English literature in the nineteenth century

Positivist ways of thinking left a profound impression on the work of George Eliot. A lady of great learning, she was deeply read in European philosophy and in the latest critical writings. She early stood up against orthodox religiosity. She admired and translated Feuerbach, was friendly with Herbert Spencer and other scholars and scientists of his group. On the one hand, positive philosophy was of some use in giving theoretical support to Eliot's notions both of society and of its ideas; on the other hand, it narrowed her vision and scope and frequently led to the writer's incorporating her doctrines in novels, generally to the letters' detriment. George Eliot was a social novelist and one who took her duties to her readers seriously. She lacked Dickens's sense of the dramatic contrast between rich and poor, she was rather inclined to accept them in a positivist spirit, as something that should be taken for granted and only subjected to cautious reform. There is no defiance, no open rebellion in her books. And yet their true and honest tale of the drab monotony and injustice of life, of the daily crime of indifference of man to man is in its way enough to make her readers realise a great many things they had previously left unnoticed.

In writing, as Eliot mostly did, about humble country folk, and setting them far higher than their "elders and betters", the novelist added her mite towards educating public opinion and securing the democratic rights of those she glorified in her books, as Adam Bede, the joiner, or Silas Marner, the weaver (Dickens himself, fine as his popular characters were, did not call his novels Samuel Welter orMark Tapley, but the Pickwick Papers and Martin Chuzzlewit. Whatever he did, the hero had to be a gentleman).

Eliot's best known novel is The Mill on the Floss. Largely autobiographical, it is a searching analysis of the heroine's inner life, of the forces that joined to make her an outcast in the petty-bourgeois community she belonged to. The novelist's portrayal of the selfishness and callousness of self-satisfied mediocrity has a lasting value. This is also true of George Eliot's most ambitious book Middlemarch—a bold endeavour of taking the whole of a typical English provincial town for her subject and depicting its representative figures so as to achieve a sort of a cross-section of the most important elements of the prevalent social psychology, of the influence of environment and heredity on the shaping of the individual mind. The political problems of England are treated in Felix Holt the Radical, an early specimen of what later in the 20th century came to be called "a novel of ideas". In some of Eliot's novels (partly even in The Mill on the Floss) the discussion of intellectual problems and the too obvious embodiment of abstract ideas into characters proves detrimental to art and testifies to the unwholesome influence of preconceived philosophical notions.

This criticism also applies to the work of George Meredith, a poet and novelist whose books marked an important stage in the development of the psychological novel in the late 19th century. His art is complex, being an imperfect blend of subtle psychologism shot through and through by the critical and scientific tendencies of the period and of a somewhat laboured and over-ornamented impressionism in style and language. A consistent upholder of evolution as the central law dominating nature no less than society, Meredith regarded the destiny of man as following and illustrating universal laws. His first novel of importance, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, considers life as a painful process of gradual maturing of intellect and emotion, the hero's natural development being thwarted by the artificial and snobbish system of education introduced by his aristocratic father. Interference with natural law has disastrous consequences for the life and happiness of Richard and those he holds dear. The prejudices and narrow-minded arrogance of the privileged is ironically laid bare in Meredith's best known novel The Egoist. A scientifically refined psychological interpretation of Sir Willoughby Patterne's feelings exposes to ridicule and scorn his upper class belief in his own impeccability and in the absolute moral value of his own judgement. The contrast between the immensity of pretension and the actual lack of anything to justify it is at once comical and instructive.

By making the egoist Willoughby undergo a humiliating defeat at the hands of an inexperienced girl, strong-minded enough to defend the right to dispose of her own self in love and marriage, Meredith mocks the overweening pride of the upper class and lets the reader see it in its true proportions. A radical in his political views, he traced with warm sympathy the thorny progress of a rebel against a false and hollow society in Beauchamp's Career.

Meredith's over-elaborate and sometimes wayward style with his resolute preference for the rarely used word and quaint metaphor made it next to impossible for him to please the general reader. Subsequent generations have, so far, not reversed the judgment of the writer's own contemporaries. The somewhat heavy intellectuality, the abstract philosophising Meredith often indulges in demanding a strain and an effort on the readers' part that only the literary minority are prepared to make. The majority decidedly preferred to skip the pages of Wilkie Collins's sensational thrillers and Anthony Trollope's circumstantial comfortable tales of provincial life with commonplace people doing commonplace things and arriving at a timely happy end. Trollope's were the most gifted and true-to-life of numerous Victorian bestsellers.

The greatest contributor to the literature whose principal purpose was to divert and amuse the reader was Arthur Conan Doyle. His stories of the adventures of the master detective Sherlock Holmes fascinated England, and the name of the hero became a household word.

Meanwhile the more serious literary work of the period was affected by modern schools of thought. The ideas of positive philosophy also found their way into poetry where, however, they curiously and variously combined with elements of the romantic tradition, never quite extinct in England until the close of the century. In this sense the art of Tennyson can be called transitional, in its endeavour to blend romantic soaring above the commonplace and a romantic treatment of the commonplace — with problems strictly belonging to the epoch and necessarily touched with its prose. In his first poetical ventures Tennyson excells in word-painting, in melody and euphony. His themes are frequently borrowed from an idealised past (comprising medieval England and classical antiquity) and from present-day scenes. In his poem The Princess, for example, a fantastic setting is used to inculcate modern ideas of female emancipation and learning.

Tennyson is at his best in lyrical poetry, ever fresh with spontaneous feeling, with admiration and understanding of everything that is lovely in the life of nature and the heart. Unfortunately, Tennyson early began to entertain the belief that his was the task of teaching his own generation, and those to follow, a new outlook, a new lesson of morality, and the didactic purpose he set to himself, mostly rather specifically Victorian, took a great deal away from the immediate charm of his lyrical impulse. Thus, the beautiful lyrics collected in In Memoriam are rather heavily overlaid with platitudes of modern moral philosophy. In the poem of Maud there is an abrupt, poetically and logically uncalled for transition from a violent curse of the modern Money-God, from glorification of true love as the only thing untainted in a world of vulgar material interests — on to jubilant praise of war and conquest in the final section of the poem.

In Tennyson's Idylls of the King the romance of the Middle Ages centered upon the legendary King Arthur and his Round Table is packed till bursting point with purely modern moralising, with intellectual problems peculiarly midnineteenth century. It has been aptly remarked by one of the contemporary reviewers that to associate these with the life of a rude age produces the same effect as to combine a man's head, a horse's neck, a woman's body, and a fish's tail. King Arthur is less of a true knight than a modern gentleman whose wildest deeds of daring are done on the Exchange and whose most deadly quarrels are settled in the Court of Queen's Bench.

Tennyson's musical and pictorial art is sufficient for lyrics, most remembered for imaginative symbolic descriptions of states of mind, and sometimes also for his popular idylls — studies of simple hearts in the Wordsworthian tradition, — but it hardly ever sees him through his longer poems necessitating a wider and more philosophical thinking.

Tennyson's importance for the poetry of his age was, for most of later 19th and 20th century critics, eclipsed by that of Browning. Endowed with a robust intellect and a solid education he was abreast of the advanced liberal thought of his time. His interest in moral and political problems, in the freedom of peoples and individuals, in passions and ideas characteristic of past and present lent a bright open-eyed vitality as well as a breadth and depth to his artistic vision that Tennyson manifestly lacks. While certainly not a rebel from the main body of Victorian beliefs Browning questioned enough of their assumptions to hold an individualistic attitude that proved his intellectual courage.

From modern biological theories Browning drew knowledge that helped him to attempt a detailed psychological motivation of his characters' emotions. From this point of view two of his greater works are of the keenest interest. One is his early dramatic poem of Paracelsus, a 17th century Faust, bent on discovering the secret spring of all knowledge and becoming a benefactor of mankind. The other is one of his final achievements, the poem of The Ring and the Book. The same event, the dastardly murder of a 17-year-old woman by her highly connected husband is the subject of twelve long narratives, analysing the complex motives and reactions of all the participants, witnesses, and judges of the drama. Browning's most memorable contribution is probably his dramatic lyrics, a large number of various monologues that the poet puts on the lips of characters belonging each to a different epoch, country, class, culture, religion. The art of speaking for an astounding variety of dramatic characters and making their speech sound psychologically true, has won universal admiration. Browning's style struck the readers with its vigorous independence of all set models and the rich complexity of vocabulary and imagery. While criticising his age from the standpoint of humane and democratic ideals, Browning nevertheless was a man of his own time and shared its social optimism.

Towards the mid-seventies and more markedly so towards the 'eighties a crisis of Victorian England began to make itself felt. There were the first warning symptoms of decay in English economics; there was a general move towards political reaction; a wave of chauvinistic imperialism rose high; British colonial power was greater than ever, Queen Victoria was proclaimed empress of India, and the grandeur of the British Empire became the key-phrase to official ideology. At the same time a steady resistance to the nationalistic and aggressive policy of the ruling classes rapidly gained in scope and intensity. That resistance was stimulated by the nonconformist free thought of the previous period and by pessimistic trends of "fin de siecle" Philosophic systems, such as that of the German scholar Schopenhauer.  He had written his famous and controversial book The World as Will and Idea as early as 1819 but it only became important by the end of the century.

The beginning of the crisis of Victorianism, of the decay of the English countryside is reflected in the bleakly pessimistic novels of Thomas Hardy. The narrow village-world he depicts acts as a sort of microcosm through which an insight is obtained into the deepening gloom of the century's last decades.

Hardy's first book of indisputable artistic worth is The Return of the Native where, like Eliot in Middlemarch, he introduces a kind of collective hero in Egdon Heath, a small out of the way place inhabited by poor wood-cutters and poorer farmers. According to Hardy, it is precisely among common villagers devoting themselves to a severe struggle for existence that genuine and spontaneous passions still live, as distinct from the artificial sophistications that pass for feeling among city ladies and gentlemen, if is in these God-forsaken villages, Hardy claims, that dramas of truly Sophoclean grandeur are enacted.

Clashes of wills, beliefs, personalities, dramas of love and death form the subject-matter of most of Hardy's novels. Those of his characters that adapt themselves well to their surroundings, that become part of their nature and scenery mostly do well and make good; those that rebel against them in one way or another are generally destroyed or made hopelessly miserable. Sometimes these rebels, these unclassed ones who attempt to rise above their own sphere succeed in ruining those who - under any other circumstances were made for a simple and healthy life, a life full of such work as is consistent with nature's ways and benefit. This is what occurs in Woodlanders where the lives of such true children of nature as Giles Winterbourne and Marthey South are wrecked by weaklings who have severed their ties with their native land.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

In the novels Hardy wrote in his later years (Tess of the d`Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure) his favourite characters fight a losing battle against the cruel social law that is ever ready to do down those who by birth and education do not belong to the privileged classes. The inhumanity of society causes the tragic death of Hardy's most attractive heroine Tess; Jude is thoroughly beaten in his quest for inner freedom, for knowledge, for unconventional love. "Happiness," Hardy sadly remarked, "is but an episode in the general drama of pain." In his novels Hardy also displayed some affinities with the scientific thought of his time — ideas of evolution, of biological necessity and struggle for existence go together with somewhat mystical notions of fate blindly ruling the destiny of men and women and often taking the shape of tragic irony.

After the hue and cry raised by critics and official opinion about the dreary pessimism of Jude the Obscure Hardy gave up novels and devoted himself to poetry which he had been steadily writing since his youth but hardly ever publishing. It varies much in nature and form, including philosophical lyrics, popular ballads and songs.

Hardy's poetry has certain parallels with that of James Thomson, a philosophical poet in violent revolt against Victorian moral and religious assumptions. His symbolic poem The City of Dreadful Night is a ghastly vision of contemporary London and the "life-in-death" existence of its inhabitants.

The stark pessimism of the last decades was strongest in the works of George Gissing. He emphasised his wish to go on where Dickens had left off. "I mean to bring home to people the ghastly condition (material, mental, and moral) of our poor classes, to show the hideous injustice of our whole system of society, to give light on the plan of altering it..." In his first novel Workers in the DawnGissing may be said to have stuck to this program, for he exposed the sordid realities underlying capitalist civilisation and discussed social reform. But quite early in his career he gave up all idea of altering the world. He became increasingly hostile to socialism and to the working class (Demos). Gissing's descriptions are naturalistic and convey a feeling of deadly disgust with all aspects of physical degradation. He never succeeds in creating convincing flesh and blood characters of "low" life and hardly ever rises to see their essential humanity.

On the whole, English naturalism as represented by Gissing, Arthur Morrison and, partly, George Moore was derivative. It is easily traced to French influence, and it never assumed the stature and the originality it had in France. This is not to say that it had no raison d'etre in England where it was stimulated by the great progress of science and consequent desire to explore the interdependence of  physiology, psychology and sociology, to give a scientific explanation of man and society.

If the novel was an immediate answer to the relentless demands of time, the answer given by poetry was more complex and indirect. Part of it seemed utterly divorced from the problems of the age. In 1848 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt and John Millais organised an exhibition of their pictures, all of them signed with the letters P. R. B. —which stood for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This implied that the artists were of the opinion that the decay of art had started ever since Raphael, who, they proclaimed, had already been formal and uninspired.  They called for a return to early Italian Pre-Raphaelite art (Botticelli) where religious inspiration had led to true and pure beauty. They lovingly painted pictures on religious subjects and on subjects borrowed from romantic poets, as for example, Keats. Their criticism of the soulless mechanical modernity assumed a purely aesthetic form; it deliberately refused to seek for universal accept ion and appealed to a small and sophisticated minority.

Nevertheless, whatever the limitations of the creed of the Pre-Raphaelites, their pictures and poetry were a protest against the prosperous bourgeois and against the emptiness of official academic art. It was this protest that the well-known critic and writer John Ruskin welcomed in his famous pamphlet Pre-Raphaelitism. He praised the young painters for their earnestness of purpose, for their lofty perception of the artist's message to his public. Yet his own concepts were much more profound and radical. In studying art Ruskin came to the bitter conclusion that its mission could not be fulfilled unless it helped to make life more beautiful. Now in an age of industrial capitalism with all the inevitable hideousness it brings in its wake art proved incapable of carrying out its main function, because most people were too miserable and too uneducated to enjoy it. Therefore it is the business of the artist not only to create beauty but to enable common people to feel that beauty. This is how Ruskin came to think of the artist's duty in social terms. He preached his sermon of love and mutual kindness to both higher and lower classes, naively entreating them to fight the evils of capitalism together.

These ideas of Ruskin's were also largely influenced by his senior contemporary Thomas Carlyle, writer, historian and essayist, one of the first to utter a sweeping denunciation of the victorious English bourgeoisie. Carlyle, according to Marx, was strong in his hatred of capitalism and in his understanding of all the suffering it stood for but wrong-headed in his apotheosis of medieval old times as an everlasting model of social and moral perfection. Ruskin was at one with him in his  abhorrence of the annihilating effect of industrialisation upon the natural development of the majority of people, but his attention was focused on what was needed to regenerate men so that their hearts should be open to the further vivifying influence of art.

Ruskin's political and economic ideas were naive (as for instance in The Political Economy of Arty or Unto This Last), but his keen sense of the fundamental wrongness of bourgeois civilisation and passionate belief in the uplifting and restorative power of art had a far-reaching effect appreciated even outside England, as for instance by L. N. Tolstoy. The aesthetic works of Ruskin were widely and anxiously read, ail the more so as his prose was lucid and pure and easy to follow- His worship of art led his followers to two different conclusions. One of them amounted to developing Ruskin's cult of beauty into a doctrine of the supremacy of art — to the exclusion of most other principles and interests. The other was focused on the social aspect of Ruskin's theories. Its upholders came to think of beauty mostly in the terms of its moral and social value. Ruskin had voiced his indignant protest against the higher classes monopolising art and thus making it effete and anaemic.

William Morris, his disciple, went further than that. He began by being an enthusiastic Pre-Raphaelite painter; he proceeded to write poems on subjects borrowed from Classical myth and medieval folklore and, seeing that poetry was helpless to relieve the dreary ugliness of Victorian England, he started as decorator and artistic designer with the view of bringing some beauty into everyday life. Unfortunately, the lovely wall-paper, carpets, stained glass he produced, using nothing but the simplest looms, were so expensive that only the very rich could afford to buy them. And of course the readers of Morris's poetry were not numerous either. It was in his desperate attempt to make art serve the majority of the people that Morris adopted the ideas of socialism as the only system that could provide for the happiness of the greatest number of men and women. This occurred at the beginning of the 'eighties when the protest of working-class and socialist agitation grew in power, as the crisis of "classical" capitalism had begun to make itself felt in more ways than one. Morris subsidised and contributed to several socialist papers, became an active member of the Socialist League and wrote poetry intended to inspire and to enlighten the working men of England so as to make them turn their minds to socialism. The Chants for Socialists, The Poems by the Way, the verse narrative of The Pilgrims of Hope called for freedom, justice and repeal of the selfish laws of capitalism.

Morris's dreams of the universal happiness to be realised after a world-wide victory of socialism were embodied in his prose tales A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere. The land of the future as Morris sees it, must primarily be beautiful, but in contradistinction to Ruskin, Morris perfectly realised that the way to the land of bliss did not lie through harmony and reconciliation of classes but through clashes between them. He was but the most talented, versatile and best known of a fairly large number of revolutionary poets of the 'eighties (Henry Salt, James Joynes and others).

The other literary group also supporting the doctrines of Ruskin drew mostly on their weaker aspects. Thus, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti the concept of the supreme influence of art became mystically religious. His poetry is overelaborate, refined and heavily ornate. The beauty of its imagery is marred by mannerisms, some of which are repetitive, and all of which are particularly obvious in comparison with the sources from which he draws his inspiration — the poetry of Dante, Blake, Keats, and the popular ballad (as in Sister Helen). With Rossetti poetry moves into a sphere that can hardly be accessible to anybody outside a small artistic elite. It seems safe to say that Rossetti's greatest achievement lay in painting: his insistence on simplicity, on spirituality, his concentration on the inner instead of the outward life were a fine display of indignation at official routine and mediocrity.