Victorian Literature: Sixty Years of Books and BookmenShorter, Clement King
History
Victorian Literature: Sixty Years of Books and Bookmen
Shorter, Clement King
English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
The leader for many years of the "Hegelian" school of philosophy at
Oxford, which has long held the field against Mill on the one hand and
Spencer on the other, was =Thomas Hill Green (1838-1882)=, who was
appointed Whyte Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1877, and who published
the same year a series of articles in the _Contemporary Review_, on "Mr
Herbert Spencer and Mr G. H. Lewes: their Application of the Doctrine of
Evolution to Thought." He was preparing for publication his
"Prolegomena to Ethics" at the time of his death, and the work was
finally edited by Professor A. C. Bradley, who has himself written a
treatise on logic, and whose Hegelian work, entitled "Ethical Studies,"
is of the highest interest. Green was a moral force in Oxford, quite
apart from his philosophical speculation, as the following extract from
one of his lectures will indicate:--"I confess to hoping for a time when
the phrase, 'the education of a gentleman,' will have lost its meaning,
because the sort of education which alone makes the gentleman in any
true sense will be within the reach of all. As it was the aspiration of
Moses that all the Lord's people should be prophets, so with all
seriousness and reverence we may hope and pray for a condition of
English society in which all honest citizens will recognize themselves
and be recognized by each other as gentlemen."
=George Henry Lewes (1817-1878)=, whose name is frequently joined with
that of Spencer by his association of biology with ethics and
psychology, was the son of Charles Lee Lewes, the actor, and was one of
the most versatile writers of our times. His first important work was
the "Biographical History of Philosophy," originally published in 1845
in Knight's Shilling Library, but amplified without improvement into two
substantial volumes in 1867. Lewes's distaste for the ordinary
metaphysics, and the severity of his criticism on Hegel, have rendered
this work the _bête noir_ of all transcendental students; but it remains
the one English "History of Philosophy" of any pretension. More
unqualified praise may be given to the "Life of Goethe," which Lewes
published in 1855. Perhaps no other man then living could have shown
himself competent to deal with Goethe's many-sidedness--to discuss
"Faust" and "Tasso," "Hermann und Dorothea" at one moment, the poet's
biological and botanical discoveries the next, and to estimate at their
true worth the speculations on colours, which Goethe held to be more
calculated than his poems to secure him immortality. The book remains
the standard life of the great Weimar sage in this country, and is
popular in Germany, in spite of a vast Goethe literature which has been
published since its appearance. In addition to these great works Lewes
wrote two novels, one of which, "Ranthorpe," Charlotte Brontë praised
enthusiastically. He edited the _Fortnightly Review_, and also initiated
a craze for aquaria, by his "Seaside Studies;" he endeavoured, indeed,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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