was
low. It was, however, soon to be raised. Ruskin, who, inciden-
tally, is a critic of literature as well as of painting, published his
first volume of real weight in 1843. The Germ, the organ of the
pre-Raphaelites, appeared in 18501. And Matthew Arnold's earliest
critical essay was prefixed to his Poems of 1853. That stirring of
the spirit which their appearance indicated was shown, also, in the
critical work of George Brimley, whose feeble health, resulting in
an early death, alone prevented him from winning a great name.
His most notable criticism, and the only one to which he affixed
his name, was the essay on Tennyson which appeared in Cambridge
Essays in 1855. Though he is less than just to Tennyson's Poems
of 1830, holding that they ‘scarcely reach the altitudes of common
sense,' and condemning the 'perverse, unreal treatment' in the
poems inscribed with the names of women, yet, with perfect com-
prehension, he traces the evolution of Tennyson's art from 1830
to 1842. While none of the other essays can rank with that on
Tennyson, they are generally right in tone and substance.
In the case of Brimley, principles are rather implied than
stated; they are to be inferred from his judgments on particular
works. The attempts in English to make the statement of a
principle the main object have been few and incomplete; but,
among the few, that of Eneas Sweetland Dallas deserves honourable
mention. Both by blood and by training, Dallas was drawn
towards a philosophical treatment of his subject, for he was of
Scottish parentage, and he studied at Edinburgh under Sir William
Hamilton. His journalistic career carried him, at times, far enough
away from philosophy; but, when he had leisure to write a volume,
his thoughts took a philosophic cast-both in the somewhat
immature Poetics, an Essay on Poetry, and in that unhappily
See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. v.
a
## p. 140 (#170) ############################################
140
[CH.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
named book, The Gay Science. How he came to write, also, the
pseudonymous Kettner's Book of the Table, a Manual of Cookery, it
is not altogether easy to understand. The Gay Science is, certainly,
one of the most remarkable works of its class that we possess. It
is, first of all, lucid both in thought and in style; and it is suggestive
in a very rare degree. The preface proclaims that the author's
purpose is 'to settle the first principles of Criticism. ' But, while
Dallas feels himself to be a pioneer, he is not unconscious of the
limits of his actual achievement, and admits that he has done little
more than lay down the groundwork of a science. It must be
remembered that his design was never carried to completion; there
were to have been four volumes, but only two were written. The
incurable English distrust of system condemned the book to oblivion.
The Gay Science is psychological from the foundation, and, in more
points than one, anticipates by a generation the development of
opinion. In nothing is this anticipation more remarkable than in
Dallas's view of what is now called the subliminary self. This, he
holds, lies at the root of all art. Aristotle's theory that art is
imitation, is, in his opinion, false, and ‘has transmitted an heredi-
tary squint to criticism. ' What art does is not to imitate what
any eye can see, but, rather, to bring into clear vision what is
first apprehended only by 'the hidden soul. ' Art has to do with
pleasure, but not alone with the pleasure which the sensual man
recognises as such ; there is hidden pleasure, as well as a hidden
soul. It is everywhere the subliminary self which is active in art,
and the subliminary self to which true art appeals. Dallas prided
himself most of all on his analysis of imagination, and imagination
he pronounced to be ‘but another name for the automatic action
of the mind or any of its faculties. Everywhere, then, The Gay
Science moves in the region of ideas. Dallas has a refreshing
confidence that there is a cause for everything in art as well as in
physical science : a cause, for example, why the earlier poets of
modern civilisation delight most of all in sunrise, while those of
the nineteenth century delight in sunset. This is clearly an im-
portation, through Hamilton, of the German spirit; and, if Dallas
appears to be guilty of that excess with which he charged German
criticism that it is 'all idea '-it must be remembered that his
work is incomplete, and that the unwritten concluding volumes
would have redressed the balance.
On a lower plane stood James Hannay, who had ended a naval,
and begun a literary, career before he was twenty. It was not
unnatural that his experience in the navy should suggest the
6
## p. 141 (#171) ############################################
111]
Bagehot. Hutton
141
a
possibility that he might follow in the steps of Marryat, and
Singleton Fontenoy and a collection of short stories are based
upon that experience. But the knowledge of a boy could furnish
no such groundwork as Marryat's long years of storm and battle.
Hannay turned, rather, to criticism, and, in the essays contributed
to The Quarterly Review, which were afterwards reprinted, as
well as in the lectures entitled Satire and Satirists, he showed
taste and judgment.
About the same time, both Walter Bagehot and Richard Holt
Hutton began to write. They were associated for nine years as
joint editors of The National Review; and Hutton's fine memoir
of his colleague bears testimony to the closeness of their friendship.
Of the two, Hutton, though far the less gifted, was, as a literary
critic, the more influential; for Bagehot was, essentially, a publicist,
and his Literary Studies, a collection of papers contributed to
The National Review from the early fifties onwards, are little
more than a by-product; while, in Hutton's case, notwithstanding
the theological inclinations shown in a volume on cardinal Newman,
in Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought and in one of the
volumes of Essays, Theological and Literary, the critical element
is the most important. Yet, Hutton is rarely free from some
preoccupation which is not purely literary. His personal tastes,
first of all, were theological; and, in literature, he most willingly
dealt with writers in whom some theological interest was either
latent or explicit. It was partly, at least, this that made him the
consistent though discriminating admirer of the verse of Matthew
Arnold. He detected that undertone in Arnold to which critics
indifferent to such interests have been deaf. On the other hand,
this preoccupation narrowed Hutton's range. To purely aesthetic
considerations he was not highly sensitive, and his criticisms are
not, intrinsically, of very great value. But Hutton was more than
himself. For over thirty years he was one of the editors of The
Spectator ; in no small degree he impressed upon that journal his
own character; and, in estimating his significance, heed must be
paid to the great influence it wielded under his control.
Bagehot was an editor, too; but the most important part of his
editorial career was that in which he conducted The Economist.
It thus emphasises his work as economist and publicist rather
than his work as literary critic, and readers will grieve or rejoice
according to their taste. Undoubtedly, Bagehot had gifts
that would have secured great success in either sphere.
If his
reputation is, even now, below his deserts, it is probably because
## p. 142 (#172) ############################################
142
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose [CH.
his interests were varied and his energies, in consequence, dis-
sipated. He is at once biographer, critic, economist and publicist.
In his critical essays, the keen incisive phrases, the humour, the
penetrating analyses of character, the touches of philosophy, give
the impression of the presence of a great man. Bagehot was
never content to play upon the surface, he sought to penetrate to
the principle underneath. He had the qualifications requisite to
make him what Dallas called a systematic critic. But, as he did
not choose to concentrate himself upon literature, his criticism,
though brilliant, remains fragmentary. In Biographical Studies,
another collection of contributions to periodicals, Bagehot's
interest in politics comes into the foreground. Even in his
literary essays it could not be entirely suppressed: there is, for
example, an analysis of the forms of social organisation in the
paper on Sterne and Thackeray. In other respects, his bio-
graphical sketches show much the same qualities as his literary
essays; and the resemblance is all the closer because his
critical essays largely depend for their effect upon insight into
character. When Bagehot wrote about Shakespeare, he chose,
characteristically enough, to lay emphasis on the man, rather than
on the poet or the playwright. In Biographical Studies, there
are the same short crisp sentences that we find in Literary Studies,
the same epigrammatic point, the same humour, the same abound-
ing life, the same easy, sometimes colloquial, diction.
But it was to his work as economist and as publicist that
Bagehot gave the greatest part of his strength. He is at his best
in Lombard Street and in The English Constitution? Some, it is
true, have set Physics and Politics above either. But Physics
and Politics has not worn so well as the other two; its con-
temporary influence was due, not exclusively to its intrinsic
merits, but, partly, to a deft application of the conception of evolu-
tion to political society, an application which seemed more original
than it really was. Yet, the other two books might have been
expected to show the more serious signs of wear. The laws of
human society at large are more stable than the forms of a given
constitution; and political economy has been largely revolu-
tionised since Bagehot wrote. Even the most conservative is now
more socialistic than would have seemed possible to Bagehot and
to the vast majority of his contemporaries. But, in spite of this,
Lombard Street and The English Constitution are almost as fresh
as they were at first. The reason is that they are descriptive
1 See, ante, chap. I.
## p. 143 (#173) ############################################
111]
Leslie Stephen
143
of an actual state of affairs. No change which has taken place,
or which may take place, in the organisation of the money market
can invalidate Bagehot's lively and entertaining analysis of the
money market of his day. The facts were open to all, yet no one
knew how to interpret them till Bagehot, in Lombard Street,
showed the way. So, too, of The English Constitution. It is not
a history, but a philosophical discussion. Stubbs and Hallam and
May tell the story of three stages of the growth of the constitu-
tion ; Bagehot appraises the actual values of the elements of the
constitution. It was a work no less difficult, no less valuable, than
that of the historian, but it called for a gift of a different sort :
not the gift of research but that of speculative insight; not
learning, but philosophy. Bagehot is comparable, not to Stubbs,
but to Burke; and, while he is inferior to the great Irishman,
;
there is no other writer of English to whom, on this his special
ground, he need yield the palm. It needed a great mind to penetrate
the hollowness of the theory of checks and balances, and to
discover that a board of gentlemen with no legal status possesses
more real power than either king or lords or commons.
Sir Leslie Stephen showed a similar diversity of interests. The
first volume that bore his name was the collection of agreeable
essays on mountaineering entitled The Playground of Europe ;
but he had already published anonymously a series of humorous
and satirical Sketches from Cambridge, and, under initials, a grave
statement of the case for the North in the United States civil
war. Yet another vein is opened in Essays on Free Thinking
and Plain Speaking ; for Stephen was one of the numerous
men of letters who were troubled by the difficulty of reconciling
modern thought and the discoveries of modern science with tradi-
tional beliefs. Before this volume appeared, however, Stephen
had become editor of The Cornhill Magazine, a post which he
held from 1871 till 1882, when he assumed the still heavier burden
of editing The Dictionary of National Biography. Stephen
seems to have felt, at times, that editorial work was drudgery;
but, at least, as contributor to The Cornhill Magazine, he had a
free hand; and the three series of Hours in a Library made up of
his articles may fairly be taken to show him at his best as a critic.
On the other hand, the plan of the great Dictionary necessarily
limited his freedom, and the 378 articles covering 1000 pages
which he contributed to it must be read with this consideration
in view. They are, essentially, biographical, and only incidentally
critical. The necessity of thus conforming to a plan, however,
## p. 144 (#174) ############################################
144
[Ch.
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose
meant to Stephen by no means what it would have meant to such
a critic as Coleridge or as Arnold. That his natural bent was
towards biography is shown not only in his Studies of a Biographer,
but in all his fine contributions to the two series of English Men
of Letters,' and, above all, in the admirable monograph on Johnson.
Stephen's most ambitious and weightiest books, however, lie out-
side the sphere both of literary criticism and of biography.
They are contributions to philosophy, History of English Thought
in the Eighteenth Century and The English Utilitarians—and
have been considered elsewhere in the present volumel Like the
fine essay, An Agnostic's Apology, they reveal Stephen as a
rationalist, and suggest an explanation of his limits as a critic.
His ear was keen for what is heard in literature, but a little
dull to what is overheard ; and, so, he is apt to be warmer in
writing about the school of Pope than he is when he deals with
the romantic poets.
The tendency of periodicals, the contributions to which, until
recently, have been unsigned, has been to make the literary life,
for a time, flow, as it were, underground. Thus, Leslie Stephen
was nearly forty before his name became familiar to the public
outside literary circles. Though Richard Garnett was a younger
man by several years, a different mode of publication gave him
a status in literature earlier than Stephen. He sought fame first
as a poet; but, though he had a true lyrical gift, it was neither
very strong nor very original ; and, so, the poetical strain in him
does better service in imparting an aroma to his criticism than
when it impels him to write verse. He was a master of the art of
writing literary biography, and nothing of the same kind shows
a defter touch than his unpretending but masterly primer on
Coleridge or his monograph on Carlyle. The most original of his
works is The Twilight of the Gods, a collection of singular tales in
which he shows an unexpected power of sarcasm.
Perhaps the most remarkable instance of the tendency of the
periodical to submerge the man of letters is afforded by Theodore
Watts-Dunton, a richly gifted critic, a poet and a romancer, who
was yet practically unknown by name outside literary circles until
he was nearly sixty, and whose earliest independent publication
appeared when he was sixty-five. A great mass of valuable
criticism is still and, it may be feared, will remain, buried in The
Athenaeum. But his admirable article on poetry contributed to
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, and that entitled The Renascence
i See, ante, chap. I.
## p. 145 (#175) ############################################
11] Watts-Dunton. Borrow 145
of Wonder in Poetry in Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English
Literature, are enough to prove that Watts-Dunton had in rare
fullness the qualities which go to make a great critic. He had
scholarship, refined taste and a firm grasp of principles ; and they
are all generously used for the purpose of securing recognition for
rising genius. No one did more pioneer work in criticism than he.
Nor were Watts-Dunton's gifts limited to criticism : he had the
gift of poetry and the gift of the romancer; and he put both at the
service of the gypsies whom he had studied for many years-
the first in The Coming of Love and the second in Aylwin.
A less conspicuous instance of submergence in the periodical
is offered by Sidney T. Irwin, who is more likely to be remembered
by the short and slight memoir prefixed to the letters of the
Manx poet Thomas Edward Brown, than by articles contributed
to magazines and reviews, though these show a gift of keen
appreciation as well as of happy expression.
His interest in gypsies brought Watts-Dunton into touch with
George Borrow and with Francis Hindes Groome. It was Borrow
who first gave gypsies a citizenship in literature, though his
knowledge of them, as of many other things, seems to have been
wide and general rather than exact. Watts-Dunton's authority
is conclusive, and he declares that Borrow's first-hand knowledge
of gypsy life was superficial compared with Hindes Groome's;
yet Borrow made gypsies live in the English mind as neither
Hindes Groome did in his absurdly named and ill-constructed
Romany novel Kriegspiel, nor Watts-Dunton in Aylwin.
In a loose sense, Borrow might be called a scholar, since he knew
many languages, and spoke and wrote them freely. He was
a traveller, and has told the story of his travels with extraordinary
verve. He has written books that read wonderfully like picaresque
stories; but, in these, Wahrheit is so mingled with Dichtung that
they stand in a class by themselves. On the whole, it seems best
to regard him as one of the most remarkable of autobiographers.
What is autobiography? ' he asked. “Is it a mere record of the
incidents of a man's life, or is it a picture of the man himself-his
character, his soul ? ' If, as seems reasonable, we take this to be
applicable to Lavengro and The Romany Rye, it links together
the works of Borrow that really matter—these two and The Bible
in Spain. In the last, no doubt, there is more precise truth of fact,
but it is at least possible that there is more perfect sincerity in the
less literally true books. The correspondence between Borrow and
1 The Athenaeum, 22 February 1902.
E. L. XIV.
10
CH. III.
## p. 146 (#176) ############################################
146 Critical and Miscellaneous Prose [CH.
the Bible society, for which he worked, gives evidence that, some-
times, there was friction between that society and its extraordinary
colporteur. In The Bible in Spain, the adventures ring true; but,
though there can be no doubt as to Borrow's hatred of popery and
his consequent zeal, of a sort, for protestantism, the piety is, by no
means, so convincing. Alike in this book and in the two gypsy
tales, Borrow is unsurpassed for graphic power. In Wild Wales,
he shows the same gift, though not quite in the same degree.
Essentially, he is a man of the open air ; and few have equalled
him in the art of transporting the reader's spirit into the wilder-
ness, while his body sits by the fireplace. His books are planless,
as picaresque books are apt to be. Events succeed one another;
they are not consequent upon one another. But, nevertheless,
the books are held together by the personality of the author;
and it is the sense of his personality, in addition to that sense of
the open air already mentioned, which makes Borrow eminently
readable. By reason of these gifts, Borrow, in the literary sense,
is far superior to Hindes Groome. Yet the latter was a very
skilful literary craftsman. His sketch of Edward FitzGerald throws
a pleasant light on an interesting character, and his paper on his
own father, A Suffolk Parson, is rich with racy local anecdotes.
What neither Kriegspiel nor In Gypsy Tents could impart was
that sense of abounding vitality which sparkles in every page
of Borrow.
The Romany group has diverted our attention, for the moment,
from the literary critics of the period. Among these, in the latter
part of the nineteenth century, William Minto held a respectable
position in the second rank; but his writings hardly rise above
the level of good journey-work. Henry Duff Traill', a man of
higher and more varied gifts, was among those whom the pressure
of journalism deprived of the fame which he had the capacity to
win. In addition to a considerable critical faculty, which is
attested by his monographs on Coleridge and Sterne, and by the
essays entitled The New Fiction, he had the happy knack of
writing light satirical verse, one volume of which, Saturday Songs,
by its title commemorates his connection with The Saturday
Review. He also wrote on constitutional and political questions.
In The New Lucian and in Number Twenty, he gave rein to his
imagination, and, in the former, he reaches his highest point in
pure literature. It was a bold conception, that of writing new
dialogues of the dead; and to say that Traill completely succeeded
1 See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. VI.
## p. 147 (#177) ############################################
III]
Dowden. Henley
147
would be very high praise. He did not. Sometimes his opinions
seem to get between him and the character he delineates.
Nevertheless, the book shows not merely ability but genius. It
is always well written, frequently witty and sometimes eloquent.
There remain two critics who may be taken as specially
representative, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the
one of academic, and the other of non-academic, criticism.
Edward Dowden was for many years the most widely known of
the former group, and William Ernest Henley' was the most
highly gifted and the most influential of the latter. Both were
something more than critics ; but what, for the present purpose,
may be called the extraneous activities of Dowden were of far less
importance than Henley's; for Dowden's graceful and accomplished
verse is light in the balance against Henley's virile and varied
poetry. And, except for one venture into the realm of the muses,
Dowden, until his death remained, what his earliest and best
known book proclaimed him to be, a critic. It is rarely that
a young man wins fame with a single effort, as Dowden did
with Shakespeare. . . his Mind and Art; and still more rarely
does a first book remain, at the end of a long and active
literary career, the best known and the best liked. This ready
acceptance and this permanent fame were due, partly, to the
merits of the book, and, partly, to the wide interest felt in Shake-
speare. There was plenty of Shakespearean criticism even half
a century ago; but it was mostly of what Dallas called the
editorial class. Dowden supplied something different and higher
-a thoughtful interpretation of the spirit of Shakespeare's work.
It was expressed, too, in a style lucid and attractive, though not
free from the faults which, long afterwards, were pointed out in
Matthew Arnold's pungent essay on Dowden's Life of Shelley.
For the rest, his numerous essays are invariably scholarly, and
they usually show that insight which a genial sympathy gives.
The point where Dowden is weak is just that where Henley
is peculiarly strong. No recent critic has been more boldly, and
even defiantly, original; none has expressed himself in more striking
phrases. Perhaps his greatest service, as a writer of prose, was
that he taught the power of incisiveness to a generation which
was prone to lose itself in words. His criticisms in Views and
Reviews, alike in the section devoted to literature and in that
devoted to art, are brief-vignettes rather than full-length
portraits—but they are pregnant. He plunges at once in medias
1 See, ante, vol. xm, chap. VI.
10-2
## p. 148 (#178) ############################################
148
Critical and Miscellaneous Prose [CH.
res, and expresses his views in such a way that, whether the
reader agrees with him or differs from him, he can be in no doubt
as to the meaning. Sometimes, his views are startling, and even
demonstrably false, as when he declares that 'the great First Cause
of Romanticism was Napoleon’; sometimes, probably, they are
inspired by a spirit of mischief or are drawn from him by the
lure of alliteration. 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.
