“Time and space,” a noble philosopher has observed, “are but hallucinations.” It may be so, and from the point of view of the metaphysician ours may have been merely a “so-called nineteenth century.” Certain it is that to judge literature in blocks of centuries is to make a convenient but illogical cross-division. The early, and perhaps the most important, literary influences of the century were in existence long before 1801. Thus, if we look at whatever is now called fin de siÈcle, at violent antagonism to tradition and convention, at discontent of every sort with everything—with rank, wealth, morality, law, marriage, the family—we find that this passion was as noisy and self-complacent a hundred years ago as it is to-day. The French Revolution was the lurid playground of “New Women,” full of what they supposed to be new ideas. The German drama of 1780–1800, now best remembered by the parody called “The Rovers,” in the Anti-Jacobin, was replete with the humorless paradoxes and strained situations of Ibsen. The shortest way to an understanding of the antiquity of our “new ideas” is, in fact, a study of the Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin.

Romance, again, as far as romance depends for her effects on desperate deeds, on the rhetoric of noble brigands, on the phantasms of the sheeted dead shivering down dark passages among skeletons, on clanking chains, and on distressed damsels, was as much alive in the end of the eighteenth century as at any age of literary history. Goethe, Schiller, BÜrger, Mrs. Radcliffe, all following in the Gothic wake of honest Horace Walpole and his Castle of Otranto, were preparing the ground for Scott and Dumas. Once more the old “popular” elements so necessary to literature (which, like AntÆus, regains vigor on touching mother-earth) had been wholly absent from the poetry and prose of the last reigning Stuart and of the first two Hanoverian kings of England. But, about 1770–1780, literature had returned to its archaic popular sources. Percy had made volks-lieder fashionable, Fergusson and Burns had revived the rustic muse of Scotland, and Macpherson had given mankind a draught, though an adulterated draught, from the cup of the sorceries of the Celtic enchantress. In opposition to the urban self-restraint and contented complacency of the Augustan age, Rousseau had preached the pleasures of virtue, sentiment, and of a “blessed state of Nature”; young Werther had gotten him a stool to be sad upon, like Master Stephen: weeping was the mode. Rousseau, as Mr. Pater once observed in conversation, was “the grandmother of us all,” and as tearful as Mrs. Gummidge in David Copperfield. Meanwhile the “emancipation” born of science had set in; people thought they knew all about everything; the elder Darwin could explain the universe without a God, quite as easily as any modern Darwinian, if not so elaborately. He may not have been always correct in his theories and facts, still, there they were, and they were “emancipating.” Yet, far from being laughed out of court by the gratifying progress of science, a more mystical religion and a life more austere had come in from the preaching of Wesley, who was practically the parent of our neo-Catholicism in its varying forms. The “Oxford Movement,” with all the strange after-symptoms which it has left behind it, is directly descended from Wesley. Thus romance, sentiment, freedom and variety in poetic form, philanthropy, revolt against the past, return to and reverence for the past, scientific doubt, weariness of life, love of nature, wistful belief, relapse on the forms of the Church, and everything else which stamps the literature of the nineteenth century were alive and active in the last half of the eighteenth century. The year 1801 made no sudden break. The nineteenth century merely went on evolving the principles, revolutionary or reactionary, of the last half of the eighteenth century.

Thus Crabbe, the precursor of whoever, Englishman, American, Frenchman, or Slav, has written of the sombre tragedies of the poor, was born in 1754. Blake, whose perfectly un-Augustan rhapsodies and mystic lyrics were made fashionable about 1870, was born in 1757, out of due time, for his best side is Elizabethan in quality. Burns, born in 1759, is as much at home in the nineteenth century as TolstoÏ, while Godwin could not be more “advanced,” or Mary Wollstonecraft more of “a New Woman,” if the former belonged to our “Forward Liberals” and the latter perorated at congresses of her sex. The first twenty-five years of Miss Austen belong to the eighteenth century; yet, except for a certain “old-fashioned” primness of style, she is the first, and, beyond all doubt, the greatest of all nineteenth-century “realistic” novelists of domestic life. For, though a “realist,” she is a humorist, and the combination is almost unexampled. Your common realist is a gloomy thing, with no more sense of the comic than M. Zola.

Of the new poets, revolutionary in metre and matter, Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, and Southey were born in 1770–1774; they were mature before the nineteenth century dawned. His northern home, among the hills and lakes, fitted Wordsworth to be the austere and mystical poet of nature and of man in relation to nature. Born a poet, his genius was determined by his environment, while his ardent sympathy with the Revolution at once turned his attention to the unregarded poor, and inspired his not wholly successful attempt to shake off the trammels of Augustan “poetic diction,” the survival of the Latinism of Boileau and Pope. Later, of course, Wordsworth became the Tory, the patriot, the Churchman, and the Stamp Collector. But his poetical creed he never consciously changed, though he often lapsed from it unconsciously. If Scott was to be a poet at all he was fated to be influenced by the New World, not in its emancipated ideas, but in its wistful return to the Old World of reivers, spearmen, claymores, goblin, ghost, and fairy. The Border ballads lulled his cradle and were the joy of his childhood and manhood. All tradition murmured to him her charms of Border and Highland legend; every ruined abbey and castle had its tale for him; to Ettrick and Yarrow he needed not to say, like Lady John Scott, “Have you no message for me?” He never had a touch of the Augustan horror of mountain and torrent, never a touch of the Augustan contempt of “Barbarism.” Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels of terror went to the molding of his genius, as the novels of Miss Edgeworth (born 1767) suggested fiction about the lives and manners of his own people. In his return to the past he came, like Lamb, on the Elizabethan drama, and, unlike Lamb, on the unpublished documents of the Tudor age, the age of desperate resistance to England. But Scott would never have been exactly the poet that he was if he had not heard “Christabel” recited. “Christabel,” the entirely original utterance of a genius which, at first, was a child of the enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The early ideas of Coleridge were the ideas of Rousseau and of Bernardin de Saint Pierre, who was, like Coleridge, but more energetically, a seeker for an ideal land where pantisocracy might flourish and a clown might be the poet’s “brother.”

In poetry, in poetic form, Coleridge was the real and daring innovator, inspired by the eighteenth century reaction against convention, and played on like an Æolian harp by every wind of his mystic spirit. His reaction was too violent even for Lamb; his originality too extreme even for Wordsworth. In him, of all our later poets, the “unconscious self” was the strongest and the most free, and of all our poets he had the hardest battle with the dull Augustan survival in such critics as Jeffrey. To them all the ripened fruit of the blossoming time of the late eighteenth century, the poetry of Scott and of Wordsworth, was but dimly intelligible, but Coleridge was the most unintelligible of all. From the Germany of the late eighteenth century came one of Scott’s springs of poetic action; from the Lenore of BÜrger (a popular ballad rewritten) and from the GÖtz von Berlichingen of Goethe. These were the days when Scott longed to possess a skull and cross-bones, and in a love-letter dilated on his choice of a sepulchre. But what came to Coleridge from Germany was the late eighteenth century’s reaction against the truly “common-sense” ideas of Hume, the philosophy of Kant, Schelling, and Fichte. In this field, too, he was unintelligible (and no wonder), but he was but adapting the ideas of 1770–1800, and the neo-Hegelians of Oxford are doing the same thing. A reaction against the materialism of common-sense was inevitable; Mesmer, Swedenborg, and Kant began what survives in the hands of the Master of Balliol and of Professor William James.

In a more recent generation Byron prolonged the Wertherism of Werther, Byron being thus a grandson of Rousseau, while he borrowed his form, and borrowed it very ill, from what Scott borrowed of Coleridge. The genius of Byron is not contested by the sane, but except in satire it seldom found clear and adequate, because it sought hurried, heedless, and tumultuous, expression. Scott had a better ear and was not so reckless an improvisatore. Poems that can endure are not written like Byron’s, in the brief leisure of fashionable industry. We admire the native impetus of Byron, his gift of satire, his sensitiveness to elemental force in nature and in man, but we cannot understand the furore which was so much the child of his title, his beauty, his recklessness, and his studiously cultivated air of mystery. Mr. Lenville, as reported by Mr. Folair, said that Nicholas Nickleby was “a regular stick of an actor, and it’s only the mystery about him that has caused him to go down with the people here, though Lenville says he don’t believe there’s anything at all in it.” A later age must partly adopt the same theory of Byron’s original and unparalleled success in Europe as well as in England. He was mysterious Manfred, he was Childe Harold, he was the Corsair; a hero of Mrs. Radcliffe’s, with an Oriental air and a gloomy secret and a heart burning with indignation against the unworthy species of men. What had Byron done? Even Goethe was curious, believing wild anecdotes; now we really do not care what Byron did, recognizing in him, his genius, and his pose, not so much the “Satanic,” as the result of hysteria and madness in his race. Satanism, from of old, has been mainly hysteria. The element of personal reclame in Byron has faded, and with it fades his reputation as an earth-shaking poet. Attempts to revive that fame in our day, attempts to bring us back to “the noble poet,” are respectable, being based on loyalty to the taste of our great-grandfathers and grandmothers in all civilized countries. But the efforts are futile. “Byron,” says Mr. Saintsbury, “seems to me a poet distinctly of the second class, and not even of the best kind of second, inasmuch as his greatness is chiefly derived from a sort of parody, a sort of imitation of the qualities of the first. His verse is to the greatest poetry what melodrama is to tragedy, what plaster is to marble, what pinchbeck is to gold.” Such, however unpopular they may be, are my own candid sentiments, for though from childhood I could and did read all our great poets with pleasure, it was not with the kind of pleasure which Byron in his satire and his declamation could occasionally give me. He is monotonous, he is rhetorical, his versification is often incredibly bad, and he is more obscure, mainly by dint of hurry, bad printing, and bad grammar, than Mr. Browning. Thus Byron leaves us impressed as with a vast, even volcanic, yet dandified force, untrained and often misdirected. Either by nature, or in reaction, he professed sympathy with the Augustan school of Queen Anne’s reign, and sided with Pope in the long quarrel as to whether Pope is a poet.

Even the modern opponents of Byron must recognize in him qualities which won the admiration and affection of Scott and Shelley. In Shelley we had a true child of the revolution, the Aufklarung, and the later eighteenth century. His boyhood trifled with chemical science (probably not then popular with the human boy); his adolescence was given to converting school-girls into “dear little atheists.” His social ideas, like those of some advanced moderns, aimed at the absolute destruction of the family; and the moral of Laon and Cythna went far behind the morals of the most backward savages, who make incest a capital offence. Shelley, a boy all his life, was more boyishly devoted to destruction than even the newest writers on the relations of the sexes. In “making all things new” both he and they are, in fact, relapsing on a condition of society which, if it ever existed, is so old that it may be called “pre-human,” and is contrary to nature, as far as we can study human nature in the least developed of tribes. His ideas conducted Shelley to the tragedy and farce of his career: his desertion of one young wife, followed by her suicide, and his marriage with another, in entire opposition to his own opinions. In literature he began at school with a devout following of Mrs. Radcliffe; while, in Queen Mab and Alastor, vigorous but vague and misty Childe Harold, wandering in No Man’s Land, he first displayed his originality in poetical form. His personal character being noble and generous in the highest degree, his sympathy with the poor and the oppressed being a true passion, Shelley’s errors arose from the fixed idea that almost every human ordinance must, being old, be necessarily bad. He would recognize that there is, after all, something right in the sixth commandment, but did not draw the inference that a gleam of reason might also be found in most of the rest of the Decalogue. The state of society then, as always, provoked revolt, but the state of society was grievous, not because its moral laws were bad, but because its laws were not obeyed. Shelley had no turn for narrative, and, in such poems as The Revolt of Islam, it is the splendid meteoric genius, the unexcelled music that captivate. In lyrics he was probably the most original force since the Elizabethan age: his verse is a singing and soaring flame. In Adonis his righteous indignation carries him forward like an angel with a sword of fire; and The Witch of Atlas is a triumph in a new “fairy way of writing.” His is the Muse of clouds and stars, of sea and tempest, of all the aspects, and, in appearance, most capricious forces of the world, yet his is also the Muse of flowers and peaceful woods, of dejection and of delight. What the born rebel, Milton, might have been without the foundation and trammels of Puritanism, that Shelley was, though his wild and tender lyric note was even more exquisite than Milton’s. Neither was, in the full sense, human, for both were without humor, as may be seen in their humorous pieces.

Keats, but three years younger than Shelley (1795), was more a true child of the nineteenth century. His social ideas, though of course liberal, were more in abeyance; he was more exclusively an artist; and his art was more controlled by the revived Elizabethanism of Leigh Hunt (1784). That singular man, who had so much taste, and so much of it bad; so intense a theory of social benevolence, and so keen a belief that it was more blessed to receive than to give, “owed little” (in the way of literature) “to any but the old masters, and many contemporaries owed not a little to him.” Few owed more, for good and bad, than Keats. Virgil he had found out for himself, and had translated when a schoolboy. Spenser, too, he found for himself, and Greece he discovered afresh in LempriÈre’s Dictionary and in Chapman’s Homer. But this superficial euphuism and elaborate verbal quaintness he partly derived at second hand from Leigh Hunt.

That something in Leigh Hunt which suggested Harold Skimpole to Dickens, and his violent conception of The Cockney School to Lockhart, was not hidden from Keats, and inspired him with some bitter words. It was what he derived from Hunt that gave occasion to Keats’s assailants, who were more of political than of literary partisans. Lockhart, or Wilson, or both, with the Quarterly reviewer, in attacking Endymion were attacking, they thought, a member of an affected, effeminate, and radical coterie. Keats himself, maturing with the suddenness of genius, looked on Endymion as thoroughly immature. But killed, or even discouraged, by his critics he was not, and on a page of a copy of Lamia where his publishers spoke of his discouragment he wrote “This is a lie.” (The copy is in the possession of Canon Ainger.) Keats, like Burns, whom he so intensely admired and so unerringly judged as a man and a poet, was his own best critic. Despite his boyish lusciousness of taste, and the fever of letters written when dying, there was no manlier or more chivalrous soul in England than that of the poet of the odes to the nightingale and to autumn. Keats at his best attained sheer perfection of language, of emotion, and of thought. As he advised Shelley to be, he was not content with less than filling all the rifts with pure gold. “Untaught,” like the minstrel of Odysseus, he combined a Greek clarity and largeness of manner with that romance which Greece does not lack, but which he possessed in a degree more conspicuous, at least to readers who are not Greeks. Though he has not been and cannot be imitated, he has supplied to Tennyson and the best moderns a standard and an ideal. That the Shakespearian copiousness of humanity and humor and dramatic genius would ever have been his nothing indicates, but what writer of the nineteenth century, except Scott, has possessed a large share of these qualities? In poetry, not one, and it was in prose that Scott wore his fragment of the cloak of Shakespeare. For the century has not produced, in England or America, a great dramatic poet. It is to fiction, to Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Stevenson, Meredith, Hawthorne, George Eliot, that we must look for the humor and humanity and passion which, earlier, found their vehicle in the drama.

Ours is a reading rather than a seeing century, though this does not explain the reason which made the great novelists incapable of writing for the stage. Of the other poets of the early century, Campbell, Rogers, Moore, Landor, Hogg, and the ladies, Mrs. Hemans, and L.E.L., and Beddoes, space does not permit us to treat. Landor’s audience has not increased; Rogers has none; Campbell is best remembered for war songs which I fear are overrated; Hogg, despite some exquisite passages in Kilmeny, and some admirable songs, suffers from his countrymen’s exclusive devotion to Robbie Burns. When Scott turned to fiction (1814) the current of popular taste at once changed into that channel. Byron had still his vogue; Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge then sang only to the few initiated; Wordsworth was past his prime; and with the general public nothing was really popular but fiction, and that fiction was Scott’s. Miss Austen is probably much more widely appreciated to-day than when she died, little noted by the world, in 1817. A criticism of Scott’s novels, which first made fiction supreme and far above poetry in the estimation of “the reading public,” cannot be attempted in this place. The best estimate of Scott, if far from most favorable, is his own, in the introduction to The Fortunes of Nigel. His faults of prolixity, haste, indifference to delicacy of style, and even to grammar; his “big bow-wow” vein (as he calls it); the stilted theatrical language of his Catherine Glovers and Helen Macgregors—all these defects, with his hasty denouÉments (as of Shakespeare and MoliÈre), are patent, are confessed, and probably deter many readers from making profit of his humor, his rich knowledge of and sympathy with all human nature, his infrequent but exquisite touches of passion, his tragedy and comedy. None the less, Scott is the main stock of the fiction of the century. Men may now have more minute knowledge, though so wide a knowledge has none; may have more wit, if less humor; may eagerly hunt for all that Scott loathed and avoided in our animal nature; may, indeed must, practise a more careful style, but all the novelists are, willy-nilly, children of Scott and Miss Austen. Dickens, indeed, owed more to Smollett (one of Scott’s chief favorites), Thackeray owed more to Fielding, the “Kailyard School” owed more to Galt (1779—1839). But Scott is “the father of the rest,” above all, of Dumas; and Miss Austen is the mother. Lord Lytton and Mr. Disraeli had, especially at first, a tinge of Byronism, later developing on their own lines: Mr. Disraeli’s political; Lord Lytton’s multifarious, including the line of modern mysticism, now often worked. Scott lived to be interested in Lytton, and might have seen (though probably he did not see them) the little-noted beginnings of Browning and Tennyson, about 1830.

What he did see, and admire, was the performance of Cooper, with whom actual and living American fiction may perhaps be said to take its rise. In England, Cooper was regarded as the Scott of America; and it is to be regretted that Lockhart did not excise a splenetic personal reference to Cooper in Sir Walter’s Journal. He was old, tired, and fatigued with the pressure of society in Paris when he wrote. Cooper had the genius to appropriate the unworked fields of American patriotic seafaring life, and of the manners of the Red Man; he is “Cooper of the wood and wave.” Eagerly were his works read by boys, when Thackeray was a boy, and when I was a boy. Never shall his readers forget the “Long Carabine,” to whom Thackeray was devoted, and Uncas, and Chingachgook.

Doubtless Cooper’s Indians are not “realistically” treated, though there is infinitely more of truth in his dignified hunters and warriors than people conversant only with the Red Man of to-day are ready to believe. But Cooper, probably, does not live with the immortality of his first renowned successor, Hawthorne, who, for secure perfection of form, is to modern fiction what Keats is to modern poetry. Like Scott, Hawthorne is the unforced fruit of his ancestry and the society into which he was born—a Puritan, not a Cavalier artist, with a background of austere faith and of old superstition, differentiated from that of the Covenanters by the shadow of deep forests and of struggles with the Indians and the wild things of the woods. These had passed into mellow memories, as, for Scott, had passed the age of witches, fairies, reivers, and claymores. Entirely, in the Scarlet Letter, as by way of hereditary influence in the House of Seven Gables, Hawthorne reproduced what was old, making it poetically enduring. His Mosses from an Old Manse, and other brief tales set the fashion, except by Poe, long unfollowed, of the conte. Neither author has been excelled in his own portion of this field. Hawthorne’s haunted consciences, Poe’s treasure tale, his detective stories, and his tales of terror remain unequalled, though so profusely imitated. This epoch, say from 1830 to 1855, was a kind of classical interspace in the literature of the century. France, preoccupied by war in the first thirty years of the age, now awoke to her own famous romantic era, with Hugo, Dumas, Musset, Gautier, George Sand, Sainte-Beuve, MÉrimÉe—names of the highest. Germany, to the non-Teutonic world, is, in poetry, represented by Heine, and, in science, philosophy, philology, and history by a galaxy of innovators ingenious and industrious. America saw Hawthorne, Poe, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Ticknor, Prescott, Motley, Longfellow, Bryant, Emerson, in their prime; while England had Carlyle, Tennyson, Newman, Browning, the BrontËs, Kingsley, Thackeray, Dickens, and Ruskin, all recognized and flourishing.

We look around and see, as Mr. Stevenson says in a letter, that “the suns have set,” while we are scarcely conscious of new dawns. Who can explain, by circumstances of social evolution and historical event, the rising and the setting of such constellations of genius? It is not enough to speak of the democratic demand, naturally indifferent to style, for never was style the object of such anxious research, except in other ages of euphuism. Encouragement is even overabundant; “masterpieces” are announced every week, and forgotten every year. It may be the prejudice of hoary eld, but I must confess that our new literature does not seem to me to show such promise of permanence as the literature of 1830–1860 gave, and, so far, has fulfilled. Has fulfilled in spite of our sneers at the “early Victorian,” which was not socialistic, or evolutionist and Darwin-ridden, and was “respectable,” and did avert its eyes from all that most people in real life don’t care to stare at. This “prudery” was no new thing. The Greeks, in except some late decadents and in the old comedy, have a “prudish” literature. The Latin classics are not in the taste of M. Zola. The age of Chaucer, the age of Elizabeth, were grossly frank, that of the Restoration was frankly lewd, but we have sought out many inventions over which Sedley and Rochester would not have cared to linger. Their grossness was gay; ours is morbidly squalid. Such things are absent from the work of Hawthorne and Holmes, Longfellow, Dickens, Thackeray, and the rest. Such things we now treat of, greatly daring, and somehow our elders appear apt to outlaugh and outlive us as humorists, novelists, and poets. It is strange.

Into the merits of that remarkable middle age of the century we cannot enter in much detail. Tennyson holds unimperilled the throne of the poet of the time. That his thought is not especially penetrating, whether he deals with the intricacies of human character, or with the problems of the universe, may be readily admitted. But I am unaware that any poet has yet “got the absolute into a corner,” or solved the problems of the universe. Tennyson, more than people suppose, was, personally, a mystic, with his own mystic experiences; and his philosophy was influenced by them. He “followed the Gleam.” Neither in the Idylls of the King nor in plays, was dramatic rendering of character his forte. His forte was charm, and music, and the interpretation of nature. In these he is the equal of the Mantuan, is the Virgil of the modern world, “golden branch among the shadows.” Moreover, he has infinite variety: from Mariana to Fatima and Rizpah; from the Lotos-Eaters, which “adds a new charm” after the FaËrie Queene, to the Northern Farmer, from Ulysses to Crossing the Bar. The early Morte d’Arthur is of unsurpassed nobility and magic; the last poem, Crossing the Bar, is no less pre-eminent in these qualities. Tennyson, in short, had genius; new, as all genius is new, and no occasional defects of taste or temper can impair the splendor and richness of his gift to the world, nor the immortality of his fame.

His contemporary, Browning, had the misfortune to attract, by his faults, the people who wish to believe themselves clever, because they labor at appreciating passages which the poet had made obscure. Darkness is not depth, nor is obscurity a merit. From his letters it is plain that Mr. Browning had not the gift of lucid expression; from his poems it is manifest that he had not, in a high degree, the gift of verbal music and of charms. His gift of the grotesque, very real and original, was also his snare. In Christmas Eve and Easter Day, with Men and Women, we have the true essence of Browning at his best; we have his dramatic lyrics, with their amazing abundance of character and variety of measure. After the first fascinating volume The Ring and the Book became monotonous. One song in Paracelsus, to myself, seems worth all the dissection of character in the blank verse. There are many who find a kind of spiritual help in such pieces as Prospice. There are thousands who find in Men and Women a sort of intellectual enjoyment (or entertainment) which they can derive from no other poet who ever lived. An energy, life, and sympathy, breaking forth in fresh, unheard-of ways; vocal in strange, piercing, untried measures: these are the imperishable qualities of Browning. Look at his rendering of the Agamemnon: such is his version of life. The poetry of Æschylus is not there: “carmina desunt”; but there is a new, odd, unexpected rendering of the tragedy. So poignant and broken, sad, glad, grotesque, and pitiful, was Browning’s rendering of life. He was “ever a fighter”: no poet is more exempt from whining and despair. Destiny linked him with Mrs. Browning, whose genius, sincere and original, is apt to be obscured by palpable faults of manner, emotion, and even rhyme, on which it is superfluous to dwell. Her merits, and some of her defects, made Mrs. Browning the most popular of women poets in England, except, perhaps, Miss Ingelow. Both, in the crowd of accomplished versifiers, appear as true poets, though both, no doubt, fail to reach the place of Miss Christina Rossetti, who never can be popular.

The matter of popularity is full of puzzles and paradoxes. Tennyson was popular, yet great because he is popular. There was a moment when popularity without permanence might have been expected for Longfellow. The excellence of his moral intentions was then more obvious than the poetry. Such early pieces as Excelsior and The Psalm of Life yield odd results on analysis. But not much better can be said for the Queen of the May, and for parts of The Miller’s Daughter. In these is a marvellous dexterity in sinking. But sink, and remain sunk, was as little characteristic of Longfellow as of Tennyson. He was a true poet, in his lyrics, even in his translations, as well as in Evangeline, and that excellent experiment Hiawatha, where the measure of the Finnish popular poems is applied to the not dissimilar legends of another woodland race. But Longfellow lacked that undefinable quality of the rare, the strange, the hitherto unheard yet delightful note which now and again is heard in the verse of Edgar Poe. He was an Ishmaelite in literature, his hand against every man’s hand, and hence seems to be less admired where he was personally known than in France and England. It is not the famous Raven, but such pieces as To Helen, the Sleeper, and at most a dozen others which give Poe his high place in the judgment of his admirers. Not his ideas, but the beauty of his haunting lines, confers on him the laurel. Of Bryant, as a rule, and of Whittier almost always, the reverse is the truth. The acceptability of their ideas, the refined simplicity, not the natural magic, of their form, are their claims to renown. Except in a few places, as in such as his Commemoration Ode, Mr. Lowell is better remembered for the wit and vigor of his Biglow poems than for his serious verse, at least in England; while Emerson’s prose has precedence here over his poetry. The wisdom of the East and West, blended with his happy, courageous temper, made Emerson a corrective Carlyle, while Thoreau is the complement of Emerson.

Concerning the great Victorian novelists, Thackeray and Dickens, so much is daily written that remark is superfluous. A master of observation of all that had rarely been observed, a generous heart, an original and abundant humorist, the greatest source of mirth in our century, Dickens appears to wear less well than his rival. The unapproached merits of Thackeray’s style must preserve him in literature; his pathos is rare and unforced; his form of humor is as permanent as that of Fielding, and as successfully matched by his phrasing. Even his verse, mirthful or melancholy, does not fade, and has its own place on the borderland of poetry. George Eliot’s fame, too, must revive the success of her earlier and more humorous novels, before she became too fond of the Spencerian philosophy, and took herself too seriously, a natural result of adulation. Charlotte BrontË, in the same way, has been, as it were, rediscovered amid a chorus of fresh applauses, and with perhaps rather too curious investigations. In America, after Hawthorne, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Mrs. Beecher Stowe were the novelists most generally admired in England, when Thackeray and Dickens were verging to their decline. It is, indeed, to be regretted that Dr. Holmes did not write more fiction when in his prime. His excellent and original Elsie Venner, and Guardian Angel, with their humorous pictures of real life and their thread of phantasy, half mystical, half scientific, border (as often in the Poet and Professor at the Breakfast Table) on the ground of “psychical research.” Dr. Holmes was not merely, in verse and prose, an exquisite wit, but a man of rare knowledge, a man of science, and a sturdy defender of the purity of the language. Mrs. Beecher Stowe, on the other hand, took the world by storm with a vivid tract in the form of fiction; a book now not easy to criticise, but which can still move to laughter and tears. It is my “insular ignorance” which prevents me from appreciating other American fictions of that age, before the days of writers still happily living and working: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, W.D. Howells, Henry James, and scores of others, who, being here to speak for themselves, shall not be commented upon in this place. With Mr. Howells, as a critic, I have tried to break lances, while ready to admit one of his main contentions, that the art of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, and others of our fathers would have profited much by being a finer art, by condensation, by omission, by avoidance of the superfluous. But that our modern fiction is a greater art, that romance and story-telling and adventure are obsolete, or ought to be obsolete, that I can never admit while human nature is human nature. Mankind will never be content, in fiction, with tales of the psychology of the ordinary person; ordinary as we are, we desire to be, like Homer’s Heracles, conversant with great adventures. Mr. Howells perhaps may think Aristotle a Greek snob when he maintains that tragedy must find its theme in the sorrows of the god-descended kings. Are not the griefs of the poor or of the middle classes as poignant? They are; but they do not involve such heights and depths of fortune, raising or wrecking whole states, as do the woes “of Thebes, or Atreus’s line.” The fall of Prince Charles from an hour even of shadowy royalty, from the leadership of an army, from the wondering admiration of Europe and the applause of Voltaire into the subject and dependent sot is an example of modern historical tragedy; in its elevation and its decline more apt to move “pity and terror” than the circumstance that a journalist has taken to drink.

As in the case of America, so in that of England, I cannot enter into the merits of living novelists in so wide a task as the brief review of a century. Mr. Meredith, as a veteran of the 60’s, has shown, perhaps, fully what is the nature of his achievement; he shines as a creator of character (the highest praise) and as a writer with a thoroughly original view of the world, as a poet and as a wit. That his manner is entirely fortunate, and not rather tinged with wilful eccentricities like those of Browning and Carlyle, can scarcely be disputed. An accomplished young novelist has admitted to me that his manner is “catching,” and that he has to struggle against half-conscious efforts at imitation. Others do not struggle; and most grow older before they are able to write like themselves, with their own voices. Even Mr. Stevenson was caught now and then, his own voice being original indeed, but yet full of memories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and even of the Cameronian writers. To my mind Mr. Stevenson was the greatest, or, at least, the most enjoyable, of our novelists since George Eliot, excelling in matter and form, though probably always prevented by thwarting circumstances from doing himself complete justice. He practically revived in England the novel historical, now so abundantly practised, and practised with spirit, by Mr. Stanley Weyman, Mr. Anthony Hope, Dr. Conan Doyle, Mr. A.E.W. Mason, and a regiment of followers. The novel scientific, as in the hands of Mr. Wells, and the novel of adventure, “beyond the bounds of known romanticism,” as in Mr. Rider Haggard’s works, with the detective novel and the Oriental and imperialistic romances of Mr. Kipling, prove that man will not be satisfied with domestic realism alone. I never thought he would! Mr. Kipling’s astonishing powers of vision, his habit of ruthlessly cutting the superfluous, and his amazing command of technicalities, help to account for his world-wide fame. But the greatest of these is vision, not an acquired result of thought, but a gift of Heaven. The age has also produced a wealth of novels with a purpose. Would that the authors could be induced to state their purposes squarely, in undecorative treatises! But I confess that the treatises would not be read. The specialism of modern science has also invaded fiction, and some authors find a county or a parish wide enough for the work of a lifetime. The district has its dialect, and who can reprove it when spoken by the creatures of Mr. Barrie and Mr. Crockett? This kind of fiction is the result of our desire to learn (through novels) about the lives of all sorts and conditions of men. Enfin, the whole scope of mortal existence is now the farrage libelli of the novelists who range from prehistoric man to Bethnal Green; from Thrums to Central Africa. There is not the same eagerness to read history, which James II. regarded as “more instructive, and quite as amusing.” My heart is here with King James, and I confess to gaining more entertainment from Carlyle’s Frederick the Great than from most novels.

The earlier historians, from Scott to Carlyle, Macaulay and Froude, placed the human interest in the front rank. They conceived that history had to do with human beings of passions, caprices, moods, loves, and hates, dwelling in a world of interesting costumes, arms, architecture, ideas, and beliefs. Thus Carlyle, with much research, created his Cromwell or his Frederick, as Scott created his Queen Mary, his Louis XI., his James VI., or his Cromwell in Woodstock, who is not too remote from Carlyle’s. For these reasons Scott, Froude, Carlyle, and Macaulay really are “amusing” as well as instructive historians. When institutions and constitutions had to be described they were placed in separate compartments, as in the works of Hallam and Bishop Stubbs. Historians studied manuscripts, of course, but it was not held that only the unprinted was the valuable, that a new survey of known matter was absolutely valueless.

In the end of the century we have history which is not “as interesting as a novel” (like that of Prescott, Motley, Froude, and Macaulay), but very far from gay. Novelty of research is, quite justly, insisted upon (though research is as old as Hemingburgh, and was much advanced by Gibbon, Carter, Rymer, Walpole, Tytler, and so on) till, by a natural error, every scrap won from a wilderness of charters is valued beyond its deserts. The human interest is frowned upon; movements of forces, political and social, are treated in preference to personal character and adventure. Meticulous accuracy is insisted upon, till nervous students are actually afraid to publish. Even Mommsen, greatest of original students, is regarded as frivolous, even Curtius as “popular” by the modern school. It is natural to man to run into these excesses of reaction. Froude is not often accurate, Macaulay has prejudices, even Mr. Freeman was not sound about Knights’ Fees and about a certain palisade. Now the public does not care about Knights’ Fees or about the Manor, much; nor even about the obscure early history of civic institutions. In fact, even references to authorities frighten away part of the public, whose timidity I do not applaud. The results of our frivolity and of the portentous gravity of some modern historians is that, since Mr. Green, scarcely any writer of history is read except for examinations. As long as historians declare (often with perfect truth) that their own works are not literature, but something far more awful and solemn, namely science, history must be unpopular. But we are only waiting for a man of genius as accurate as the most meticulous, and as interesting as the agreeably irresponsible Froude. Of science I am not to treat, so I am dispensed from remarks on our scientific modern historians. It is certain that in collecting and printing and calendaring documents the age in all countries has shown praiseworthy industry, while Mr. Parkman in America, like our mid-century historians, was not too scientific to be readable.

Of theology, except when recommended by the art of a Newman or a Jowett, nothing is here to be said; though I could cheerfully say a good deal, especially about Biblical criticism. But that is science, though scarcely the sort of science which has been defined as “organized common-sense.” The poetry of the late century in England boasts the names of Rossetti, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, and Mr. Swinburne. It is tinged, in the former with mediÆvalism derived from the Italians and Chaucer; while in Mr. Swinburne every conceivable literary influence, from the Greeks to Baudelaire, from the Elizabethans to Victor Hugo, makes itself abundantly conspicuous. These poets, younger than Matthew Arnold, are not much influenced by Wordsworth, though by Shelley Mr. Swinburne was influenced. On the other hand, Mr. Arnold was a modern, academic, heterodox Wordsworth, and often a truly delightful poet.

He stood much aloof from the contemporary literature of his day, and his letters prove that he was no fervent admirer even of Tennyson or Browning. His own poetry has been to many, as to myself, full of delightful passages, whether he wrote of the Oxford country-side, or of Wordsworth’s hills, of “the shorn and parcelled Oxus,” or of the moaning sea that Sophocles long ago heard as he heard it on Dover beach. He was our greatest modern elegiac poet; a master of the Dirge. Of the living, again, no criticism can be offered; we only note the names, and real if very various merits, of Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. Watson, Mr. Davidson, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Benson, Mr. Thompson, Mr. Henley, Mr. Gosse, Mr. Stephen Philips, Mrs. Marriott Watson, Mrs. Maynell, Mr. Kipling, “a nest of singing birds.” It would be impertinent, and indeed perilous, to “draw invidious distinctions,” as the undergraduate said about the major and minor prophets: nor is it for this century to sift the poetic sheep from the goats, who, in an age that reads little poetry, are greatly guilty of much verse.

The unassuming and decried art of criticism remains. Essays are of no one age; there are similar excellences in every good essayist since Montaigne. We have no Hazlitt, Lamb, or Leigh Hunt, but we had Mr. Stephenson and Mr. Pater, so unlike in all but conscious interest in style, and reminiscence of the best models. Indeed, essay writing is almost an unpractised art, as the public “has no use for it,” any more than for the letter H on the Sandwich boards. A fairly bad novelist can live; to an appallingly bad novelist the workhouse unfolds its awful valves. In literary criticism Mr. Arnold stood alone in his age, and Mr. Arnold’s literary income, it is known, surprised, when stated, the Commissioners of Income Tax: not by its affluence. Of living critics it would be in the highest degree dangerous to say a word, though many words, both of praise and dispraise, might be said of a person of reckless character. That (with obvious exceptions) most critics are men intimately familiar with what is best, from Homer to Mr. Stephen Philips, few students would venture to aver. That we (for am I not the least of all critics, and not worthy to be called a critic?) are entirely devoid of ignorance, personal bias, likes, dislikes, prejudices, pet aversions, indolence, we are not so blindly conceited as to maintain. We have been taught by many centuries of creative geniuses, from Theocritus to the latest protesting popular novelists, to know our proper place, and we take refuge in “confession and avoidance.” The new century will not know our names when we pass where Dennis and where Cibber are, unless Mr. Robert Buchanan writes a new Dunciad.

The century, even if we are in full decadence (of which we are not the best judges), has been glorious in literature, and holds its own well with any in modern history. English itself has passed from the occasionally stilted Augustan survival, through the novelties of Macaulay, De Quincey, and Carlyle, and the early decorated of Mr. Ruskin, into slipshod slang in one extreme, and euphuism in the other. But the main stream keeps its course, and English may be written with perfect purity, and with new fluency and variety, by the men for whom the task is reserved by fate. But what does the century bequeath by way of intellectual motive? Little but the more or less transformed forces of the eighteenth century. There is science, but science, happily, is beginning to be aware that she is not really omniscient. Conceivably her foot is on the border of a new region, often surmised, never explored, full of light on the problems of spirit and matter. Hence, indeed, might come a new force in letters. Again, the social ideas of 1750–1800 may take practical shapes of incalculable momentousness, but these would not for long be favorable to literature. Or, less probably, the return on the past may assume practical shape, though this element of the later eighteenth century may seem, as far as letters go, to be exhausted. In brief, as I began by saying, the division of literary periods by measures of time is a cross-division. This peculiarity the last hundred years possess: that literature now blossoms on a far wider field. English-speaking America had, indeed, a literature long before the War of Independence; but it was not a literature for every reader of to-day. Now, and for long, the States have taken their own part in history, fiction, poetry, and all other branches of letters. Germany came back into world literature again just at the ending of the eighteenth century, after unregarded ages of neglect. Russia and the Scandinavian North awoke about the same time, and daily widen their influence, as does Belgium in the sunshine of Maeterlinck. France, of course, has in all time been in the foremost rank; while to balance America, Russia, and the North, Italy and Spain have scarcely held the place which through so many centuries was their own. Such changes in national literatures resemble the political waxings and wanings of national fortunes. The English-speaking peoples may have their eclipse; perhaps it is heralded by a modern comparative deficiency in humor which, if England and America cease to laugh, will die out of a profoundly solemn world.

In the foregoing remarks little has been said about the literature of the century except among English-speaking peoples. Not being a Mezzofanti, I am not personally acquainted with the literature of all languages, and it is a vain thing to speak of books at second hand. It was not the nineteenth but the eighteenth century that saw Germany re-enter the field of pure literature, as distinguished from that of scholarship and science. Since the end of the Middle Ages, with their poets, German writers had mainly been devoted to theology and classical criticism. Latin was the language of the learned. Many ascertainable causes, in the middle and end of the eighteenth century, and doubtless many causes which cannot be ascertained, awoke again the Teutonic genius. The victories of Frederick the Great gave Germans patriotism and confidence in their own tongue.

The philosophic and social works which preluded to the French Revolution stirred the German mind and required popular expression. Thus Kant wrote in his own native speech in reaction against the sceptical philosophy of David Hume, and Kant became the father of the long array of German metaphysicians from Hegel and Fichte to Schopenhauer and Hartmann. Their philosophy “cannot be briefly stated, especially in French,” as one of them said, but its general effect has been rather to counteract materialism by making it pretty plain that human nature is not so simple and easily to be explained as the Scottish philosophers were apt to suppose. In England, Coleridge gave an Anglican heart to the new German philosophy, which also influenced Hamilton, and still affects the philosophical teaching of Oxford. “It is nonsense, but is it the right sort of nonsense?” asked the late Professor Sidgwick (a Cambridge man) when struggling with the examination papers of a Hegelian undergraduate.

More important as literature were the double influences of return on the mediÆval past and of inspiration by the new political and social ideas which gave the impulse to the genius of Goethe, Schiller, BÜrger, and others. Goethe began as the child of Rousseau, but as a child who had read Kant, and drunk deep of the romance of the Middle Ages. Doubtless his is the greatest name of modern Germany, both as a student of life, of nature, of history, and of thought. He was the spiritual parent of Scott, with his GÖtz von Berlichingen, and, with Richter, of Carlyle. Through himself and his English or Scottish disciples, Goethe has been the most fertile source of change in the literature of the nineteenth century. In extreme old age, curious to say, he gave the first impulse to the study of early religion as displayed in the obscure rites and beliefs of the Australian natives: a theme remote enough from his effect on the poetry of Matthew Arnold. Probably the two parts of his Faust and his Roman Lyrics are the most popular, and, as literature, the most permanent parts of his work, with Werther, Wilhelm Meister, and Elective Affinities, in prose. Schiller, beginning with the boyish romanticism of The Robbers, became a kind of classic in his later dramas. Lessing and Winckelmann were the most sound and fertile influences in criticism. The Laocoon remains indispensable. The patriotic lyrists resurrected the national spirit of the Teutonic race, and Heine, Hebrew by race and half French in character, combined the characteristics of Lucian, Burns, and Voltaire.

Wolf, writing in Latin (and I believe that his work on Homer has never attained a third edition, and has never been translated into English), became the parent, for good or evil, of what is called the Higher Criticism, Lachmann introducing the painfully conjectural tendencies of that intellectual exercise. Its application to scriptural texts is notorious, but not precisely as part of literature. Like other European countries, the Germany of the close of the century is not remarkable for resplendent genius in poetry or fiction, though novels abound. The scientific, historical, and scholarly literature is of vast profusion. In thoroughness and tireless patience, Germany is the teacher of the world, while in curious contrast to her practical genius is the love of some of her scholars for baseless conjecture. The “insularity” with which the English are charged is a matter of reproach by French scholars against Germany. Some sets of ideas, long familiar in America, England, and the Latin nations, are only now beginning to reach German classical scholars.

To write an account of the changes in French literature during the century is impossible within moderate space. The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were unfavorable to the literary art, and the head of so great a poet as AndrÉ ChÉnier fell under the guillotine. Till about 1825–1830 the Restoration was accompanied by literature in the old classic style of Boileau and of the Augustan age, only enlivened by the romantic if somewhat affected style of that great rhetorician, ChÂteaubriand. The year 1830 is the sacred year of French romanticism, drawing its ideals partly from the German romantic movement, partly from Scott and Shakespeare, read, of course, only in translations. Everything was now to be mediÆval, Spanish, and passionate: the drama was to be emancipated from Aristotle, also read in translations. As far as classicism went the young adventurers had no more Greek than Shakespeare or Scott. But they had the colossal and Titanic genius of Hugo, exquisitely sweet, rapid, strange, and versatile in lyric: potent, if inflated, in the drama and the novel. They had the charming humor and exquisite taste of ThÉophile Gautier; the feverish passion and mastery in verse of Alfred de Musset; the delicate, dreamy, and wandering spirit of GÉrard de Nerval; and the manly, courageous, humorous, and unwearied vigor, in drama and in fiction, of Alexandre Dumas.

This was, indeed, an extraordinary generation, by far the greatest since that of Corneille, Racine, and MoliÈre. Many others might be named: the reserved force and incisive irony of MÉrimÉe; the learned and genial criticism of Sainte-Beuve; the inexhaustible talent of George Sand, and the mighty Balzac, the maker and founder of the modern work of introspection. Probably, of all these writers, Dumas and Balzac have exercised most influence on later fiction in England and America. Flaubert continued, with painful elaboration, the traditions of Balzac; from Flaubert, and round him, grew up Daudet and M. Zola, and the Goncourts. Poetry, after Lamartine, dwindled into the prettinesses of the Parnasse and the eccentricities, too obviously intentional, of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and the Symbolistes. Literary art, at the end of the century, became too self-conscious, too fond of argument about ideals and methods, the tattle of the studio. Great men have not thus dissipated their energy; they have done what they could do; they have not talked about how they did it. What English literature was borrowed from France, at this time, is more in the nature of words than work. Criticism has been a chimaera bombinans in vacuo, chattering about realism, naturalism, symbolism, the use of documents, and so forth. The defects, rather than the merits, of France have been imitated; a squalid pessimism is easily affected.

The closing century has seen Russia awake, as the close of the eighteenth century beheld the literary revival of Germany. Russian poetry has only reached the learned among us: the novels of Turguenieff, Dustoiefsky, and TolstoÏ are read in translation, with curiosity, antipathy, enthusiasm, and an absence of that emotion. It is very long since Terentianus Maurus remarked that the fortunes of a book depended on the taste of the reader. Often he is favorably impressed, not by the actual merit of the story as a story or as a work of literary art, but by its appeal to his private sentiments, as of socialism, pessimism, toryism, or whatever they may be. Possibly the vehement admirers of some Russian writers have been thus misguided. In any case, no qualified critic thinks that his opinion of works which he cannot read in the original language is of any value. For this reason I need not offend or please the reader by offering any uninstructed sentiments about the great Scandinavian dramatist, Dr. Ibsen; or concerning the work of Signor d’Annunzio, or the plays of M. Maeterlinck. To pronounce each of these gentlemen a Shakespeare or Æschylus is not unusual in cultivated circles; it remains for the new century to ratify or quash the verdict. In the mean time, have the approving critics taken the precaution of reading Æschylus and Shakespeare?

Andrew Lang.