Victorian Literature — Chapter IV: The Critics. Part 1

The Critics The plan of describing all the writers of a period who are not poets, novelists and historians as critics is open to many objections, although I intend to adopt it.

If Matthew Arnold's plea for poetry as a criticism of life holds good, it is precisely the poets, novelists and historians who are the true critics.

An alternative plan would have been to give a chapter to prose writers and another to the poets; and still another arrangement would have been to divide the subject, as De Quincey suggested, into the literature of power and the literature of imagination, the former including the philosophers and historians, the latter the poets, the novelists, and the more picturesque of the prose writers--Carlyle and Ruskin, for example.

One unhesitatingly assigns to Mr Ruskin the distinction of the critic whose work is most eloquent and impressive.

=John Ruskin (1819- )= was born in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London.

He has told us in his autobiography, "Præterita," of his early life under a tender mother's care, of his boyish affection for Byron and Scott, and of the youthful impulse to art study excited by the present of Rogers's "Italy," with Turner's illustrations.

In 1837 he was entered as a gentleman commoner at Christ Church, Oxford, gaining, two years later, the Newdigate prize for English poetry, his subject being "Salsette and Elephanta."

In 1843 he produced the first volume of "Modern Painters: their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters.

By a Graduate of Oxford."

The work originated, he says, "in indignation at the shallow and false criticism of the periodicals of the day on the work of the great living artist to whom it principally refers."

The artist in question was Joseph Mallord William Turner, upon whom Ruskin has pronounced somewhat contradictory judgments at different periods in his career.

"Modern Painters" soon extended beyond the mere essay at first intended, and in its final form of five handsome volumes, it was not only a philosophical treatise on landscape painting, but an exhaustive dissertation on many phases of life from one whom Mazzini declared to possess "the most analytic brain in Europe."

Another important work, "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" (1849), is a brilliant attempt at reform in domestic and church architecture.

The "lamps" represent the characteristics which good architecture should possess.

The first is the Lamp of Sacrifice: "What of beauty and what of riches we may possess, let a portion be dedicated to God.

It was in this spirit that our cathedrals were built."

The second, the Lamp of Truth, is a plea for honesty in architecture, no imitation wood or marble, but solid wood and solid stone.

"Exactly as a woman of feeling," he says, "would not wear false jewels, so would a builder of honour disdain false ornaments.

The using of them is just as downright and inexcusable a lie."

The third is the Lamp of Power: "Until that street architecture of ours is bettered, until we give it some size and boldness, until we give our windows recess and our walls thickness, I know not how we can blame our architects for their feebleness in more important work."

The fourth is the Lamp of Beauty, and in this chapter he maintains that "all the most lovely forms and thoughts" are directly taken from natural objects.

The fifth is the Lamp of Life.

"To those who love architecture," he says, "the life and accent of the hand are everything."

The sixth is the Lamp of Memory: "All public edifices should be records of national life, all ordinary dwelling-houses endeared to their owners by sacred and sweet associations.

There is infinite sanctity in a good man's house!"

The seventh is the Lamp of Obedience, and here he pleads eloquently for the enforcement of an established type of architecture--the Gothic, in his judgment, lending itself most readily to all services, vulgar or noble.

The "Stones of Venice" (1851-1853), in three volumes, gives in further detail Ruskin's views of the laws of architecture.

The pre-Raphaelite movement of Millais, Rossetti, and Holman Hunt early enlisted his sympathy, and in "Pre-Raphaelitism" (1851) he declared that they had worthily followed the advice given in "Modern Painters," to "go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing."

From that time until his Slade lectures at Oxford in 1883-1884 Ruskin wrote several books on painting and architecture, all of them in a style which attracts even those who are least in sympathy with his opinions.

But as Goethe declared of himself that posterity would honour him, not for his poetry, but for his discoveries in science, so Ruskin, perhaps more justly, insists that it is as an economist that he is most deserving of remembrance.

The four essays on the first principles of political economy, entitled "Unto this Last" (1862), he declares to be "the truest, rightest-worded, and most serviceable things" he has ever written.

These essays were originally published by Thackeray in the _Cornhill Magazine_, but the remonstrances of its readers brought the series to a speedy end.

The principles of state socialism there initiated have since entered the field in direct contest with the established order of things.

Mr Ruskin would have every child in the country taught a trade at the cost of government; he would have manufactories and workshops entirely under government regulation for the production and sale of every necessary of life, and for the exercise of every useful art; he would permit competition with government manufactories and shops, but all who desired work could be sure of it at the state establishments: finally, he would provide comfortable homes for the old and destitute, as "it ought to be quite as natural and straightforward a matter for a labourer to take his pension from his parish, because he has deserved well of his parish, as for a man in higher rank to take his pension from his country because he has deserved well of his country."

Ruskin has amplified his economic doctrines in "Munera Pulveris," "Time and Tide by Wear and Tyne," and "Fors Clavigera."

"Time and Tide" is a collection of letters on the laws of work to the late Thomas Dixon, a working corkcutter of Sunderland.

They were originally published in the _Manchester Examiner_.

"Fors Clavigera" is a series of ninety-six letters to working-men, which were issued in monthly parts, and rendered additionally interesting by the quantity of autobiographical anecdotes so freely interspersed in their pages.

The title is derived, as Ruskin has explained, from the Latin _fors_, the best part of three good English words--force, fortitude, and fortune;

the root of the adjective _clavigera_ being either _clava_, a club, _clavis_, a key, or _clavus_, a nail, and _gero_, to carry.

Fors the Club-bearer therefore represents the strength of Hercules or of Deed;

the Key-bearer, the strength of Ulysses or of Patience; and the Nail-bearer, the strength of Lycurgus or of Law.

To carry out his principles practically, Ruskin established for a short time a tea shop in the Marylebone Road, where nothing but the best tea was sold at a fair price, and he founded the St George's Guild with a view of showing "the rational organisation of country life independent of that of cities;" or in other words, the restoration of the peasantry to the soil of England.

One of the conditions of membership was that every member should give one-tenth of his property to the guild for carrying out its work.

Ruskin led the way, his property being then estimated at £70,000. He has told us in "Fors" that out of the £157,000 left him by his parents he has spent £153,000. Much of this must have gone to the Ruskin Museum at Sheffield.

It is, however, in following Carlyle as a bracing, invigorating influence that Ruskin has most claim on the gratitude of the present generation.

If Carlyle taught us to be content with this "miserable actual," with such environment as may have fallen to our lot, his disciple has given the impulse which has led to the beautifying of that environment.

The more refined taste in dress, furniture, and in dwelling-houses which has characterized the later Victorian era, and, side by side therewith, a greater simplicity of life on the part of the more cultured rich, are in an especial degree due to the influence of Ruskin.

"What is chiefly needed in England at the present day," he says, "is to show the quantity of pleasure that may be obtained by a consistent, well-administered competence, modest, confessed, and laborious.

We need examples of people who, leaving Heaven to decide whether they are to rise in the world, decide for themselves that they will be happy in it, and have resolved to seek--not greater wealth, but simpler pleasures; not higher fortune, but deeper felicity; making the first of possessions, self-possession; and honouring themselves in the harmless pride and calm pursuits of peace."

In the "Crown of Wild Olive," "Time and Tide," and "Sesame and Lilies," he emphasizes this teaching with his customary eloquence.

Of these books, by far the most important is "Sesame and Lilies," which was written, he says, "while my energies were still unbroken and my temper unfretted, and if read in connection with 'Unto this Last,' contains the chief truths I have endeavoured through all my life to display, and which, under the warnings I have received to prepare for its close, I am chiefly thankful to have learnt and taught."

It treats of "the majesty of the influence of good books and of good women, if we know how to read them and how to honour."

How to read books he shows by analyzing the well-known passage from Milton's "Lycidas" on "The Pilot of the Galilean Lake," and explaining the deep meaning of its every word.

How to honour women, how women may become worthy of honour, he shows by taking us to Shakspere and to Scott, whose Portias and Rosalinds, Catherine Seytons and Diana Vernons are ever ready at critical moments to be a help and a guidance to men; and finally he appeals to the great Florentine, and shows us Beatrice leading Dante through the starry spheres of heaven up to the very throne of light and of truth.

But the book is full of healthy and helpful passages, and is, like so much that its author has written, a moral inspiration for all who read it.

"I am a great man," Ruskin once said, with a consciousness of genius which reminds us that Horace and Milton, Shakspere and Goethe were equally outspoken.

Posterity, we may well believe, will endorse the self-criticism, and will not willingly let his works or his memory die.

Of late years Mr Ruskin has lived, not in the most robust health, in a house at Coniston, in the English Lake District.

The next most prominent critic of the period is one upon whom Ruskin has always poured his bitterest scorn, and who yet will be ever remembered with warmest reverence by those who are old enough to have been his contemporaries.

I mean John Stuart Mill.

Jeremy Bentham, who gave such an impulse to all political reform, and made a complete revolution in English jurisprudence, died in 1832. His friend James Mill, who wrote the "History of India" and an "Analysis of the Human Mind," died four years later.

"It was," says Professor Bain, "James Mill's greatest contribution to human progress to have given us his son."

It may be so, and yet he seems to have done his utmost to spoil the gift, not, as children are usually spoiled, by over-indulgence, but by the most excessive severity.

=John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)= born in Rodney Street, Pentonville.

His education, which was conducted by his father, would have been the mental ruin of a mind of smaller powers.

"I never was a boy," he said, "never played at cricket; it is better to let Nature have her own way."

He began Greek at three, and Latin at eight years of age.

The list of classical authors with whose works he was familiar at thirteen is truly appalling.

This in itself would have been a small matter had not his cold, stern father discouraged all imaginative reading.

Poetry in particular he was taught to look upon as mere vanity, and there are few passages in Mill's "Autobiography" more interesting than the story how in early manhood Wordsworth's poetry came to him like veritable "balm in Gilead," for spiritual refreshment and healing.

In 1823 he obtained a clerkship in the India House, from which he withdrew, with ample compensation, when the Indian Government was transferred to the Crown in 1858. Meanwhile he had been an industrious contributor to the _Westminster Review_ and other periodicals, and regularly attended the debates of the Speculative Society which met at Grote's house.

Scarcely any scene in literature is better known than the destruction of the manuscript of Carlyle's "French Revolution" which he had lent to Mill.

Mill lent it to Mrs Taylor, the lady who afterwards became his wife, and it was inadvertently destroyed.

The speechless agony of Mill when he went to inform his friend, the self-command with which Carlyle and his wife concealed their own misery in endeavouring to moderate his self-reproaches--these and many other details have been made familiar to us by many pens.

Mill gave Carlyle what monetary compensation he could, and acted, as he always acted in life, with all possible nobleness.

Mrs Taylor, who was the real culprit on this occasion, was the wife of a wholesale druggist in Mark Lane.

When Mill made her acquaintance, his father remonstrated, but he replied that he had no other feelings towards her than he would have towards an equally able man.

The equivocal friendship, which was the talk of all Mill's circle of acquaintances, lasted for twenty years, when Mr Taylor died, and Mill married his widow.

It is impossible to regard the enthusiasm of Mill for this lady without feeling how much there was in it of the humorous, how much also of the pathetic.

That Mill had a most exaggerated opinion of her intellectual attainments there can be no doubt.

He declared her to be the author of all that was best in his writings.

Much of his "Political Economy," he said, was her work, and also the "Liberty" and the "Subjection of Women."

His language with regard to her was always extravagant, and Grote said that "only John Mill's reputation could survive such displays."

Mill's brother George declared that she was "nothing like what John thought her," and there is much evidence to show that she was but a weak reflection of her husband.

Still, it is impossible not to sympathize with such an illusion.

Mrs Mill died in 1858, and was buried at Avignon, in France, where Mill himself spent many of the later years of his life, and where he died in 1873. It was at Avignon that the Crown Princess of Prussia and the Princess Alice of Hesse proposed to visit him, when he, with due courtesy, declined to see them.

Mill's works, which are very extensive, deal with philosophical, psychological, economical, and political problems.

His "Logic" was published in 1843, his "Essays on Unsettled Questions in Political Economy" in 1844, his "Principles of Political Economy" in 1848, and his "Liberty" in 1858. In 1865 he published his "Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy."

Four volumes of "Dissertations and Discussions" appeared between 1859 and 1867, and "Considerations on Representative Government" in 1861. In 1865 he entered Parliament as Member for Westminster, losing his seat, however, in 1868. It would be hard to speak too highly of Mill.

As a man he was all kindliness and considerate thoughtfulness for others, and his ideal of life was a very high one.

Carlyle's Letters, Caroline Fox's Memoirs, and many other sources of information, make this clear.

On the literary side he will be variously estimated, as we survey him from one or other aspect of his many-sided career.

As a stimulator of public opinion the work he did was enormous.

This is not the place to discuss the value of this or that movement associated with his name; but there can be no doubt that many questions, like the reform of the land laws, were initiated by him.

In the seventies his philosophy dominated Oxford.

It is of no account to-day.

On the philosophical side Mill's position is weakened by his ignorance of the more simple sciences, which we now know to be of the greatest moment in the study of intellectual problems.

Mill knew little of physics, and of biology still less.

His education in this respect belonged to the old-fashioned type.

His work in logic is all but unshaken, although his book has been superseded for school and college use.

His psychology, however, his ethics, much of his economics, and above all, his metaphysics, must be corrected by later ideas.

Doubtless Mill's readjustments in mental science are most valuable, especially his rehandling of the old doctrines; but fundamentally these are Hume's. Mill's chief philosophical work was destructive.

He utterly routed the remnants of a still earlier philosophy, furbished up with all the knowledge and all the acuteness of Sir William Hamilton.

But the great generalizations which have changed the whole drift of our philosophy are the Conservation of Energy, and Evolution, including as the latter does the laws and conditions of life, and in particular the doctrine of Heredity.

For adequate philosophical guidance on these subjects we must turn to Herbert Spencer.

But first let me point to the number of political economists who have followed Mill in the discussion of the relation of society to the "wealth" it produces.

Mill's "Political Economy" was more of a systematic summary of the prevailing doctrines than an original work.

It long formed, however, the basis of ordinary English knowledge on the subject, and by its adhesion to the Wages Fund and other erroneous theories, it did not a little harm as well as good to Economic Science.

Mill's most enthusiastic disciple in economics, =Henry Fawcett (1833-1884)=, went far beyond his master in his acceptance of the main doctrines of the Ricardo school.

Many of the positions maintained in his "Political Economy" were abandoned by Mill before his death, particularly the Wages Fund theory; and in his "Autobiography" he traced his own progress to views which, as he said, would class him "under the general designation of Socialist."

He declared himself in favour of "the common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour."

[18] Professor Fawcett, who published his "Manual of Political Economy" in 1863, continued to the last to hold to the old views, and especially to favour as little as possible the intervention of the State.

As member of Parliament, first for Brighton and afterwards for Hackney, he did great service by his criticisms of Indian finance.

For more than four years (1880-1884) he held the position of Postmaster-General, and introduced many valuable reforms into the department under his administration.

Other economists of importance, =John Elliott Cairnes (1824-1875)= and =William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882)=, have differed from Mill in many theoretic principles; but the fairest survey of the later developments of Mill's economics is given by =Henry Sidgwick (1838- )=, Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, and by Alfred Marshall (born 1842).

In his "Principles of Political Economy" (1883) Sidgwick attempts, with great clearness, to criticise the conflicting views of the older economists in the light of the modern and more socialist views.

He also attempts in his "Methods of Ethics" (1874) a compromise between the Utilitarian and the Intuitionist schools, and he does this also in his "Elements of Politics" (1891), a comprehensive survey of political science.

Mr Marshall, who holds the Chair of Political Economy at Cambridge, has written "Economics of Industry" (1879), and "Principles of Economics" (1890).

A writer who did much to make foreign economists known in England, and who seemed at one time destined to be the able leader of a new school, was =Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie (1827-1882)=, whose "Essays" are full of terse and suggestive criticism.

Cliffe Leslie died, however, without writing any work of first-rate importance.

He did something, however, following the line of writers like Richard Jones (1790-1855), to bring academic theory to the test of actual facts.