places. Like Joubert before him (see p. 80, supra), Jefferies felt the difficulty of language, the same difficulty, we may add, which Meredith, in his poems, solves sometimes ambulando: One of the greatest difficulties I have encountered is the lack of words to express ideas. . . . I must leave my book as a whole to give its own meaning to its words'. And, as a type of his ' book as a whole', the following extract may be submitted:

Give me life strong and full as the brimming ocean; give me thoughts wide as its plain; give me a soul beyond these. Sweet is the bitter sea by the shore where the faint blue pebbles are lapped by the greengrey wave, where the wind-quivering foam is loth to leave the lashed stone. Sweet is the bitter sea, and the clear green in which the gaze seeks the sail, looking through the glass into itself. The sea thinks for me, as I listen and ponder; the sea thinks, and every boom of the wave repeats my prayer. The sense of soul-life burns in me like a torch.

De Quincey related the visions of an English opiumeater'; Newman laid bare the processes of intellectual and spiritual belief; but no one has quite effected the particular task of Jefferies, who suffered nature herself to work her wonders upon him, not opposing her will, nor overmuch aiding the ministration, but setting forth as simply as he could the true experience of her working. He was the son of a farmer, and his native country was the Wiltshire downland, which Thomas Hughes has celebrated in Tom Brown's Schooldays.

W. E.

The wide peace of these surroundings was a permanent influence for good; and his papers on country life have the merit of accurate knowledge as well as of poetic imagination. There are several volumes of this kind, the most delightful, perhaps, being that called Field and Hedgerow. It is the child of Gilbert White's Selborne, and the father of many books of the same class, among which may justly be mentioned Idlehurst (1898) by 'John Halsham' (Mr. G. Forrester Scott). But the master surpasses his disciples in a certain passionate intuition into the hidden qualities of the medical herb '.

The dedication to William Ernest Henley of StevenHenley son's Virginibus Puerisque is a sign of the affinity 1903). between these two contemporary writers. They wrote

(1849

some plays together, which were performed at London theatres, but which have no permanent value, and they were joined by common sentiments on art, literature and life. Henley's contemporary fame was mainly as a journalist, in connection with The Scots Observer, afterwards The National Observer, and its particular type of contributions, in a spirit of romantic idealism. His influence on journalism was remarkable, and he collected on his staff a number of young men, some of whom, though middle-aged to-day, still feel the spirit of his teaching. Others have abandoned its tradition in response to the more urgent call of romance in the realities of to-day. His posthumous fame is as a poet, and several volumes of brave and ardent verse, together with two series of prose Views

and Reviews, and an anthology, Lyra Heroica, are his

chief literary remains.

Wilde

Wilde's fame was won as a dramatist (Lady Winder- Oscar mere's Fan and others), and will probably live as a (1856poet. An édition de luxe of his works has recently 1900). been published, and reminds us of the exceptional sense of beauty-raised deliberately to a cult, and obviously associated with the tendencies discussed in the present section-which this gifted Irishman possessed. He did not always apply it to the highest uses. He was too often tempted to pose as the sensitive-clever young man, and the atmosphere of some of his works is as dreary in its kind as that of 'Ouida' (Louise de la Ramée, 1840-1908). But his Poems (1881) are the pledge, if not, in places, the fulfilment, of a true poetic inspiration, and there are many who find its confirmation in the Ballad of Reading Gaol, issued anonymously in 1898. His last prose-work, De Profundis, is still too near to us for criticism. Exquisite writing has its privileges, and time only can decide if this book is a genuine cri du cœur-a 'human document', in literary slang-of a rare and valuable type, or merely a clever affectation of the thing which is not.

The connection of literature with the stage, which Wilde consummated in comedy, and which Tennyson, aided by Sir Henry Irving, had effected tentatively in poetic drama, has since been continued in that kind by Mr. Stephen Phillips, and, more notably, in Ireland, by Mr. W. B. Yeats. Mr. Yeats, and the 'Celtic

Renaissance', of which he is the father and type, are properly to be accounted the last phase of the passion for beauty and its symbols which we have tried to trace through Keats and Rossetti to our own day. Its increment to loveliness is immense, and if the bulk of its achievement stands a little outside of the line of national literature, reviewed, historically, as one piece-if it represents, in other words, a kind of literature more narrowly professionalized, and demanding more esoteric apprehension, than is wholly comfortable to the consciousness of Chaucer's and Shakespeare's heirs, we, whose enjoyment it serves, may be the more lavish of gratitude, inasmuch as the writers who have produced it have been content to make their labour its own reward, and to treat the art which they have cultivated as the jealous mistress of all their being. Moreover, their exploitation of the art to the uttermost limit of its capacities must in the end advance its interpretation to a wider audience. Mr. Hardy, in The Dynasts, has attempted a new poetic form; and Mr. Wells, in Tono-Bungay, a variant in fiction. These experiments are significant, perhaps, of a further development of literature, including, not defiant of, 'science'. Then the beauty so jealously sought will be available for the new forms, and the truths of ' literature' and 'science,' too long specialized in their departments, will be combined in a higher synthesis than those older ones of Lucretius or of Dante, and will be justified of the sacrifices they have exacted.

§ 9. THE HIGHER JOURNALISM.

i.

THOUGH little has been added to literature from the

THOU

rostrum or the stage since the speeches of Edmund Burke (1729-97) and the plays of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), a considerable debt has been incurred in other directions. Valuable contributions have been made by the pulpit and the classroom, despite the partial usurpation of their rights by the ubiquitous and all-absorbing novel. Few would choose to-day a theologian's sermons in preference to Mrs. Ward's Robert Elsmere, or a history of the Civil War in England in preference to Shorthouse's John Inglesant (1881), or would study a Blue-book on the Poor Law in preference to reading Besant's All Sorts and Conditions of Men. But the general reader has been served by another class of writers in the nineteenth century in a manner and to a degree quite unparalleled before. There is nothing in the history of British literature as sudden, as brilliant and as clearly marked as the flourishing of journalists in the noon of the Victorian era. Journalism, as the term was understood by its practitioners forty or fifty years ago, was recruited from the