NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE L PROEM OOKING back in this centenary year of Tennyson, Darwin, Gladstone, Fitzgerald, at the monuments of progress which they raised, it is just and timely to ask, not merely for facts, but for conclusions. A new formula is wanted by which to connote the literature of the nineteenth century in England. Is it an ‘age' or a nonage in the jealous records of art? Can a name and a symbol be attached to it, by which to distinguish it for ever, and wherever literature is held dear? Broadly stated, and assuming a background to set off the properties of criticism, a sensitive consciousness responds to a touch upon certain keys. We have learned to recognize the notes of the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, Puritanism, the Age of Reason, and the Romantic Revolt. These names pierce to willing I minds. Each means something beyond the name. Each suggests an atmosphere and a point of view, and a canon by which to pronounce judgment. From the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, our mood changes with the scene. We fare with the company of pilgrims on the April morning which was Chaucer. We thread with Sidney and Spenser the last enchantments of the Middle Ages. We thrill with Shakespeare and Bacon to the glory of a receding horizon, and of virgin territories unexplored. We stiffen our conscience with Milton, and stifle our consciousness with Pope, who found, successively, in the Puritan and in the Neo-Augustan ideals, compensation for the lost gardens in which so much had run to seed; and, finally, we acclaim, as a 'romantic revival' or a renascence of wonder', the reaction towards the end of the eighteenth century from the exclusive standards of that epoch. There, commonly, pliability stops. The swift shifting of the moods, responsive through five hundred years of history to the impressions which that history conveys, begins to slacken at the last. The record, as Sir John Seeley said of English history as a whole, 'leaves off in such a gradual manner, growing feebler and feebler, duller and duller towards the close, that one might suppose that England, instead of steadily gaining in strength, had been for a century or two dying of mere old age'. The injustice is greatest to literature, where most progress has been made; and it is to correct the conclusion from this feebleness and dulness, and to measure the steady gain in strength, that the following chapters are composed. It is not merely as a revival or revolt in the direction of romance, it is not even as a 'renascence of wonder', in Mr. Watts-Dunton's phrase, that a complete formula is found for the literature of the nineteenth century in England. The 'Romantic Revival' proper was a clear and a well-defined means, deliberately adopted by some writers, towards a more remote goal. It was chiefly the Scottish contribution to the main movement of the times, and was due to the native wealth of romantic material in the North. To this we shall come in its own place. But if the description was not wholly adequate even to the pioneers of revolt, it falls ludicrously short of comprehending, say, Wordsworth or Shelley. Moreover, while the term invalidates much of the most sincere work of the writers included in the formula, its novelty is obviously exhausted before the nineteenth century is well begun. To force Carlyle, Ruskin and Charles Dickens, Tennyson, Darwin and Matthew Arnold into the Procrustes-bed of a 'renascence of wonder' is to weaken their force, and to postpone indefinitely the recognition of their meaning. Part of the contempt for literature as an unpractical study, and part of the present reluctance to regard it, equally with religion and philosophy, as a medium of truth, are to be traced to this ineffective statement of its contribution to modern thought. The issue might be evaded by selecting arbitrary dates between which to place the contents of the literature of the nineteenth century. Thus, it would be |