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Show GIANTS IN THOSE DA YS In the intellectual sphere it will be found that most of the great names of the Victorian Age are those of men and women born in the ten years between be-tween 1809 and 1819. Carlyle, Mac-aulay, Mac-aulay, Disraeli, J. S. Mill, are all a little earlier, and Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, Millais, George Meredith a little later. But the calendar cal-endar of those ten years is worth re counting: In 1809 Darwin, Gladstone, Tennyson. Tenny-son. 1811 Thackeray. 1812 Dickens, Robert Browning. 181G 'Charlotte Bronte. 1819 (the birth year of Queen Viv-toria Viv-toria herself), George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, Ruskin. I have included Disraeli and Gladstone Glad-stone not because, but in spite of their being politicians. At the queen's accession the eldest of these was twenty-eight and the youngest eighteen. That year (1837) the opening scene of the Victorian drama fitly heralded the future; for in it were given to the English world two immortal works, opposite as the poles in character, but each disclosing disclos-ing for the first time the real genius of its author: Dickens' "Pickwick Papers" and Carlyle's "French Revolution." Revo-lution." During the decade which followed fol-lowed our literature was enriched by "Vanity Fair," "Jane Eyre," the first volume of "Modern Painters,' and the first two volumes of Macaulays "History "His-tory of England." Sir Edward Clarke has recently produced an interesting autobiography. autobio-graphy. . . I will not go through his catalogue, but every one should read and study it; but I will take two or three years as samples, sometimes omitting one or two of Sir E. Clarke's specimens, and smetimes adding one or two, for which he has not found a place. Take first 1850 the year of "Pen-dennis," "Pen-dennis," "In Memoriam," and "Christmas "Christ-mas Eve and Easter Day." Or again, 1855 .with "Maud," "Men and Women,' Wo-men,' "The Virginians,' Macaulay's third and fourth volumes, and Herbert Spencer's "Psychology." Or, lastly, 1859, with the "Idylls of the King," "Adam Bede," "The Tale of Two Cities," Cit-ies," "The Ordeal of Richard Fev-erel," Fev-erel," Edward Fitzgerald's "Rubai-yat," "Rubai-yat," and (in some ways the most epoch making of them all) Darwin's "Origin of Species." Even this marvelous mar-velous and almost unexampled array gives an inadequate idea of the resources re-sources of Victorian genius when the age was at its zenith. For, within the same ten years, Ave have the first published poems of Matthew Arnold and William Morris, Ruskin's "Stones of Venice," the first novel of Anthony Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell's "Cranford,"-Mill's "Cranford,"-Mill's "Liberty," and the best work of Charles Kinksley. . . . The stream, if never afterward quite so lull and strong, did not dry up; it was for years later being constantly re-enforced and vitalized by new tributaries, trib-utaries, down to the very confines of the Victorian Age. The wind blows where it lists: and no theory of causation with which I am acquainted whether of heredity, or environment, or of any combination combina-tion or permutation of possible or imaginable im-aginable antecedents can adequately account for these indisputable facts It is ritht, moreover to record, that the Victorian public, the men in the street at whom Matthew Arnold gibed, the subscribers to the circulating circulat-ing libraries, which then went far to make or unmake the fortunes of an author, were neither unappreciatlve,' nor exclusive in their appreciations. It is true that the two greatest of the women writers of the age Charlotte Bronte and, George Eliot were, at the outset of their careers, roughly handled by the orthodox and fashionable fash-ionable critics. But both came very soon into their own. In the case of another pair of the most gifted authors au-thors of the time, Robert Browning and George Meredith, each of whom had to wait before he could make good his claims to pass, from the worship of a coterie, into the recognized recog-nized Pantheon, the fault lay perhaps as much with the perversity of the writer as with the dullness o the public. From Mr. Asquith's Romanes lecture, "Some Aspects of the Victor-Ian Victor-Ian Age." |