E-text prepared by Al Haines
by
Edward Arnold
London ——— New York
37 Bedford Street ——— 70 Fifth Avenue
1895
All rights reserved
The following essays appeared in the Forum of New York, andsimultaneously in London, during the years 1894-95. They have beencarefully revised and partly re-written, after due consideration ofvarious suggestions and criticisms both in England and in America. Theaim of the writer was to attempt a mature estimate of the permanentinfluence and artistic achievement of some of the principal prosewriters in the earlier half of the reign of our Queen. The work ofliving authors has not been touched upon, nor any book of poetry,philosophy, or science.
That which in England is conveniently described as the Victorian Age ofliterature has a character of its own, at once brilliant, diverse, andcomplex. It is an age peculiarly difficult to label in a phrase; butits copious and versatile gifts will make it memorable in the historyof modern civilisation. The Victorian Age, it is true, has noShakespeare or Milton, no Bacon or Hume, no Fielding or Scott—nosupreme master in poetry, philosophy, or romance, whose work isincorporated with the thought of the world, who is destined to formepochs and to endure for centuries. Its genius is more scientific thanliterary, more historical than dramatic, greater in discovery than inabstract thought.
In lyric poetry and in romance our age has names second only to thegreatest; its researches into nature and history are at least equal tothose of any previous epoch; and, if it has not many greatphilosophers, it has developed the latest, most arduous, most importantof all the sciences. This is the age of Sociology: its centralachievement has been the revelation of social laws. This social aspectof thought colours the poetry, the romance, the literature, the art,and the philosophy of the Victorian Age. Literature has been thegainer thereby in originality and in force. It has been the loser insymmetry, in dignity, in grace.
The Victorian Age is a convenient term in English literature todescribe the period from 1837 to 1895: not that we assign anysacramental efficacy to a reign, or assume that the Queen has given anyspecial impulse to the writers of her time. Neither reigns, nor years,nor centuries, nor any arbitrary measure of time in the gradualevolution of thought can be exactly applied, or have any formativeinfluence. A period of so many years, having some well-known name bywhich it can be labelled, is a mere artifice of classification. And ofcourse an Englishman will not venture to include in his survey theAmerican writers, or to bring them within his national era. The date,1837, is an arbitrary point, and a purely English point. Yet it iscurious how different a colour may be seen in the main current of theEnglish literature produced before and after that year. In the year ofthe Queen's accession to the throne, the great writers of the earlypart of this century were either dead or silent. Scott, Byron,Shelley, Keats, Coleridge,