to a locality his celebration of domestica facta' in Cornish Ballads and Other Poems. W. E. Aytoun (1813-65), joint-author with Sir Theodore Martin of the clever Bon Gaultier Ballads, Douglas Jerrold (1803-57), playwright and wit, and Thomas Gordon Hake (1809-95), a serious poet, would have to be added to this record, which might be indefinitely extended, if mere talent increased the growth of art.

Summary.

xiv.

So we come, through assurance and suspense, to the end of this difficult period. A path, faltering, perhaps, but as clear as the clues allow, has been found through the maze of writing produced in the fifteen years of which 1832 is the centre. Dates are reconciled with facts by historians rather than by history. But the choice of 1832 as the centre of a literary cycle may claim a twofold significance. As the death-year of Scott, it looks back on the great period of Romance. As the birth-year of Reform, it looks forward to the great period of Democracy. The problem of the next half century is how to reconcile the two; how to give soul to the positive and brain to the imagination; how to make the real spiritual, and the spiritual real, and so to complete the work of intellectual liberty.

Before examining this work, we, too, concluding this book, may look backwards for a moment from the year of transit, 1832. The results of the Reform

Act were irrevocable; its social and moral gains.
A force was added to social life; the moral horizon
was widened. The older writers had done their parts-
Crabbe, Burns and Wordsworth in their several
degrees. Jane Austen had etched her pictures of
middle-class society. Scott had founded his sanctions
in history. But henceforward-here was the difference
-the inclusion of the fresh material became a common-
place of letters. Philosophy, poetry and fiction had to
reckon with the new order from the start.
The mere
technical revolt from the literary standards of the
eighteenth century was merged in a genuine rejection
of the principles from which they sprang.

1832.

Consider, for instance, in the light of the Reform 1733: Act of 1832, the inner meaning, and not only the outward form, of Pope's Essay on Man, which was published in 1733. Measure the force of the famous line, more often quoted than understood, 'The proper study of mankind is Man'. Did it raise or degrade men's power of moral and social improvement? If mankind had properly studied man, in the sense intended by Pope, would any reform have been enacted during the next hundred years? What is the relation of Pope's formula to the high argument' of Wordsworth in The Recluse,

How exquisitely the individual Mind

(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted; and how exquisitely too-
Theme this but little heard of among men-
The external World is fitted to the Mind,

or of Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, or of Tennyson in Enone, or of others to whom we shall come-of George Meredith, for example, in Outer and Inner-, and of most of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century?

These are the questions, or some of them, suggested by the literary contrast between 1733 and 1832. For Pope meant something like this: Divine order must be accepted as a whole; no sane purpose is served by opposing, or seeking to overthrow, the established order of things in any department of nature. The way of salvation lies, not in adapting 'order' to circumstances, but in justifying circumstances by referring them to 'order':

All nature is but art, unknown to thee

(that is, nature's seeming inequalities are parts of the constructive Artist's design);

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

A partial evil, universal good

(that is, nature is always right; pain, suffering, 'injustice', and all other so-called ills are only the illusion of half-knowledge):

And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.

Keats railed at the form of these verses-from the Essay on Man-, but the Revolution in Paris and the Reform Act in England are signal instances of rebellion against its spirit. In the eyes of the revolutionaries and reformers, it was no longer impious or foolish to refuse to subscribe to Pope's dogma. His Universal

Prayer found no echo in an age when the conceptions of piety and wisdom had been enlarged beyond the compass of his survey. Religion and philosophy, it was obvious, would have to test the new conceptions, and literature and art to interpret them through mediums remote from vulgar error. The new time was to hold the higher faith, or, at any rate, the braver faith, that the proper study of mankind is God,-in religion, the sanction of theology, with a liberal movement in the Church; in politics, the sanction of power, with democracy's advance; in art, the sanction of beauty; in philosophy, the sanction of truth; and, in all, by fearless inquiry.

Literature is preoccupied for awhile with this reconstruction of faith 1. How far the builders were well-inspired, whether every stone was truly laid, what corner-stone, if any, was rejected, and how much remains undone ere the new temple is complete, are questions still awaiting solution, which the following book may elucidate. The present instalment is completed. England has passed through 1832.

It may be on account of such preoccupation that drama practically ceased. The dramatic form (in all theatres since the Attic, and with the possible exception of Faust, which is really epic in character) has never been suitable for the presentation of divine' and human relations.

A'concentric view.

ΟΝ

BOOK III

THE VICTORIAN AGE, 1837-1900

§ 1. KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF.

i.

N the opposite page we attempt to exhibit by concentric tables the names and dates of the chief writers who rendered the Victorian age so extraordinary a flowering-time in English literature. They found the material ample, and endued it with every kind of shape. In fiction, theology, philosophy, poetry and criticism occur some of the greatest names which adorn any age in any country, and there is this mark to distinguish them from similar groups in other countries, that their rise is not to be associated with a definite authority-such as the Universities constitute in Germany, or the Academy in France-, but was spontaneous, local, and occasional in its area of distribution, and displayed the common feature of national inspiration.

The whole people was moving to self-expression. Literature was only one aspect of the general stirring and awakening. A new stream of thought was being