capable of writing vigorous public letters; but his pen was not a favourite weapon with him as it was with Cobden and with W. J. Fox. Bright's chief adversary in the battle of franchise, Lowe, was born and bred a pamphleteer. He had taken up arms against the famous tract which brought to a close the most notable series of religious pamphlets known to our literature; and, during his sojourn in Australia, he contributed to the discussion of the land question in that continent a luminous address which went to the very root of the problem (1847). But, on his return to England, his political activity as a pamphleteer soon merged into that of a journalist.

And such (to conclude this brief note) might seem, with exceptions which almost prove the rule, to be the inevitable tendency in this later age of political writing designed to produce an immediate effect. Journalism has not destroyed the pamphlet; but the greater part of its activity has for some time seemed to be absorbed by an organised form of publication which provides both writers and readers with opportunities that are at once more rapid, more facile and more commanding. The future only can show whether the irrepressible desire of individual opinion to find wholly independent expression, together with the recurrence of great crises in which every voice capable of making itself heard finds solace and encouragement in accomplishing this, will suffice to keep alive a form associated with many great names in our literature as well as with many important or interesting epochs of our history.

CHAPTER III

Critical and Miscellaneous Prose

JOHN RUSKIN AND OTHERS

HE critical and miscellaneous prose of the Victorian age is a somewhat unmanageable subject, both because of its volume and because of its variety. Classification is extremely difficult. There are some writers who must clearly be ranked as literary critics and others who, for want of a better word, may be said to belong to the aesthetic school. Others, again, because of that charming note of personal friendliness for which Lamb is supreme, may be described as essayists par excellence. But how are we to classify Borrow; or Lafcadio Hearn, the interpreter of Japan? And is there any one class which will hold at once the author of Modern Painters and the author of Munera Pulveris?

The line of which the evolution is clearest is that of literary critics, and it will be convenient to treat first those who can be classified under this head.

The critics of the Victorian age inherited from Lamb, Coleridge, Hazlitt and Carlyle a tradition which was certainly more wholesome than that which had prevailed in the days of Gifford and Jeffrey; and, thanks to this tradition, criticism grew decidedly more urbane. The oldest of this group by many years was Abraham Hayward, who is now, perhaps, best known as author of The Art of Dining, a volume made up, like much of Hayward's work, of contributions to periodicals written long before their separate publication. But Hayward began with work of a widely different sort-a very good prose translation of Faust; and he never abandoned his interest in Goethe. Near the end of his life, he himself published a volume on the poet

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whom he had begun by translating. He was interested in other foreign writers also, and contributed to The Edinburgh Review articles on the countess Hahn-Hahn and on Stendhal, at a time when these authors were hardly known in England. Hayward could draw a good biographical sketch or build up a very readable article out of anecdotes, just as he made his reputation in society from the same materials; and his articles on contemporaries, such as those on Sydney Smith and Samuel Rogers, are valuable for their personal reminiscences. He could also construct an ingenious argument, as in his More about Junius. But, for critical principles, we search his works in vain. Somewhat akin to Hayward in his love of anecdote, though inferior to him, was John Doran, the pleasant author of Knights and their Days and Their Majesties' Servants. The latter contains much information, but seems to have no clear end in view, and has little depth of scholarship.

And

Doran's reputation among contemporaries is evidence that the level of criticism about the middle of the nineteenth century was low. It was, however, soon to be raised. Ruskin, who, incidentally, is a critic of literature as well as of painting, published his first volume of real weight in 1843. The Germ, the organ of the pre-Raphaelites, appeared in 1850. Matthew Arnold's earliest critical essay was prefixed to his Poems of 1853. That stirring of the spirit which their appearance indicated was shown, also, in the critical work of George Brimley, whose feeble health, resulting in an early death, alone prevented him from winning a great name. His most notable criticism, and the only one to which he affixed his name, was the essay on Tennyson which appeared in Cambridge Essays in 1855. Though he is less than just to Tennyson's Poems of 1830, holding that they "scarcely reach the altitudes of common sense, " and condemning the "perverse, unreal treatment" in the poems inscribed with the names of women, yet, with perfect comprehension, he traces the evolution of Tennyson's art from 1830 to 1842. While none of the other essays can rank with that on Tennyson, they are generally right in tone and substance.

In the case of Brimley, principles are rather implied than stated; they are to be inferred from his judgments on particular 1 See, ante, Vol. XIII, Chap. v.

works. The attempts in English to make the statement of a principle the main object have been few and incomplete; but, among the few, that of Eneas Sweetland Dallas deserves honourable mention. Both by blood and by training, Dallas was drawn towards a philosophical treatment of his subject, for he was of Scottish parentage, and he studied at Edinburgh under Sir William Hamilton. His journalistic career carried him, at times, far enough away from philosophy; but, when he had leisure to write a volume, his thoughts took a philosophic castboth in the somewhat immature Poetics, an Essay on Poetry, and in that unhappily named book, The Gay Science. How he came to write, also, the pseudonymous Kettner's Book of the Table, a Manual of Cookery, it is not altogether easy to understand. The Gay Science is, certainly, one of the most remarkable works of its class that we possess. It is, first of all, lucid both in thought and in style; and it is suggestive in a very rare degree. The preface proclaims that the author's purpose is "to settle the first principles of Criticism." But, while Dallas feels himself to be a pioneer, he is not unconscious of the limits of his actual achievement, and admits that he has done little more than lay down the groundwork of a science. It must be remembered that his design was never carried to completion; there were to have been four volumes, but only two were written. The incurable English distrust of system condemned the book to oblivion. The Gay Science is psychological from the foundation, and, in more points than one, anticipates by a generation the development of opinion. In nothing is this anticipation more remarkable than in Dallas's view of what is now called the subliminary self. This, he holds, lies at the root of all art. Aristotle's theory that art is imitation, is, in his opinion, false, and "has transmitted an hereditary squint to criticism." What art does is not to imitate what any eye can see, but, rather, to bring into clear vision what is first apprehended only by "the hidden soul." Art has to do with pleasure, but not alone with the pleasure which the sensual man recognises as such; there is hidden pleasure, as well as a hidden soul. It is everywhere the subliminary self which is active in art, and the subliminary self to which true art appeals. Dallas prided himself most of all on his analysis of imagination, and imagination he pronounced to be "but another name for the

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automatic action of the mind or any of its faculties." Everywhere, then, The Gay Science moves in the region of ideas. Dallas has a refreshing confidence that there is a cause for everything in art as well as in physical science: a cause, for example, why the earlier poets of modern civilisation delight most of all in sunrise, while those of the nineteenth century delight in sunset. This is clearly an importation, through Hamilton, of the German spirit; and, if Dallas appears to be guilty of that excess with which he charged German criticism-that it is "all idea"-it must be remembered that his work is incomplete, and that the unwritten concluding volumes would have redressed the balance.

On a lower plane stood James Hannay who had ended a naval, and begun a literary, career before he was twenty. It was not unnatural that his experience in the navy should suggest the possibility that he might follow in the steps of Marryat, and Singleton Fontenoy and a collection of short stories are based upon that experience. But the knowledge of a boy could furnish no such groundwork as Marryat's long years of storm and battle. Hannay turned, rather, to criticism, and, in the essays contributed to The Quarterly Review, which were afterwards reprinted, as well as in the lectures entitled Satire and Satirists, he showed taste and judgment.

About the same time, both Walter Bagehot and Richard Holt Hutton began to write. They were associated for nine years as joint editors of The National Review; and Hutton's fine memoir of his colleague bears testimony to the closeness of their friendship. Of the two, Hutton, though far the less gifted, was, as a literary critic, the more influential; for Bagehot was, essentially, a publicist, and his Literary Studies, a collection of papers contributed to The National Review from the early fifties onwards, are little more than a by-product; while, in Hutton's case, notwithstanding the theological inclinations shown in a volume on cardinal Newman, in Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought and in one of the volumes of Essays, Theological and Literary, the critical element is the most important. Yet, Hutton is rarely free from some preoccupation which is not purely literary. His personal tastes, first of all, were theological; and, in literature, he most willingly dealt with writers in whom some theological interest was either latent or