THE VICTORIAN ERA (1850-1900)

The Queen. Victoria (1819-1901), who was 18 when she became the Queen, had all the personal traits and characteristics of her age; in the arts she did not introduce any changes; she simply approved of them and became a symbol of them. She was a sheltered child, with well-marked personal traits which she demonstrated throughout her long life as the Queen of England. For the moderns, she represents false modesty, squeamishness in facing the facts of life (particularly if they concerned sex). We associate with her name such concepts as complacent narrowness, artificial respectability, a code of 'decency' decided upon by the 'best' people. Victoria, as a queen was simply an ideal, who personally agreed with the practices and ideals of the new corn mercial upper-middle classes of England. Throughout her reign, she was adored by the people and was the symbol of the greatness and glory of England. Love of England meant love of the great and glorious Queen.
An Era of Peace and Prosperity. In the beginning of the era there was a widespread faith in unlimited progress. This sense of self-satisfaction or complacency resulted from the immense strides that England had taken in the industrial and scientific fields. The nation was prospering and ' growing richer and richer everyday. Wealth brought with it many evils, like snobbery and social climbing. Money values prevailed, and as a result of increased materialism of the age, art and culture suffered. The British empire was already a reality; the white man's burden; or the colonising mission of the English, was already bringing in rich dividends. They at­tributed all this prosperity to their glorious and dominant Queen Victoria. It was an era of prosperity, an era of aggressive nationalism, an era of rising imperialism. Hence, nobody wanted that the status quo should be dis­turbed; any questioning of the present order was frowned upon. Emphasis was on faith, faith in one's religion, faith in the. Queen and those in autho­rity, and faith in continuous progress. It there were doubts any-where, they needed to be compromised with the existing order.
Rapid Social Change. However, such a state of affairs could not continue for long. The Industrial revolution gradually destroyed old agricultural England. It shook the supremacy of the aristocratic class and landed gentry, and brougth into being a new merchant class. This new class, quite naturally, clamoured for power and prestige, both political and social, and did not agree to the accepted order of things. Victorian tradi­tions and conventions were thus subjected to greater and greater pressures and by the last quarter of the century there were large cracks in the Victorian fabric. Moreover, the lower classes, too, were acquiring political rights. There was mental and cultural emancipation all around.
Rise of Democracy : Llberalism. This spirit of emancipation is nowhere seen to better advantage than in the freedom which women gradually acquired. Victorian tradition and Victorian prudery placed ex­cessive emphasis on the chastity of women. Their proper sphere was within the four walls of the home; any contact with the outside world was supposed to corrupt and spoil them. Their sole business was to look after the comfort of their menfolk. But with the passing of time the movement for women's emancipation gained ground; women were given political rights and more and more of them came out of their homes to take up independent careers. Florence Nightingale did valuable service to the cause of women. Problems of sex and married life were receiving increasing attention from thinkers and writers. Havelock Ellis and Freud were already working on their epock-making works. Tennyson expresses his views on the problem in his The Princess.
Evolutionary Science : The Spirit of Questioning. This breakup of Victorian traditions and conventions was accelerated by the rapid advance of science. Science with its emphasis on reason rather than on faith, encouraged the spirit of questioning. Victorian beliefs, both religious and social, were subjected to a searching scrutiny and found wanting. The publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 is of special significance from this point of view. His celebrated theory of Evolution contradicted the account of Man's origin as given in The Bible. His theory carried conviction as it "was logically developed and supported by overwhelming evidence. Man's faith in orthodox religion was shaken; he could no longer accept without question God's mercy, etc, for such orthodox notions of God were contradicted by facts. Similarly, Darwin, with his emphasis on the brutal struggle for existence which is the law of Nature, exploded the romantic view of her as a "Kindly Mother" having a "Holy plan" of her own. The process started by Darwin was completed by philosophers like Huxley, Spencer, Mill, etc. The impact of these developments in science and philosophy on the literature of the period is far- reaching.
Pessimism of the Age. Thus the established order, customs, faiths, beliefs and traditions were losing their hold on the minds of the people, and the new order of things had not yet been established. Man had lost his mooring in God, Religion and Nature. The mechanistic, view of the universe precluded any faith in a benevolent creator. Man felt, "Orphan and defrauded". He took a gloomy, view of life, for he felt miserable and helpless with nothing to fall back upon. It was for the first time, says David Cecil, that "conscious, considered pessimism became a force in English literature". The melancholy poems of Arnold, the poetry of Fitzgerald, Thomson's The City of God, and the works of Thomas Hardy all reflect the pessimistic outlook of the late Vicorian era. This growth of pessimism was further encouraged by the flow of pessimistic thought from Europe, where pessimism was much in the air at the time.
The Victorian Compromise. A word may now be said of the famous Victorian compromise. The age in which Tennyson matured and produced was an era of social change. Man was caught between two worlds, with the old one crumbling down, and the new one not yet formed. Doubts and unrest possessed man's soul and everything was in ferment. The chief disintegrating forces of the Victorian age were three: (a) the Industrial Revolution resulting in the rise of a new, rich and prosperous merchant class, desirous of rank and privilege, (b) the rise of democracy, and (c) the rise of evolutionary science. All these forces tended towards the break­down of the existing order; hence an effort was made to reconcile the old and the new, to bring about a compromise between science and religion, between the demand for "progress" and the need of stability, order and peace.
Its Several Aspects. The Victorian compromise had several aspects. Politically it meant the reconciliation of the claims of liberty and progress with order. An orderly broadening down of freedom from precedent to precedent became the Victorian ideal. Government still remained an affair of "great families" whether Whig or Tory. But the aristocracy itself was recruited more freely from the middle classes. In every field the Victorians tried to uphold authority in the face of the rising tide of social change. In the political field "mehority" meant State and established law: in the field of government it meant aristocracy; in religion it was represented by the Established Church : in the domestic sphere it meant the supremacy of man over woman. Victorianism emphasised authority, and in religion it was represented by the English Church. The emphasis on Church authority deepened in the face of the challenge from science and rationalism.
Social Morality. Morality and respectability were the corner-stones of Victorianism. This emphasis on conventional morality was partly a reaction against the corruption of the earlier age, scandals of Byron and the radicalism of Shelley who did not hesitate even from depicting incest. "Moral duty remained for most Victorians a categorical imperative." The Victorians expected the poets not only to amuse but also to instruct. Men of letters must show a sense of social responsibility in a high degree. It is reflected in the humanitarianism of Dickens, Kingsley and Charles Reade.
Avoidance of Extremes. The Victorians disliked extremes of feeling or passion or even language. There was a tacit understanding as to what was to be depicted on the stage and what was to be left to the imagination. A general reticence concerning matters of sex is a common characteristic of literature in the Victorian age. H.M. Jones remarks: Victorianism is the pretence that if you do not name a thing it isn't there. According to Elwin, "prudery and humbug" presided over the age. This prudery placed a real limitation on the contents of the novel. It made it impossible for the novelist and poets to portray a real, living woman. Hence it is that decorum and solemnity are associated with Victorianism.
General Characteristics
The Victorian Age, also known as the Age of Tennyson in English literature, witnessed an unprecedented change and progress in all spheres of life. It was an era of material affluence, political awakening, democratic reforms, industrial and mechanical progress, scientific advancement, social unrest, educational expansion, idealism and pessimism. The literature of this period, wonderfully rich and varied in personal quality, embodies the spirit of the age. The Victorian era is characterised by the following main currents which transformed both life and literature:
(i) An Era of Peace: The Victorian Era was remarkable for its uninterrupted peace. The few colonial wars that took place during this period did not seriously disturb the national life. Though the Crimean War directly affected Britain, the sores of this war were soon healed up. The liberals of this period were particularly ardent champions of universal peace, brotherhood and justice. They regarded war as an unmitigated evil on a relic of barbarism. It was a peaceful epoch when Englishmen could complete the transformation of all aspects of their industrial, commercial, and social life without any of those risks of violent interruptions that gave quite a different quality to the history of continental nations.
(ii) Prosperity and Progress: As it was an age of peace, it made remarkable progress in industrial and mechanical development. Factories were established all over England, and large-scale production added to the national wealth. The new commercial energy of England was reflected in the Great Exhibition of 1851 and it was hailed as the beginning of a new era of prosperity. Carlyle writes in Signs of The Time "It is the age of machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to evils. Not the external and the physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the spiritual also. Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand. It was an era of prosperity, an era of aggressive nationalism, an era of rising imperialism.
Rapid industrialisation, commercial and material expansion also resulted in many evils, such as the appalling social conditions of the new industrial cities, the squalid slums, and the exploitation of cheap labour, often child labour, the painful fight by the enlightened few to introduce social legislation and the slow extension of franchise. The evils of Industrial Revolution were vividly painted by Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell and Kingsley. The disintegration of the village community, which was also necessitated by industrial expansion, is expressed in Hardy's novels.
(iii) The New Education: Educational expansion was registered by the passing of Education Acts, by which education to a limited degree became compulsory. The education expansion produced an enormous reading public. As the publication of books became cheap, their production was multiplied. Education brought political and social awakening among the masses. Press became a powerful political force. With the diffusion of education, a great reading public grew up unlike any that had existed before. The new reading public had no high literary standards. It asked for something to read. So, journalism and novel writing grew up. Edward Albert writes: "The most popular form of literature was the novel, and the novelists responded with a will. Much of their work was of a high standard so much so that it has been asserted by competent critics that the middle years of the nineteenth century were the richest in the whole history of the novel."
(iv) Victorian Compromise: It was an era of turbulent social changes. Man was caught between two worlds, the one dead and the other not yet formed. The new democratic, scientific and industrial forces tended towards the breaking down of the existing order. Hence, an effort was made to reconcile the old and the new, to bring about a compromise between science and religion, between the demand for progress and the need of stability, order and peace. In the field of political life there was a compromise between democracy and aristocracy. Harold Nicholson writes that the Victorians "desired to be assured that all was for the best; they desired to discover some compromise which, while not outraging their intellect and their reason, would nonetheless soothe their conscience and restore their faith, if not completely, at least sufficiently to allow them to believe in some ultimate purpose and most important still, in the life after death. In voicing these doubts, in phrasing the inevitable compromise, Tennyson found, and endeavoured passionately to fulfil his appointed mission."
(v) Social Unrest, Social Purpose and Realism: Victorian era was characterised by great social unrest. The class of wealthy capitalists and mill owners was rolling in wealth and luxury, but, on the other hand, factory workers and labourers were leading a life of abject misery and poverty. The industrial revolution had appealed strongly to the baser instincts of the commercial classes. To the wage earning classes the new Wealth accruing from the vast increase of manufacturers meant little. The Poor living conditions of the industrial slaves attracted the attention of social reformers and writers. The writers were inclined to depict a realistic picture of contemporary life with a conscious purpose of reformation. W. J. Long remarks: " ..... the Victorian Age is emphatically an age of realism rather than of romance,—not the realism of Zola and Ibsen, but a deeper realism which strives to tell the whole truth, showing moral and physical diseases as they are, but holding up health and hope as the normal conditions of humanity." Both poets and writers worked under the shadow and burden of a conscious social responsibility. In the stories of Dickens is faithfully mirrored, writes Rickett, "the deplorable state of the Debtors' Prison, the Fleet, and the Marshalsea; the dismal abysses of elementary education; the oppression of little children; the prevalence of religious hypocrisy— these and many other dark corners of the life of London, were illuminated by the searchlight of his genius."
"The closer approximation of literature to social life is very marked in the Victorian era. Kingsley writes passionate social tracts in the guise of a story, cheap bread inspires Ebenezer Elliott; Elizabeth Barrett voices The Cry of the Children, and Thomas Hood immortalizes the weary sempstress and the despairing unfortunate. Carlyle ..... plunges into the political problems of the day. Ruskin, starting as critic of the art of painting, turns in the new century to the more complex art of life, and no man of letters has tackled industrial problems with greater insight and more brilliant suggestiveness."
(vi) Advance of Democratic Ideals: In the political sphere the progress of democracy was a remarkable achievement. The political supremacy of the landed aristocracy had been destroyed by the Reform Bill of 1832 but there was no improvement in the condition of the working classes. Agitation for electoral reforms continued. The popular movement, known as Chartism kept England for about ten years in a state of political unrest, which was further stimulated by the industrial depression and widespread misery of "the hungry forties". The glaring social and political problems stirred the conscience of reformers and gave immense impetus to philanthropic energy and the spirit of humani­tarianism. The repeal of the Corn Law in 1848 ushered in an era of improved industrial conditions. The Chartist movement came to an end in 1848. Subsequently the Reform Bills of 1867 and 1884-85 "transformed the essentially oligarchic England of William IV's time into "the crowned republic" whose praises Tennyson sang." The old feudal landmarks and distinctions gradually disappeared, and the growth of sympathy between man and man and class and class was evident. With the expansion of democratic and humanitarian ideals popular education also spread, which provided proper opportunities for personal development to all. Journalism also became popular. The literature of their period derived greater energy and driving power from the democratic and humanitarian ideals. Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, Kingsley and even Mrs. Browning were deeply influenced by these ideals.
Women's liberation also characterised the Victorian epoch. Women were given political rights, and more and more of them came out of their homes to take up independent careers.
(vii) The Impact of Science: The progress of science kept pace with the progress of democracy. Due to the spread of popular education, newspapers, magazines and cheap books, the facts and speculations of scientists and thinkers passed rapidly into the possession of the reading public at large. The doctrine of evolution which is generally associated with the names of Darwin, Wallace and Herbert Spencer had completely revolutionised all current ideas about nature, man and society. Faith in the Biblical view of cosmology and creation was shaken, and was replaced by the Darwinian theory of revolution through struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. The impact of science was so powerful on human mind that it had affected every channel of intellectual activity.
According to Rickett it influenced human thought in two ways. First, it had fostered a spirit of restlessness; for by increasing man's material resources, it had commercialised human life at the cost of religious and spiritual values. Carlyle and Ruskin condemned growing materialism. Carlyle proclaimed the insufficiency of existing social ideals. The general spiritual unrest is voiced most remarkably in mid-Victorian poetry. Rickett remarks: "The questioning note in Clough, the pessimism of James Thompson, the wistful melancholy of Matthew Arnold, the fatalism of Fitzerald, all testify to the sceptical tendencies evoked by scientific research. It did not kill poetry but it stifled for a while the lyric impulse and overweighted verse with speculative thought."
The scientific method of observation and critical insight influenced the poetic art of Tennyson and other poets. "In accuracy of detail it would be impossible to rival the scenic descriptions of Tennyson," says Rickett, "whose nature poetry is like the work of an inspired Scientist……."
The scientific spirit is also clearly discernible fiction. The problems of heredity and environmenty attracted the attention of novelists. Biology, psychology and pathology influenced the works of Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Kingsley and Reade, who deal with social problems. We come across the influence of Herbert Spencer and Comte in the novels of George Eliot. The analytical methods of science were more subtly followed by George Eliot and Hardy.
(viii) Revival of Interest in the Past: Though the Victorians were interested in contemporary social and political life, they still had a fascination for the old ages. Some of the writers and poets had romantic thirst for beauty, love and art. The pre-Raphaelites remained unaffected by the sweeping tide of realism in fiction and they were attracted towards the Middle Ages. In the sphere of religion Keble and Newman pioneered the Oxford Movement which was based on spiritual romanticism. Just as Romanticism went back to old traditions and feelings in the same way the Oxford reforms refreshed religious life by a return to the past. Pater and Oscar Wilde were the pioneers of the Aesthetic Movement, which was a reaction against utilitarianism and pessimism. Cazamian explains that the spirit of Romanticism continues to influence the innermost consciousness of the age which sees a Tennyson, a Thackeray, a Browning and an Arnold, it permeates every thought just as it colours almost every mode of expression. Even its adversaries, and even those who would escape its spell are impregnated with it...... England, like Europe, is not yet entirely free from the predominant influence of Romanticism; she still witnessing the development of its effects.”
POETRY
1
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809-92)
His Life and Works
Lord Tennyson, the son of a clergyman, was born on August 6, 1809 at Somersby Rectory, Lincolnshire. The scenic beauty of his birthplace found artistic expression in his poetry. In his childhood he was educated at Louth and in 1828 he proceeded to Cambridge for further study. He won the Chancellor's medal for a poem on Timbuctoo. He left Cambridge without taking a degree. He spent the next twenty years of his life in tranquillity. In 1850 Tennyson became Poet-Laureate in succession to Wordsworth. He was raised to the peerage as Lord Tennyson in 1884, and died in 1892.
Tennyson's poetic activity extended over sixty years. At the age of seventeen he brought out Poems by Two Brothers in collaboration with his elder brother, Charles. His Poems, Chiefly Lyrical was published in 1830. These poems are immature but in some poems like Isabell and Madeline the pictorial effects and conscious poetic artistry, which characterise his mature works, are conspicuous. Poems (1833) marks a decided advance in Tennyson's poetic art. It contains such memorable poems as The Lady of Shalott, Oenone, The Lotos Eaters and The Palace of Art. Tennyson produced two volumes in 1842. The first volume consists mostly of revised versions of poems which had already been published, but the second volume consists of entirely new poems as Morte D'Arthur Ulysses and Locksley Hall.
Then came Tennyson's longer poems. The Princess (1847) deals with the theme of "the new woman in a serio-comic" manner. It is written in blank verse but contains several beautiful lyrics. In Memoriam (1850), a philosophic poem, was inspired by the death of the poet's friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. It is an elegy which contains meditations on life and death. It is also noticeable for picturesque descriptions of English scenery and for the deft handling of metre. Maud and Other Poems (1855) did not add anything remarkable to Tennyson's poetic fame. Enoch Arden and Other Poems appeared in 1855. In 1859, 1869, and 1889 he issued a series of The Idylls of the King, which deals with the theme of King Arthur and the Round Table. Tennyson's shorter poems, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886) and The Death of Benone (1892) echo sadly the sumptuous imaginings of the year 1842.
During his later years Tennyson wrote some dramas— Queen Mary, Harold, Becket, The Falcon, The Cup and The Foresters, which have little literary worth.
Tennyson as a Poet or Characteristics of Tennyson's Poetry
Lord Tennyson was unquestionably the greatest poet of the Victorian England. "For nearly half a century Tennyson was not only a man and a poet, he was a voice, the voice of a whole people, expressing in exquisite melody their doubts and their faith, their griefs and their triumphs. In the wonderful variety of his verse he suggests all the qualities of England's greatest poets. The dreaminess of Spenser, the majesty of Milton, the natural simplicity of Wordsworth, the fantasy of Blake and Coleridge, the melody of Keats and Shelley, the narrative vigour of Scott and Byron—," says W. J. Long, "all these striking qualities are evident in the successive pages of Tennyson's poetry." Tennyson has carved for himself a permanent place in English poetry due to the presence of following characteristics in his poetry:
1. Tennyson, the Representative Poet of His Age: Tennyson reflects in his best poetry the restless spirit of the progressive Victorian Age. As a poet he expresses not so much a personal as a national spirit. So he is the most representative poet of the Victorian era. His poetry is the mighty organ for the expression of Victorian conscience, the mirror reflecting the true genius and temperament of his age. He wedded art to life. "Nevertheless, Tennyson's poems are the work of a man," says Hugh Walker, "keenly alive to every human interest. In no other poet is the thought of the age more faithfully mirrored, and the poems in dialect are sufficient proof of interest in the humbler aspects and phases of life." Tennyson's poetry gave the Victorians what they desired. His poetry, therefore, represents the ideas and tastes, the inherited pedilections, the prevailing currents of thought of Englishmen belonging to his class and his generation. Moderation in politics, refined culture, religious liberalism, chequered by doubt, a lively interest in the advancement of scientific discovery, coupled with alarm lest it might lead us astray, attachment to ancient institutions, larger views of the duty of the state towards its people, and increasing sympathy with poverty and distress —all these feelings and tendencies find expression in his poetry.
Tennyson is the most complete embodiment of the Victorian spirit of compromise. To him love is a domestic sentiment. As regards sex problems, the main object of Victorians was to discover some middle course between the unbridled licentiousness of previous ages and the complete negation of the functions and purposes of nature. With sigh of hope and relief they decided that this biological necessity could be elevated into a moral, nay, even a civic virtue. So they evolved the idea of English home, which finds expression in Tennyson's poetry. The Miller's Daughter is a true story of married love, which Byron and Shelley could not envision. The woman's place was the home and hearth, the man's Place was the outside world. In this respect he represents the Victorian compromise, as the following lines reveal:
Man for the field, woman for the hearth;
Man for the sword and for the needle she
Man with the head and woman with the heart
Man to command and women to obey
All else confusion
Tennyson also championed the cause of women’s progress and education in The Princess.
Tennyson’s poetry embodies the political and social opinions of his age. His Locksley Hall is full of the restless spirit of “young England”, and of its faith is science, commerce, and the progress o mankind, while its sequel, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After shows the revulsion of feeling which had occurred in manly minds when the rapid development of science seemed to threaten the very foundations of religion, and commerce was filling the world with materialistic greed. He was not opposed to progress and development but he believed in slow and orderly development.
The old order changeth, yielding place to new
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
In his political opinions Tennyson believed in a compromise between aristocracy and democracy. Recluse and aristocratic as he was profoundly interested in common people and common things. "Both politically and socially," writes Hudson, "he stands out, on the whole, the poetic exponent of the cautious spirit of Victorian liberalism."
While Tennyson's poetry is thus historically interesting as reflecting the political and social tendencies of the age, it is even more important as a record of the intellectual and spiritual life of the time. A careful student of science and philosophy, Tennyson was deeply influenced by the far-reaching implications of the new discoveries and speculations by which the edifice of old thought was being undermined; more especially he was impressed by the wide implications of the doctrine of evolution, The two voices— science and religion—of the Victorian age are perpetually heard in Tennyson's poetry. In Memoriam, writes Rickett, "is a deliberate statement of Tennyson's religious philosophy, and incidentally presents those vexed questions, interrelated science and religion that were beginning to trouble the poet's generation." In this respect Tennyson tried to evolve a compromise between science and religion. He propounded a via media between the materialistic science ol his day and dogmatic Christianity. He looked beyond the disputes of creed and dogma to something higher and more essential. He felt that science was both fruitful and important. He told his generation that the true religious man was the man of action; he showed them in "The Holy Grail" that religion would lose rather than gain if they neglected then business interests. He told them:
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
He advised them in their moments of doubt and hesitation to keep to "the summerside of doubt", to cling "to Faith beyond the Forms of Faith, to trust in "the hidden hope," to look to
One far off divine event
To which the whole creation moves.
Tennyson represents the Victorian spirit of compromise when he writes:
Let knowledge grow from more to more
But more of reverence in us dwell.
2. His Sense of Law: The dominant element in Tennyson's thought is his sense of law. The thing which most impresses him is the spectacle of order in the universe. The highest praise which Tennyson expresses is that she is
A land of settled government,
A land of old and just renown
Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent.
W. J. Long writes: "Law implies a source, a method, an object. Tennyson, after facing his doubts honestly and manfully, finds law even in the sorrows and losses of humanity. He gives this law an infinite and personal source, and finds the supreme purpose of all law to be a revelation of divine love. All earthly love, therefore, became an image of the heavenly...... Because law and love are in the world, faith is the only reasonable attitude toward life and death, even though we understand them not. Such in a few words, seems to be Tennyson's whole message and philosophy."
3. His Nature Poetry: Tennyson's nature poetry is original and bears the impact of contemporary science. It is seen in the minuteness and exactness of his observation. Hudson remarks: "But Wordsworth had seen nature with the eye of the poet only, while Tennyson saw it with the eye of the scientist as well." Tennyson happily blended accurate observation with delicate poetic feeling in his nature poetry. He can give us large scenic effects in precise and accurate words, as in the description of an autumn storm:
The last red leaf is whirled away,
The rooks are blown about the sky.
Tennyson can impress us also with microscopic effects. In his finest poetry we find a combination of the accuracy of perception and beauty of delineation. How vividly he describes the dragon fly as "a living flash of light he flew", or the sunflower that "rays round with flames her disc of seed.”
Tennyson's landscape painting shows that he was endowed with the exactitude of the botanist and the delicate sensibility of the artist. Tennyson never paints nature as something outside of man, with a life-spirit purpose of its own. Nature for him is always a background for reflecting some human emotion. It has no message of its own, but harmonises with delicate adaptability to the mood of man. Thus, in depicting moods of indolence, of sorrow, of love he chooses such scenic accessories as may best accentuate these moods. In The Lotos Eaters the narcotized companions of Ulysses read their, own feelings into the surroundings. The desolate background of Mariana suits the mood of despondent isolation. Sorrow in varying degrees of poignancy serves the Poet as the inspiration of some of the loveliest pictures in In Memoriam.
Tennyson's nature poetry is intellectual. His world of nature is the world of “imaginative scientific man", who has an eye for beauty, and a heart to feel it. He is content to describe the outward beauty of nature and he does not pierce below the surface of the phenomena to find out a living soul in nature. To him nature is soulless and lifeless. Nature is beautiful but it is also cruel and indifferent:
For nature is one with rapine, a harm
no preacher can heal,
The Mayfly is torn by swallow, the sparrow
is spear'd by the shrike
And the whole little world where I sit is
a world of plunder and prey.
[Maud]
"No poet," writes Rickett, "has ever been more sensitive to the varied loveliness of Nature; to the sensuous glory of things. Nature's more august moods are better interpreted by Wordsworth, her ecstasies more subtly felt by Shelley; but the varying and complex spell of her multi­tudinous moods as a whole has found no finer expression than is given in the verse of Tennyson."
His Poetic Craftsmanship
Tennyson is a great and gifted poetic craftsman. "Tennyson is essentially the artist. No other in his age," writes W. J. Long, "studied the art of poetry so constantly or with such singleness of purpose; and only Swinburne rivals him in melody and the perfect finish of his verse."
Tennyson's poetic style shows remarkable variety, which harmonises with the variety of his themes. Classical, mediaeval, and Renaissance themes in his pages are mingled with stories drawn from his own day, such as Dora and Enoch Arden. Tennyson attained high excellence in every kind of poetry– the song, the idyll, the dramatic monologue, the dialect poem, the descriptive or "pageant" poem, the ballad, the war-ode, the threnody, the epic narrative, and the drama. "Everywhere his style," write Moody and Lovett, "is one of exquisite finish, with a flawlessness of technique which it seems that no labour could improve. He is the best example in English of the 'eclectic' style, made up of elements borrowed from many sources and perfectly fused, especially in his, mature, vigorous, disciplined interpretations of such classical personalities and legends as those of Ulysses and Tiresias." Tennyson formed a poetic style of his own, of quite faultless precision –musical, simple and lucid.
Tennyson's poetry is conspicuous for the deft application of sound to sense and in the subtle and pervading employment of alliteration and vowel music. He is also unsurpassable in handling the English metres. He skilfully employed blank verse.
His poetry is picturesque. In this respect he follows the example of Keats. Edward Albert remarks: "Nearly all Tennyson's poems, even the simplest, abound in ornate description of natural and other scenes. His method is to seize upon appropriate details, dress them in appropriate and musical phrases, and thus to throw a glistening image before the reader's eye."
Tennyson's Place
Tennyson's place is secure and permanent in literature by virtue Of his message, the pure and exquisite beauty of much of his work, his, modernity, the melody of his verse, his images and symbols, his vivid observation and his superb craftsmanship. No poet can surpass Tennyson's "exquisite variety and varied exquisiteness". There also runs a powerful undercurrent of universality of thought in his poetry. Rickett writes: "As a word painter of typical English scenery, as the exponent of the simple emotions of everyday life, he holds a treasured and honourable place. His delicacy and crystalline charm, his dignified and melodious utterance, will always endear him to English men and women."
2
ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889)
His Life and Works
Robert Browning was born in 1812 at Camberwell. He was educated semi-privately, and from an early age he had an aptitude for studying unusual subjects. Shelley influenced him. Browning was fascinated by Shelley's love for liberty and his revolt against convention and oppression. It was the example of Shelley which inspired him to dedicate his life to poetry, in the hope of making some striking contribution to the progress of intellectual freedom and the perfection of man. Byron also influenced him. It was the influence of Byron's comic style which gave to Browning's later idiom its peculiar colloquial flavour.
After a brief course at University College, Browning for a short period travelled to Russia in 1833; then lived in London, where he became acquainted with the leaders of literary and theatrical worlds. His earliest work Pauline appeared in 1833. It is an experimental introspective poem which shows the influence of Shelley. Paracelsus (1835) deals with the development of a soul thirsting for knowledge. It reveals the poet's faith both in love and God. It is dramatic in form but lyric in spirit. His next work was a play Strafford (1837). Sordello (1840) is an obscure work on the relationship between art and life. Bells and Pomegranates (1846) is a collection of dramatic and miscellaneous poems which appeared between 1841 and 1846. Besides two collections of lyrical and narrative poems, this series included six plays, Pippa Passes, A Soul's Tragedy, King Victor and King Charles, The Return of the Druses, Blot on the Scutcheon and Colombe's Birthday. All these plays lack in dramatic quality.
Dramatic Lyrics (1846) covering a period of ten years (1836-1846) exhibits every side of Browning's genius: tenderness in Evelyn Hope, passion in A Gondola, subtlety in Porphyria's Lover, intellectual brilliance in My Last Duchess, quaint kindliness in Warning, and genial extravaganza in The Piped Piper. Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) shows the flawless excellence 'Browning achieved in writing dramatic
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett, the poetess, whose works had strongly attracted him. The remainder of his life was occupied with Journeys between England and France and Italy. Men and Women, (1855), one of his finest works, consists entirely of dramatic monologues. The memorable monologues which appeared in this volume are– Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Sarto, Cleon, One Word More, Bishop Blougram's Apology etc. Dramatis Personae (1864) is again a collection of dramatic monologues. Famous among them are Caliban Upon Setebos, A Death in the Desert, Rabbi Ben Ezra and AN Vogler.
Browning's last volume Asolando was published in December 1899. The same year he died and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Characteristics of His Poetry
1. Browning's Message or Philosophy or Optimism: Browning's message is the triumph of the individual will over all obstacles; the self is not subordinate but supreme. "There is nothing oriental," says W. J. Long, "nothing doubtful, nothing pessimistic in the whole range of his poetry. His is the voice of the Anglo-Saxon, standing up in the face of all obstacles and saying, 'I can and I will'." His entire poetry is charged with moral purpose. To him the world is the "Valley of Soul making"; and every act, thought and feeling of life is of concern only as it hinders or determines the soul on its course. Like Tennyson he does not believe in the suppression of will and gut. He believes that salvation can be attained by the assertion of will and passion in right channels.
Browning is a poet of hope which lies in the imperfection of man. His optimism was a result of experience. His faith was founded on joyful experience, not in the sense that he selected the joyful experiences and ignored the painful ones, but in the sense that his joyful experiences selected themselves and stood out in his memory by virtue of their extraordinary intensity of colour. Like Caryle, he preaches a doctrine of strenuous endeavour, but with more hope, with complete ideas, and with wider sympathy for all sorts of good. He is not a mere ascetic, protesting against art and culture, as well as folly. He finds all things good, though virtue is the best. Our own weaknesses and follies have their value, —we must learn to tolerate frailties which are an earnest of higher things.
Browning's firm faith in the existence of God, who is all pervading, benign and all powerful, is the main source of his optimism. In Pippa Passes he says:
God is in his Heaven
All is right with the world.
Paracelsus declares:
Thus He dwells in all
From life's minute beginnings, at last to man.
In Andrea Del Sarto the poet again says:
Love, we are in God's hands
How strange now, looks the life He-makes us lead
So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!
I feel he led the fetters: let it lie.
The realisation of God should be the sumum bonum of life. "His mysticism," says G. K. Chesterton, "is not of that idle and wordy type which believes that a flower is symbolical of life; it is rather of that deep and eternal type which believes that life, a mere abstraction, is symbolical of a flower."
Browning is an adventurer in the infinite realm of spirit which always kindles with sparks of divine fire, but he does not deny the importance of the senses. He is a singer of the joys of life. Browning's characters — David, Pippa, the Duchess, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea Del Sarto and the Bishop of St. Praxed's— characters morally lofty and morally low— are all keenly alive to the pleasures of senses. The pleasures the world yields to, wisely used, are instruments to the mind, as food is an instrument to the body, both are equally legitimate and may be equally necessary. In Rabbi Ben Ezra the poet condemns the opposition between soul and flesh:
Let us not always say
Spite of this flesh to-day
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the
whole
As the bird wings and sings
Let us cry "All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now than
flesh helps soul.
Browning was capable of sympathy with asceticism when directed to higher ends; but for asceticism as an end in itself he had nothing but dislike. He believes that the present earthly life is a probation for the life to come. We have to face trials and difficulties during the probationary period but we should face them with courage and determination. Earth, with its failures and despairs, is the best training ground for man. Better its trials and crosses than a sterile uniformity of happiness:
Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit, nor stand but go !
Be our joys three-parts pain !
Strive and hold cheap the strain,
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never
grudge the throe ! [Rabbi Ben Ezra]
In Prospice the poet asserts:
I was ever a fighter, so one fight more
The best and the last.
In Grammarian's Funeral we are told that higher aims though unattained are worthier than complete attainment of a hundred lower aims. In Andrea Del Sarto he emphasises the necessity of keeping high ideals in ones life:
A man's reach must be above his grasp
Else, what is a heaven for?
Browning is, according to Rickett, "preeminently, a poet of the World. As an artist, he seems, .....most convincing and most alive when he is the spectator of earthly life and earthly difficulties. He loved life — every phase of it ¾ ‘scenting the world, looking it full in face" and with an immense physical zest and heartiness”.
The chief characteristic of Browning’s poetry is his firm conviction that life is worth living. He rolled back the morbid pessimism, the sickly disdain of active life, which had infected so much of English literature during the nineteenth century.
2. Browning, the Singer of Love: Browning is an ardent singer of the glory of love. The love he writes of is love between man and woman. The object of love in his poems is not an imagined goddess but a real woman. The natural end of such love is marriage. Browning, like Donne, is the poet of wedded love. There is sharp intellectual quality in his love poetry from the deep, tormented, sensual strain in Donne's poetry.
Browning's love poetry is intensely realistic in character. The imagery of his love poetry is of suburban streets, straws, medicine bottles, pianos, window blinds. "Browning's love poetry is the finest in the world, because it does not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven," says Chesterton, "but about window panes and gloves and garden walls. It does not deal about abstractions. It is the truest of all love poetry, because it does not always speak much about love. It awakens in every man the memories of that immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the power of any millionaire to compute."
As a result of the intellectualization of passion in Browning's love poetry, instead of dwelling on the beauty of woman he concentrates on the power wielded by her in sex life. Woman has the power to transfigure man's life. She can give it new strength and lift it to a nobler level as in By the Fire Side or she can enmesh it in sensuous beauty as in Andrea Del Sarto.
All love poems of Browning whether dealing with cases of successful love or failure in love end on a note of optimism and triumph. This triumphant note is nicely sounded in the concluding lines of Evelyn Hope, where an old man puts a scroll in the "sweet cold of his dead beloved hoping that some; when she awakes, she "will remember and understand." The lover. in The Last Ride Together is optimistic and the poem ends on a note of hope:
That instant made eternity,
And Heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride, together, for ever-ride.
Browning took up a wide variety of love situations. In Cristina love is the interpreter of life. In A Gondola he, deals with the abandonment of love. By the Fireside deals with the complete realisation and failure of love, whereas Andrea Del Sarto relates the complete failure of love. Meeting At Night, Parting At Morning, and Confessions are memories of love. Raphsodical love is expressed in The Flower's Name and Women and Roses. In James Lee's Wife we have a study in the caprices of love.
Browning also treats love as a philosophic principle which harmonises and unifies all beings. It is the moral ideal towards which man must strive to advance:
O World, as God has made it all is beauty,
And knowing this is love, and love is duty.
A life devoted to Love is an ennobling life and leads man higher and higher:
Love once evoked, once admitted into the soul
Adds worth to worth.
Browning's attitude towards love is happier and healthier. "For his outlook on love," says Rickett, "is the outlook of a man who puts it in front of any other thing in life, as a force sanctifying and strengthening the soul.”
3. Browning as the Writer of Dramatic Monologues: Browning's genius was essentially dramatic but due to his profound interest in depicting human soul and psyche he could not be a successful dramatist. He cannot interest us in his plot or represent his dramatis personae in action. So he attempted the monologue form, which provided him ample scope for representing the inner side of human beings, their mental and moral qualities, with great artistic excellence. "Having surrendered the drama," says Rickett, "he throws much of his dramatic material in the monologue form."
What is dramatic monologue? It is essentially a study of character, of mental states, moral crises, made from the inside and its mode is predominantly psychological or analytical, meditative or argumentative. According to Young dramatic monologue is "a comprehensive soliloquy, absorbing into its substance by the speaker's keenly observant glance the surrounding scenery and audience bringing all that is pertinent to the chosen movement by the channels of memory, argument, curiosity and association, adding through the deep graven lives which habit has insisted upon character much which the soul would fain conceal, or is even more unconscious of the necessity for concealing, and enriching the current of self-revealing speech with the product of any other emotion which may have been powerful enough to share in the fashioning of this critical movement." A dramatic monologue is very much like a soliloquy— one man's speech—but there is a difference between the two. In a soliloquy the speaker delivers his own thoughts, without being interrupted or disturbed by objections or propositions of other persons. In the dramatic monologue there is the presence of a second person to whom the thoughts of the speaker are presented, though the second man may not interpret the speaker. Most of the monologues are of conversational nature.
Browning's characteristic art form is dramatic monologue in which he takes some striking individual, generally at a critical moment, and instead of dissecting him from the outside, penetrates to the depth of his nature and through his own utterances compels him to reveal the innermost secrets of his life. Psychological insight, analytical subtlety, and power of dramatic interpretation are among the main features of Browning’s dramatic monologues. Some outstanding examples of his method are found in many of the poems in Men and Women and Dramatis Personae. This method is also adopted in his largest work, The Ring and the Book.
Browning did not invent the dramatic monologue but he made it especially his own, and no one else has never put such rich and varied material into it. He composed beautiful monologues with intense lyrical intensity on love theme as Evelyn Hope, The Last Ride Together, On Way of Love, Any Wife to Any Husband, A woman’s Word, By the Fireside, In A gondola, Porphyria’s Lover, One Word More and Lyric Love. In these monologues the poet conceives some definite situation and he reveals the emotions and psychic conditions of the character placed in that situation, and, thus, the individuality of that speaker is brought out. Some of his monologues - Caliban upon Setebos, Sludge, the Medium, Bishop Blougram's Apology, Grammarian's Funeral and Rabbi Ben Ezra deal with religious and philosophical themes. Fra Lippo Lippi,Andrea Del Sarto and Abt Vogler embody the poet's ideas on individual painters and musicians.
Browning's monologues are remarkable for psychological depiction of human character. Cazamian calls his monologues "studies in practical psychology". "Shakespeare works as with the clay of human action," writes Sharp, "Browning as with the clay of human thought." He loves to work on "great moment". But he reveals character not through action but through thought. Rickett says: "Browning was not interested in action at all—but in reaction—the result of action on character." He usually "isolates an emotion or a mood or either traces it through varying phases as in Andrea Del Sarto, or seizes it, in its moments of culmination as in Porphyria's Lover.
Browning portrays a wide variety of characters— crooks, cowards, scholars, poets, musicians, painters, dukes, murderers, cheats etc. The more tangled the character, the more passionate and stormy the experience, the more complicated the story, the greater was the zest with which Browning approaches them. Browning was more interested in the complexities of motive and unexpectedness of human behaviour.
Tennyson used the monologue form in Ulysses, Tithonus and a few other poems, "but these are essentially mood pieces, while Browning's monologues are not written in order to make up an atmosphere of languid sorrow or quiet determination or heavenly beauty," writes David Daiches, "but to project it with an almost quizzical violence a certain kind of personality, a certain temperament, a way of looking at life, even a moment of history realized in the self-revelation of the type. The method is not impressionistic or symbolic, nor is it really exploratory; these are set pieces in which a fully known character, seen in clear light, is set sharply before the reader."
4. Browning's Craftsmanship: Browning is a gifted poetic craftsman. He is matchless in writing dramatic monologues. His artistic principle is that a poet should under no circumstances, sacrifice sense to sound. Hence, he often seems to be careless of music and melody. But when sense and sound combine, as they often do in his poetry, he is able to achieve a music more melodious and sweet, than can even be possible for those, who care for sound alone. Mark music and melody in the follow­ing lines from A Lover's Quarrel:
Woman, and will you cast
For a word, Quite off at last
Me, your own, your You,
Since, as truth is true,
I was You all the happy past
Me do you leave aghast
With the memories we amassed?
The above quotation reveals that Browning cultivated realistic and conversational style. Rickett says: "Browning's way of addressing his public..... is a piquant mixture of chatter and song ...... He did to English poetry what Steele did to English essay. He informalised it. He brought into his subject matter ..... a familiar, direct unconventional method of speech..... often lacking a formal beauty."
Browning uses highly condensed and abbreviated style, which often leads to obscurity. He frequently becomes colloquial; for example:
Had I said that, had I done this,
So might I gain, so might I miss,
Might she have loved me? just as well
She might have hated, who can tell.
Browning, a great metrical artist, invented a large variety of verse forms and used them with consummate skill. His use of the grotesque is usually artistically justified. There is much in nature which is grotesque, fantastic and absurd, and similarly there is much in thought which is grotesque and fantastic. Such was Browning's genius that had a predilection for the grotesque and the odd both in the world of nature and in the world of man, as well as in the world of thought. His grotesqueness of manner is entirely in harmony with the peculiarity of his genius. Browning is the greatest poet of the grotesque in English poetry.
5. Browning's Obscurity: Obscurity is a serious drawback in Browning's poetry. It arises to some extent from his preoccupation with soul dissection or psychological analysis. Extreme compression and condensation of style also contribute to his obscurity. His style is, often, telegraphic. Inverted constructions abound and he, often, throws rules of grammar and syntax to the wind. His stupendous learning and fondness for Latin quotations and expressions further complicate matters for his readers. In fact, Browning wrote with great rapidity and rush. The language at his command was a poor instrument to render effectively and with the same speed the thoughts and ideas that flashed through his mind. This condensation of thought was extremely baffling to readers.
Swinburne said that Browning is rapid rather than obscure. Dowden remarks. "His obscurity is not deliberate or intentional. It is the obscurity of one who wishes to make himself plain but is confronted by two difficulties—the depth of his thought and his want of skill in expressing himself." According to Chesterton: "Browning is not obscure because he has such deep things to say, any more than he is grotesque because he has such new things to say. He is both of these things primarily, because he likes to express himself in a particular manner. The manner is as natural to him as a man's physical voice, and it is abrupt, sketchy, allusive and full of gaps.”
Browning’s Place and Popularity
Browning is an original poet. Recognition was slow in coming, but, fellow's. Wordsworth he lived to see his name established high among his lows. He was astonishingly great but also astonishingly faulty, and his faults have come in the way of the appreciation of his real greatness. "Browning has many poems," says Hugh Walker, "in which beauty of style is conjoined with profundity of thought, and in these poems lies the hope of the permanence of his fame."
Browning's conversational and realistic style influenced modern poets. Moody and Lovett remark: "Twentieth century poets, who reacted against his somewhat jaunty optimism, were, nevertheless, able to profit by his psychological realism, his audaciously colloquial diction, his deliberately rough rhythms, and his extension of the domain of poetry to include cacophony and ugliness."
PESSIMISM IN VICTORIAN POETRY
Tennyson is a poet of Victorian compromise and Browning strikes a note of ardent hope and optimism in the midst of despair, scepticism and pessimism. Pessimism, as we have seen, became a strong force in English literature of Victorian era. The advancement of science and rationalism contributed to industrial expansion and material progress, but it caused profound spiritual disturbance. Faith in religion was shaken. There was a total breakdown of values and ideals, and man felt orphaned and defrauded. Poets and writers found themselves caught
Between-two words, one dead
The other powerless to be born.
Poets like Tennyson attempted a sort of compromise between science and religion, but they could not make a popular appeal. Others like Arnold and Clough were knocked down by doubt and despair and cultivated a pessimistic attitude. Browning's optimism was certainly alien to Victorian spirit and he was dubbed as a blind optimist by a number of contemporaries.
By and large the pessimism of the Victorians arose from impersonal causes, and not from subjective experience. The.pessimistic poets of the Victorian age wrote with a sensitive and an acutely impressionable mind, with a tendency towards self-introspection, and a searching intellect. "It was the endeavour to intellectualise the visions of imaginative life," observes Rickett, "that led Arnold, Gough, Fitzgerald and James Thomson into that mood of wistful melancholy, that crystallized soon into a more or less pessimistic criticism of life."
1
MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1883)
His Life and Works
Matthew Arnold, the son of Thomas Arnold who was the renowned Headmaster of the Rugby School, was born in 1822 at Laleham in the county of Middlesex. In 1836 Arnold was sent to Winchester Board School. In August 1837 he was called to Rugby to be under his father’s personal care. He won a prize at Rugby in 1840 for his poem Alarid at Rome.
In 1841 he went up to Oxford on a scholarship. In 1842 his father died, who is remembered in the famous elegy Rugby Chapel, written fifteen years after his father's death. In 1843 Arnold won the Newdigate prize with a poem entitled Cromwell. His stay at Oxford was the happiest part of his life. Here he composed some of his finest poems The Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis, and the famous Preface to The Essays in Criticism.
In 1847 Arnold was appointed private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, President of the Council in Lord Russell's cabinet. In 1851 he was appointed the Inspector of Schools, on which post he remained for the next thirty-five years. The same year he married Frances Lucy Wightman. The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems appeared in 1849 and in 1852 came out Empedocles on Etma and Other Poems. The second volume contained some of his finest poems-Tristram and Iseult, A Summer Night and Lines Written in Kensington Garden. Then followed Poems (1853), with its famous critical Preface. and New Poems (1867).
In 1837 Arnold was elected to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. In 1858 he published Merope, a tragedy on the Greek model.
Arnold was also a distinguished prose writer and literary critic. His critical prose consists of Essays in Criticism, I Series (1865), Essays in Criticism, II Series (1868), On Translating Homer (1861), and On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867). As an Inspector of Schools he wrote some very valuable educational criticism which included The Popular Education of France (1861), Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868) and Special Report on Elementary Education Abroad (1866). Arnold wrote upon religion, politics and society in such thought-provoking books as Culture and Anarchy (1869), St. Paul and Protestantism (1870), Friendship's Garland (1871) and God and the Bible (1875).
In 1883 Arnold resigned, receiving a pension from the Government. In 1888 he died suddenly of heart disease.
Characteristics of Arnold's Poetry
1. Elegiac Note: Arnold, according to Garrod, "is the greatest elegiac poet in our language; not in virtue of merely Thyrsis but in virtue of the whole temper of his Muse. His genius was essentially elegiac...... His poetry, profoundly melancholy, runs from the world, runs from it, as I think, hurt, hurt in some vital part. It believes itself able to sustain life only in the shade.”
Arnold is regarded as the greatest elegiac poet of England. It is not that he has written more elegies of the highest quality than others, but that the elegies note runs through all his poetry. Arnold's elegiac spirit is like that of Gray rather than that of Milton, or Shelley or Tennyson. His elegies have never the triumphant and inspiring ring of Milton’s or Shelley’s. Even the personal elegies, in which the poet laments the death of some close relative or friend, runs a strong note of impersonal grief over the miserable destiny of human life and the gloomy and sordid conditions of human life. The subject of Rugby Chapel is his own father; in A Southern Night it is his brother, in Westminster Abbey and thyrisis, his most intimate friends; but even in these instances of keen personal sorrow the poet widens his view and treats of human destiny, almost as much as Gray does in The Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard. The same spirit inspires those poems which are not elegiac. In both the real theme is the condition of modern life, its feverishness, its "sick hurry and divided aims". It is so too in the Obemiann Poems, The Stanzas from Grand Charteuse, Heine's Grave and Memorial Verses. Arnold's poetry is voice of a spirit almost crushed beneath the burden of life. So, the monastic life attracts him and wrings from him a momentary cry for shelter in the cloister:
Oh, hide me in your gloom profound,
The solemn seats of holy pain !
Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence my round,
Till I possess my soul again.
Arnold's poetry is an expression of his inherent pessimism and loveliness. Various factors combined to make him a frustrated individual. His uncongenial occupation which put a severe strain on him, contemporary conflict between science and religion, the conflict in his own soul, and above all, his thoughtful, lovely temperament, made him take a dark, gloomy view of man's journey on this planet. His elegies are expression of this inner grief. He seizes every possible opportunity to express his pessimistic view of life. Arnold was
Standing between two worlds, one dead
The other powerless to be born.
The age just past had been potent for the destruction of old values, but powerless to create new ones. In Arnold's opinion the time demanded above all things the discovery of some shore, not false or impossible, towards which to steer. We need "some Columbus to guide us over a trackless ocean to a new continent which he discerns, though we cannot." Arnold never conceived himself to be capable of giving a solution to cure the sickness of the age. This feeling is the secret of Arnold's melancholy and pessimism.
Arnold's lamentations and melancholy are always characterised by classical self-control and decorum. Arnold is never hopeless. Man can come out triumphant out of chaos and gloom, if he strives to know his soul. So energetic, so enthusiastic and so active a soul was his father that the poet cannot think of him as dead in Rugby Chapel. He must be living in some other world, in some other "far shining sphere" from where he still inspires the sorry world of ours. Heart weary and sick the poet fixes his gaze on "a fugitive and gracious light, shy to illumine"—the light of his own soul, save which he has no star. In poem after poem this liberation of soul from "efforts unmeaning and vain" is the main theme. In Southern Night Arnold bewails that we "never once possess our soul,/Before we die." Finally, this cry of despair turns into a bold resolve in Self Dependence, where the voice of his own heart says:
Resolve to be thyself, and know that he
Who finds himself, loses his misery.
This self-dependence is Arnold's panacea for curing "this strange disease of modern life."
Rickett says: "No whining, no luxury of grief, no sentimental pessimism. Neither is there any real joy, and real peace. It is the serenity of a troubled but brave spirit." Hugh Walker also said: "He found in the elegy the outlet of his native melancholy, of the `Virgilian Cry' over the mournfulness of mortal destiny."
2. Arnold, the Critic of His Age: Arnold's poetry is an interpretation of "the main movement of mind" in the England of his time. "Of all modern poets," says H. Paul, "except Goethe, he was the best critic. Of all modern critics, with the same exception, he was the best poet." Arnold saw the whole of contemporary life "steadily".
Arnold vehemently criticised the rising spirit of modernity in all spheres of his time, contemporary life in his poetry. Perhaps more than any other poet of his time. Arnold saw life what in his was poetry. His famous poem The Scholar Gipsy is “a passionate indictment of the new dictatorship of the never resting intellect over the soul of modern man. It is a threnody for the lives of men smirched by modernity, of men who have become, in the words of Empedocles living men no more, nothing but naked, eternally restless minds.” Arnold was so much afraid of his materialistic age that he warned the Scholar Gipsy to go back to the age when this anomaly had not appeared:
But fly our path, our feverish contact fly,
For strong the infection of our mental strife
Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest.
Arnold realised that all human values and human emotions are of social growth, if not of social origin. He knows how much of what man does for himself depends upon what society allows him to do. Social changes, he thinks, are the cause of human isolation and the sterilization of emotions.
The rapid industrialization in Victorian England led to the growth and development of materialism, which resulted in loss of spiritual and human values, and the terrible contrasts of wealth and poverty. To him the city of London was a symbol of industrial and material expansion, of lawlessness and sordidness. In his famous elegies — The Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis, he yearns for idyllic surroundings, free from the uncongenial influences of city life. In A Summer Night he presents a vivid picture of sordidness and unending gloom in the likes of his contemporaries. The Victorian England was a world where
....most men in brazen prison live
Where in the sun's hot eye,
With heads bent over their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning task work give,
Dreaming of nought beyond their prison wall.
Science imagined a universe without soul where everybody struggled for existence and only the fittest survived— and created the machine that changed the shape of society and industry. Man ceased to be man, divided from all that he held dear. Restless activity in mill and factory, office and workshop — "effort unmeaning and vain" — became the one aim, the one business, the one desire. And all to no purpose for while wealth increased, happiness declined. Hence the poet thinks of the past:
When wits were fresh and clear
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims
Its heads overtax'd, its palsied hearts were rife.
In the opinion of Garrod Arnold's best poetry is conceived "as a battle with worldliness, the worldliness in ourselves, and the worldliness in the world."
3. Classicism and Romanticism in Arnold's Poetry: Arnold was a born classicist, a lover of shapeliness, restraint, clarity and lucidity. He disliked eccentricity, arbitrariness and self-will which Romanticism encourages. It is also negligent of unity and attaches great importance to beautiful passages—the purple patches. As regards his poetical method, Arnold is essentially classical, not romantic. He is considered to be the greatest exponent of classical spirit since Milton. His main aim was to tone down what was excessive and to supply what was deficient. In his poetry he tried to cultivate that calm and disinterested objectivity which he assigned to the products of early Greek genius. Cazamian observes: "His poetry was the fruit of calm contemplation and majestic pains rather than of 'urgent and imperative impulse'." In his finest poems— The Scholar Gipsy, Thyrsis, Rugby Chapel, Dover Beach, A Southern Night, The Forsaken Merman, Westminster Abbey etc. he presents one of the examples in English of the classical spirit" — of its self-possession, its freedom from vagueness, its naked statement.
Despite his innate, love for classicism and his reaction against romanticism, Arnold could not wholly keep the romantic element out of his poetry. According to Cazamian: "Arnold's verse shall continue to be read because of inner romanticism which precisely was what the poet sternly tried to repress." "His romantic instincts," says Douglas Bush, "his desire for feeling, though half-suppressed, break through the austere or prosaic surface and flower in images from nature and the simple words of classical and Biblical antiquity. Arnold's recurrent wistful yearning to escape from "the darkling plain" to some place of ideal peace —early Greece, Oxford countryside or the Alps is basically romantic in spirit.
4. Nature in Arnold's Poetry: Love of nature is "present as an essence in all his work". Arnold is a passionate lover of the countryside. Wordsworth enshrined the Lake District in his poetry, Arnold chiselled the Oxford countryside into immortality in his poems. He has Wordsworth's calm, but neither his cheerfulness, nor his detachment. Arnold does not find joy in nature but he finds peace from life's disturbances in her.
Arnold loved nature in her quieter and more subdued moods. He preferred her silence to her many voices, moonlight to sunlight, the sea retreating from "moon blanch'd land" with its "melancholy, long withdrawing roar" to the sea in tumult and uproar. The sea was for him the one element in which he discovered the deepest reflection of his own melancholy and sense of isolation. What Arnold worshipped in nature was her steadfastness and calm, and her act of ever teaching the lesson of self-dependence:
Calm soul of all things !
make it mine To feel, amid the city's jar,
That there abides a peace of thine
Man did not make, and cannot mar.
[Kensington Garden]
Joy is neither in nature, nor in human life, but man has no peace either, in which Nature is so rich.
As a poet of nature, Arnold is best when he is melancholy. According to Hugh Walker it is his melancholy which "determines his preference for pale colours, soft lights and subdued sounds, for moonlight effects, and for the hum of brooding mountain bee."
5. Arnold's Poetic Art: Arnold was a great and gifted poetic artist, who took great pains in polishing and perfecting the rhythm of his poems. Disraeli once congratualted Arnold on being "the only living Englishman who had become a classic in his own life time". He is really a classic so far as his felicitious phraseology, the crystalline perfection of his lines, his fastidious workmanship and lucidity of expression are concerned. The following lines illustrate his lucidity of expression, rhythmic felicities and flawless phraseology:
France, famed in all arts, in none supreme.
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
……………………………………..
Still nursing the unconquerable hope
Still clutching the inviolable shade.
……………………………………..
Eyes too expressive to be blue,
Too lovely to be grey.
She let the legions thunder past
And plunged in thought again.
Arnold's poetic style is uniformly excellent and in this respect only a few poets can rival him. Arnold excels in using Homeric simile deftly.
"Lucidity was what he aimed at, above all things — classical beauty and truth of phrase and image, suggesting always, in his own words "the Pure lines of an Ionian sky. The studied effort after perfection of form accounts largely, though not altogether, "for the quality of adhesiveness, which Sir Leslie Stephen found in his poetry."
Arnold was not a lyric poet par excellence. His lyrical faculty, which seldom reaches the point of singing, is arrested by thinking. There is some genuine lyricism in his love poems¾Marguerite Poems, Absence, Parting, Longing and Lucy Wightman.
Arnold's artistic skill shows itself in Hugh sonnets—Shakespeare, To A Republican Friend, Quiet Work and Worldly Place. With their simplicity, their epigrammatic quality, their consumte art and their seriousness of the thought they are rich and admirable. Huge Walker writes: “Next, perhaps, to the elegies and elegiac lyrics, Arnold seems best in sonnets. The severe restraint of the form was hardly necessary to him; but it suited him, and as a sonneteer in Italian form he ranks with the best in English literature."
Arnold's Place in Poetry
Arnold's poetic output is limited. In his case the critical and intellectual faculty superseded the poetical one. His sense endowment was not rich. His ear was uncertain. Like Gray, he was born in an unpoetical age. Arnold was a greal scholar. He wrote for a small group of saddened intellectuals, for whom the dominant world was a wasteland, men who felt heartsick and deprived of some part of their energy by their civilization. Elton remarks: "His poetry, on the one hand, is a plangent threnody for a lost wholeness and peace, on the other hand, it is an exploration of two modern intellectual traditions which have failed him and his peer, the traditions of rationalism and romanticism, and, moving back and forth, between these two strands, it is an attempt to weave them together into a synthesis. Each alone, he feels, is insufficient, but put together, he feels, is insufficient, but together they promise much. The effort of reconciliation produces a body of poetry which is philosophic but not systematic."
Arnold was never popular and never will be popular as a poet. "A popular poet as Byron was, as Tennyson is, he never was, and is never likely to be."
2
A. H. CLOUGH (1819-1861)
Clough was an intimate friend of Arnold, whose Thyrsis is a noble monody on Clough's death. Clough's poetry is "the truest expression in verse of the moral and intellectual tendencies, the doubt and struggle towards settled convictions, of the period in which he lived." It resembles Arnold's poetry in its sceptical quality, its transparent sincerity, and its moral earnestness and courage. His first long poem The Bothie of Toper-na-Vuolich (1848), Amours de Voyage (1849) and Dipsychus (1850) are charged with much of the deep seated unrest and despondency that mark the work of Arnold. His memorable lyric Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth contains the philosophy of action, not stoic endurance which characterises Arnoldian attitude.
3
JAMES THOMSON (1834-1882)
Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night strikes a note of unrelieved pessimism, largely subjective. In the words of Hugh Walker, "His pessimism was founded on the conviction that there was no hope for humanity any more than for himself, and that the appearance of progress was a mere illusion." The gloom and depression that envisage the poem are due largely to the many disappointments he had suffered, intensified by his constitutional intemperances.
4
EDWARD FITZGERALD (1809-1888)
Fitzgerald is remembered for his translation of the Persian work, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The translation has the force and beauty of an original work. "Like Tennyson's In Memoriam, the Rubaiyat is also a criticism of life, less explicit, less polemical in its form, but nonetheless definite. In its outlook Tennyson's poem stands midway between Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat and Browning's Easter Day, blending the two characteristics of the day—a wistful hesitancy and a religious optimism—in a way that proved by its very compromise extremely welcome and soothing to many minds." No English writer has expressed so beautifully the Epicurean philosophy as Fitzgerald. The translation is remarkable for its artistic beauty and its fine sincerity of utterance.
According to David Daiches this work "puts an altogether more attractive face on pessimism. Thomson alternated between hedonism and despair; Fitzgerald expressed a hedonism grounded on scepticism." Fatalism is an important element in Fitzgerald's pessimism:
The moving finger writes and having writ
Moves on, neither all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a live
Nor all thy tears shall wash out a word of it.
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH POETRY
The Pre-Raphaelite movement seems at first sight something apart from the main stream of Victorian literature. It has no concern either with domestic ideals or with scientific and philosophic problems. Its chief concern is with art, and it emphasises especially the connection between poetry, painting, and the plastic arts. In fact, the Pre-Raphaelite poets drew their inspiration from the works of Italian painters before Raphael, "in whom they found a sweetness, depth, and sincerity of devotional feeling, a self-forgetfulness and humble adherence to truth, which were absent from he sophisticated art of Raphael and his successors." The celebrated Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 by three painters, Holman Hunt, John Millais and Rossetti, and one sculptor Thomas Woolner. The Brotherhood identified themselves artistically with the early Florentine painters, the painters before Raphael, for they were impressed with the individuality and sincerity they found in these medieval painters. These early painters were endowed with the gift of minute observation, and they set down faithfully what they had seen, with implicity of art. Ruskin said of Rossetti and his friends that "they imitate perfect fidelity to details. The Brotherhood adhered to the creed of simplicity of art. Ruskin said of Rossetti and his friends that “they imitate no pictures; they paint from nature only.” The Pre-Raphaelite poetry has the following characteristics:
(i) An Extension of Romantic Revival: Rickett calls it “the logical development of Romantic Revival." It is characterised by the revival of mediaevalism and Hellenism. On the poetical side “the Pre-Raphaelites derive from Keats even more than from Scott, in their idealism and devotion to beauty. But Swinburne approximates rather to the Hellenic and Shelley; while his art is nearer akin to music than painting." [Rickett] The Pre-Raphaelites also recoiled from the philosophic and scientific preoccupation of many Victorian poets. The polemical note which had spoiled some of Tennyson's later work and much of Browning's rhythmic analysis, was hateful to passionate worshippers of beauty like Rossetti and Morris.
(ii) Medievalism: Medievalism inspired the Pre-Raphaelites, but their medievalism was different from the genial but slightly superficial medievalism of Scott, and even from the more exact but narrow and conventional medievalism of Tennyson. These poets imparted subtlety and a touch of realism to the Middle Ages. Swinburne remarks: "By the strong touch of modernness which these poets and the best of their followers introduced into their work, they have given the vivification required."
(iii) Art For Art's Sake: The Pre-Raphaelites had no moral, didactic or philosophical purpose. Like Keats, who was a constant source of inspiration to them, they were worshippers of beauty and aimed at achieving perfection of form. Their main purpose was to depict or create beauty for its own sake.
(iv) Picturesqueness: Like the poetry of Keats, the Pre-Raphaelite poetry abounds in vivid and sensuous word-pictures. The aim of these poets was to create the effect of landscape painting in poetry. Ruskin remarked: "Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch in the open air from the thing itself Every minute accessory is painted in the same manner." Mark the effect of painting in the following lines:
"The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of heaven."
……………………………………..
"Where the long cloud the long wood's
counterpart
Sheds doubtful darkness up the labouring hill."
(v) Love of Symbolism: Another remarkable characteristic of this movement was its love of symbolism. This is a mediaeval note, and Rossetti learnt this secret from Dante. William Morris and A. C. Swinburne too abundantly used symbolism.
(vi) Music and Melody: The Pre-Raphaelites paid great attention to vowel music, to artistic metres and to choice of musical words. Legouis writes: "Vowels call to vowels, and consonants to consonants, and these links often seem stronger than the links of thought or imagery." In Rossetti we often come across consummate triumphs of word-music. In Swinburne, the word and vowel music had been carried to an extreme and he can often sacrifice sense for the sake of sound.
(vii) Conclusion: The Pre-Raphaelite poets canot be compare' with the art of such great Victorian poets as Tennyson and Browning Victorian literature at its greatest is intensely humanistic and vital. The Pre-Raphaelite poetry, which is devoid of human touch, cannot be ranked high order of poetry. However, these poets influenced the English Aesthetes, led by Oscar Wilde.
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE POETS
1
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (1828-1882)
Rossetti, the eldest of the Pre-Raphaelite school of artists and poets, was himself both painter and poet. His poetical work consists of two slender volumes, Poems (1870) and Ballads and Sonnets (1881).
Rossetti's poetry is sensuous, picturesque and impassioned like that of Keats. "That the pictorial element is more insistent in Rossetti than in Keats is obviously due to the fact that Rossetti's outlook on world is essentially that of the painter. He thinks and feels in pigments." [Rickett] He was, indeed, a poet-painter; for example:
"She had three lilies in her hand
And the stars in her hair were seven."
……………………………………..
"Her jewels in her hair, —
Her white gown, as became a bride,
Quartered in silver at each side,
Sat thus aloof, as if to hide."
Rossetti remained aloof from the political and social conditions of contemporary life. He was fascinated, like Keats, by the chivalry and romance of the Middle Ages. The Staff and Script is a tale of medieval chivalry. Rossetti was considerably influenced by Dante and the early Florentine painters and his identification with mediaeval ideas and feelings was so complete that the atmosphere of his famous poems, The Blessed Damozel and Ave is not unlike that of Dante's poetry or of the works of great catholic painters. Rossetti's mediaevalism is a fine combination of the human elements of old romance which were apprehended by Scott and Morris, the sensuous elements which attracted Keats and the mystic and supernatural elements which inspired Coleridge. Rossetti's handling of supernaturalism is psychological and suggestive, as in Sister Helen.
Rossetti is a great melodist. He carefully chose words for their melodious and musical quality. His style is also marked by abundant use of symbols.
2
WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-1896)
Morris produced a great amount of poetry and was one of the most conspicuous figures of mid-Victorian literature. He was a man of versatile genius. He was considered as "poet, artist, and manufacturer, and socialist, author of The Earthly Paradise. Morris's first volume of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858) reveals his strong love of beauty of colour, sound and scenery, and his passion for the medieval. The Life and Death of Jason (1866) is a long narrative poem of a familiar theme. It is told in smooth, easy couplets and has the melancholy tone so common in Morris. The Earthly Paradise (1868-70) is a collection of twenty-four tales on various subjects of classical and mediaeval origin. In this volume Morris appears as a dreamer and romancer. Although he modelled himself on Chaucer, he was incapable of the robust realism of the earlier author. His poetical works "are purely romantic in method and style," says W. H. Hudson, "though their undertone of sadness served to remind the critical reader that, while the poet deliberately turned his back upon his time, he could not altogether escape its troubled spirit." Later, under the influence of Ruskin and his own growing revulsion from the growing ugliness of commercialism, Morris became a socialist and reformer. His later works were mainly in prose. Two of them, The Drearn of John Ball and News from Nowhere, were romances of social propa­ganda.
3
A. C. SWINBURNE (1837-1909)
Swinburne was a prolific poet of the Pre-Raphaelite School. Atlanta in Colydon (1865), an attempt at an English version of an ancient Greek tragedy, was his first considerable effort in poetic form. It is remarkable for musical style, tuneful and impetuous movement, a cunning metrical craftsmanship, and a mastery of melodious diction. Songs Before Sunrise (1871) is a collection of poems chiefly in praise of liberty. Tristram and Other Poems (1882), a narrative of much passion and force, was composed in the heroic couplet. He wrote a number of tragedies, The Queen Mother and Rosamond, Chastelard, Bothwell, Mary Stuart, Locrine and The Sisters. His genius was not dramatic but lyrical. As a critic he is remembered for William Blake, A Study of Shakespeare and A Study of Ben Jonson.
As a poet, Swinburne is a great Pre-Raphalite poet. Music, melody and picturesqueness are the outstanding qualities of his poetry. His poetry charms both the eye and the ear. Rickett calls him "the most musical of our poets." Rickett adds, "Just as Rossetti made thought pictorially sensuous, Swinburne has made thought musically sensuous. He is not merely melodic— Shelley was gloriously melodic—he is harmonic; Shelley's music is the music of the lute; Swinburne's the music of a full orchestra; his melodies are rich and complex, with a sweeping grandeur that no other poet had equalled, much less excelled."
OTHER POETS
E. B. Browning (1806-61), the wife of the poet Robert Browning, was a famous poetess. Her works include An Essay on Mind: With Other Poems (1826), Prometheus Bound (1833), The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838), Sonnets from the Portugese (1847), Casa Guidi Windows (1851), Aurora Leigh (1857) and Last Poems (1862). Her poetry is often marred by overwrought emotionalism, prolixity, diffuseness and gross abuses in diction and rhyme. At her best she exhibits the redeeming qualities of sincerity, genuine passion, and undeniable power over language. In some, of her poems like Casa Guidi Windows she reveals her love of liberty and Italy, and poems like the Cry of Children have the same humanitarian, enthusiasm as we have in the novels of Dickens and Kingsley. Her finest work is enshrined in the sonnet series, entitled Sonnets from the Portugese in which she enshrined her love.
Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-94), the younger sister of the poet D. G. Rossetti, was a lyrical poet. Her works, which include Goblin Market and Other Poems (1864), The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1866), A Pageant and Other Poems (1881), and Verses (1893), are entirely lyrical, and are characterised by deep religious feeling, a pronounced strain of mysticism, and much metrical charm.
A. E. O' Shaughnessy (1844-81) wrote An Epic of Women and Other Poems (1870), Lays of France (1872), Music and Moonlight (1874) and Songs of a Worker (1881). His poetical genius shines best in shorter poems which are conspicuous for a musical and attractive style and a certain half-mystical wistfulness.
Coventry Patmore (1823-1896) was a famous but not a great poet. The Angel in the House is a fine piece of work and is remarkable for psychological insight. His later works The Unknown Eros and Amelia show a remarkable mastery of metre. His poems are remarkable for neatness and lucidity of expression.
Alexander Smith (1830-1867) was a poet with romantic tempera­ment. His poems are contained in three volumes Poems (1853), City Poems (1857) and Edwin of Deira (1861). His finest imaginative poems are found in City Poems. His poems contain some fine descriptive passages, and they are also remarkable for sensuousness and picture­squeness.
Robert Buchanan (1841-1901) was "an acute observer, a vigorous thinker, with a strong sense of humour and a versatile imagination." His poems are included in London Poems and The Book of Cerm, The Celt. His poems reveal a sense of uncompromising realism. Rickett remarks: “To some extent we may regard Buchanan as the pioneer of the note of romantic realism…..”
Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904) is remembered for his long poem The Light of Asia (1879).
Lord Macaulary won fame for his Lays of Ancient Rome and Lord Lytton with a romantic epic, King Arthur and Lost Tales of Miletus. Thackeray also composed some humorous poetry and some beautiful lyrics. George Eliot, the famous novelist, wrote Spanish Gypsy, Agatha, The Legend of Jubal and How Lisa Loved the King. Her poems lack in real poetic inspiration but have great moral and intellectual qualities of her prose fiction. Kingsley's Saint's Tragedy and Andromeda are memorable Works, and his songs and ballads are remarkable.
PROSE
The prose literature of Victorian Era is immensely rich and varied. The essay par excellence was successfully attempted by R. L. Stevenson. Carlyle, Symonds and W. H. Pater wrote essay-cum-treatise. Dickens in some parts of The Uncommercial Traveller and Thackeray in Roundabout Papers successfully practised the shorter Addisonian type; and this again was enlarged and made more pretentious by Ruskin,
Pater and Stevenson. Lectures of Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens and of many others were published in book forms. Historical prose was abundantly written. Scientific treatises also attained literary rank. As regards the development of prose style, Carlyle and Macaulay developed the middle style, Ruskin and Pater cultivated ornate style. Stevenson's style is modern.
EMINENT PROSE WRITERS
1
THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881)
His Life and Works
Born in 1795, Carlyle was educated at Edinburgh University, and became for a time a school teacher. After a few years of teaching, he abandoned the profession and removed to Edinburgh, where he did literary hack work for a living. He was poor in means and wretched in health. He also suffered from doubts, uncertainties and spiritual conflicts. At this moment of confusion he felt mystical illumination, which restored him to courage and faith. Carlyle's spiritual conflict and the restoration of faith are expressed in Sartor Resartus. His married life with Jane Welsh was happy. In 1834 the Carlyles settled permanently in Chelsea. He gave lectures far and wide, and wrote profusely. He died in 1881 in Chelsea.
Carlyle was a versatile thinker and writer who successfully wrote on philosophy, history, criticism and biography. His earliest work consisted mainly of translations, essays and biographies. The translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1824), his The Life of Schiller (1825) and his essays on Burns and Scott are his best works of the early period. His most characteristic book is Sartor Resartus (1834), which is also "one of the most remarkable and vital books in modern English literature." Carlyle's major historical works are The French Revolution (1837), Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845), The Life of John Sterling (1851) and The History of Frederick II of Prussia, Called Frederik the Great (1858-65). His famous works dealing with contemporary life and events are Chartism, Past and Present (1843) and Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850). The series of lectures he delivered in 1837 was published as On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History.
Characteristics of His Work
"The greatest personality," says Rickett, "in criticism and essay during the earlier part of the era was Thomas Carlyle." His prose is characterised by the following qualities:
(i) Carlyle's Message: Carlyle is considered as a sage in moral and political affairs. He was a staunch Puritan who valued moral purpose in life very highly. "In him," says Hudson, "the strenuous and uncompromising ethic spirit of seventeenth-century Puritanism found its last great exponent." He bitterly condemned moral weakness, downright wrong doing, apathy and indifference. Carlyle exposed the hypocrisy and insincerity of the conventional society of his age. The keynote of his teaching was sincerity and the recognition of reality in society, politics and religion. He opposed all the characteristic ideas and ideals of his age. To him democracy was the last word of political unwisdom. Carlyle repeatedly pointed out that the masses needed the guidance and leadership of "the hero" or "the able man". He denounced commercial prosperity, easy-going optimism, scientific materialism and the utilitarianism of the Victorian Age. Carlyle, on the other hand, proclaimed faith in God and spiritual freedom to a generation, which had fallen into idolatrous worship of the "mud-gods of modern civilization." Summing up Carlyle's influence Harriet Martineaw wrote that "he had infused into the mind of the English nation..... sincerity, earnestness, healthfulness and courage."
(ii) Revolutionary Note: Carlyle's message shows that he was a great revolutionary thinker. "Not an abstract revolutionary, like Shelley," says Rickett, "not a mere literary radical like Lamb, but one thoroughly inbued with the revolutionary spirit, dissatisfied with modern commer­cialism, a champion of the simplicities of life, with keen admiration for the qualities of courage and endurance, a fighter rather than a critic, while in spirit he was far more attuned to the transcendentalism of Wordsworth than to the utilitarianism of Mill."
(iii) His Style: Carlyle's style is entirely his own. It is the expression of his own peculiar personality. He expresses his own genius and intense conviction in his own vivid and picturesque way. "Carlyle's style," according to Hudson, "with its enormous wealth of vocabulary, its strangely constructed sentences, its breaks, abrupt turns, apostrophes and exclamations, is unique in our prose literature, and at times, it may seem uncouth and even chaotic, we must still regard even its most conspicuous mannerisms as the expression of the writer's peculiar personality." His mastery of vivid and telling phraseology is unrivalled.
Flexibility is an outstanding characteristic of his style. He can be calm and persuasive. He is conversational and can be humorous. Macaulay's style is that of an orator, Carlyle's, that of an exhorter. His style appeals to the heart. It is remarkable for sweetness, piercing melody, suggestiveness and intense lyrical quality.
2
JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)
His Life and Works
John Ruskin was born in 1819 in London. He was educated privately before he went to Oxford. His father was a rich wine merchant, and as a boy and youth he enjoyed all the advantages which wealth can afford. His early training was as rigidly Puritan as Carlyle's had been. At Oxford he won the Newdigate prize for his poem entitled Salsette and Elephanta. In 1843 appeared Ruskin's famous work Modem Painters Vol. I, which was Written with a view to vindicating the genius of Turner and to expounding the true principles of landscape painting in general. Successive volumes of Modem Painters appeared between 1843 and 1860. He, then, became occupied with architecture and produced The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stone of Venice (1851-53). The Two Paths appeared in 1859.
Ruskin's study of the history of art aroused his interest in the study of social conditions. He began to take interest in the practical problems of his age. Carlyle inspired him. Thus, Ruskin, the famous art critic, was transformed into the philanthropist and reformer. In 1869 he was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. He directed all his efforts at expounding his social and economic theories in lectures, essays and books. Ruskin's views on political economy, and his educational and institutional ideals were expressed in Unto This Last (1861), Munera Pulveris (1862), Time and Tide by Wear and Tyne (1867) and Fors Clavigera (1871-84), a sries of letters to the working men of England. His more general ethical teachings appeared in Sesame and Lilies (1865) and The Crown of Wilde Olive (1866). Ruskin spent the closing years of his life in failing health in Conistan Water, in the Lake District. He died in 1900.
Characteristics of His Work
Ruskin, according to Tolstoy, was one of the greatest men of the Victorian Age. He was an art critic, a literary critic, social reformer, educationist, revolutionary and reactionary. He was a man of high moral principles and of luxuriant imagination, and these qualities made him a powerful thinker and writer. Ruskin's writings are noticeable for the following characteristics:
(i) Ruskin as a Thinker: Ruskin was a profound and original thinker. His aesthetics rested ultimately on moral foundations. He asserted that true art can be produced only by a nation which is inspired by noble national aims, and lives a pure, righteous and happy life. For art meant to him the outward of the inward beauty that haunts the imagination of every great artist. He deemed it impossible to preach art to the people of nineteenth century England, whose conditions of living were ugly and deadening.
Sincerity and truthfulness are essential for art. An artist should have a constant, direct, firsthand knowledge of nature. To this extent he supplemented the implicit teaching of Wordsworth and Shelley. An artist must break down the tyranny of convention and tradition, and must abandon the stereotyped formalism of the schools. He must go straight to nature for himself, and must strive to reproduce forcefully and faith­fully what he finds there, "rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing." An artist must have a feeling for beauty. A lack of feeling for beauty means "a contempt for right sense—beauty is the concrete final expression of rightness." According to Ruskin there is a close correspondence between art and morality.
In regard to his social and economic teachings Ruskin vehemently denounced the current political economy of his age. He condemned the rapid commercial and material expansion, because it militated against the rightness of feeling. Ruskin tried to humanise political economy.
Ruskin highlights the importance of work, but he promises that work should not be uninspiring and mechanical, but interesting and pleasurable, so far as is possible.
At the present time Ruskin is best remembered and valued as a critic of modern social conditions. Rickett writes: "Meanwhile, let us bear in mind the intellectual force, the imaginative insight, the funda­mental sincerity that — inconsistencies and extravagancies notwithstand­ing — he has brought to bear upon every side of life."
(ii) Ruskin's Style: As a stylist, Ruskin's place is very high. His prose which is sonorous, musical and rhythmical is the perfect example of cadenced prose which reminds us of the writings of Milton. His style is marked by long sentences, which are carefully punctuated, and by a gorgeous march of image and epithet. In his later books Ruskin cultivated Biblical ease and simplicity of style, but he is always lyrical and sonorous. Ruskin's style, remarks Hudson, "calls for the highest praise; and alike in the rich ornate prose of his early, and the easy colloquialism of his later writing, he is in the front rank of his greatest masters."
3
T. B. MACAULAY (1800-1859)
Macaulay contributed a number of essays to The Edinburgh Review. His essays are of two kinds—those dealing with literary subjects such as Milton, Byron and Bunyan, and those dealing with historical studies, including his famous essays on Lord Clive and Warren Hastings. His essays are clearly and ably written, and in them he often creates vivid picturesque effects. He contributed five biographies to The Encyclopedia Britannica. His magnum opus History of England in five volumes is a memorable work.
Macaulay had a remarkable faculty for making everything he touched interesting. He rarely wrote a dull page. His approach to life was based on commonsense and, unlike Carlyle and Ruskin, he had a firm faith in the "happy materialism" of his age. He was not a profound thinker but he addressed himself almost exclusively to the understanding.
Macaulay's style is energetic, vivid and picturesque. It has a boundless fertility of illustration. It is entirely direct and clear. He used short, detached sentences. His vocabulary is copious and expressive.
Hudson writes: "More than any other writer he may be said by his essays to have popularised a taste for literature, and his History remains the most generally attractive piece of historical narrative in the language."
4
MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-88)
Matthew Arnold, whose poetry has already been discussed, was a celebrated critic and writer. His prose works are large in bulk and wide in range. His critical essays are of the highest value. Essays in Criticism (1865 by and 1889) contains the finest of his critical work, which is stamped by wide scholarship and careful thought. His critical judgment, though often spoiled by imperfect sympathy, is sound and sane. He showed a reaction from romanticism and advocated a return to the classical spirit, which means “calm cheerfulness, disinterested objectivity.” He stressed the importance of lucidity and harmony of presentment. To him “poetry is the criticism of life.” This epigrammatic remark sums up his real intention both as a writer and critic. It means that poetry is an expression of the moral and intellectual attitude of the literary artist. Poetry must assume the function of religion, and must rehabilitate faith. According to Arnold criticism means more than literary scholarship. The critic should bring the "best" from all branches of knowledge and should make it prevail. He advocates a broad, cosmopolitan view of literature as a basis for comparative judgment, and attacks "provincialism" and lack of real knowledge. Arnold also wrote freely upon theological and political themes. His best books of this class are Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Literature and Dogma (1873). His style is perfectly lucid, easy and rhythmical, and not without a certain elegance and distinction.
5
WALTER HORATIO PATER (1839-94)
Pater was also a distinguished critic and stylist. His first essays appeared in book form as Studies in the History of Renaissance (1873) and are concerned chiefly with art. Imaginary Portraits (1887) deals with artists; and Appreciations (1889) is on literary themes. Marius, the Epicurean (1885) is a remarkable philosophical novel. Pater represented the school of aesthetic criticism. As a critic he is not a moralist like Arnold. To him art exists to afford us an intense and noble pleasure, and the highest pleasure necessarily furnishes an ethical impulse. In his Essay on Style in Appreciations he gives importance to beauty of expression, which can be achieved by well-chosen words. Words for him were not merely connections of thought, but carried with them an aroma that might create the fitting mood for appreciating the drift of the writer's mind. According to Pater criticism is the critic's attempt to put himelf into sympathetic relationship with the artist in such a way as to derive the maximum of personal pleasure from the work of art.
Pater's individual style is remarkable. Edward Albert writes: "It is the creation of immense application and forethought; every work is conned, every sentence proved, and every rhythm appraised, until we have the perfection of finished workmanship."
6
CARDINAL NEWMAN (1801-1890) AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT
Cardinal Newman was the pioneer of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement. The other stalwarts of this movement were John Keble, W. G. Ward and Edward Bouverie Pusey. As Newman has traced the beginning of the movement to John Keble, who he said had made the English Church poetical.
John Keble (1792-1866), the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, gave the emotional atmosphere of the movement, and Newman provided its dialectics. In his capacity as pastor he gave his famous discourse on National Apostasy (1833), which, according to Newman started the Movement of the thirties. He had an affinity with the authority of the Church in pre-Reformation days.
Defining Oxford Movement Gates writes that it was "in its essence an attempt to reconstruct the English Church in harmony with the romantic (mediaeval) ideal." In the words of Rickett: "Scott tried to recapture the external splendour of the Middle Ages; Coleridge its mystical beauty, Newman its ecclesiastical hierarchy." Newman broke away from the old evangelical traditions and threw himself whole‑heartedly into the Tractarian Movement, and set to work upon The Tracts of the Time — his own Tract X C appearing in 1841.
Newman was endowed with poetic imagination and power of speculative thought. As a poet he is remembered for his poem Lead Kindly Light. His famous prose works are Essay of Doctrinal Development, Autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, which is considered his spiritual autobiography, The Development of Christian Doctrine and A Grammar of Assent.
Newman possessed passionate temperament, critical attitude and contemplative bent of mind. In an age which was full of logical intellectualism, Newman studied the intuitive background of belief in his Grammar of Assent. He stood at the centre of reaction against Victorian rationalism and prepared the way for the mysticism of the last decades of the century.
Newman was a preacher, a mystic, a moralist and a psychologist. He was also a great stylist. His diction is remarkable for strength, elegance, flexibility and aptness. He was a lover of clear, definite and tangible statements. His style, writes Rickett, is "beautiful with a limpid lucidity, a chastened eloquence, a gentle persuasiveness."
The Oxford Movement stimulated religious feelings all over the country. It was a strong protest against the materialism and utilitarianism of the Victorian Age. William Morris was an ardent Tractarian while he was at Oxford. Tennyson's poetry shows the influence of the spiritual philosophy of Newman.
7
R. L. STEVENSON (1850-94)
As an essayist R. L. Stevenson stands on a very high plane. "Since Lamb there has been," writes Hugh Walker, "no more accomplished essayist than he. Nature made him an essayist, and he cooperated with Nature, developing and strengthening the gifts with which he was endowed at birth."
Stevenson, like Montaigne and Lamb, is personal and intimate. Everywhere we get personal experiences in The Amateur Emigrant, Memories and Portraits, Random Memories Fontainebleau etc. He is always in the foreground and never in the background. We get charming glimpses of his childhood and youth in The Lantern Bearers, Some College Memories and A College Magazine. "What holds us most," says Rickett, is his engaging mariner. Examine his agreeable essays, Virginibus Puerisque and Familar Studies of Men and Books, and this quality will manifest itself. Frequently we are reminded of Hazlitt, Lamb and Montaigne. Yet despite his obvious indebtedness to these greater writers, there is an individual flavour about Stevenson's work—the flavour of an attractive personality. This is sufficient compensation."
Stevenson brought the story element to essay writing. He was a great observer of man and nature and he could write brilliant and charming essays even on the most trivial scene or even in street or in country. He was a born essayist who knew how to make use of small things. According to Hugh Walker the skill of the essayist lies in showing, or rather in hinting, how the village path leads to Rome. Stevenson was a great master of this skill. An Island Voyage and Travels with a Donkey are interesting essays, full of humour and flashes of imagination and insignificant things.
Stevenson was a moralist too. He is profoundly ethical. He loved the heroic quality in man. It is the essence of the Christmas Sermon and of his frequent meditations on death in Ordered South and Aes Triplex.
Stevenson was a skilled stylist. He could create a striking effect by using a well chosen phrase or expression. Hugh Walker remarks: "....he rather diffuses his meaning, and makes it an atmosphere enfolding everything, but at times his skill in words concentrates itself in a sentence or phrase, or even in a word."
Stevenson is eminent for his skill in conveying the effect of scenes of nature, but he sees nature in relation to man. His first interest is in man. He found much in the country, but even more in the street. Like Scott, he loved nature, but above all nature associated with man.
8
OTHER PROSE WRITERS
Out of the innumerable Victorian prose writers only those few, who gained distinction in the fields of science, history, criticism etc. are given here. In history H. T. Buckle (1821-62) in his History of Civilisation in England made an attempt to eliminate the personal factor from human affairs, and to explain progress entirely by reference to natural causes and general laws. The Short History of the English People by John Richard Green (1837-83) is the best of history of this period. Other books on history are The History of Norman Conquest by E. A. Freeman (1823-92), History of England in the Eighteenth Century by W. E. Hartpole and History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada by J. A. Fronde.
J. A. Symonds (1840-93) was one of the foremost critics of the age. Much of his work was contributed to periodicals, and was collected and issued in volume form. The best collections are his two series of Studies of Greek Poets (1873-76). His longest work is The Renaissance in Italy (1875-86). His style is often ornate and even florid. He is a well-informed critic.
Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) wrote Hours in a Library. It is a collection of biographical studies of great value by reason of their learning, catholicity and sureness of taste.
Scientific subjects were dealt with in an interesting manner. The nineteenth century beheld the exposition of scientific themes raised to the level of a literary art. Charles Robert Darwin (1809-82), one of the greatest names in modern science, was a naturalist. His chief works are The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), On the Origin of Species (1859), and The Descent of Man (1871). Darwin's revolutionary scientific theories exercised a far-reaching influence on contemporary thought and literature. Darwin is always a delightful craftsman. His monogram on earthworms is an astonishingly fascinating work. The Origin of Species an' The Descent of Man are remarkable for condensed thought and argument. T. H. Huxley (1825-95) was one of the staunch supporters of Darwin. His lectures and addresses were issued in volume form as Man's Place in Nature (1863), Lay Sermons Addresses and Reviews (1870) and American Addresses (1877).
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was a great thinker and writer, whose contribution to political science and economics is memorable. His Autobiography is valuable to the literary student and general reader, whereas his treatises On Liberty and Representative Government are of great interest to students of economics and political philosophy. Mill's prose is clear, lucid and frank.
In the field of essay writing Alexander Smith (1829-1867), Sir John Skelton (1831-1897) and A. K. H. Boyd (1825-1899) deserve mention. Andrew Lang (1844-1912), who wrote the History of English Literature, wrote some essays which are collected in Essays in Little. His work is journalistic rather than literary. Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) wrote Two Years in the French West Indies and Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.
NOVEL
(i) Flexibility and Variety: The Victorian Age in English literature is remarkable for the development of the novel. The novelists of this era like Dickens, Meredith, Thackeray, Hardy, George Eliot, the Bronte Sisters and many others occupy a very high place in the history of English novel.
Novel was an immensely popular literary form, which attracted the great and ever increasing general reading public. Great writers chose this form for self-expression. "Its breadth and elasticity, and the freedom it gave to each new practitioner to do his own work in his own way" contributed to its popularity. Dickens was the first to introduce the novel of social reform. Thackeray used novel to express "a conscious, considered criticism of life." George Eliot is a psychological novelist. Thackeray brought to perfection the Fielding-type novel. Hardy is a great regional novelist. The Bronte Sisters were the pioneers of that aspect of romantic movement which concerned itself with the baring of the human soul.
The Victorian novel reflected all the complex forces which influenced the contemporary age. Hudson remarks: "The spread of science made it realistic and analytical; the spread of democracy made it social and humanitarian; the spirit of moral and religious unrest, of inquiry and criticism, was often uppermost in it; often too, it revealed the powerful influences of the Romantic revival." In its very variety and treatment of matter, therefore, the Victorian novel is the index of the in any sided interests and conflicting elements of the Victorian Age."
(ii) Technique: The early Victorian novels are generally rambling narratives, episodic in character, full of excitement, tear compelling pathos and thrilling melodrama. But in course of time the novelists detached more and more importance to the symmetry of their plots. It was developed by Meredith, and became dominant in Moore and Henry James.
The novelists of this period reveal remarkable creative imagination. They present the imaginative rendering of reality before the readers. Dickens is called "the romancer of London streets. Thackeray transports us to an entirely new world, call it Vanity Fair or Thackeray-land. The creative imagination is also seen at work on the incidents or the stories of Victorian novelists. The novels abound in dramatic and picturesque scenes. The creative imagination is also seen in humour in Victorian novels. The most important expression of this creative imagination is to be seen in characterisation. A Victorian novel has a crowded canvas of living, breathing individuals.
I
THE SOCIAL NOVEL
1
CHARLES DICKENS (18124870)
His Life and Works
Dickens was born near Portsea, where his father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. Much of his boyhood was spent at home, where he read the novels of Smollett, Fielding and Le Sage. These writers influence his own novels very deeply. In early life he became very fond of theatre. His fondness for theatre affected his novels to a great extent. In 1823 the Dickens family was removed to London, where his father was involved in money difficulties and was confined to Marshalsea prison for debt. Dickens started from the humblest position in life; when he was ten years old he was at work in a blacking warehouse; sleeping beneath a counter, and spending his Sundays with his family in Marshalsea Prison.
Dickens' education was desultory. In 1827 he entered the office of an attorney and got an appointment as reporter on The True Sun and later on The Morning Chronicle. Some of his articles, known as Sketches by Buz appeared in The Monthly Magazine in 1833. They were brilliantly written and were published in two volumes in 1836. Then appeared Rickwick Papers in 1836-37, which was a great success. It is a sort of picaresque novel. The incidents are loosely connected, but in vivacity of humour and minuteness of observation it is a marvellous work. Oliver Twist (1837) appeared piecemeal in Bentley's Miscellaney, and Nicholas Nickleby came out in 1838. Dickens became immensely popular and his novels were in great demand.
Dickens varied his work with much travelling—among other places to America (1842), to Italy (1842), to Switzerland (1846), and again to America (1867). As a journalist he edited The Daily News (1846), and, founded Household Words (1849) andAll the Year Round (1859). The Old, Curiosity Shop which appeared in 1840 was an immense success, and Barnaby Rudge (1841), was a historical novel. His American experiences are described in American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843). Then followed A Christmas Carol (1843) and Dombey and Son (1846). Dickens' famous autobiographical novel David Copperfield appeared ill 1849. His other famous novels are Bleak House (1842), Hard riffles (1854), A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations (1860) and Our Mutual Friend. Dickens did not live to finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood, as he died in 1870.
Dickens as a Novelist or Characteristics of Dickens' Novels
English novel in the hands of Dickens and his followers is entirely different from what it was in the hands of Scott. In short, there is now less of romance, more of realism. His is the romance of dreary London streets. Dickens was the first novelist who possessed extreme sensibility with which he felt the sufferings of the poor, an intense imagination with which he depicted pictures of their lives, and aroused the conscience of the people. Dickens was immensely popular. His popularity is due to the fact that with the exception of Shakespeare, he is the greatest creative genius of England. He is among the greatest humorists of the world and for sheer variety and abundance of invention he has no equal. Dickens' novels are conspicuous for the following characteristics:
(i) Realism: Dickens is the pioneer of realism in nineteenth century novel. Chesterton says: "Dickens used reality while aiming at an effect of romance, while Thackeray used the loose language and ordinary appearance of romance while aiming at an effect of reality...... Dickens writes realism in order the incredible credible." Dickens' power of minute and keen observation coupled with poetic imagination, retentive memory and remarkable instinctive power of reading character make him a realist of a high order. As a realist he centred his eye on London and low life. To him London was the epitome of contemporary English life. He knew London thoroughly. Hugh Walker remarks: "He knew it topographically, industrially, socially within the limits of middle and lower classes. He could penetrate into all obscure nooks. He was familiar with all its strange trades and with those who followed them—the dustman, the articulator of skeletons, the marine-store dealers, the, man who made a living by recovering bodies from the Thames, and many less innocent than he—Dickens knew them all better than we know our next door neighbours. It was from this material that he built his books." He was the first genuine story-teller of London life. He did not know the manners of. high society. His gentlemen are colourless abstractions. His best characters are portraits from life, and the life that he knew best was lower class life. Instead of the pageant of the Middle Ages, Dickens showed the Pageant of contemporary English life, strikes and riots, factories and granaries burning, employee shooting employer, underground tenements, workhouses, truck-stores, wretched schools, model prisons, model cottages.
Dickens exposes various evils of Industrial Revolution, especially the employment of child abour. Child labour was inhumanly exploited. The sufferings of David,l a child of ten in David Copperfield, are the sufferings of many Victorian children. The sordid condition of English Prisons is brought to light in David Copperfield and Great Expectations. His Oliver Twist is a powerful indictment of the education of poor children Pt. his day. Abuses of the legal system, and delays in the meeting out of justice are also criticised in David Copperfield. In one novel after another Dickens is sharply critical of poor laws and the working of the work-houses.
(ii) Prophetic Note or Purpose in the Novel of Dickens: Dickens is a novelist with a purpose. He tended to suspect all institutions, churches, government offices, charitable institutions, laws, reformatories and even schools because he felt they were attempting to do by mechanical means the good which could only come from the spontaneous action of the individual. He hated all class distinctions and the aristocratic system because they checked the natural free current of benevolence which should flow from one man to another. Dickens "is also a prophet," says David Cecil, "he is out to expound a gospel, a view of life, a score of values which he wishes his fellowmen to accept. As was to be expected, it is a very simple gospel; it does not appeal to the intellect, it is the result of intuition rather than of logic and learning. It centres round a single belief — a belief in the primary, simple, benevolent impulses of man, his natural affections for home, mother and wife and sweetheart, his unconsidered movements of charity and gusts of gaiety, his instinctive wish to love and laugh and give and share."
(iii) Humanitarian Note: All novels of Dickens are characterised by humanitarian note. He attacked the abuses in the existing system and throughout he considered himself as the champion of the weak, the outcast and the oppressed. Hudson remarks: "Humanitarianism was indeed the keynote of his work, and as his enormous popularity carried his influence far and wide, he may justly be reckoned one of the greatest social reformers of his age." Dickens' sympathy was always with the out-castes, the poor, the downtrodden, the exploited and all victims of society. In most of his novels a child is usually presented as a victim of society. Oliver Twist, Little Nell, Florence Dombey and David Copperfield, stand out in celestial innocence and goodness, in contrast to the evil creatures whose persecution they suffer for a season. They represent vividly the complaint of the individual against society. The cruelty the malign characters inflict on children is a manifestation of social wrong. Bumble's savage blow at Oliver Twist asking for more food, and Squeers' wicked exploitation of his pupils in Nicholas Nickleby expose utter want of human love and sympathy in the existing social system. In his novels we find a deep-seated reaction against the organised authority and established institutions. His three novels, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and Old Curiosity Shop established Dickens as the pioneers of humanitarianism. He tried to arouse the conscience of the people against the exploitation of the oppressed and the downtrodden. Dickens saw life from the view­point of the poor and oppressed. He had himself known the lot of the persecuted at the root of the zeal for reform was the memory of his own bitter childhood.
(iv) Characterisation: The genius of Dickens was for characters, not character. He could portray innumerable kinds of human beings, but he could not analyse the individual. He could vividly describe every detail of manners, appearance, dress and other external details of his characters. "Despite the broad brush of caricature, despite the over ­insistence on the externals of his characters, he makes them live; and they live," says Rickett, "by virtue of their humanity."
It is generally said that Dickens gives us types, not individuals. His characters are types of the most abstract kind, something like the figures in the old moralities: embodied hypocrisy, selfishness, pride, and so on, masking as everyday mortals. Mr. Pecksniff is hypocrisy personified; Mr. Dombey embodies pride and Tom Pinch is amiably personified. His characters are oddities personified. But it must be admitted that this remark is applied only to a certain number of satirical portraits and not to his characters at large. Gissing remarks that Dickens "sees in them, not abstractions, but men and women of such loud personalities, so aggressively individual in mind and form, in voice and form, that they for­ever proclaim themselves the children of a certain country. Clothed abstractions do take hold upon the imagination and the memory as Dickens did from the day of their coming into life. The secret of this subtle power lay in the reality of the figures themselves."
Leaving aside the portraits of children, Dickens imparts some abnormality, some eccentricity of manner, some mental twist, some intellectual slowness to his characters. He treats his characters primarily from without, and he highlights only such characteristics which may express themselves externally. He fashions his characters from skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them. His characters do not react upon each other; in truth, they do not act at all, they only behave, and show off their unlikeness one to the other. "Dickens," writes Rickett, "was not a scientific student of character; he was a shrewd observer of certain types of character, and although he did not confine his character studies altogether to these types, yet he was rarely successful when he diverged from them."
(v) Humour and Pathos: Humour is the soul of the novels of Dickens. Without his humour, he might have been a vigorous advocate of social reform, but as a novelist assuredly he would have failed. Humour is present in his writings from the very beginning. The Sketches have a touch of true humour, but there is much more of merely youthful high spirits, tending to be farcical. The admixture of humour, satire and farce is an important characteristic of Dickens as a novelist. Pickwick Papers is a veritable storehouse of humour and farce.
Dckens' humour arises from the heart and not from the lips. The farce inch is early work always results from the exuberance of spirits; later he introduces it deliberately, with conscious art, save perhaps at those moments when the impulse of satire is too much for him. The wild absurdity of the Miffin Company at the beginning of Nicholas Nickleby and the first chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit are examples of his early humour and farce. Dickens reaches the highest point of humour in the scene describing the marraige of Jack Bransby to the great Macstinger. It is the ludicrous in the purest form and it leaves behind it nothing but the wholesome aftermath of self-forgetful mirth.
The humour of Dickens is "broad, humane and creative". He is par excellence in creating humourous characters—Mr. Pickwick, Mrs. Garnp, ,Mr. Micawber, and Sam Weller. His humour is not very subtle, but it goes deep, and in expression it is free and vivacious. His humour takes a satiric turn when he exposes the evils of his age. His satire covers a great part of English life, public and private. Education, charity, religion, social morality in its broadest sense, society in its narrowest legal procedure, the machinery of politics, and the forms of government.
Dickens is superb both in pure humour and satiric humour. "Satire, however, is one-half of Dickens' humour," writes David Cecil, "and not the most characteristic half. Dickens' unique position as a humorist lies in his mastery of "pure humour", jokes that are funny not for the satirical light they throw but just in themselves. The humour does not illustrate anything or tell us anything, one needs no extraneous information to see its points, it is simply self-dependently, intoxicatingly funny.
Dickens' humour and pathos cannot be sharply differentiated. Like his humour the pathos of Dickens is overdone and too long drawn out. It shows lack of self-restraint. The theatrical element is repellent in his pathos. Pathos in the death of Paul Dombey, the death of Jo, and that of little Nell is exaggerated and overdone. Dickens most effectively mingles humour and pathos when he deals with childhood. Rickett writes: "There we have a humour that caresses, a pathos that brightens, a rainbow humour where the author is smiling at us through his tears. It is hard to overpraise Dickens' sketches of child life. Dickens did not describe a child—he became a child for the time being. He lived over again his own childish days. Hence the poignancy and actuality of his pictures." Paul, David and Pip are his memorable studies of childhood, which combine humour and pathos. There is plenty of pathos in his descriptions of prison life. Pathos of the graver and subtler kind is the distinguishing note of Great Expectations. The old convict Magwitch, if he cannot he called a tragical personality, is certainly an impressive pathetic figure. Dickens' gentlest, brightest humour, his simplest pathos occur in those unexciting pages which depict the everyday life of poor and homely English folk.
(vi) Dickens' Plots: Dickens' novels, writes David Cecil, "have no organic unity, they are full of detachable episodes, characters who serve no purpose in furthering the plot. His characters are almost irrelevant to the actions of the books in which they appear. We remember the story for them, but the story could perfectly well go on without them." Dickens' early novels are usually simple in structure. Following the tradition of Smollet and Le Sage, he built his early novels on the picaresque tradition. Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby are, like Smollett's, bundles of adventures, connected, so far as they are connected at all, only by the characters who figure in them. In Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son and David Copperfield some effort is made towards greater unification, but even these books belong substantially to the loose, chronicle type. In his later books, however, he gained the power of constructing elaborate plots, and of creating characters of heroic dignity and tragic intensity, such as, Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, and Lady Dedlock in Black House. It is his first systematic attempt to gather up all the diverse threads of the story into a coherent plot. Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and the unfinished Edwin Drood are planned, but there is still in them a great deal of episodic material. Moody and Lovett remark: "Dickens is remembered not as a dramatic artist in the novel form, but as a showman of wonderful resources. He is a master of vast and fascinating stage, crowded with farcical characters, with grotesque and terrible creatures, more devils than men, and with the touching forms of little children. The action is sometimes merry, sometimes exciting, sometimes pathetic. We have laughter, and horror, and tears; but the prevailing atmosphere is one of cheerfulness, as befits a great Christmas pantomime."
(vii) Dickens' Style: Dickens is one of the masters of prose in his own way, though his style cannot be admired for flow of pure idiom or command of subtle melodies. His style is often too much mannered. At its best Dickens' style is neither polished nor scholarly, but it is clear, rapid and workmanlike, the style of the working journalist. His style in the early books is spoiled by funs, cockneyisms, and tiresome circumlocutions. The style of Barnaby Rudge is simple, direct and forcible.
Rickett writes: "None but a genuine dramatic artist could modulate his style as Dickens can so as to take on the mood of the moment." He could picturesquely describe the marshes at the beginning of The Great Expectations, with its creeping fog and flat loneliness in a language which consists of "a mist of words and phrases". In his description of a coach ride, the language quickens and slackens, becomes rollicking or deliberate, according to the pace of the coach. Dickens adopted a lyrical style, a kind of verse-in-prose in his more aspiring flights, in particular, in his deeply pathetic passages. Clutton-Brock says: "Dickens was a master of sound and even classical prose style. His teachers were Smollett, Fielding and Defoe, and he had learned from them thoroughly. He wrote like a man, with a masculine weight, clearness and balance." Rickett writes about his greatness as a stylist: "With all its mannerisms there is the element of greatness about Dickens' style. For colour, movement and variety it is a remarkable style. Tawdry and mannered at times, if you will, but despite this, fascinating, arresting, and with the impress of the writer's infectious personality."
(viii) Dickens' Place: Dickens, according to Hugh Walker, is the most original novelist of England. "A hint here and there, a turn of phrase, a situation, the outline of a character—he certainly adopted, but the substance of his novels comes from his own experience. Keen observation, a retentive memory and a remarkable instinctive power of reading character, were the gifts to which he owed his literary success." Dickens has left us a rich and varied inheritance. His characters, some remarkably humorous and not a few genuinely pathetic figures, are a memorable contribution to the world of noveldom. Dickens was a humanitarian who has touched with pity and tenderness the springs of our national life, and English life no less than English letters ...... "
2
CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-75)
Kingsley employed fiction for purposes of propaganda even more effectively than Bulwer and Disraeli, because he was more sincere than they were in the task of social reform. His books express the conscience of mid-nineteenth century. His first novels, Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (1850) and Yeast, a Problem deal in a robust fashion with the social questions of his day. Both are as much sociological tracts as novels, with little plot and a great deal of discussion. Hypatia is a historical novel on religious controversy. Westward Ho (1855), a tale of the good old days of Queen Elizabeth, marks the climax of his career. In Two Years Ago (1857) Kingsley took up the Crimean War. In Hereward the Wake he captured the tragic grandeur of Norse sagas.
Kingsley's writings are suffused with a strong moral note. He not only attacked shams and injustices of society, but proposed remedies. Kingsley's humanitarian novels are inferior to his romances, but they certainly exhibit his fine social sympathies. Both Yeast and Alton Locke are excellent as preachments. Dickens shows the moral qualities of the poor and uneducated, Kingsley shows that the poor man has a head as well as a heart.
Kingsley's narrative art is manly and straightforward. His characters are clearly visualised but they lack delicacy of finish.
3
CHARLES READE (1814-1884)
Charles Reade was a novelist with a purpose. He shines with the reflected light of Dickens. Like Dickens, he had the temperament of a romanticist. Like Dickens, he tried to discover the romantic elements in real life and to treat them in the romantic manner, but he also tried to satisfy himself and his readers about their truth by elaborate documentary evidence. His serious discipleship of Dickens appears in his social novels. Put Yourself in His Place (1870) is a story designed to reflect the wrongs which trade-unions inflicted upon the individual workman. In A Terrible Temptation (1871) he introduces a representative of himself, a novelist, a student of modern social conditions, to whom the oppressed have recourse, and who uses his power to enlist public sympathy in their behalf and to overawe the oppressor. "Charles Reade — a novelist with a note­book —," writes Diana Neill, "added documentation to the novel as a weapon for the social reformer."
Reade's masterpiece The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) is a historical novel. "Dickens and Reade," write Moody and Lovett, "had in common their essentially romantic temperaments, their tendency to seek literary effects of the sentimental kind, and their disposition to regard the novel seriously as a social instrument."
4
EDWARD LYTTON BULWER (1803-1873)
He was a voluminous and rapid writer. He was influenced by Byron, whose influence is seen on his early romances Falkland (1827) and Pelham (1828), which deal with crime and social injustice. He wrote many historical romances, The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Rienzi (1835), Leda. (1838), The Last of the Barons (1843) and Harold (1848). Bulwer's Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story are fantastic romances of terror, supernaturalism and terrorism. The Corning Race (1871) is a utopian, fantasy, in which he gives a description of some future perfection of planned government and social order. Kenelm Chillingly (1873) is a realist novel with a purpose in which the novelist pictures the feverish political and social activities in England and Paris. The hero of this novel lives in slums and works as labourer.
5
BENJAMIN DISRAELI (1804-1881)
Disraeli, who was a celebrated Statesman and Prime Minister of England, began his literary career as a novelist. In Vivian Grey he makes a satirical attack on fashionable society. His other novels in which incisive wit and satire are prominent, are Contarini Fleming A Psychological Autobiogrpahy (1832), Henrietta Temple (1837), Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845) and Tancred (1847). Coningsby presents a vivid picture of contemporary governing classes in England. In Coningsby Disraeli "called attention to the state of our political parties, their origin, their history and their present position. In Sybil he proceeds "to draw public attention to the state of the people whom those parties for two generations have governed." He graphically depicted the miserable condition of the working classes in the early years of Queen Victoria's reign. Disraeli belongs to the humanitarian tradition of Dickens, and his sympathy is with the poor and the exploited. These books, "written when experiences of public affairs had added depth to his vision and edge to his satire, are polished and powerful novels dealing with the politics of his day."
6
WILKIE COLLINS (1824-89)
He served under. Dickens on the staff of Household Words and later All the Year Round. Collins' finest books are The Woman in the White (1860), Annadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868). His place is secure as a great master of suspense, sensation and plot. It was in part at least under his influence that his friend Dickens changed from the inorganic to the organic type of story. His work is distinguished by exceptional skill in the art of plot construction, a remarkable gift of dramatic suggestion and pictorial power of a very high order. Rickett remarks: "He is a master of dramatic innuendo; the Sterne of sensationalism. He can thrill you more by the posting of a letter than most of his school can by a lurid minder." Rickett adds: "In Wilkie Collins the novel of domesticity and the novel of romantic adventure are pleasantly blended." He is also the forerunner of the detective novel.
English novel in the hands of Dickens and his followers became an instrument for exposing the evils of the social system and for expressing humanitarian concerns. They broke away from the tradition of romance. If there is romance, it is the dreary romance of London streets.
II
THE REALISTIC NOVEL
Dickens and his followers, Reade, Kingsley, Lytton, Wilkie Collins and others were the champians of humanitarianism in Victorian novel. They had in common their essentially romantic temperaments, their tendency to seek literary effects of the sentimental kind, and their disposition to regard the novel seriously as a social reformer. A vigorous reaction against these reactions, against these practices was led by Thackeray. Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot and many others revived the old realistic tradition of Fielding under the circumstances of their age.
1
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-63)
His Life and Works
Thackeray was born in 1811 at Calcutta. In boyhood he was sent to England for his education. He was educated at Charterhouse School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He turned to journalism and contributed both prose and light verse to several periodicals, including Punch and Fraser's Magazine.
Among his early works The Book of Snobs (1849) is memorable. It is a biting satire on snobbery, which had assumed alarming proportions in the wake of Industrial Revolution, which brought rich upstarts to the top. To the novelist the evil of snobbery is a crime, not an absurdity. The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841) and Fitzboodle Papers (1842-43) are deeply marked with his biting humour and merciless observation of human weaknesses. The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon (1844) is a species of picaresque novel. Thackeray's genius reaches the high watermark in The Vanity Fair (1847-48). It is mainly concerned with the adventures of Becky Sharp, a female adventuress with few moral scruples. It is remarkable for the wide panorama of life and the world it presents. Edward Albert writes: "In dexterity of treatment, in an imaginative power that both reveals and transforms, and in a clear and mournful vision of the vanities of mankind the novel is the greatest in the language. Pendennis (1849-50) is autobiographical in nature. In it he owes his debt to Fielding. The History of Henry Esmond (1852) is a historical novel of great length and complexity. In it the novelist shows minute and accurate knowledge of the times of Queen Anne and remarkably reproduces both the style and atmosphere of the period. It is a classic. The Newcome is a true successor to Pendennis. In it there is no compromise with truth. It is remarkable for its strong realism. In tone it is more genial than its predecessors, but it ends tragically with the death of the aged Colonel Newcome. The Virginians (1857-59), a sequel to Henry Esmond , records experiences of two lads, the grandson of Henry Esmond himself. Thackeray's Lovel, the Widower (1860), The Adventures of Philip (1861) and the unfinished work, Dennis Duval are inferior works. He also wrote series of charming essays, The Roundabout Papers (1860)
Characteristics of His Work
Thackeray is one of the greatest novelists of the world. His works stand in sharp contrast with those of Dickens. He deftly revived and innovated the Fielding type novel. His novels are conspicuous for the following characteristics:
(i) Realism: As a realist Thackeray completely departed from tradition of romanticism in English fiction. He believed that the romantic novel, which dealt with high-flown sentiment and distorted views of motive and character, gave an entirely false impression of life, and, so it did great harm. He agreed with Fielding that "truth is best, from whatever pulpit." Thackeray, therefore, decided to portray the world as he himself observed it. He changed the centre of gravity of interest in fiction, making vice rather than virtue the pith and substance of his stories. His novels deal almost exclusively with the sordid and ugly aspects of life. The emphatic realism of Thackeray's novels impresses us. He departed from "the philanthropic romanticism of Dickens. He restored English fiction to realism, and presented a fair appraisement of class virtues and class failings. "For this reason," says Rickett, "Thackeray excels as a painter of manners, as an artist of conventions, as a draughtsman of civilised man with all his merits and limitations." He tells us the truth about contemporary society. His creative power shows itself not in transforming the facts he has observed about life, but in arranging them in symmetrical order. Thackeray, in the words of Hudson, "was a social satirist and realist. He knew nothing of Dickens' humanitarianism and tremendous zeal for reform." He persistently attacked snobbery, affectation and humbug. He took up the weapon of ridicule and satire, and brought the novel once more into the current of realism that had been started by Fielding and disturbed by Scott.
(ii) Characterisation: Thackeray's characterisation is marvelously penetrative and truthful. His characters are true to life. They are painted in "the round", unlike Dickens' which are painted in "the flat". He gave life to characters, and then allowed them to behave according to their nature in the crucial moments of life. "I don't control my characters," he said, "I am in their hands, and they take me where they please." This is an excellent trait in his art of characterisation. His method of character portrayal led to important developments. He vividly exhibits his characters, scolds them, and suddenly stopping, turns to his audience telling them all about the figures on the wires and all about themselves. He imparts a double emotion, that of the actors in the events and that of the author who records them. Thackeray is the pioneer of this technique which was later adopted by Bennett and Galsworthy.
Thackeray's characters are both types and individuals. They are universal types representing certain permanent traits common to all ages and countries. Some of his characters represent particular institutions and organisations of their own age. Thackeray subtly exposed middle-class failures and failings, as his powerful pictures of the Crawleys, the Sedleys, and the Osbornes can testify.
Thackeray excels in creating vivid pictures 'of rogues, male and female. Barry Lyndon, Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley are brilliant and momorable performances. Colonel Newcome, Pen and Costigan are some of his finest creations. Rickett remarks: "Just as Dickens can make his mentally weak characters likeable, so can Thackeray attract us to his moral weaklings." Thackeray's insight into the psychology of the plausible scoundrel and into thoughtless, hot-blooded youth is remarkable.
Thackeray's pictures of Bohemian life in Victorian London are reveal his minute observation. Like Dickens he could not remarkably portray heroines.
In respect of characterisation he returned to the Fielding method: "to view his characters steadily and fearlessly, and to set on record their failings as well as their merits and capacities. In his hands the results are not flattering to human nature, for most of his clever people are rogues and most of his virtuous folks are fools, but whether they are rogues, or fools, or merely blundering incompetents, his creations are rounded, entire, and quite alive and convincing.
(iii) Humour and Pathos: A good deal of the criticism of the cynicism of Thackerays humour is true. It was his aim to reveal the truth, and satire is one of his most potent methods of revelation. He is not bitter like Swift. His bitterness is the cloak to hide his sensitiveness. He satirised social conventions, whereas Dickens exposed national weaknesses. He lashed at pretence and snobbery. "His sarcasm, a deadly species," says Edward Albert, "is husbanded for deserving objects, such as Lord Steyne and Barnes Newcome, In the case of people who are only stupid, like Rawdon Crawley, mercy tempers justice, and when Thackeray chooses to do so he can handle a character with loving tenderness, as can be seen in the case of Lady Castlewood and of Colonel Newcome." In pathos Thackeray is not sentimental like Dickens. He is quiet, effective and reticent.
Irony is an important element in his satire. "Irony," writes David Cecil, "is the keynote of Thackeray's attitude. If Thackeray is out to expose, this irony is bitter, if to illustrate those domestic affections which he thought the most amiable of human impulses, it is almost dissolved in sentiment."
(iv) Style: Thackeray's style is effortless and unobtrusive. He writes like a cultivated gentleman, and his prose is polished, balanced, harmonious and flexible. It has conversational ease and effortlessness but it is never vulgar. Thackeray often shows wonderful vernacular felicity and inimitable idiom. Unlike Dickens he has no mannerisms or affectations. According to Rickett, "Thackeray's style appeals to our critical intelligence, Dickens' to our heart and imagination."
(v) His Place: Thackeray's claim to greatness cannot be denied. What Dickens did for the lower and lower middle classes, Thackeray did for "society" — of the clubs, drawing rooms, and the well-to-do. His contribution to the revival and renovation of the Fielding type novel is memorable. Despite the immediate purpose of his social satire, he did some of his best work with materials furnished by the past. Thackeray's Henry Esmond, with its wonderful recreation of life and atmosphere, and even of the tone and style of the early eighteenth century, is one of the finest historical novels in English language. Thackeray was a great artist, a great stylist, and an admirable painter of manners.
2
ANTHONY TROLLOPE (1815-1882)
In his return to realism Thackeray found an industrious follower in Anthony Trollope. His fame began with a series of novels dealing with clerical life in a Cathedral city. His famous novels are The Warden (1855), Barchester Towers (1857), Framley Parsonage (1861) and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). Among his novels on public life are Phineas Finn (1869) and The Prime Minister (1876).
Trollope's novels are slices of contemporary English life. In his wide survey of social conditions in the upper and middle classes of England, he comes nearer to French realists, Balzac and Zola. With urbane familiarity and shrewed observation Trollope presents an accurate, detailed picture of their quiet, uneventful lives in a matter-of-fact way which gives his works the appearance of chronicles of real life. A vein of satire runs through many of his novels, and he makes skilful use of pathos.
3
SAMUEL BUTLER (1835-1902)
Samuel Butler, the author of Erewhon (1872), Erewhon Revisited (1901) and The Way of All Flesh (1903), was only incidentally a novelist. He vehemently attacks the weaknesses of modern society, its treatment of crime, poverty, and sickness, its religion and its trust in machinery. His influence on Bernard Shaw has been very profound. As a satirical critic of modern life he must always be reckoned among the more potent influences of his generation.
III
THE NOVEL AS POETIC COMEDY
1
GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-1909)
His Life and Works
Meredith was born at Portsmouth on February 12, 1828. He was of Welsh and Irish descent. His mother died when he was a child and he spent two years at Nuewied on the Rhine in Germany, where he came under the influence of German romanticism. When he came back to England he was influenced by the liberalism of 1848. He preferred literature to law.
George Meredith was both a poet and novelist. His famous poem Modem Love (1862) records his pains and heartsearchings. His first attempt in fiction was The Shaping of Shagpat, a pleasant oriental tale. His well-known novels are The Ordeal of Richard Feveral (1859), Evan Harrington (1861), Sandra Belloi (1864), Rhoda Fleming (1865), Vittoria (1867), Harry Richmond (1871), Beauchamps Career (1876), The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1855).
Richard Feveral is one of his memorable works. It is a study of real life sublimated by poetry.Evan Harrington is largely autobiographical and contains many intimate details about the novelist's life. The Adventures of Harry Richmond is also believed to be autobiographical. The Egoist is his masterpiece.
Characteristics of Meredith's Novels
(i) His Conception of Poetic Comedy: Meredith is not a realist like Fielding and Thackeray. He enlarged the scope of the novel by creating a new species of fiction which has been called the Romantic comedy. Fielding’s novel was the prose comedy of life; Meredith's novel is the poetic comedy. It is a synthesis of the intellectual transcript of reality and his vision of a more perfect world. He treated the novel as a medium of his philosophical interpretation of life. Meredith is not only a novelist, but a thinker, critic, a teacher, a prophet. He deftly blends poetry and the comedy of real life so harmoniously that they cannot be separated. All his novels are poetic comedies. There is often tragedy lurking in his stories. The sacrifice of Richard Feveral's wife, the wasteful end of Nevil Beauchamp are tragic events, but they are parts of the essential comedy of life, for the comedy that Meredith presents does not always keep us laughing. Good sense is the key point of his comedy. By comedy Meredith does not mean farce and gaiety, but serious social ridicule on the borderland of tragic and comic states.
Meredith draws a fine distinction between humour and comedy. According to Meredith comedy presents the actions of men and women, and points out their inconsistencies with a view to effecting their moral improvement. Comedy does not create loud laughter. It creates smiles and the smile is of the intellect. Comedy presents the humour of the mind which is distinguished from the humour of the heart. He mingles with society, and presents social maladies in an artistic manner. He represents the consummation of the spirit of comedy in English novel. He probes life with a clear perception and shows what we are.
As an ardent champion of poetic comedy, Meredith, according to Trevelyan, is the "Prophet of Common Sense" and the "inspired prophet of sanity." Anone who deviates from the path of sanity and commonsense becomes a prey to the comic muse. He believes in a harmony of blood, brain and spirit and holds that when this sacred balance between the physical, the intellectual and the spiritual is disturbed, a man becomes lopsided and behaves like a snob or egoist. Meredith emphasises the corrective tendencies of comedy. Common sense means social sense and those who do not behave properly are the victims of comedy. According to Meredith comedy provokes "thoughtful laughter". Its appeal is to the intellect, and, therefore, it flourishes only in an intelligent and highly civilised society.
(ii) His Satiric Power: As a shrewd observer of human nature Meredith was unsurpassable. Rickett remarks: "His humour lacks the jolly geniality of Dickens, and the easy breadth of Fielding: but there is a keener intellectual vision behind. Less universal in his appeal as a humorist, he has no rival as a satirist; for his satire is keen, subtle, incisive; and never blunted as Dickens' occasionally was by overemphasis, or as Thackeray's was by overemphasis, or as Thackeray's was by senti­mentality. No Victorian novelist has a wider range of sympathy, or a shrewder vision."
Meredith is peerless as a painter of contemporary life. He excels his contemporaries in presenting vivid pictures of Englishman with his merit and defects. The English, he once remarked in a flash of comic insight are people requiring to be studied, who "mean well and who are warm somewhere below as chimney pots are, though they are so stiff." looked into their merits and demerits with a corrective viewpoint. The victim of his comedy is the egoist, and there is a Willoughby in every one
(iii) His Characterisation: Meredith interprets his characters from the inside and subjects them to microscopic psychological examination. Snobs and egoists are his brilliant characters. They are the victims of the comic music. They have much of Meredith himself in them, and owe their extraordinary vitality to his secret imaginative sympathy. Sir Willoughby Patterne in The Egoist is the greatest of his characters. He knew his aristocrats and barbarians well and saw clearly enough why and where they are found wanting. Sir Willoughby Patterne is a subtler and more dangerous type of egoist held up to our notice. He seems to be refined, urbane and sincere, but soon his selfishness and insincerity are exposed to his beloved, Clara Middleton. Through his mellow urbanity she sees the tyrant and she resolves to avoid the servitude so clearly marked out for her. Richard Feveral is drawn with sympathy and discernment. He is an attractive young fellow, but he is selfish and headstrong and regardless of others.
As a satirist Meredith desentimentalises men and women. He exposes the prig and the sensualist, so he removes "the conventional rose pink that early Victorian writers loved to cloak womanhood in. What Fielding did for men, Charlotte Bronte did for women, drawing them frankly and sincerely from the life—and not from the conven­tions." ...... There is no better feminine company in English fiction than we may find in Meredith's women: some of Hardy's women are more fascinating, but they are also wayward. Meredith's best women are both reliable and attractive, not a whit less feminine and desirable for being clear headed and sound hearted." (Rickett) In his Essay on Comedy Meredith points that women have to play sane and sound role in comedy: ' "Comedy lifts women to a station offering them free play for their wit, as they usually show it, when they have it, on the side of sound sense. The higher the comedy, the more prominent the part they enjoy in it." Meredith's characters of women are excellent. They are not puppets like most of the heroines in early Victorian novels. They are portrayed as the true comrades and coequals of men. His great heroines like Diana, Clara and Nataly stand a comparison with Shakespeare's heroines.
(iv) His Technique: Meredith's art of story telling is poor. He flouts the art of narration. Proportion, balance and sound construction are generally wanting, and there are loose ends everywhere in his novels. Meredith is a psychologist and moralist. He chooses situations and events from actual life, and analyses the reaction of his characters with great minuteness. In Diana of Crossways a well-known literary woman sold to a newspaper a political secret entrusted to her by her lover. Meredith boldly imagines all the mental states surrounding such an act, from temptation to retribution. Here, as in all his novels, he tests his characters by their response to the situation, which is often of an unusual, sometimes of a grotesque nature.
Meredith exposes the sins of the self through comedy. He makes the evil doers ridiculous. His famous novel The Egoist is "a comedy in Ben Jonson's sense, as purging in its morality as classical tragedy." The plot of this novel arises from the attempts of Sir Willoughby Patterne, a self-satisfied wealthy man, to find a wife in every way suitable to his social position. With various women, he makes considerable progress until his real nature is discovered. When in humiliation he turns to the intelligent but socially ineligible Lactitia Dale, she postpones her consent until he has learned to overcome the excessive egotism which has warped his basically admirable character.
Meredith does not reproduce life with scrupulous minuteness. He selects some relevant situations and puts emphasis upon things that are truly significant. Commenting on Meredith technique Moody and Lovett remark: "Like Browning, instead of presenting his tale in plain, clear narrative, he prefers to give it to us in flashes and half lights, as it is seen from different points of view. He plays round his story, seeming to miss a hundred strong situations for which the reader actually hungers. But this is the strategy of novel writing. After pages of skirmishing he at last brings his characters to battle in just relation to which every force is available. Thus in vital moments Meredith does for his readers, more than any other novelist, what the artist should do — he gives a heightened sense of realities. He does not reproduce life; he does not decorate it; he does not idealize it, but he exemplifies it in types and situations of unusual meaning and power."
IV
THE REGIONAL NOVEL
1
THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928)
His Life and Works
Thomas Hardy, the son of a builder, was born in 1840 in the county of Dorset. He was educated at a local school and later in Dorchester. Except for a brief period in London during manhood, Hardy passed his life near Dorchester. He cultivated an intimate knowledge of local churches in the course of his training as an architect, which was utilized to great advantage in his writings. He minutely observed the people and customs, the monuments and institutions of Dorest and suburban counties of south-western England, which he placed permanently on the literary map by the ancient name, Wessex. Hardy, a prolific and versatile novelist and poet, died in 1828. As a poet he belongs more to the twentieth century than the ninenteenth century.
Rickett classifies Hardy's novels in the following groups:
(i) Pastoral Tragedies: The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude, the Obscure (1896).
(ii) Pastoral Comedies: The Hand of Ethelberta (1875), A Laodicean (1881), Two on a Tower (1882).
(iii) Pastoral Romances: Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), A Pair of Blue Eyes (1875), The Trumpet Major (1880), The Woodlanders (1887).
(iv) Pastoral Extravaganza: The Well Beloved (1897).
(v) Short Stories: Wessex Tales (1883), A Group of Noble Dames (1891), Life's Little Ironies (1894), A Changed Man (1913) and The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid, which appeared in The Graphic in 1883.
Hardy, the poet, will be dealt with in the next chapter.
Characteristics of Hardy's Works
Hardy deals with simple, primal natures with remarkable ease and sureness, but a certain awakwardness and theatricality appear when he deals with the more complex characters of the highly civilised society of men and women. Hardy's love for the elemental simplicities and elemental forces is suffused in all his works. His novels have the following outstanding features:
(i) Hardy's Wessex: Hardy, the son of humble parents, only just above the rank of labourer, was born in a small village near the wild stretch in Dorsetshire which he called Egdon Heath. It was a hard agricultural life. The rural life remained unaffected by the advancement of science. The villagers had to face mishaps and hardships of life. They enjoyed traditional pleasures—harvest celebrations, parties to celebrate birth and marriage—where people danced and sang ballads, and drank cedar and told stories. Hardy's father, a celebrated musician in the neighbourhood, took his son with him to a wedding party or a Christian party. He heard girls singing tragic to love songs. In his neighbourhood he saw that young lovers parted; a young man, in need of livelihood, would leave his native place to seek his fortune, years later he would return to find his sweetheart married to another. In such a world elemental passions ruled supreme. Hardy was a sensitive boy. The impressions of early experiences were so deeply impressed on his imagination that when he began to write, he began to conceive his picture of life in terms of his experiences. In his novels Hardy deals with the various aspects of village tragedy he had observed in Dorsetshire. His tragedy is village tragedy, Composed of the drama of broken love, wronged girls like Tess, jilted farmers, feuds and fights, shootings and hangings. His tragedy is the tragedy of the disintegration of village community.
Hardy is a great regional novelist. He is the creator of "Wessex", a small tract of country comprising six odd counties in South England. His knowledge of this limited region was as comprehensive as that of Scott of Waverley and that of Wordsworth of the Lake District. Wessex appears in all his novels and he seldom strays out of it. Hardy's treatment of this region is neither narrow nor provincial. It is the locality that he minutely observed all around him from his infancy to his manhood. He has raised it to the level of the uninversal. He has imparted universal appeal to the scenes, houses and men and women, customs and traditions of Wessex. Hardy has, thus, imparted a new emphasis and significance to the regional novel.
Hardy idealized Wessx to which he was bound by every tie of birth, childhood and youthful love. He depicted the region of Wessex with their Georgian houses and Gothic churches with ruins and wrecks of empires, hills and dales, roads and bridges, markets and fairs, inns and municipal halls, farmers' cottages and barns. A rich panorama of Wessex life forms the background of his life. "Hardy's strength, as well as his inclination," writes Rickett, "lay in tracing the elemental things of life, and that is why he has annexed Wessex as his province and left London and town society, for the most part, severely alone."
(ii) Hardy and Nature: As an interpreter of nature Hardy is not a transcendentalist like Wordsworth and Shelley, but in the concreteness and picturesqueness of his settings and landscape he reminds us of Keats. Nature in his novels is a brooding presence, which often tinges human life with sadness and fatality.
Nature is not just the background of his novels, but a leading character in them. Sometimes it exercises an influence on the course of events, more often it is a spiritual agent, colouring the mood and shaping the disposition of human beings. The huge bleak darkness of Egdon Heath dominates the lives of the characters in The Return of the Native, infusing them with its grandeur and melancholy. In The Woodlanders Hardy uses the natural setting with symbolical meaning, as when he makes the warped, misshapen, stunted trees suggest the "unfulfilled intentions" in human life.
Nature passes into human character and Hardy represents it as the embodiment of the power, not ourselves which works man's humiliation. Nature is also shown as a character itself in the drama of life, much in the same way as Fate appeared in the Greek tragedies—like character, playing a principal part, cheating, deceiving, betraying, watching with a grim smile the blundering action of other men. Egdon Heath acts on human beings just as other human beings do. Bonamy Dobree writes: "Without it, not Eustacia Vye, nor the Reddleman, nor Clym Yeobright, nor Thomasin, nor even deaf, grotesque old Grandfather Cantle would have been the same. In Hardy's novels it may not be fate that is shown working through us, but it is certainly earth working with us, both the earth and ourselves being part of the expression of the Immanent Will, or if you prefer, the Blind Creative Principle."
Hardy chooses his human types from those who are closest to nature, those in whom the primitive impulses are strongest. Rickett remarks: "In fact his interpretation of nature gives us the clue to his outlook on men and women. To understand the self-sacrificing love of Marty South we must realise the spell of the brooding woods, the magic of the quiet, enduring trees whose life she knew so well. To understand the attraction of the Reddleman, with his vagrant aloofness, we must first be made to feel the fascination of Egdon Heath in all its moods."
Nature is an incarnation of a living force with a will and purpose of its own, the detached and ironical spectator of human beings who struggle on its surface. Nature moves on its appointed course, warming to spring, yellowing to autumn whether Tess's life is blasted or Fanny dies or Henchard goes to his doom.
(iii) Hardy's Philosophy or View of Life or Hardy's Pessimism: Hardy's personal nature combined with the circumstances of his life and the scientific rationalism of the age developed in him a pessimistic view of life. He was influenced by the melancholy spirit of the age, which was generated by the disintegration of old religious, social and economic order, and the advancement of science and scientific thinking. An atmosphere of doubt and apprehension prevailed everywhere. Under such circumstances he could not cultivate a happy view of life. His view of life has been variously described as "pessimism", "twilight view of life", "determinism", "fatalism", "atheism" and "evolutionary meliorism".
Influenced by Darwin and other philosophic thoughts, Hardy realized that the universe is the product of impersonal evolution, working by the callous means of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. Man finds himself to be a part of this universe and is faced with the problem of adapting himself best to the environment, to the force that has made him, which is indifferent to the things to which his consciousness attaches meaning. This is the reason of all suffering, all trouble. This is the mystery, the evil of life.
The evil is not only external but internal also. Externally, our environment, comprising Nature, chance, society, is responsible for our sufferings. Internally, the instincts and emotions in human character are responsible for human suffering. These impulses are chiefly sex impulse or biological necessity which is as blind as the force which created the universe, and, secondly, ambition. These instincts and emotions are not formed by man but by the force that created the environment. Indeed, they are also a part of the environment in which man finds himself. He cannot control them but he can try to do so by means of wisdom and knowledge. Here lies some hope for man's betterment.
(iv) Hardy's Characterisation: Hardy's art of characterisation is superb. His living and vital characters are always natives of countryside. They are farmers and thatchers, shepherds and hedgers, and never stray beyond its border. Some of his characters go off as soldiers and sailors, like the Loveday brothers in The Trumpet Major; Clym Yeobright in The Return of the Native and Jude in Jude the Obscure go out to fulfill their intellectual aspirations. But soldiers and countrymen alike bear the stamp of the countryside on every facet of their personality. The moment his characters long for the life of higher aspirations and leave the country side, they are doomed to suffer. Jude longs to satisfy his desire for learning; Eustacia Vye yearns for the colourful and luxurious life of Paris; Grace and Fancy hesitate to marry their rustic sweethearts because a glimpse of the great world has made their taste fastidious. All these characters suffer. Thus, Hardy's stories "turn on the conflict between his rural circumstances and the aspirations cherished by those confined in them towards a more refined existence." Hardy's figures, writes Rickett, “are elemental forces on a background of a vaster elemental forces; they are the natural expression of sleepy woodland places, gaunt, austere hills, purling streams, lonely open spaces.
Hardy writes about man and not about men. Though his great characters are distinguished one from another clearly enough, their dual ties are made subsidiary to their typical human qualities. Giles stands for all faithful lovers, Tess for all betrayed women, Eustacia for all passionate, imprisoned women. Hardy's characters are grouped into the following simple categories:
(i) Staunch, selfless, tender-hearted heroes like Oak, Giles, Winterborne, Venn.
(ii) The dashing, fickle, breaker of hearts like Sergeant Troy, Wildeve, Alec D'urberville.
(iii) Patient, devoted, forgiving women like Tess, Marty, Elizabeth
(iv) Wilful, capricious, but good-hearted girls like Bathsheba, Jane.
(v) Passion tormented romantic enchantresses like Eustacia, Grace, Fancy.
Hardy's female characters are more elemental than men, swayed far more by the instinctive life than their male counterparts. So he draws them with greater clarity and intensity. He can record the minutest fluctuations of their emotional experience, and make them real and actual. Tess, Bathsheba and Eustacia Vye are vital and full-blooded
Hardy's minor characters form a class apart. They are the representatives of antiquity and perform the function of Greek chorus in Hardy's novels. They comment on action and character and tell us what has happened off the stage. They are also the main source of humour in his novels. Hence, they are also called chorus characters or comic characters. Often they are the spokesmen of the novelist himself and express his views on life. They are shrewd, impartial commentators on characters and events.
Hardy's rustic characters are eternal. They represent reality. Henchard and Eustacia may love and suffer and die, but the rustics go on. Their very prosaicness anchors the story to reality. "Taken individually they may seem exaggerated, but taken, as; they are meant to be taken—in a corporate mass, they build up a picture of average mankind in its rural manifestation that is carved out of the bedrock of life."
In his last two novels Tess and Jude Hardy leaves the rustic characters out. So they give, we feel, a distorted picture of life.
(v) Hardy's Plot Construction: Hardy's plots are well built and symmetrical. He achieves symmetry by a careful use of parallelism and contrasts in the construction of his plots. His plots are well planned. They are not artificial — something laboriously constructed from the outside, without reference to inner causation, to the truth of characters. His plots are directly the result of his philosophy of life, a scheme of tragic impression which he wanted to present, and to that end they are suitably tuned. Hardy's greatest contribution to the art of novel writing is the architectonic quality of his novels. In this connection Rutland writes that Hardy once remarked about the plot of The Return of the Native that "it was the only one of his novels in which he has consciously striven to observe the unities, the result is impressive ...... To such shapely symmetry of construction, to so complete a blending of setting with the story, he did not attain hereafter." In the sphere of plot construction he is superior to Scott, Dickens, Thackeray and other novelists of the nineteenth century. What distinguishes him as a story teller is his gift of combining rich inventive power with a sense of symmetrical development. "For all his minuteness of method," writes A. C. Rickett, "Hardy never loses sight of the harmonious whole; his detailed touches have ever their special significance in unfolding the burden of the story; here he shows the economy of the great artist. We shall find no loose ends in his work."
(vi) His Style: Hardy was a great stylist. His is "an admirable style, clear, straightforward, unpretentious, yet capable of carrying subtle implications, and always instinct with a simple dignity, and compelling sincerity. There is no straining aftereffect, no self-conscious attitudinis­ing." It is a poetic style which is conspicuous for its pictorial and visualising power. Hardy possessed an almost Shakespearean felicity of expression and the knack of using best word for his purpose. He deftly uses obsolete words and expressions, and scientific terminology only because he wants to be exact and convey his sense to the readers as accurately as possible. He surpasses other novelists in the use of similes and metaphors. His minor characters speak their own dialect, but they use it most forcefully and effectively.
Hardy's Place in English Novel
Hardy's place as a novelist is unsurpassable. He is a great regional novelist of the nineteenth century. Assessing Hardy's place in English novel L. Johnson writes: "In the largeness of design, in the march and sweep of imagination, in the greatness of his great themes, he has given to the novel a simple grandeur and impressiveness, the more impressive for his preoccupation with the concerns of modern thought."
IV
OTHER NOVELISTS
The major novelists of the Victorian period have been discussed. Some minor novelists also deserve mention. R. L. Stevenson (1850-94) was a poet, novelist and essayist. He led the way from realism to romance. His famous works Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantre deserve an abiding place in literature. William Ainsworth (1805-1882) was a vigorous and spirited stylist. His best tales are The Tower of London, Old St. Paul's and Jack Sheppard. He had real though crude sense of historical colour.
George Macdonald (1824-1905), who wrote Alec Forbes (1865) and Robert Falconer (1868), deals with Scottish life. His novels show considerable humour, actuality and deep religious feeling. Richard D. Blackmore (1825-1900) was a celebrated story teller. His Lorna Doone (1869) is a memorable romance remarkable for breadth, imaginative beauty and freshness.
George Gissing (1857-1903) was one of the ablest writers of the non-romantic school. His books—Demos (1886), New Grub Street (1891),
The Town Traveller (1898) — are pessimistic in outlook, which is chastened by his humour and his passion.
George Barrow (1803-81) is remembered for The Bible in Spain (1843), Lavengro (1851), The Romany Rye (1857) and Wild Wales (1862). Edward Albert remarks: "As a blend of fact and fiction, of hard detail and misty imagination, of sly humour and stockish solemnity, the books stand apart in our literature."
WOMEN NOVELISTS OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
The women novelists form a class apart in Victorian novel. Mrs. Gaskell, The Bronte Sisters and George Eliot made memorable contribution to the development of English novel.
1
MRS. ELIZABETH CLEGHORN GASKELL (1810-65)
Mrs. Gaskell used novel as an instrument of social reform. In her first novel Mary Barton (1848) she presents a sociological study based on her experience of the conditions of the labouring classes in the new cities of the industrial North. It is remarkable for passionate sympathy for the downtrodden. North and South (1855) is a better constructed novel than its predecessor but it is also a sociological novel. Despite her sympathy with the poor and the downtrodden, she does not offer any positive solution to the hardships of laourers. Her next novel, Sylvia's Lovers (1863) is a moralistic love story in a domestic setting. Wives and Daughters, her last unfinished novel, is an ironical study of snobbishness, and is noticeable for the fine delineation of female characters ¾ Mrs. Gibson, Molly Gibson and Cynthia Kirpatrick.
Mrs. Gaskell’s most celebrated work is Cranford (1853). It is less a novel than a series of papers in the manner of The Spectator. It is remarkable for light, gently humorous tone and the realistic picture of life and manners the author had known in Kirpatrick.
Mrs. Gaskell was also the pioneer of psychological novel. Cranford is a fine study of female life and psychology. Rickett remarks: "She lays greater stress than Miss Austen on the emotional life, and is less interested in the external history than in the inner history of her character. In other words, Mrs. Gaskell may fairly be regarded as the pioneer of the novel of character, of which George Eliot is the first brilliant exponent."
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THE BRONTE SISTERS
The Bronte Sisters—Charlotte (1816-55), Emily (1818-48) and Anne (1820-49) —, writes Edward Albert, "were the pioneers in fiction of that aspect of the romantic movement which concerned itself with the baring of human soul. In place of the detached observation of a society or group of people, such as we find in Jane Austen and the earlier novelists, the Brontes painted the sufferings of an individual personality, and presented the new conception of the heroine as a woman of vital strength and passionate feelings. Their works are as much the products of imagination and emotions as of the intellect, and in their more powerful passages they border on poetry. In their concern with the human soul they were to be followed by George Eliot and Meredith."
Charlotte Bronte's first novel The Professor (1857) is a tedious and clumsy effort. It is autobiographical in tone and the characters are drawn from her own personal acquaintances. Jane Eyre (1847), her greatest work, is also autobiographical and reveals the love story of Charlotte. It combines realism and romanticism. It is rich in Wordsworthian attitude to nature. Shirley (1849) is extremely realistic and factual in character. The main incidents in this novel are historical and the places are real. According to E. A. Baker: "In Shirley, Charlotte wrote a novel in the somewhat desultory style of reminiscences, dealing with the people around her or in the house where she had lived as a governess, her personal friends or obnoxious acquaintances, those people, above all, who had impressed themselves on her imagination. The book is full of portraits." Her last novel Villette (1852) is a direct autobiographical novel.
As a novelist Charlotte Bronte is concerned with the baring of human soul. In her novels the literature of manners gave place to a literature of spirit. Cross opines about her contribution: " ..... at any rate, her significance in the course of fiction is that she delineated the intense moods of her heart and imagination, which have their rapport in the moods of the race. In Jane Eyre and Villette, photography of manners has passed into the inner photography, which Trollope lamented as an art beyond his power of vision." This method was carried forward by George Eliot while dealing with states of conscience. Her characterisation is remarkable for great emotional intensity. Her prose is characterised by force and precision.
Emily Bronte's only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847) is unique in English literature. It is a story of passion that transcends the limitations of the world and the flesh. The novelist skilfully blends romance with realism. Wuthering Heights is a story in which extreme heights of poetry and mysticism are reached, but which has also a realistic and solid setting like the moorland rocks. In the words of Edward Albert, "It breathes the very air of wild, desolate moors. Its chief characters are conceived in gigantic proportions, and their passions have an elemental force which carries them into the realm of poetry. In a series of climaxes the sustained Intensity of the novel is carried to almost unbelievable peaks of passion, described with a stark, unflinching realism."
Anne Bronte's two novels Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) are much inferior to those of her sisters. She lacks nearly all their power and intensity.
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GEORGE ELIOT (1819-80)
Mary Ann Evans, known as George Eliot, was a celebrated novelist, who imparted moral and philosophical dimension to English novel. Her first work consisted of three short stories, published in Blackwood's Magazine during 1857. These stories deal with the tragedy of ordinary lives, unfolded with an intense sympathy and deep insight into the truth of character. Her first novel Adam Bede (1859) presents a fine picture of English country life among the humbler classes. It contains well delineated characters Hetty, Adam Bede and Mrs. Poyser. The Mill on the Floss (1860) is partly autobiographical. Set in authentic rural background, it is a highly moving tragedy. The character of Maggie is psychologically portrayed. Silas Marner: the Weaver of Raveloe (1861) is remarkable for earnestness of tone, rich humour, profound tragedy and excellent pictures of village life. With the publication of Romola in 1863 the ethical note becomes more prominent in her writings. It is a historical novel set in medieval Florence. A Study of Provincial Life (1871-72) presents the complex picture of the life of a small town. George Eliot's last novel Daniel Deronda (1876) is overloaded with moral problems and considerations.
We come across the following characteristics in her novels:
(i) Regional Element: George Eliot's early novelsAdam Bede, Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner realistically and concretely present the life of the Midland counties of Warwickshire and Derbyshire, which she had intimately known. A large number of scenes and characters in her novels have been identified with actual scenes and characters.
(ii) Sense of Tragedy: There lies a sense of tragedy in all her best works. In her novels sin or folly brings its own reward. She could depict moving incidents which touch the core of our heart. Her tragedies are highly moving. George Eliot produced poignant dramatic effects by mingling pathos and humour. Hudson remarks: "Humour of a rich and delicate kind, and pathos which was never forced, are to be reckoned among her principal gifts; and though the foundation of her art was avowedly uncompromising truth to life, her realism was everywhere tempered with the widest and tenderest sympathy."
(iii) Character and Psychology: Her characters are usually drawn from the lower classes of society. She shows great understanding and insight in her studies of English countryman. George Eliot's characters are never static. They grow and change. Long rightly remarks: "They go from weakness to strength, or from strength to weakness, according to the works that they do and the thoughts that they cherish. The novelist exactly exhibits the mode by which step by step a character goes down, readjusting his principles to suit his practice, till imperceptibly he is transformed, changed or ruined." Her feminine characters are drawn with great psychological insight.
George Eliot was the first novelist to lay stress on character rather than on incident. She was "singularly powerful in describing the conflict of emotions, the ingenious modes of self-deception in which most of us acquire considerable skill, the uncomfortable result of keeping cons­cience unless we act up to its ideals, and the downright hypocrisy of lower nature."
(iv) Moral Earnestness: The tone of the novels of George Eliot is one of moral earnestness. It becomes all the more powerful in her later novels. Moody and Lovett remark: "She does not deal with party questions, nor primarily with industrial or social problems. Her ethical motive is a broader one than the emanicipation of thought or the formulation of a political programme. It is to show how, in obedience to law, character grows or decays; how a single fault or flaw brings suffering and death, and throws a world into ruin; how, on the other hand, there is a making perfect through suffering, a regeneration through sin itself a hope for the world through the renunciation and self-sacrifice of the individual."
Her Place
George Eliot has a forward looking quality. "Her serious concern with the problems of human personality and its relationship with forces outside itself, her interest in detailed psychological analysis of the realm of the inner consciousness, did much to determine the future course of English novel."
DRAMA
Drama in the Early Nineteenth Century
The nineteenth century made remarkable advancement in novel and poetry but lagged conspicuously behind in drama and theatre. The typical Victorian attitudes and beliefs of complacency, smugness and compromise hampered the development of drama. Matthew Arnold wrote: "In England we have no drama at all. Our vast society is not homogenous enough, not sufficiently united, even any large portion of it, in a common view of life, a common ideal capable of serving as a basis for modern English drama." During the romantic period Shelley, Byron, Southey and Lamb wrote plays but they could not create living characters different from their own selves. These plays could not be acted on the stage. They could only be read in closet. So they came to be known as "closet plays".
During Victorian England Tennyson had more success in the theatre than other poets of the century. Browning's Strafford (1837) and A Blot in the Scutcheon (1843) evinced some genuine dramatic gift. Lord Lytton's Money (1840) is a moral comedy of love and cupidity. Charles Reade's The Courier of Lyons (1854) and Drank (1879) are full of melodramatic element and have little literary worth. Tom Taylor (1817-80) in Still Waters Run Deep (1855) and The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863) show a pioneer trend toward realistic drama which was on the way. Sir Thomas, Talfourd (1795-1854) wrote Ion, a pseudo-classic tragedy in declamatory style. The tragedies of Sheridan Knowles (1784-1862) are an example of the popular sentimental romantic drama. The Hunchback is now regarded with some interest.
Thus, the first half of the nineteenth century was almost completely barren from the dramatic point of view. The few dramatic works which were written during this period never saw the stage.
The Rise of Drama in the Nineteenth Century
Meanwhile radical changes in all spheres of human thought and activity were taking place in the Victorian age. Popular education and popular journalism remarkably helped in transforming the country. The bondage of conventions came to an end. Parental authority was almost reduced. Women's emancipation was speeded up. "A new type of woman, bold, self-confident, aggressive and contemptuous of sweet domesticity, began to figure in the literature and the social life of the age." Marriage was regarded as only a social contract. The rapid advancement of industrialisation took place in England. Men became aware of the impact of the machine and the consequences of the class conflict. Man was no more the master of his fate. He was a product of the environment and his personality bore the impress of circumstances. Science and psychology dominated all aspects of life and literature. The powerful impact of religion on human mind was on the wane. Reason dominated and sentiments were discarded. These changes coupled with the new note of realism paved the way for the rise of drama. Henry Arthur Jones wrote in the Preface to Saints and Sinners that drama should not be "the art of sensational and spectacular illusion" but "mainly and chiefly, "the art of representing English life".
The number of theatres increased in England and many talented writers began to write for the theatre. For the first time the social and artistic significance of the theatre was realized. The playhouses which had fallen into disrepute and had become the haunts of vulgar began to attract the middle-class people and became the centres of artistic endeavour. The romantic plays became unpopular and realism became the outstanding characteristic of British Drama.
Foreign Influences on the Rise of Drama
The influence of continental dramatists brought about a revolutionary change in British drama. Ibsen, Hebbel, Dumas, Angier, Gorky, Strindberg and many others made memorable contribution to the rise of realistic drama in England. Scribe formalised the technique of the new Drama, also known as the problem play, by setting into action, if not a character or an idea, at least a subject and above all, a situation, and to extract from that subject and that situation their logical theatric effect." Hebei excelled in writing domestic tragedies with a realistic note. The new tragedy regards man not as a moral animal, but as a rat caught in the trap of reality.
Henrik Ibsen, a Norwegian playwright, revolutionized British drama. He created a sensation in European literary circles by publishing in 1879 a play known as A Doll's House. Nora, the heroine of this play, is the new woman who struggles "between two worlds—one dead and the other powerless to be born." Ibsen's theme consists of contemporary situations, conflicts, beliefs, institutions, environment and human relationships. In his realistic plays he exposed the hypocrisy on which our social and family relationships are based. A Doll's House exposes the hypocrisy that prevails in domestic life all over the world. An Enemy of the People is the tragedy of idealist who struggles in modern society. In Ghosts he discusses the problems of hereditary diseases. In spite of their emotional appeal Ibsen's plays are plays of ideas. Here is the beginning of the problem play where the author shapes various aspect' of a social problem and leaves the reader to draw his conclusions from the things as they really are. Ibsen pioneered the problem plays, the drama of ideas and symbolic realistic plays. Ibsen's plays became very popular in England and greatly influenced contemporary dramatists in England. Ibsen's plays are "stories of lives, discussion of conduct, unveiling of motives, conflict of characters in talk, laying bare of souls, discovery of pitfalls—in short, illumination of life."
THE PIONEERS OF MODERN BRITISH DRAMA
T. W. Robertson (1829-71), Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929) and A. W. Pinero (1855-1934)
Robertson tried to write realistic comedy depicting the foibles of aristocratic society and satirising the snobbery of all classes in Ours, Caste, School, Home, M. P., and David Garrick. Both his characters and settings are real. He introduced in his plays the idea of a serious theme underlying the humour, and characters and dialogue of a more natural kind. Nicoll writes about Robertson's contribution: "Nevertheless we must acknowledge two things, that he carried this realism as far as the audiences of his time could permit and that he was able to incorporate into these plays a quality which still succeeds in giving them an appealing charm to readers and spectators who have passed far beyond the world for which they were originally intended. One of Robertson's chief virtues was that he set out to bring life into the theatre, abandoning the distressed maidens and black villains and impossibly noble heroes, and, that in doing so, he tried to avoid any doctrinaire approach. Although his basic creed is essentially Victorian he takes a wide view of the world around him."
Henry Arthur Jones' first play The Silver King is a melodrama. His second play Saints and Sinners is noticeable for realism. Characters are realistically portrayed and are presented into two classes representing meanness and idealism respectively. It deals with everyday problems as the hatred of petty shopkeeper at the larger cooperative stores, the meaninglessness of conventional puritanism, the rapacity and poverty of soul in middle-class provincial society.
A. W. Pinero was a skilled craftsman and had a keen appreciation of stage effects. In his early dramatic farces as The Squire, Sweet Lavender, The Magistrate, The Schoolmistress, The Dandy Dick, The Weaker Sex, The Profligate and The Second Mrs. Tranquery, Pinero endeavoured to impart realism to both situation and character. In his serious plays Trelawany of the Wells, The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, Iris and Midchannel he success­fully delineates realistic characters and deftly creates realistic atmos­phere. Nicoll writes: "Whatever feelings Sir Arthur Pinero exhibits, however, he must be acclaimed a master of his craft and unquestionably one of the most important figures in the dramatic revival which came at the start of our own period. His sentimentalism and often conventional treatment of character cannot take from his significance as a pioneer who helped to build a foundation for the twentieth century realistic theatre and who pointed out to others the virtues of the plays of ideas.”
Oscar Wilde (1856-1900)
His The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) brought back to the English theatre something of the distinction absent from it since Sheridan ceased to write a century before. Wilde surpassed Sheridan in combining with the sense of comedy and feeling for literary style a brilliant and fantastic wit which does not stale. His other plays are Lady Winderemere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895). He was weak in characterisation but knew how to create humorous situations. His dialogue is full of witty and paradoxical statements which send audiences to roars of laughter.
The New Drama and G. B. Shaw
G. B. Shaw, who will be dealt with in detail in the last chapter, published his weekly theatre essays in The Saturday Review from January 1895 to May 1898. These essays lifted dramatic criticism to a higher level. His Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898) launched the New Drama, which was to be the most hopeful, the most invigorating and the most outstanding feature in English drama during the next decade.