Studies in Literature and History

Part 1

STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND HISTORY

by the Late

SIR ALFRED C. LYALL

P.C., G.C.I.E., K.C.B., D.C.L., LL.D.

London John Murray, Albemarle Street, W. 1915

PREFACE

In the Second Series of his Asiatic Studies the late Sir Alfred Lyall republished a number of articles that he had contributed to various Reviews up to the year 1894. After that date he wrote frequently, especially for the Edinburgh Review, and he left amongst his papers a note naming a number of articles from which he considered that a selection might be made for publication.

The present volume contains, with two exceptions, the articles so mentioned, together with one that was not included by the author.

A large number of Sir Alfred Lyall's contributions to the Reviews deal, as might be expected, with India--with its political and administrative problems, or with the careers of its statesmen and soldiers. He appears, however, to have regarded such articles as not of sufficient permanent value for republication, and his selection was confined almost exclusively to writings on literary, historical or religious subjects. He made an exception in favour of an essay on his old friend Sir Henry Maine; but as the limitations imposed by the publisher made it necessary to sacrifice one of the larger articles, this essay was, with some reluctance, excluded. It dealt chiefly with Maine's influence on Indian administration and legislation; and would more appropriately be included in a collection of his writings on India, should these ever be published.

While Indian official subjects have been excluded, readers of the earlier 'Studies' will recognise that many of the writings in this volume follow out lines of thought suggested in the earlier works, or apply in a larger sphere the results of observations made when the author was studying Indian myths and Indian religions in Berar, or the 'rare and antique stratification of society' in Rajputana. The two addresses on religion placed at the end of the volume form the most obvious example, but there is a close connection between a group of the other articles and the views developed in Asiatic Studies.

In the last edition of that work a chapter on 'History and Fable' was inserted because of its bearing on the author's general views 'regarding the elementary commixture of fable and fact in ages that may be called prehistoric.' In this chapter the author made a rapid survey of the 'kinship between history and fable,' tracing it through the times of myth and romance to the period of the historic novel. 'At their birth,' he says, 'history and fable were twin sisters;' and again, 'There is always a certain quantity of fable in history, and there is always an element of history in one particular sort of fable.' The reviews of English and Anglo-Indian fiction, and of 'Heroic Poetry' in the present work, give opportunities of further illustrations from fiction of his views: which reappear from another standpoint in the 'Remarks on the Reading of History'--a short address, which it has been thought worth while to reprint, though it was not specially indicated by the author for publication.

Several of the other articles contain criticism of a more purely literary character; the article on 'Frontiers,' which recounts exciting but little-known episodes in the Russian advance in Asia, has an important bearing on a branch of Indian policy in which Sir Alfred Lyall to the end of his career took a deep interest, and of which he had a profound knowledge; and 'L'Empire Libéral' may, it is thought, be found to contain much that is of special interest at the present time.

These articles have not had the benefit of any general revision by their author, but in a few cases he had indicated in the printed copies alterations or additions that he desired to be made.

The Quarterly. The Anglo-Saxon. The Edinburgh. The Fortnightly.

Except that the two essays on 'Race and Religion' and 'The State in its Relation to Religion' have been brought together at the end of the volume, the chronological order of original publication has been observed. The source from which each article is drawn has in all cases been indicated, and this opportunity is taken of acknowledging the permission to republish that has courteously been accorded by the editors or proprietors of the Reviews concerned.

Permission has also been given to publish the article on 'Sir Spencer Walpole' written for the British Academy, and the address on the 'Reading of History.'

John O. Miller

December 1914.

CONTENTS

PAGE

NOVELS OF ADVENTURE AND MANNERS 1

ENGLISH LETTER-WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 34

THACKERAY 76

THE ANGLO-INDIAN NOVELIST 121

HEROIC POETRY 155

THE WORKS OF LORD BYRON 177

THE ENGLISH UTILITARIANS 210

CHARACTERISTICS OF MR. SWINBURNE'S POETRY 263

Part 2

FRONTIERS ANCIENT AND MODERN 291

L'EMPIRE LIBÉRAL 328

SIR SPENCER WALPOLE 368

REMARKS ON THE READING OF HISTORY 377

RACE AND RELIGION 399

THE STATE IN ITS RELATION TO EASTERN AND WESTERN RELIGIONS 427

INDEX 454

NOVELS OF ADVENTURE AND MANNERS

Mr. Raleigh very rightly goes back to mediæval romance for the origins of English fiction. In all countries the metrical tale is many generations older than the prose story; for prose writing is a refinement of the literary art which flourishes only when reading has become popular; while verse, being at first a kind of memoria technica used for the correct transmission of sacred texts and the heroic tradition, strikes the ear and fixes the recollection of an audience. The exploits of mighty warriors and the miracles of saints--love, fighting, and theology--form the subject matter of these stories in verse. They are, as Mr. Raleigh says, epical in spirit though not in form: 'they carry their hero through the actions and adventures of his life ... they display a marked preference for deeds done, and attempt no character-drawing.... A sense of the instability of human life, very present to the minds of men familiar with battle and plague, is everywhere mirrored in these romances.' Then came Chaucer, who not only wrote prose tales, but also carried far toward perfection the art of narration in verse; and 'in the fifteenth century both of the ancestors of the modern novel--that is, the novella or short pithy story after the manner of the Italians, and the romance of chivalry--appear in an English prose dress.' But the genius of English fiction was still loaded with the chains of allegory and pedantic moralisation; and in the Gesta Romanorum, the most popular collection of English prose stories which had been translated from the Latin at the end of the fifteenth century, 'human beings are mere puppets, inhabiting the great fabric of mediæval thought and mediæval institution.... It was the work of the Renaissance to recover the literal and obvious sense of human life, as it was the work of the closely-allied Reformation to recover the literal sense of the Bible.'

The playwright has always been a formidable rival to the novelist, insomuch that in a period of dramatic activity the novel, as our author remarks, can hardly maintain itself. But from the middle of the seventeenth century the stage had fallen low, while the formal and fantastic romance, the long-winded involved story, was losing its vogue. So the heroic romances, we are told, 'availed themselves skilfully of the opportunity to foster a new taste in the reading public--a delight, namely, born of the fashionable leisure of a self-conscious society, in minute introspection, and the analysis and portraiture of emotional states.' We are inclined to suspect that these words, which would serve well enough to describe the taste for the analytic novel of our own day, must be taken with considerable reserve in their application to the writings and the readers of two centuries ago. But we may agree that certain tendencies of style and developments of feeling which are now predominant may be traced back to this time. And when, toward the end of the seventeenth century, Mrs. Aphra Behn began to enlist incidents of real life into the service of her fiction, she was making a distinct attempt, as Mr. Raleigh points out, to bring romance into closer relation with contemporary life, although a conventional treatment of facts and character still overlay all her work. Mr. Raleigh holds, however, that this attempt was abortive; that it failed at the time; and that the great eighteenth-century school of English novelists, with Richardson and Fielding at their head, took its rise, quite independently of predecessors in the seventeenth century, out of the general stock of miscellaneous literature--plays, books of travel, adventures, satires, journals, and broadsides--which had been drawn at first hand from observation and experience of the various forms of surrounding life.

We are quite ready to agree that the eighteenth-century Novel of Manners belongs to a family distinct from that of the Romantic story, or is at any rate very distantly connected with it. But when Mr. Raleigh goes on to say that the heroic romance died in the seventeenth century and left no issue, although it was revived again in the latter half of the eighteenth century, to this view we are much inclined to demur. Such complete interruptions in the transmission of species are as rare in the intellectual as in the physical world; and we prefer to maintain that the romance, although it was for a time eclipsed by the brilliancy of the writers who described the manners and sentiments of contemporary society, was never extinguished, but became transformed gradually, by successive modifications of environment, into the modern novel of adventure. It is true that Defoe entirely rejected the marvellous, while Horace Walpole, fifty years later, dealt immoderately in the elements of mystery and wonder; yet, notwithstanding these violent oscillations of style and method, we believe that the great historical novels of the early nineteenth century, and the tales of stirring incident which flourish at the present day, descend by an unbroken filiation from the fabulous romance of elder times.

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