A conclusion which avows that it might almost as well have presented itself as a preface may seem to be self-condemned; it must be the business of the following pages to justify it. In summing up on such a great matter as this it is desirable ­it is indeed necessary ­to indicate, in broader lines than at the mere outset would have seemed appropriate or indeed possible, the general course of thought and of speech, of literary matter and literary form, during the century and more which is submitted to the view. We can thus place individuals in their position to each other and to the whole more boldly and with less reserve; we can sketch the general character of existing movements, the movers in which have been exempt from individual consideration by virtue of their life and work being incomplete; we can at once record accomplishment and indicate tendency.

The period dealt with in the first chapter of this book illustrates the differences in appeal of such periods to the merely dilettante and “tasting” critic, and to the student of literature in the historical and comparative fashion. To the former it is one of the most ungrateful of all such sub-periods or sub-divisions in English literature. He finds in it none, or at most Boswell’s Johnson, Burns, and the Lyrical Ballads (this last at its extreme end), of the chief and principal things on which alone he delights to fix his attention. Its better poetry, such as that of Cowper and Crabbe, he regards at best with a forced esteem; its worse is almost below his disgust. Its fiction is preposterous and childish; it contributes nothing even to the less “bellettristic” departments of literature that is worth his attention; it is a tedious dead season about which there is nothing tolerable except the prospect of getting rid of it before very long.

To the latter ­to the historical and comparative student ­on the other hand, it has an interest of an absolutely unique kind. As was observed in a former volume of this history, the other great blossoming time of English literature ­that which we call Elizabethan, and by which we mean the last five and twenty years of the Queen’s reign and the fifty or sixty after her death ­was preceded by no certain signs except those of restless seeking. Here, on the contrary, with no greater advantage of looking back, we can see the old fruit dropping off and the new forming, in a dozen different kinds and a hundred different ways. Extravagance on one side always provokes extravagance on the other; and because the impatient revolt of Coleridge and some others of the actual leaders into the Promised Land chose to present the eighteenth century as a mere wilderness in respect of poetry, enjoyment of nature, and so forth, there have been of late years critics who maintained that the poetical decadence of that century is all a delusion; in other words (it may be supposed) that Akenside and Mason are the poetical equals of Herrick and Donne. The via media, as almost always, is here also the via veritatis. The poets of the eighteenth century were poets; but the poetical stream did not, as a rule, run very high or strong in their channels, and they were tempted to make up for the sluggishness and shallowness of the water by playing rather artificial and rococo tricks with the banks. The fiction of the eighteenth century was, at its greatest, equal to the greatest ever seen; but it was as yet advancing with uncertain steps, and had not nearly explored its own domain. The history of the eighteenth century had returned to the true sense of history, and was endeavouring to be accurate; but it only once attained ­it is true that with Gibbon it probably attained once for all ­a perfect combination of diligence and range, of matter and of style.

In all these respects the list might, if it were proper, be extended to much greater length. The twenty years from 1780 to 1800 show us in the most fascinating manner the turn of the tide, not as yet coming in three feet abreast, rather creeping up by tortuous channels and chance depressions, but rising and forcing a way wherever it could. In the poets, major and minor, of the period, omitting, and even not wholly omitting, Burns and Blake ­who are of no time intrinsically, but who, as it happens, belong accidentally to this time as exponents, the one of the refreshing influence of dialect and freedom from literary convention, the other of the refreshing influence of sympathy with old models and mystical dreaming ­all the restlessness of the approaching crisis is seen. Nothing in literature is more interesting than to watch the effect of the half-unconscious aims and desires of Cowper and Crabbe, to see how they try to put the new wine in the old bottles, to compare them with Goldsmith and Thomson on the one hand, with Wordsworth and Coleridge on the other. Hayley perhaps alone, or almost alone, is rebel to the comparative method. Hayley is one of these hopeless creatures who abound at all periods, and whose native cast of nothingness takes a faint fashion from the time. But even in the verse of “Monk” Lewis we see the itch for new measures, the craving for lyric movement; even in the day-flies of the Della Crusca group the desire to be “something different.” And then in Bowles, with his sonnets of places, in Sayers, with his rhymeless Pindarics, we come upon the actual guides to the right way, guides the oddest, the blindest, the most stumbling, but still ­as not merely chronology but the positive testimony and the still more positive practice of those who followed them show ­real guides and no misleaders.

Least studied, perhaps, because of its want of positive savour in comparison with their later achievements, but more interesting than all of these, is the early work of Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth themselves, and the work, not merely early but later, of men like Rogers and Campbell. Here the spectacle already presented in Crabbe and Cowper is repeated; but the process is in a further stage, and the fermentation is determining, according to the nature of the fermenting material. On Rogers it is nearly powerless; in Campbell only in his lyrics does it succeed in breaking up and dissolving the old crust; in Southey the effect is never quite complete; in Coleridge and Wordsworth, but especially in Coleridge, the leaven changes all the latter lump. Thenceforward the process is reversed. Instead of instances of advance amid a mass of inertia or aimless wandering we have instances of reaction amid a mass of advance. The work of the revolutionary time is done; the scholar, contrary to Goethe’s dictum, has now not merely to exercise himself but to perfect.

The phenomena of the time in fiction are of the same character, but they lead as yet to no such distinct turn. The tale-telling of Beckford is like the singing of Burns, not uncoloured by the time, but still in the main purely individual; the purpose of the novels of Holcroft, Godwin, and Bage is groping in the dark; the Radcliffian romance and its exaggeration by Lewis exhibit the same uncertainty, the same application of the Rule of False. And there is for once a more philosophical and less cowardly explanation ­that Scott, the Joshua in this instance, as Coleridge and Wordsworth were in the other, was occupied elsewhere before he sought the Palestine of the novel. For it must be remembered that prose fiction, though it had been cultivated in a scattered and tentative way for thousands of years, was up to this time the most inorganic of literary kinds. Poets, when they chose to give themselves up to poetry and to turn their backs on convention, were almost as well off then as now. They had but to open the great Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, the Latins such as Lucretius and Catullus, the great mediaeval, the great Renaissance examples of their own art, to see, as soon as they chose to see, where and how to go right. The adventurer in fiction was destitute of any such assistance. Only a few examples of much real excellence in his art were before him; many of those existing (including most of the mediaeval instances) were hardly before him at all; and none of these, with the exception of the eighteenth century novel of manners and character (which, in the nature of the case, was at that special time the last thing he wanted to imitate), and the short tale of France and Italy, could be said to have been brought to anything like perfection. Hence the wanderings and the stumblings here were far greater, the touch of the groping hands far feebler and less sure than even in poetry; but the crying for the light was there too, and it was to be heard in time. Even as it was, before the century closed, Miss Edgeworth had given important new lines to fiction, and was on the eve of opening the most fertile of all its seams or veins, that of national or provincial character; the purpose-novel just referred to was full of future, though it might be a future of a perilous and disputable kind; the terror-romance, subdued to saner limits and informed with greater knowledge and greater genius, was not soon to cease out of the land; and, a detail not to be neglected, the ever increasing popularity of the novel was making it more and more certain that it would number good intellects sooner or later.

In all other directions, with the single exception of drama, in which there was neither performance nor promise, so far as literature was concerned, to any great extent, the same restlessness of effort, and not always the same incompetence of result was seen. The fact of the revolutionary war abroad and the coercive policy thereby necessitated at home may have somewhat postponed the appearance of the new kind of periodical, in all shapes from quarterly to daily, which was to be so great a feature of the next age; but the same causes increased the desire for it and prepared not a few of its constituents. It is impossible for any tolerably careful reader not to notice how much more “modern,” to use an unphilosophical but indispensable term, is the political satire both in verse and prose, which has been noticed in the first chapter of this book, than the things of more or less the same kind that immediately preceded it. It was an accident, no doubt, that made the Anti-Jacobin ridicule Darwin’s caricature of eighteenth century style in poetry; yet that ridicule did far more to put this particular convention out of fashion than all the attacks of the same paper on innovators like Coleridge (who at that time had hardly attempted their literary innovations) could do harm. The very interest in foreign affairs, brought about by the most universal war that had ever been known, helped to introduce the foreign element which was to play so large a part in literature; and little affection as the critic may have for the principles of Godwin or of Paine, he cannot deny that the spirit of inquiry, the rally and shock of attack and defence, are things a great deal better for literature than a placid contentment with accepted conventions.

Theology indeed may share with drama the reproach of having very little that is good to show from this time, or indeed for a long time to come. For the non-conformist sects and the Low Church party, which had resulted from the Evangelical movement in the earlier eighteenth century, were, the Unitarians excepted, for the most part illiterate. The Deist controversy had ceased, or, as conducted against Paine, required no literary skill; and the High Church movement had not begun. Philosophy, not productive of very much, was more active; and the intensely alien and novel styles of German thought were certain in time to produce their effect, while their working was in exact line with all the other tendencies we have been surveying.

In short, during these twenty years, literature in almost all its parts was being thoroughly “boxed about.” The hands that stirred it were not of the strongest as yet, they were absolutely unskilled, and for the most part they had not even any very clear conception of what they wanted to do. But almost everybody felt that something had to be done, and was anxious ­even childishly anxious ­to do something. It by no means always happens that such anxiety is rewarded or is a good sign; but it is always a noteworthy one, and in this instance there is no doubt about either the fact of the reward or its goodness.

The subsequent history of poetry during the century divides itself in an exceedingly interesting way, which has not perhaps yet been subjected to full critical comment. There are in it five pretty sharply marked periods of some ten or fifteen years each, which are distinguished, the first, third, and fifth, by the appearance in more or less numbers of poets of very high merit, and of characteristics more or less distinctly original; the second and fourth by poetic growths, not indeed scanty in amount and sometimes exquisite in quality, but tentative, fragmentary, and undecided. It will of course be understood that in this, as in all literary classifications, mathematical accuracy must not be expected, and that the lives of many of the poets mentioned necessarily extend long before and after the periods which their poetical production specially distinguishes. In fact the life of Wordsworth covers as nearly as possible the whole five sub-periods mentioned, reckoning from his own birth-year to that of almost the youngest of the poets, of whom we shall here take account. And perhaps there are few better ways of realising the extraordinary eminence of English nineteenth century poetry than by observing, that during these eighty years there was never a single one at which more or fewer persons were not in existence, who had produced or were to produce poetry of the first class. And the more the five-fold division indicated is examined and analysed the more curious and interesting will its phenomena appear.

The divisions or batches of birth-years are worth indicating separately: the first comprises the eighth and ninth decades of the eighteenth century, from the birth of Scott and the Lakers to that of Shelley, with Keats as a belated and so to speak posthumous but most genuine child of it; the second covers about fifteen years from the birth of George Darley, who was of the same year (1795) with Keats, to the eve of that of Tennyson; the third goes from 1810 or thereabouts, throwing back to include the elder Tennysons and Mrs. Browning; the fourth extends from about 1825 to 1836; the fifth from the birth of Mr. Morris (throwing back as before to admit Rossetti) to the end.

In the first of these we see the Romantic revolt or renaissance, whichever word may be preferred, growing up under the joint influences of the opening of mediaeval and foreign literature; of the excitement of the wars of the French Revolution; of the more hidden but perhaps more potent force of simple ebb-and-flow which governs the world in all things, though some fondly call it Progress; and of the even more mysterious chance or choice, which from time to time brings into the world, generally in groups, persons suited to effect the necessary changes. The “Return to Nature,” or to be less question-begging let us say the taking up of a new standpoint in regard to nature, made half unconsciously by men like Cowper and Crabbe, assisted without intending it by men like Burns and Blake, effected in intention if not in full achievement by feeble but lucky pioneers like Bowles, asserts itself once for all in the Lyrical Ballads, and then works itself out in different ­in almost all possibly different ­ways through the varying administration of the same spirit by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, in the highest and primary rank, by Scott and Byron in the next, by Southey, Campbell, Leigh Hunt, Moore, and others in the third. And it is again most interesting to watch how the exertion of influence and the character of it are by no means in proportion to the exact poetical strength of the agent. Scott and Byron, certainly inferior as poets to the first four mentioned, have probably had a greater bulk of poetical influence and poetical action on mankind at large certainly, and a vastly earlier, more immediate and more sweeping influence on other poets than their betters. Leigh Hunt, a poet quite of the third rank, exercised directly and indirectly, through Shelley and Keats, an influence on the form of poetry, on metre, cadence, phrase, greater than any of the others, save Wordsworth and Byron, and perhaps more than these. In all ways, however, by this channel and that, in straightforward or stealthy fashion, the poetic flood comes up, and by the death of Byron, Shelley and Keats having still more prematurely gone before, it is at its very highest spring. Six and twenty years passed, from 1798 to 1824, from the time when the Lyrical Ballads were brought out to take their chance to the time when Mr. Beddoes, Mr. Procter, and somebody else clubbed to publish Shelley’s posthumous poems at their own expense or at least guarantee, and justly objected to paying for more than 250 copies, because more were not likely to be sold. In these six and twenty years such an addition had been made to English poetry as five times the space had not previously seen, as perhaps was not far from equalling the glorious gains of a not very different though somewhat longer space of time between the appearance of the Shepherd’s Calendar and the death of Shakespeare.

But the sequel of this abnormally high tide is hardly less interesting than itself. We generally expect at such moments in literature either a decided falling off, or else a period of decent imitation, of “school work.” It would be absurd to say that there is no contrast, no falling off, and no imitation in the group of poets noticed at the end of the second chapter in this volume. But they are not utterly decadent, and they are by no means purely or merely imitative. On the contrary, their note is quite different from that of mere school work, and in a sort of eccentric and spasmodic fashion they attain to singular excellence. Hood, Praed, Macaulay, Taylor, Darley, Beddoes, Hartley Coleridge, Horne, are not to Wordsworth or Coleridge, to Byron or to Shelley, what the later so-called Elizabethan playwrights are to Jonson and Fletcher, the later poets of the same time to Spenser and Donne. But they almost all, perhaps all, seem forced to turn into some bye-way or backwater of poetry, to be unable or unwilling to keep the crown of the causeway, the flood of the tide. Hood and Praed ­the former after actually attempting great poetry, and coming nearer to it than some great poets come in their first attempts ­wander into the special borderland of humorous and grotesque verse, achieving in different parts of it something not unlike absolute and unsurpassed success. Beddoes, and to some extent Darley, adopt fantastic varieties, grim in the former’s hands, playful chiefly in the latter’s, but alike remote from everyday interests and broad appeals; while the incomparable lyrics of Beddoes are of no special time or school, their very Elizabethanism being somewhat delusive. Taylor and Horne attempt the serious moral play with hardly any stage purposes or possibilities, and Horne in Orion tries an eccentric kind of ethical or satirical epic. Macaulay ­the most prominent of all, and the most popular in his tastes and aims ­is perhaps the nearest to a “schoolman,” adapting Scott as he does in his Lays; yet even here there is no mere imitation.

Thus the people of this minor transition exhibit ­in a most interesting way, rendered even more interesting by the repetition of it which, as we have seen and shall see, came about twenty years later ­the mixed phenomena of an after-piece and a lever de rideau, of precursorship and what we must for want of a better word call decadence. They were not strong enough in themselves, or were not favourably enough circumstanced, entirely to refresh or redirect the main current of poetry; so they deviated from it. But hardly in the least of them is there absent the sign and symptom of the poetic spirit being still about, of the poetic craft still in full working order. And their occasional efforts, their experiments in the half-kinds they affected, have a curious charm. English poetry would be undeniably poorer without the unearthly snatches of Beddoes, the exquisitely urbane verse-of-society of Praed, the pathetic-grotesque of Hood, even the stately tirades of Horne and Taylor. Some of them, if not all, may at this or that time have been exaggerated in value, by caprice, by reaction, by mere personal sympathy. But no universal critic will refuse admiration to them in and for themselves.

In the next stage we are again face to face, not with half-talents, uncertain of their direction, but with whole genius, inevitably working on its predestined lines. Nothing quite like the poetical career and the poetical conception of Alfred Tennyson and of Robert Browning, so different in all respects, except that of duration and coincidence in time, meets us in English, perhaps nothing similar meets us in any literature. It is easy to overestimate both; and both have been over-estimated. It is still easier to depreciate both; and both have been depreciated. Both wrote constantly, and at frequent intervals, for some sixty years ­the same sixty years ­and, with not more than fair allowance for the effects of time, both wrote at the end better than at the beginning, and nearly as well as at the best time of each. Wordsworth, it is true, wrote for nearly as long, but no one can assert the same duration of equality in his production.

In a certain sense, no doubt, neither can claim the same distinct individuality, the same unmistakable and elementary quality, as that which distinguishes Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley. The work of each is always at once recognisable by any tolerably competent judge; but the signs of identity are more composite than atomic, more derived and literary than essentially native. Browning’s unconventional mannerisms, and his wide range of subject, have made him seem even less of a mere scholar than Tennyson; but, as a fact, each is independent enough to a certain extent and to a certain extent only. In both appears, perhaps for the first time, certainly for the first time in combination with distinct original genius, that indebtedness to the past, that relapse upon it in the very act of forming vast schemes for the future, which is more the note of the nineteenth century than anything else. They not merely have all literature and all history behind them; but they know it. Yet this knowledge does not weigh on them. They do not exactly neglect it as Wordsworth and Shelley were still able to do, but they keep it under. It is the attendant fiend for which they must find work, but which they never, as too many of their contemporaries and followers have done, allow to become their master. And so they two, as it seems to me, do actually win their way to the first class, not perhaps to the absolutely first division of it, but to a first class still pretty rigidly limited.

It is not the object of this Conclusion to deal with the performances of individuals at any length, and therefore I must refer back to the text for a detailed indication of the position of Keats as the summer-up of the tradition of the first of the groups or periods here noticed, and the begetter, master, and teacher of the third, as well as for descriptions of the different manners in which Tennyson and Browning respectively shared and distributed between themselves that catholic curiosity in poetical subject, that exploration of all history and art and literature, which is the main characteristic of strictly nineteenth century poetry. But it is very pertinent here to point out the remarkable way in which these two poets, from the unexampled combination of length and potency in their poetical period of influence, governed all the poetry that has followed them. We shall now see that under their shadow at least two well-marked groups arose, each of magnitude and individuality sufficient to justify the assignment to it of a separate position. Yet it was in their shadow that these rose and flourished, and though the trees themselves have at length fallen, the shadow of their names is almost as great as ever.

The first of these two groups, the fourth of our present classification, renews, as has been said before, the features of its twenty or thirty years older forerunner, the group between Keats and Tennyson, in a most curious and attractive fashion. Once more we find the notes of uncertainty, of straying into paths, ­not always quite blind-alleys, but bye-paths certainly, ­the presence of isolated burst and flash, of effort unsuccessful or unequal as a whole. But here we find, what in the earlier chapter or section we do not find, distinct imitativeness and positive school-following. This imitation, attempting Shelley at times with little success (for, let it be repeated, Shelley is not imitable), selected in regular chronological order, three masters, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, though in each stage the master of the preceding rather shared than yielded his chair. It has been said in a famous passage that Wordsworth was more read about sixty years ago than at any time before or since, and this may perhaps be true. But his influence on writers has not depended on his popularity with readers, and from Sir Aubrey de Vere, who was born more than a century ago, to verse-writers who have only just published, his unmistakable tone, the tone which, so far as we can see, would never have been if Wordsworth had never existed, shows itself. The writing influence of Tennyson did not begin till the issue of the Poems of 1842, but it began almost immediately then, and has remained in full force to the present day. It is an influence somewhat more external and technical than Wordsworth’s, but for that reason even more unmistakable, and some of its results are among the most curious of school-copies in literature. As for Browning, imitation there tried both the outside and the inside, not very often with happy results, but, of course, with results even more obvious to the most uncritical eye than the results of the imitation of Tennyson itself.

The attempts to be original and to break away from these and their imitations ­the principal of them being that of the so-called Spasmodic school, which flourished at the dead waist and middle of the century ­were not particularly happy, and those who incline to gloomy views may say that the imitation was less happy still. In Mr. Matthew Arnold, a recalcitrant but unmistakable Wordsworthian, sharing a partly reluctant allegiance between Wordsworth, the ancients, Goethe, and Tennyson himself, it is impossible not to think that a freer attitude, a more independent and less literary aim, might have strengthened his elegance, supplied his curious mixture of stiffness and grace, and even made him less unequal than he actually is. And yet he is much the greatest poet of the period. Its effect was more disastrous still upon the second Lord Lytton, who was content to employ an excellent lyrical vein, and a gift of verse satire of the fantastic kind so distinct and fascinating, that it approaches the merit of fantasists in other kinds of the former group, like Beddoes and Darley, to far too great an extent on echoes. The fact is, that by this time, to speak conceitedly, the obsession of the book was getting oppressive. Men could hardly sing for remembering, or, at least, without remembering, what others had sung before them, and became either slavishly imitative or wilfully recalcitrant to imitation. The great leaders indeed continued to sing each in his own way, and, though with perfect knowledge of their forerunners, not in the least hampered by that knowledge. But something else was needed to freshen the middle regions of song.

It was found in that remarkable completion of the English Romantic movement, which is in relation to art called prae-Raphaelitism, and which is represented in literature, to mention only the greatest names, by Rossetti, his sister, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Swinburne. The death of the two former, and the fact that the movement itself, still active in art, has in a manner rounded itself off, though it is not necessarily finished, in literature, enable us to discuss it here as a whole, though its two chief poets are luckily still alive.

The first thing of interest in general history which strikes us, in regard to this delightful chapter of English poetry, is its illustration ­a common one in life and letters ­of the fact that there is a false as well as a true side to the question quoted by Aristotle: “If water chokes you, what are you to drink on the top of it?” “Wine,” one kind of humourist might answer; “More water,” another: and both rightly. It has been said that the group which preceded this suffered from the pressure of too constant, wide, and various reminiscence, literary, artistic, and other. The prae-Raphaelites refreshed themselves and the world by applying still more strenuously to the particular kind and period of such reminiscence which had been hitherto, despite the mediaeval excursions of many from Percy to Tennyson, imperfectly utilised. The literary practitioners of the school (with whom alone we are concerned) were not indeed by any means purely mediaeval in their choice of subject, in their founts of inspiration, or in their method of treatment. English poetry has known few if any more accomplished scholars both in the classics and in the modern languages than Mr. Swinburne, for instance; and something similar might be said of others. But, on the whole, the return of this school ­for all new things in literature are returns ­was to a mediaevalism different from the tentative and scrappy mediaevalism of Percy, from the genial but slightly superficial mediaevalism of Scott, and even from the more exact but narrow and distinctly conventionalised mediaevalism of Tennyson. They had other appeals, but this was their chief.

It may seem that mere or main archaism is not a very charming or powerful thing, and in weaker hands it would not have been either one or the other; but it so happened that these hands were very strong indeed. Mr. Rossetti had one of the most astonishing combinations ever known of artistically separate gifts, as well as a singular blend of passion and humour. His sister was one of the great religious poets of the world. Mr. Swinburne has never been surpassed, if he has ever been equalled, by any poet in any language for command of the more rushing and flowing forms of verse. Mr. Morris has few equals in any time or country for narrative at once decorative and musical. Moreover, though it may seem whimsical or extravagant to say so, these poets added to the very charm of mediaeval literature which they thus revived a subtle something which differentiates it from ­which to our perhaps blind sight seems to be wanting in ­mediaeval literature itself. It is constantly complained (and some of those who cannot go all the way with the complainants can see what they mean) that the graceful and labyrinthine stories, the sweet snatches of song, the quaint drama and legend of the Middle Ages lack ­to us ­life; that they are shadowy, unreal, tapestry on the wall, not alive even as living pageants are. By the strong touch of modernness which these poets and the best of their followers introduced into their work, they have given the vivification required.

Beyond them we must not go, nor inquire whether the poets who have not come to forty years represent a new school of the masterful and supreme kind, or one of the experimental and striving sort, or something a good deal worse than this, a period of sheer interval and suspense, unenlivened even by considerable attempt. Not only our scheme, not only common prudence and politeness, but most of all the conditions of critical necessity insist on the curtain being here dropped. It is possible that a critic may be able to isolate and project himself sufficiently to judge, as posterity will judge them, the actually accomplished work of his own contemporaries and juniors. But even such a skilful and fortunate person cannot judge the work which they have not yet produced, and which may in all cases, and must in some, modify their position and alter their rank.

But what has been has been, and on this mass (not in the actual case “vulgar” by any means) of things done it is possible to pronounce securely. And with security it may be said that for total amount, total merit, total claims of freshness and distinctness, no period of poetical literature can much, if at all, exceed the ninety years of English verse from The Ancient Mariner to Crossing the Bar. The world has had few poets better than the best of ours during this time in degree; it has had none like Shelley, perhaps none exactly like Wordsworth, in kind. The secret of long narrative poems that should interest has been recovered; the sonnet, one of the smallest but one of the most perfect of poetic forms, has been recovered likewise. Attempts to recover the poetic drama have been mostly failures; and serious satire has hardly reappeared. But lighter satire, with other “applied” poetry, has shown variety and excellence. Above all lyric, the most poetic kind of poetry, has attained a perfection never known before, except once in England and once in Greece. It has been impossible hitherto to make a full and free anthology of the lyric poets from Burns and Blake to Tennyson and Browning to match the anthologies often made of those from Surrey or Sidney to Herrick or Vaughan. But when it can be done it is a question whether the later volume will not even excel the earlier in intensity and variety, if not perhaps in freshness of charm.

And then it is needful once more to insist, even at the risk of disgusting, on the additional interest given by the subtle and delicate, but still distinctly traceable gradations, the swell and sinking, the flow and ebb, of poetical production and character during the time. As no other flourishing time of any poetry has lasted so long, so none has had the chance of developing these mutations in so extensive and attractive a manner; in none has it been possible to feel the pulse of poetry, so to speak, in so connected and considerable a succession of experiment. Poetical criticism can never be scientific; but it can seldom have had an opportunity of going nearer to a scientific process than here, owing to the volume, the connection, the duration, the accessibility of the phenomena submitted to the critic. The actual secret as usual escapes; but we can hunt the fugitive by a closer trail than usual through the chambers of her flight.

Of the highest poetry, however, as of other highest things, Goethe’s famous axiom Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh holds good. Although there is a difference between the expressions of this highest poetry in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, in the fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth after Christ there is also a certain quiet sameness, not indiscernibility but still identity. The lower kinds of literature admit of more apparent and striking freshness of exterior. And perhaps the most strikingly fresh, some might even say the distinctive, product of the nineteenth century, is its prose fiction.

This, as has been shown in detail, is much later in date than the poetry in anything like a characteristic and fully developed state. Although it was busily produced during the last twenty years of the eighteenth century and the first fifteen of the nineteenth, the very best work of the time, except such purely isolated things as Vathek, are experiments, and all but the very best ­the novels of Miss Edgeworth, those written but not till quite the end of the time published by Miss Austen, and a very few others ­are experiments of singular lameness and ill success.

With Scott’s change from verse to prose, the modern romance admittedly, and to a greater extent than is generally thought the modern novel, came into being; and neither has gone out of being since. In the two chapters which have been devoted to the subject we have seen how the overpowering success of Waverley bred a whole generation of historical novels; how side by side with this the older novel of manners, slightly altered, continued to be issued, with comic deviations chiefly, as in the hands of Theodore Hook; how Bulwer attempted a sort of cross between the two; how about the middle of the century the historical novel either ceased or changed, to revive later after a middle period illustrated by the brilliant romances of Kingsley; how about the same time the strictly modern novel of manners came into being in the hands of Thackeray, Miss Bronte, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope, Dickens overlapping both periods in a fantastic and nondescript style of his own; and how more recently still both romance and novel have spread out and ramified into endless subdivisions.

There is, however, this broad line of demarcation between poetry and the novel, that they are written for different ends and from different motives. It is natural to man to write poetry; it does not appear to be by any means so certainly or unvaryingly necessary to him to read it. Except at rare periods and for short times, poetry has never offered the slightest chance of livelihood to any considerable number of persons; and it is tolerably certain that if the aggregate number of poets since the foundation of the world had had nothing to live on but their aggregate gains as poets, starvation would have been the commonplace rule, instead of the dramatic exception, among the sons of Apollo.

On the other hand, it is no doubt also natural to man to tell prose stories, and it seems, though it was a late-discovered aptitude, that it is not unnatural to him to read them; but the writing of them does not seem to be at all an innate or widely disseminated need. Until some hundred or two hundred years ago very few were written at all; the instances of persons who do but write novels because they must are exceedingly rare, and it is as certain as anything can be that of the enormous production of the last three-quarters of a century not 5, perhaps not 1 per cent would have been produced if the producing had not led, during the whole of that time, in most cases but those of hopeless incompetence to some sort of a livelihood, in many to very comfortable income, and in some to positive wealth and fame. In other words, poetry is the creation of supply and novel-writing of demand; poetry can hardly ever be a trade and in very rare cases a profession, while novel-writing is commonly a very respectable profession, and unfortunately sometimes a rather disreputable trade.

Like other professions, however, it enlists genius sometimes, talent often; and the several and successive ways in which this genius and this talent show themselves are of more than sufficient interest. But the steady demand, and the inevitable answer to it, work adversely to such spontaneous and interesting fluctuations of production as those which we have traced in reference to poetry. There have been times, particularly that between the cessation of Sir Walter’s best work and the perfecting of that of Thackeray, in which the average value of even the best novels was much lower than at other times. But even in these the average volume maintained itself very well, and, indeed, steadily increased.

It is this which, with another to be mentioned shortly, will, so far as it is possible for a contemporary to judge, be noted in the literary history of the future as the distinguishing crop or field of the nineteenth century. Sermons, essays, plays, no doubt, continue to be written; but the novel has supplanted the sermon, the essay, the play in the place which each at different times held as the popular form of literature. It may be added, or repeated, that it has in part at least achieved this result by trespassing upon the provinces of all these three forms and of many others. This is true, but is of somewhat less importance than might be thought. The fable has an old trick of adjusting itself to almost every possible kind of literary use, and the novel is only an enlarged and more fully organised fable. It does not, no doubt, do best when it abuses this privilege of its ancestor, and saturates itself overmuch with “purpose,” but it has at least an ancestral right to do so.

There is no doubt also that the popularity of the novel has been very directly connected with a cause which has had all manner of effects fathered upon it ­often with no just causation or filiation whatever ­to wit, the spread of education. In the proper sense of course the spread of education must always be strictly limited. The number of educable persons probably bears a pretty constant ratio to the population, and when the education reaches the level of the individual’s containing power, it simply runs over and is lost. But it is possible to teach nearly everybody reading and writing; and it is a curious but exact observation that a very large proportion of those who have been taught reading require something to read. Now the older departments of literature do not lend themselves with any facility to constant reading by the average man or woman, whose requirements may be said to be amusement rather than positive delight, occupation much rather than intellectual exertion, and above all, something to pass time. For these requirements, or this compound requirement, the hearing of some new thing has been of old recognised as the surest and most generally useful specific. And the novel holds itself out, not indeed always quite truly, as being new or nothing by name and nature. Accordingly the demand for novels has gone on ever increasing, and the supply has never failed to keep up with it.

Nor would it be just to say that the quality has sunk appreciably. The absolutely palmy day of the English nineteenth century in novel-writing was no doubt some thirty-five or forty years ago. Not even the contemporary France of that date can show such a “galaxy-gallery” as the British novelists ­Dickens, Thackeray, Miss Bronte, George Eliot, Trollope, Kingsley, Bulwer, Disraeli, Lever, Mr. Meredith, and others ­who all wrote in the fifties. But at the beginning of the period the towering genius of Scott and the perfect art of Miss Austen, if we add to them Miss Edgeworth’s genial talent, did not find very much of even good second-rate matter to back them; there was, as has been said, a positively barren time succeeding this first stage and preceding the “fifty” period; and twenty years or a little more ago, when Thackeray and Dickens were dead, Trollope and George Eliot past their best, Kingsley and Bulwer moribund, Mr. Meredith writing sparely and unnoticed, the new romantic school not arisen, and no recruit of distinction except Mr. Blackmore firmly set, things were apparently a great deal worse with us in point of novel-writing than they are at present. Whether, with a return of promise and an increase of performance, with a variation of styles and an abundance of experiment, there has also been a relapse into the extravagances which we have had in this very book to chronicle as characterising the fiction of exactly a century ago, ­whether we have had over-luxuriant and non-natural style, attempts to attract by loose morality, novels of purpose, novels of problem, and so forth, ­and whether the coming age will dismiss much of our most modern work as not superior in literary and inferior in other appeal to the work of Godwin and Lewis, Holcroft and Bage, it is not necessary distinctly to say. But our best is certainly better than the best of that time, our worst is perhaps not worse; and the novel occupies a far higher place in general estimation than it did then. Indeed it has been observed by the sarcastic that to some readers of novels, and even to some writers of them, “novel” and “book” seem to be synonymous terms, and that when such persons speak of “literature,” they mean and pretty distinctly indicate that they mean novel-writing, and novel-writing only. This at least shows that the seed which Scott sowed, or the plant which he grafted, has not lost its vitality.

Certainly not less, perhaps even more, distinctive of the time in history must be that development and transformation of what is broadly called the newspaper, of which the facts and details have occupied two more of these chapters. It is true that at times considerably earlier than even the earliest that here concerns us, periodical writing had been something of a power in England as regards politics, had enlisted eminent hands, and had even served once or twice as the means of introduction of considerable works in belles lettres. But the Addisonian Essay had been something of an accident; Swift’s participation in the Examiner was another; Defoe’s abundant journalism brought him more discredit than profit or praise; and though Pulteney and the Opposition worked the press against Walpole, the process brought little benefit to the persons concerned. Reviewing was meagrely done and wretchedly paid; the examples of Robinson Crusoe earlier and Sir Launcelot Greaves later are exceptions which prove the rule that the feuilleton was not in demand; in fact before our present period newspaper-writing was rather dangerous, was more than rather disreputable, and offered exceedingly little encouragement to any one to make it the occasion of work in pure literature, or even to employ it as a means of livelihood, while attempting other and higher, though less paying kinds.

The period of the French Revolution, if not the French Revolution itself, changed all this, assisted no doubt by the natural and inevitable effects of the spread of reading and the multiplication of books. People wanted to see the news; papers sprang up in competition to enable them to see the news; and the competitors strove to make themselves more agreeable than their rivals by adding new attractions. Again, the activity of the Jacobin party, which early and of course directed itself to the press, necessitated activity on the other side. The keenest intellects, the best-trained wits of the nation, sometimes under some disguise, sometimes openly, took to journalism, and it became simply absurd to regard the journalist as a disreputable garreteer when Windham and Canning were journalists. The larger sale of books and the formation of a regular system of “pushing” them also developed reviews ­too frequently, no doubt, in the direction of mere puffing, but even thus with the beneficent result that other reviews came into existence which were not mere puff-engines.

Even these causes and others will not entirely explain the extraordinary development of periodicals of all kinds from quarterly to daily, of which the Edinburgh, Blackwood, the Examiner, and the Times were respectively the most remarkable examples and pioneers in the earlier years of the century, though as a literary organ the Morning Post had at first rather the advantage of the Times. But, as has been said here constantly, you can never explain everything in literary history; and it would be extremely dull if you could. The newspaper press had, for good or for ill, to come; external events to some obvious extent helped its coming; individual talents and aptitudes helped it likewise; but the main determining force was the force of hidden destiny.

There is, however, no mistake possible about the results. It is but a slight exaggeration to say that the periodical rapidly swallowed up all other forms of literature, to this extent and in this sense, that there is hardly a single one of these forms capital performance in which has not at one time or another formed part of the stuff of periodicals, and has not by them been first introduced to the world. Not a little of our poetry; probably the major part of our best fiction; all but a very small part of our essay-writing, critical, meditative, and miscellaneous; and a portion, much larger than would at one time have seemed conceivable, of serious writing in history, philosophy, theology, science, and scholarship, have passed through the mint or mill of the newspaper press before presenting themselves in book form. A certain appreciable, though small part of the best, with much of the worst, has never got beyond that form.

To attempt to collect the result of this change is to attempt something not at all easy, something perhaps which may be regarded as not particularly valuable. The distinction between literature and journalism which is so often heard is, like most such things, a fallacy, or at least capable of being made fallacious. Put as it usually is when the intention is disobliging to the journalist, it comes to this: ­that the Essays of Elia, that Southey’s Life of Nelson, that some of the best work of Carlyle, Tennyson, Thackeray, and others the list of whom might be prolonged at pleasure, is not literature. Put as it sometimes is by extremely foolish people, it would go to the extent that anything which has not been published in a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly publication is literature.

There is probably no subject on which it is more necessary to clear the mind of cant than this. Of course there is journalism in the sense opposed to literature, though not necessarily opposed in any bad sense. No wise man intends, and no wise man will ever suffer, articles which are in the strict sense articles, which are intended to comment on merely passing events, and to produce a merely immediate effect, to be extracted from journals and put on record as books. Not only is the treatment unsuitable for such record, but it may almost be said that the treatment suitable for things so to be recorded is actually unsuitable for things ephemeral. But there is a very large amount of writing to which this does not in the least apply, and in which it can make no kind of real difference whether the result appears by itself in a bound cloth volume as a whole, or in parts with other things in a pamphlet, covered with paper, or not covered at all. The grain of truth which the fallacy carries is really this: ­that the habit of treating some subjects in the peculiar fashion most effective in journalism may spread disastrously to the treatment of other subjects which ought to be treated as literature. This is a truth, but not a large one. There have been at all times, at least since the invention of printing and probably before it, persons who, though they may be guiltless of having ever written an article in their lives, have turned out more or less ponderous library volumes in which the very worst sins of the worst kind of journalist are rampant.

There are, however, more thoughtful reasons for regarding the development of periodicals as not an unmixed boon to letters. The more evanescent kinds of writing are, putting fiction out of the question, so much the more profitable in journalism that it certainly may tempt ­that it certainly has tempted ­men who could produce, and would otherwise have produced, solid literature. And there is so much more room in it for light things than for things which the average reader regards as heavy, that the heavy contributor is apt to be at a discount, and the light at a premium. But all this is exceedingly obvious. And it may be met on the other side by the equally obvious consideration already referred to, that periodicals have made the literary life possible in a vast number of cases where it was not possible before; that whereas “toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol” was not a very exaggerated description of its prospects little more than a hundred years ago, the patron has become superfluous, want and the gaol rather unlikely, except in cases of extreme misconduct, incompetence, or ill-luck, while if toil and envy remain unvanquished, they are not specially fated to the literary lot. Indeed the more paradoxical of Devil’s Advocates against the press usually urge that it has made the literary life too easy, has tempted too many into it, and has thereby increased the flood of mediocrity.

The most serious objection of all perhaps, though even this is rather idle in face of accomplished facts, is that the perpetual mincing up and boiling down of the constituents of the diet of reading have produced, in the appetite and digestive faculties of the modern reader, an inability to cope with a really solid meal of perhaps slightly tough matter, and that periodicals not merely eschew the provision of this solid stuff themselves, but do their best to make things worse by manipulating the contents of books that do contain it.

The fact, however, once more, concerns us much more than moralisings about the fact; and the fact of the prominence, the extraordinary prominence, of the periodical press in the nineteenth century, is as little open to dispute as the prominence in that century’s later mechanical history of discoveries in electricity, or in its earlier of experiments with steam. Occasionally one may hear enthusiasts of one kind or another announcing with joy or horror that the periodical is killing the book. But if it is, it is very impartially engaged in begetting it at the same time that it kills; and it may be very seriously doubted whether this killing of a book is an easy act of murder to commit. With the printing press to produce, the curiosity of man to demand, and his vanity and greed ­if not also his genius and ambition ­to supply, the book is in all probability pretty safe. In the forms and varieties of this periodical publication we have seen some interesting changes. As might have been expected, the tendency has been for the intervals of publication to be shortened ­for the quarterly to give way as the fashionable form to the monthly, the monthly to the weekly, the weekly to the daily. Many years ago Macaulay, in a mild protest against having his articles altered by Macvey Napier, suggested in effect that the bloom might be left on poor things destined to be read only for a month or so. The duration of an article now may be measured rather by hours than by weeks. Still many of these changes are more apparent than real; and just as the institution of the graver monthly reviews twenty years ago simply reintroduced the quarterly article in a scarcely altered form after it had been pushed out of favour by the slighter magazine, so other introductions have been in fact réintroductions.

One point, however, of real importance in literary history remains to be noticed, and that is the conflict between signed and anonymous writing. Partly from the causes above enumerated as having conduced to the keeping of journalism in a condition of discredit and danger, partly owing to national idiosyncrasies, the habit of anonymous writing was almost universal in the English press at the beginning of the century. It may have been perfectly well known that such and such an article in the Quarterly was by Southey or Croker, such another in the Edinburgh by Sydney Smith or Macaulay, but the knowledge was, so to speak, unofficial. The question of the identity of “Zeta” in Blackwood cost a man’s life; and the system resulted (in daily papers especially) in so much editorial inter-mixture and refashioning, that sometimes it would really have been impossible to assign a single and authentic paternity. Even about the editorship of the great periodicals a sort of coquetry of veiling was preserved, and editors’ names, though in most cases perfectly well known, seldom or never appeared.

It is difficult to say exactly when or how this system began to be infringed. But there is no doubt that the prominence given in Household Words to the name and personality of Dickens, who was not unfriendly to self-advertisement, had a good deal to do with it; and when, a little later, the cheap shilling magazines appeared, writing with names became the rule, without them the exception. Criticism, however, for obvious reasons still held back; and it was not till about five and twenty years ago that the example, taken more or less directly from the French, of signed reviews was set by the Academy among weekly papers, and the Fortnightly among monthly reviews. It has been very largely followed even in daily newspapers, and the Saturday Review was probably the last newspaper of mark that maintained an absolutely rigid system of anonymity. It should, however, be observed that the change, while not even yet complete ­leading articles being still very rarely signed ­has by no means united all suffrages, and has even lost some that it had. Mr. John Morley, for instance, who had espoused it warmly as editor of the Fortnightly, and had, perhaps, done more than any other man to spread it, has avowed in a very interesting paper grave doubts about the result. Still it undoubtedly has increased, and is increasing, and in such cases it is much easier to express an opinion that things ought to be diminished, than either to expect that they will, or to devise any means whereby the diminution is to be effected. As for what is desirable as distinguished from what is likely, the weight of opinion may be thought to be in favour of the absence of signature. Anonymous criticism, if abused, may no doubt be abused to a graver extent than is possible with signed criticism. But such a hackneyed maxim as corruptio optimi shows that this is of itself no argument. On the other hand, signed criticism diminishes both the responsibility and the authority of the editor; it adds either an unhealthy gag or an unhealthy stimulus to the tongue and pen of the contributor; it lessens the general weight of the verdict; and it provokes the worst fault of criticism, the aim at showing off the critic’s cleverness rather than at exhibiting the real value and character of the thing criticised. And perhaps some may think the most serious objection of all to be that it encourages the employment of critics, and the reception of what they say, rather for their names than for their competence.

In that very important department of literature which stands midway between Belles Lettres and Science, the department of History, the century cannot indeed claim such striking and popularly effective innovations as in the departments of prose fiction and of periodical writing. Yet it may be questioned whether the change of this old kind is not in itself almost as noteworthy as in the other cases is the practical introduction of a new. What the change is was epigrammatically, if somewhat paradoxically, summed up recently by a great authority, Lord Acton. “History,” the Cambridge Professor of that art or science said in his inaugural lecture, “has become independent of the historian.”

It is possible to demur to the fact, but it is not difficult to explain the meaning. From the necessity of the case, the earliest history, at least in the West, is almost independent of documents and records. Thucydides and Herodotus wrote, the one from what he had actually seen and heard of contemporary events, the other partly from the same sources and partly from tradition of short date. Somewhat later historians of course had their predecessors before them, and in a few cases a certain amount of document, but never a large amount. When history, vernacular or Latin, began to be written again in the dark and middle ages, the absence of documents was complicated (except in the case of those early chroniclers, English and Irish chiefly, who merely put down local events) by that more peculiar and unaccountable, though possibly kindred, absence of critical spirit, which, of the many things more or less fancifully attributed to the mediaeval mind, is perhaps the most certain. It is a constant puzzle to modern readers how to account exactly for the fashion in which men, evidently of great intellectual ability, managed to be without any sense of the value of evidence, or any faculty of distinguishing palpable and undoubted fiction from what either was, or reasonably might be held to be, history. But by degrees this sense came into being side by side with the multiplication of the document itself. Even then, however, it was very long before the average historian either could or would regard himself as bound first to consult all the documents available, and then to sift and adjust them in accordance rather with the laws of evidence and the teachings of the philosophy of history than with his own predilections, or with the necessities of an agreeable narrative. But the patient industry of the French school of historical scholars, at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, founded this new tradition; the magnificent genius of Gibbon showed how the observance of it might not be incompatible with history-writing of the most literary kind; the national and natural tendency of German study adopted it; and shortly after Gibbon’s own day the school of historians, which is nothing if not documentary, began gradually to oust that of which the picturesque, if not strictly historical, legend about the Abbe Vertot and his “Mon siege est fait” is the anecdotic locus classicus of characterisation.

It has been shown, in the chapter devoted to the subject, how this school of documentary historians grew and flourished in England itself, from the days of Turner and Palgrave to those of Froude and Freeman. Certainly there could not, at least for some time, be said to be any very sensible tendency in history to dispense with the historian, or, in other and perhaps rather more intelligible words, of history ceasing to be literary. No historians have been more omnilegent, more careful of the document, than Carlyle and Macaulay, much as they differed in other respects, and in no histories has the “historian” ­that is to say, the personal writer as opposed to the mere “diplomatist” ­been more evident than he is in theirs. Nor is it very easy to see why the mere study of the document, still less why the mere accumulation of the document, should ever render superfluous the intelligent shaping which the historian alone can give. In the first place, documents are contradictory and want shifting and harmonising; in the second they want grasping and interpreting; in the third (and most important of all) they need to be made alive.

Nevertheless Lord Acton’s somewhat enigmatic utterance points, however vaguely, to real dangers, and it would be idle to say that these dangers have not been exemplified in the period and department we are considering. In the first place, the ever-increasing burden of the documents to be consulted is more and more crushing, and more and more likely to induce any one but a mere drudge either to relinquish the task in despair, or to perform it with a constant fear before his eyes, which prevents freedom and breadth of work. In the second it leads, on the one hand, to enormous extension of the scale of histories, on the other to an undue restraining and limiting of their subjects. Macaulay took four large volumes to do, nominally at least, not more than a dozen years; Froude twelve to cover fifty or sixty; Grote as many to deal with the important, but neither long nor richly documented, period of Greek, or rather Athenian, flourishing. To this has to be added the very serious drawback that when examination of documents is ranked before everything, even the slightest questioning of that examination becomes fatal, and a historian is discredited because some one of his critics has found a document unknown to him, or a flaw, possibly of the slightest importance, in his interpretation of the texts.

Nevertheless it is necessary to lay our account with this new style of history, and it is fortunately possible to admit that the gains of it have not been small. Thanks to its practitioners, we know infinitely more than our fathers did, though it may not be so certain that we make as good a use of our knowledge. And the evil of multiplication of particulars, like other evils, brings its own cure. The work of mere rough-hewing, of examination into the brute facts, is being done ­has to no small extent actually been done ­as it never was done before. The “inedited” has ceased to be inedited ­is put on record for anybody to examine with little trouble. The mere loss of valuable material, which has gone on in former ages to an extent only partially compensated by the welcome destruction of material that has no value at all, has been stopped. The pioneers of the historical summer (to borrow a decorative phrase from Charles of Orleans) have been very widely abroad, and there is no particular reason why the summer itself should not come.

When it does it will perhaps discard some ways and fashions which have been lately in vogue; but it will assuredly profit by much that has been done during the period we survey, no less in form than in matter. The methods have been to a certain extent improved, the examples have been multiplied, the historical sense has certainly taken a wider and deeper hold of mankind. Very little is wanting but some one ausus contemnere vana; and when the future Thucydides or the future Carlyle sets to work, he will be freed, by the labour of others, alike from the paucity of materials that a little weakened Thucydides, and from the brute mass of them that embittered the life of Carlyle.

Not so much is to be said of the remaining divisions or departments individually. If the drama of the century is not, in so far as acting drama is concerned, almost a blank from the point of view of literature, the literary drama of the century is almost a blank as regards acting qualities. It is true that there have been at times attempts to obtain restitution of conjugal rights on one side or on the other. In the second and third decades, perhaps a little later, a strong effort was made to give vogue to, and some vogue was obtained for, the scholarly if pale attempts of Milman and Talfourd, and the respectable work of others. Bulwer, his natural genius assisted by the stage-craft of Macready, brought the acting and the literary play perhaps nearer together than any one else did. Much later still, the mighty authority of Tennyson, taking to dramatic writing at the time when he was the unquestioned head of English poetry and English literature, and assisted by the active efforts of the most popular actor and manager of the day, succeeded in holding the stage fairly well with plays which are not very dramatic among dramas, and which are certainly not very poetical among their author’s poems. With more recent times we have luckily nothing to do, and the assertions of some authors that they themselves or others have brought back literature to the stage may be left confronted with the assertions of not a few actors that, for reasons which they do not themselves profess entirely to comprehend, a modern drama is almost bound not to be literary if it is to act, and not to act if it is literary. Some have boldly solved the difficulty by hinting, if not declaring, that the drama is an outworn form except as mere spectacle or entertainment; others have exhausted themselves in solutions of a less trenchant kind; none, it may safely be said, has really solved it. And though it is quite true that what has happened was predicted sixty or seventy years ago, as a result of the breach of the monopoly of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, it is fair to say that the condition of the drama of at least a quarter of a century earlier had been little if at all better than it has been since. It is a simple fact that since Sheridan we have had no dramatist who combined very high acting with very high literary merit.

Of what have been called the applied departments of literature, a somewhat less melancholy account has to be given; but, except in their enormous multiplication of quantity, they present few opportunities for remarks of a general character.

Very great names have been added to the list of theological writers, but these names on the whole belong to the earlier rather than to the later portion of the period, and even then something of a change has been observable in the kinds of their writing. The sermon, that is to say the literary sermon, has become more and more uncommon; and the popular ear which calls upon itself to hear sermons at all prefers usually what are styled practical discourses, often deviating very considerably from the sermon norm, or else extremely florid addresses modelled on later Continental patterns, and having as a rule few good literary qualities. So, too, the elaborate theological treatise has gone out of fashion, and it may be doubted whether, at least for the last half century, a single book of the kind has been added to the first class of Anglican theological writing. This writing has thus taken the form either of discourses of the older kind, maintained in existence by endowment or by old prescription, such as the Bampton Lectures, or of rather popular polemics, or of what may be called without disrespect theological journalism of various kinds. The general historical energy of the century, moreover, has not displayed itself least in the theological department, and valuable additions have been made, not merely to general church history, but to a vast body of biography and journal-history, as well as to a certain amount of Biblical scholarship. In this latter direction English scholars have distinguished themselves by somewhat less violation of the rules of criticism in general than their foreign brethren and masters. But it cannot be said that the nineteenth century is ever likely to rank high in the history of English theology. Even its greatest names ­Irving, Chalmers, the Oxford leaders, and others, with perhaps the single exception of Newman ­are important much more personally and as influences than as literary figures; while the rank and file, putting history aside, have been distinctly less noteworthy than in any of the three preceding centuries.

The “handmaid of theology” has received, at any rate during the first half of the period, or even the first three-quarters, more distinguished attentions than her mistress; and the additions made to the list headed by Erigena and Anselm, if we allow Latin to count, by Bacon and Hobbes, if we stick to the vernacular, have been many and great. Yet it would not be unreasonable laudation of times past to say that there hardly, after Hume’s death, arose any philosopher who combined the originality, the acuteness, and the literary skill of Hume during the first half of this century, while certainly, at least till within a period forbidden to our scheme, the latter part of the time has not seen any writer who could vie even with those of the earlier. To a certain extent the historical and critical tendencies so often noticed have here been unfortunate, inasmuch as they have diverted philosophical students from original writing ­or at least from writing as original as the somewhat narrow and self-repeating paths of philosophy admit ­to historical and critical exercises. But there is also no doubt that the immense authority which the too long neglected writers of Germany attained, a little before the middle of the century, has been unfortunate in at least one respect, if not also in others. The ignorant contempt of technicalities, and the determination to refer all things to common sense employing common language, which distinguished the eighteenth century with us, was certain to provoke a reaction; and this reaction, assisted by imitation of the Germans, produced in the decades from 1840 onwards an ever-increasing tendency among English philosophers or students of philosophy to employ a jargon often as merely technical as the language of the schoolmen, and not seldom far emptier of any real argument. It is not too much to say that if the rough methods of Hobbes with a terminology far less fallacious, were employed with this jargon, it would look much poorer than Bramhall’s scholasticisms look in the hands of the redoubtable Nominalist. Fortunately of late there have been more signs than one of yet another turn of tide, and of a fresh appeal to the communis sensus, not it may be hoped of the obstinately and deafly exoteric character of the eighteenth century, but such as will refuse to pay itself with words, and will exercise a judicious criticism in a language understanded of all educated people. Then, and not till then, we may expect to meet philosophy that is literature and literature that is philosophic.

Science, that is to say physical science, which has sometimes openly boasted itself as about to take, and has much more commonly made silent preparations for taking, the place both of philosophy and of theology, will hardly be said by the hardiest of her adherents to have done very much to justify these claims to seats not yet quite vacant from the point of view of the purely literary critic. We have had some excellent scientific writers, from Bishop Watson to Professor Huxley; and some of the books of the century which would deserve remembrance and reading, whatever their subject matter, have been books of science. Yet it is scarcely rash to assert that the essential characteristics of science and the essential characteristics of literature are, if not so diametrically opposed as some have thought, at any rate very far apart from one another. Literature can never be scientific; and though science may be literary, yet it is rather in the fashion in which a man borrows some alien vesture in order to present himself, in compliance with decency and custom, at a foreign court. Mathematics give us the example ­perhaps the only example ­of pure science, of what all science would be if it could, and of what it approaches, ever more nearly, as far as it can. It is needless to say that the perfect presentation of mathematics is in pure symbols, divested of all form and colour, of all personal tincture and bias. And it should be equally superfluous to add that it is in form and colour, in suggestion of sound rather than in precise expression and sense, in personal bias and personal tincture, that not merely the attraction but the very essence of literature consists.

By so much as verbal science or scholarship, which would seem to be more especially bound to be literature, claims to be and endeavours to be strictly scientific, by so much also necessarily does it divorce itself from the literature which it studies. This, if not an enormously great, is certainly rather a sore evil; and it is one of the most considerable and characteristic signs of the period we are discussing. The older scholarship, though sufficiently minute, still clung to the literary side proper: it was even, in the technical dialect of one of the universities, opposed to “science,” which word indeed was itself used in a rather technical way. The invention of comparative philology, with its even more recent off-shoot phonetics, has changed all this, and we now find “linguistic” and “literary” used by common consent as things not merely different but hostile, with a further tendency on the part of linguistics to claim the term “scholarship” exclusively for itself.

This could hardly in any case be healthy. What may be the abstract value of the science, or group of sciences, called philology, it is perhaps not necessary here to inquire. It is sufficient to say that it clearly has nothing to do with literature except in accidental and remote applications, that it stands thereto much as geology does to architecture. Unfortunately, while the scientific side of scholarship is thus becoming, if it has not become, wholly unliterary, the aesthetic side has shown signs of becoming, to far too great an extent, unscientific in the bad and baneful sense. With some honourable exceptions, we find critics of literature too often divided into linguists who seem neither to think nor to be capable of thinking of the meaning or the melody, of the individual and technical mastery, of an author, a book, or a passage, and into loose aesthetic rhetoricians who will sometimes discourse on AEschylus without knowing a second aorist from an Attic perfect, and pronounce eulogies or depreciations on Virgil without having the faintest idea whether there is or is not any authority for quamvis with one mood rather than another. Nor is it possible to see what eirenicon is likely to present itself between two parties, of whom the extremists on the one side may justly point to such things as have here been quoted, while the extremists on the other feel it a duty to pronounce phonetics the merest “hariolation,” and a very large part of what goes by the name of philology ingenious guesswork, some of which may possibly not be false, but hardly any of which can on principles of sound general criticism be demonstrated to be true. It is not wonderful, though it is in the highest degree unhealthy, that the stricter scholars should be more or less scornfully relinquishing the province of literary criticism altogether, while the looser aesthetics consider themselves entitled to neglect scholarship in any proper sense with a similarly scornful indifference.

It is, however, impossible that offences of this sort should not come now and then in the history of literature, and fortunately, in that history, they disappear as they appear. For the present purpose it is more important to conclude this conclusion with a few general remarks on the past, fewer on the present, and fewest of all on the future.

On this last head, indeed, no words were perhaps even better than even fewest; though something of the sort may be expected. Rash as prophecy always is, it is never quite so rash as in literature; and though we can sometimes, looking backward, say ­perhaps even then with some rashness ­that such and such a change might or ought to have been expected, it is very seldom that we can, when deprived of this illegitimate advantage, vaticinate on such subjects with any safety. Yet the study of the present always, so to speak, includes and overlaps something of the future, and by comparison at least of other presents we can discern what it is at least not improbable that the future may be. What, then, is the present of literature in England?

It can be described with the greater freedom that, as constantly repeated, we are not merely at liberty ex hypothesi to omit references to individuals, but are ex hypothesi bound to exclude them. And no writer, as it happens rather curiously, of anything like great promise or performance who was born later than the beginning of the fifties has died as yet, though the century is so near its close. Yet again, all the greatest men of the first quarter of the century, with the single exception of Mr. Ruskin, are gone; and not many of the second remain. By putting these simple and unmistakable facts together it will be seen, in a fashion equally free from liability to cavil and from disobliging glances towards persons, that the present is at best a stationary state in our literary history. Were we distinctly on the mounting hand, it is, on the general calculation of the liabilities of human life, certain that we must have had our Shelley or our Keats side by side with our Wordsworth and our Coleridge. That we have much excellent work is certain; that we have much of the absolutely first class not so. And if we examine even the good work of our younger writers we shall find in much of it two notes or symptoms ­one of imitation or exaggeration, the other of uncertain and eccentric quest for novelty ­which have been already noted above as signs of decadence or transition.

Whether it is to be transition or decadence, that is the question. For the solution of it we can only advance with safety a few considerations, such as that in no literary history have periods of fresh and first-rate production ever continued longer than ­that they have seldom continued so long as ­the period now under notice, and that it is reasonable, it is almost certain, that, though by no means an absolutely dead season, yet a period of comparatively faint life and illustration should follow. To this it may be added as a consideration not without philosophical weight that the motives, the thoughts, the hopes, the fears, perhaps even the manners, which have defrayed the expense of the literary production of this generation, together with the literary forms in which, according to custom, they have embodied and ensconced themselves, have been treated with unexampled, certainly with unsurpassed, thoroughness, and must now be near exhaustion; while it is by no means clear that any fresh set is ready to take their place. It is on this last point, no doubt, that the more sanguine prophets would like to fight the battle, urging that new social ideas, and so forth, are in possession of the ground. But this is not the field for that battle.

In dealing with what has been, with the secular hour that we have actually and securely had, we are on far safer, if not on positively safe ground. Here the sheaves are actually reaped and brought home; and if the teller of them makes a mistake, his judgment, and his judgment only, need be at fault. Not all ways of such telling are of equal value. It may be tempting, for instance, but can hardly be very profitable, to attempt to strike an exact balance between the production of the century from 1780 to 1880 with that of the other great English literary century from 1580 to 1680. Dear as the exercise is to some literary accountants, there is perhaps no satisfactory system of book-keeping by which we can really set the assets and the liabilities of the period from the appearance of Spenser to the death of Browne against the assets and liabilities of that from the appearance of Burns to the death of Tennyson, and say which has the greater sum to its credit. Still more vague and futile would it be to attempt to set with any exactness this balance-sheet against that of the other great literary periods of other countries, languages, and times. Here again, most emphatically, accuracy of this kind is not to be expected.

But what we can say with confidence and profit is that the nineteenth century in England and English is of these great periods, and of the greatest of them; that it has taken its place finally and certainly, with a right never likely to be seriously challenged, and in a rank never likely to be much surpassed.

The period which lisped its numbers in Burns and Blake and Cowper, which broke out into full song with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, which, not to mention scores of minor singers, took up the tale with Tennyson and Browning and passed it on to Arnold, Rossetti, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Swinburne, need fear no comparisons in the matter of poetry. In prose fiction, as we have seen, it stands alone. It is almost a century of origins as regards the most important kinds; it is quite a century of capital and classical performance in them. In “making” ­prose or verse ­no time leaves record of performance more distinguished or more various.

That in one great literary kind, drama, it exhibits lamentable deficiency, that indeed in that kind it hardly counts at all, has been admitted; and it is not probable that in any of the serious prose kinds, except history, it will ever rank very high when compared with others. Its theology has, as far as literature is concerned, been a little wanting in dignity, in finish, and even in fervour, its philosophy either commonplace or jargonish, its exercises in science and scholarship ever divorcing themselves further from literary ideals. But in the quality of its miscellaneous writing, as well as in the facilities given to such writing by its special growth ­some would say its special fungus ­of the periodical, it again rises to the first class. Hardly the period of Montaigne and Bacon, certainly not that of Dryden, Cowley, and Temple, nor that of Addison and Steele, nor that of Johnson and Goldsmith, can vie with the century of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, of Leigh Hunt and Thomas de Quincey, of Macaulay and Thackeray and Carlyle, of Arnold and Mr. Ruskin. Miscellaneous we have been, ­perhaps too much so, ­but we should be a little saved by the excellence of some of our miscellanists.

Pessimists would probably say that the distinguishing and not altogether favourable notes of the century are a somewhat vagabond curiosity in matter and a tormented unrest of style. The former concerns us little, and is chiefly noticeable here because of the effect which it has had on the great transformation of historical writing so often noticed; the latter concerns us intimately. And no doubt there is hardly a single feature ­not even the growth of the novel, not even the development of the newspaper ­which will so distinctly and permanently distinguish this century in English literary history as the great changes which have come over style, and especially prose style. There has been less opportunity to notice these collectively in any of the former chapters than there has been to notice some other changes: nor was this of much importance, for the present is the right place for gathering up the fragments.

The change of style in prose is undoubtedly as much the leading feature of the century as is in poetry the change of thought and outlook, on which latter enough perhaps has been said elsewhere; the whole of our two long chapters on poetry being indeed, with great part of this conclusion, a continuous exposition of it. But the change in prose was neither confined to, nor specially connected with, any single department of literature. Indirectly indeed, and distantly, it may be said to have been connected with the growth of the essay and the popularity of periodicals; and yet it is not quite certain that this was anything more than a coincidence due to the actual fact that the first extensive practitioners of ornate prose, Wilson and De Quincey, were in a way journalists.

That the sudden ornateness, in part a mere ordinary reaction, was also in part due to a reflection of the greater gorgeousness of poetry, though it was in itself less a matter of thought than of style, is true. But literary reactions are always in part at least literary developments; and after the prose of Burke and Gibbon, even after that of Johnson, it was certain that the excessive plainness reached in the mid-eighteenth century would be exchanged for something else. But it could not possibly have been anticipated that the change would exhibit the extent or the variety that it has actually shown.

That it has enriched English literature with a great deal of admirable matter is certain; that it has not merely produced a great deal of sad stuff, but has perhaps inflicted some permanent or at least lasting damage on the purity, the simplicity, and in the best sense the strength of style, is at least equally certain. It is less easy to say whether it is, as a movement, near its close, or with what sort of reaction it is likely to be followed. On the one hand the indication of particular follies and excesses may not seem decisive; for there is little doubt that in all the stages of this flamboyant movement ­from De Quincey to Carlyle, from Carlyle to Mr. Ruskin, from Mr. Ruskin to persons whom it is unnecessary to mention ­the advocates of the sober styles thought and said that the force of extravagance could no further go, and that the last outrages had been committed on the dignity and simplicity of English. On the other hand there are signs, which are very unlikely to deceive the practised critic, tending to show that the mode is likely to change. When actual frippery is seen hanging up in Monmouth Street or Monmouth Street’s successors, when cheap imitations of fashionable garments crowd the shop windows and decorate the bodies of the vulgar ­then the wise know that this fashion will shortly change. And certainly something similar may be observed in literature to-day. Cacophony jostles preciousness in novel and newspaper; attempts at contorted epigram appear side by side with slips showing that the writer has not the slightest knowledge of the classics in the old sense, and knows exceedingly little of anything that can be called classic in the widest possible acceptation of the term. Tyrannies cease when the cobblers begin to fear them; fashions, especially literary fashions, when the cobblers take them up.

Yet the production of what must or may be called literature is now so large, and in consequence of the spread of what is called education the appetite so largely exceeds the taste for it, that it is not so easy as it would once have been to forecast the extent and validity of any reaction that may take place.

If, without undue praising of times past, without pleading guilty to the prejudices sometimes attributed to an academic education, and also without trespassing beyond the proper limits of this book, it may be permitted to express an opinion on the present state of English literature, that opinion, while it need not be very gloomy, can hardly be very sanguine. And one ground for discouragement, which very especially concerns us, lies in the fact that on the whole we are now too “literary.” Not, as has been said, that the general taste is too refined, but that there is a too indiscriminate appetite in the general; not that the actual original force of our writers is, with rare exceptions, at all alarming, but that a certain amount of literary craftsmanship, a certain knowledge of the past and present of literature, is with us in a rather inconvenient degree. The public demands quantity, not quality; and it is ready, for a time at any rate, to pay for its quantity with almost unheard of returns, both, as the homely old phrase goes, in praise and in pudding. And the writer, though seldom hampered by too exact an education in form, has had books, as a rule, too much with him. Sometimes he simply copies, and knows that he copies; oftener, without knowing it, he follows and imitates, while he thinks that he is doing original work.

And worse than all this, the abundance of reading has created an altogether artificial habit ­a habit quite as artificial as any that can ever have prevailed at other periods ­of regarding the main stuff and substance of literature. Much reading of novels, which are to the ordinary reader his books, and his only books, has induced him to take their standards as the standards of both nature and life. And this is all the more dangerous because in all probability the writers of these very novels have themselves acquired their knowledge, formed their standards, in a manner little if at all more first-hand. We have nature, not as Jones or Brown saw it for himself, but as he saw it through the spectacles of Mr. Ruskin or of Jefferies; art, not as he saw it himself, but as he saw it through those of Mr. Ruskin again or of Mr. Pater; literary criticism as he learnt it from Mr. Arnold or from Sainte-Beuve; criticism of life as he took it from Thackeray or from Mr. Meredith.

Something like this has occurred at least three times before in the history of European literature. It happened in late Graeco-Roman times, and all the world knows what the cure was then, and how the much-discussed barbarian cleared the mind of Europe of its literary cant by very nearly clearing out all the literature as well. It happened on a much smaller scale, and with a less tremendous purgation, at the close of the Middle Ages, when the world suddenly, as it were, shut up one library and opened another; and at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, when it shut both of these or the greater part of them, and took to a small bookshelf of “classics,” a slender stock of carefully observed formulae and ­common sense.

What it will take to now, nobody can say; but that it will in one fashion or another change most of its recent wear, shut most of its recent books, and perhaps give itself something of a holiday from literature, except in scholastic shapes, may be not quite impossible. Another Lyrical Ballads may be coming for this decade, as it came a hundred years ago: all we can say is that it apparently has not come yet. But whether it does come or does not, the moment is certainly no bad one, even if chronology did not make it inviting, for setting in order the actual, the certain, the past and registered production of the century since the dawn of the great change which ended its vigil. The historian, as he closes his record, is only too conscious of the objections to omission that may probably be brought against him, and of those of too liberal admission which certainly will be brought. It is possible that for some tastes even this chapter may not contain enough of Tendenz-discussion, that they may miss the broader sweeps and more confident generalisations of another school of criticism. But the old objection to fighting with armour which you have not proved has always seemed a sound one, and has seldom failed to be justified of those who set it at nought. Careful arrangement of detail and premiss, cautious drawing of conclusions, and constant subjection of these conclusions to that process of literary comparison which I believe to be the strongest, the safest, the best engine of literary criticism altogether ­these are the things which I have endeavoured to observe here. It might have shown greater strength of mind to reject a large number of the authors here named, and so bring the matter into case for more extended treatment of interesting individuals. But there is something, as it seems to me, a little presumptuous in a too peremptory anticipation of the operations of Time the Scavenger. The critic may pretty well foresee the operations of the wallet-bearer, but he is not to dictate to him the particular “alms for oblivion” which he shall give. As it used to be the custom for a dramatic author, even though damned, to have his entrees at the theatre, so those who have once made an actual figure on the literary stage are entitled, until some considerable time has elapsed, to book-room. They lose it gradually and almost automatically; and as I have left out many writers of the end of last century whom, if I had been writing sixty years since, I should doubtless have put in, many of the first half of it whom I should have admitted if I had been writing thirty years since, so in another generation others will no doubt exercise a similar thinning on my own passed or pressed men.

But few, however, I think, appear here without more or less right of admission to the mind-map of the century’s literature which a well-furnished mind should at this moment contain. That such a mind-map, quite irrespective of examinations and lecture-courses, and of literary bread-study generally, is a valuable thing, I have no doubt. And I think, without wishing to magnify mine office, that the general possession of it might do something to counteract these disastrous influences which have been referred to a little earlier. A man should surely be a little less apt to take the pinchbeck poetry of his own day for gold when he remembers the Della Cruscans and Sentimentalists, the Montgomerys and the Tuppers; the terror-novel and the Minerva Press should surely be useful skeletons to him at his feast of fiction in kinds which it would be beyond my province to describe more particularly. He will not clamour, as I have known very excellent persons clamour, for the “raising of English to a new power” when he has before him the long procession of ingenious jargonists whose jargon has been in its turn hailed as a revelation and dismissed as an old song. And he will neither overexalt the dignity of literature, nor be a self-tormentor and a tormentor of others about its approaching decline and fall, when he sees how constantly, how incessantly, the kissed mouth has renewed its freshness, the apparently dying flower has shed seed and shot suckers for a new growth.