Helps, in a quieter vein, developed the humour of his Friends in Council (first series, 1847). Borrow's Bible in Spain (1843) revealed a new writer, with taste and relish strikingly his own. Less important as literature were the travel-books of this later section, Bremner and Davis and Samuel Laing and Mountstuart Elphinstone, or even the first Journal of the Beagle (1835). But Kinglake's Eothen and Eliot Warburton's Crescent and Cross (both 1844) are of the new school, and subordinate everything to literary effect; while Layard's Nineveh (1848), void of literary artifice, powerfully impressed popular imagination by its glimpses of a buried world. Conclusion. And here we must pause. Completeness is even more impossible (if the Irishism be pardonable) in this chapter than in last. Writers of English prose, yet more than of English verse, were legion in those days. Enough has probably been said to show how diversified and manysided were their modes of working, how completely and with what variety of effect the movement we are reviewing had transformed the canons of our style. This largeness and liberality, this freedom and wealth of colouring and width of sympathy and aspiration, flow directly from the Romantic Movement. Even in our lighter departments of writing the effect has been traced. Next chapter will follow it into the field of didactic writing, seeking to show that there too the same disruption and supersession of ancient standards produced a result analogous to what we have seen in the realm of belles lettres. 131 CHAPTER III. DIDACTIC LITERATURE: HISTORY, SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, THEOLOGY. HISTORICAL WRITING - SOME PIONEERS SCOPE OF THIS CHAPTER HALLAM-THE NEXT DECADE-PRINCIPAL GROUP-ARNOLD-GROTE: 6 HISTORY OF GREECE -THIRLWALL-OTHER MEMBERS OF GROUP SUMWRITERS ON SCIENCE- BUCKLAND AND MURCHISON LYELL OWEN SEDGWICK -FARADAY -HERSCHEL STUART MILL: LIFE AND BOOKS-CHARACTER OF HIS WORK-HIGH IN approaching these weightier matters of the law, we must remember the necessary limitations of this survey. Scope of this chapter. With the pædagogic value of the writers to be reviewed, the profit or harm caused by their speculations, we have little concern. We do not ask whether a scientific fact was established, an historical view proved correct, a religious or metaphysical doctrine based on true or false lines. Our criticism deals chiefly with matters of style and form, with the embodiment of research rather than the research itself. To show that the same revolutionary impulse which we have seen permeating all forms of imaginative literature is perceptible in treatises of graver import, shaping at once mental conception and rhetorical expression-such is the aim of this chapter. Many causes were at work, many influences moulded the thought and words of our professed teachers, investigators, and preachers. But it is safe to say that all are results of one movement, that in the last resort-however diverse their manifestations-all were but various features of that completed change which is most succinctly styled the Romantic Triumph. In History the change is especially noticeable. For a marked interval separated the great men of the old school from the leaders of the new. Gibbon, and 1 Chambers and Craik, as before. Lives of Macaulay, Grote, &c. Miss Meteyard, A Group of Eminent Englishmen (1871). J. S. Mill's Autobiography (3rd ed., 1874). Darwin's Life and Letters (3 vols., 1887). Joseph Henry Green, Spiritual Philosophy, founded on the Teaching of S. T. Coleridge, with memoir (2 vols., 1865). Stanley's Life of Arnold (2 vols., 1844). Ward's Oxford Movement (1889). Recent Lives of Pusey, Manning, Jowett, &c. Cockburn's Memorials of his Time (1856). writing. Hume, and Robertson- the courtly, full-dress hisHistorical torians of the previous Century, with their mannered style, their air of superiority, their leisurely erudition-left no immediate successors. Of course historical writing still flourished. Mitford, and Gillies, and Roscoe, historians by profession; Pinkerton and Chalmers, who were mainly antiquarians; William Godwin and Sir James Mackintosh, eminent in many fields besides history-all lived well into the time we have to consider. The chief imaginative writers themselves, moreover, made excursions into this field. Southey's great History of Portugal never got itself written, as things chanced. But he produced some studies of great merit, including a History of Brazil (1810-20), and his life of Nelson is a classic of our language. His chief historical work, the History of the Peninsular War (3 vols., 1823-32), unluckily clashed with a more striking book, to be mentioned soon. Scott was of course a practised historian, as well as a voluminous writer of miscellanea. His short History of Scotland (1830), written for Lardner's Cyclopædia, is good, but the delightful Tales of a Grandfather (1827) eclipse all competition in that line. His Life of Napoleon (9 vols., 1827) was more a work of dauntless energy than a happily chosen task. Moore, Campbell, and several other of our poets also laboured at historical work. But we may neglect such by-play, and go to the real students and writers of history. And it will be best to preserve chronological order, beginning with contemporaries of Wordsworth and Scott, and noting how the genius of composition changes when we come to those whose date of birth tinged them deeper with the Romantic dye. Some pioneers. The earliest writers requiring mention here—earliest in date both of birth and publication—are Sharon Turner (1768-1847) and John Lingard (1771-1851). The first was a conscientious worker of the old type, whose best-known History of the Anglo-Saxons belongs to last Century, but who produced a History of England from the Norman Conquest to the Union with Scotland (1814-23) and other works during later life. Lingard's History of England (1819-30) was fiercely attacked as the work of a Roman Catholic, and can hardly be reckoned free from religious bias. But it set an example of honest inquiry and original research. Another veteran investigator, Dr Thomas M'Crie (1772-1835), wrote only ecclesiastical history (Life of Knox, 1812), and broke a lance with Scott over his views of the Covenanters. (A son of the same name carried on much the same work some twenty years after.) James Mill (1773-1836), to be mentioned later as a thinker, deserves note here as author of a History of British India (1817-18), which however no longer keeps the place it took at the time of its publication. Henry Hallam (1777-1859) may be accounted the last of the old school, or the first of the new. His calm sedate style has little indeed of Romantic colour; yet his ideals and admirations are wider than those of the Eighteenth Hallam. |