Payne 
 
 Quarter-century of 
 English Literature
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT
 
 I
 
 A QUARTER-CENTURY 
 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
 
 A Quarter- Century of 
 English Literature 
 
 1 880-1905 
 
 By 
 William iMorton Payne, LL. D. 
 
 Chicago Literary Club 
 1908
 
 Copyright, 1908 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE
 
 4-G 
 
 A QUARTER-CENTURY 
 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 QUARTER of a century 
 is something less than a 
 full generation, but it is a 
 period of time sufficient to 
 bring about, in most of the 
 great departments of hu- 
 man activity, a fairly com- 
 plete shifting of actors, and 
 scenes, and interests. This statement par- 
 ticularly holds if we apply it to the history 
 of English and American literature during 
 the past twenty-five years, in illustration 
 whereof a few facts may be presented. 
 Beginning with the year 1881, our common 
 literature entered upon a period of severe 
 losses, and the landmarks of the earlier age 
 disappeared from view with startling rapid- 
 ity. While the decade just preceding had 
 witnessed the death (to mention only 
 names of considerable significance) of Bul- 

 
 wer, Mill, and Kingsley in England, and of 
 Bryant and Taylor in America, the decade 
 following plunged us into mourning, in 
 England for Carlyle, George Eliot, Darwin, 
 Rossetti, Reade, Arnold, and Browning; 
 and in America for Lanier, Emerson, and 
 Longfellow. A few years later, this necrol- 
 ogy of genius was extended to include the 
 names of Tennyson, Morris, Newman, 
 Ruskin, Christina Rossetti, Huxley, Sym- 
 onds, Pater, Whittier, Whitman, Holmes, 
 and Lowell, Other names as important as 
 some of these might be added to the list, 
 but enough have been mentioned to show 
 how nearly, upon this checker-board of 
 nights and days, the spirit who plans the 
 moves had put back into the closet the 
 major pieces of the game before the nine- 
 teenth century reached its close. 
 
 Let us look at these facts in another 
 light, at the same time making some sort 
 of rude effort to classify them. At the 
 close of 1880, the six great poets who had 
 long made illustrious the Victorian age of 
 English song were all living and all vocal. 
 Within sixteen years, five of the six had 
 passed away, leaving Mr. Swinburne the 
 sole surviving representative of that great 
 period. Less than this number of years 
 had sufficed to extinguish the entire con- 
 stellation of our greater American poets, 
 not one of their fellowship being left us to
 
 keep the torch ahght. With George EHot 
 there died the last of the great English 
 novelists, for it could not be soberly urged 
 that she has found a true successor. Two 
 novelists of unquestionably distinguished 
 achievement — Mr. Thomas Hardy and Sir 
 George Meredith — still live to remind us 
 of the great age of English fiction, but 
 their following is an esoteric cult in com- 
 parison with the wide acclaim accorded to 
 Dickens and Thackeray. The twentieth 
 century, moreover, finds us as bereft of 
 prophets as of novelists and poets. The 
 wisest of our time must seem but minor 
 prophets when we contrast their utterances 
 with the burning eloquence of Carlyle and 
 Ruskin, or even with the persuasive accents 
 of Arnold and Newman. Truly, the living 
 word as it comes to the ears of our youth 
 of to-day is but a feeble and ineffectual 
 stimulus to noble thought and action, in 
 comparison with the call that rang in the 
 ears of the rising generation a quarter of a 
 century ago. 
 
 It should be fairly evident, then, from 
 this brief survey, that the English-speaking 
 people are no longer living in a creative 
 age, that their literary lot is now cast in 
 such a critical or Alexandrine period as 
 usually supervenes when a great creative 
 impulse is spent. This is by no means the 
 same as saying that we have fallen upon
 
 evil days. On the contrary, such a season 
 of stock-taking, of self-examination, of re- 
 action from exuberance, has distinct advan- 
 tages of its own. It is the inheritor of all 
 that is great and splendid in the past, and 
 it is in a position to classify, to balance, to 
 weigh, to digest, and to view in the right 
 perspective its accumulated possessions. 
 It is by no means a stagnant age: it is rather 
 a singularly active one; it misses only the 
 sharp stimulus that comes from direct asso- 
 ciation with the great masters. This influ- 
 ence, thus removed from the vital plane, 
 becomes purely spiritual, but remains nev- 
 ertheless potent in the shaping of ideals. 
 Meanwhile (to speak more particularly of 
 our own age), literary activity is greater 
 than ever before. There is a wider diffu- 
 sion of culture than in any time past, there 
 are more people who are capable of writ- 
 ing fairly good books, and there is a larger 
 intelligent public devoted to the reading, 
 not only of the contemporary product, but 
 also of the books that have come down to 
 us from our ancestors. And the level of 
 average excellence reached by our present- 
 day literary craftsmen is truly surprising. 
 If we do not ascend with them into the 
 highest heaven of invention, we may at 
 least, when in their company, pursue an 
 agreeable course upon the uplands, where 
 the air is pure and bracing, and whence 
 
 10
 
 we may have frequent glimpses orthe sun- 
 lit peaks. 
 
 Is it so sure, we may sometimes ask, our 
 sense of gratitude aroused by the vital truth 
 and the appealing idealism of the new book, 
 fresh from the writer's heart, to which our 
 own is so readily responsive, — is it so sure 
 that this book is of the inferior imitative or 
 secondary type, that it may not itself come 
 to be reckoned among the classics, and held 
 up to the admiration of our descendants as 
 a rebuke of their own feeble efforts at ex- 
 pression? May it not be that the dead 
 hand weighs more heavily upon our judg- 
 ment than it should, and prevents us from 
 doing justice to the work of our contem- 
 poraries? Has it not always been the 
 fashion to decry one's own age and exalt 
 the past, until the whirligig of time has 
 brought in its revenges, and clothed the 
 figures misunderstood of their fellows with 
 the vesture of the immortals? These are 
 searching questions, and no one may quite 
 dare to give them a blunt negative ; yet if 
 the light that is in him reveals his own age 
 as one of decline or decadence, the critic 
 may in honesty do no more than write what 
 he sees, under possible future correction 
 at the hands of some clearer-sighted suc- 
 cessor. He will be the first to allow that 
 every age has its own oracles, and that, 
 however dubious or confused their utter- 
 
 II
 
 ance, they must not go altogether unheeded 
 because of too bhnd a faith in the oracles 
 of the past. 
 
 Let us consider, by way of emphasizing 
 the contrast between the last quarter- 
 century and the period preceding it, a few 
 of the most important reputations achieved 
 since 1880. There is Walter Pater, to be- 
 gin with, known at that time only by a 
 single volume of essays. During the score 
 of years that made up his working lifetime, 
 his philosophical temper and his delicate 
 skill in aesthetic analysis made a deep 
 impression upon the finer spirits among 
 his contemporaries, and his influence was 
 one to be reckoned with. Probably there 
 never was a book that took its place more 
 promptly and unquestionably among the 
 classics of our literature than ''Marius the 
 Epicurean"; and its successors, although 
 they never equaled that performance, were 
 of rare and precious quality. And yet, as 
 an enduring influence. Pater's work may 
 not be seriously ranked with that of either 
 Arnold or Ruskin, to name the two men 
 with whom comparison is most natural. 
 Our attention is next invited by Robert 
 Louis Stevenson, that winsome personality 
 who bore with such fortitude the sorrows 
 of illness and of exile, who faced adversity 
 with so brave a front, and who so made 
 the best of a bad case as almost to con- 
 
 12
 
 vince us that he had small need of sym- 
 pathy. His fame, like Pater's, was almost 
 wholly achieved during the last two dec- 
 ades of the century, and it was a fame that 
 brought with it more personal affection 
 than has perhaps been lavished upon any 
 other English author since Lamb. But his 
 literary product, varied and charming as 
 it is, may hardly be viewed save of eyes 
 dimmed by friendship, as resting upon the 
 highest plane. With the work of Lamb 
 and Scott for touchstones, we must admit 
 that ''Virginibus Puerisque " and "Kid- 
 napped" are books of secondary rank. A 
 pathetic possibility of greatness, rather 
 than greatness itself, must be the sub- 
 stance of an impartial estimate of the fruits 
 of Stevenson's endeavor. 
 
 These two, Pater and Stevenson, seem 
 to be the two stars of largest magnitude 
 that have, since 1 880, emerged from the 
 mists of the horizon, described their arcs, 
 and set. A few other stars, still visible in 
 the English firmament, are those of Mr. 
 Kipling, Mr. Watson, Mr. Phillips, Mr. 
 Hewlett, and Mr. Lang. Mr. Kipling's 
 star is a variable, and, when flashing out 
 at its brightest, has attracted world-wide 
 attention. But when we look dispassion- 
 ately at his entire miscellaneous product, 
 it is impossible to classify much of it as 
 literature of the higher sort, or any of it 
 
 13
 
 with the works of the masters. As a nov- 
 elist he has failed, and as a writer of short 
 stories, while he has done many striking 
 things, the same sort of things had been 
 done before by Bret Harte, and probably 
 better done. Then he has given us the 
 "Jungle Books" (more nearly works of 
 genius than any of the others) and the 
 poems. With the fine cadences of "Re- 
 cessional" and "The Flag of England" 
 echoing in our ears, it would doubtless be 
 unfair to characterize the whole of his 
 verse, in Professor Peck's witty phrase, as 
 "rag-time poetry," but that phrase comes 
 dangerously near the truth in its applica- 
 bility to the greater part of the Kipling 
 product. And most of the pieces, by vir- 
 tue of which his poetical popularity with 
 the multitude has been won, bear little or 
 no relation to poetry in the proper sense 
 of the word. Mr. Kipling's ideals, more- 
 over, as voiced in both verse and prose, 
 are ethically open to serious question. 
 
 Mr. Lang may perhaps be taken as the 
 most typical writer of our critical age. 
 His versatility is remarkable, his clever- 
 ness is something diabolical, and he has 
 withal the gift of graceful expression and 
 the indefinable quality of charm. He does 
 nothing that he does not well, and yet he 
 does most kinds of things, — poetry, fiction, 
 essays, history, philology, and folk-lore. 
 
 H
 
 For many years he has brightened the 
 ways of Hterature, and we owe him a deep 
 debt of gratitude. But he will hardly be 
 found in the pantheon fifty years hence. 
 Mr. Hewlett has given us the most delight- 
 ful interpretations imaginable of Italian life 
 and character; he has also explored to 
 happy effect the thickets of medieval ro- 
 mance; we admire and cherish him, but 
 we know at the same time that he is far 
 from being one of the immortals. Mr. 
 Watson has dedicated himself to poetry in 
 a very serious sense, and impressed us 
 anew with the sacred mission of the singer. 
 He has even survived the injudicious 
 trumpetings with which his fame was 
 threatened by over-zealous champions, and 
 may read his title fairly clear, but it is not 
 the title of a Tennyson or a Wordsworth, 
 and those w^ho would persuade us to that 
 view are the ones who do him the most 
 wrong. Mr. Phillips has also been hailed 
 as a new great poet, and suffered thereby, 
 for the graceful retelling of a few famous 
 old-world tales is a very different thing from 
 the exercise of the creative imagination. 
 The English writers thus far mentioned 
 may suffice for the present contention, 
 which is simply that the last quarter- 
 century has done little to provide substi- 
 tutes for the great writers whose death it 
 has witnessed. In this country, the defect 
 
 15
 
 is even more striking ; we have a host of 
 minor poets ; we have also Mr. Woodberry 
 and Mr. Moody who are more than minor 
 poets, and who have done finer work than 
 any of their English contemporaries of the 
 newer age; we have excellent writers 
 swarming in all the departments of litera- 
 ture, but we have none whose perform- 
 ance can quite reconcile us to the loss of 
 our Lowell and our Longfellow and our 
 Emerson. 
 
 Up to this point, more has been said 
 about poets than about novelists, but a 
 survey of our fiction leads to substantially 
 the same conclusion. The tendency, grow- 
 ing all through the nineteenth century, of 
 fiction to become the predominant literary 
 form is still the tendency of the early 
 twentieth century. Or it is more than a 
 tendency now, for the sway of the novelist 
 is so wide, and so undisputed by the vast 
 majority of readers, that workers in other 
 fields get scant encouragement by compar- 
 ison. But where are the successors of the 
 older novelists.'' We do not say of Field- 
 ing and Scott, but of Thackeray and Dick- 
 ens, of Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, 
 even of Bulwer and Reade.-' Mr. Hardy 
 and Sir George Meredith remain, but their 
 work is nearly done, and they belong to the 
 glorious past rather than to the mediocre 
 present. Mr. James and Mr. Howells are 
 
 16
 
 with us, but they give us the workmanship 
 of fine art, without the substance which 
 alone can make it enduring. Mrs. Ward 
 and Mrs. Wharton are writers who carry 
 intelHgence and conscience and talent about 
 as far as it is possible to carry them ; but 
 who would say of either that she had pro- 
 vided an adequate substitute for the intel- 
 lectual weight and the moral force and the 
 creative genius of George Eliot? We have 
 American novelists by the scores, who pro- 
 vide us with much agreeable entertainment 
 year after year, but we once had a Haw- 
 thorne, and who would pretend that Mr. 
 Crawford or Mr. Cable or Mr. Allen or 
 Dr. Mitchell should be mentioned in the 
 same breath with him ? 
 
 It is evident that the search for com- 
 manding personalities among the newer 
 English writers must be in vain ; we have 
 done the best that is possible, and revealed 
 only an array of writers for whom nothing 
 more than secondary or tertiary rank may 
 fairly be claimed. Since personalities thus 
 fail us, there remains the question of what 
 may be called currents, or tendencies, or 
 movements, or whatever else we may 
 choose to call the various developments of 
 the period under consideration. Whatever 
 of interest the subject has must be sought 
 chiefly in a study of this sort, even if we 
 reach no more definite conclusion than that 
 
 17
 
 the currents are cross-currents, the ten- 
 dencies centrifugal, and the movements 
 divergent and confused. The difficulty of 
 such an investigation is very great, when 
 the student has to deal with the period in 
 which he is himself immersed, or, to 
 change the metaphor, when his field of 
 vision is so circumscribed that he cannot 
 see the woods for the trees. It is easy to 
 make hasty generalizations, and quite as 
 easy to refute them with others of the same 
 nature. Yet the study of tendencies and 
 their resulting transformations is the most 
 important part of the history of any litera- 
 ture, and it is better to get an imperfect 
 view of the evolutionary process that must 
 ever be at work than to ignore that aspect 
 of the subject altogether, leaving criticism 
 to take refuge in the old-fashioned aesthetic 
 appraisement of isolated individuals. 
 
 What can be said, for example, of the 
 probable issue, from recent indications, of 
 the secular conflict between the forces of 
 realism and romanticism .'' We have been 
 assured over and over again by the realists 
 that their foe was finally and ignominiously 
 routed, but every time there has followed 
 some resurgence of the romantic impulse, 
 the ghost has refused to be laid, and iri- 
 descent fantasy has held its own against 
 sober-hued truth in its appeal to the com- 
 plex spirit of man. Hosts of modern read- 
 
 i8
 
 ers are still attracted to the great romantic 
 writers of the past, and delight in them, 
 not as representing an outworn phase of 
 expression, — a curious phenomenon in lit- 
 erary history, — but as still offering a vital 
 response to the deepest demands of the 
 soul. And as long as Scott and Shelley 
 thus exercise their sway over our hearts, 
 so long will their spiritual inheritors — no 
 matter how much the inheritance has dwin- 
 dled in the transmission — find a loyal fol- 
 lowing, even in this most material and 
 bustling age. It would be futile to argue, 
 all things considered, that the romantic em- 
 bodiment of idealism in English literature 
 has lost either its vitality or its potency to 
 weave spells over the modern imagination. 
 That ' ' renascence of wonder, ' ' which the 
 unerring insight of Mr. Watts-Dunton has 
 discerned to be the most distinctive char- 
 acteristic of nineteenth-century English 
 poetry, shows no signs of having spent its 
 quickening force. Directly related to this 
 phase of our discussion is the recent and 
 highly significant rehabilitation in English 
 literature of the Celtic or Gaelic element, 
 — an influence seemingly moribund a gen- 
 eration ago, — through the activities of a 
 group of writers numbering Dr. Douglas 
 Hyde, Mr. W. B. Yeats, and Mr. G. W. 
 Russell among its leaders. It may be a 
 sort of Hibernicism thus to characterize as 
 
 19
 
 a development of English literature a move- 
 ment that has for its aim the revival for 
 literary purposes of a dying form of speech, 
 but the men just named, and others as- 
 sociated with them, have written chiefly 
 in English despite their devotion to the 
 Gaelic, and their poems and dramas and 
 tales have contributed much to our imagi- 
 native enrichment. When Matthew Ar- 
 nold discoursed at Oxford forty years ago 
 upon Celtic literature, and incidentally 
 showed how the intuition of genius can get 
 at the heart of a subject with no more than 
 the amateur's equipment of scholarship, he 
 was mainly concerned with the task of in- 
 dicating the indebtedness to the Celt of our 
 English poetry, "in its turn for style, its 
 turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural 
 magic, for catching and reading the charm 
 of nature in a wonderfully real and vivid 
 way. ' ' He impressed us with the concep- 
 tion of English literature as uniting "a vast 
 obscure Cymric basis with a vast visible 
 Teutonic superstructure," but he hardly 
 foresaw that these Celtic elements, basal 
 though they might be, or subtly woven 
 into the spiritual texture of our thought, 
 would ever again separate themselves from 
 the structure or the pattern, and be given 
 concrete embodiment in works that should 
 be undeniably Celtic through and through. 
 Yet this is what has happened in our own 
 
 20
 
 time, and in so notable a way as to consti- 
 tute one of the most striking literary man- 
 ifestations of recent years. The Ossianic 
 revival of the eighteenth century was a 
 mere galvanic phenomenon as compared 
 with the really vital renascence of the 
 Celtic genius that we are now witnessing. 
 
 On the other hand, the spirit of realism 
 has vastly extended the area of its activity. 
 The novelists, and to a certain extent the 
 poets also, have been busily engaged in 
 exploiting special conditions and aspects of 
 life everywhere. It would be difficult to 
 name an occupation, or an industry, or an 
 intellectual vagary, or a racial peculiarity, 
 or a form of dialect, or a persistent pro- 
 vincialism, or a social experiment, or a 
 current historical happening, that has not 
 found its special chroniclers among the 
 writers of our recent fiction. Socialism, 
 hypnotism, Christian "Science." the labor 
 agitation, the sweat-shop, civil-service re- 
 form, the divorce problem, political and 
 commercial corruption, the hovel and the 
 mansion, — all of these themes, and many 
 more, have each its own literature, based 
 upon minute observation and obviously de- 
 clared sympathy or disfavor. The life of 
 the rustic, the miner, the engineer, the 
 sailor, the lumberman, the shop-girl, the 
 politician, the actress, the musician, the 
 artist, and the poet is depicted for us at 
 
 21
 
 close range, often with a needless insist- 
 ance upon detail, but usually with a degree 
 of technical familiarity that must challenge 
 our admiration if it does not win the ap- 
 proval of our artistic sense. Dialects and 
 provincialisms are dragged to the light of 
 publicity with the same zealous determina- 
 tion to let no picturesque possibility escape 
 the curious reader of fiction. English 
 novelists portray for us the speech and 
 the manners of Welshmen and Irishmen 
 and Scotsmen (these in numerous varie- 
 ties), of Manxmen and Shetlanders, of the 
 rustics of Wessex and Dartmoor and Dev- 
 onshire. American novelists, seizing the 
 more diversified opportunities offered by 
 the conglomerate population of this coun- 
 try, seek to interest us (and generally suc- 
 ceed) in Georgia crackers and Tennessee 
 mountaineers, in Pennsylvania miners and 
 Michigan loggers, in Texas cowboys and 
 Montana ranchmen, in New England opera- 
 tives and Southern field-hands and West- 
 ern railway employes, in the descendants 
 of Creoles in Louisiana and of Dutchmen 
 in New York and of Spaniards in Cali- 
 fornia. Nothing like this exhibit was ever 
 made or attempted in any earlier period of 
 our literature ; of no other time have we 
 such a collection of social documents. 
 
 One of the reasons for this illumination 
 of the nooks and corners of contemporary 
 
 22
 
 life is doubtless to be found in the passion 
 for novelty with which most writers are 
 beset. Genius cares little whether its mat- 
 ter be new or old, for it has the power to 
 bestow eternal freshness upon its creations; 
 but we are now concerned with something 
 very different from genius ; namely, with 
 the sort of talent that may be found almost 
 anywhere under the conditions brought 
 about by our widespread systems of public 
 education. Now this kind of literary abil- 
 ity shrinks from being compared with cre- 
 ative power, and seeks to divert attention 
 from its imitative or derivative character 
 by the use of novel subject-matter. If in 
 addition to this element of superficial origi- 
 nality there may be devised some striking 
 pose, or mannerism, or rhetorical trick, the 
 disguise is complete in the eyes of most 
 readers, who put about as little conscience 
 into reading as their favorite authors do 
 into writing. The device may be an affec- 
 tation of sugary sentiment, or a pompous 
 parade of sophistical philosophy, or an ar- 
 ray of audacious paradox, or almost any 
 other form of trickiness ; it achieves its 
 purpose if it provides a new variety of sen- 
 sation for the palate that has been dulled 
 by over-indulgence in literary condiments. 
 This straining for effect, for originality 
 at any cost, is one of the reasons why cur- 
 rent literature handles so great a number 
 
 23
 
 of far-fetched themes in so great a variety 
 of manners. A deeper reason is that cur- 
 rent literature must inevitably share in the 
 democratic development of society. There 
 is no escaping democracy, and we have to 
 put up with its evils for the sake of enjoy- 
 ing its benefits. The evils are probably 
 not inherent in its nature, but in its pres- 
 ent assault upon privilege it does not pause 
 to discriminate. The privilege which is 
 nature's gift is confused with the privilege 
 born of man's selfishness, and one gets as 
 scant shrift as the other. Envy, arro- 
 gance, irreverance, and vulgarity are among 
 the most conspicuous features of democ- 
 racy in its present transitional phase, and 
 literature reflects them all. Small wonder, 
 then, that books should be written upon 
 the theory that one subject is as good as 
 another, that a man of affairs is as worthy 
 a hero as a man of ideas, and that the pul- 
 sating present is superior for example and 
 admonition to the lifeless past. 
 
 But these counsels of despair are not the 
 only lessons taught us by the democratiza- 
 tion of literature. There is also in the pro- 
 cess a saving and uplifting element which 
 expresses itself in broadened human sym- 
 pathies and a deepened sense of social re- 
 sponsibility. There is no blinking the fact 
 that the tide of socialism is rapidly rising 
 everywhere, and threatens in its blind on- 
 
 24
 
 ward sweep to engulf not only the selfish 
 abuses of our civilization, but much also of 
 its higher spiritual life. It particularly be- 
 hooves the conservators of our heritage of 
 wisdom and art to keep their heads clear, 
 to deal judiciously with this invading force, 
 and to endeavor, while accepting its in- 
 evitable consequences, to save from the 
 deluge those finer ideals whose repository 
 must ever be the chosen spirits of the few 
 rather than the general mind of the un- 
 thinking masses. It is no easy matter for 
 our vestal virgins to keep the sacred fire 
 burning upon the altar in these stormy 
 times of change. 
 
 The progressive socialization of our mod- 
 ern society is closely reflected in our modern 
 literature. It is a world-wide movement, 
 and among its major prophets are num- 
 bered not only the professed workers in 
 economics and sociology, but also the poets 
 and the novelists, and the critics of litera- 
 ture and art. Ruskin, Morris, Zola, and 
 Tolstoy are counted among its standard- 
 bearers, and the last-named writer's tractate 
 upon the principles of art exhibits a sort of 
 danger-signal, whereby we may take warn- 
 ing of what the movement is likely to mean 
 if its direction comes under the unrestrained 
 control of its zealots. To make the move- 
 ment effective for good in the largest sense 
 (and its potentialities for that purpose are 
 
 25
 
 enormous) calls for a leadership based upon 
 social sympathy and enlightened judgment ; 
 merely destructive criticism of its vagaries 
 will do little, and the attitude of indiffer- 
 entism nothing at all, toward holding it in 
 check. 
 
 It has been no easy matter to overcome 
 the spirit of smug complacency which char- 
 acterized English literature not very long 
 ago. It was a spirit content to hover over 
 the surface of life, and finding that sur- 
 face fairly pleasant to look upon, it made 
 slight effort to look beneath. It could find 
 little meaning, for example, in such words 
 as those of Georg Brandes, outlining his 
 critical programme in the early seventies. 
 "I go down to the foundations of real life, 
 and show how the emotions which find 
 their expression in literature arise in the 
 human heart. And this same human heart 
 is no still pool, no idyllic mountain lake. 
 It is an ocean, with submarine vegetation 
 and terrible inhabitants." The view of 
 criticism which the Danish writer thus de- 
 termined to oppose was the natural correl- 
 ative of the view of life itself which the 
 makers of literature sought to present. 
 Since then, both letters and the criticism 
 of letters have got closer to reality, and 
 have greatly enlarged the scope of their 
 enterprise. The social conscience has be- 
 come aroused in earnest, the spirit of shal- 
 
 26
 
 low optipiism has been exposed in all its 
 dull insincerity, and has given place to a 
 spirit of resolute meliorism, intent upon 
 baring the evils of society as a necessary 
 step toward the application of their proper 
 remedy. Half a century ago, such books 
 as ' 'Alton Locke ' ' and ' ' Felix Holt ' ' were 
 startling novelties, literary phenomena iso- 
 lated from the prevailing currents of their 
 age ; to-day books of their type have grown 
 so common that it takes an effort to realize 
 how modern is the literary fashion which 
 they illustrate. 
 
 We must carefully distinguish the hu- 
 manitarian impulse of a preceding genera- 
 tion, aiming only at the exposure and 
 remedy of special abuses, from the more 
 general and far deeper social criticism with 
 which recent literature has become infused. 
 The attacks made by Dickens and Reade 
 upon the management of prisons and mad- 
 houses, upon courts of chancery and pri- 
 vate schools, had little in common with the 
 terrific indictment of modern society im- 
 plicit in the later books of Thomas Hardy. 
 Or, to take examples having nothing to do 
 with literature in the narrow sense, yet ex- 
 tremely significant in the social sense, a 
 comparison might be made between "Uncle 
 Tom ' s Cabin " and " The Jungle. ' ' There 
 is all the difference that exists between the 
 exhibition of an ulcer and a diagnosis of 
 
 2^
 
 poison in the blood. One is within the 
 reach of surgery; the other (assuming the 
 diagnosis to be correct) calls for nothing 
 less than complete renovation of the social 
 organism. 
 
 As a consequence of the new-found will- 
 ingness of many of our writers to look life 
 squarely in the face, our literature has lost 
 that fine quality of reticence which was 
 its distinctive mark in the last generation. 
 The extreme propriety of our literary man- 
 ners in the mid-Victorian era was the sub- 
 ject of more or less ridicule on the part of 
 foreign observers, and when propriety de- 
 generates into prudery and casts over its 
 shoulders the protecting mantle of hypoc- 
 risy, it deserves to be ridiculed. Cant is 
 always loathsome, and its exhibition, both 
 in English literature and English life, fully 
 deserved the bludgeon of Carlyle's vehe- 
 ment denunciation and the satirical shafts 
 of such diverse continental critics as Heine 
 and Taine. But if our predecessors car- 
 ried reticence too far, something more than 
 compensation for their restraint may be 
 found in the productions of their latter-day 
 successors. A recent writer, Mr. Basil 
 Tozer, is responsible for the following 
 statistics : ' ' Out of eighty-seven selected 
 novels that I have by me at this moment, 
 and that have been published within the 
 last three years and a half, books that have 
 
 28
 
 had considerable vogue, and have all, at 
 one time or other, been obtainable at the 
 circulating libraries, seventeen adopt the 
 attitude of sneering at matrimony as a 
 thing ' played out ' ; eleven raise upon a 
 pinnacle imaginary co-respondents in im- 
 aginary divorce cases ; twenty-two prac- 
 tically advocate that married men shall be 
 allowed to keep mistresses openly ; seven 
 hold up to ridicule the wife who is faithful 
 to her husband ; and twenty-three describe 
 seduction as openly as it can be described 
 in a book that is not to be ostracized by 
 the book-stalls." Such a showing as this 
 makes one think that even prudery may 
 have a soul of unsuspected goodness. At 
 all events, readers of " Jude the Obscure" 
 and "Evelyn Innes" and "The Help- 
 mate ' ' do not need to be told that we have 
 gone far since the days of Anthony Trol- 
 lope. When literature becomes so emanci- 
 pated that even decency is felt to be an 
 intolerable restraint, it is time to remember 
 Goethe's deep saying, that men may attain 
 true freedom only by submission to the 
 fundamental laws of their being. 
 
 The recent literature of England and 
 America supplies examples by the hun- 
 dreds which might be adduced in support 
 of our thesis concerning the growth of 
 social sympathy. The poet, the novelist, 
 and the playwright all make their contri- 
 
 29
 
 bution, and the new social note is sounded 
 in many keys. It is heard in the shrill 
 falsetto of the sensationalist whose stock in 
 trade is limited to clever epigram and star- 
 tling paradox; its basso ostinato underlies 
 most serious artistic attempts to portray 
 contemporary life. It is voiced so widely 
 and so insistently that it becomes to many, 
 impatient of the new burden of responsi- 
 bility which it would fasten upon their un- 
 willing shoulders, a cause of irritation, from 
 which they turn for refuge to the literature 
 of bygone days, the literature of the easy- 
 going past, of entertainment pure and sim- 
 ple, of manners and misty romance, or if, 
 perchance, concerned with the deeper 
 issues of human existence, to a literature 
 which time has freed from the pressure of 
 whatever anxieties gave it birth, thus mak- 
 ing it fit for the delectation of minds that 
 shrink from the envisagement of such evils 
 as actually surround them. 
 
 The stream of socialistic tendency is not, 
 however, the only movement to be reck- 
 oned with in an attempt to make clear the 
 recent developments of our literature. It 
 is opposed by a marked counter-current of 
 individualizing effort, presenting for our 
 admiration the type of the masterful man, 
 whose purpose is personal triumph, and 
 whose example is offered in many quarters 
 for our emulation. This movement has for 
 
 30
 
 its philosophical basis the evolutionary doc- 
 trine in an undigested form, and crudely 
 applies to life and conduct the principle of 
 the survival of the fittest. It was inevi- 
 table that some such development as this 
 should accompany the acceptance of evolu- 
 tion as the master-key of scientific inves- 
 tigation, and should pave the way for so 
 extreme a philosophy as has been offered 
 by Nietzsche to ears far too ready to re- 
 ceive it, — a philosophy which rejects with 
 scorn the whole system of Christian ethics, 
 and sees in successful achievement the all- 
 sufficient sanction of every kind of effort. 
 This is, of course, a question-begging 
 philosophy, for it interprets "the fittest" 
 in the narrow sense needed to justify a re- 
 jection of those motives and ideals hitherto 
 held most in honor by Christian civilization. 
 But it is a dangerously specious doctrine, 
 with its brave pretense of clearing away 
 the obstructions that impede the evolution- 
 ary process, and its dazzling vista of a 
 future that shall realize the fully developed 
 type of the overman. 
 
 In its extreme form, this philosophy de- 
 rives directly from the teachings of Nietz- 
 sche, although the writings of Carlyle did 
 much to prepare the way for it. While 
 Nietzsche has little or no professed follow- 
 ing in England and America, his influence 
 has nevertheless been considerable, al- 
 
 31
 
 though insidiously exerted and in round- 
 about ways. His bold repudiation of the 
 claims of the weakling, his defiant assertion 
 of the individual's right to ride roughshod 
 over all obstacles, and his scornful denunci- 
 ation of Christianity as the embodiment of 
 a servile morality, cringing unworthily be- 
 fore the false idols of charity and forbear- 
 ance and self-sacrifice, are teachings which 
 chime too closely with the frenzied temper 
 of our modern materialism to fail of a cer- 
 tain degree of semi-conscious acceptance. 
 And so, in opposition to the marked social 
 trend of much of our recent literature, 
 there is also an evident trend toward self- 
 indulgence and brutality and the apotheosis 
 of strength. There are only too many who 
 are willing to recognize as an adequate 
 measure of the good the intensity of indi- 
 vidual desire coupled with the control of 
 the means of its realization. Thus un- 
 abashed does a narrow form of hedonism 
 obtrude itself into our literature, and chal- 
 lenge the knights of the spirit. Those of 
 us who share Kant's conviction, that the 
 moral law is as fixed a reality as the starry 
 heavens, will not seriously question the 
 ultimate issue, although we may be tem- 
 porarily disheartened by the weary length 
 of the combat. 
 
 There is nothing new in this divided al- 
 legiance of the literary forces of to-day. 
 
 32
 
 There have always been writers to cham- 
 pion the soHdarity of social interests, and 
 other writers to assert the importance of 
 the individual and to emphasize his claims. 
 But the line of battle between these con- 
 flicting ideals is more sharply drawn than 
 has been the case hitherto, and therein lies 
 the distinctive feature of the present situa- 
 tion. It is a difficult problem, both for 
 literature and for ethics, so to adjust the 
 opposing demands as to bring them into a 
 sort of harmony, and thus enable them both 
 to contribute to the advancement of hu- 
 manity. Social sympathy, if unregulated, 
 always runs the risk of degenerating into 
 a dangerous form of sentimentality, while 
 uncontrolled individualism runs the risk of 
 committing wanton outrage upon all the 
 instincts which men rightly cherish as 
 sacred. Among our latter-day prophets, 
 Ibsen seems to have been more successful 
 than most of his compeers in marking out 
 the via media which best satisfies the bal- 
 anced judgment. Holding character to be 
 the thing that chiefly counts, he preached 
 individualism incessantly, but always an 
 individualism tempered and controlled by 
 obligation. Even when he seemed to be 
 saying most vehemently that a man's first 
 duty is toward himself, there was always 
 the implication that this duty is made im- 
 perious by the claims of others upon the 
 
 33
 
 individual thus self-strengthened. So he 
 emphasized successively the obligation of 
 husband to wife, of parent to child, of pas- 
 tor to flock, and of the good citizen to so- 
 ciety. It was essentially Goethe's teaching 
 applied to special modern conditions. 
 
 This discussion of the present situation 
 in English literature has taken us far afield, 
 and the impatient reader may ask what on 
 earth Nietzsche and Ibsen and Goethe have 
 got to do with the case. The question is 
 easily answered. No survey of a literary 
 period in any country can be worth much 
 unless it takes foreign influences into ac- 
 count. This has always been true to some 
 extent, and it is vastly truer at the present 
 time than it ever was before. Even the 
 earlier periods of our own literature require 
 for our comprehension that we take ac- 
 count of the streams of influence flowing 
 in upon it from Italy, France, and Ger- 
 many. But in none of those earlier peri- 
 ods was there so much of this sort of 
 reaction to impressions from without as is 
 now the case, when not only the greater 
 but also the lesser writers, not only of the 
 greater but also of the lesser countries, 
 speedily find their way to English audi- 
 ences, and blend their voices in the chorus 
 with which our ears are filled. A self- 
 contained literature is no longer possible 
 anywhere in the world, — not in the old 
 
 34
 
 Greek sense, nor even in the more limited 
 modern French sense. It was a modern 
 Frenchman who devised the formula which 
 must henceforth become the ideal of every 
 national literature. " Rester soi-meme et 
 pourtant s'unir aux autres." England can 
 no longer boast of its " splendid isolation" 
 in literature any more than it can in poli- 
 tics, and the American offshoot of English 
 literature has proved itself rather more sus- 
 ceptible to alien influences than is the main 
 trunk. In many cases, it has been Amer- 
 ican receptivity that has set England the 
 example ; and all the way from the Concord 
 period down to our own, American writers 
 have been alert to detect the new foreign 
 note and seize the message of the old for- 
 eign classic. That the spirit of cosmopol- 
 itanism has become a permanent factor in 
 the development of English literature is 
 one of the clearest signs of the times. 
 Despite the occasional aberrations of taste 
 and extravagances of enthusiasm that may 
 accompany the new habit of looking abroad 
 for the fresh inspiration or the fertilizing 
 thought, the current now sets so strongly 
 in the direction of intellectual free-trade as 
 to be in no danger of checks or reverses. 
 For good or for evil, — and I hold it for 
 good, — the world is fast growing one in 
 spirit, and this at a time when, as never 
 before, the instinct of race is asserting 
 
 35
 
 itself as a force in the shaping of poHties, 
 and the arousing, among men of the same 
 stock, of a common consciousness of their 
 distinctive character. In a word, the for- 
 mula of the Frenchman, previously quoted, 
 is being fulfilled before our very eyes in 
 the combined literary, social, and political 
 movement of the present day, among the 
 English, as among the other chief peoples 
 of the modern world. 
 
 i 
 
 36
 
 "A Q_UARTER-CENTURY OF 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE" WAS 
 WRITTEN FOR THE CHICAGO 
 LITREARY CLUB, AND WAS READ 
 BEFORE THE CLUB ON THE 
 EVENING OF MONDAY, NOVEM- 
 BER THE TWENTY-FIFTH, NINE- 
 TEEN HUNDRED AND SEVEN. 
 THIS EDITION CONSISTS OF 
 THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY 
 COPIES, PRIVATELY PRINTED 
 FOR MEMBERS OF THE CLUB, 
 IN THE MONTH OF MAY, NINE- 
 TEEN HUNDRED AND EIGHT
 
 I
 
 This book is DUE on ihe last 
 dale stamped below. 
 
 ":■ 1 mm W-.n^ 
 
 •«*^S3fc. 
 
 19^' 
 
 10M-n-50(2555)470 REMINGTON RAND - 20 
 
 
 
 •Vi>
 
 PAMPHl'^T BINDER 
 
 Slockl 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACIUTY 
 
 AA 000 684 518 4