Studies in Early Victorian Literature | Page 9

at a
tea-table, near an angular girl with a bad squint. "Some tea?" said Mary,
touching the pot. "I don't mind," replied Jane in a careless tone; "I am
rather tired and it is a dull day." "It is," said Mary, as her lack-lustre
eyes glanced at the murky sky without. "Another cup?" And so the
modern romance dribbles on hour by hour, chapter by chapter, volume
by volume, recording, as in a phonograph, the minute commonplace of
the average man and woman in perfectly real but entirely common
situations. To this dead level of correctness literary purism has brought
romance. The reaction against the photographic style, on the other hand,
leads to spasmodic efforts to arouse the jaded interest by forced
sensationalism, physiological bestialities, and a crude form of the
hobgoblin and bogey business.
In all the ages of great productive work there were intense individuality,
great freedom, and plenty of failures. Tom Jones delighted the town
which was satiated with gross absurdities, some of them, alas! from the
pen of Fielding himself. Shakespeare wrote happily before criticism
had invented the canons of the drama, and Sir Walter's stories had no
reviews to expose his historical blunders. In the great romance age
which began to decline some forty years ago, there was not a tithe of
such good average work as we get now; criticism had not become a fine
art; every one was free to like what he pleased, and preposterous stuff
was written and enjoyed. Of course it cannot be good to like
preposterous stuff, and an educated taste ought to improve literature.
But it is almost a worse thing when general culture produces an
artificial monotony, when people are taught what they ought to like,
when to violate the canons of taste is far worse than to laugh at the Ten
Commandments.

With a very high average of fairly good work, an immense mass of
such work, and an elaborate code of criticism, the production of
brilliant and inimitable successes is usually arrested in every field.
Having thousands of graceful verse-writers, we have no great poet; in a
torrent of skilful fiction, we have no great novelist; with many
charming painters, who hardly seem to have a fault, we have no great
artist; with mises-en-scène, make-up costumes, and accessories for our
plays such as the world never saw before, we have no great actor; and
with ten thousand thoughtful writers, we have not a single genius of the
first rank. Elaborate culture casts chill looks on original ideas. Genius
itself is made to feel the crudeness and extravagance of its first efforts
and retires with shame to take a lower place. We are all so fastidious
about form and have got such fixed regulation views about form, we
are so correct, so much like one another, such good boys and girls, that
the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of the inventive spirit are taught
from childhood to control themselves and to conform to the decorum of
good society. A highly organised code of culture may give us good
manners, but it is the death of genius.
There are other things which check the flow of a really original
literature, though perhaps a high average culture and a mechanical
system of education may be the most potent. Violent political struggles
check it: an absorption in material interests checks it: uniformity of
habits, a general love of comfort, conscious self-criticism, make it dull
and turbid. Now our age is marked by all of these. From the age of
Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, the French genius produced almost no
imaginative work of really European importance until it somewhat
revived again with Chateaubriand in the present century. Nor in
England can we count anything of a like kind from the death of
Goldsmith until we reach Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth after an
interval of forty years. In the United States the great eras of imaginative
production have been those which were free from political and military
struggles.
The case of France is indeed conclusive proof how suddenly political
turmoil kills imaginative work. French literature, which during the
greater part of the eighteenth century had shown amazing activity,

suddenly seems arrested with Rousseau; and in the latter years of the
eighteenth century there is absolutely nothing of even moderate quality
in the field of art. The same is true of England for the last thirty years
of the same century. Shakespeare's dramas were not produced till his
country had victoriously passed through the death-struggle of the
religious wars in the sixteenth century. The civil war of the Puritans
arrested poetry, so that for nearly thirty years the muse of Milton
himself withdrew into her solitary cell. Dryden carried on the torch for
a time. But prose literature did not revive in England until the
Hanoverian