Book Review: Chesterton on "The Victorian Age of Literature"

According to Joseph Pearce in his biography of G.K. Chesterton, Wisdom and Innocence, the editors of The Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, The Rt. Hon. H. A. L. (Herbert Albert Laurens) Fisher, M.A., F.B.A., Prof. Gilbert Murray, Litt.D., LL.D., F.B.A. (Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford), Prof. Sir J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., and Prof. William T. Brewster, M.A., asked Chesterton to write a survey of the Victorian Age in Literature. His book was published in 1913 as no. 61 in the library; the editors thought it best to warn their readers:

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.

Chesterton was an author, he was a Victorian (his dates: 1841-1922) , and he had obviously read the Victorians and their works, so I read the book as his authoritative history of Victorian Literature. He approaches the composition of a survey of an age in literature in the only way that Chesterton could: a systematically unsystematical way. He can't do it chronologically any more than he can do it alphabetically, so he traces themes and genres throughout the queen's long reign (her dates: 1837-1901), highlighting along the way a few of his favorites: Cobbett, Dickens, and Shaw. And he does it all in an introduction and four chapters:

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Victorian Compromise and its Enemies

Chapter 2. The Great Victorian Novelists

Chapter 3. The Great Victorian Poets

Chapter 4. The Break-up of the Compromise

Bibliographical Note (added by the editors?)

The page numbers below are based on the Dodo Press edition pictured above.

He actually begins his overview before Queen Victoria's reign begins with the French Revolution: "the most important event in English history [that] happened in France". Moreover, he asserts "that the most important event in English history was the event that never happened at all—the English Revolution on the lines of the French Revolution." The Romantic poets were the radicals: unlike the first of his favorites, William Cobbett, who really knew how the rural and urban poor suffered and had suggestions for correcting these injustices, there was no revolution. Or as Chesterton states, there was a counter-revolution: "an aristocratic revolution, a victory of the rich over the poor. It was about this time that the common lands were finally enclosed; that the more cruel game laws were first established; that England became finally a land of landlords instead of common land-owners." While that was being implemented, "English Romantics, English Liberals, were not public men making a republic, but poets, each seeing a vision." . . .  "Ideals exhausted themselves in the void; Victorian England, very unwisely, would have no more to do with idealists in politics." (p. 3)

Thus the Victorian Compromise: implement reform and progress in England without great social unrest. Chesterton identifies Thomas Babington Macaulay as an exponent of this compromise: "its praise of Puritan politics and abandonment of Puritan theology; its belief in a cautious but perpetual patching up of the Constitution; its admiration for industrial wealth." (pp. 7-8) 

You'll have to read the book for yourself to appreciate how Chesterton characterizes and criticizes the strengths and weaknesses of the authors he discusses. It is a very quotable book and believe it or not, I have restrained myself in quoting it in this review. As an example, 

"There were two Macaulays, a rational Macaulay who was generally wrong, and a romantic Macaulay who was almost invariably right. All that was small in him derives from the dull parliamentarism of men like Sir James Mackintosh; but all that was great in him has much more kinship with the festive antiquarianism of Sir Walter Scott." (p. 8)

Macaulay could be Homeric, he could praise both the England that defeated the Armada and the Jacobite who died in exile after fighting to restore the Catholic Stuarts:

TO my true king I offered, free from stain,
Courage and faith; vain faith, and courage vain.
For him I threw lands, honours, wealth, away,
And one dear hope, that was more prized than they.
For him I languished in a foreign clime,
Grey-haired with sorrow in my manhood’s prime;
Heard on Lavernia Scargill’s whispering trees,
And pined by Arno for my lovelier Tees;
Beheld each night my home in fevered sleep,
Each morning started from the dream to weep;
Till God, who saw me tried too sorely, gave
The resting-place I asked, an early grave. . . . (my example, not his)

Chesterton thus praises Macaulay's greatness: "His noble enduring quality in our literature is this: that he truly had an abstract passion for history; a warm, poetic and sincere enthusiasm for great things as such; an ardour and appetite for great books, great battles, great cities, great men." (pp. 8-9)

He also cites John Stuart Mill and his utilitarian and libertarian philosophy but without much analysis of Mill as a writer.

If Macaulay is an emblem of the Victorian Compromise, with its rationalism and utilitarianism, Newman and the Oxford Movement is an example of one of its enemies: The Oxford Movement "was an appeal to reason: reason said that if a Christian had a feast day he must have a fast day too. Otherwise, all days ought to be alike; and this was that very Utilitarianism against which their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault. This idea, even by reason of its reason, narrowed into a sort of sharp spear, of which the spear blade was Newman." (p. 13)

(I've already quoted most of Chesterton's comments about Newman here.)

Then Chesterton goes on to analyze Carlyle, Froude, Ruskin, Kingsley, and Arnold, all with the same balance of praise and blame. He cites them all as "roughly representative of the long series of protests against the cold commercial rationalism which held Parliament and the schools through the earlier Victorian time, in so far as those protests were made in the name of neglected intellect, insulted art, forgotten heroism and desecrated religion. But already the Utilitarian citadel had been more heavily bombarded on the other side by one lonely and unlettered man of genius."  (p.25)

And that genius is, of course, Charles Dickens, who Chesterton includes both among "the fighters" in this chapter and the novelists in the next. 

In that chapter Chesterton begins by highlighting the great achievement of female novelists, from Austen to the Brontës , but especially George Eliot. He certainly admires Jane Austen:

Her [George Eliot's] originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power in fiction as  well or better than she. Charlotte Brontë, understood along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The latter comes into our present consideration only as that most exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all the after women went about looking for their brains. She could describe a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Brontë could do. She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not know—like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished world before the great progressive age of which I write. (p. 35)

He later says of her in comparison to Eliot and the Brontës :

Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by the Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing his faults, says, "I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in theory," he gets nearer to a complete confession of the intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the Brontës' heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot's. Jane Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her later rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of small nationalities. (p. 37)

Then he goes on to the men: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, Reade, Kingsley, Bulwer Lytton, Meredith, and Hardy. He concludes chapter 2 with a discussion of children's literature and "literature meant merely for fun": Macdonald, Lear, Carroll, and W.S. Gilbert (and Sullivan?), ending with a joke about the librettist's last name and his own first name: "the word "Gilbertian" will probably last longer than the name Gilbert."! (p. 83)

Among the poets in chapter three he reviews Tennyson, and Browning, with this comment on Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

With all his Italian sympathies and Italian residence, he was not the man to get Victorian England out of its provincial rut: on many things Kingsley himself was not so narrow. His celebrated wife was wider and wiser than he in this sense; for she was, however one-sidedly, involved in the emotions of central European politics. She defended Louis Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel; and intelligently, as one con scious of the case against them both. . . . She is by far the most European of all the English poets of that age; all of them, even her own much greater husband, look local beside her. Tennyson and the rest are nowhere. (pp. 61-62)

Then he goes on to Swinburne, Rossetti, Fitzgerald, Morrison, Thompson, and Patmore.

Chesterton summarizes the end of the Victorian Age and the break-up of the Victorian Compromise thus:

There came a time, roughly somewhere about 1880, when the two great positive enthusiasms of Western Europe had for the time exhausted each other—Christianity and the French Revolution. About that time there used to be a sad and not unsympathetic jest going about to the effect that Queen Victoria* might very well live longer than the Prince of Wales. Somewhat in the same way, though the republican impulse was hardly a hundred years old and the religious impulse nearly two thousand, yet as far as England was concerned, the old wave and the new seemed to be spent at the same time. [*Today we could substitute the name "Queen Elizabeth II"!] . . .

Liberalism (in Newman's sense) really did strike Christianity through headpiece and through head; that is, it did daze and stun the ignorant and ill-prepared intellect of the English Christian. And Christianity did smite Liberalism through breastplate and through breast; that is, it did succeed, through arms and all sorts of awful accidents, in piercing more or less to the heart of the  Utilitarian—and finding that he had none. Victorian Protestantism had not head enough for the business; Victorian Radicalism had not heart enough for the business. Down fell they dead together, exactly as Macaulay's Lay says, and still stood all who saw them fall almost until the hour at which I write. (pp. 75-76)

In this chapter he examines the Æsthetes and the Decadents: Wilde, Beardsley, and even Maeterlinck(?). He did not include Dowson ("days of wine and roses"; "gone with the wind")! Among novelists, he critiques Henry James, opining that The Turn of the Screw is such a great achievement as a ghost story because the characters in the rest of James's novels are like ghosts! Again, he brings in one of his best literary friends (and designated heretic), G.B. Shaw, and another heretic H.G. Wells for his commendation and criticism.

Then he closes with the Imperialist phase: Stevenson, Henley, and Kipling. His appreciation of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is astute:

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a double triumph; it has the outside excitement that belongs to Conan Doyle with the inside excitement that belongs to Henry James. Alas, it is equally characteristic of the Victorian time that while nearly every Englishman has enjoyed the anecdote, hardly one Englishman has seen the joke—I mean  the point. You will find twenty allusions to Jekyll and Hyde in a day's newspaper reading. You will also find that all such allusions suppose the two personalities to be equal, neither caring for the other. Or more roughly, they think the book means that man can be cloven into two creatures, good and evil. The whole stab of the story is that man can't: because while evil does not care for good, good must care for evil. Or, in other words, man cannot escape from God, because good is the God in man; and insists on omniscience. This point, which is good psychology and also good theology and also good art, has missed its main intention merely because it was also good story-telling. (p. 87)

The main caveat to be made about this book is that you have to know Victorian literature--you have to know it just to know who Chesterton is talking about sometimes for he does not always include first names (unless like Henry James the author has two first names as his name) or the title of the novel or book he is describing. You have to know the novels and the poems and the characters and the plots. I pulled out the second volume of the Norton Anthology of English Literature just to double-check some things. 

Sadly, the only author not included in this survey is G.K. himself (which would have been a conflict of interest anyway)--but it's interesting to think about the contributions he made to literature before Queen Victoria died and his attacks on the Victorian compromise on the side of reason and faith, against utilitarianism, industrialism, and jingoism, and how he continued the fight long after the queen died. 

An enjoyable and enlightening read. Notice how the discussion of the English reaction to the French Revolution dovetailed with my recent reading of Robert R. Reilly's book. Notice how Chesterton would have been particularly pleased with the alliteration of my penultimate sentence.

One Good Book Leads to Another: Chesterton on the Victorians

Our local Chesterton Society is reading Joseph Pearce's biography of Chesterton, Wisdom and Innocence. Next month we're going to conclude our discussion of a chapter  in which Pearce introduces us to one of Chesterton's works of literary criticism, The Victorian Age in Literature.

Dale Ahlquist of the American Chesterton Society offers some background for the book, which is out of print:

In 1913 the Home University Library published Chesterton’s The Victorian Age in Literature. But the editors emphatically declared that the book was not being offered as “an authoritative history of Victorian Literature” but only as Chesterton’s “personal views” on the subject. Apparently someone with personal views cannot write an authoritative history. In other words, an author cannot be an authority.

In spite of this handicap, the book was hugely successful, with multiple reprintings. One reviewer, however, while admiring the book, still expressed his irritation at “Chesterton’s obsession with religion.” (Again, authors should not have opinions, though critics may.) The reviewer’s irritation enabled him to miss the whole point of the book: that we cannot understand the Victorian writers without reference to their traditions and creeds – especially the traditions and creeds that they have rejected. Chesterton says religion “was the key of this age as of every other.” . . .

We cannot really understand the Victorian era unless we go back to the breakup of Catholic society. The multiple heresies that pulverized Catholicism were not merely religious but cultural and political and artistic. The old order was never replaced with a new order, but only with continued reactions against the old order. Chesterton says the later Protestant-types kept the Protestantism but did away with the Christianity. The Victorian Age began under the godless philosophy of Utilitarianism; it ended in the god-defying philosophy of Decadence, where men engaged in vile behavior not because they did not know it was wrong but because they did know it was wrong. “The decadents utterly lost the light and reason of their existence.” . . .

When I began reading the on-line edition of Chesterton's study I was happy to see his mention of St. John Henry Newman as a writer:

A mere conviction that Catholic thought is the clearest as well as the best disciplined, will not make a man a writer like Newman. But without that conviction Newman would not be a writer like Newman; and probably not a writer at all. It is useless for the æsthete (or any other anarchist) to urge the isolated individuality of the artist, apart from his attitude to his age. His attitude to his age is his individuality: men are never individual when alone.

And in the first paragraph of the first chapter Chesterton cites Newman again:

Now in trying to describe how the Victorian writers stood to each other, we must recur to the very real difficulty noted at the beginning: the difficulty of keeping the moral order parallel with the chronological order. For the mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead. It is no good getting the almanac to look up moonshine; and most literature in this sense is moonshine. Thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no one can understand tradition, or even history, who has not some tenderness for anachronism.

Chesterton identifies the Oxford Movement as one of the three great trends of Victorian thought along with Utilitarianism and Romantic Protestantism, and he summarizes his view of Newman's leadership of the Oxford Movement and his Catholic career after he left it thus:

But the greater part of all this happened before what is properly our period; and in that period Newman, and perhaps Newman alone, is the expression and summary of the whole school. It was certainly in the Victorian Age, and after his passage to Rome, that Newman claimed his complete right to be in any book on modern English literature. This is no place for estimating his theology: but one point about it does clearly emerge. Whatever else is right, the theory that Newman went over to Rome to find peace and an end of argument, is quite unquestionably wrong. He had far more quarrels after he had gone over to Rome. But, though he had far more quarrels, he had far fewer compromises: and he was of that temper which is tortured more by compromise than by quarrel. He was a man at once of abnormal energy and abnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written the Apologia.  In this sense his Apologia is a triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in this sense he does indeed (to use his own expression) vanquish not his accuser but his judges. Many men would shrink from recording all their cold fits and hesitations and prolonged inconsistencies: I am sure it was the breath of life to Newman to confess them, now that he had done with them for ever. His Lectures on the Present Position of English Catholics, practically preached against a raging mob, rise not only higher but happier, as his instant unpopularity increases. There is something grander than humour, there is fun, in the very first lecture about the British Constitution as explained to a meeting of Russians. But always his triumphs are the triumphs of a highly sensitive man: a man must feel insults before he can so insultingly and splendidly avenge them. He is a naked man, who carries a naked sword. The quality of his literary style is so successful that it succeeds in escaping definition. The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionate patience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap. But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I have said: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise. So far as the present purpose is concerned, his protest died with him: he left few imitators and (it may easily be conceived) no successful imitators. The suggestion of him lingers on in the exquisite Elizabethan perversity of Coventry Patmore; and has later flamed out from the shy volcano of Francis Thompson. Otherwise (as we shall see in the parallel case of Ruskin's Socialism) he has no followers in his own age: but very many in ours.

More of Chesterton's appraisal of Newman's style may be found here (also highlighting Newman's Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England).

At our last meeting, we ended our discussions in the midst of chapter 12, "Brothers in Arms" as Chesterton has confessed to Father O'Connor (the model for Father Brown) in the spring of 1912 that he wants to become a Catholic but is waiting for his wife Frances. Pearce's description of Chesterton's The Victorian Age in Literature will be part of our reading next month as we finish up chapter 12 and move along to chapters 13 through 15. In the meantime, I'm reading Chesterton's evaluations of the Brontes, Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith, Browning, Barrett Browning, et al.