[In the following excerpt, Wellek describes the 1830s and 1840s as transitional decades between earlier Romantic theories and those of the Victorian age.]

INTRODUCTORY

In England the thirties and forties of the 19th century can be described as an age of transition. This, it has been objected, is true of any period; but these two decades fit particularly well John Stuart Mill's description in his Spirit of the Age (1831): “Men have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones.” There was an anarchy of opinions and an aversion to system and theory. “He is a theorist: and the word which expresses the highest and noblest effort of human intelligence is turned into a bye-word (sic) of derision.”¹ Mill is thinking in general terms, but his diagnosis also applies to the situation in literary criticism. The 18th-century system of poetics and aesthetics had decayed, but it lingered on with many writers. The romantic creed systematically propounded by Coleridge had not taken firm root in England, though it was upheld, in various versions, by Lamb and Hazlitt, and after their death by a few survivors such as De Quincey and Leigh Hunt. New or comparatively new ideas and emphases emerge with several writers who achieved eminence in other activities than strictly literary criticism: with Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Macaulay, and Ruskin. But the idea of a coherent literary theory disappears almost completely and with it any technique of analyzing literature and any interest in form. The nature of literature is misunderstood. Literature becomes, for most critics, a purely didactic or emotive activity. Slowly the attitude which has been called “Victorian” was crystallizing: a didacticism rooted either in a utilitarianism that extended far beyond the Utilitarian group, or an Evangelicalism that distrusted art as secular and frivolous. The standard of utility, of social use, was combined with a distrust of the intellect, the free play of the mind, the speculative, the theoretical. Art became suspect either as mere amusement, or worse, as a stimulus to sensuality or as a revolutionary subversive force. The violence of the English reaction to the French novel² can be explained only in that it was felt to challenge the basic assumptions and proprieties of the society. Those who still exalted the arts either transformed literature more and more into a branch of religion, or defended it against the contempt of a scientific and industrial age as a domestic culture of the emotions—a nook in which man preserved his privacy. The distrust of the intellect implied by didacticism and emotional theories meant, in criticism, a reliance on natural shrewdness, on the common sense of every individual, and thus, in practice, led to an anarchic impressionism. The personal caprice was, however, usually concealed behind the enormous self-assurance of the Victorian prophet and sage, behind the dogmatism of his ipse dixit.³ The critic who believes in the infallible evidence of his common sense or prophetic insight will lose all patience with analyzing a work of art or formulating a general theory. He will look for the same tone of authority in the writer he discusses. He will study his life for evidence of “sincerity,” the new cant word of the criticism of the time, as if conviction, sincerity, belief could assure good art, as if “the worst” were not “full of passionate intensity.”

The comparative decline of literary theory was, however, accompanied by an enormous expansion of literary antiquarianism and literary history. It was precisely the breakdown of critical standards, the lack of theoretical interest, which favored an all-embracing tolerance and encouraged an indiscriminating accumulation of mere information about literature. The process had begun in the 18th century but intensified enormously in the first decades of the 19th. Book clubs reprinting early English books⁴ in limited editions, reviews such as The Retrospective Review⁵ devoted expressly to the excerpting and describing of older English literature, and the popular lecture series on English literature addressed to a mixed metropolitan public were all new developments. The intense interest in older English literature had its patriotic overtones, connected with the resurgence of English nationalism during the Napoleonic wars, and reflected a general change of taste: the new enjoyment of medieval and particularly of Elizabethan literature. But these motives behind the revival of older English literature quickly decayed, and its study became, more and more, the exclusive domain of the literary antiquarian whose ethos was an indiscriminate love of the past, a worship of new facts, and a mildly scientific curiosity. During the 19th century English literature became an academic subject of instruction. But, significantly, English literature was first taught in Scotland, Ireland, and the United States and was not established fully at the old English universities until the 20th century.⁶ There was in English studies hardly anything of the corporate national enthusiasm that inspired “Germanistik” in Germany. Anglo-Saxon studies had a very old tradition in England, dating back to the Elizabethan age, but they had decayed in the later 18th century.⁷ Only under the impact of the new Danish and German scholarship, its discoveries in Germanic philology and its enthusiasm for Teutonic antiquity, did Anglo-Saxon studies revive also in England. Beowulf had been edited in Denmark and Germany before John Mitchell Kemble (1807-57), who had studied with Jakob Grimm in Göttingen, brought out the first English edition in 1833.⁸ The other eminent early student of Anglo-Saxon literature, Benjamin Thorpe (1782-1870), had learned his Anglo-Saxon in Copenhagen from Rasmus Rask. But Anglo-Saxon literature remained an academic specialty in England.

Much more enthusiasm was engendered by the study of medieval romances, ballads, and folk songs. The interest had been prepared by the very half-hearted endeavors of Bishop Percy and Thomas Warton. Such a meritorious antiquary as Joseph Ritson thought “legends and fables constantly fabricated for the same purpose, and with the same view: the promotion of fanaticism” and treated the old poems merely as illustrations of antiquity.⁹ George Ellis retold medieval romances with a condescending jeering irony.¹⁰ Only the enthusiasm of Sir Walter Scott for the ballads and his own imitations of metrical romances stimulated a whole band of researchers, collectors, and imitators. Though the word “folklore” dates only from 1846,¹¹ early in the century an enormous body of miscellaneous knowledge of fairy tales, romance themes, ballad and folksong types came into being. Scott had freely contaminated and rewritten his ballads, but accurate and faithful methods of editing were slowly established. In ballad lore William Motherwell's Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern (1827) represents the turning point.¹² Richard Price, in his remarkable preface to a new edition of Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry (1824) was apparently the first to introduce the idea of general literature as a huge treasure house of themes, which spread, multiply, and migrate according to laws similar to those established for language by the new Germanic philology of the Grimms. Price believes that “popular fiction is in its nature traditive” and represents an age-old symbolic wisdom.¹³ Many new students devoted themselves to what we would call international Stoffgeschichte: Sir Francis Palgrave (1788-1861) and Thomas Wright (1810-77) in particular were scholars of stupendous though often unorganized learning on all such subjects. Enthusiasm for romances and ballads nourished even much later poets, such as Tennyson, Rossetti, and Morris; but the study itself became an antiquarian specialty proliferating in text societies and local historical groups, with less and less critical discrimination toward the masses of uncovered materials.

The Elizabethan age attracted the most critical attention. It was generally exalted as the greatest age of English literature, not only by romantic poets but also by many critics of conservative taste, such as Jeffrey and Gifford. The flood of new editions is staggering: almost all poetical miscellanies were reprinted, there was a complete edition of Elizabethan critical essays,¹⁴ and there was no end to the reprinting of plays. Marlowe, Greene, Middleton, Ford, and Webster were identified as proper subjects for criticism for the first time in the early decades of the century; and there were solid annotated editions of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger.¹⁵ The interest began to extend to the comparatively neglected parts of 17th-century literature. Though the metaphysical poets remained under a cloud, there were exceptions to their general disfavor: occasional praise was bestowed on Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and even Crashaw;¹⁶ and Sir Thomas Browne was widely admired and well edited by Simon Wilkin.¹⁷ The enthusiasm for the plays often seems especially undiscriminating. But in these first decades of the century were accumulated all the materials (or almost all) that made the writing of English literary history for the first time an urgent possibility.

The interest in older literature extended also to foreign literatures, which before had hardly been known, at least in these newly discovered periods. There were, for the first time, translations from the troubadours and the German Minnesänger.¹⁸ J. G. Lockhart's Ancient Spanish Ballads (1823) belongs to the ballad movement initiated by Scott. Dante's entire Divine Comedy was translated in Miltonic blank verse by Henry Francis Cary (1772-1844).¹⁹ The Nordic fashion, which dates from the 18th century, led to substantial accounts of Teutonic antiquities and finally to translations of the poetic Edda and the Danish ballads.²⁰ Individual enthusiasts even began translating and reporting on the literatures of the Slavs, the modern Greeks, and the Magyars,²¹ and there was a purely literary side to the growing interest in Oriental literatures.²²

But, surprisingly, this strong antiquarian movement was not accompanied by anything that could be described as a flowering of literary historiography: there is no comparison with Germany or France in this respect. In England no history of literature was produced to replace and supplement Warton's. The first very elementary general History of English Language and Literature (1836) was a little handbook by Robert Chambers which was later expanded to his popular Cyclopaedia.²³ Historiographical conceptions were still extremely backward: either Warton's progress from imagination to reason or a seesaw scheme was adopted.

The most eminent literary historian of the time, Henry Hallam (1777-1859), provided in his Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries (1838-39) little more than a well-informed catalogue of books, a descriptive survey of everything of any importance published in all subjects from mathematics and medicine to poetry and novels. Hallam has no concept of imaginative literature and thus devotes more space to Grotius and Hobbes than to any other authors. He is essentially a skeptic who distrusts all theories, all psychological or social explanations. “If there are no great writers at a certain time and place, we must simply ascribe” their lack to “a pause in natural fertility.” “Nature does not think fit to produce them.” Hallam concludes, for instance, that “the scarcity of original fiction in England of the 17th century was so great as to be inexplicable by any reasoning.”²⁴ Still, he holds firm to a standard of neoclassical taste. He defends Malherbe, complaining that “we narrow our definition of poetry too much if we exclude from it the versification of good sense and select diction.” Hallam constantly asserts that the historical point of view cannot change the judgment of taste. “It will not convert bad writing into good to tell us, as is perpetually done, that we must place ourselves in the author's position and make allowances for the taste of his age, or the temper of his nation.” He thus objects to the current overrating of “our old writers,” bluntly lists the faults of Shakespeare, and can say that “it is impossible not to wish that Shakespeare had never written his Sonnets.”²⁵ It is hardly surprising that Hallam despises Donne, Góngora, and Calderón, and that he praises not only Montaigne but Sir John Davies and Massinger as “second to Shakespeare.”²⁶ His ideal is a “general diffusion of classical knowledge.” Milton seems to him “the first writer who eminently possessed a genuine discernment and feeling of antiquity.” Hallam, with his refusal to generalize about national literatures or epochs, with his concept of genius as mere accident, with his rejection of all “sophistical theories which assume a causal relation between any concomitant events,”²⁷ belongs intellectually to an earlier age.

Some literary historians of the time grasped the necessity of a historical scheme but failed in their practice. Thus J. P. Collier (1789-1883), who is today discredited because of his later forged entries in Elizabethan documents, wrote a History of English Dramatic Poetry up to the Time of Shakespeare (1831) which, in intent, aims at the writing of a formal genre history. He wishes to show that the mystery plays “almost imperceptibly deviated into the morality, by the gradual intermixture of allegory with sacred history,” while the morality plays, in turn, “gave way to tragedy and comedy, by the introduction, from time to time, of characters of actual life, or supposed to be drawn from it.”²⁸ But Collier's book does not fulfill this program. He is hunting too many hares at the same time: he gives long lists of plays and performances, information on actors and theaters, and loses sight of the history of the genre as an art form.

The social explanation of literary history as propounded by Madame de Staël did find an English (or rather Scottish) practitioner. John Dunlop's History of Fiction (1814) was planned in close correlation with the history of society. Dunlop relates, for instance, the mercantile spirit and the Italian novelle, and contrasts the courts of Louis XIV and Charles I in order to account for the respective states of heroic romance. “From the very nature of domestic fiction, it must vary with the forms and habits and customs of society, which it must picture as they occur successively.”²⁹ The theory behind the book is sound, but the practice suffers from his vague conception of social history and its relation to literature.

Only Thomas Carlyle imported the concept of a national literature unified by a national mind, the concept of literary evolution, and the whole ideal of narrative consecutive literary history.

Notes

1. These were essays in The Examiner (January-May 1831), republished with an introductory essay by Frederick A. von Hayek (Chicago, 1942), pp. 6, 21.

2. See C. R. Decker, The Victorian Conscience (New York, 1952), for reaction to Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Baudelaire in England.

3. Cf., e.g., Ruskin's letter to Furnivall, 9 June 1854: “Until people are ready to receive all I say about art as ‘unquestionable’ … I don't consider myself to have any reputation at all worth caring about.” Works, ed. Cook-Wedderburn, 36, 169.

4. Harrison Ross Steeves, Learned Societies and English Literary Scholarship, New York, 1913.

5. Ed. Henry Southern, 14 vols. 1820-26; second series, 1827-28. See Saintsbury, 3, 283-86 for an excessively favorable account. His list of contributors is incorrect; there is no evidence for Hartley Coleridge's collaboration. Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789-1864) wrote most of the papers on Elizabethan drama and James Crossley (1800-83) those on 17th-century prose.

6. Besides Potter, for details see C. H. Firth, The School of English Language and Literature: A Contribution to the History of Oxford Studies, Oxford, 1909; and R. W. Chambers, Philologists at University College, London, 1927.

7. See Eleanor F. Adams, Old English Scholarship from 1566-1800, New Haven, 1917.

8. See Bruce Dickins, “John Mitchell Kemble and Old English Scholarship” in Proceedings of the British Academy, 25 (1939), pp. 51-84; and Marvin C. Dilkey and H. Schneider, “John M. Kemble and the Brothers Grimm,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 40 (1941), 461-73.

9. Ancient English Metrical Romanceës (London, 1802), 1, xxxiii. See Bertrand H. Bronson, Joseph Ritson, Scholar-at-Arms, 2 vols. Berkeley, Calif., 1938. Bronson overrates him extravagantly; see my review in Philological Quarterly, 20 (1941), 184-87.

10. Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances, 3 vols. London, 1805.

11. W. J. Thoms proposed the term “folklore” in the Athenaeum, 22 August, 1846.

12. See Hustvedt, Ballad Books and Ballad Men.

13. Reprinted in W. C. Hazlitt's ed. of Warton's History (London, 1871), 1, 32-33, 92. Price knows the Grimms, Görres, and Creuzer.

14. Many reprints of Elizabethan poetical miscellanies were edited by Sir Samuel Edgerton Brydges and Thomas Park. On Brydges, a curious enthusiast, see Mary Catherine Woodworth, The Literary Career of Sir Samuel Edgerton Brydges, Oxford, 1935. Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poësy, ed. J. Haslewood (2 vols. London, 1811-15). Reprints Puttenham, Webbe, etc.

15. On Marlowe, see C. F. Tucker Brooke, “The Reputation of Christopher Marlowe,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 25 (1922), 347-408.—Robert Greene, ed. A. Dyce, 1831.—Middleton, ed. A. Dyce, 1840.—Ford, ed. Henry Weber, 1811, and W. Gifford, 1827.—Webster, ed. A. Dyce, 1830.—Ben Jonson, ed. W. Gifford, 1816.—Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. H. Weber, 1812; George Darley, 1840; and A. Dyce, 1843-46.—Massinger, ed. W. Gifford, 1805.

16. See A. H. Nethercot, “The Reputation of the ‘Metaphysical Poets’ during the age of Johnson and the ‘Romantic Revival,’” Studies in Philology, 22 (1925), 81-132; Austin Warren, “Crashaw's Reputation in the 19th Century,” PMLA, 51 (1936), 769-85; Kathleen Tillotson, “Donne's Poetry in the 19th Century (1800-72),” in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to F. P. Wilson (Oxford, 1959), pp. 307-26; Joseph E. Duncan, The Revival of Metaphysical Poetry, Minneapolis, 1959.

17. Works. Including His Life and Correspondence, 4 vols., London, 1836. Much on Browne's reputation is in O. Leroy, Le Chevalier Thomas Browne, Paris, 1931.

18. See Louisa Stuart Costello, Specimens of the Early Poetry of France from the Time of the Troubadours and Trouvères to the Reign of Henri Quatre, London, 1835; Edgar Taylor, Lays of the Minnesinger, or German Troubadours, London, 1825; Taylor also translated Wace's Chronicle (London, 1837) with good reproductions of the Bayeux Tapestry, and the Grimms' Fairy Tales as German Popular Stories (2 vols. 1823-26), with elaborate notes.

19. Cary's translation was preceded by Henry Boyd's very poor version, 3 vols. 1802. Cary's Inferno was published in 2 vols. 1805-06; the whole Divine Comedy in 2 vols. 1814. On Cary, see R. W. King, The Translator of Dante, London, 1925.

20. William Herbert, Select Icelandic Poetry, 2 vols. London, 1804-06; Henry Weber and R. Jamieson, Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, Edinburgh, 1814; George Borrow, Romantic Ballads, 1826.

21. Sir John Bowring, Specimens of the Russian Poets, 1820;—Servian Popular Poetry, 1827;—Specimens of the Polish Poets, 1827;—Poetry of the Magyars, 1830;—Cheskian Anthology, 1832; etc.

22. Sir William Jones' translation of Kalidasa's Sakuntala dates back to 1789. Horace H. Wilson (1786-1860) published Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus, Calcutta, 3 vols. 1826-27; and Edward William Lane produced a translation of the Arabian Nights from the Arabic (The Thousand and One Nights, 3 vols. London, 1839-41).

23. Chambers calls the book “a textbook for those lectures on English literature, which are now given in so many institutions for mechanics and others.” Still he claims it to be “the only History of English Literature which has as yet been given to the world” (preface). The Cyclopaedia of English Literature, largely an anthology, appeared first in 2 vols., in 1844.

24. I quote the London, 1876 reprint, in 4 vols: 1, 67, 164; 4, 331.

25. Ibid., 3, 243, 290; 4, 229; 3, 315, 264.

26. Ibid., 3, 241-42, 255-56, 289; 2, 227; 3, 343.

27. Ibid., 3, 226, 349.

28. Vol. 1, xi-xiii.

29. 1815 ed., Vol. 2, 157-58.

Bibliography

Besides George Saintsbury's History of Criticism and William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York, 1957), M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York, 1953) discusses several writers of the time (Carlyle, Mill, etc.) perceptively. Ian Jack, English Literature 1815-1832 (Oxford, 1963) pays attention to criticism and has a valuable chapter, “Interest in Foreign Literature and in Earlier English Literature.”

There are general reflections in Jerome H. Buckley, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven, 1957), and John Holloway, The Victorian Sage (London, 1953).

We have no history of English literary scholarship or historiography for this period. There are some hints in Gerard O'Leary, English Literary History and Bibliography (London, 1928), an unpretentious bibliographical handbook, and in Stephen Potter, The Muse in Chains (London, 1937), a glib attack on the teaching of literature which culminates in praise of “King Saintsbury.”

On ballad study, see Sigurd B. Hustvedt, Ballad Books and Ballad Men, Cambridge, Mass., 1930.

On romances, see Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1964), which has something on the early 19th century, too.

On Hallam an excellent anonymous article in Edinburgh Review, 72 (October 1840), 194. The author was Herman Merivale (1806-74). (Information by Walter Houghton.) See the good remarks in Emerson's Journal, Vol. 8, p. 461 (1854).