TABLE OF CONTENTS. Hampshire Farmer's Address: by William Cobbett Drury's Dirge by Laura Matilda ix 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 hymn-singers. 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 mediæval 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 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 xiii |