From Chaucer to Tennyson
construction, the most perfect of her novels, and _Silas Marner_ of her
shorter stories. Her analytic habit gained more and more upon her as she
wrote. _Middlemarch_, in some respects her greatest book, lacks the
unity of her earlier novels, and the story tends to become subordinate
to the working out of character studies and social problems. The
philosophic speculations which she shared with her husband were
seemingly unfavorable to her artistic growth, a circumstance which
becomes apparent in her last novel, _Daniel Deronda_, 1877. Finally in
the _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_, 1879, she abandoned narrative
altogether, and recurred to that type of "character" books which we have
met as a flourishing department of literature in the 17th century,
represented by such works as Earle's _Microcosmographie_ and Fuller's
_Holy and Profane State_. The moral of George Eliot's writings is not
obtruded. She never made the artistic mistake of writing a novel of
purpose, or what the Germans call a _tendenz-roman_; as Dickens did, for
example, when he attacked imprisonment for debt, in _Pickwick_; the poor
laws, in _Oliver Twist_; the Court of Chancery, in _Bleak House_; and
the Circumlocution office, in _Little Dorrit_.
Next to the novel, the essay has been the most overflowing literary form
used by the writers of this generation--a form characteristic, it may
be, of an age which "lectures, not creates." It is not the essay of
Bacon, nor yet of Addison, nor of Lamb, but attempts a complete
treatment. Indeed, many longish books, like Carlyle's _Heroes and Hero
Worship_ and Ruskin's _Modern Painters_, are, in spirit, rather literary
essays than formal treatises. The most popular essayist and historian of
his time was Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), an active and
versatile man, who won splendid success in many fields of labor. He was
prominent in public life as one of the leading orators and writers of
the Whig party. He sat many times in the House of Commons, as member for
Calne, for Leeds, and for Edinburgh, and took a distinguished part in
the debates on the Reform bill of 1832. He held office in several Whig
governments, and during his four years' service in British India, as
member of the Supreme Council of Calcutta, he did valuable work in
promoting education in that province, and in codifying the Indian penal
law. After his return to England, and especially after the publication
of his _History of England from The Accession of James II.,_ honors and
appointments of all kinds were showered upon him. In 1857 he was raised
to the peerage as Baron Macaulay of Rothley.
Macaulay's equipment, as a writer on historical and biographical
subjects, was, in some points, unique. His reading was prodigious, and
his memory so tenacious that it was said, with but little exaggeration,
that he never forgot any thing that he had read. He could repeat the
whole of _Paradise Lost_ by heart, and thought it probable that he could
rewrite _Sir Charles Grandison_ from memory. In his books, in his
speeches in the House of Commons, and in private conversation--for he
was an eager and fluent talker, running on often for hours at a
stretch--he was never at a loss to fortify and illustrate his positions
by citation after citation of dates, names, facts of all kinds, and
passages quoted _verbatim_ from his multifarious reading. The first of
Macaulay's writings to attract general notice was his article on
_Milton_, printed in the August number of the _Edinburgh Review_ for
1825. The editor, Lord Jeffrey, in acknowledging the receipt of the
manuscript, wrote to his new contributor, "The more I think, the less I
can conceive where you picked up that style." That celebrated
style--about which so much has since been written--was an index to the
mental character of its owner. Macaulay was of a confident, sanguine,
impetuous nature. He had great common sense, and he saw what he saw
quickly and clearly, but he did not see very far below the surface. He
wrote with the conviction of an advocate, and the easy omniscience of a
man whose learning is really nothing more than "general information"
raised to a very high power, rather than with the subtle penetration of
an original or truly philosophic intellect, like Coleridge's or De
Quincey's. He always had at hand explanations of events or of characters
which were admirably easy and simple--too simple, indeed, for the
complicated phenomena which they professed to explain. His style was
clear, animated, showy, and even its faults were of an exciting kind. It
was his habit to give piquancy to his writing by putting things
concretely. Thus, instead of saying, in general terms--as Hume or Gibbon
might have done--that the Normans and Saxons began to mingle about 1200,
he says: "The great-grandsons of those who had fought under William and
the great grandsons of those who had fought under Harold began to draw
near to each other." Macaulay was a great scene painter, who neglected
delicate truths of detail for exaggerated distemper effects. He used the
rhetorical machinery of climax and hyperbole for all that it was worth,
and he "made points"--as in his essay on _Bacon_--by creating
antithesis. In his _History of England_ he inaugurated the picturesque
method of historical writing. The book was as fascinating as any novel.
Macaulay, like Scott, had the historic imagination, though his method of
turning history into romance was very different from Scott's. Among his
essays the best are those which, like the ones on _Lord Clive, Warren
Hastings_, and _Frederick the Great_, deal with historical subjects; or
those which deal with literary subjects under their public historic
relations, such as the essays on _Addison, Bunyan_, and _The Comic
Dramatists of the Restoration_. "I have never written a page of
criticism on poetry, or the fine arts," wrote Macaulay, "which I would
not burn if I had the power." Nevertheless his own _Lays of Ancient
Rome_, 1842, are good, stirring verse of the emphatic and declamatory
kind, though their quality may be rather rhetorical than poetic.
Our critical time has not forborne to criticize itself, and perhaps the
writer who impressed himself most strongly upon his generation was the
one who railed most desperately against the "spirit of the age." Thomas
Carlyle (1795-1881) was occupied between 1822 and 1830 chiefly in
imparting to the British public a knowledge of German literature. He
published, among other things, a _Life of Schiller_, a translation of
Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, and two volumes of translations from the
German romancers--Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Fouque--and contributed
to the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_ articles on Goethe, Werner,
Novalis, Richter, German playwrights, the _Nibelungen Lied_, etc. His
own diction became more and more tinctured with Germanisms. There was
something Gothic in his taste, which was attracted by the lawless, the
grotesque, and the whimsical in the writings of Jean Paul Richter. His
favorite among English humorists was Sterne, who has a share of these
same qualities. He spoke disparagingly of "the sensuous literature of
the Greeks," and preferred the Norse to the Hellenic mythology. Even in
his admirable critical essays on Burns, on Richter, on Scott, Diderot,
and Voltaire, which are free from his later mannerism--written in
English, and not in Carlylese--his sense of spirit is always more lively
than his sense of form. He finally became so impatient of art as to
maintain--half-seriously--the paradox that Shakspere would have done
better to write in prose. In three of these early essays--on the _Signs
of the Times_, 1829; on _History_, 1830, and on _Characteristics_,
1831--are to be found the germs of all his later writings. The first of
these was an arraignment of the mechanical spirit of the age. In every
province of thought he discovered too great a reliance upon systems,
institutions, machinery, instead of upon men. Thus, in religion, we have
Bible societies, "machines for converting the heathen." "In defect of
Raphaels and Angelos and Mozarts, we have royal academies of painting,
sculpture, music." In like manner, he complains, government is a
machine. "Its duties and faults are not those of a father, but of an
active parish-constable." Against the "police theory," as distinguished
from the "paternal" theory, of government, Carlyle protested with ever
shriller iteration. In _Chartism_, 1839, _Past and Present_, 1843, and
_Latter-day Pamphlets,_ 1850, he denounced this _laissez faire_ idea.
The business of government, he repeated, is to govern; but this view
makes it its business to refrain from governing. He fought most fiercely
against the conclusions of political economy, "the dismal science"
which, he said, affirmed that men were guided exclusively by their
stomachs. He protested, too, against the Utilitarians, followers of
Bentham and Mill, with their "greatest happiness principle," which
reduced virtue to a profit-and-loss account. Carlyle took issue with
modern liberalism; he ridiculed the self-gratulation of the time, all
the talk about progress of the species, unexampled prosperity, etc. But
he was reactionary without being conservative. He had studied the French
Revolution, and he saw the fateful, irresistible approach of democracy.
He had no faith in government "by counting noses," and he hated talking
Parliaments; but neither did he put trust in an aristocracy that spent
its time in "preserving the game." What he wanted was a great individual
ruler; a real king or hero; and this doctrine he set forth afterward
most fully in _Hero Worship_, 1841, and illustrated in his lives of
representative heroes, such as his _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_,
1845, and his great _History of Frederick the Great,_ 1858-1865.
Cromwell and Frederick were well enough; but as Carlyle grew older his
admiration for mere force grew, and his latest hero was none other than
that infamous Dr. Francia, the South American dictator, whose career of
bloody and crafty crime horrified the civilized world.
The essay on _History_ was a protest against the scientific view of
history which attempts to explain away and account for the wonderful.
"Wonder," he wrote in _Sartor Resartus_, "is the basis of all worship."
He defined history as "the essence of innumerable biographies." "Mr.
Carlyle," said the Italian patriot, Mazzini, "comprehends only the
individual. The nationality of Italy is, in his eyes, the glory of
having produced Dante and Christopher Columbus." This trait comes out in
his greatest book, _The French Revolution_, 1837, which is a mighty
tragedy enacted by a few leading characters--Mirabeau, Danton, Napoleon.
He loved to emphasize the superiority of history over fiction as
dramatic material. The third of the three essays mentioned was a
Jeremiad on the morbid self-consciousness of the age, which shows
itself, in religion and philosophy, as skepticism and introspective
metaphysics; and in literature, as sentimentalism, and "view-hunting."
But Carlyle's epoch-making book was _Sartor Resartus_ (The Tailor
Retailored), published in _Fraser's Magazine_ for 1833-1834, and first
reprinted in book form in America. This was a satire upon shams,
conventions, the disguises which overlie the most spiritual realities of
the soul. It purported to be the life and "clothes-philosophy" of a
certain Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, Professor _der Allerlei
Wissenschaft_--of things in general--in the University of Weissnichtwo.
"Society," said Carlyle, "is founded upon cloth," following the
suggestions of Lear's speech to the naked bedlam beggar: "Thou art the
thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare,
forked animal as thou art;" and borrowing also, perhaps, an ironical