It is in the Victorian age (1840-1900) that the field is most bewildering.It is true, as Frederick Harrison says, that "this Victorian age has no Shakespeare or Milton, no Bacon or Hume, no Fielding or Scott-- no supreme master in poetry, philosophy, or romance whose work is incorporated with the thought of the world, who is destined to form an epoch, to endure for centuries."[1] The genius of the period is more scientific than literary, yet we would be helpless if we had not already eliminated from our discussion everything but the works and writers of pure literature.The output of books has been so tremendous that it would be impossible to analyze the influences which have made them.There are in this Victorian period at least twelve great English writers who must be known, whose work affects the current of English literature.Many other names would need mention in any full history or any minute study; but it is not harsh judgment to say that the main current of literature would be the same without them.A few of these lesser names will come to mind,and in the calling of them one realizes the influence, even on them, of the English Bible.Anthony Trollope wrote sixty volumes, the titles of most of which are now popularly unknown.He told George Eliot that it was not brains that explained his writing so much, but rather wax which he put in the seat of his chair, which held him down to his daily stint of work.He could boast, and it was worth the boasting, that he had never written a line which a pure woman could not read without a blush.His whole Framley Parsonage series abounds in Bible references and allusions.So Charlotte Bronte is in English literature, and Jane Eyre does prove what she was meant to prove, that a commonplace person can be made the heroine of a novel; but on all Charlotte Bronte's work is the mark of the rectory in which she grew up.So Thomas Grey has left his "Elegy" and his "Hymn to Adversity," and some other writing which most of us have forgotten or never knew.Then there are Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen.We may even remember that Macaulay thought Jane Austen could be compared with Shakespeare, as, of course, she can be, since any one can be; but neither of these good women has strongly affected the literary current.Many others could be named, but English literature would be substantially the same without them; and, though all might show Biblical influence, they would not illustrate what we are trying to discover.So we come, without apology to the unnamed, to the twelve, without whom English literature would be different.This is the list in the order of the alphabet: Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning (Mrs.Browning being grouped as one with him), Carlyle, Dickens, George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, Macaulay, Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Swinburne, Tennyson, and Thackeray.
[1] Early Victorian Literature, p.9
It is dangerous to make such a list; but it can be defended.Literary history would not be the same without any one of them, unless possibly Swinburne, whose claim to place is rather by his work as critic than as creator.Nor is any name omitted whose introduction would change literary history.
Benjamin Jowett thought Arnold too flippant on religious things to be a real prophet.At any rate, this much is true, that the books in which Arnold dealt with the fundamentals of religion are his profoundest work.
In his poetry the best piece of the whole is his "Rugby Chapel." His Religion and Dogma he himself calls an "essay toward a better apprehension of the Bible." All through he urges it as the one Book which needs recovery."All that the churches can say about the importance of the Bible and its religion we concur in." The book throughout is an effort to justify his own faith in terms of the Bible.The effort is sometimes amusing, because it takes such a logical and verbal agility to go from one to the other; but he is always at it.He is afraid in his soul that England will swing away from the Bible.He fears it may come about through neglect of the Bible on one hand, or through wrong teaching about it on the other.Not in his ideas alone, but markedly in his style, Arnold has felt the Biblical influence.He came at a time when there was strong temptation to fall into cumbrous German ways of speech.Against that Arnold set a simple phraseology, and he held out the English Bible constantly as a model by which the men of England ought to learn to write.He never gained the simplicity of the old Hebrew sentence, and sometimes his secondary clauses follow one another so rapidly that a reader is confused; but his words as a whole are simple and direct.
