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CHAPTER IV.

ENGLISH AND FRENCH-THE OLDER PROSE KINDS

DRAMA.

DISABILITIES OF THIS CHAPTER-HERBERT SPENCER-BUCKLE-SIDGWICK AND GREEN-HISTORIANS: FROUDE-FREEMAN-GREEN, KINGLAKE, STUBBS, AND OTHERS-THEOLOGY: COMPARATIVE BARRENNESS NOT DUE TO THE OXFORD MOVEMENT-PHYSICAL SCIENCE-CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP FRANCE: THE GENERAL DEPARTMENT-TAINERENAN-MERITS OF HIS STYLE-DRAMA.

IN popularity and profit the novel and the newspaper, as we have seen, far outstripped, during the present period, their older and still perhaps more dignified rivals the history, the theological tractate or discourse, the philosophical disquisition; and though physical science comes in a manner to the support of these against belles lettres,1 yet she is recognised as but a dangerous auxiliary.

Yet for a time at least, in both the leading literary countries, very remarkable additions were made in all

1 In some uses of this rather ambiguous term, History would be included; but it is better to take it as designating Poetry, Fiction, Criticism, and miscellaneous Essay-writing only.

this chapter.

these kinds, and more especially in the historical deDisabilities of partments of the others, as well as in History pure and simple. Only of very recent years has the sorrowful fact been recognised by the persons themselves concerned that "history has killed the historian"-that the document has overwhelmed the art. And there are, perhaps, some faint grounds for hoping that this recognition is only a passing spasm of pusillanimity. Theology and, as far as mere writing goes, philosophy are in a somewhat worse way; yet they also are not wholly forlorn. Of all and of others we may contrive to set forth no such very beggarly array, though it is only by borrowing from belles lettres themselves that the severer Muses can sustain a competition with their most engaging sisters. Even with this aid the contrast is rather against them.

Moreover, the special figures of the past volume invade our province here even more notably than elsewhere. Macaulay and Carlyle, Grote and Thirlwall, Mill and Hamilton, Pusey and Newman, though most of them lived far into our period, all belonged of right to Mr Omond. Villemain, Guizot, Cousin, Michelet, Quinet, Comte, Tocqueville, belonged to him in France; and though in all these cases, English and French, more or less important work was added to the tale of each during our own time, it would skill but little to examine it minutely here. The prose writer, unlike the poet, very seldom develops quite important new gifts late in life; in any case, no one of the writers named can be said to have made, after 1850, the solid

and important additions to their budgets which were made by Tennyson and Browning and Hugo. Even Darwin, Montalembert, and one or two others, who perhaps may be said on balance to belong rather more to us, have received sufficient treatment in The Romantic Triumph; and though Mr Herbert Spencer's career and productions were prolonged for Herbert Spencer. more than another half-century, it will not be necessary to say much of him. Eminent among the thinkers of Europe, particularly influential on its rawer and less cultivated nations, and on those nonEuropean peoples who have been anxious to "get" European culture, Mr Spencer was perhaps the least literary of all philosophers. This came not merely from the fact that he had no style-not even a bad one-but from the other fact that his entire spirit and attitude were anti-literary,-that literature is, in short, the most impregnable and annoying Decelea in the territory, the most gruesome skeleton at the feast, of the Spencerian philosophy. To be a Spencerian you must ignore literature, and, therefore, without any undignified resentment, but as charitably as justly, literature may ignore Mr Spencer. Yet there are some gleanings of the old harvest-fields left, and some sheaves from newer ones.

Buckle.

Among these figures a name which, once unduly exalted, has perhaps for some years been rather unduly ignored. The same generalising mania which was epidemic in the middle of the century, and which found its most distinguished patients in Mr Spencer himself, in Comte, and later

in M. Taine, found an exponent of far greater literary power than at least the first of these in Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862). It was perhaps fortunate for Buckle that he died rather early, for his system, which nearly caricatured itself in the two actual volumes of his History of Civilisation (1857-61), must almost to certainty have completed the effect in any possible continuation. The atheistic, though not necessarily antitheistic, determinism which is so often found in connection with this mania, and which, indeed, is almost logically necessary to allow it full swing and sweep, took in him a rather lower and more Philistine form than in the greater men just mentioned; and, young as he died, he was even younger than his years in a certain clever crudity, which marked and marred all his work. But he was nearly as clever as he was crude; and his purely literary faculty, though not of the highest order, and marked, like the rest of his composition, by a certain vulgarity, was extraordinary in its own way. His clearness was free from that "offensive" quality, that exasperating determination to make everything quite plain as to a very little and rather stupid child, which, in the even greater clearness of John Stuart Mill, was gibbeted by Nietzsche's epigram-epithet.1 And the extreme ingenuity of his complete explanation of all the History of Spain and Scotland, by climate, geography, and religion, atoned to some extent for its manifest futility.

Both Spencer and Buckle represented a mixed class

1 "Beleidigende Klarheit." See the Götzen-Dämmerung.

of historian-philosopher-politician which has more and more enlisted men who in former days would have been philosophers pure and simple; and Mr Omond, by arrangement, took into his view not only Mr Spencer but some names representing work belonging to almost the latest years of our own period. The chief now to be added are those of Henry Sidgwick Sidgwick (1838-1900), a Cambridge moral

and Green. ist and political philosopher of the most amiable character and the most varied acquisitions, possessing a power of thought which could meet with no disparagement, except that it "divided itself this way and that" almost too swiftly and impartially, so that the reader was often left in a state of mere adiaphoria if not in sheer puzzlement; and of his Oxford compeer, T. H. Green, who combined a tendency to very abstract philosophy with a considerable turn for practical affairs.

History proper, despite its affecting and Laocoontic struggles with the document, has been somewhat Historians more brilliantly and numerously repreFroude. sented. If the epitaph chosen for himself by one of not the least of its representatives, the lamented Bishop Creighton (1843-1901), author, among other things, of a valuable History of the Popes—" He tried to write true history"-be the whole motto for the historian, then we must refuse the highest place of all to James Anthony Froude (1818-1894). But some of the Bishop's greatest admirers would prefer, even in opposition to him, to confirm this primacy to Mr Froude. He was most certainly not accurate: he was