English literature in the nineteenth century

Rossetti exercised a powerful influence upon Algernon Charles Swinburne who besides went to school to French poets (Hugo, Baudelaire} and painters (Manet). His early poems, like the art of the Pre-Raphaelites, were an aesthetic protest against the pompous formality of Victorian art and poetry. Swinburne's frank eroticism shocked the critics who raised a terrible outcry against the immorality of the author. For some time Swinburne was carried away by the Italian movement for liberation (Risorgimento) and celebrated the cause of freedom in his masterpiece, a-collection of poems called Songs before Sunrise. But he soon gave up politics and went heart and soul into a practical and theoretical defence of the idea of the supremacy of art, which, he maintained, should have no purpose but beauty. Swinburne's poems and tragedies were generally brilliant specimens of excellent technique, as far as word-painting and musical effects were concerned. Their virtuosity is extraordinary but they are singularly void of true depth, — in thought and feeling alike.

In his later years Swinburne unexpectedly reconciled his republicanism and his sympathy with freedom — with the most respectful admiration of Queen Victoria, of British colonial policy and even of the imperialist Boer War.

The formalistic aesthetic note that rang in the poetry, prose and critical essays of Swinburne was still more clearly pronounced in the work of Walter Pater. A disciple of John Ruskin, he resolutely detached the latter's cult of beauty from moral and social purpose. He says: "Let us understand by poetry all literary production which attains the power of giving pleasure by its form as distinct from its matter." Aestheticism goes hand in hand with extreme subjectivism and agnosticism in the whole of Pater's literary output. In his history of Renaissance painters, in the collection of critical essaysAppreciations Pater definitely says he does not see his way to any manner of objective interpretation. A critic can only answer one question: "What is this song or picture to me?" This reduces the function of a critic to an impressionistic description of his own sensations in connection with art. Impressionism also characterises Pater's fiction (Marius the Epicurean).

Pater profoundly worked on the literary theory of the poet and critic Arthur Symons, of the painter and prose writer Audrey Beardsley and even more so on that of Oscar Wilde, who in the words of a later historian, "pushed his master's sober and academic doctrine to an excessive and cynical display". Not only did he support Pater's idea on the divorce between art and morality — he went so far as to maintain that perfect art was perfectly consistent with perfect immorality. This is the subject of the essay Pen, Pencil and Poison. In his own art, however (fairy-tales, plays, novels, poetry), Wilde was very often a moralist. In The Happy Prince and Other Stories] in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, in dramas like The Ideal Husband the moral is that of altruism, kindness and honesty. This contradiction between theory and practice is partly the result of Wilde's desire to shock bourgeois public opinion, to take Mrs. Grundy's breath away with the sharpness of his paradoxes. These were really Wilde's way of protest against the vulgarity and flatness of official ways of thinking. Paradoxes find their way into all his dramas and novels alike and are mostly a simple and effective argument against the pretentious futility of received opinion. Wilde's work was certainly not so immoral as Wilde's theory proclaimed. Thus, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, despite the emphatic statement of the preface, the conclusion the author arrives at is that immorality mars beauty — at least in a society that is not yet ready to give full scope to persons who seek for ' unfettered expression of their ego, regardless of other people's sentiments. Wilde's most passionate plea for humanity is his Ballad of Reading Gaol.

A similar,  though essentially  different conflict between theoretical indifference to all moral purpose in art and practical preoccupation with moral problems ,   is obvious  in  all  the writings of  Robert Louis Stevenson. His art has curious affinities with very nearly all of the most important aspects of contemporary literature. To begin with, it has tangible associations with the aesthetic school whose "art for art" precepts Stevenson often repeats; he is next closely associated with the novel of adventure that flourished in the last decades of the century, the difference being ' that with Stevenson narrative is also psychological, written in a style that is a model of purity, simplicity and descriptive felicity; this brings Stevenson into close contact with the psychological novel, dominated by the influence of French translations of Dostoeysky's books. Stevenson, finally, is the bearer of romantic traditions in English literature.  His poetry was stimulated by Coleridge's and Wordsworth's , interpretation of folklore, by the latter's exploration of a child's mentality; some of his novels are historical, after the manner of Scott (e.g.,   Kidnapped). Stevenson's poetry with his little readers, with their range of interest and vision. Stevenson's later novels are dramatic and they considerably gain in depth and subtlety. His is a transitional and mixed art that has all the charm of profound sincerity, of anxious searching for truth and beauty.

The refinement of the aesthetic school, no less than the pessimistic tendencies of later 19th century social thought, were criticised as decadent and effete by poets like William Henley and Rudyard Kipling. The latter alternately adopted a naturalistic and imitative pseudo-romantic technique. An enthusiastic supporter of the British Empire whose mission, Kipling believed, was to be a saviour of all nations, Kipling glorified simple men of action, builders of the Empire, sacrificing health, wealth and their very lives for what they felt to be their patriotic duty. They form the subject matter of Kipling's poetry (as in Barrack Room Ballads or The Seven Seas) and of his prose (as in Soldiers Three). As Kipling mostly describes common men — soldiers, sailors, mechanics and petty colonial servants — his descriptions of their self-sacrifice and heroic endeavour generally do not strike us as false. It is only when Kipling lauds the great men of the Empire and the White Man's burden that he departs from truth and art simultaneously.

Kipling's novel The Light That Failed is the story of a painter who discovers his vocation in painting scenes of war, colonial war, in all its naked ugliness and cruelty and yet conveying the feeling that all suffering is worth while for the sake of Britain's greatness.

Kipling is at his best in works for children where reactionary politics interfere least with his narrative and descriptive art. He was also a great master of the short story, of striking description, particularly of Indian scenery.

The political and moral values Kipling stood for were not palatable to his ^more advanced and sensitive contemporaries. Their spokesman was the poet and critic Matthew Arnold. The all-embracing criticism of Victorian civilisation voiced in his essays found numerous admirers. He endeavoured to make his poetry severely classical so as to strike a contrast to the shoddy sentimentality that was so much in vogue with the general public.

Disgust with the spirit of Victorianism culminated in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh. The author, a scholar and scientist, was at one and the same time profoundly influenced by the new biological theories, by the discoveries of Darwin, and repelled by their mechanistic interpretation. The novel is a history of several generations of the middle-class family of the Pontifexes. Butler's chief attention is given to their youngest off-spring Ernest. His life is very nearly wrecked by the false and hypocritical upbringing he has enjoyed in the thoroughly smug home of his clerical father and his weak and sentimental mother. School and University do their best to deprive him of the capacity for independent thought (in an earlier satire on the fantastic land of Erewhon, a parody of contemporary English life, Butler had called them Colleges of Unreason whose main function was to cause atrophy pf opinion). It is only after Ernest's public disgrace and imprisonment that the scales fall from his eyes and he starts thinking for himself. On finally realising the nature of the humbug and the pious frauds Victorian ideology rests upon, Ernest does exactly what the author himself did: he practically becomes a recluse rejecting all social a*id domestic ties and devotes himself to science and fiction, taking every precaution not to mix freely with the leading literati of his time.

Butler's style conforms as little to received notions as his ideas. It is concise, terse, dry and ironical; it entirely dispenses with the sentimental vocabulary of emotion and with rhetorical flourishes. The author dissects and analyses, he mocks the fashionable stylistic tags and is careful to appeal to reason and logic rather than to feeling and imagination. His very imagery (frequently derived from the author's biological studies) is more informative and businesslike than emotional and suggestive. The quiet, subdued matter-of-factness of his tone makes his indictment of contemporary bourgeois ways of thinking all the more formidable.

Butler was wise not to have published in his own life-time a book that would certainly have made him the butt of savage critical attacks. It therefore was brought to public attention posthumously and constitutes one of the stimulating influences in the history of the advanced novel in the first decades of the 20th century.

The new flowering of critical and social realism associated with the names of Shaw, Galsworthy, Wells, Conrad, Bennett, though inaugurated in the later years of the 19th century, belongs rather to the 20th and will, accordingly, be treated in the last volume of the present series.