pastorals; poor Collins, a young enthusiast, who was disgusted with life, would read nothing but the Bible, went mad, was shut up in an asylum, and in his intervals of liberty wandered in Chichester cathedral, accompanying the music with sobs and groans; Glover, Watts, Shenstone, Smart, and others. The titles of their works sufficiently indicate their, character. One writes a poem on The Pleasures of Imagination, another on the Passions and on Liberty ; one an Elegy in a Country Churchyard and a Hymn to Adversity, another a poem on a Deserted Village, and on the character of surrounding civilisations (Goldsmith's Traveller); another a sort of epic on Thermopyla, and another the moral history of a young Minstrel. They were nearly all grave, spiritual men, impassioned for noble ideas, with Christian aspirations or convictions, given to meditating on man, inclined to melancholy, to descriptions, invocations, lovers of abstraction and allegory, who, to attain greatness, willingly mounted on stilts. One of the least strict and most noted of them was Young, the author of Night Thoughts, a clergyman and a courtier, who, having vainly attempted to enter Parliament, then to become a bishop, married, lost his wife and children, and made use of his misfortunes to write meditations on Life, Death, Immortality, Time, Friendship, The Christian Triumph, Virtue's Apology, A Moral Survey of the Nocturnal Heavens, and many other similar pieces. Doubtless there are brilliant flashes of imagination in his poems; seriousness and elevation are not wanting; we can even see that he aims at them; but we discover much more quickly that he makes the most of his grief, and strikes attitudes. He exaggerates and declaims, studies effects and style, confuses Greek and Christian ideas. Fancy an unhappy father, who says:

'Silence and Darkness! Solemn sisters! Twins

Of ancient night! I to Day's soft-ey'd sister pay my court

(Endymion's rival), and her aid implore

Now first implor'd in succour to the Muse.''

And a few pages further on invokes heaven and earth, when mentioning the resurrection of the Saviour. And yet the sentiment is fresh and sincere. Is it not one of the greatest of modern ideas to put Christian philosophy into verse? Young and his contemporaries say beforehand that which Chateaubriand and Lamartine were to discover. The true, the futile, all is here forty years earlier than in France. The angels and the other celestial machinery long figured in England before appearing in Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme and the Martyrs. Atala and Chactas are of the same family as Malvina and Fingal. If M. de Lamartine read Gray's odes and Akenside's reflections, he would find there the melancholy sweetness, the exquisite art, the fine arguments, and half the ideas of his own poetry. And yet, near as they were to a literary renovation, Englishmen did not yet attain it. In vain the

1 Young's Night Thoughts.

foundation was changed, the form persisted. They did not shake off the classical drapery; they write too well, they dare not be natural. They have always a patent stock of fine suitable words, poetic elegances, where each of them thought himself bound to go and search out his phrases. It boots them nothing to be impassioned or realistic; to dare, like Shenstone, describe a Schoolmistress, and the very part on which she whips a young rascal; their simplicity is conscious, their frankness archaic, their emotion compassed, their tears academical. Ever, at the moment of writing, an august model starts up, a sort of schoolmaster, weighing on each with his full weight, with all the weight which a hundred and twenty years of literature can give his precepts. Their prose is always the slave of the period: Samuel Johnson, who was at once the La Harpe and the Boileau of his age, explains and imposes on all the studied, balanced, irreproachable phrase; and the classical ascendency is still so strong that it domineers over the infancy of history, the only kind of English literature which was then European and original. Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon were almost French in their taste, language, education, conception of man. They relate like men of the world, cultivated and instructed, with charm and clearness, in a polished, rhythmic, sustained style. They show a liberal spirit, a continuous moderation, an impartial reason. They banish from history all coarseness and tediousness. They write without caprice or prejudice. But, at the same time, they attenuate human nature; comprehend neither barbarism nor exaltation; paint revolutions, as people might do who had seen nothing but decked drawing-rooms and dusted libraries; they judge enthusiasts with the coldness of chaplains or the smile of a sceptic; they blot out the salient features which distinguish human physiognomies; they cover all the harsh points of truth with a brilliant and uniform varnish. At last there started up an unfortunate Scotch ploughman (Burns), rebelling against the world, and in love, with the yearnings, lusts, greatness, and irrationality of modern genius. Now and then, driving his plough, he lighted on genuine verses, verses such as Heine and Alfred de Musset have made in our own days. In those few words, combined after a new fashion, there was a revolution. Two hundred new verses sufficed. The human mind turned on its hinges, and so did civil society. When Roland, being made a minister, presented himself before Louis xvI. in a simple dress-coat and shoes without buckles, the master of the ceremonies raised his hands to heaven, thinking that all was lost. In fact, all was changed.

I. Changes in society-Rise of democracy-The French Revolution-Desire of getting on-Changes in the human mind-New notion of causes-German philosophy-Craving for the beyond.

II. Robert Burns-His country-Family-Youth-Wretchedness-His yearnings and efforts-Invectives against society and church-The Jolly Beggars-Attacks on conventional cant-His idea of natural life-of moral life-Talent-Spontaneity-Style-Innovations-Success-Affectations Studied letters and academic verse—

in the Excise-Disgust-Excesses-Death.

-Farmer's life-Employment

III. Conservative rule in England-The Revolution affects the style onlyCowper-Sickly refinement-Madness-Retirement-The Task-Modern idea of poetry-Of style.

IV. The Romantic school-Its pretensions-Its tentatives-The two ideas of modern literature-History enters into literature - Lamb, Coleridge, Southey, Moore-Faults of this school-Why it succeeded less in England than elsewhere-Sir Walter Scott-Education-Antiquarian studies -Aristocratic tastes-Life-Poems-Novels-Incompleteness of his historical imitations-Excellence of his national pictures-His interiors— Amiable raillery-Moral aim-Place in modern civilisation-Development of the novel in England-Realism and uprightness-Wherein this school is cockneyfied and English.

V. Philosophy enters into literature-Lack of harmony in the style—Wordsworth-Character-Condition-Life-Painting of the moral life in the vulgar life-Introduction of the gloomy style and psychological divisions -Faults of style-Loftiness of his sonnets-The Excursion-Austere beauty of this Protestant poetry-Shelley-Imprudences-TheoriesFancy-Pantheism-Ideal characters-Life-like scenery-General tendency of the new literature-Gradual introduction of continental ideas.

ON

I.

N the eve of the nineteenth century began in Europe the great modern revolution. The thinking public and the human mind changed, and underneath these two collisions a new literature sprang

up.

223

The preceding age had done its work. Perfect prose and classical style put within reach of the most backward and the dullest minds the notions of literature and the discoveries of science. Moderate monarchies and regular administrations had permitted the middle class to develop itself under the pompous aristocracy of the court, as useful plants may be seen shooting up under trees which serve for show and ornament. They multiply, grow, rise to the height of their rivals, envelop them in their luxuriant growth, and obscure them by their density. A new world, commonplace, plebeian, thenceforth occupies the ground, attracts the gaze, imposes its form in manners, stamps its image in the mind. Towards the close of the century a sudden concourse of extraordinary events displays it all at once to the light, and sets it on an eminence unknown to any previous age. With the grand applications of science, democracy appears. The steam-engine and spinning-jenny create in England towns of from three hundred and fifty thousand to five hundred thousand souls. The population is doubled in fifty years, and agriculture becomes so perfect, that, in spite of this enormous increase of mouths to be fed, one-sixth of the inhabitants provide from the same soil food for the rest; importations increase threefold, and even more; the tonnage of vessels increases sixfold, the exportation sixfold and more.1 Prosperity, leisure, instruction, reading, travels, whatever had been the privilege of a few, became the common property of the majority. The rising tide of wealth raised the best of the poor to comfort, and the best of the well-to-do to opulence. The rising tide of civilisation raised the mass of the people to the rudiments of education, and the mass of citizens to complete education. In 1709 appeared the first daily newspaper, as big as a man's hand, which the editor did not know how to fill, and which, added to all the other papers, did not produce yearly three thousand numbers. In 1844 the Stamp Office showed 71 million numbers, many as large and as full as volumes. Artisans and townsfolk, enfranchised, enriched, having gained a competence, left the low depths where they had been buried in their narrow parsimony, ignorance, and routine; they came on the scene, forsook their workman-like and supernumerary's dress, assumed the leading parts by a sudden irruption or a continuous progress, by dint of revolutions, with a prodigality of labour and genius, amidst vast wars, successively or simultaneously in America, France, the whole of Europe, founding or destroying states, inventing or restoring sciences, conquering or acquiring political rights. They grew noble through their great deeds, became the rivals, equals, conquerors of their masters; they need no longer imitate them, being heroes in their

2

1 See Alison, History of Europe; Porter, Progress of the Nation.

2 In the Fourth Estate, by F. Knight Hunt, 2 vols. 1840, it is said (i. 175) that the first daily and morning paper, The Daily Courant, appeared in 1709.— TR.

turn: like them, they can point to their crusades; like them, they have gained the right of having a poetry; and like them, they will have a poetry.

In France, the land of precocious equality and finished revolutions, we must observe this new character-the plebeian bent on getting on : Augereau, son of a greengrocer; Marceau, son of a lawyer; Murat, son of an innkeeper; Ney, son of a cooper; Hoche, an old sergeant, who in his tent, by night, read Condillac's Traité des Sensations; and above all, that thin young man, with lank hair, hollow cheeks, dried up with ambition, his heart full of romantic fancies and grand roughhewn ideas, who, a lieutenant for seven years, read twice through the whole stock of a bookseller at Valence, who about this time (1792) in Italy, though suffering from itch, had just destroyed five armies with a troop of barefooted heroes, and gave his government an account of his victories with all his faults of spelling and of French. He became master, proclaimed himself the representative of the Revolution, declared that the career is open to talent,' and impelled others along with him in his enterprises. They follow him, because there is glory, and above all, advancement to be won. 'Two officers,' says Stendhal, 'commanded a battery at Talavera; a ball laid low the captain. "So!" said the lieutenant, "François is dead, I shall be captain." "Not yet," said François, who was only stunned, and got on his feet again.' These two men were neither enemies nor wicked; on the contrary, they were companions and comrades; but the lieutenant wanted to rise a step. Such was the sentiment which provided men for the exploits and carnages of the Empire, which caused the Revolution of 1830, and which now, in this vast stifling democracy, compels men to vie with each other in intrigues and labour, genius and baseness, to get out of their primitive condition, and raise themselves to the summit, whose possession is assigned to their union or promised to their toil. The dominant character now-a-days is no longer the man of the drawing-room, whose place is certain and his fortune made, elegant and unruffled, with no employment but to amuse and please himself; who loves to converse, who is gallant, who passes his life in conversations with highly dressed ladies, amidst the duties of society and the pleasures of the world it is the man in a black coat, who works alone in his room or rides in a cab to make friends and protectors; often envious, feeling himself always above or below his station in life, sometimes resigned, never satisfied, but fertile in inventions, lavish of trouble, finding the picture of his blemishes and his strength in the drama of Victor Hugo and the novels of Balzac.1

With the state of human

There are other and greater cares. society, the form of the human mind has changed. It has changed by

1 To realise the contrast, compare Gil Blas and Ruy Blas, Marivaux's Paysan Parvenu and Stendhal's Julien Sorel (in Rouge et Noir).

VOL. II.

P