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followed by other posthumous works. Robertson's preaching is not
very easy to judge, because the published sermons are admittedly
not what was actually delivered, but after-reminiscences or
summaries, and the judgment is not rendered easier by the
injudicious and gushing laudation of which he has been made the
subject. He certainly possessed a happy gift of phrase now and then,
and remarkable earnestness.
Note.—In no chapter, perhaps, has there been greater
difficulty as to inclusion and exclusion than in the present.
The names of Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, of Dean
Alford, of Bishop Lightfoot for England, of Bishop Charles
Wordsworth, of Dean Ramsay, of Drs. Candlish, Guthrie,
and Macleod for Scotland, may seem to clamour among
orthodox theologians, those of W. R. Greg, of James
Hinton, of W. K. Clifford among not always orthodox lay
dealers with the problems of philosophy, or of theology, or
both. With less tyrannous limits of space Principal Tulloch,
who was noteworthy in both these and in pure literature
as well (he was the last editor of Fraser), must have
received at least brief notice in this chapter, as must his
brother Principal, J. C. Shairp (an amiable poet, an
agreeable critic, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford), in
others.

FOOTNOTES:
[11] This famous book, published in 1860, was a collection of papers by
six clergymen and a layman, some of which undoubtedly were, and the
rest of which were by association thought to be, unorthodox. It was
condemned by Convocation, and actual legal proceedings were taken
against two of the writers, but without final effect.
 CHAPTER IX
LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM IN ART AND
LETTERS

In a former chapter we conducted the history of criticism, especially

literary criticism, and that chiefly as displayed in the periodicals
which were reorganized and refreshed in the early years of the
century, to about 1850. We have now to take it up at that point and
conduct it—subject to the limitations of our plan as regards living
authors, and in one extremely important case taking the license of
outstepping these limits—to the present or almost the present day.
We shall have to consider the rise and performances of two great
individual writers, one of whom entirely re-created, if he may not
almost be said to have created, the criticism of art in England, while
the other gave a new temper, if not exactly a new direction, to the
criticism of literature; and we shall have, in regard to periodicals, to
observe the rise, in the first place of the weekly newspaper, and then
of the daily, as competitors in strictly critical and literary work with
the quarterly and monthly reviews, as well as some changes in these
latter.
For just as we found that the first development of nineteenth
century criticism coincided with or followed upon a new departure or
development in periodicals, so we shall find that a similar change
accompanied or caused changes in the middle of the century.
Although the popularity of the quarterly and monthly reviews and
magazines which had been headed respectively by the Edinburgh
and Blackwood did not exactly wane, and though some of the most
brilliant work of the middle of the century—George Eliot's novels,
Kingsley's and Froude's essays, and the like—appeared in them, the
ever fickle appetite of readers seemed to desire something else in
shape, something different in price, style, and form. Why this sort of
change, which is perpetually recurring, should usually bring with it a
corresponding change, and sometimes a corresponding
improvement, of literary production, is more than any one can say,
but the fact is not easily disputable.
On the present occasion the change took three successive forms—
first, the raising, or rather restoring, of the weekly sixpenny critical
newspaper to a higher pitch of popularity than it had ever held;
secondly, the cheapening and multiplying of the monthly magazines;
thirdly, the establishment of new monthly reviews, somewhat more
resembling the old quarterlies than anything else, but with signed
instead of anonymous articles.
The uprising of the weekly newspaper took shape in two remarkably
different forms, represented respectively by Household Words, which
Dickens started early in the fifties, and by the Saturday Review,
which came a little later. The former might best be described as a
monthly of the Blackwood and London kind cheapened, made more
frequent in issue, and adjusted to a considerably lower and more
popular standard of interest and culture—politics, moreover, being
ostensibly though not quite really excluded. Dickens contributed to it
largely himself. He received contributions from writers of established
repute like Bulwer and Lever; but he made his chief mark with the
paper by breeding up a school of younger writers who wrote to his
own pattern in fiction, miscellaneous essay, and other things. Wilkie
Collins was the chief of these, but there were many others. In
particular the periodical developed a sort of popular, jocular, and
picturesque-descriptive manner of treating places, travels,
ceremonies, and what not, which took the public fancy immensely. It
was not quite original (for Leigh Hunt, Wainewright the murderer-
miscellanist of the London, some of the Blackwood men, and others,
had anticipated it to a certain extent), and it was vulgarised as
regards all its models; but it was distinct and remarkable. The
æsthetic and literary tone of Household Words, and of its successor
All the Year Round to a somewhat less extent, was distinctly what is
called Philistine; and though Dickens always had a moral purpose, he
did not aim much higher than amusement that should not be
morbid, and instruction of the middle-class diffusion-of-knowledge
kind. But there was very little harm and much good to be said of
Household Words; and if some of the imitations of it were far from
being happy, its own popularity and that of its successor were very
fairly deserved.
The aims, the character, and the success of the Saturday Review
were of the most widely different character. It was less novel in
form, for the weekly review was an established thing, and had at
least two very respectable examples—the Examiner, which (under
the Hunts, under Fonblanque, under Forster, and under the late Mr.
Minto) had a brilliant, if never an extremely prosperous, career for
three-quarters of the century, and the Spectator, which attained a
reputation for unswerving honesty under the editorship of Mr.
Rentoul, and has increased it under that of its present conductors.
But both these were Liberal papers first of all; the Saturday Review,
at first and accidentally Peelite, was really (throughout the nearly
forty years during which it remained in the possession of the same
family and was directed by a succession of editors each of whom
had been trained under his predecessor) Independent Tory, or (to
use a rather unhappy and now half-forgotten name) Liberal-
Conservative. It never tied itself to party chariot-wheels, and from
the first to the last of the period just referred to very distinguished
writers of Liberal and Radical opinions contributed to it. But the
general attitude of the paper during this time expressed that peculiar
tone of mainly Conservative persiflage which has distinguished in
literature the great line of writers beginning with Aristophanes. Its
staff was, as a rule, recruited from the two Universities (though
there was no kind of exclusion for the unmatriculated; as a matter of
fact, neither of its first two editors was a son either of Oxford or
Cambridge), and it always insisted on the necessity of classical
culture. It eschewed the private personality which had been too apt
to disfigure newspapers of a satirical kind during the first half of the
century; but it claimed and exercised to the full the privilege of
commenting on every public writing, utterance, or record of the
subjects of its criticism. It observed, for perhaps a longer time than
any other paper, the salutary principles of anonymity (real as well as
ostensible) in regard to the authorship of particular articles; and
those who knew were constantly amused at the public mistakes on
this subject.
Applying this kind of criticism,—perfectly fearless, on the whole fairly
impartial, informed, human errors excepted, by a rather
exceptionally high degree of intelligence and education, and above
all keeping before it the motto, framed by its "sweet enemy"
Thackeray, of being written "by gentlemen for gentlemen,"—the
Saturday Review quickly attained, and for many years held, the very
highest place in English critical journalism as regards literature, in a
somewhat less degree politics, and in a degree even greater the
farrago of social and miscellaneous matters. By consent too general
and too unbiassed to be questioned, it gave and maintained a
certain tone of comment which prevailed for the seventh, eighth,
and ninth decades of the century, and of which the general note
may be said to have been a coolly scornful intolerance of ignorance
and folly. There were those who accused it even in its palmiest days
of being insufficiently positive and constructive; but on the negative
side it was generally sound in intention, and in execution admirably
thorough. It may sometimes have mishandled an honest man, it may
sometimes have forgiven a knave; but it always hated a fool, and
struck at him with might and with main.
The second change began with the establishment of the Cornhill and
Macmillan's Magazine, two or three years later. There was no
perceptible difference in the general scheme of these periodicals
from that of the earlier ones, of which Blackwood and Fraser were
the most famous; but their price was lowered from half a crown to a
shilling, and the principle of signed articles and of long novels by
famous names was adopted. The editorship of Thackeray in the
Cornhill, with the contributions of Matthew Arnold and others,
quickly gave a character to it; while Macmillan's could boast
contributions from the Kingsleys, Henry and Charles, as well as from
many others. From this time the monthly magazine, with the
exception of Blackwood, found a shilling, which attempts have been
recently made to lower to sixpence, its almost necessary tariff, while
the equal necessity of addressing the largest possible audience made
pure politics, with occasional exceptions, unwelcome in it. It is to the
credit of the English magazines of this class, however, that they have
never relinquished the tradition of serious literary studies. Many of
the essays of Mr. Arnold appeared first either in one or the other of
the two just mentioned; the Cornhill even ventured upon Mr.
Ruskin's Unto this Last; and other famous books of a permanent
character saw the light in these, in Temple Bar, started by Mr.
Bentley, in the rather short-lived St. Paul's, of which Anthony
Trollope was editor, and in others.
Whether the starting of the monthly "Review" as distinguished from
the "Magazine," which came again a little later towards the middle or
end of the sixties, be traceable to a parallel popularisation of the
quarterly ideal—to the need for the political and "heavy" articles
which the lightened monthlies had extruded—or to a mere imitation
of the famous French Revue des Deux Mondes, is an academic
question. The first of these new Reviews was the Fortnightly, which
found the exact French model unsuitable to the meridian of
Greenwich, and dropped the fortnightly issue, while retaining the
title. It was followed by the Contemporary, the Nineteenth Century,
and others. The exclusion of fiction in these was not invariable—the
Fortnightly, in particular, has published many of Mr. Meredith's
novels. But, as a rule, these reviews have busied themselves with
more or less serious subjects, and have encouraged signed
publication.
It would, of course, be impossible here to go through all, or even all
the most noteworthy, of the periodicals of the century. We are
dealing with classes, not individuals, and the only class yet to be
noticed—daily newspapers falling out of our ken almost entirely—are
those weekly newspapers which have eschewed politics altogether.
The oldest and most famous of these is the Athenæum, which still
flourishes after a life of nearly seventy years, while between forty
and fifty years later the Academy was founded on the same general
principles. But the Athenæum has always cleaved, as far as its main
articles went, to the unsigned system, while the Academy started at
a period which leant the other way. Of late years, too, criticism
proper, that is to say, of letters and art, has played a larger and
larger part in daily newspapers, some of which attempt a complete
review of books as they appear, while others give reviews of selected
works as full as those of the weeklies. If any distinct setting of
example is necessary to be attributed in this case, the credit is
perhaps mainly due to the original Pall Mall Gazette, an evening
newspaper started in 1864 with one of the most brilliant staffs ever
known, including many of the original Saturday writers and others.
The result of this combined opportunity and stimulus in so many
forms has been that almost the whole of the critical work of the
latter part of the century has passed through periodicals—that,
except as regards Mr. Ruskin, a writer always indocile to editing,
every one who will shortly be mentioned in this chapter has either
won his spurs or exercised them in this kind, and that of the others,
mentioned in other chapters and in connection with other subjects, a
very small proportion can be said to have been entirely disdainful of
periodical publication. At the very middle of the century, and later,
the older Quarterlies were supported by men like John Wilson
Croker, a survival of their first generation Nassau W. Senior, and
Abraham Hayward, the last a famous talker and "diner-out." Other
chief critics and essayists, besides Kingsley and Froude, were George
Brimley, Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge; Henry Lancaster, a
Balliol man and a Scotch barrister; and Walter Bagehot, a banker,
and not a member of either University. Brimley has left us what is
perhaps the best appreciation of Tennyson in the time between the
days when that poet was flouted or doubted by the usual critic, and
those when he was accepted as a matter of course or cavilled at as
a matter of paradox; and Lancaster occupies pretty much the same
position with regard to Thackeray. It is not so easy to single out any
particular and distinguishing critical effort of Bagehot's, who wrote
on all subjects, from Lombard Street to Tennyson, and from the
Coup d'État (which he saw) to Browning. But his distinction of the
poetical art of Wordsworth and that of these other poets as "pure,
ornate, and grotesque" will suffice to show his standpoint, which
was a sort of middle place between the classical and the Romantic.
Bagehot wrote well, and possessed a most keen intelligence. Also to
be classed here are Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, the very agreeable
author of Horæ Subsecivæ, and James Hannay, a brilliant journalist,
a novelist of some merit and an essayist of more, and author of A
Course of English Literature which, though a little popular and
desultory, is full of sense and stimulus.
Most popular of all at the time was Sir Arthur Helps (1813-75), a
country gentleman of some means and of the usual education, who
took to a mixed life of official and literary work, did some useful
work in regard to Spanish-American history, but acquired most
popularity by a series of dialogues, mostly occupied by ethical and
æsthetic criticism, called Friends in Council. This contains plenty of
knowledge of books, touches of wit and humour, a satisfactory
standard of morals and manners, a certain effort at philosophy, but
suffers from the limitations of its date. In different ways enough—for
he was as quiet as the other was showy—Helps was the counterpart
of Kinglake, as exhibiting a certain stage in the progress of English
culture during the middle of the century—a stage in which the Briton
was considerably more alive to foreign things than he had been, had
enlarged his sphere in many ways, and was at least striving to be
cosmopolitan, but had lost insular strength without acquiring
Continental suppleness.
Of the literary critic who attracted most public attention during this
period,—the late Mr. Matthew Arnold,—considerable mention has
already been made in dealing with his poetry, and biographical
details must be looked for there. It will be remembered that Mr.
Arnold was not very early a popular writer either as poet or prose-
man, that his poetical exercises preceded by a good deal his prose,
and that these latter were, if not determined, largely influenced by
his appointment to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. He began,
however, towards the end of the fifties and the beginning of the
sixties, to be much noticed, not merely as the deliverer of lectures,
but as the contributor of essays of an exceedingly novel, piquant,
and provocative kind; and in 1865 these, or some of them, were
collected and published under the title of Essays in Criticism. These
Essays—nine in number, besides a characteristic preface—dealt
ostensibly for the most part, if not wholly, with literary subjects,
—"The Function of Criticism," "The Literary Influence of Academies,"
"The Guérins" (brother and sister), "Heine," "Pagan and Mediæval
Religious Sentiment," "Joubert," "Spinoza," and "Marcus Aurelius,"—
but they extended the purport of the title of the first of them in the
widest possible way. Mr. Arnold did not meddle with art, but he
extended the province of literature outside of it even more widely
than Mr. Ruskin did, and was, under a guise of pleasant scepticism,
as dogmatic within the literary province as Mr. Ruskin in the artistic.
It might almost be said that Mr. Arnold put himself forth, with a
becoming attempt at modesty of manner, but with very
uncompromising intentions, as "Socrates in London," questioning,
probing, rebuking with ironical faithfulness, the British Philistine—a
German term which he, though not the first to import it, made first
popular—in literature, in newspapers, in manners, in politics, in
philosophy. Foreign, and specially French, ways were sometimes
directly, sometimes obliquely, held up as examples for our
improvement; and the want of "ideas," the want of "light," the want
of "culture," was dwelt on with a mixture of sorrow and satire. All
this was couched in a very peculiar and (till its mannerism became
irritating) a very captivating style, which cannot be assigned to any
single original, but which is a sort of compound or eclectic outcome
of the old Oxford academic style as it may be seen at times in
Newman, of French persiflage, and of some elements peculiar to Mr.
Arnold himself. The strongest, though the most dangerous, of these
elements was a trick of iterating words and phrases, sometimes
exactly, sometimes with a very slight variation, which inevitably
arrested attention, and perhaps at first produced conviction, on the
principle formulated by a satirist (also of Oxford) a little later in the
words—

What I tell you three times is true.

But besides and underneath all this flourish, all this wide-ranging
scatter of sometimes rather haphazard arrows, there was a solid
literary value in Mr. Arnold's method. As has been noticed earlier in
this chapter, the literary essay of the best kind had somewhat gone
off in England during the middle of the century, and the short, crisp
criticisms which had appeared to take its place in weekly papers
were almost necessarily exposed to grave faults and inadequacies. It
was Mr. Arnold's great merit that by holding up Sainte-Beuve, from
whom he had learnt much, and other French critics, and by urging
successfully the revival of the practice of "introducing" editions of
classics by a sound biographical and critical essay from the pen of
some contemporary, he did much to cure this state of things. So
that, whereas the corpus of English essay-criticism between 1800
and 1835 or thereabouts is admirable, and that of 1835 to 1865
rather thin and scanty, the last third of the century is not on such
very bad terms as regards the first. And he gave example as well as
precept, showing—though his subjects, as in the case of the
Guérins, were sometimes most eccentrically selected—a great deal
of critical acuteness, coupled, it may be, with something of critical
"will-worship," with a capricious and unargued preference of this and
rejection of that, but exhibiting wide if not extraordinarily deep
reading, an honest enthusiasm for the best things, and above all a
fascinating rhetoric.
The immediate effect of this remarkable book was good almost
unmixedly on two of the three parties concerned. It was more than
time for the flower of middle-class complacency, which horticulturists
of all degrees, from Macaulay downwards, had successively striven
to cultivate, and which was already overblown, to drop from its
stalk; and the whiff of pleasant scorn which Mr. Arnold directed at it
was just the thing to puff it off. So the public, upon which he was
never likely to produce too much effect, had reason to thank him for
the effect that he did produce, or helped to produce. And on the
critics too his effect, or the effect of which he was the symptom and
voice, was also good, recalling them on the one hand from the
dulness of the long reviews of the period, and on the other from the
flippancy of the short, while inculcating a wider if not always a
sounder comparison. Practically German poetry had nothing left to
do in Mr. Arnold's day, and French had much: he thought just the
other way, and reserved his encomium of France for its prose, in
which it was drooping and failing. But this did not matter: it is the
general scope of the critic's advice which is valuable in such cases,
and the general scope of Mr. Arnold's was sound. On the third party,
however,—himself,—the effect was a little disastrous. The reception
which, after long waiting, he had attained, encouraged him not so
much to continue in his proper sphere of literary criticism as to
embark on a wide and far-ranging enterprise of general censure,
which narrowed itself pretty rapidly to an attempt to establish
undogmatic on the ruins of dogmatic Christianity. It would be very
improper to discuss such an undertaking on the merits here; or to
criticise narrowly the series of singular treatises which absorbed
(with exceptions, no doubt, such as the quaint sally of Friendship's
Garland on the occasion of the Franco-German War) Mr. Arnold's
energies for some fifteen or sixteen years. The titles—Culture and
Anarchy, God and the Bible, St. Paul and Protestantism, Literature
and Dogma, etc.—are well known. Of the contents it is enough to
say that, apart from the popular audacity of their wit and the
interesting spectacle of a pure man of letters confidently attacking
thorny questions without any apparatus of special knowledge and
study, they have not been generally thought quite worthy of their
author. There are many brilliant passages in these books as writing,
just as there are some astonishing lapses of taste and logic; but the
real fault of the whole set is that they are popular, that they undergo
the very curse, of speaking without qualification and without true
culture, which Mr. Arnold had himself so freely pronounced.
Fortunately, however, he never quite abandoned the old ways; and
in his last years he returned to them almost wholly. Nothing better of
the kind (individual crotchets always excepted) has ever been
written than his introductions to selected lives from Johnson's Poets,
to Byron, to Shelley (the most crotchety and unsound of all), to
Wordsworth (incomparably the best). He aided others; and a
collection of his purely or mainly literary work is still eagerly
expected. Even this would be extremely unequal and open to
exception here and there. But it would contain some of the very best
things to be found in any English critic. And this after all, if not the
absolutely highest, is one of the highest things that can be said of a
critic, and one of the rarest. Undoubtedly the influence of Mr. Arnold
did not make for good entirely. He discouraged—without in the least
meaning to do so, and indeed meaning quite the contrary—
seriousness, thoroughness, scholarship in criticism. He discouraged—
without in the least meaning to do so, and indeed meaning quite the
contrary—simplicity and unaffectedness in style. But he was a most
powerful stimulus, and in some ways, if not in all, a great example.
Some at least of the things he said were in the very greatest need of
saying, and some of the ways in which he said them were inimitably
charming.
Contemporary with Mr. Arnold, and his complement in critical
influence, was John Ruskin, the sole living author of whom it has
seemed proper to treat here at length, and, since the death of Mr.
Froude, the sole surviving man of letters of the first class who had
published before the middle of the century. He was born in 1819: he
has given copious accounts of his family, of his youth at Denmark
Hill, and so forth, and all the world knows that his father was a
sherry merchant who, though he lived rather plainly, was able to
give his son an early and plentiful indulgence in that Continental
travel which had so much to do with developing his genius. Mr.
Ruskin's education was oddly combined; for, after going to no
school, he was sent to Christ Church as a gentleman-commoner and
took his degree in 1842, having gained the Newdigate three years
earlier. He wrote a good deal of other verse in his early years,—and
he made himself a not inconsiderable draughtsman. But his real
vocation was as little the practice of art as it was the practice of
poetry. As early as 1843 there appeared, by "a Graduate of Oxford,"
the first volume of the famous Modern Painters, which ran to five
large volumes, which covered seventeen years in its original period
of publication, and which was very largely altered and remodelled by
the author during and after this period. But Mr. Ruskin by no means
confined his energies before 1860 to this extensive task. The Seven
Lamps of Architecture (1849), and (between 1851 and 1853) the
larger Stones of Venice, did for architecture what the companion
work did for painting. The Præ-Raphaelite movement of the middle
of the century found in Mr. Ruskin an ardent encomiast and literary
apostle, and between 1850 and 1860 he delivered divers lectures,
the text of which—Architecture and Painting (1854), Political
Economy of Art (1858)—was subsequently published in as
elaborately magnificent a style as his other works. As Modern
Painters drew to its close he became prolific of more numerous and
shorter works, generally with somewhat fantastic but agreeable titles
—Unto this Last (1861), Munera Pulveris (1862), Sesame and Lilies
(1865), The Cestus of Aglaia (1865), The Ethics of the Dust (1866),
The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), Time and Tide by Wear and Tyne
(1867), The Queen of the Air (1869), Aratra Pentelici and The
Eagle's Nest (1872), Ariadne Florentina (1873), Proserpina and
Deucalion (1875 seq.), St. Mark's Rest and Præterita (1885). Not a
few of these were issued in parts and numbers, but Mr. Ruskin's
bulkiest and most characteristic venture in this kind was Fors
Clavigera, which was published at irregular intervals from 1871 to
1884. He has written many other things even in book form, besides
innumerable essays and letters, some of which have been collected
in two gatherings—Arrows of the Chace and On the Old Road.
Two things are mainly perceptible in this immense and at first sight
rather bewildering production. The first, the most disputable and
probably the least important, though the most at the author's heart,
is a vast, fluctuating, but on the whole pretty coherent body of
doctrine in reference to Art. Up to Mr. Ruskin's day, æsthetics had
been little cultivated in England, and such handlings of the subject
as existed—Burke's, Adam Smith's, Alison's, and a few others—were
of a jejune and academic character. Even writers of distinct literary
genius and of great taste for the matter, who had not resided abroad
long, such as Hazlitt, much more such as Charles Lamb and Hartley
Coleridge, betray the want of range and practice in examples. Even
the valuable and interesting work of Mrs. Jameson (1794-1860) was
more occupied with careful arrangement and attractive illustration
than with original theory; and, well as she wrote, her Characteristics
of Shakespeare's Women (1832) is perhaps more important as
literature than the series of volumes—Sacred and Legendary Art,
etc.—which she executed between 1845 and her death. The sense of
the endless and priceless illustration of the best art which was
provided by Gothic domestic and ecclesiastical architecture was only
wakening; as for painting, the examples publicly visible in England
were very few, and even private collections were mostly limited to
one or two fashionable schools—Raphael and his successors, the
later Low Country schools, the French painters in the grand style,
and a few Spaniards.
Strongly impressed by the Romantic revival (he has all his life been
the staunchest of Sir Walter's devotees), a passionate lover of Gothic
architecture both at home and abroad, and early drawn both to the
romantic nature-painting of Turner and the gorgeous colouring of
the early Italian schools, Mr. Ruskin heralded Art with a passion of
which eighteenth century "gusto" had had no notion. But he was by
no means satisfied with heralding Art alone. Anathematising at once
the doctrine that utility is beauty—that beauty is utility he would
always have cheerfully admitted—and the doctrine that the beautiful
is not necessarily connected either with utility, with goodness, or
with truth, he from the first and to the last has endeavoured to work
ethics and æsthetics into a sort of single texture of warp and woof
respectively, pushing his endeavours into the most multiform, the
most curious, and it must be owned sometimes the most grotesque
ramifications and extremities. But he was not satisfied with this bold
attempt at the marriage of two things sometimes deemed hostile to,
and generally held to be independent of, one another. He must
needs be bolder still, and actually attempt to ally with Art, if not to
subject to her, the youngest, the most rebellious, and, as it might
seem, the most matter-of-fact and utilitarian of all the sciences—that
of Political Economy. As we have seen, he had brought the subjects
together in lectures pretty early in his career, and he developed the
combination further in the eccentric book called Unto this Last,
originally published in the Cornhill Magazine as noted above. In this
Æsthetics and Economics combined took a distinctly Socialist turn;
and as England was under the very fullest dominion of the Liberal
middle-class regime, with its belief in laissez-faire and in supply-and-
demand, Mr. Ruskin was not a little pooh-poohed. It would be
improper here to attack or to defend his views, but it is part of the
historian's duty to say that, for good or for ill, they have, though in
forms different from his and doubtless by no means always meeting
his approval, made constant headway, and that much legislation and
still more agitation on the extreme Liberal side, and not there only,
may be said to represent, with very slight transformation, Ruskinian
doctrine applied, now and then, to very anti-Ruskinian purposes.
With regard to æsthetics proper, it might be contended, without too
much rashness, that the history of Ruskinism has not been different;
but to some observers it seems to have described rather a curve
than a steady ascent. After being, between 1840 and 1860, laughed
at, despised, attacked all at once, Mr. Ruskin found his influence as
an art teacher rise steadily during the seventh decade of the
century, and attain its highest point about the close thereof, when he
was made Slade Professor in his own university, and caused young
Oxford to do many fantastic things. But, as always happens, the
hour of triumph was the hour, not, perhaps, of downfall, but of
opposition and renegation. Side by side with Mr. Ruskin's own
theories had risen the doctrine of Art-for-Art's sake, which, itself as
usual half truth and half nonsense, cut at the very root of Ruskinism.
On the other hand, the practical centre of art-schools had shifted
from Italy and Germany to Paris and its neighbourhood, where
morality has seldom been able to make anything like a home; and
the younger painters and sculptors, full of realism, impressionism,
and what not, would have none of the doctrines which, as a matter
of fact, stood in immediate relationship of antecedence to their own.
Lastly, it must be admitted that the extreme dogmatism on all the
subjects of the encyclopedia in which Mr. Ruskin had seen fit to
indulge, was certain to provoke a revolt. But with the substance of
Ruskinism, further than is necessary for comprehension, we are not
concerned.
Yet there are not many things in the English nineteenth century with
which a historian is more concerned than with the style of the
deliverance of these ideas. We have noticed in former chapters—we
shall have to notice yet more in the conclusion—the attempts made
in the years just preceding and immediately following Mr. Ruskin's
birth, by Landor, by De Quincey, by Wilson, and by others in the
direction of ornate, of—as some call it—flamboyant English prose. All
the tendencies thus enumerated found their crown and flower in Mr.
Ruskin himself. That later the crowns and the flowers were, so to
speak, divided, varied, and multiplied by later practitioners, some of
whom will presently be noticed, while more are still alive, is quite
true. But in 1895 it is not very unsafe to prophesy that the
flamboyant style of the nineteenth century will be found by posterity
to have reached its highest exposition in prose with Mr. Ruskin
himself.
Like all great prose styles—and the difference between prose and
poetry here is very remarkable—this was born nearly full grown. The
instances of comparison in those who have tried both harmonies are
rare; those in poets only are delusive and uncertain. But with the
three greatest poets of England who have also been great prose
writers, Milton, Dryden, Shelley, the assertion that the distinctive
quality of their prose developed itself earlier than the distinctive
quality of their verse is only disputable in the case of Milton. And
Milton, as it happened, wrote prose and verse in manners more
nearly approaching each other than any one on record. Mr. Ruskin
has not been a poet, except in extreme minority; but he has been a
great prose writer from the first. It is almost inconceivable that good
judges can ever have had any doubt about him. It is perfectly—it is,
indeed, childishly easy to pick faults, even if matter be kept wholly
out of sight. In Mr. Ruskin's later books a certain tendency to
conversational familiarity sometimes mocks those, and not those
only, who hold to the tradition of dignified and ex cathedra
pronouncement; in his earlier, and in all, it is possible for Momus to
note an undue floridness, an inclination to blank verse in prose,
tricks and manners of this or that kind unduly exuberant and
protuberant.
But when all these things have been allowed for to the very fullest,
what an enormous advance there is on anything that had gone
before! The ornate prose writers of the seventeenth century had too
frequently regarded their libraries only; they had seldom looked
abroad to the vast field of nature, and of art other than literary art.
The ornate writers of the eighteenth, great as they were, had been
as afraid of introspection as of looking outwards, and had spun their
webs, so far as style and ornament were concerned, of words only.
Those of the early nineteenth had been conscious of revolt, and, like
all conscious revolters, had not possessed their souls in sufficient
quietness and confidence. Landor, half a classic and half a Romantic,
had been too much the slave of phrase,—though of a great phrase.
Wilson, impatient in everything, had fluctuated between grandeur
and galimatias, bathos and bad taste; De Quincey, at times
supreme, had at others simply succumbed to "rigmarole." Mr. Ruskin
had a gift of expression equal to the best of these men; and, unlike
them, he had an immense, a steady, a uniform group of models
before him. Indulge as he might in extravagance, there were always
before him, as on a vastly extended dais set before the student, the
glories of nature and of art, the great personalities and productions
of the great artists. He had seen, and he could see (which is a
different thing), the perennial beauties of mountain and cloud, of
tree, and sea, and river; the beauties long, if not perennial, of
architecture and painting. A man may say foolish things,—Mr. Ruskin
has said plenty; but when he has Venice and Amiens and Salisbury,
the Alps and the Jura and the Rhine, Scott and Wordsworth, Turner
and Lionardo, always silently present before his mind's eye, he can
never, if he is a man of genius, go wholly wrong. And he can never
go more than a little wrong when he is furnished by his genius with
such a gift of expression as Mr. Ruskin has had.
For this gift of expression was such as had never been seen before,
and such as, for all the copying and vulgarising of it, has never been
seen since. It is a commonplace of literary history that description,
as such, is not common or far advanced in the earlier English prose.
We find Gray, far on in the eighteenth century, trying to describe a
sunrise, and evidently vexed at the little "figure it makes on paper."
Then the tourists and the travellers of the end of that age made
valiant but not always well directed efforts to induce "it" to make a
figure on paper. Then came the experts or student-interpreters in
ornate prose who have been mentioned. And then came Mr. Ruskin.
"Never so before and never quite so since," must be the repeated
verdict. The first sprightly runnings in these, as in other kinds, are
never surpassed. Kingsley, an almost contemporary, Mr. Swinburne,
a younger rival, have come near; others have done creditably in
imitation; none have equalled, and certainly none have surpassed.
Let the reader read the "Wave Studies" in the first volume of Modern
Painters, more than fifty years old; the "Pine Forest in the Jura,"
almost forty; the "Angel of the Sea," fully thirty-five, and say, if he
has any knowledge of English literature, whether there had been
anything like any of these before. Shelley, perhaps, in some of his
prose had gone near it. Shelley was almost as great a prose writer
as he was a poet. No one else could even be mentioned.
Nor was it mere description, great as Mr. Ruskin is in that, which
differentiated him so strongly. He is a bad arguer; but his arguments
are couched in rhetoric so persuasive that the very critics who detect
his fallacies would almost consent to forfeit the power of detecting,
if they could acquire that of constructing, such delightful
paralogisms. His crotchets of all sorts are sometimes merely childish,
and not even always or very often original; for, like all fertile minds,
he never could receive any seed of thought from another but it bore
plant and fruit at once. But the statement of them is at its best so
captivating that weaklings may pardonably accept, and strong men
may justly tolerate, the worthless kernel for the sake of the exquisite
husk. Few men have less of the true spirit of criticism than Mr.
Ruskin, for in his enthusiasm he will compass sea and land to exalt
his favourite, often for reasons which are perfectly invalid; and in his
appreciation he is not to be trusted at all, having a feminine rather
than a masculine faculty of unreasoned dislike. But praise or blame,
argue or paralogise as he may, the golden beauty of his form
redeems his matter in the eyes of all but those who are unhappy
enough not to see it.
That his influence has been wholly good no one can say. There is
scarcely a page of him that can be safely accepted on the whole as
matter, and the unwary have accepted whole volumes; his form is
peculiarly liable to abuse in the way of imitation, and it has actually
been abused to nausea and to ridicule. But this is not his fault.
There is so little subtlety about Mr. Ruskin that he can hardly deceive
even an intelligent child when he goes wrong. There is so much
genius about him that the most practised student of English can
never have done with admiration at the effects that he produces,
after all these centuries, with the old material and the old tools. He
is constantly provocative of adverse, even of severe criticism; of half
the heresies from which he has suffered—not only that of
impressionism—he was himself the unconscious heresiarch. And yet
the more one reads him the more one feels inclined almost to let
him go uncriticised, to vote him the primacy in nineteenth-century
prose by simple acclamation.
Richard (or as his full name ran), John Richard Jefferies, occupies,
though an infinitely smaller and a considerably lower place than Mr.
Ruskin's, yet one almost as distinctly isolated in a particular
department of æsthetic description. The son of a farmer at Coate, in
North Wiltshire, and born in November 1848, he began journalism at
eighteen, and was a contributor to the North Wilts Herald till he was
nearly thirty. Then he went to London, and in 1878 published some
sketches (previously contributed to the Pall Mall Gazette) under the
title of The Game-Keeper at Home. These, though not much bought,
were very much admired; and Jefferies was encouraged to devote
himself to work of the same kind, which he varied with curious and
not very vigorous semi-philosophic speculations and attempts at
downright novels (a kind which he had also tried in his youth).
Unfortunately the peculiar sort of descriptive writing in which he
excelled was not very widely called for, could hardly under the most
favourable circumstances have brought in any great sums of money,
and was peculiarly liable to depreciate when written to order. It does
not appear that Jefferies had the rare though sometimes recorded
power of accommodating himself to ordinary newspaper hack-work,
while reserving himself for better things now and then; and finally,
he had not been long in London before painful and ultimately fatal
disease added to his troubles. He died in August 1887, being not yet
forty. A burst of popularity followed; his books, The Game-Keeper at
Home, Wild Life in a Southern Country, The Amateur Poacher,
Round about a Great Estate, etc., none of which had been printed in
large numbers, were sold at four or five times their published price;
and, worst of all, cheap imitations of his style began to flood the
newspapers. Nay, the yet later results of this imitation was that
another reaction set in, and even Jefferies' own work was once more
pooh-poohed.
The neglect, the over-valuation, and the shift back to injustice, were
all examples of the evils which beset literature at the present time,
and which the much-blamed critic is almost powerless to cause or
cure. In other days Jefferies was quite as likely to have been
insufficiently rewarded at first by the public; but he would then have
had no temptation to over-write himself, or try alien tasks, and he
would have stood a very good chance of a pension, or a sinecure, or
an easy office in church or state, on one or other of which he might
have lived at ease and written at leisure. Nothing else could really
have been of service to him, for his talent, though rare and
exquisite, was neither rich nor versatile. It consisted in a power of