THE PROGRESS OF LITERATURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BY ANDREW LANG CONTEMPLATING the literature of the whole century, we notice how slightly new developments correspond to our arbitrary divisions of time, and perhaps we convince ourselves of the futility of literary generalisations. The art of letters has, indeed, on the whole, and in the procession of the years, certain well-marked periods. Beginning with mere popular snatches of song, amatory, magical, religious, man advances to narrative lays of heroic adventure, and to the evolution of professional minstrels, and castes of hymnsingers. The Epic, the Drama, Satire, are developed; then come lyrics of individual experience, while, in the region of prose, and after the discovery of writing, the brief notes of annalists expand into history; philosophy turns from semi-religious verse to pedestrian measures, and written criticism comes last of all. Greece, Rome, the mediaval and the modern world all exhibit this natural process. But the full round once accomplished, the literature of a given century, say the nineteenth, depends for its character on forces which we can but partially estimate. It has been a century of Revolution, of social and political unrest, of almost miraculous development in physical science, and in power of directing mechanically the forces of nature. Such a chaos of new ideas may take form in literature, but most of the ideas will be too raw for artistic expression. Thus the motive of Evolution, as formulated by Darwin, is revolutionary, and is grandiose, but in literature it does but tinge the thought of xiii Tennyson, or extract the sharper whine from the many minor poets of cheap pessimism. The socialistic idea, no less vast, has but inspired William Morris, among notable English poets, and less formally sounds in some pieces of Shelley. Meanwhile the mechanical knowledge of the time is hostile to literature, because it is hostile to leisure and to loneliness. Yearly, we become more hurried, more gregarious, and more apt to depend absolutely on newspapers for our reading. Perhaps this may be the cause of the degeneracy of literature since 1860. After the great generation of 1790-1820, in England, after Wordsworth, Scott, Shelley, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, came a day of small things, followed by the period of Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold. In America, all the classical writers in prose and verse-Hawthorne, Poe, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Prescott, Motley, Holmes, and others—were contemporary with Dickens, Thackeray, and the Victorian authors already named. Since 1860, the stars of Rossetti, Swinburne, and a crowd of novelists arose, and for the most part set, in England, where we have no new poet high in the second rank, and no prose writer of the charm and distinction of Mr. Stevenson. In America, too, there is no Hawthorne or Poe, no Emerson or Longfellow. There is a fairly high level of merit, accompanied by much conscientious reflection on "art" and method, but we see no pre-eminent genius, among all the schools of experiment. The same rule applies to continental literature. "Decadence" and reaction from Decadence (as in M. Rostand); "Realism" and reaction from Realism; social philosophies striving to take literary form (as in Tolstoi); theories, and contending critical slogans meet us everywhere, but we find little spontaneous genius, little permanent excellence. Why is this so? Our hurry and confusion help to make us barren; our neglect of serious study of the classics in dead and living languages helps to make our authors ephemeral, mere creatures of the day, but causes which we can never hope to estimate Persons of genius happen not to be born. exceptions, between Pope and Burns. We are yet more potent. So it was, with rare can know no more, but do not let us shut ourselves into the belief that our mediocre talents are miracles of genius. Though now we are "waiting for the fountain to arise," our century has been notable in letters. A man who died in 1800 had never a chance to read the Waverley Novels, Vanity Fair, Esmond, Pickwick, much of Wordsworth, all of Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne. He was unconscious of Poe, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Hugo, Musset, Dumas, George Sand, Heine, Lamartine, Turguenieff, Daudet, and was innocent of Zola, to take only a few names. Great regions of philosophy, poetry, humour, were closed to him, which are open to us. Many musical voices, as of "all the angels singing out of heaven," had not yet been raised. Our familiar quotations, our household words, were, many of them, not yet uttered. The romance of the Middle Ages was a sealed book, practically, till Walter Scott opened it, as William of Deloraine opened the book of the buried wizard, and Alexandre Dumas turned over other pages full of as potent spells. The poetic secret of nature was waiting for Wordsworth: the inner charm of words, of verbal music, frozen by a century of common sense, was to be freed by Keats, Coleridge, Shelley, and Tennyson. The pity and the humour of the poor (the pity and tragedy already revealed by Crabbe) were to be made common knowledge by Dickens, Barrie, and an army of followers. The treasures of local and provincial literature had been revealed by Burns, but more were to be brought out from a hundred rural places. The comedy and tragedy of society expected Thackeray to renew the exploits of Fielding. The whole province of æsthetics was to be refreshed, and to flower quaintly under the showers of Mr. Ruskin's eloquence. The art of poetry was to be revolutionised, so that the verse of Pope and of Johnson should fall into unmerited disdain. Only the stage, for social reasons, probably, was to yield place, as far as literary merit is concerned, to the novel. The novel was almost to overrun the whole field of letters, so that "poetry is a drug," and the essayist prattles unheeded. In History the man who died in 1800 missed Hallam, Macaulay, Grote, Thirlwall, Freeman, Froude, Motley, Prescott, Bancroft, Fustel de Coulanges, Michelet, Mommsen, Sismondi, Ranke, Henri Martin-one does not know where to stop-and he missed, of course, our learned Gardiner, Stubbs, and all the new explorers of documents. We are only beginning to come into the treasures of the Vatican, of Venice, of Foreign Offices, of the charter chests, and muniment rooms. Our dead man of 1800 knew only the beginnings of our science of institutions, of anthropology, of comparative philology, the sciences of Mr. Tylor, Maclennan, Maine, Grimm, Brinton, Fiske, Von Maurer, Réville, Spencer, Renan, Maspero, Max Müller. Their name is legion, but here we are on the debatable land between science and literature. Enfin, though he had good letters in abundance, and read much that is now unfortunately neglected, the dead man of 1800 missed a vast opulence of knowledge, style, beauty, and mirth, which he could have entered upon merely by living for another hundred years. Whatever evil men yet unborn may say of our century, they cannot deny to it the laurel. There are drawbacks, of course. As to knowledge, much of it is premature speculation. Like other ages, ours thinks it has discovered "the secret," in a dozen provinces where (we are beginning to learn) the secret is yet to seek. Our secret has usually been one or other statement of Materialism, one or other exposition of scepticism. The next century, if it comes to know more than we, will be very apt to reverse a number of popular verdicts. Oriental archæology, anthropology, experimental psychology, may check or divert the present march of Biblical and Homeric criticism, and of religious and psychological science. A period of hope may even succeed a period of negation, and another note than that of wistful pessimism may come to sound in poetry. Great stores of "realism," "naturalism," Ibsenism, decadence, and art according to Maeterlinck, have been "unloaded" on a public which, lectured out of its natural human tastes, is already reverting to them. Theories of literary art have been based by moderns and on the mood of the passing moment, to the neglect of the ages. The dismal commonplace has now been advertised as our only theme, while, again, we |