The Age of Tennyson. Hugh Walker

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and economic condition of the poor pressed upon the imaginative writers of the time. Others in earlier days had been interested too. No reader of the Canterbury Tales can doubt that Chaucer was keenly alive to the state of all the grades of society. Shakespeare by a few vivid words in King Lear proves himself a humanitarian before humanitarianism became fashionable. Crabbe was the stern, and perhaps, after all, only half-truthful painter of humble life in the generation which had just closed. Burns gave to the peasant a citizenship in literature more sure than that conferred by Crabbe, because he knew from personal experience that the life hardest pressed by poverty need not be wholly sordid. The interest is not new, but it has become more universal and has grown in importance, and the proportion it bears to other things is changed. The political revolution brought this in its train. He who possesses power is sure of consideration and respect; and the classes which, to the Elizabethans, were the ‘rascal multitude,’ have for sixty years been struggling towards mastership, and have at last attained it.

      Among other results incident to this process, there has been a great change in the character of the audience appealed to by literature. That audience is now far wider than it ever before was. The spread of education through all classes has vastly increased the number of those who must and will read something. It was not till the year 1870 that the State took the great step which brought primary education fully under its control; but for many years before that date the elementary schools had been partially supervised by the State, and from the year 1851 one of the greatest men of letters of the time, Matthew Arnold, had laboured as an inspector in the cause of popular education. The movement for the education of women and for political equality between the sexes, if it has not added a new class of readers, has certainly tended to widen the range of interest among female readers.

      It would be rash to assert that this increase in the number of readers has been an unmixed benefit to literature. The proportion of those who have neither the culture nor the time and inclination to study serious books is probably greater now than at any former period. The taste of such persons is gratified by the mass of fiction and of periodicals which has grown and is still growing year by year, not only in absolute, but in relative quantity; and it cannot be considered satisfactory that growth is most vigorous just in those forms of literature which are least able to stand the test of time. It may be freely conceded that much of this growth would have taken place apart from any democratic movement or any extension of popular education; but nevertheless it has been stimulated by these causes.

      In respect of periodicals the change, as compared with even the generation immediately preceding 1830, has been very great. The Edinburgh Review was for some years the only great critical periodical in Britain. The Quarterly Review was established to redress the political balance, shaken by the organ of the Whigs. A little later, Blackwood’s Magazine gave scope to the fun and humour for which there was no place in the graver pages of its contemporaries. The London Magazine and the Westminster Review likewise did valuable service to literature and thought. But the great development of the magazines and critical journals has taken place during the last sixty years. In the course of it two tendencies have become manifest: first, a tendency to shorten the intervals of publication; and secondly, a tendency to multiply the organs of this periodical literature. The old quarterly has almost given place to the monthly magazine; the latter in its turn has had to abandon no small share of its province to the weekly journal; and recently the daily newspaper has been encroaching more and more upon the sphere of the weekly. Partly, no doubt, the change has been due to differentiation of function; partly too it has been brought about by impatience, and necessarily implies greater hurry and less mature consideration. The multiplication of organs has been equally remarkable. In early days a few magazines held the field alone; now their name is legion. One result is that there will probably never again be concentrated on a single paper as much talent and genius as we find in the early numbers of Fraser’s Magazine. Another is that in ever growing ratio the literary talent of the age finds its outlet in the periodical. If Horace was right in his celebrated maxim, the change is not one to rejoice over.

      The increase of the magazines has influenced all literature, but especially fiction. It has greatly stimulated the demand, and it has changed the manner of publication. In earlier days a book was as a matter of course finished before the publication began. Chiefly by reason of the example of Dickens it became common to publish in parts; and the magazines have made this the normal rather than the exceptional form of publication, at least for authors of sufficient reputation to command an audience first in the periodical and afterwards when the parts are gathered into a volume. Lately there have been indications that this may come to be the mode of publication, not of fiction only, but of serious historical and biographical works as well.

      We see then that a large popular audience, the majority with little time, little money and little culture, is the environment in which the man of letters in these days has to live. For purposes of art it is neither the best nor the worst possible. It is not so good as that of the Elizabethan dramatists; for while many of the drawbacks are common to the two, there is wanting in this later time that living contact between author and public which invigorated almost every page written then. Still less is it equal to that of the golden age of Athens, when, as the commonest remains of art still indicate, the mere journey-work of the ordinary artisan proved the existence of culture in the man himself, and of culture generally diffused among those to whom his work appealed. In a less degree, but for similar reasons, it is inferior to the environment of the Italian Renaissance. On the other hand, it is better than patronage, whether individual or political, and better than the terrible struggle out of patronage through which Johnson passed. It is, in fact, the logical development of that freedom which Johnson’s struggle won. But the kind of ‘natural selection’ it implies is rough in its process and crude in its results. The popular audience nourishes and feeds fat a few classes who minister to its wants, but there are many others, in a literary sense nobler and more valuable, whom it barely enables to live. Darwin himself, though he made earthworms far more fascinating than many novelists can make the most romantic tale of love, could not have lived if he had been really subject to this competition. As late as the year 1870 Matthew Arnold was assessed for £1,000 a year; but the evidence satisfied the Commissioners that the assessment must be cut down to £200; and the author said that he must write more articles to prevent his being a loser even on the smaller sum. Browning’s Paracelsus, Sordello and Bells and Pomegranates were all published at his father’s expense and brought no return whatever. Edward FitzGerald, one of the greatest poets of the age, lived and died almost unknown, and is even now known to comparatively few. Tennyson alone among the greater poets of the time was really successful in the financial sense. Even in fiction there has been but little proportion between merit and remuneration. Dickens and George Eliot deserved and won success; Thackeray’s reward was comparatively inadequate; and it is hardly probable that Mr. George Meredith ever received anything approaching the sums paid to not a few of the favourites of a day. Evils such as these—the accumulation of material rewards upon one class of writers, want of discrimination even within that class, and neglect, more or less complete, of others—must necessarily tend to cramp and fetter literature. They are not new; perhaps they have been as bad in former times; but at best we have done little or nothing towards finding a remedy.

      The development of physical science is another feature of the time plainly visible in its literature. It is needless to discuss its effect upon the material conditions of life; for that has been not only fully recognised, but its importance, for the present purpose, has been greatly exaggerated. Besides this however, the direct contributions of science to literature have been considerable, and some of them possess literary qualities rarely equalled among the scientific writings of past times. Moreover, science has so filled the minds and possessed the imagination of men that its indirect has been far greater than its direct influence. Whatever its ultimate creed may prove to be, science has certainly been in part responsible for the growth of a spirit of materialism, and has caused those who do not share that spirit to examine themselves and to remould their arguments. Science has therefore tended to depress and to give a tone of stoic resignation if not of pessimism to many who, without accepting materialistic opinions, have been affected by them.

      But in another СКАЧАТЬ