of phrasing and a charm of style peculiar to the genius of the
author, rendering it one of the masterpieces of English prose.
But while Newman was thus sounding a retreat, louder and
more urgent voices were signalling the advance in a totally
opposite direction. The Apologia fell in point of time between
The Origin of Species and Descent of Man, in which Charles Darwin
was laying the corner stones of the new science of which Thomas
Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace were to be among the first
apostles, and almost coincided with the First Principles of a
synthetic philosophy, in which Herbert Spencer was formulating
a set of probabilities wholly destructive to the acceptance of
positive truth in any one religion. The typical historian of the
Macaulay.
’fifties, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and the seminal
thinker of the ’sixties, John Stuart Mill, had as determinedly
averted their faces from the old conception of revealed
religion. Nourished in the school of the great Whig pamphleteer
historians, George Grote and Henry Hallam, Macaulay combined
gifts of memory, enthusiastic conviction, portraiture and literary
expression, which gave to his historical writing a resonance
unequalled (even by Michelet) in modern literature. In spite of
faults of taste and fairness, Macaulay’s resplendent gifts enabled
him to achieve for the period from Charles II. to the peace of
Ryswick what Thucydides had done for the Peloponnesian War.
The pictures that he drew with such exultant force are stamped
ineffaceably upon the popular mind. His chief faults are not of
detail, but rather a lack of subtlety as regards characterization
and motive, a disposition to envisage history too exclusively
as a politician, and the sequence of historical events as a kind of
ordered progress towards the material ideals of universal trade
and Whig optimism as revealed in the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Macaulay’s tendency to disparage the past brought his whole vision of the Cosmos into sharp collision with that of his rival appellant to the historical conscience, Thomas Carlyle, a man whose despair of the present easily exceeded Newman’s. But Carlyle’s despondency was totally irrespective Carlyle. of the attitude preserved by England towards the Holy Father, whom he seldom referred to save as “the three-hatted Papa” and “servant of the devil.” It may be in fact almost regarded as the reverse or complement to the excess of self-complacency in Macaulay. We may correct the excess of one by the opposite excess of the other. Macaulay was an optimist in ecstasy with the material advance of his time in knowledge and power; the growth of national wealth, machinery and means of lighting and locomotion caused him to glow with satisfaction. Carlyle, the pessimist, regards all such symptoms of mechanical development as contemptible. Far from panegyrizing his own time, he criticizes it without mercy. Macaulay had great faith in rules and regulations, reform bills and parliamentary machinery. Carlyle regards them as wiles of the devil. Frederick William of Prussia, according to Macaulay, was the most execrable of fiends, a cross between Moloch and Puck, his palace was hell, and Oliver Twist and Smike were petted children compared with his son the crown prince. In the same bluff and honest father Carlyle recognized the realized ideal of his fancy and hugged the just man made perfect to his heart of hearts. Such men as Bentham and Cobden, Mill and Macaulay, had in Carlyle’s opinion spared themselves no mistaken exertion to exalt the prosperity and happiness of their own day. The time had come to react at all hazards against the prevalent surfeit of civilization. Henceforth his literary activity was to take two main directions. First, tracts for the times against modern tendencies, especially against the demoralizing modern talk about progress by means of money and machinery which emanated like a miasma from the writings of such men as Mill, Macaulay, Brougham, Buckle and from the Quarterlies. Secondly, a cyclopean exhibition of Caesarism, discipline, the regimentation of workers, and the convertibility of the Big Stick and the Bible, with a preference to the Big Stick as a panacea. The snowball was to grow rapidly among such writers as Kingsley, Ruskin, George Borrow, unencumbered by reasoning or deductive processes which they despised. Carlyle himself felt that the condition of England was one for anger rather than discussion. He detested the rationalism and symmetry of such methodists of thought as Mill, Buckle, Darwin, Spencer, Lecky, Ricardo and other demonstrations of the dismal science—mere chatter he called it. The palliative philanthropy of the day had become his aversion even more than the inroads of Rome under cover of the Oxford movement which Froude, Borrow and Kingsley set themselves to correct. As an historian of a formal order Carlyle’s historical portraits cannot bear a strict comparison with the published work of Gibbon and Macaulay, or even of Maine and Froude in this period, but as a biographer and autobiographer Carlyle’s caustic insight has enabled him to produce much which is of the very stuff of human nature. Surrounded by philomaths and savants who wrote smoothly about the perfectibility of man and his institutions, Carlyle almost alone refused to distil his angry eloquence and went on railing against the passive growth of civilization at the heart of which he declared that he had discovered a cancer. This uncouth Titan worship and prostration before brute force, this constant ranting about jarls and vikings trembles often on the verge of cant and comedy, and his fiddling on the one string of human pretension and bankruptcy became discordant almost to the point of chaos. Instinctively destructive, he resents the apostleship of teachers like Mill, or the pioneer discoveries of men like Herbert Spencer and Darwin. He remains, nevertheless, a great incalculable figure, the cross grandfather of a school of thought which is largely unconscious of its debt and which so far as it recognizes it takes Carlyle in a manner wholly different from that of his contemporaries.
The deaths of Carlyle and George Eliot (and also of George
Borrow) in 1881 make a starting-point for the new schools of
historians, novelists, critics and biographers, and
those new nature students who claim to cure those
evil effects of civilization which Carlyle and his
New schools.
History.
disciples had discovered. History in the hands of Macaulay,
Buckle and Carlyle had been occupied mainly with the bias and
tendency of change, the results obtained by those who consulted
the oracle being more often than not diametrically opposite.
With Froude still on the one hand as the champion of
Protestantism, and with E. A. Freeman and J. R.
Green on the other as nationalist historians, the school of applied
history was fully represented in the next generation, but as the
records grew and multiplied in print in accordance with the wise
provisions made in 1857 by the commencement of the Rolls
Series of medieval historians, and the Calendars of State Papers,
to be followed shortly by the rapidly growing volumes of Calendars
of Historical Manuscripts, historians began to concentrate their
attention more upon the process of change as their right subject
matter and to rely more and more upon documents, statistics
and other impersonal and disinterested forms of material. Such
historical writers as Lecky, Lord Acton, Creighton, Morley and
Bryce contributed to the process of transition mainly as essayists,
but the new doctrines were tested and to a certain extent put
into action by such writers as Thorold Rogers, Stubbs, Gardiner
and Maitland. The theory that History is a science, no less and
no more, was propounded in so many words by Professor Bury
in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1903, and this view and
the corresponding divergence of history from the traditional
pathway of Belles Lettres has become steadily more dominant
in the world of historical research and historical writing since
1881. The bulk of quite modern historical writing can certainly
be justified from no other point of view.
The novel since 1881 has pursued a course curiously analogous to that of historical writing. Supported as it was by masters of the old régime such as Meredith and Hardy, and by those who then ranked even higher in popular esteem such as Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Besant and Rice, The novel. Blackmore, William Black and a monstrous rising regiment of lady novelists—Mrs Lynn Linton, Rhoda Broughton, Mrs Henry Wood, Miss Braddon, Mrs Humphry Ward, the type seemed securely anchored to the old formulas and the old ways. In reality, however, many of these popular workers were already moribund and the novel was being honeycombed by French influence.
