Victorian Architecture. See ARCHITECTURE. Victorian Period in English Literature. The name "Victorian" is popularly given in honor of the late Queen Victoria (1819-190r), and the literature designated by that adjective is roughly coincident with her reign (1837-1901), and is limited to England. The death of Scott (1832) is commonly taken as the most convenient date for fixing the term to the brilliant literary movement of the last years of the 18th century and the early decades of the 19th: and, from this point of view, Victorian literature stands for the new literary impulses that succecded the decline of the great work of Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Scott, and their contemporaries. The literary movement of the Victorian period may best be defined by the main tendencies in poetry, prose, and the drama.

POETRY AND PROSE.

Poetry. The first, the most popular, and the most prolific poets of the period were Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. Three main interests may be observed in their work and that of their contemporaries and successors. The ideal interest in humanity, best represented in the preceding epoch by Shelley, found its most vivid expression in Browning, whose work, at first written under the spell of the great lyric poet, early took on those traits of vigorous interest in the experiences of mankind which are the source of its originality and popularity. Browning's poems are distinguished for their pervasive feeling for the moods and the experiences of many people of all ages and for the dramatic vigor of their expression. In these respects he represents a very important movement of the century, and many of the same characteristics inform the poetry of his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

In the second place, the serious moral poetry of Wordsworth, the poetry "of man, of nature, and of human life," justly celebrated as one of the chief glories of English literature, had a legitimate successor in the grave, reflective poetry of Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough. They began writing a few years later than Tennyson and Browning. Like many of their contemporaries, of whom they are the best mouthpieces, they were oppressed by the melancholy of life, and, to a greater degree than their literary prototype, they deal with morals, with duty, with the vanity of human effort, and with "the eternal note of sadness." Their poetry, particularly that of Arnold, is brilliant in style and finely finished, and a high place is accorded to them as exponents of the graver and more solemn side of the poetry of the century. Their temper is expressed in a more sentimental strain in such poets as Arthur O'Shaughnessy.

Contemporaneous with the decline of this impulse, which spent itself in the endeavor to express some solution of the enigma of existence, there arose the third school of poets, who, foregoing this quest, gave themselves up to the search for beauty of form and sentiment, who busied themselves with the retelling of old tales, who were concerned with romance, and who strove, for the most part, to recreate a picturesque and ideal world. Three names stand out conspicuously; the painter-poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; William Morris, poet,

story-teller, socialist, and manufacturer; and Algernon Charles Swinburne. With them is to be named Christina Rossetti, sister of D. G. Rossetti.

In some respects, Tennyson more than any other poet of the century, is representative of these three groups. Beginning, in his first volume (1827), under the spell of Keats, he had within a decade produced much original work and by 1860 established his reputation as the best-beloved poet in England. In much of his earlier work, he treated subjects from human life not unlike those of Browning, though with more calm and repression and less lively vigor. The ethical ideas of his time found, as in Arnold and Clough, a current and lasting expression in many of his shorter lyrics, such as The Two Voices' and 'Locksley Hall,' as well as in the longer 'In Memoriam' (1850) and as 'Idylls of the King' (1858-). Throughout his poetical career, Tennyson was a most distinguished and careful workman, and in this respect he is akin to the poets who were spoken of in the third group, as, like them, he is, in some respects, a reteller of tales. Unlike them, however, an ethical and not chiefly an æsthetic motive is dominant in him.

Besides these chief poets, there should be mentioned William Barnes, the painter of the homely life of Dorsetshire; two distinguished writers of vers de société, Frederick LockerLamson, and Charles Stuart Calverly; Tennyson's own less celebrated brothers, Frederick Tennyson and Charles Tennyson Turner, Coventry Patmore, and many other poets who have written in a touching way of simple things: and above all, Edward Fitzgerald, whose trans lation of the 'Rubáiyát' of Omar Khayyám is not only classical in its finish but also not unrepresentative of much of the melancholy of the poetry of the century. Of contemporary English poets, the greatest amount of popular fame has fallen to Mr. Rudyard Kipling.

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Prose.-Important as is the poetry of the era, it is many ways surpassed by the amount and richness of the prose. During the period the great popular form of imaginative literature was the novel. Sir Walter Scott, in the preceding part of the century, did more than any one else in the history of English literature to establish the widespread vogue of fiction, and in the field of historical romance he remains an object of the detracting envy and real despair of his successors. The main development of the novel in the Victorian period was, however, along a different line from that established by Scott, whose more immediate successor, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a prolific writer, marked decadence of the romance from the standard of the great master. Rather the novel developed according to the principles laid down and exemplified by the great writers of the 18th certury, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, and brilliantly carried on in the early 19th century by Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen. Accordingly the great fiction of the Victorian period is largely realistic in tendency. The most brilliant and most popular, as well as the earliest of the men of the period, was Charles Dickens, who, in the type of story and the method of narrative, followed the school of LeSage and Smollett, but added to the English novel, considered as a whole, a new kind of buoyant humor and a warm and polemic hatred of wrongdoing and

oppression. Almost contemporary, though flowering later and declining earlier, was William Makepeace Thackeray, often spoken of as the chief of English novelists. Like that of Dickens, his material was largely drawn from contemporary life, but he wrote of higher social strata, and viewed his world more as a panorama, calmly and with less personal intensity and less polemic sense. Almost contemporary with the finest work of these masters, was represented a very different and highly original impulse in Charlotte Bronté, whose 'Jane Eyre' (1847) is the prototype of the intense personal novel from time to time in vogue.

Of the types of material furnished by these novelists, that represented by the humanistic novels of Dickens was the most conspicuous in the group of slightly less great novelists of this early Victorian period. The purposeful spirit found a very interesting expression in the religio-historical, and modern ethical, novels of Charles Kingsley, the gist of whose teaching is that no earthly happiness exists, save in the surrender of self to the faith of Christianity (understood in an Anglican sense); in Elizabeth Gaskell, whose classic and charming 'Cranford' (1865) is less representative of her interest in social questions than such earlier novels as 'Mary Barton' (1848); and in the vigorous and voluminous Charles Reade, who, besides being a writer of historical fiction, was also a vehement champion of the oppressed and a challenger of injustice. These writers were, in many respects, akin to Dickens. The most distinguished representative of the more realistic school, in many respects a follower of Thackeray, was Anthony Trollope, a writer of pleasant stories of English life, and one of the most consistent of the realists.

Charlotte Bronté and her sisters may be called specialists in representing emotional intensity. The term "specialist" may also be applied to several writers of the early Victorian period. Frederick Marryat was a specialist in the writing of sea-stories, and some of his nautial creations are famous. Charles Lever dealt hiefly with the military hero. An interesting picture of the out-of-the-way life of peasants and gypsies is to be had in the works of George Borrow. A popular writer on school and college life was Thomas Hughes. There may be named also Benjamin Disraeli, G. P. R. James, Samuel Lover, and of a somewhat later period, contemporary with George Eliot, Richard Doddridge Blackmore and Margaret Oliphant.

Since the time of the great panoramic novelists of the early Victorian period, the novel has tended to specialization, such as has been described, though of a larger kind. Among writers belonging to the so-called later Victorian period, stands out the name of the great specialit in states of the human mind, in questions of Guty, in ethics, "George Eliot" (Marian Evans Cross). Though in one or two novels, as 'Middlemarch' (1871-72), she attains the panoramic view, and produces classical types, her interest was chiefly centered in the problems mentioned, which she illustrated, for the most part, in the lives of people of humble and rural circumstance. Her artistic aim was to make interesting the life of the lowly. Contemporary with her, but continuing his production down almost to the present date, is Mr. George Meredith. In a series of powerful novels, he

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has exhibited various phases of human temperament, and has tried to express what is most native and fundamental to human action. and Mr. Thomas Hardy are the foremost living English novelists of the day; the latter, however, has, in a long series of brilliant novels, been less concerned with the problems of the individual soul and the expression of types of human temperament, than with the workings of an external and unaccountable chance and caprice in human destiny, and in this respect, as in his beautiful pictures of rural life, Hardy also is a great specialist. With them, in a totally different field, that of the romance built on the tradition of Scott, but embodying more allegorical and figurative elements, is Robert Louis Stevenson.

Quite as important and striking as either the poetry or the fiction of the Victorian period, is the large body of humanistic, critical, and scientific prose that is regarded by Victorian writers as among the chief glories of English literature. During the period, the essay form, owing largely to the growing prevalence of magazines and reviews, was, and still is, in vogue, but it was used more and more widely for other than strictly literary purposes. There have been practically no important successors of such essayists as Lamb, Hazlitt, and DeQuincey (who, like Landor, falls also into the early Victorian period). The ancestry of the literature of 1830-1900 is rather to be traced back, in humanism, to Burke and the French Revolution, with some diffusion and dispersion; in criticism, to Coleridge; in history, to Gibbon; in economics, to Adam Smith and Bentham; in science and philosophy, to Hume and Bentham; with the infusion, from time to time, of ideas from Germany.

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This last was the initial source of inspiration of one of the greatest humanists of the century, Thomas Carlyle. Beginning with translations of German writers and essays and excursions into German ideas, Carlyle, not far from the opening of the reign of Victoria, became at once the prophet and the scourge of his countrymen. Moved by the same spectacle that had stirred Dickens and Kingsley, he proceeded somewhat illogically but very eloquently to demonstrate the futility of contemporary institutions, to decry the impotence of the democracy, and to point out the one way of salvation, the dominance of the "hero" whom he illustrated in several important works, 'Heroes and Hero-Worship' (1841); 'Cromwell' (1845); and 'The History of Friedrich I.' (1858-1865). It would be wrong to say that the mantle of Elijah fell upon the Elisha of John Ruskin, for the careers of the two overlap by many years. But Ruskin continued vehemently the task of upbraiding his countrymen for their failure to observe what was of good report. Starting his career as a critic of art, and trying to reform the taste and the aesthetic manners of the time and to lead his readers back to a true idea of the beautiful and the good, he, by the middle of his career, 'Unto This Last' (1860), broadened the scope of his interests so that they included economic and social, as well as literary and artistic, questions. His influence has been very widely diffused, like that of Carlyle, and their contemporary humanist, Emerson. A third great chastiser of the evil which men do and think was Matthew Arnold,

already mentioned as a poet. From about 1870 to 1880, his literary energies, originally devoted to poetry and next to literary criticism, were directed toward trying to make his stubborn island countrymen think rightly on political, literary, and religious matters in accord with that formula which he continually characterized as "culture."

With these spiritual guides is to be named the great humanist, the friend and contemporary of Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, who besides being an admirable technical student and expounder of logic and political economy, attempted to disseminate the principles of moderation, of justice, of right reason, and in all his works, as in his famous essays 'On Liberty' (1859) and 'The Subjection of Women' (1869), sowed the seed of righteousness. For a discussion of Mill's work as an economist and a philosopher, the general articles and the special article on Mill should be consulted, since it is out of the province of the present article to touch on scientific studies of the century except in so far as they relate to literature.

The humanistic movement in its earlier phases is often regarded as an aspect of what is called, for the purposes of classification, the romantic movement, the impulse, that is, which expressed the desire for individual expansion rather than the submission to the limits imposed by authority, and which implied the manumission of the human spirit and intellect from current and traditional bonds. In the religious field, the so-called Oxford Movement of 1833-1841 is sometimes called romantic in that it was the work of a few young men who revolted at the religious custom of the time and endeavored to re-establish an earlier, and as they conceived it, a purer form of belief and worship. The Oxford Movement received at once its best exposition and severest criticism in the controversial autobiography of the originator of the movement, The Apologia Pro Vita Sua' of John Henry Newman, written in defence of his conversion to Catholicism. Newman stands in English literature as one of the great masters of finished prose of a formal but winning cast and as a specialist in somewhat technical religious controversy. The orthodox Anglican feeling of the time is best represented in the sermons and writings of Frederick Denison Maurice, Frederick William Robertson, and Charles Kingsley, the novelist.

The more strictly critical movement, as related to literature, goes back to Coleridge and Germany. The dogmatic manner and air of finality which distinguished the pronouncements of the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviewers, found its descendent chiefly in the common-sense criticism of Macaulay. Most of the critics of the early decades of the century, Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey, and others, were, in one way or another, frankly personal or deliberative rather than ex cathedra in their attitude, and in Coleridge criticism tended to the ascertaining and expounding of principles rather than the assertion of dogmas. The early work of Carlyle, the next important critic after the group just named, was largely critical, and it busied itself with the exposition and interpretation of Schiller, Goethe, Richter, and other contemporary German writers, for the benefit of his countrymen. Carlyle, however, was too busy exploiting the doctrine of the "hero" and sound

ing the sins of his fellow men to become a literary critic of lasting influence. The main stream of critical tendency, up to the time of the modern scientific and philological schools, had sprung from the stimulating power of the German-derived Coleridgeianism. The chief tenets of that influence were the casting aside of authority in favor of appreciation: any work of art contained in itself the reason why it was good: and consequently an author's purpose, his range, his total production, and his vogue were things to be taken into consideration. This principle passed naturally in the later Victorian period to the criticism of types, wherein criticism tended to become characterization rather than censure or commendation. Two great critics are illustrative of the tendency: Walter Bagehot (1826-1888), unexcelled for the vigor and brilliancy of his characterizations of types of mind and art, and Walter Pater (1839-1894), the polished expounder of artistic personality. The same tendencies, with different material and different emphasis, are to be observed in the work of such distinguished modern critics as Leslie Stephen, John Addington Symonds, Mr. John Morley (1838-), and others. Matthew Arnold, poet and humanist, second to none in importance as a critic, represents a reaction in favor of a more abstract and ideal standard. Historically important as having done much to enlarge the confines of English criticism and to rid it of insularity, he, nevertheless, was at variance with his contemporaries (as in matters of religion and politics) in asking for more authority and standardization of judgment, which standard is largely a matter of his own predilection.

Much of the critical study of literature during the period was dominated by the historical and the scientific method. That aspect of criticism, except in such invaluable work as Stephen's 'Dictionary of National Biography' and other excellent biographical works, is, however, less important in the field of literature proper than that of history and science. Though these subjects do not properly enter into the present article, they are so important that mention of them cannot be wholly ignored. In history, besides such men as Carlyle, who wrote histories, and Symonds, the historian of the 'Renaissance,' there were, in the Victorian period, since the time of Hallam, such distinguished names as Milman, Grote, Macaulay,__Harriet Martineau, Kinglake, Froude, Buckle, Freeman, Gardiner, J. R. Green, Lecky, and Mr. James Bryce. In philosophy and science the names of Lyell and Spencer are eminent, and the theory of natural selection as presented by Darwin and expounded by Huxley has profoundly influenced the whole train of 19th century thought since the publication of 'The Origin of Species' (1859).

Bibliography.-References are so numerous that it is impossible for the preceding and the following section to make more than a general reference to the lists contained under the articles on the writers specifically named, though such books as Saintsbury's 'History of Nineteenth Century Literature,' Stedman's 'Victorian Poets,' Stopford Brooke's 'English Literature,' and Palgrave's 'Golden Treasury' (second series) may be cited.

WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, Professor of English, Columbia University.