not broach his love till at the point of death, and dies in broaching it. Naturally, praise induces satire; and in the opposite field we see Fielding, valiant roysterer, and Sheridan, brilliant rake, the one with Blifil, the other with Joseph Surface, two hypocrites, especially the second, not coarse, red-faced, and smelling of the vestry, like Tartuffe, but worldly, well-clad, a good speaker, loftily serious, sad and gentle from excess of tenderness, who, with his hand on his heart and a tear in his eye, showers on the public his sentences and periods, whilst he soils his brother's reputation and debauches his neighbour's wife. A character, thus created, soon has an epic made for him. A Scotchman, a man of wit, of overmuch wit, having written to his cost an unsuccessful rhapsody, wished to recover himself, went amongst the mountains of his country, gathered picturesque images, collected fragments of legends, plastered over the whole an abundance of eloquence and rhetoric, and created a Celtic Homer, Ossian, who, with Oscar, Malvina, and his whole troop, made the tour of Europe, and, about 1830, ended by furnishing baptismal names for French grisettes and perruquiers. Macpherson displayed to the world an imitation of primitive manners, not over-true, for the extreme rudeness of barbarians would have shocked the people, but yet well enough preserved or portrayed to contrast with modern civilisation, and persuade the public that they were looking upon pure nature. A keen sympathy with Scotch landscape, so grand, so cold, so gloomy, rain on the hills, the birch trembling to the wind, the mist of heaven and the vagueness of the soul, so that every dreamer found there the emotions of his solitary walks and his philosophical glooms; chivalric exploits and magnanimity, heroes who set out alone to engage an army, faithful virgins dying on the tomb of their betrothed; an impassioned, coloured style, affecting to be abrupt, yet polished; able to charm a disciple of Rousseau by its warmth and elegance: here was something to transport the young enthusiasts of the time, civilised barbarians, scholarly lovers of nature, dreaming of the delights of savage life, whilst they shook off the powder which the hairdresser had left on their coats.

Yet this is not the course of the main current of poetry; it lies in the direction of sentimental reflection: the greatest number of poems, and those most sought after, are emotional dissertations. In fact, a sensitive man breaks out in violent declamations. When he sees a cloud, he dreams of human nature, and constructs a phrase. Hence at this time among poets, swarm the melting philosophers and the tearful academicians; Gray, the morose hermit of Cambridge, and Akenside, a noble thinker, both learned imitators of lofty Greek poetry; Beattie, a metaphysical moralist, with a young girl's nerves and an old maid's hobbies; the amiable and affectionate Goldsmith, who wrote the Vicar of Wakefield,' the most charming of Protestant

See vol. ii. bk. iii. ch. 8, p. 182.

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 oǹ 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-Farmer's life-Employment in the Excise-Disgust-Excesses-Death.

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 interiorsAmiable 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-Theories— Fancy-Pantheism-Ideal characters-Life-like scenery-General tendency of the new literature-Gradual introduction of continental ideas.

ΟΝ

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

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.