HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
No. 61
_Editors:_
THE RT. HON. H. A. L. FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT.D., LL.D., F.B.A.
PROF. SIR J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
_A complete classified list of the volumes of The Home University Library already published to be found at the back of this book._
THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
LONDON THORNTON BUTTERWORTH LTD.
COPYRIGHT, 1913,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTION 7
I THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE AND ITS ENEMIES 12
II THE GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS 90
III THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS 156
IV THE BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE 204
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 253
INDEX 255
The Editors wish to explain that this book is not put forward as an authoritative history of Victorian literature. It is a free and personal statement of views and impressions about the significance of Victorian literature made by Mr. Chesterton at the Editors' express invitation.
THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE
INTRODUCTION
A section of a long and splendid literature can be most conveniently treated in one of two ways. It can be divided as one cuts a currant cake or a Gruyere cheese, taking the currants (or the holes) as they come. Or it can be divided as one cuts wood--along the grain: if one thinks that there is a grain. But the two are never the same: the names never come in the same order in actual time as they come in any serious study of a spirit or a tendency. The critic who wishes to move onward with the life of an epoch, must be always running backwards and forwards among its mere dates; just as a branch bends back and forth continually; yet the grain in the branch runs true like an unbroken river.
Table of contents (by pages)
- 1: The Victorian Age in Literature by Chesterton
- 2: And deal with the great Victorians
- 3: The rants of Shakespeare with the rants of Victor Hugo
- 4: William Cobbett was buried at Farnham
- 5: The romantic liberalism of Rousseau
- 6: His puns were not all good nor were Shakespeare's
- 7: And Macaulay is typical of them
- 8: This was the small conscious Macaulay
- 9: In substance Macaulay accepted the conclusions of Bentham
- 10: Before the true Victorian epoch began
- 11: Of which the spear blade was Newman
- 12: As an ordinary lowland peasant
- 13: As a student and disciple of Goethe
- 14: Will you accuse us of overproduction
- 15: He may be present not as on Gilboa but Golgotha
- 16: Who also employed the long rich rolling sentence that
- 17: Newman and Ruskin were as serious
- 18: No one will seriously rank Kingsley
- 19: But Arnold kept a smile of heart broken forbearance
- 20: Dickens was a mob and a mob in revolt
- 21: Gradgrind long before he created him
- 22: Liked the things that Cobbett had liked
- 23: If they had been written by George Lewes
- 24: It is right that womanhood should specialise in individuals
- 25: And Victorian women most of all
- 26: Which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Bronte could do
- 27: The Brontes suggest themselves here
- 28: It is Charlotte Bronte who enters Victorian literature
- 29: But though Ouida was violent and weak where Mrs
- 30: Mantalini collecting the washing
- 31: When we hear of Aunt Betsy Trotwood
- 32: All really representative Victorians
- 33: Who more or less mirror their mid Victorian mood
- 34: And Disraeli and even Kingsley
- 35: Meredith really is a Pantheist
- 36: The God of Meredith is impersonal
- 37: But cannot afford the penny for Redworth plain
- 38: On whom I might delight to linger on Shorthouse
- 39: It meant a real Victorian talent
- 40: But Tennyson was a provincial Virgil
- 41: For whatever else Tennyson was
- 42: Lancelot was the first in tournament
- 43: These metres and manners were not accidental
- 44: Tennyson and the rest are nowhere
- 45: To judge Swinburne by Songs Before Sunrise
- 46: The chief thing about Swinburne
- 47: Rossetti was the Italian in England
- 48: As poetical as Swinburne and far more perfect
- 49: If his poems were too like wallpapers
- 50: But the very fact that Patmore was
- 51: Huxley had no hand in spreading these fallacies
- 52: This paradox pursued and tormented the Victorians
- 53: Victorian Radicalism had not heart enough for the business
- 54: It is either a nocturne or a nightmare of childish nonsense
- 55: Aubrey Beardsley may be admired as an artist or no
- 56: Max Beerbohm has been able to imagine Mr
- 57: In which the Socialists that is
- 58: Shaw supported them and supplanted them
- 59: But much smaller than Langland
- 60: He thought it immoral to neglect romance
- 61: The Victorian Age made one or two mistakes
- 62: And Stedman's Victorian Poets