5^ 
 
 f<r^ 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 ESTATE OF 
 HUBERT ORRISS
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 I. Esthetics ; or, The Science of Beauty. 8vo, cloth |1.50 
 
 II. Ethics; or, The Science of Duty. 8vo, cloth 1.75 
 
 III. Natural Theology. 8vo, cloth 1.50 
 
 IV. The Science op Mind. 8vo, cloth _ 3.00 
 
 V. The Philosophy of English Literature. Lectures deliv- 
 ered before the Lowell Institute, Boston. 8vo, cloth 1.50 
 
 VI. Comparative Psychology ; or, the Growth and Grades of 
 
 Intelligence. 8vo, cl )th 1.50 
 
 VII. A Philosophy of Religion ; or, the Rational Grounds 
 
 of Religious Belief. 8vo, cloth 3.00 
 
 VIII. Philosophy of Rhetoric. 8vo, cloth 1.35 
 
 IX. The Words of Christ. 8vo, cloth 1.50 
 
 X. Problems in Philosophy. 8vo, cloth 1.50 
 
 XI. Sociology. 8vo, cloth 1.50 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York and London
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 English Literature 
 
 A COURSE OF LECTURES DELIVERED IN 
 THE LOWELL INSTITUTE 
 
 JOHN B A S C O M 
 
 AUTHOR OF PKINCIPI.es OF PSYCHOLOGY, SCIEN'CE, PHILOSOPHY AND 
 
 RELIGION," " iESTHETICS " 
 
 G, P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 NEW YORK LONDON 
 
 27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND 
 
 Sbe llmcktrbothtr '^Qxtss 
 1893
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by 
 
 JO HN B ASCO M, 
 In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, 
 
 Press of 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 
 New Vork
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 There are, in each department of knowledge, 
 central facts and germinant principles. If we reach 
 these early and well, the labors of acquisition are 
 greatly lightened. They serve to explain to the 
 mind, and to hold for the memory, those multitudi- 
 nous minor facts which otherwise confuse the 
 one and burden the other. It is a secret of wise 
 acquisition, to learn the most in learning the least, 
 md we do this by directing attention at once to 
 leading, fruitful facts. The ground is thus outlined ; 
 we know where to look for particulars ; and these, 
 as they come to us by direct search, or as incidents 
 of growing information, fall at once into their place, 
 strengthen our general hold of truth, and are them- 
 selves securely rolled in and bound up in the com- 
 pact bundle of knowledge. 
 
 The object of the lectures herewith published is 
 to put the general reader and the student of Eng- 
 lish Literature into early possession of the leading 
 influences operative in it, and thus to enable them 
 to peruse and to study its numerous productions 
 with more insight, more pleasure, a better mastery 
 of relations, and a more ready retention of facts. 
 A net-work of forces is here given, which, cover- 
 ing the entire field, may enable thcin easily to in- 
 
 ( iii )
 
 iV PREFACE. 
 
 close and attach the ideas each day furnished in 
 this range of knowledge. We have termed our 
 work a Philosophy of English Literature, as indica- 
 ting a discussion of causes, of controlling tenden- 
 cies, and leading minds, rather than a presentation 
 of details, a reproduction of facts in their chrono 
 logical connections. 
 
 A class pursuing English literature by the aid 
 of text-books like Craik's, Shaw's, Spalding's, 
 Angus', Oilman's, might, we believe, carry on a 
 review to advantage in connection with these lec- 
 tures. The last impression would thus be one 
 more organic and living than that ordinarily 
 reached. 
 
 It is not necessary to suppose what is said in 
 these lectures is wholly proportionate, or entirely 
 sufficient, in order that the student may, by means 
 of it, reach the end here proposed. It will be 
 enough if the lines of thought struck out, and the 
 considerations brought forward, are those which in- 
 terlace and occupy the field. Each reader will then 
 easily make such additions and modifications as his 
 own mind suggests, and the facts before him seem 
 to require. We have followed freely the bent of 
 our own thoughts, and our conclusions therefore 
 will not be found exactly parallel with those which 
 others are reaching. If they provoke question, 
 they may not for that reason be less valuable, pro- 
 vided the discussion leads to a better insight into 
 principles.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 INITIATIVE PERIOD. 
 LAST H.A.LF OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Lecture I. Pagb. 
 
 Three Forms of Value in Literature 2 
 
 The Chief Element, the Emotional One 3 
 
 Mere Thought, Secondary 4 
 
 Definition of English Literature 5 
 
 Influence of Ethical Sentiment 6 
 
 Literature, How to be Treated 8 
 
 The National Character 9 
 
 Its Two Constituents 10 
 
 Character of the Normans II 
 
 Their Points of Superiority (a) Arms {i>) Cultivation (c) 
 
 Religion 13 
 
 Relation of Normans and Saxons 14 
 
 Growing Unity between them 15 
 
 English Character 17 
 
 Foreign hijluences 18 
 
 (i) Classical 19 
 
 (2) Italian 20 
 
 (3) Nor7nan 21 
 
 The Romances are Interesting to us. Why 22 
 
 Minstrels 23 
 
 Summary , 24 
 
 Lecture II. 
 
 Home Injliceitces 26 
 
 (l) Religions Forces .,t 27 
 
 The Characters of the Canterbury Tales 28 
 
 Contradictions in Religious Characters 31 
 
 (v)
 
 VI CONTENTS. 
 
 Pagb. 
 
 Two Irritations {a) of Ethical Sense 32 
 
 {&} Of Common Sense 33 
 
 Friar and Summoner 34 
 
 (2) Social Forces 34 
 
 Chivalry, Character of 35 
 
 Effects of 36 
 
 Influence on Women 37 
 
 Pride of English 38 
 
 Relation of Leader and Retainer 39 
 
 Condition of the Working Classes 40 
 
 Character of Women 41 
 
 Effects of the Times upon them 42 
 
 Action of the Church toward Woman 43 
 
 Licentiousness of Language 44 
 
 (3) Language 45 
 
 Elements of the English Language 46 
 
 (4) Forms of Literature 48 
 
 Poetry precedes Prose 49 
 
 Sir John Mandeville, Wicliffe 50 
 
 Lecture III. 
 
 Chaucer 5' 
 
 His Character ;.. 52 
 
 The First National Poet 53 
 
 His Indebtedness to Piers Ploughman 54 
 
 His Free, Political Spirit 55 
 
 Progressive in Poetry 5^ 
 
 Allegory 57 
 
 His Dramatic Powei 59 
 
 His Humor and Pathos 60 
 
 His Sensuality 61 
 
 His Love of Nature 62 
 
 The Poet not a Reformer 63 
 
 RETROGRESSIVE PERIOD. 
 
 FHE FIFTEENTH, AND FIRST HALF OF THE SIXTEENTH, CENH/RY. 
 
 Due to 
 
 (1) Repression of Inquiry 65 
 
 (2) Civil Wars 66
 
 CONTENTS. VU 
 
 Pagb. 
 
 Effects of the Wars of the Roses , . . . . 67 
 
 Introduction of Printing , 67 
 
 Barrenness of the Times , 68 
 
 FIRST CREATIVE PERIOD. 
 
 rHH LAST PORTION OF THE SIXTEENTH, AND THE FIRST PORTION 
 OF THE SEVENTEENTH, CENTURY. 
 
 The Weight of the Ethical Element 69 
 
 Lecture IV. — General Injluences at work in the Creative 
 Period. 
 
 (1) Activity of Religions Sentiment 75 
 
 Political Events affected by it 76 
 
 Domestic Events affected by it 77 
 
 Effect of the English Bible on Literature 78 
 
 Various Versions 80 
 
 Theological Composition 81 
 
 Polemics and Literature 82 
 
 Prose style 84 
 
 Hooker 85 
 
 (2) Revival of Classical Learning 85 
 
 Diversity of Effects 86 
 
 (3) Groivth of Science 88 
 
 Bacon 89 
 
 (4) Geographical Discovery 92 
 
 (5) Invention 93 
 
 Printing 94 
 
 Gunpowder 95 
 
 Special Influences at work in this period. 
 
 (1) Classical Scholarship in England 9^ 
 
 (2) Italian Scholarship 96 
 
 Surrey 97 
 
 (3) Peaceful Reign of Elizabeth 98 
 
 (4) Chivalrous Spirit of her Court 98 
 
 (5) Social State 9^ 
 
 (6) Branches of Literature 100 
 
 Themes of Poetry lOX 
 
 Lecture V. 
 
 Infl uences of Climate I0»
 
 VIU CONTENTS. 
 
 Pagb. 
 
 Power of Individuals 105 
 
 Spenser 
 
 His Character 106 
 
 Faery Queen 108 
 
 An Allegorical Poem 109 
 
 A Narrative Poem lie 
 
 Its Length 112 
 
 A Religious Poem 113 
 
 A Poem for Poets 114 
 
 English Drama 114 
 
 Historic Rise 117 
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 His Rank 118 
 
 His Power 119 
 
 His Relation to Art 121 
 
 His English Character 122 
 
 His Relation to Morality 124 
 
 Lecture VI. 
 
 Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, contrasted 128 
 
 Milton, his Puritanic Sentiments 129 
 
 Periods in his Life 130 
 
 His Style 131 
 
 Paradise Lost 132 
 
 Criticisms on it 133 
 
 Milton as belonging to the Elizabethan Era 134 
 
 FIRST TRANSITION PERIOD. 
 
 LAST PORTION OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Reformatory Periods Critical 136 
 
 Puritan Character 137 
 
 Transitional Features 
 
 (1) Conflict of pai-ties , I38 
 
 The Drama, its Debasement 140 
 
 Causes of the Degeneracy of the Theatre 
 
 (a) Monetary Influences 142 
 
 (f) Moral Influences I<j2 
 
 (c) Cultivation of Scenic Effects , 143 
 
 i^d) Unfitness for High Sentiment 144 
 
 (2) Conflict of Frettch and English Tastes 145
 
 CONTENTS. U 
 
 Pack. 
 
 English and French Character 146 
 
 (3) Conflict of Creative and Critical Tendencies 14S 
 
 Drydcn 149 
 
 His Character 150 
 
 Subservient to his Times I5' 
 
 His Moral Weakness 152 
 
 Estimate of his Works 153 
 
 Lecture VH. 
 
 FIRST CRITICAL PERIOD, 
 
 [NCLUDING THE EARLY AND MIDDLE PORTIONS OF THE EIGH- 
 TEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Balance of the Creative and the Critical Periods 155 
 
 Form and Substance 156 
 
 Pope Aimed at Formal Correctness 157 
 
 Value of the Results, 158 
 
 Opinions held of Pope as a Poet 159 
 
 Rank of his Poetry 160 
 
 Poetry and Prose of the Period 162 
 
 Causes at Work to Produce the Period 
 
 ^l) Criticis9)i tiaticrally follows Invention 1 63 
 
 (2) French Influence 1 64 
 
 (3) Classical Influence 165 
 
 (4) Science 166 
 
 (5) Political and Social Spirit of the Period 1 68 
 
 Pohtical Parties 169 
 
 Improvement in Morals 1 70 
 
 The Papers of Steele 171 
 
 Their Purpose 172 
 
 Their Qualities , J 73 
 
 The Moral Element in Addison 175 
 
 X Leadership 176 
 
 Swift 178 
 
 Pope 1 79 
 
 Steele 179 
 
 Addison , 180 
 
 Lecture VIII. 
 
 Second Phase of the Critical Period 182 
 
 Relation in it of Prose and Poetiy 183
 
 T CONTENTS. 
 
 Pacb. 
 
 Differences between the First and Second Phases 184 
 
 (a) Pre-eminence of Prose {d) Influence of Johnson 185 
 
 Style of Johnson 187 
 
 (1) Growth of Prose 190 
 
 Theology and Philosophy 191 
 
 Political Science and History 193 
 
 Oratory 196 
 
 Rhetoric and the Novel 197 
 
 (2) Influence of Johnson 199 
 
 Personal Qualities 200 
 
 Reputation 202 
 
 Critical Powers 203 
 
 His Control 206 
 
 Lecture IX. 
 
 SECOND TRANSITION PERIOD. 
 
 LAST PORTION OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Relativon of Periods 209 
 
 Three Periods in our Literature stand in natural Sequence 2-10 
 
 Aienside 213 
 
 Thomson 214 
 
 G}'ay, Collins 216 
 
 Co-difer 217 
 
 His Relation to the Coming Era 218 
 
 His Traits 219 
 
 His Devotion 220 
 
 Bums 221 
 
 The Slight Hold on him of Conventional Forces 222 
 
 The I nriuences making way for a New Era 2 23 
 
 (i) Interest in Early English Poetry 223 
 
 Percy's Reliques of Ancient Englisli Poetry 224 
 
 (2) German Influence 225 
 
 Relation in Thought, of Germany, France, and England.. 226 
 
 Value in Philosophy of a Practical Bent 227 
 
 {3) Political Eights and Liberty 230 
 
 American Revolution 230 
 
 French Revolution 23 1 
 
 Effects on different Persons 232 
 
 {4) Philosophy and Theology 233 
 
 Coleridge 233
 
 CONTENTS. XI 
 
 Pagb. 
 
 France and Engl ind 234 
 
 (5) Convergence of Tendetu'es 233 
 
 LECTURE X. 
 
 SECOND CREATIVE PERIOD. 
 
 FIRST PORTION OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Contrasted with the First Creative Period 237 
 
 Poetry, its Predominating Feature 238 
 
 The Influence of Men of Genius 238 
 
 Spencer's View 239 
 
 Taine's View 240 
 
 The Relation of Individual and National Life 241 
 
 Walter Scott 246 
 
 His Powers 247 
 
 His Personal Character , 248 
 
 ~ Byron 249 
 
 His Character 25c 
 
 His Worlcs 251 
 
 His Immorality 252 
 
 Coleridge 254 
 
 A Philosopher, Poet and Critic . . . , 254 
 
 His Conversational Powers 255 
 
 His Influence 256 
 
 Wordsworth , .... 257 
 
 His Relation to Poetry 258 
 
 His Relation to Political Questions 260 
 
 His Powers 261 
 
 ~ Shelley 262 
 
 His Purpose .... 263 
 
 Lecture XI. 
 
 PERIOD OF DIFFUSION. 
 
 THE PRESENT. 
 
 Opening of the Last Three Centuries .... 265 
 
 The Present a Period of Prose 266 
 
 One of Diffusion 367 
 
 Science, History 268 
 
 The NoT^el and the Newspaper, Chief Features 269 
 
 The Novel, its OfBce 27c
 
 Xll CONTENTS. 
 
 I'ACB 
 
 A Classification of Novels 2yi 
 
 Its Excellencies 275 
 
 The Superiority of Our Time in this Respect 277 
 
 The Nrwspaper 278 
 
 Amount of Circulation 279 
 
 {a) Favors the Rapid Solution of Social Questions 2!<a 
 
 {b) Tends to the Vigor, Soundness, and Candor, of Public 
 
 Opinion 282 
 
 So) riety of Judgment of the English Race 283 
 
 (c) \ Chief Resistance to Corruption 285 
 
 {d Affects Beneficially Public Education and the Pulpit.. 285 
 
 {e] Diffuses the Influence of Cities 2S6 
 
 TI • Evils of the Press, Social and Literary 287 
 
 Ci'ticism 289 
 
 Lecturp XII. 
 
 ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 Tei ns Defined 292 
 
 Lin ? of Descent in English Philosophy 293 
 
 The Source of Knowledge taken as the Central Idea 293 
 
 Bac n 294 
 
 Hoi 'es 296 
 
 Cudworth 297 
 
 Lode 297 
 
 Shaftesbury 300 
 
 Clarke, Berkeley 301 
 
 Hartley, Priestley , 302 
 
 Hume 304 
 
 His view of Miracles 308 
 
 Paley, Bent/mm, Bain 309 
 
 Mackintosh, Whewell 311 
 
 Spencer 311 
 
 The Mills 312 
 
 The Leading Conclusions of the English School of Phi- 
 losophy 313 
 
 The Scottish School 314 
 
 Reid 314 
 
 Hamilton 315 
 
 Rejection of the word, Materialism, by the English School 316 
 The Contradictions of this School 317
 
 THE PniLOSOPIIY 
 
 OF 
 
 e:n'glish literature. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 Literature. — Its Essential Cliaracteristics. — Variable Use of the 
 Word. — The Initiative Period in English Literature. — Last half 
 of Fourteenth Century the Date of the English Nation, Lan- 
 guage and Literature. — Anglo-Saxov: Element. — Norman Ele- 
 ment. — Norman Superiority. — Early Relation of the Two. — 
 Causes which United Them. — English Character. — Foreign In- 
 fluences : First, Classical ; Second, Italian ; Third, Norman, 
 
 The literature of a nation is the embodiment of 
 that which is most artistic and complete in its intel- 
 lectual, literary life. There are many practical 
 products of composition, records, chronicles, works 
 of instruction, of science, and of reference, which 
 contain the material of knowledge, the raw staple 
 of art, but are not literature. These change with 
 succeeding years, and reappear in altered and en- 
 larged forms, as the progress of events and investi- 
 gation determine. Many books, in each generation, 
 are the .i-eed which is returned to the soil as the 
 condition of farther increase. No work is a part of 
 national literature, in its more specific sense, till it 
 is possessed of such merit of execution, aside from 
 
 (i)
 
 2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 mere matter, or it were better to say in conjunction 
 with matter, as to give it permanent value. Thought 
 alone, the substance of wisdom merely, cannot 
 save a work to literature. It may be rather the oc- 
 casion of its speedy disappearance. More skilful 
 laborers will swarm around the sweet morsel, let 
 fall as it were in the highway of thought, and each 
 bear off a portion of the unidentified product. It is 
 some completeness, symmetry, excellence of form 
 that gives identity, ownership to a product ; and a 
 permanent interest in its careful, exact preservation. 
 There are in literature three forms of value, an 
 intellectual, an emotional and an expressional one. 
 The thought-value is the most stable, residuary ele- 
 ment; the emotional and expressional values are 
 the constituents most changeable and volatile. 
 These two are thoroughly interdependent, and ac- 
 cording as merit passes to this end of the scale, is 
 the literary excellence of a work declared. 
 
 Thought as thought is saved, no matter how often 
 it is altered in expression, and reappears in new re- 
 lations. Form alone, in subtile fellowship with 
 emotional power, necessitates careful transmission. 
 Gold as bullion waits momentarily on the arts for 
 working up ; stamped as coin, or wrought as orna- 
 ment, it has a new character, an enhanced value, 
 that everywhere attend upon it, and guard it. 
 
 In proportion as the excellence of the form 
 transcends the value of the matter, does the literary 
 work gain perpetuity. The poems of Shakespeare 
 and Milton hold their present position, not from any 
 new truths they announce, not from facts of history
 
 FORM IN LITERATURE. 3 
 
 or of science they contain, but through the superior, 
 inimitable workmanship which belongs to them. 
 Material, for the most part fanciful, thus acquires 
 an interest, and receives an estimate, that fall to no 
 records of history, no facts of science, however val- 
 uable these may be. Indeed, in proportion as th 
 very substance of a literary work, the thought il 
 contains, becomes important, is it difficult for it to 
 claim and hold a place in literature. The material 
 of history in so large a measure confers upon it its 
 value, that each succeeding work, the product of 
 more investigation, tends to displace preceding 
 ones ; and only rare excellencies of style can keep 
 the early historian in possession of the national 
 mind. The very interest of the facts stated stimu- 
 lates farther inquiry, and this pushes into the back- 
 ground those who first contributed to it. The hard 
 workers, the investigators and compilers, in the 
 fields oi knowledge, descend by genesis only to 
 those who come after them ; their discoveries, their 
 theories, like wind-sown flowers, enrich many who 
 are ignorant of their origin. 
 
 Literature, then, is essentially of an artistic 
 character ; poetry is its chief product ; and all its 
 creations hold their ground by completeness and 
 beauty of form. The material is as often imagina- 
 tive as historical, and must, even in the essay, get 
 its peculiar character and coloring from the mind 
 of the writer. There must be in the literary work, 
 as in the crystal, something which cannot be broken 
 in on without loss, something in itself specific and 
 final. It is, in fact, the individual mind which the
 
 4 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 nation treasures up in literature ; and he who has* 
 only common truths, that which is or may be the 
 spoil of all, to bring, can find no entrance to this 
 gallery of art. His contributions are valuable, but 
 they have other and coarser storehouses than those 
 in which beauty garners her own. He must bear his 
 useful things to the markets in which like products 
 are bought and sold. 
 
 There seems, at first, something a little unequal 
 and harsh in this, that the patient laborer is so ea- 
 sily thrust back by the artist, he who gives bread 
 by him who gives visions ; yet we are willing to ac- 
 cept it as one more proof that spiritualities, inspira- 
 tions, creative touches, though they be mere traces 
 of light, are more to man than the solid, coarse- 
 grained comforts of being. Those who bring us 
 these fare. as servants, and those who fling care- 
 lessly to us those rarer gifts are sought after, and 
 entertained as angels ; yet at times a little too 
 much on the light food of posthumous praise. 
 
 The word literature is determined in its breadth 
 by its connections. When we speak of the litera- 
 ture of one department of knowledge, as chemistry, 
 the artistic quality is comparatively overlooked, and 
 all works of merit that have been written on the 
 subject are included. If we refer to the literature 
 of a particular century, as of the sixteenth century 
 in England, we then gather up in the word more 
 carefully all the literary products of that period, 
 though some of them may since have sunk out of 
 sight. In the words, English literature, we should 
 comprise only those works whose artist'C merit has
 
 DEFINITION OF LITERATURE. 5 
 
 put them ill permanent possession of the mind of 
 the nation ; which hold on their way, not through 
 years, but through centuries. Yet few even of 
 these would reappear in the world's literature, as 
 working for themselves an abiding-place in the edu- 
 cated thought of different nations. While the word, 
 therefore, is always inclining towards merit of form, 
 and the more with each extension of it, the theme, 
 the time and the territory in which the literary suc- 
 cess has been achieved are indicated by the qualify- 
 ing adjective, and our definition becomes a conjoint 
 one. English literature is made up of those Eng- 
 lish writings which have gained a permanent place 
 in the regard of the English people. This position 
 has been won by artistic excellence, and hence oui 
 literature is, in letters, our national art-gallery. 
 The broader the field which the collection covers, 
 the more select are its constituents ; while restric- 
 tion in time or place makes lighter the conditions 
 of admission. 
 
 We have pushed this point clearly out, that the 
 pleasures of literature are essentially aesthetic, be- 
 cause it will aid us in a just estimate of the merits 
 of English literature, and of the forces which have 
 affected it. We hold it to be a general truth, that 
 moral influences, the ethical tone of sentiment, the 
 spiritually perceptive powers are pre-eminently united 
 to works of literary art. This seerns to follow from 
 the fact, that nothing mounts into the region of art 
 without undergoing some transformation, receiving 
 buoyancy and color from the mind that wings it for 
 flight. Art is not literal, is not commonplace, mere
 
 6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 copy; but owes much to selection, arrangement, 
 mfused character and infused life. Now this in- 
 fusion which goes mantling through the new, the 
 beautiful product is the intellectual, spiritual life 
 and movement of the artist ; and as the artist him- 
 self is known in his temper and moods by their re- 
 lation to the supreme element of his nature, to the 
 ethical temperature of his own soul, so are his 
 works. What the light is to the landscape, grading 
 it in its every degree of emotion, lifting it up to the 
 key-note of highest joy and exultation ; or depress- 
 ing it to the deepest sadness and unmingled fear ; 
 or leaving it in the midway region of commonplace 
 comforts ; that is the moral revelation to the liter- 
 ary work, revealing men, revealing things and 
 thoughts even, under a sportive and jocular, a se- 
 rene and reflective, or a stern and portentous aspect, 
 according to the soul that is in it. We are not to 
 be understood, of course, as restricting the word 
 ethical to precepts of conduct, more or less numer- 
 ous, but rather as referring by it to that tacit dec- 
 laration which every man makes of the nature of 
 life, its delights, its insights, its achievements ; and 
 of the ministrations of God, society and nature to it. 
 The soul of man is centred in his moral constitu- 
 tion ; that is in his perceptions of the objects and 
 forms, and hence of the beauties, of rational action. 
 He can gain no orbit of thought; he can reach not 
 even the conventional excellencies of character, the 
 courage of manhood, the gentleness of womanhood ; 
 he can give no interpretation to the voices of na- 
 ture, save as he does it by one or more of those
 
 INFI UENCE OF ETHICAL ELEMENT. ^ 
 
 ethical sentiments that spring from the depths of 
 his being, -that belong to him as man, under larger 
 joys, and severer sufferings, and sterner laws and 
 more enduring hopes than those which fall to the 
 animals about him. As man sinks in action, in 
 emotion, in intuition, he loses high art; as he as- 
 cends he regains it, effecting a new entrance into 
 that which is peculiar to himself, to a moral being 
 with springs and laws of life hidden in its superiorly 
 perceptive constitution. Even comedy cannot 
 thrive on mere trifles. Unless its laugh has elation, 
 election, taste, sense and sensibility in it, it sinks 
 to low burlesque, in which the animal appetites so 
 predominate, that we find ourselves in action and 
 impulse facing downward toward the brute. The 
 poet Schiller seems to have been possessed of this 
 principle in a more tense form than we have ven- 
 tured on. "There was in him," says his biograph- 
 er, " a singular ardor for truth, a solemn conviction 
 of the duties of a poet, a deep-rooted idea on which 
 we have been more than once called to insist, that 
 the minstrel should be a preacher. That song 
 is the sister of religion in its largest sense ; that 
 the stage is the pulpit to all sects, all nations, all 
 time." * The difference between men is great ; it 
 lies here. To one nothing is religious which is not 
 coldly, formally preceptive ; to another nothing fails 
 of religion, which at all reaches the heart. It is, 
 then, of English literature in its associated artistic 
 and ethical forces, of necessity gathering strength 
 and beauty from that which is in man most beauti- 
 
 * «• Bibliotheca Sacra," Oct. No., 1871, p. 716.
 
 8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 ful and strong, that we are to speak. If it has been 
 at times like a tropical forest, infested by a rank 
 undergrowth of briars, we may be sure it was be- 
 cause the hot and reeking atmosphere engendered 
 them, entering in to obstruct and hide the majestic 
 life above them. 
 
 It is not our purpose to give the facts of English 
 literature, we shall assume a general knowledge of 
 them, and strive to trace their dependence. We 
 shall start with the earliest works of pronounced 
 merit in our literary history, and shall speak of au- 
 thors only as their productions are themselves a 
 distinct force, giving character to the periods under 
 discussion. 
 
 The initiative period in English letters covers 
 the last half of the fourteenth century. Literary pe- 
 riods have no definite bounds. As the slopes of 
 mountains may gently rise and gently descend 
 again to the plains beyond, leaving their midway 
 line and general trend to be determined by isolated 
 peaks and bold ridges ; so periods in literature are 
 defined, not by definite dates, but by persons scat- 
 tered through them, characteristic tendencies that 
 stretch across them. 
 
 The initiative period was one of vigorous poetic 
 life, whose chief representative was Chaucer. In 
 an effort to understand this introductory era, we 
 shall need to inquire into the national character, 
 into the foreign and domestic influences prevalent, 
 and into the traits of individuals whose productions 
 constitute its chief intellectual strength. The na- 
 tional and the individual elements can never be
 
 NATIONAL CHARACTER. 9 
 
 separated in literature, nor do they maintain any 
 uniform ratio to each other. In writers of ordinary 
 power, the conditions under which they compose 
 their works exert a controlling influence ; in writers 
 of genius, this influence, though still felt, is over- 
 shadowed by personal qualities. The direction and 
 general character of their labor may be settled by 
 external inducements, but its method of accomplish- 
 ment is to be referred to their own powers. Our 
 first inquiry is into national character. It is through 
 those general conditions which surround and en- 
 velop the individual, and whose force he cannot but 
 feel, either in assent or dissent, that we at length 
 approach the seat of art in the soul of the artist. 
 
 An English nationality, like an English lan- 
 guage and an English literature, was beginning to 
 appear in the last half of the fourteenth century. 
 The three sprang up together; they had one birth, 
 nationality, language and literature ; and held in 
 union the same elements. The root of our language 
 is Saxon. It has furnished, though in connection 
 with revolutionary changes, the grammatical frame- 
 work of our speech. The foreign tongue, which foi 
 a time overlay and at length largely melted into 
 our language, saturating it with its vocabulary so 
 far as one language can be saturated by another, 
 was Norman French. 
 
 So too the nation, in bulk and staple Anglo- 
 Saxon, was permeated, put in active ferment 
 everywhere with Normans, first as rulers, after- 
 ward as leaders and fellow-subjects. The popular 
 I'terature, hitherto chiefly Norman, began, as the 
 I*
 
 lO THE PHILObv^.HY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 fourteenth century drew to an end, to be English 
 in form and theme. 
 
 The two elements, then, in English nationality, 
 of very unequal prevalence and unlike characteris- 
 tics, were the Saxon and the Norman. The first 
 remained throughout, the substance into which the 
 second, as a color or quality, was received ; consti- 
 tuted the material shaped by the latter into new 
 forms, and enlarged into new offices. The Saxon 
 character, though less brilliant and dominant than 
 the Norman, was superior to it in patient strength. 
 The Anglo-Saxon, of Low-German origin, seems 
 to have possessed the qualities which belong to his 
 kinsmen of the continent. Known abroad as Sax- 
 ons, early spoken of by themselves as Angles or 
 English, they have, in the more careful historic 
 use of the present, been designated as Anglo-Sax- 
 ons. For six hundred years they had held by ex- 
 tirpation and expulsion, rather than by conquest, of 
 its inhabitants, the larger share of Britain, leaving 
 to the Celts the mountains of the west and north. 
 At the time of the Norman conquest, they were 
 possessed of less enterprise and less cultivation 
 than their invaders ; but more equality, greater lib- 
 erty, and the hardihood of stubborn strength. Their 
 rights were ill-defined, as those of a rude, independ- 
 ent people are wont to be ; but centuries were re- 
 quired after the conquest to win again for the gen- 
 eral voice of the nation the influence that fell to it 
 under the Saxon constitution. The sturdy array 
 of foot-soldiers and the heavy battle-axes with 
 which they met the horsemen and bowmen of tne
 
 NORMANS. II 
 
 Normans presented in a visible form their tough, 
 unyielding temper. 
 
 The Normans were in many respects the reverse 
 of the Saxons. These had occupied England for 
 six centuries by displacement, with comparatively 
 slight alterations of character and language. Tue 
 Normans, in less than a third of that time, gained 
 in the north of France, a new speech, and gave rise 
 to a new national development. They did not, as 
 the Saxons, expel and exclude those whom they in- 
 vaded, but included them in a fresh life. Not only 
 did they become a leading element in the formation 
 of the French monarchy and people ; that portion 
 of them which was transferred to England, in a 
 period but little longer, accepted new conditions, 
 again changed their language, and once more gath- 
 ered, with vigorous, organizing force, a new, diverse 
 and independent nation. 
 
 "Above all men," says one, "the Norman was 
 an imitator, and therefore an improver; and it was 
 precisely because he was the least rigid, most sup- 
 ple, plastic and accommodating of mortals, that he 
 became the civilizer and ruler wherever he was 
 thrown. In France he became French ; in Eng- 
 land, English; in Italy, Italian; in Novgorod, Rus- 
 sian. ■'■' * '"••" Wherever his neighbors invented 
 or possessed anything worthy of admiration, the 
 sharp, inquisitive Norman poked his aquiline nose. 
 Wherever what we now call the march of intellect 
 advanced, there was the sharp, eager face of the 
 Norman in the van. He always intermarried with 
 !he people among whom he settled, borrowed its
 
 12 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 language, adopted its customs, reconciled himself 
 to its laws, and confirmed the aristocracy of con- 
 quest, by representing, while elevating, the charac- 
 ter of the people with whom he closely identified 
 himself." "•'■" 
 
 We give, as another illustration of the flexibili- 
 ty of Norman character, the control soon gained 
 over the Irish by those to whom lands were appor- 
 tioned on the first invasion by Henry II. This 
 Norman nobility became rapidly Irish in character, 
 outstripping native chiefs in indigenous traits, won 
 an easy and complete ascendancy over the primitive 
 population, and were cordially sustained by them 
 in later rebellions against English rule. " Some 
 most powerful families rooted themselves in the 
 soil, and never forsook it ; the Geraldines, of Mun- 
 ster and Kildare ; the Butlers, of Kilkenny ; the De 
 liurghs, the Birminghams, the De Courcies. This 
 complete absorption of the Norman into the char- 
 acter, customs, feuds, revolts of the Irish was ex- 
 pressed in the phrase ' Ipsis H ibernis Hiberniores.' "f 
 It was this subtile, diffusive, adaptable, and spirited 
 element that was infused by the conquest into the 
 sluggish, phlegmatic Saxon society ; and became 
 the nervous system in the body politic, with wide 
 awake senses and a rapid interchange of influences 
 calling to instant service and active subjection the 
 solid bone and brawny muscle which composed the 
 staple of English strength. 
 
 * The Examiner^ for 1848, as given in Stephen's " Literatuie 
 of the Kymry," p. 429. 
 
 f Froude's " History of England," vol. ii. p. 238.
 
 SUPERIORITY OF NORMANS. I3 
 
 The points at which the Normans surpassed the 
 Saxons, and were thus prepared to contribute new 
 impulses to the national character, were three. The 
 first of these was in weapons and warlike enterprise. 
 They used the bow, and fought on horseback, and 
 were thus ready for more aggressive and nimble 
 movement, for skirmish as well as encounter. The 
 were also of so martial a turn as to give promise of 
 the ultimate unity and sure defense of Britain. No 
 portion of Europe, and not even the new world, were 
 withheld from the wild adventure of this race. 
 Cape Cod is set down as the western limit of their 
 explorations as early as the commencement of "the 
 eleventh century. 
 
 A second superiority was found in culture, more 
 particularly in poetry and architecture. They had 
 shown gains in both of these directions, and were 
 to become, in Gothic architecture, the most skilful 
 builders in Europe. England and Normandy pos- 
 sess many of their magnificent structures. In po- 
 etry also they were relatively cultivated, their min- 
 strels dividing with those of southern France the 
 honors of the national Romance literature. 
 
 Their third point of excellence, worth more per- 
 haps than either of the other two, was the piety and 
 intelligence of their clergy. Such men as Anselm 
 and Lanfranc, transferred from the celebrated ab- 
 beys at Bee and Caen, were more superior to the 
 native Saxon clergy in the grounds of just influence 
 than were the Norman lords to the Saxon thanes. 
 The conquest was thus attended with a new religious 
 rule, and took possession of authority in both of its
 
 14 THE IMIILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERAIURE. 
 
 great branches. The leading ecclesiastics, of which- 
 ever portion of the nation, became identified with 
 the Normans. We find among them, at that time 
 and later, men of great ability, such as Thomas a 
 Becket and William Wykeham. Though there was 
 occasionally a bitter struggle against ecclesiastical 
 influence in secular affairs, the superior clergy, 
 directly and indirectly, exercised a strong civil au- 
 thority, and were parties to the power of the state. 
 
 For the first two hundred and fifty years suc- 
 ceeding the conquest, the pride and arrogance of 
 the Normans, sustained by these points of superi- 
 ority, kept them aloof from the Saxons. The op- 
 pression also which these suffered from their rulers 
 embittered the division, and made the inferior party, 
 as is wont to be the case, even more hostile than 
 the superior one. French was the language of the 
 court and of polite intercourse, and Saxon speech 
 became a badge of inferiority and dependence. 
 Cultivation and rank shrank away from it, and 
 though it remained unshaken as the popular tongue, 
 it soon began to undergo those changes, incident to 
 grammatical decay, by which it passed into English. 
 Resting for support upon the ignorant, and, from a 
 literary point of view, the indifferent and the care- 
 less ; living on the lips of the people, Saxon speech 
 suffered a rapid loss of inflections and construction. 
 These, dropping off by misuse and disuse, left the 
 English the most bald, but one of the most simple 
 and serviceable of languages. 
 
 The hostility of the Saxon subjects to their 
 ruleis was maintained, in the earlier reigns, by the
 
 RELATIONS OF SAXONS AND NORMANS. 1 5 
 
 connection of the English throne with ducal author- 
 ity in Normandy, making the fortunes of the former 
 dependent on the latter; and by the severe rule of 
 the Normans, especially in the extension of forests, 
 and preservation of game. Little was done to con- 
 solidate the nation till after the loss of Normandy 
 under king John, and the final identification of th 
 conquerors with England as the exclusive seat of 
 authority, and centre of all possessions. 
 
 There were indeed influences which began at 
 once to abate the hostility of the Saxons and Nor- 
 mans, and prepare the way for their later union in 
 one nation. The clergy, never altogether partisan 
 in its character, constantly became less so. The 
 Englishman, Saxon or Norman in descent, found an 
 open path to preferment in the church; and thus 
 the Norman features of authority rapidly softened 
 in that most influential body, the clergy. Thus 
 both Becket and Wykeham came up from the peo- 
 ple, and won by talent the prominent positions they 
 held. 
 
 The wars also of the Normans in Wales, in Ire- 
 land and on the continent, made them more de- 
 pendent on the Saxons, and their common victories 
 served to unite the two races. Add to these causes 
 the softening influences of time, and of intercourse 
 between parties of very unequal opportunities and 
 rank, indeed, but characterized alike by solid en- 
 dowments, and we are prepared for that ultimate 
 subsidence of the flexible Normans into the mass 
 of the community, by which the nation became one 
 again in its dissolved and evenly diffiised elements.
 
 l6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 The Norman provinces being lost — a fresh in- 
 debtedness of the nation, like that for the first char- 
 ter of its liberties, to the tyranny and weakness 
 of John — the two divisions of the English people, 
 enclosed in one kingdom, and one island, and one 
 set of interests ; too closely interlocked to render 
 separation either desirable or possible, were, in the 
 reign of Edward III., firmly compacted and welded 
 together by their common national victories on the 
 continent ; and by the commencement of that bitter 
 warfare with France which evoked a rivalry and 
 hostility of the two nations, from that time on- 
 ward shaping the history of both of them. Already, 
 then, in the fourteenth century, had there begun to 
 be a movement toward liberty at home, interesting 
 Norman lord and Saxon thane alike, while that 
 century beheld the two, side by side, as English- 
 men, gaining great victories on French battle-fields, 
 and consolidating their national unity by a pro- 
 longed conflict with those who had been to the Nor- 
 man kinsmen and fellow-subjects. In the battle of 
 Cressy, the English yeomen, a Saxon branch of the 
 service, became a recognized national feature and 
 national power by the stubbornness with which they 
 held the field. This sense of superior unity, this 
 growth of English influence are evinced by that na- 
 tional jealousy which compelled Edward, on open- 
 ing the conflict, to declare, " We will and grant and 
 stablish that our said realm of England, nor the 
 people of the same, of what estate or condition they 
 be, shall not, in any time to come, be put in subjec- 
 tion nor in obeisance of us, nor of our heirs and
 
 CONCESSIONS TO SAXONS. I J 
 
 Buccessors, as kings of France." We find also a 
 similar concession to national feeling in the law 
 that all pleas " shall be pleaded, shewed, defended, 
 answered, debated and judged in the English 
 tongue." This was not only a step toward nation- 
 ality, it was equally one toward justice and liberty, 
 by bringing the action of the courts more imme- 
 diately under the knowledge and criticism of the 
 people. We know indeed that all legal and legisla- 
 tive proceedings were not at once thereon trans- 
 ferred into English, but for a time bore a mixed 
 character. So decisive a movement could not com- 
 plete itself instantly. In France, it was two cen- 
 turies and one-half later, when a kindred transfer 
 into the vernacular was effected. 
 
 What, then, are the features of English character, 
 appearing in this new nation, whose political, social 
 and literary elements were, in the fourteenth cen- 
 tury, passing into permanent union } The English 
 are a reflective people, as opposed to an impulsive, 
 passionate one. Herein they are the reverse of the 
 Jrish, and unlike the sprightly, intuitive French. 
 They have not the enthusiasm for a sentiment 
 which stirs the French to such extreme and contra- 
 dictory action ; but they have a dogged policy, a 
 predisposition settled in interest and conviction, 
 which render them the most calculable and pa- 
 tient, and ultimately the most irresistible, force in 
 European politics. It is inspiration to an army of 
 France, that forty centuries look down on it from the 
 pyramids ; it nerves an English fleet to be told, in 
 severe phrase, that England expects every man to do
 
 l8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 his duty. What tae sentiments are to one nation, 
 the interests of life are to the other ; and if there is 
 here some want of brilliancy, there is none of sub- 
 stantial good. If there is less to nourish taste, there 
 is more to feed affection ; if the fire does not flame in 
 every wind, it is well raked in, and keeps warm the 
 national hearth from century to century. 
 
 The cast of English character is also of an ex- 
 ternal, objective type, rather than of an internal, 
 subjective one. In this they are opposed to the 
 Germans. English thought issues in a physical 
 good, a social gain, a practical view, with one foot 
 upon the land and one upon the sea ; German 
 thought issues in a theory, a speculation, a criti- 
 cism, whose locality and bearings are scarcely 
 asked for; which traverses the air, or, touching the 
 earth, does it at times with a cloven foot. The 
 fruits of the German mind are subtile spirits, that 
 spring out of great heat of thought, bent, in way- 
 ward fashion, on any or no mission ; the fruits of 
 the English mind are spirits of a cold, tame, ant- 
 serviceable cast, that, at the worst, can, like Caliban, 
 »be pinched and whipped into hard work. Thus ideal- 
 ism has found few disciples in England, and the en- 
 tire drift of her philosophy has been materialistic. 
 For the most part she has grounded morals in 
 utility, and thus made her theory the reflection of 
 her practice. Amid all her plodding, patient virtues, 
 she has rarely had a bold, brilliant ideal, plucking 
 at the heart, and lifting society into revolution. 
 This reflective, external cast of English character 
 has colored her literature and history, and, united
 
 LATIN INFLUENCE. 1 9 
 
 (vith her insular, protected position, has given rise to 
 a social and civil growth, slow, safe and continuous ; a 
 growth that renders her institutions the most instruc- 
 tive and interesting in the record of modern nations. 
 
 Having defined the national character, every- 
 where effective in English literature, we shall con- 
 sider the foreign influences at work in its initiative 
 period, the last half of the fourteenth century. In- 
 directly, modern Europe is deeply indebted to the 
 literature and cultivation of Greece and Rome. 
 These were the seeds left in the soil ; and when 
 the first savage, rugged growth of barbarism was 
 cleared away, it was these that occupied the field, 
 and slowly beautified it. The Latin influence was 
 wrought into Latin Christianity, and spread, there- 
 fore, with the evangelization of the Gothic races. 
 Moreover these races came in their conquests every- 
 where in contact with the laws and civilization of 
 Rome, laws which slowly resumed sway in those 
 provinces in which they had become indigenous. 
 Latin was the only universal language of western 
 Europe in the Middle Ages ; contained the works 
 of religion, science, philosophy, the products of the 
 times ; and transmitted also the classical works of 
 earlier Rome. 
 
 Grecian philosophy and poetry were more re- 
 mote and indirect in their influence. The logic 
 of Aristotle gave shape to the scholastic philosophy, 
 but in a secondary form as it had found transmis- 
 sion through Arabic, Jewish, Latin mediums. The 
 direct influence of classical authors on English lit- 
 erature in the fourteenth century would seem to
 
 20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 have been slight. It was most immediately in- 
 debted to the Latin for those stories of earlier times, 
 which reappear so often in the works of Chaucer 
 and of later poets. These tales, increased by those 
 of Oriental origin, and by others, native to the west 
 of Europe, furnished a stock in trade to all the 
 poets. They were transmitted in Latin collections, 
 and also transferred to the vernacular tongues of 
 the West. It was the hold they had secured on the 
 popular mind by constant repetition, and the semi- 
 historical character they bore in that credulous age, 
 that fitted them to the purposes of the mediaeva' 
 minstrelsy, and gave them, by steady accretion, tha' 
 flexible form and controlling influence which ren 
 dered them, even to such men as Chaucer and 
 Shakespeare, a constant source of material. These 
 themes were already in possession of a popular in- 
 terest denied to a purely literary creation ; and the 
 subjects of literature had thus a conventional exist- 
 ence and force to which all readily yielded. The 
 growth of history and invention has slowly pushed 
 aside these stories, that thus presented new versions 
 with every transfer, though even in our day we oc- 
 casionally return to them with fresh zest. 
 
 The second foreign force, which was especially 
 operative in English literature, was Italian influence. 
 As was to be expected, Italy was the first division 
 of Europe, after the barbaric overflow, to regain 
 the arts of civilization. In commerce, in freedom, 
 in the industrial and fine arts, in literature, and, 
 later, in science, she took the lead, a position she 
 has failed to maintain, chiefly through political di-
 
 ITALIAN INFLUENCE. 21 
 
 visions and ecclesiastical tyranny. No real liberty of 
 thought, or settled polity, has found foothold on her 
 soil. The three great poets of the fourteenth cen- 
 tury were Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer, two Ital- 
 ian and one English. The first of these in time was 
 Dante. He was much less influenced than the 
 other two in the form of his poetry by his own 
 period. There was more moral elevation in his 
 theme, there were more ethical force and senti- 
 ment in his execution, and he aspired, under tbe 
 guidance of Virgil, to the breadth and dignity of d 
 great poet. Next came Petrarch, with whom Chau- 
 cer may have met. His poetry was of that l}\ical 
 cast which chiefly affected English literature later 
 than the time of Chaucer. Chaucer, the last J the 
 three, stands in more immediate sympathy with 
 Boccaccio, whose rehearsal in the Decameron of 
 mediaeval tales has won for him his chief reputation. 
 Some of these Chaucer has borrowed, or both have 
 taken them from common sources. We may well 
 believe that Chaucer was quickened by his Italian 
 contemporaries, without being very directly guided 
 by them. 
 
 A last foreign influence, and one more immedi- 
 ate than either of the others, were the romances 
 and fabliatix of the Normans. The fabliaux were 
 of a popular cast, briefer than the romances, and 
 more diversified in their subjects. They had the 
 ease, humor, and variety of the story, and were 
 keyed to minor occasions. The romances were 
 fitted to the intellectual palate of the gentry, were 
 narrative and heroic, and required for their rehearsal
 
 22 IHE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 a more select occasion. The minstrels of northern 
 and southern France divided the sentunents of chiv- 
 alry between them. The valor and daring of the 
 true cavalier were magnified by the Trouv^re ; while 
 the amatory song of the Troubadour dwelt on the 
 devotion of the knight to his lady-love. Petrarch 
 stood in much the same relation to the .lyric poetry 
 of the south as Chaucer did to the epic verse of the 
 north. Each form degenerated, though the degen- 
 eracy of erotic song is ever more fatal than that of 
 heroic verse. The sentiment of love had, at best, 
 in chivalry but an artificial and forced development, 
 and was ready for an easy decline into lascivious- 
 ness. The courage and valor of chivalry were more 
 simple, sincere, normal to the condition of society ; 
 and though liable to become hair-brained and ex- 
 travagant in the exploits undertaken, yet retained 
 some sound and wholesome quality. 
 
 The romances deserve attention because of the 
 influence they exerted on our Norman ancestry, and 
 the social character of western Europe ; because a 
 first and chief literary service to which the early 
 English was put was the reception, and circulation, 
 in prose and metrical form, of these narratives, as 
 translated from the French ; and because the char- 
 acter of English poetry has all along been affected 
 by them, and that too strongly in its later periods. 
 The chief subjects of these romances were Arthur 
 and his knights, Charlemagne and his followers. 
 Later were added warriors of the Crusades, and 
 Grecian heroes. The story of Arthur and his knights 
 of the round table offers a good illustration of the 
 
 I
 
 THE MINSTREL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 23 
 
 growth of poetic fiction, its steady enlargement, the 
 transmission of its resources, the currency and in- 
 creasing interest it gives to its inventions. As chiv- 
 alry was an institution of rigid and overstrained 
 sentiments, this, its literary side, was very requisite 
 to it, both as expressing and enforcing its views of 
 character, as stimulating and rewarding its heroes. 
 The minstrel was essential to the knightly pageant, 
 as giving body, form and circulation to those fine- 
 spun sentiments of life, of love, and of loyalty ; 
 making them felt and operative in the rough, law- 
 less impulses of the age. Without the minstrel to 
 rehearse, in hours of leisure and festivity, warlike 
 achievements ; and make positive, frequent and 
 pungent their stimulus, chivalry could scarcely 
 have gained or retained the influence it exerted. It 
 is not surprising that the minstrel became a sort of 
 sacred character with claims of ingress and enter- 
 tainment everywhere. The minstrel put the expe- 
 rience and exploits of the knight in their most trans- 
 figured and poetic form, and rehearsed them to his 
 flattered and delighted senses. He became to the 
 knight his idealizing spirit, holding before him a 
 magic mirror, in which his deeds found the liveliest 
 and most fascinating reflection. The knight thus 
 learned how nobly he acted, how tenderly he felt, 
 and with what enchantment he was invested. 
 When these romances became more extravagant, 
 and were, moreover, in the decay of chivalry, in- 
 creasingly divorced from the actual temper and 
 wants of men, it was a most serviceable task which 
 Cervantes undertook in Don Quixote, that of turn
 
 24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 ing into ridicule the notion of knight errantry. We 
 shall scarcely understand the value and success ot 
 this work, except as we see in it a last blow given 
 to a proud and mischievous sentiment lingering be- 
 yond its time. 
 
 The Normans, famous cavaliers, haughty and 
 irritable, had embodied their social feelings in this 
 Romance literature, and could scarcely unite them- 
 selves to a new language and nationality without a 
 transfer of these, their favorite literary recreations. 
 Thus the fourteenth century beheld a large repro- 
 duction in English of these works, so essential to an 
 adventurous and chivalrous gentry. Thus were 
 they able to wont themselves to their new home 
 .with a reduced sense of loss. 
 
 We have now spoken of the essential constit- 
 uents of literature, urging two points, that the 
 aesthetical impulse, or the element of form, is pre- 
 dominant in literature, and th« more so as long 
 periods are taken into consideration ; and that a 
 controlling force, giving character to the literary 
 effort of any period, is found in the ethical nature. 
 This is the light which imparts depth and coloring to 
 our spiritual heavens, and, negatively or positively, 
 determines the tone of the passing hour. Wc 
 have spoken of the sluggish strength of the Saxons, 
 the flexible enterprise of the Normans, slowly uniting 
 to form English character on a type of unrivalled, 
 patient, practical and aspiring sagacity. We then 
 passed to the foreign influences at work in England 
 in the fourteenth century, the initiative period of its 
 literature. In common with western Europe, the
 
 THE SUMMARY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 25 
 
 germs which began to reclothe the earth, when the 
 flood of barbaric invasion liad passed by, and the 
 sedimentary deposit had become fixed, were found in 
 Christianity, modified and sustained by Latin civiU- 
 zation. The classical influence on popular literature 
 showed itself chiefly in a fund of stories, wrought 
 and rewrought by the minstrelsy of different nations, 
 Italy, as at the very centre of these civilizing forces, 
 yielded the earliest growth, and became a source of 
 art and literary cultivation to the Western nations. 
 A third force felt in England was the native Norman 
 poetry, indigenous to the times, peculiarly vigorous, 
 and closely connected with their chivalrous charac- 
 ter and customs. 
 
 Such were the more remote fountains that fed 
 the streams of English thought. We shall next 
 turn to those which at home more directly and 
 copiously maintained it. Many are the forces, near 
 at hand and afar off, that are at work in national 
 character and national life. If the future lies an 
 open field before us, we march to take possession of 
 it with our flocks and herds and household stufl". 
 The good and the evil travel on together, and renew 
 their conflict at each successive stage. We have 
 sketched the leading conditions under which the 
 English nation, newly compacted in its elements, 
 occupied the fourteenth century, and made ready 
 to work out the national history. As this evolves 
 itself, we shall see the old taking up the new, and 
 the new uniting itself to the old, with the organic 
 freedom of forces, that hold within themselves their 
 own law of life.
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 Home Influences affecting English Literature in the Fourteenth 
 Century. — Religious Life. — Social Life. — Language. — Prevalent 
 Literature. 
 
 We have now to speak of those home or do- 
 mestic influences which in England gathered about 
 and helped to shape the literature of the fourteenth 
 century. 
 
 They drop into four classes ; religious or ethical 
 forces, social forces, language, and the directions or 
 divisions of literature. These lie like concentric 
 circles around the germinant points of growth, each 
 succeeding one approaching more nearly, and af- 
 fecting more definitely, the literary product of the 
 time ; yet falling off in the scope and breadth of its 
 influence. 
 
 The outer, or ethical circle, when it fails to de- 
 termine the immediate form and spirit of a pro- 
 duction, constitutes none the less the atmospherei 
 the climate, under which it grows up, and thus de- 
 cides the vigor of its life. Ethical influences so 
 pervade our national life, that, positively or nega- 
 tively, they set limits to all that is said or done in it. 
 Like the rarity or density of the air, they settle the 
 flight that is open to a given stroke of wing, how 
 high it shall bear the spirit upward. 
 
 In the fourteenth century, religion inter-pene- 
 trated society, visibly touching and modifying it at 
 
 (26)
 
 THK RELIGION OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. 2"] 
 
 all points. Its apparent power was much greater 
 than now, its actual power much less. In propor- 
 tion as faith forsakes the heart, and therefore ceases 
 to rule in its own hidden and spiritual realm, does 
 it strive, by compensation, in an external, solemn 
 and ceremonial way, to show its presence, and se- 
 cure authority over a portion of the actions of men. 
 When men make a compromise with religion, with- 
 holding a part and giving a part, their religious acts 
 become at once exacting in form and ostentatious 
 in fulfilment. They are the purchase-money, the 
 exemption payment, good only as they are clearly 
 and abundantly certified. Forms and superstitions 
 are surface eruptions ; the blood clearing itself by 
 cutaneous disease. The national life, failing to 
 absorb and healthily to use the spiritual element, 
 casts it to the surface in fears, credulities, and 
 frivolous observances. 
 
 In this and adjunct centuries, court, castle, 
 cloister and cottage were equally infested with re- 
 ligion, and almost equally destitute of it. The cor- 
 ruption of the theory and practice of religion, was 
 preparing the way for the reformation. The sources 
 of religious authority had become the sources of 
 evil, and virtue had been compelled to find a refuge 
 in the individual heart alone. This is the descrip- 
 tion of Avignon while the seat of the papacy, as 
 given by Petrarch. " You imagine that the city of 
 Avignon is the same now that it was when you re- 
 sided in it ; it is very different. It was then, it is 
 true, the worst and vilest place on earth, but it has 
 now become a terrestrial hell, a residence of fiends
 
 28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and devils, a receptacle of all that is most wicked 
 and abominable. In this city there is no piety, no 
 reverence or fear of God, no faith or charity, noth- 
 ing that is holy, just, equitable or himiane. Why 
 should I speak of truth when not only the houses, 
 palaces, courts, churches and the thrones of popes 
 and cardinals, but the very earth and air seem to 
 teem with lies. Good men have of late been treated 
 with so much contempt and scorn, that there is not 
 one left amongst them to be an object of their 
 laughter." * 
 
 This corruption was unequal in different branch- 
 es of the church. The higher clergy had more in- 
 centives to vice than the inferior clergy, and among 
 these were to be found many devout men. The 
 mendicant orders also, existing under a peculiarly 
 distorted and vagrant form of life, became cor- 
 respondingly vicious and worthless. In the gallery 
 of the Canterbury Tales, we have portraits of vari- 
 ous religious personages. Let us glance at them. 
 
 First, there is a well-to-do monk, with gown 
 lined with the finest fur, a lover of good horses and 
 good living, and fond of the chase. 
 
 Ilis hed was balled, and shone as any glass, 
 And eke his face, as it hadde ben anoint, 
 lie was a lord ful fat and in good point. 
 His eyen stepe, and rolling in his head, 
 
 He was not pale as a forjiined gost, 
 A fat swan loved he best of any rost. 
 
 He cares little about the rules of his order, and 
 is bent on having a good time. 
 
 * Henry's " History of Great Britain," vol. viii. p. 366.
 
 FRIAR — CLERK PARSON. 29 
 
 This ilke monk lette oltle thinges pace. 
 And held after the newe world the trace. 
 He yave not of the text a pulled hen, 
 That saith, that hunters ben not holy men : 
 
 Next comes a friar, a mendicant, full of dalliance 
 and fair language. 
 
 He was an esy man to give penance, 
 Ther as he wiste to han a good pitance : 
 
 Therto he strong was as a champioun. 
 And knew wel the tavernes in every toun. 
 And every hosteler and gay tapstere. 
 
 He shirked beggars, was familiar with prosper- 
 ous farmers, pleased the housewives, and had more 
 skill than any one in his cloister in securing, by 
 means of soft, lisping English, a merry song, a 
 twinkling eye, even from the poorest widow, a far- 
 thing before he left. 
 
 Then comes the clerk of Oxford, as yet without 
 a benefice. 
 
 As lene was his hors as is a rake. 
 And he was not right fat, I undertake. 
 
 He had in him the spirit of scholarship, how- 
 ever, and preferred to have at his bed's head, twenty 
 books of Aristotle than rich robes or fiddle. 
 
 Of studie toke he moste cure and hede, 
 Not a word spake he more than was nede; 
 And that was said in forme and reverence, 
 And short and quike, and ful of high sentence. 
 
 On the parish parson, Chaucer bestows a rich 
 dowry of graces. He is learned, devout, diligent, 
 self-denying ; watching over his flock with tender- 
 ness, and guiding them equally by example and
 
 30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 precept. He withholds nothing necessary to com- 
 plete the character of a faithful and loving teacher. 
 
 That Christes gospel trewely vvolde preche, 
 
 • ««***«• 
 
 A better preest I trowe that nowher non is, 
 lie waited after no pompe ne reverence, 
 Ne maked him no spiced conscience, 
 But Christes lore, and his apostles twelve. 
 He taught, but first he fohved it himselve. 
 
 Quite another person is the sompnour, or sum- 
 moner, whose office it was to call any person who 
 had broken the laws of Holy Church. He had 
 a fire-red face, narrow eyes, scald brows, a beard 
 thin and scurvy, and warts and freckles, that no 
 ointment could mollify. He liked leeks, onions and 
 strong wine, and when tipsy, shouted his law Latin 
 as one mad. He was a terror to children, com- 
 muted the sentences of the arch-deacon for a fine, 
 and sought everywhere his vicious and lecherous 
 pleasures, yielding like indulgences to others on 
 terms of a bribe. 
 
 One other religious character appears in the 
 pardoner. His yellow hair flowed loosely down his 
 shoulders. 
 
 His wallet lay beforne him in his lappe, 
 Bret-ful of pardon come from Rome al hote, 
 
 • «*****♦ 
 And in a glas he hadde pigges bones, 
 
 ivhich he sold as those of saints. 
 
 But with these relikes, whanne that he fond 
 A poure persone dwelling up on lond. 
 Upon a day, he gat him more moneie 
 Than that the persone gat in mnnethes tweie.
 
 CONTRADICTIONS OF CHARACTER. 3 1 
 
 He performed his services in a loud command- 
 ing voice, denounced habitually the love of money 
 as the root of all evil, produced his bulls from Rome, 
 spoke a few words in Latin to season his discourse, 
 and admonished his hearers, 
 
 That no man be so bold, ne preest ne clerk, 
 Me to disturbe of Christes holy werk. 
 
 He then produced his relics, informed the rustics of 
 the various cures they would work on man and 
 beast, and their power to remove jealousy. He 
 unblushingly announces, to his fellow-travellers, his 
 temper of mind. 
 
 For I wol preche and beg in sondry londes, 
 I wol not do no labour with min hondes, 
 Ne niake baskettes for to live therby. 
 Because I wol not beggen idelly, 
 I wol non of the apostles contrefete : 
 I wol have money, wolle, chese and whete, 
 Al were it yeven of the pourest page. 
 Or of the pourest widewe in a village : 
 Al shulde hire children sterven for famine. 
 
 Such are the strong contradictions of character 
 that the religious world presented in the time oi 
 Chaucer, and such the preponderance of evil. 
 Over against the devout parson, appear the sleek, 
 luxurious, self-indulgent monk, with strong physical 
 appetites ; the meddlesome friar, full of low cun- 
 ning, importunate and unscrupulous ; the summoner, 
 or go-between in ecclesiastical courts, persecuting 
 the innocent, sheltering offenders, commuting pen- 
 alties, loathsome in the personal fruits of sin, and 
 full of effrontery; the pardoner, bent on gain, 
 plausible in appearance, sacrilegious in speech,
 
 32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 unconscientious in method, with a joint stock of 
 falsehood and cunning, working as an inexhaustible 
 vein of wealth, the ignorance and superstition of 
 the lower classes ; and a canon, introduced later, 
 who is deeply involved in the delusions and frauds 
 of alchemy. 
 
 There are in this picture of the religious life of 
 the times, the sharpest contradictions and the 
 highest irritations. These are of two kinds, both 
 of which strongly affected the literature of the cen- 
 tury ; the irritation of the ethical sense of a few, the 
 irritation of the common-sense of many. The one 
 result finds representation in Wiclifife, the other in 
 Chaucer. The spirit of Christianity has never been 
 so smothered under those rank overgrowths of su- 
 perstition that have shot above it, as not, from time 
 to time, to make new points of disclosure. This 
 has never been merely a fallen and decaying trunk, 
 nourishing lichen, moss and fern, but has some- 
 where sent up a fresh growth, wherewith to replace 
 and continue the primitive stock. Early and signif- 
 icant among those movements of sturdy resistance, 
 which at length resulted in the Reformation, was 
 that of Wicliffe, a rejection on moral grounds of 
 that perverted, religious life expressed in the eccle- 
 siasticism of the time. Christianity indicates its 
 independent, spiritual power, shows itself to be 
 rooted in the constitution of man and the world, by 
 the vigorous way in which it has ever opened a new 
 conflict within its own household, rejected the devel- 
 opments which oppressing, perverting circumstances 
 have fastened upon it, and, returning to initial prin-
 
 THE IRRITATION OCCASIONED. 33 
 
 ciples, has once more forced its way outward in re- 
 newed, regenerated activity. One of the purest and 
 most influential of these efforts of restoration found 
 its origin in this antagonism of the religious life of 
 England. 
 
 The second irritation was more general, but less 
 powerful than this of the rehgious sense. It sprang 
 from the exacting, dishonest and openly corrupt form 
 which religious action had assumed. It rejected 
 the monk, not because he was a monk, but because 
 he despised and laughed at the rules of his order. 
 It rejected the friar, not because he imposed con- 
 fession and penance, but because he did it in his own 
 behoof; the summoner, not as an officer of justice, 
 but for his ribaldry and extortion ; and the seller of 
 indulgences, not on account of his traffic, but be- 
 cause he dealt in sham relics. 
 
 And thus with fained flattering and japes, 
 He made the persone and the peple, his apes. 
 
 The summoner and mendicant friar were espe- 
 cially distasteful to the English. They each, in the 
 Canterbury Tales, expose the misdeeds of the other, 
 and, in a conflict of mutual abuse, are drawn out 
 and set apart for our equal and hearty detestation. 
 They both sinned against strong English feelings, 
 the one against fair dealing, and honesty between 
 man and man ; and the other against the privacy and 
 purity of the home. The mendicant was held in 
 detestation as an unmanly, impertinent beggar, who 
 pretended to pay for his keep and clothing in 
 prayers, and then shirked even this return. His 
 habitual and unforgiven sin was that, 
 2*
 
 34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 In every hous he gan to pore and prie, 
 
 and thus left no place free from his meddling and 
 mischief, his sales and pious pilfer. 
 
 The offence of the summoner, though less irri- 
 tating and constant, was not less grave. In the 
 tales to which reference has been made, one of the 
 class serves a false notice on a widow, and then 
 professes himself willing to hush up the matter for 
 twelve pence. Failing of this, he lays claim to her 
 new pan. The upshot is, that the devil, who has 
 been the travelling companion in disguise of the 
 summoner, puts in an appearance, and claims his 
 own in this wise, 
 
 Now brother, quod the devil, be not wroth; 
 Thy body and this panne ben min by right, 
 Thou shalt with me to helle yet to-night. 
 Wher thou shalt knowen of our privatee 
 More than a maister of divinitee. 
 
 While, therefore, these pertinacious, multiplied, 
 omnipresent abuses of the religious impulse found 
 a strong support in the ignorance and superstition 
 of the masses, they were also at war with stubborn 
 English instincts, a love of home, industry and 
 justice ; and were a perpetual irritant to the com- 
 mon-sense and good-will of the more intelligent. 
 The religious influence of the time, therefore, was 
 one of general restlessness, provoking satire and 
 stern attack. 
 
 The social phase of life, the second circle of 
 force that gathered about our literature, was of an 
 equally declared and extreme cast. Its prevailing 
 spirit was that of chivalry. However, the poet
 
 CHIVALRY. 35 
 
 may idealize this institution, the philanthropist can 
 only regard it as casting a slight glow over a very 
 dark and discouraging period. It grew out of 
 incessant warfare, and this under the unendurable 
 form of public and private feud, of contagious, 
 universal and interminable strife ; a state of things 
 which a lingering sentiment of humanity sought 
 feebly to remedy by the Truce of God, rescuing, 
 under the sanction of religious sentiments, a portion 
 of each week from acts of violence. The mailed 
 knight fills the historic, as well as the poetic, page ; 
 and the gentry of France, cutting down and riding 
 over their own foot-soldiers at the battle of Cressy, 
 the more quickly to reach the enemy, reveals the 
 spirit of the age. The soldier came to receive 
 much larger pay than the artisan ; and gentility 
 honored or won its rank in the tournament and on 
 the battle-field. The literature, like the life of the 
 time, was imbued with an extravagant martial spirit. 
 A large amount of composition in Western Europe 
 gave itself to inflaming the sentiments of chivalry, 
 and resulted in incalculable mischief, so far as all 
 peaceful and just life was concerned. 
 
 No permanent, civil, commercial or social good 
 could grow out of this martial mania, or bless a 
 people cursed by it. The fictions of poetry may 
 make a glowing dream of it, but the facts of his- 
 tory can only show it to have been a waking, wide- 
 spread horror ; a perpetual disruption of society, and 
 overthrow of its peaceful virtues and fruitful arts. 
 
 The courtly qualities into which chivalry was 
 baptized, were courage, loyalty, courtesy, munifi-
 
 36 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 cence. Its sentiment was honor ; its reward, love 
 Exalted as these incentives may seem, they were 
 so divorced from sober, substantial, retiring virtues ; 
 so overleaped the bounds of common-sense and 
 common honesty, as often to make their possessors 
 more implacable and infuriate than simple, native 
 savageness would have rendered them. The honor 
 of knights was one that wrought irritation among 
 themselves, and contempt toward all others ; their 
 love and courtesy were fanciful, exaggerated senti- 
 ments, ready to overstep the limits of marital obliga- 
 tion and domestic virtue. Their courage and loyalty 
 were merely the breath of praise, with which they 
 blew their own passions into an intolerable heat ; 
 and their munificence, the free, careless hand which 
 goes with rapine and tyranny. Such virtues, like 
 polished armor, may dazzle the vagrant eye, but so 
 far as they conceal, adorn and quicken the demoni- 
 ac spirit of war, they are all the worse for the bril- 
 liancy of the disguise. Prodigal splendor, thought- 
 less courage, and that magnanimity which, punctili- 
 ous to equals, makes little of the safety and the 
 happiness and the rights of inferiors that chance tc 
 lie in its path, have not much to commend them 
 to humanity. They are born of selfishness and tyr- 
 anny, and, therefore, in their ultimate elements 
 are most mean and base and worthless. 
 
 We are wont to think that women were especial- 
 ly indebted to the courtesy of chivalry, and this, in 
 a measure, is true, if we consider the violence and 
 rude passion of the times. Man as against man, 
 enforced certain restraints under this sentiment
 
 CHIVALROUS SENTIMENT. 37 
 
 It was a reduction and softening down of a rough 
 and lawless period. Yet it, itself, often rose to a 
 foolish fanaticism, or sank to gross impurity. It 
 had its " love fraternities," " love courts," leading to 
 absurdities only less than those of the religious sen- 
 timent; and instituting obligations quite in over- 
 sight of the duties of domestic life. If we were to 
 go back to the darkness of those dark days, we 
 might be glad to cheer it with the light of chivalry, 
 but fortunately we are rid of both. 
 
 Yet if men are to be brutish, we would certainly 
 desire that they might also be courageous ; if they 
 are to be proud, we would wish to temper pride 
 with courtesy ; if they are to fight, it is better they 
 should do it in fellowship, for this is partial peace ; 
 if they are to revel, that their indulgences should 
 come with social sentiments and jollity. Chivalry 
 was the deceptive bloom of unripe fruit ; those who 
 set their teeth in it, found it sharp and indigestible. 
 Chivalry gave a tint of amethyst to a bitter winter's 
 day. Those who looked out from castle windows, 
 found their delight in it, but God's poor were frozen 
 none the less. Later, as the expression of a sweet 
 and gentle heart, as the dream of poetry, it has be- 
 come quite another thing, a prodigality of nature 
 that at once satisfies the mind and feeds the senses. 
 
 Pride, in a violent and offensive form, is closely 
 connected with the ascendancy of the military 
 spirit. 
 
 Says Froissart : " When I was at Bordeaux, a 
 little before the departure of the Prince of Wales 
 on his expedition into Spain, I observed that the
 
 ^S THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 English were so proud and haughty, that they could 
 not behave to the people of other nations with any 
 appearance of civility." 
 
 Says William of Malmsbury : " Every one swell- 
 ing with pride and rancor scorns to cast a look on 
 his inferiors, disclaims his equals, and proudly 
 rivals his superiors." A Venetian traveller gives 
 this description of the English : " They think that 
 there are no other men than themselves, and no 
 other world but England ; and whenever they see a 
 handsome foreigner, they say that he looks like an 
 Englishman." This pride, enhanced, doubtless, by 
 the superiority of the Norman to the Saxon, was 
 also greatly strengthened by the personal superior- 
 ity of the knight, encased in armor, to soldiers of 
 inferior grade. To the inevitable arrogance of mil- 
 itary authority, was thus added almost complete 
 personal impunity. The musket-ball, when it came, 
 was a great leveller, and powder has been the most 
 democratic of inventions. Modern society, though 
 in fact widening the real differences in character 
 and advantages between the high and low, has 
 greatly reduced the pride that attends upon these 
 distinctions. The knight, scarcely superior to his 
 followers in cultivation, was thrown by the conditions 
 of his life on terms of familiar intercourse, almost 
 intimacy, with them. With all his haughtiness, he 
 mingled habitually with his servants, and accepted 
 close personal service from them. He combined, in 
 one character, the arrogant leader and jovial com- 
 panion, drawing near to his retainers in tastes and 
 Bentiments, while he stood apart from them in rank. 
 
 I
 
 RELATION OF LEADER AND RETAINER. 39 
 
 Thus the rough leader both swears with and swears 
 at his comrades. 
 
 The luxury of the nobility showed itself chiefly 
 in food and dress. Their castles, constructed for 
 defense, were, in most cases, but narrow and cheer- 
 less abodes. Their feasts were of a hearty and 
 rollicking, rather than of a refined and luxurious, 
 character. Sixty fat oxen are mentioned as an 
 item in one of them. A love of hospitality early 
 belonged to the English. Says the same Italian 
 traveller, " They think that no greater honor can be 
 conferred or received, than to invite others to eat 
 with them ; and they would sooner give five or six 
 ducats to provide an entertainment for a person, 
 than a groat to assist him in any distress." * Over 
 against this luxury of the few, we have to put very 
 general poverty and a low grade of life, especially in 
 the country and villages. The laws were very 
 inadequately administered, and property was inse- 
 cure. The peasantry in their houses of " mud and 
 sticks " were often at the mercy of depredators, and 
 agriculture was greatly depressed. This is shown 
 by the frequent and severe famines, and the various 
 forms of pestilence, the plague, the sweating sick- 
 ness, the black tongue, that swept through the coun- 
 try, at times almost depopulating it. Discourage- 
 ment, poverty and extreme ignorance hovered over 
 the masses. Debased by superstition, and familiar 
 with injury, they had too little to hope for, and too 
 little to lose, to offer much resistance. In the open 
 country, so weak were the laws, there was little pro- 
 
 * Knight's " History of England," vol. ii. p. 254.
 
 40 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 tection for industry, and hence little motive to it. 
 The home of the peasant was open to plunder, with- 
 out hope of redress. I'he coat of arms of one of 
 these marauders bore this inscription, " I am Cap- 
 tain Warner, commander of a troop of robbers, an 
 enemy to God, without pity and without mercy."* 
 In the cities, especially in London, the middle 
 classes first learned their power, and by commerce 
 and the arts climbed into strength. The domestic 
 Wrtues had yet secured but a slight foothold, and 
 the homes of the nobles with their heavy, cheerless 
 walls, and large dining-halls, pushed into the fore- 
 ground the ideas of feasting and defense. War stood 
 on the right side, and riot on the left. 
 
 The character of woman always goes far to de- 
 fine social influences, as she, above all, is subject to 
 them, and they in turn are, in large part, in her 
 keeping. There are two types of female character 
 that appear in Chaucer, the fruits, on opposite sides, 
 of the spirit of the age. The first is represented by 
 the prioress, simple, pleasing, and dainty, winning 
 in manners, gentle and pitiful in disposition. 
 
 " At mete was she wel ytaughte withalle ; 
 She lette no morsel from hire hppes falle, 
 Ne wette hire fingres in hire sauce depe. 
 Wel coude she carie a morsel, and wel kepe, 
 Thatte no drope ne fell upon hire brest." 
 
 Pretty and agreeable accomplishments were 
 these, when one without forks shared his trencher 
 with his companion. Forks, needful instruments as 
 they are of refinement, seem to have fallen earlier to 
 
 * Henry's History, vol. viii. p. 386.
 
 FEMALE CHARACTER. 41 
 
 the Fiji than to Englishmen. It is probable, 
 therefore, that human flesh was one of the first mor- 
 sels held in dainty contemplation at a fork's end.* 
 
 Quite opposite to her, is the type seen in the 
 wife of Bath, skilled in weaving and domestic 
 manufacture, bold in bearing, and, withal, a woman 
 of large travel. 
 
 " Thrice had she been at Jerusalem." She was 
 loud in laughter and in talk. 
 
 " Bold was hire face, and fayre and rede of hew. 
 Housbondes at the chirche dore had she had five." 
 
 Jaunty, thrifty, and fearless, careful neither in 
 speech nor act, she made herself formidable either 
 as a spouse or a companion. Her latest and best 
 conjugal adjustment was this : 
 
 " And whan that I had getten unto me 
 By maistrie all the soverainetee, 
 And that he sayd, min oweu trewe wif, 
 Do as thee list, the ternie of all thy lif, 
 Kepe thin honour, and kepe eke min estat ; 
 After that day we never had debat." 
 
 A like and stronger contrast is there between 
 such a character as Grisilde and the hostess of 
 the Tabard ; the one softening the harsh, extreme 
 tyranny of her lord by patient submission and un- 
 conquerable affection ; the other striving perpetually 
 to goad and exasperate her husband into an ill- 
 nature equal to her own. 
 
 " By Goddes bones, whan I bete my knaves, 
 She bringeth me the grete clobbed staves, 
 And cryeth ; slee the dogges everich on, 
 And breke hem bothe bak and every bon." 
 
 * Pre- Historic Times, p. 454.
 
 42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 These contrasts belong to a period of rude 
 domination, where the only choice for woman lay 
 between the extremes of submission and resistance ; 
 between coarse strength, lawless, unlovely and in- 
 vulnerable force ; and meek endurance, the persua- 
 sion of patience, the gentle, admirable graces of 
 weakness. One may love these virtues, though 
 he hates the violence that evokes them. English 
 society in the time of Chaucer was still in that 
 savage state in which woman must either shy and 
 dodge the brutality about her, making such a show 
 as she was able of the mild and submissive traits 
 of character ; or, bursting the bonds of slavery 
 and nature at once, become formidable by becom- 
 ing unendurable, setting up her safeguards in 
 the violence of vituperation. Thus we have the 
 shrew ; a character so familiar in the early drama. 
 The virtues and vices of bondage partake alike of 
 its taint. 
 
 The church sinned against woman in two re- 
 spects. While it made of marriage a sacrament, 
 it, nevertheless, by insisting on the celibacy of the 
 clergy, and constructing its religious orders on the 
 same principle, gave an inferior, an impure char- 
 acter to this relation, especially fitted to reflect 
 discredit upon woman. Far worse than this : by 
 the licentiousness of its chosen servants it invaded 
 the household, and established, as vicious connec- 
 tions, those relations which it scorned to accept in 
 good faith. Thus the religious corps became as 
 numerous, as searching, and as unclean as the frogs 
 of Egypt, which penetrated into all quarters, into
 
 LICENTIOUSNESS OF LANGUAGE. 43 
 
 the ovens and kneading-troughs, leaving their filthy 
 trail wherever they went. Henry, l^ishop of Liege, 
 could unblushingly boast the birth of twenty-two 
 children in fourteen years. 
 
 Chaucer says, that many hundred years ago, 
 England was full of fairies and elfs, but now every 
 field and every stream so swarms with friars, thick 
 as motes in a sunbeam, that the jolly crew have 
 altogether fled. He delivers the last telling blow 
 of his irony in the words : 
 
 " Women may now go safely up and doun, 
 In every bush, and under every tree, 
 Ther is non other incubus but he. 
 And he ne will don hem no dishonour." 
 
 Such is the gain the poetic satire tosses to view 
 the presence of scrupulous, meek-eyed friars, in 
 the place of wanton, mischief-making fairies, in the 
 groves and along the by-paths. 
 
 One of the most undeniable social features of 
 the time, showing their half-barbaric cast, was that 
 sensuality of language which is the cheap dye of 
 vulgar wit. The taint of it is especially strong in 
 Chaucer, frequently quite overpowering the poetic 
 aroma. One wonders what evil beast has strayec 
 among these flowers. I confess to a certain shame 
 in speaking of Chaucer to the healthy and pure, so 
 far is he from wholesome companionship. As mii- 
 rored in the Canterbury Tales, English speech was 
 at once gross and licentious. The offence is pal- 
 pable to the very senses, and not to the moral 
 instincts simply. Startled by the sudden burden 
 of the air, we hasten on, nor care to know all the
 
 44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 grounds of the wrong done us. Distance is qui 
 instant and only remedy. Those superior instincts 
 of our nature, by which we lift the eye and thought 
 from the animal portions and gross functions of 
 our being, by which we move amid Contamination 
 as light unstained of evil things, were all for- 
 gotten ; and men, as swine, rooted for food wh^re 
 food chanced to be. There is no apology for this ; 
 it is the personal impurity, the filth unwashed away, 
 that remain from a savage life. There is only one 
 point of reduction we have to make. Language, 
 before it is cleansed of a given license, does not, 
 to those who then use it, bring the same gross 
 imagery and rank offence, that it necessarily does 
 to those, who, from an advanced position, for a mo- 
 ment, return to it. Though it is not true, that lan- 
 guage and life, the exterior form and interior fact of 
 virtue, are independent of each other ; that ribaldry 
 does not taint the blood, and burn as fire in the 
 bones, it is true, that coarseness of speech and 
 grossness of action, owing a portion of their start- 
 ling effect upon us to the want of familiarity, are 
 more consistent with substantial purity in those who 
 are habituated to them, than they at first sight seem 
 to be. Enough ; we thank God there are five cen- 
 turies between us and this surface sewerage of 
 early English society. Vice is buried deeper, and 
 by so much leaves the atmosphere purer, now than 
 then. 
 
 Our third topic is that of language. For the 
 first two hundred years following the Conquest, the 
 divisions of speech seem to have been strongly de-
 
 LANGUAGE. 45 
 
 fined. Latin, the language of the church, was the 
 universal tongue, the medium of communication on 
 topics of religion and philosophy. French was the 
 speech of the court and nobles ; and Saxon, of the 
 mass of the nation. Layamon's Chronicle, a work 
 of thirty-two thousand lines, written in Saxon, a 
 century and a half after the Conquest, contains 
 scarcely fifty French words. All of these lan- 
 guages were used carelessly, and, with the excep- 
 tion of Latin, chiefly in speech. They, therefore, 
 underwent rapid changes. Latin was saved from 
 permanent debasement by possessing a fixed point 
 of reversion and revision in classical literature, in a 
 standard previously set up, and which none could 
 abrogate or permanently modify. We may well 
 believe, however, that Latin sutiered much perver- 
 sion in its ordinary use. This is shown in what is 
 termed Leonine Verse, usually devoted to satire, 
 and constructed on accent and rhyme in neglect of 
 quantity; also in Macaronic Poetry, an amalgam of 
 different languages. Two archbishops in succes- 
 sion cautioned the universities against such forms 
 as ; ego curret, tu curret, curens est ego, pressing 
 the point that they were not correct. Some have 
 supposed from the constancy with which Latin was 
 used in accounts, that there was a very general 
 familiarity with it. When, however, we look at 
 those accounts, we see that very little knowledge of 
 Latin was required for their composition. A few 
 connecting phrases were sufficient, and rendered 
 the same exhaustive service as a half-dozen words 
 to a court crier. We give an abridged example :
 
 46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LlTliRAiUKE. 
 
 "Et pro uno seedcod empto III:I, 
 Et pro factura de drawgere Hid. 
 Et pro uno dongecart empto XlVd."* 
 
 The Norman French, in the latter stages ol 
 change, as the nobles were slowly adopting the 
 English, must, as a spoken language, have had a 
 very shifting, careless law of use. This change 
 seems to have occurred mainly in the fourteenth 
 century. It was accompanied by the consolida- 
 tion of the nation to which reference has been 
 made ; by a larger transfer of French romances 
 to the English ; and by that new national char- 
 acter shown in the works of Chaucer, marked 
 though they are with French idioms and filled 
 with French words. The Saxon, the neglected 
 tongue of the common people, losing its organic 
 force, first confounded and then dropped its gram- 
 matical inflexions. It thus passed into the simple 
 and hospitable English, which, almost devoid of 
 inflexions, could receive all the words of other 
 languages that any chose to bring to it. The 
 Saxon gave the bulk of its vocabulary to the 
 English, left behind its distinctive and exacting 
 features of grammar, and with the simplest pos- 
 sible construction, passed over as a new language 
 to new-comers. That English pronunciation, un- 
 der such a derivation, should be a network of 
 perplexities and anomalies, is not surprising. 
 
 The English, in its very limited and fragmen- 
 tary grammar, and comprehensive vocabulary, arose 
 from social exigencies, which the nation inevitably 
 
 * Henry's History of Great Britain, vol. viii. p. 271.
 
 LANGUAGP.. 47 
 
 and unconsciously strove to meet ; and from the 
 fresh nationality which all parties were combining 
 to develop. In the fourtejnth century, the unit- 
 ing, constructive forces, had so far come to prevail, 
 that a new language, open for all uses, and ready 
 for a great career, was the result. Chaucer laid 
 hold of this germinant speech, disclosed its power 
 helped farther to determine the proportion of ele- 
 ments which should belong to it, and passed it on, 
 accelerated in growth and enriched by his handling. 
 He justified the language to itself and to others by 
 showing what it could do. He strengthened and 
 honored it by great literary works, and thus com- 
 mended it to public favor. It has been observed, 
 that the English has changed less than other Eu- 
 ropean languages in the years that have intervened 
 between the present and the fourteenth century. 
 For this fact, several reasons may be given. The 
 excellence and eminence of Chaucer served to set 
 up a standard, to establish early an authority in 
 the language. This conservative tendency was 
 greatly strengthened later by the translations of 
 the Bible, intimately connected with each other, 
 generally circulated, and closely united to popular 
 speech. Moreover, our chief literary period, that 
 of Elizabeth, lies relatively well back in our his- 
 tory, and thus early stamped on the language its 
 character. The linguistic fact of most significance 
 in the fourteenth century, is the junction then 
 effected in the elements of our vocabulary. We 
 may represent this union as the flowing of the 
 Norman into the Saxon, receiving from it a new
 
 ^8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 law and direction, and passing on with it as Eng- 
 lish. While, however, there was an influx in 
 volume of French words in the fourteenth cen- 
 tury, many smaller tributaries from it and the 
 Latin, earlier and later, passed without observa- 
 tion into the new tongue, the great river of English 
 .>peech. 
 
 The fourth and last circle of influence which 
 gathered about our early literature, were the forms 
 it assumed. It was almost exclusively a literature 
 of poetry. The prose works of the time have an 
 archaic and moral interest for us, rather than an 
 artistic one. Poetry, not only comes first in litera- 
 ture proper, it is likely long to remain the almost 
 exclusive feature of literary art, and is sure to 
 retain the first position in all creative periods. 
 Poetry owes so much to form, is so far the best 
 expression of a shaping artistic force, as at once 
 to imply its presence, and to invite its labor. Nor 
 is it strange that we have poetry before we have 
 prose, any more than it is strange that we have 
 cathedrals, while those who build them still live in 
 hovels. The strongest, most universal, most ele- 
 vating impulse will be the first to command art. 
 This in architecture is religion ; and in literature 
 is imaginative sentiment. Not till men have set- 
 tled down to a faithful, thorough view of life, will 
 they value prose as a vehicle of truth, a thesaurus 
 of facts ; and not till art has so diffused itself as to 
 give grace and expression to the familiar, homely 
 things of daily life, will prose become artistic, and 
 pass up into literature.
 
 PROSE. 49 
 
 Moreover, poetry has a definite form, a sensible 
 impression, which allows its oral transfer without 
 change, its rehearsal without shifting, aimless 
 modifications. While language lives chiefly on 
 the tongue and in the ear, the rhythm of poetry 
 is the first luxury of speech, and takes to its ser- 
 vice, the universal, easily aroused love of music, 
 The minstrel blends in his rehearsal two arts, and 
 draws the heart after him with double bonds. The 
 changes also which rhythm calls for are readily 
 made in these flexible periods of speech, and them- 
 *;elves become controlling, formative laws. 
 
 Prose, on the other hand, in its typical service, 
 instruction, — for it is not till later, it furnishes the 
 novel stealing in part the purposes of poetry, — be- 
 longs to written language, and periods of patient 
 thought ; and implies, therefore, that the useful is 
 holding even sway with the beautiful, reflection 
 with imagination. Art, in the fourteenth century, 
 rested as yet with poetry. We have, indeed, prose 
 in two most diverse forms, but prose that serves 
 rather to fix a date than to illuminate it. 
 
 Sir John Mandeville, in the middle of the cen 
 tury, gives us his gossipy, fugacious travels that 
 stint at no marvels, and grant to myths as easy 
 admittance as if the author were at a fairy tale. 
 There are thus huddled together, fancies for the 
 poet and a few facts for the historian ; as first reap- 
 ers, on the margin of a great field, may gather and 
 bind in one sheaf, grass and flowers and scattered 
 heads of grain. The only other prose author re- 
 quiring mention is Wicliftc. His was a simple, 
 3
 
 50 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Sturdy, moral purpose ; a translation of the Bible into 
 the vernacular, the English of common life. In this 
 he was aided by others. The simplicity and spirit- 
 uality of their motive, and the direct, colloquial 
 force of the current language, gave to this version a 
 character like that which still belongs to our Eng- 
 lish Bible. This translation, appearing in 1480, 
 had a wide circulation, though unaided by printing, 
 and passed from hand to hand with danger. 
 
 It wrought secretly in the English mind for a 
 century and a half, waiting for that second and 
 more fortunate initiation of a like work under Tyn- 
 dale, which gives the leading date to our present 
 version. 
 
 These, then, are the domestic influences, the 
 coarse and conflicting forces which joined hands, 
 and gathered close around the growth of our liter- 
 ary art : a religion overlying offensively the sur- 
 face of society, at war equally with the honest in- 
 stincts of the human heart, and with the seeds of 
 life hidden under its own corruptions ; a social 
 temper, extravagant and absurd in its fanciful vir- 
 tues, gross in its real vices, fighting the deadliest 
 sins with a poetic, fictitious sentiment ; a language 
 gorged with wayward, unorganized material, and 
 waiting for some mastery of mind, some fire of the 
 spirit to lift, consolidate and temper it ; and a lit- 
 erature of poetry, that, with careless, uncritical 
 strength, used or abused, as happened, whatever 
 came to hand, that grew and flourished with native 
 vigor, on the elements about it, rank as these some- 
 times were.
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 Chaucer. — Appearnnce. — Character. — National Poet, {a) in Direo 
 
 tion of Composition, {/>) in Language. 
 Progressive Poet, (a) in Religion, {/>) in Politics, (r) in Poetry. — 
 
 Choice of Themes and Forms. — His Dramatic Power.— 
 
 Pathos, Humor. 
 Relation of Art and Reform. 
 The Retrogressive Period. — Due, ((?) to Rejection of Reform, {l>) 
 
 Civil Wars. — Printing. — Place of the Moral Element. 
 
 We have now spoken of both the foreign and 
 domestic influences that gathered about the four- 
 teenth century, the initiative period of English Ht- 
 eraturc. There was but one man of such power 
 that we need to consider him separately; to mark 
 the control of his genius as itself a distinct element 
 of growth. That man was Chaucer. Though the 
 times in a measure circumscribe genius, genius 
 gives to the times the brightest light that is in 
 them. The position and material of the illumina- 
 tion are found in the age ; but how far its pointed 
 flame shall ascend is determined by him who feeds 
 it. Without Chaucer, the fourteenth century would 
 flicker and glimmer in our literary history with a 
 light but little greater than that of antecedent years. 
 If the dreary, tedious Gower, for a time at least the 
 friend of Chaucer, remained as the chief represen- 
 tative of early English poetry, few indeed would 
 seek those pale rays, or much value them when 
 found. It was the task of genius to lift the period 
 
 (sO
 
 52 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 into permanent distinction, and shed upon it its 
 serene glory. Gower, ambling his Pegasus with 
 placid indifference along a way of Latin or French 
 or English verse, as it chanced, alike plodding in 
 all, established the average grade of the time, 
 spreads out, in his njultitudinous verse, the Egyp- 
 tian plain, above which towers in strength Chaucer, 
 a sphynx that renders conspicuous and memorable 
 through the silent repose of many centuries the en- 
 trance of that way, which leads in literature to our 
 great national labors. 
 
 Chaucer was of moderate stature, full form, of 
 somewhat retiring manners, with a sharp, humorous 
 and downcast eye ; a lover of books, and good liv- 
 ing; of large experience, and varied intercourse 
 with men. His life was not merely one of literary 
 activity, but of extensive public service. He was 
 directly attached to the court, and assigned missions 
 of trust at home and abroad. 
 
 In quality of manhood he was thoroughly Eng- 
 lish. English in the outward, observant cast of his 
 mind; in his honest handling of facts without gloss 
 or concealment ; in his humor, his good-fellowship, 
 his love of men and their doings. Says Browne, in 
 his enforcement of this point, " The national char- 
 acter is a root of bravery rising to a stem of strong, 
 social feeling, gnarled and twisted just above the 
 ground with genuine fun. Said to be slow to talk, 
 the English are good fellows through it all. T.o 
 put it differently, they are before all things human 
 and sociable. In this sense, who is an Englishman 
 more English than Chaucer. He loves the haunts
 
 THE ENGLISH CHARACTER OF CHAUCER. 53 
 
 of men, the places where they dwell, the episodes 
 of mutual need that bring and keep them together; 
 meat and drink ; industry and play ; the uprisings 
 and downsittings, the incomings and outgoings of 
 men and women." * 
 
 Thus English in character,. Chaucer is the first 
 national poet. This national force of the man is 
 seen in many directions. His composition was 
 fitted to interest all classes. Unlike the ballad or 
 the romance or the treatise, it was directed to no 
 one division of society, but brought amusement to 
 all. It broke away from the literary traditions and 
 restricted tastes of ranks and classes, and gave itself 
 to general themes. This is especially true of his 
 later and greater production, the Canterbury Tales 
 Nothing could be more broad and catholic than 
 these, open to the Englishman as English, and to 
 man as man. 
 
 This nationality of taste is also seen in his uni- 
 form choice of the English language. He earl}) 
 translated the Romaunt of the Rose, one of the 
 most popular of French poems, by way of adding 
 interest and grace to his mother tongue. He ac- 
 quired that mastery over the English, that ease of 
 versification and aptness of expression in it, which 
 bespeak one in love with his language, aiding it and 
 aided by it in equal proportion. This clinging to 
 the national speech, the coarse vernacular, and 
 building it up in literary beauty and strength, dis- 
 close the truly national bent of his feelings and 
 tastes. This, too, was at a time when the English 
 
 * Chaucer's England, vol. i. p. 47.
 
 54 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 had hardly emerged from tlie disgrace of its servi- 
 tude, and when imimpassioned poets, like Gower, 
 wandered far from the popular heart in Latin and 
 in French. There was a national vindication and 
 national service in this action of Chaucer ; and a 
 flavor, therefore, of national gratitude should min- 
 gle with our admiration of him. 
 
 Again, Chaucer was a progressive poet ; not a 
 radical reformatory poet, but one who always and 
 easily perceived the line of improvement, and had a 
 predilection for it ; chose to walk along it, at least 
 so far as good fellowship would allow him. Thus, 
 though by no means a reformer in the sense in 
 which Wicliffe was one, and ready doubtless to 
 render a general assent to the doctrines and even 
 the superstitions of the church, he had a keen 
 discernment of its many abuses in practice, and 
 lashes the delinquents with unsparing satire. It 
 is thought that he owed some of his predilection 
 for English, and vigor in it, to an acquaintance with 
 Wicliffe, and to ihe Piers Ploughman of Lang- 
 lande. This poem, of a religious, satirical, alle- 
 gorical and erratic character, fitted for popular cir- 
 culation, was more vigorous and of sharper insight 
 than any other production of the period save the 
 works of Chaucer. " It was written with as intense 
 an earnestness, and as untiring a search after truth 
 as any prorluction in the English language." "•••■ Its 
 occasional felicity of expression and popular cast, 
 its satirical and social features, constituted it a 
 fitting study for the author of the Canterbury 
 
 * Introduction of the Early English Text Society.
 
 Chaucer's political spirit. 55 
 
 Tales. It has also about the same measure of the 
 reformatory spirit as that which fell to the works 
 of Chaucer, though it is certainly written in a 
 much sterner mood. While Chaucer fits his satire 
 to his easy and ethically indolent temper, it is never- 
 theless directed with unerring instinct to the right 
 mark. 
 
 He was equally progressive in his political 
 spirit. The son of a trader of the city of Lon- 
 don, he entered earnestly into the conflict of the 
 mayoralty of the city in behalf of John of North- 
 ampton, the candidate of municipal rights and re- 
 form. The proximity of London to Westminster, 
 and its growing commercial strength, made it jealous 
 of court influences, progressive and liberal in its 
 sentiments. For his participation in this contest, 
 Chaucer fell under the displeasure of the court. 
 His democratic sentiments appear also in his writ- 
 ings, in the cast of his characters, and in the words 
 he puts into their mouths. " Straw for your gen- 
 tillesse," exclaims the host of the Tabard, and we 
 feel that it is Chaucer, speaking out of a healthy 
 English heart. He repeatedly expresses in full 
 his estimate of rank ; as in the wife of Bath's tale : 
 
 " But for ye speken of swiche gentillesse, 
 As is descended out of old richesse, 
 That therefore shullen ye be gentilmen ; 
 Swiche arrogance n'is not worth an hen. 
 
 And he that wol han pris of his genterie, 
 
 For he was boren of a gentil hous, 
 And had his elders noble and vertuous. 
 And n'ill himselven do no gentil dedes,
 
 56 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Ne folwe his gentil auncestrie, that ded is, 
 He n'is not gentil, be he duk or erl ; 
 For vilains sinful dedes make a cherl. 
 For gentillesse n'is but the renomee 
 Of thin auncestres, for hir high bountee, 
 Which is a strange thing to thy persone: 
 Thy gentillesse cometh fro God alone. 
 Than cometh our veray gentillesse of grace, 
 It was no thing bequethed us with our place." 
 
 The fundamental principle of human liberty is 
 not merely set forth in this passage, but the 
 grounds of it are vigorously urged. Thus, in the 
 birth of the English nation, in the obscure begin- 
 nings of that great controversy, which, ripening 
 from generation to generation, has given form and 
 character to English history, and achieved the liber- 
 ty of the freest and most peaceful of the nations of 
 the earth, a voice was found, the voice of her first 
 great poet, to ring forth the rights of manhood and 
 virtue. 
 
 In his own art, poetry, Chaucer was equallji 
 progressive, though he reaches his highest results 
 by a growth rather than by a leap. The poetry of 
 his time was made narrow and puerile by the ex- 
 travagant and artificial sentiment of chivalry ; and 
 by a tendency to obscure, trivial allegory. Both 
 of these restraints Chaucer cast off, and at length 
 reached a form of composition as direct, natural and 
 entertaining as that of any of his successors. God- 
 win says very strongly of him, " While the roman- 
 tic writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 
 are not less exuberant than Homer in the descrip- 
 tion of blows and wounds and fighting fields, Chau- 
 cer has not prostituted one line to the fashionable
 
 ALLEGORY. 57 
 
 pursuit."'*' We owe much to this better, broader 
 tendency of Chaucer. His works helped quietly to 
 displace the literature of chivalry, and to breathe 
 into English letters a more serene and comprehen- 
 sive spirit. We thus had no need of a Cervantes 
 to arrest with satire the extravagance and feeble- 
 ness of an effete system. This early acceptance of 
 real, common life as his subject shows the humanity 
 of Chaucer, and the penetrative, commanding char- 
 acter of his mind. 
 
 The taste for allegory was inwoven with that of 
 chivalry, and resulted in conceits still more remote 
 and fanciful. It was also united with a belief in 
 enchantments, and a constant intervention of super- 
 natural agents in the absorbing affairs of knight- 
 hood. Acceptable allegory, from the artificial form 
 of its composition, can occur but rarely in literature. 
 It belongs, on the whole, to rude periods and un- 
 cultivated minds. Device, cunning contrivance, a 
 spirit of riddles accompany a state of semi-enlight- 
 enment, in which the mind delights in its own gym- 
 nastic feats ; not yet sobered by a clear, direct view 
 of outward beauty, or brought down to a quiel 
 search into the increasing wonders of knowledge 
 Early English literature is full of allegory, the rude 
 mind being pleased with the play and illusion of a 
 double meaning, when it cared little for the senti- 
 ments involved. Moreover a predominant imagina- 
 tion gave easy and perfect personification to ab- 
 stract qualities, and Messrs. Do-well, Do-better and 
 Do-best became an effective, substantial oligar- 
 
 * Life of Chaucer, vol. ii. p. 220. 
 3*
 
 58 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 chy in the kingdom of virtue. It was only when 
 these and like conceptions came forth from the 
 world of ideas as visible figures, ready, with ex- 
 tended hands, to take partners, and become com 
 panions in the sports and labors of men, that alle- 
 gory, freely entering the thoughts by the door of a 
 vigorous fancy, exerted a controlling influence over 
 the ordinary mind. Thus religion has never been 
 able in illiterate periods to keep sufficiently in the 
 background the tendency to personification, and 
 angels and demons, swarming in on either hand, 
 have overpowered the rational, voluntary life of 
 man. This extravagance of allegory easily united 
 Itself to that of chivalry, and gave rise to produc- 
 tions fanciful and puerile. The earlier works of 
 Chaucer, The Court of Love, The Assembly of 
 Fowls, The Flower and the Leaf, Chaucer's Dream 
 were constructed under the influence of this prev- 
 alent taste. The House of Fame is in the best 
 vein of allegory, and the great poet is less ham- 
 pered than another by the artificial and the false. 
 It is plainly to be seen, that not till his later works 
 did Chaucer win his entire liberty, and give himself 
 fearlessly to the simple, native force of his theme. 
 In the Canterbury Tales, allegory disappears, and 
 we have once more the plain, pleasing conditions 
 of daily life. 
 
 In language we have already marked the pro- 
 gressive spirit of Chaucer. He had the insight to 
 Bee, and the feeling to greet, the strength of the 
 new-born tongue ; and by this sympathy with 
 rising greatness, and coming times, exerted an
 
 Chaucer's dramatic power. 59 
 
 influence incalculably more than would otnerwise 
 have fallen to him. His works in Latin would have 
 been as seed stored under lock and key ; in Eng- 
 lish, they fell into a virgin soil, and with them, and 
 under their shadow, have arisen the trees, shrubs 
 and flowers of a broad, prolific land. 
 
 We have thus far spoken of those general char- 
 acteristics of the works of Chaucer which made 
 them at the time especially significant ; we now 
 turn to their more intrinsic and peculiar qualities. 
 Without central, creative force, these radiating in- 
 fluences would have speedily fallen off. 
 
 As the great work of Chaucer is the Canter- 
 bury Tales, it is common, resting his merits on this, 
 to speak of him as possessed of high dramatic 
 power. Its general prologue contains a series of 
 characters introduced with sharp delineation ; while 
 the connecting prologues of the several stories pre- 
 sent brief, but spirited, dialogue. These portions 
 fall sensibly short of dramatic composition in its 
 pure form, yet imply something of the same power. 
 The dramatic writer is creative rather than descrip- 
 tive, works from within, causes character to grow 
 up before us from its living constituents in words 
 and actions. The narrator, the novelist is as often 
 descriptive as creative ; works by observation, and 
 is more exterior to the circumstances and parties he 
 delineates. Yet he cannot, though more aided by 
 description, prosper by it alone. With true drama- 
 tic force he must set his characters in action, and 
 from time to time give them the play of lifelike dia- 
 logue. The dramatist moves exclusively in the
 
 6o THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 vigorous elements of speech and action ; the nar- 
 rator supports his personages and unites his events 
 with the lighter, more facile resources of descrip- 
 tion. It may well happen, therefore, that one, like 
 Fielding, should prosper as a novelist, and fail as a 
 dramatist. Keen observation goes far to give suc- 
 cess in the one undertaking ; while, in the other, 
 this must have passed over into intuitive insight, 
 and easy instinctive development. If, therefore, 
 we withhold the term dramatic from Chaucer in its 
 full, precise form, we must concede it in its rudi- 
 ments, as expressing that pictorial power which 
 deals in a living way with men and their actions ; 
 and finds the characters whom it calls up propor- 
 tionate, natural and pliant to its purposes. This 
 power Chaucer possessed in a high degree, and the 
 people of his tales come before us as a veritable 
 troop of pilgrims, each with the mark of an individ- 
 ual character and of a peculiar calling strongly on 
 him. We come at the life of the century through 
 this motley company, as they file out of the court- 
 yard of the inn ; we reach its temper, and catch the 
 flavor of its sentiments, as certainly as we do those 
 of our own society in the streets of our cities. When 
 the artist sketches them, trotting leisurely on, in 
 loose array, marshalled by my host of the Tabard, 
 we know them each and all ; they are as familiar to 
 us in garb and carriage as the persons who, in apt 
 illustration, face a descriptive page in Dickens. 
 
 Chaucer, like all who excel in the delineation 
 of character, was a master of humor and pathos. 
 These are the light and shade of every human pic-
 
 HUMOR AND PATHOS. 6\ 
 
 ture, and must everywhere inter-penetrate each 
 other in shifting proportions. They give to each 
 other by contrast and by change intensity and re- 
 lief. As light and darkness are expressed in de- 
 grees, turn upon the diverse state of one element, 
 so pathos and humor, the sober and the sportive, 
 are one living, sympathetic impulse differently act 
 ed on, met by diverse forces in the outside world. 
 The transition from one to the other is safe and 
 easy, when the artist feels alike the force of both, 
 and floats on an emotional current, that gathers, of 
 its own bias, deep and sombre shadows under the 
 overhanging bank, or glides gayly, noisily down the 
 steep incline. 
 
 Chaucer was strongly predisposed to humor. 
 His serenity and good-nature led him into the sun 
 shine. He loved to take things lightly, occupied 
 with their surface play, with only such brief glances 
 into their mysteries and woes as would allow him 
 to return with unbroken spirits. His humor is a 
 well-meaning, pleasant sprite, that can only be sad- 
 dened for a moment by the flying shadow of grief, 
 and, easily shirking the burden, comes back with 
 wonted good-nature and relish to the trifles, the 
 haps and mishaps of intercourse. 
 
 Closely allied to this sportive vein of Chaucer is 
 his vulgarity. He has the sensual vulgarity of 
 grossness, up to, or very nearly up to, his times. 
 Yet it is not the sin, the filth, but the fun of the 
 thing that he is after ; and so manifest is this, that 
 we laugh away in part our irritation and shame. We 
 feel that we have been caught, yet so fairly caught,
 
 62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 that we are unwilling to be angry. Laughter is 
 wholesome, and the malignant spirits of irreverence, 
 the impure spirits of unseemly jesting, are in a 
 measure exorcised by it. As malarious vapor rapidly 
 disappears under the open sky, and requires to be 
 confined in a chamber, or shut up in a close court, 
 to become deadly, so vice, held within a vicious 
 heart, is tenfold pestilential, and shoots out through 
 the bitter word, like a scalding jet of steam. With 
 Chaucer, vulgarity lay under the broad heavens, an 
 offensive fact indeed, but one with which he had 
 no more to do than another. He chose to laugh, 
 others might run away and hide, if they pleased. 
 So much perhaps may be fairly said in extenuation ; 
 yet these low, sensual features remain, a thing of 
 bad significance. One needs to know the moral 
 constitution of the recipient, or he may breathe pes- 
 tilence in this atmosphere. If one goes to Chaucer 
 for pleasure, he eats honey from the carcase of a 
 lion ; while he feeds one sense, he may have occa- 
 sion to close others. Yet with all we acquit him of 
 the lasciviousness of later periods. 
 
 While society is the chosen theme of Chaucer, 
 he has a kindly love of nature. He treats of it 
 without analysis and without interpretation ; but 
 with a quick perception of its pleasant, cheerful, 
 aspects. Thus he speaks of the mornhig in the 
 Squiere's Tale : 
 
 Up riseth freshe Canace hireselve, 
 
 As rody and bright, as the yonge Sonne, 
 
 That in the ram is foure degrees yronne ;
 
 THE POET NOT A REFORMER. 63 
 
 Tlie vapour, which that fro the erthe glode, 
 Maketh the sonne to seme rody and brode : 
 But natheles, it was so faire a sight, 
 That it made all hir hertes for to light, 
 "What for the seson, and the morwening, 
 And for the foules that she herde sing. 
 For right anon she wiste what they ment. 
 Right by hir song, and knew al hir intent. 
 
 An exterior appreciation of the good and beauty 
 of the world is the first spontaneous tribute of the 
 poetic spirit to nature; an analytic, penetrative and 
 spiritual interpretation of it belongs to a period of 
 more reflection. 
 
 From these characteristics of Chaucer, his 
 national and progressive temper, his strong sympa- 
 thies with men, his sense of the abuses under which 
 they suffered, and his good-will to them, we see that 
 he felt appreciatively the moral forces of his age, and 
 that his genius ripened under them, both in the 
 direction and form of his labors. He was not, it is 
 true, a reformer; artists as artists are rarely, if ever 
 so. An urgent, cogent, ethical sentiment eats a 
 man up, gives the soul an intensity and velocity that 
 are sublime, perhaps, but not beautiful. The true 
 poet of a period feels the moral elements at work 
 about him, but is not driven by them. He is left 
 sufficiently free to treat them artistically, sesthetically, 
 appreciatively, with something of the patience and 
 sufferance we find in nature, in the imperturbable 
 tarrying of Divine Providence till events ripen. He 
 has little of the haste, struggle, fierceness, over- 
 estimates of reform. There is an affection in him 
 for the present and the past, a catholic appreciation
 
 64 THE PHILOSOPHV OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 of their beauties, an eye for their inner embryonic 
 forces, which make him less headstrong in change, 
 less confident of its results. He uses the ethical 
 light that is in him not so much to cast deep 
 shadows on the sins of the hour, as to bring out in 
 bright relief its virtues, and to make each declining 
 sun shed long beams of promise on the horizon, 
 assuring us that the days hold each other and unfold 
 each other with one continuous, triumphant force. 
 The great poet feels the ethical temper and working 
 of his time, as one who tarries in the sunlight, not 
 as one who works in it ; as one who enjoys it, 
 rather than as one who is put to speed under it. 
 Without a wakeful consciousness to moral elements, 
 the mind is left opaque and feeble; fiercely stimu- 
 lated by them, it is thrown into discipleship, and 
 achieves an epic, rather than writes one ; simply 
 translucent and receptive under them, it breaks 
 their solid beams into brilliant lines of color. 
 
 Chaucer, like most men of unusual powers, 
 gained the appreciation that has fallen to him some- 
 what slowly. It is by some thought that in the 
 esteem of his own times, and of those immediately 
 subsequent, he scarcely surpassed Gower, of whom 
 Lowell has said, " Our literature had to lie by and 
 recruit for more than four centuries ere it could 
 give us an equal vacuity in Tupper, so persistent a 
 uniformity of commonplace in the Recreations of a 
 Country Parson. ""'•'■ 
 
 Having thus presented the forces at work in 
 the last half of the fourteenth century, and the 
 
 * My Study Windows, p. 260.
 
 THE RETROGRESSIVE PERIOD. 65 
 
 height to which genius carried them, we turn to the 
 interregnum of EngUsh Hterature, the fifteenth cen- 
 tury and the earlier portion of the sixteenth. This 
 may be called the retrogressive period, and so sep- 
 arated the times which preceded from those which 
 followed it, that the problem of progress was taken 
 up almost anew at a later date. Not only was noth- 
 ing added to the ground gained in the fourteenth 
 century, the genius of that period suffered eclipse, 
 and was not disclosed again for two centuries. In 
 Scotland, indeed, a literature more nearly corres- 
 ponding to that of the fourteenth century in Eng- 
 land found place in the fifteenth, and the deferred 
 dawn of letters appeared in the north, with less 
 brilliancy, under Dunbar and his associates. 
 
 A chief reason for this barrenness of the fif- 
 teenth century was the stern repression which met 
 all free inquiry. " The University of Oxford chose 
 twelve of its members to examine the writings of 
 Wicliffe, and the report made presented two hun- 
 dred and sixty-seven opinions which were described 
 as worthy of fire."* So voluminous and hot a cen- 
 sure did this university, and with it all England, 
 pass on him who first brought to it bold, free 
 thought, and religious emancipation. Severe meas- 
 ures were set on foot ; the reformation, as a forest 
 conflagration, was extinguished. It was not, how- 
 ever, completely trampled out; it sank into the 
 soil, ran along the low ground, and smouldered in 
 various places as the intelligence or independence 
 of the common people gave it opportunity. The 
 
 * Revolutions in English History, vol. i. p. 590.
 
 66 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 hold which the new doctrines maintained on the 
 popular mind is shown in a work entitled, The 
 Lantern of Light, a fearless exposure of religious 
 corruption ; and in the martyrdom of Claydon at 
 Smithfield. The reaction in the church, however, 
 was so complete, that its upper orders became more 
 than ever luxurious and licentious, its lower or- 
 ders increasingly dissolute ; both uniting to suppress 
 the present movement, and to provoke a new one 
 more thorough and irresistible. 
 
 The cause of religious liberty was identified, as 
 it always must be, with that of intellectual freedom. 
 Learning declined, especially at Oxford, and her 
 scholars, through the poverty of her foundations, be- 
 came "travelling mendicants," treated, at times, 
 with the utmost indignity. Herein is a first and 
 sufficient reason for the literary feebleness of the 
 period. The bold proffer of life that was made it 
 had been rejected, and the reactionary influences 
 of vice, ignorance and superstition were in the as- 
 cendant. 
 
 A second, confirmatory force were the civil wars, 
 which raged in the latter portion of the century. 
 They involved little or no principle, were ambitious 
 struggles for power, carried lawless violence every- 
 where, and were thus thoroughly opposed to the 
 peaceful and enlightened arts. The immediate in- 
 fluence of these wars of succession was almost 
 wholly evil, though they tended at length to con- 
 solidate and strengthen society and government. 
 This civil strife was greatly aided by the compara- 
 tive independence and power of the nobles. Many
 
 WARS OF THE ROSES. 6/ 
 
 of these perished on the battle-field, or on the scaf- 
 fold. They mutually broke each other in pieces, 
 and when the succession was finally established in 
 the strong hand of Henry VII. they were prepared 
 to render an obedience more complete, and to fall 
 into a position more subordinate, than ever before. 
 The government was established on stronger foun- 
 dations ; and later insurrections, like those of Suf- 
 folk and of the Commonwealth, were in the interests 
 of the people rather than of the nobles. The law 
 of Henry the VII. forbidding to the nobles the main- 
 tenance of retainers, other than domestic servants, 
 shows at once how thoroughly the power of the 
 aristocracy was broken. This pulverizing afresh 
 of society, making way for a new, national aggrega- 
 tion, was the chief beneficial result of the Wars of 
 the Roses, and was ultimately, therefore, favorable 
 to the more truly national life which belonged to 
 the reign of Elizabeth. These wars helped to do, 
 in the political world, what reform, at a later 
 period, accomplished in the religious world ; and 
 an arrogant nobility and a haughty clergy slowly 
 sank to a level more consistent with national unity 
 and national liberty. Separate centres of influence 
 and intrigue were broken up, and all power began 
 to go forth from the court, the government, the na- 
 tion, the popular heart. 
 
 The latter portion of the fifteenth century, 1474, 
 was marked by the introduction of printing into 
 England. This art, however, unfolded its vast re- 
 sources very slowly. It offers means only, and de- 
 mands a great and noble spirit for their use. For
 
 68 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 the first fifty years of its existence, it was waiting 
 for the power, that should lay hold of it, as a ready 
 weapon, and smite with it the intellectual tyranny of 
 the times. Its first labors were inspired by no 
 great purpose, and were in part unfavorable to 
 scholarship. Manuscripts were negligently repro- 
 duced, and, displaced by their printed rivals, dis- 
 appeared, rendering more difficult the careful edit- 
 ing of later critical periods. There was, none the 
 less, slumbering in the press another of those pow- 
 ers which were to make the next struggle f':r intel- 
 lectual liberty so different in its results from those 
 that had preceded. The bullet was not more 
 fatal to the sway of the mailed knight than were 
 the swift, prolific messengers of the press to the 
 dominion of the religious and philosophical bigot. 
 Invention, which has always found its home with 
 the people, furnished the two weapons, which, more 
 than all others, have levelled aristocracy and hier- 
 archy, and put men in possession of their civil and 
 religious birthright. The people have wrought 
 most effectively in their own cause by that invent* 
 ive power which is the best development of theii 
 strength. 
 
 This period of subsidence, in which every re- 
 pressive influence rushed in to submerge the ger- 
 minant seeds of progress, presents as much to 
 interest us in its prose as in its poetry, and offers 
 but very little in either direction. On the one side 
 are Pecock, Fortescue, Malory; on the other Oc- 
 cleve, Lydgate, Skelton. We pass them all, mere- 
 ly mentioning them that they may give a little dis-
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 69 
 
 tention to a period that would otherwise collapse, 
 and be lost to our literature ; a dreary one hundred 
 and fifty years whose consolation is, that the down- 
 ward here touched the upward movement, and 
 passed into it. Out of this darkness leaped the 
 day we hail with double delight. As this period 
 drew to a close, in the vigorous reign of Henry VIII., 
 those forces were active, which were to shape the 
 coming years of progress, and began to show in 
 such men as Tyndale, Coverdale, More, Ascham, 
 Surrey, the strength and diversity of later years. 
 
 We now pass to the period designated as Eliza- 
 bethan ; the first creative period of English letters. 
 Times, like colors on the clouds, have no definite 
 outlines ; they have centres; surfaces, directions, 
 not margins. We gather into this period the ante- 
 cedent causes which gave rise to it, and its own 
 fruits ripening in times immediately subsequent. 
 It is the period of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. 
 It is clearly defined in the first, reaches its zenith 
 in the second, and passes away in the third. As 
 this is the great era of our literary history, and also 
 the first of its stages of consecutive, derivative 
 growth, we must study carefully its productive 
 forces ; those in which it had its origin. 
 
 As we attribute very much of the superiority of 
 this period to the ethical activity called out by the 
 Reformation, we wish to inquire into the real value 
 in progress of the ethical power. Some, like 
 Buckle, have assiduously disparaged^ its influence in 
 civilization. His view owes whatever of plausibility 
 belongs to it to the limited meaning attached to the
 
 JO THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 word moral. It is often restricted to religious ac- 
 tivity, and even at that, to a dogmatic, formal and 
 preceptive one. If we give to the word ethical, tiiC 
 compass which falls to it from the depth and activ- 
 ity of the ethical sentiment in our constitution, we 
 shall hardly afterward deny the important part 
 played by this impulse in all periods of progress. 
 Religious activity is but the more intense play of 
 the moral nature, its movement under the leading 
 facts of our spiritual relations in life. A false relig- 
 ion is the most fatal of anodynes to the conscien- 
 tious insight of the mind, and times of quiet 
 submission to this external tyranny of priest, ritual 
 and creed, should be instanced, not as examples of 
 the activity of the moral sentiments, but of their re- 
 pression and perversion. The fungi that feed upon 
 a tree, consuming its native quality, are no measure 
 of its own vital force. The moral nature is never so 
 thoroughly put to sleep, and never so truly impotent, 
 as in periods of corrupt sacerdotal rule ; in which ex- 
 ternal authority is substituted for internal conviction, 
 submxission for virtue, and a ritual service for the 
 guidance of a quickened conscience. If we were in 
 search of specimen periods, showing what is possi- 
 ble in art and literature aside from the moral nature, 
 we should bring forward these moments of paraly- 
 sis, of torpid and benumbed sensibility. On the 
 other hand, reform in religion, a reasserting of indi- 
 vidual rights, a resurrection of private thought, in- 
 terpretation, conviction, constitute the spring-time 
 of ethical sentiment. Though the movement may 
 be partial, so far as it goes, it is a rebellion of con-
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 7I 
 
 science against usurped authority. Civil liberty 
 and the love of liberty are to be pronounced upon, 
 not during the stretches of despotism, but in those 
 halcyon days in which every man's blood tingles with 
 hope, desire, achievement ; nor in those only, save 
 as the end is wisely proposed, the labor successfully 
 consummated. 
 
 All that activity, then, within the field of religion 
 by which truth has struggled to cast off error, the 
 better to abolish the worse tendency, the freer the 
 move servile one, appeal being taken to the moral 
 nature of man, to his own convictions, is the product 
 of ethical force, whose seeds are always in the soil, 
 and sure, when the reign of winter relaxes, to find 
 their way to the light. This appeal, to the individ- 
 ual life may not always be direct ; it may be made, 
 in the first instance to history, or to the Bible, or, as 
 by Voltaire, to practical intelligence ; but it underlies 
 none the less every other appeal, since history and 
 the Bible and practical intelligence must have inter- 
 pretation ; and this can only be given by the indi- 
 vidual to the individual. Even if we abrogate our 
 own powers in behalf of those of another, or those 
 of a set of men, this new bill of disfranchisement 
 we must first consider, and put to it our own seal ; 
 we catch at least a gleam of light, though we see fit 
 to quench it again. 
 
 Hence periods of struggle in belief are pre-emi- 
 nently ethical periods, and also periods of intense 
 individuality and personal activity, accompanied 
 with an exalted sense of power and responsibility. 
 The whole nature of man is lifted by this inspira-
 
 72 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 tion of independent guidance and government, this 
 walking alone with truth, this gathering, under the 
 eye and favor of God, into his own hand the lines 
 of control, and going forth to achieve a life that 
 shall fulfil a private, and thus a general, purpose. 
 If there are possibilities in men, these periods of lib- 
 erty, of ethical strength, of a central movement for- 
 ward, can not fail to develop them. 
 
 Nor do the infidelity and unbelief which are sure 
 to belong to these eras of progress at all militate 
 with this view of the force of the moral sentiment, 
 they rather confirm it. Unbelief that is positive, 
 that is asserted as a right, that passes into a crusade, 
 does so by virtue of the moral nature, directly and 
 indirectly. Liberty is a claim and a passion with it. 
 The mind, irritated by a perpetual, persecuting 
 tyranny, wanders in mere wantonness, for a little, be- 
 fore it will accept any principle that may become to 
 it a fresh yoke in the school o-f enforced belief. The 
 licenses of skepticism are often reactions against im- 
 perious faith ; as are those of liberty the resent- 
 ments which have sprung up under the maddening 
 hand of irresponsible power. The effervescence of 
 thought is due to the revolt and ferment of the 
 moral nature, the nature which resents wrongs and 
 claims rights, the nature that thinks of the fitness of 
 thought, and with indignation of any opinion, creed 
 or custom that would smother thought. Whether 
 the mind of the devout reformer is primarily delighted 
 with the truth ; or, less devout, but not less free, is 
 pleased with its own exhilarating search for it, the 
 fact is the same ; it is the return of the mind to its
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 73 
 
 powers, its liberties, its responsibilities ; and this 
 is an ethical victory. 
 
 Even if the point of advance is one of" science, 
 of mere knowledge, the opposition it meets with, if 
 any, is likely to come from the moral world, to be 
 a religious anathema ; and the counter assertion, 
 therefore, will necessarily be one resting on a moral 
 basis, the mind's right to the truth, its right to its 
 own powers, and to whatever God has sealed under 
 them as its inheritance in his intellectual and spir- 
 itual kingdoms. Liberty is the starting-point of 
 science, liberty to inquire, accept, reject ; but the 
 battles of liberty have been fought, and must be 
 fought in connection with religious truth, that truth 
 that involves immediate duties and dangers, and is 
 involved in all the cogent concerns of this and an- 
 other life. Hence the secondary struggle must 
 share the fortunes of the primary one, the skirmish 
 must go as goes the battle, and we shall only be 
 intellectually, aesthetically free, as we are spiritually 
 free. The ethical element finds place in every con- 
 flict because it is so pervasive, fundamental ; and 
 while it may seem merely to cover the retreat of 
 error, it heads the advance of truth. 
 
 We have said, that those who depreciate the 
 moral sentiment should look for excellence to 
 periods of superstitious repose ; they may also look 
 for it to times of passive unbelief, mere negation, 
 that cares little for what it denies, and is not even 
 earnest in the denial. Quiet, tacit belief and un- 
 belief fall off alike, though on opposite sides, from 
 ethical power ; and so far as there is good in either 
 4
 
 74 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 of them, any invention, any bold realization of the 
 undertakings or pleasures of life, we concede it to 
 be the fruits of secondary impulses ; we make it 
 over to purely intellectual action. 
 
 How can it be othervvise than that the ethical 
 sentiment, as we understand it, should be large- 
 minded, bold, creative ; and that all that has been 
 creative, bold, large-minded in any art, should, at 
 least tacitly, have claimed this liberty, and ex- 
 ercised this inspiration. Secondary impulses give 
 secondary qualities, but the primary impulse of 
 great and pervasive power is this freedom of the 
 mind, its right to see, to judge, to act; its sense of 
 a destiny, and of its power to fulfil that destiny. 
 
 We are prepared, then, to put down as first, and 
 first to consider, among those general conditions 
 which made a great epoch out of the Elizabethan 
 age, the unusual activity of religious, polemic 
 thought, breaking the narrow bounds of minute 
 dogma, and resuming its hold on principles. To 
 this first influence we add, second, as one with it, and 
 sustaining to it the relation both of effect and cause, 
 the revival of learning, more especially classical 
 learning ; third, the earlier steps toward scientific 
 progress ; fourth, discovery ; and fifth, invention. 
 We shall speak of each of these general conditions 
 from which date our modern civilization, before we 
 turn to those special causes which helped to develop 
 our first creative period — an era so brilliant in itself, 
 and so influential on all that have followed, that in 
 understanding it, we start in possession of the secret 
 springs of our consecutive, literary history.
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 Forces at work on the First Creative Period, (a) Activity of Re- 
 ligious Thought, (d) Revival of Learning, {c) Scientific De- 
 velopment, (d) Discovery, (c) Invention. 
 
 Secondary Influences, {a) Classical Knowledge, (d) Italian Lit- 
 erature, {c) Quiet Reign of Elizabeth, {J) Chivalrous Senti- 
 ment, (e) Growth of Popular Influence, {/) Kinds of Lit- 
 erature. 
 
 The ethical forces of the sixteenth century, of 
 whose claims to influence we have spoken, disclosed 
 themselves in a religious struggle which affected the 
 entire Latin Church, and resolved itself, in different 
 places and between different parties, into every de- 
 gree and every diversity of strife. It was a dissolu- 
 tion of old beliefs, with a reformation, under local 
 and individual tendencies, of many new shades of 
 faith. This, which was the reproach of the refor- 
 mation in the eyes of the Catholic, was in fact its 
 chief merit. Men were not passed from one over- 
 shadowing organization to another, but were com- 
 pelled, amid endless phases of belief, to think and 
 act with relative independence. 
 
 We have in John Morley an able and independ- 
 ent witness, who says, in his treatise on Voltaire, 
 "Protestantism was indirectly the means of creat- 
 ing and dispersing an atmosphere of rationalism, 
 in which there speedily sprang up philosophic, theo- 
 logical and political influences, all of them entirely 
 antagonistic to the old order of thought and insti- 
 
 (75)
 
 7t) THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 tution. The whole intellectual temperature under- 
 ivent a permanent change, that was silently mortal 
 to the most flourishing tenets of all sorts."* 
 
 Whatever was the cause of the great fruitful- 
 ness in letters of the last portion of the sixteenth, 
 and of the earlier half of the seventeenth century 
 no other general, pervasive force, searching into all 
 ranks and relations of society, existed at that or 
 at any subsequent period like this of the Reforma- 
 tion. The leading events of the political world all 
 turned upon it for more than a century. From the 
 amours of Henry VIII. to the tragedy of Mary 
 Queen of Scots, every stirring event in English 
 history either drew its passion from the relig- 
 ous sentiment, or was strongly colored by it. 
 Foreign policy and domestic policy were alike in- 
 separable from religion. The regency in Scot- 
 land ; the relation of England to the Netherlands 
 and to Spain ; the sense of power that came to 
 her in exerting a controlling influence on the con- 
 tinent, while maintaining peace in her own borders, 
 turned one and all on diversities of faith. The 
 great political names and events of the period, 
 both in England and on the Continent, are indis- 
 solubly interwoven with religious controversies, 
 Gustavus Adolphus, Charles V., Philip II., Henry 
 VIII., Mary, Elizabeth, the rise of the Netherlands, 
 the struggle of the Huguenots, the settlement of 
 the new world, the growth of constitutional liberty 
 in England. 
 
 Nor was the influence of religious differences in 
 
 * Voltaire, p. 86.
 
 UKSIKLCTIUN OK Tllli MONASTERIES. // 
 
 the domestic relations of England less manifest. 
 To say nothing of that perpetual strife, passing 
 under Mary into an extensive and bloody perse- 
 cution, which pervaded English social and politi- 
 cal relations during the sixteenth century, on the 
 ground of conflicting faiths and rituals, what one 
 change could have been more sweeping, or have 
 altered, in a more striking way, the face of society, 
 than the overthrow of the monasteries, so numer- 
 ous and so venerable. A measure of this char- 
 acter, wholesale and sudden, was attended with 
 very mixed results. It greatly diminished the 
 popular reverence for religious orders, and rapidly 
 reduced their hold on the public mind, both by 
 the exposure of the corruption of these institutions, 
 of the religious tricks which had been practiced in 
 them on the credulity of the masses, and also by 
 that sudden loss of prestige, which, with the many, 
 attends on misfortune. The burden of a large un- 
 productive class was lifted from the people, and 
 industry and independence gained a victory over 
 indolence, deception and exaction. For these 
 gains there were compensations. Valuable manu- 
 scripts may have been lost ; communities, in part 
 devoted to scholarship, to popular instruction, and 
 to charity, were broken up; and the support of 
 the most worthless and vagrant of the monks was 
 shifted, not escaped. No well rooted abuse gives 
 way without tearing up the soil somewhat, and in- 
 volving local interests in its fall. 
 
 The direct literary influence of the Reformation 
 is nowhere more manifest than in England. The
 
 yS THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 h stcry of the English Bible presents it in the 
 clearest light. Our present version has held un- 
 questioned supiemacy for more than two centuries 
 and a half; has been found, in later periods, in 
 almost every English household ; has received 
 weekly enforcement from innumerable pulpits ; 
 and been the direct occasion of a large share of 
 the printed matter that has come from the English 
 press. It has thus exerted a literary influence, 
 greater in volume beyond all comparison than has 
 fallen to any other book. The works of Shake- 
 speare may have affected single minds, from a 
 literary point of view, more strongly than the Bible, 
 but ihe style and language of our version, aside 
 from its religious authority, have exercised a con- 
 trol incalculably greater on our general literature. 
 We may instance Bunyan's Allegories, whose 
 merits have never been surpassed in their own 
 field, as among those productions which have 
 sprung directly from the Scriptures, bulblets half 
 inclosed in the parent bulb. No such complete 
 and prosperous dependence can elsewhere be found 
 in our literary history, as this between the Bible 
 and many of its literary offspring. This version, 
 so infl'iential, arose with coi responding painstaking, 
 and under a most fortunate concurrence of influ- 
 ences. Tyndale, by his translation of 1525, began 
 the work. The masculine vigor of the man, the sim- 
 plicity and earnestness of his purpose, and its popu- 
 lar bent, together with the prevalent Saxon features 
 of our speech, united to give this early and most 
 influential rendering of the Scriptures an idiomatic
 
 TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE. 79 
 
 force and directness which it helped to impart to all 
 the versions that followed, and the more easily as 
 many of these arose under kindred conditions. For 
 nearly a hundred years, version followed version, 
 with constant comparison, and with a firm hold on 
 previous and cotemporary work. At length with 
 fearless revision, yet with deserved deference to 
 former editions, appeared the authorized version, 
 the fruits of the ripest scholarship, at home and 
 abroad. The labors of the century were gathered 
 up in it. Catholics, churchmen, dissenters, men 
 of varying belief, had virtually labored upon it. 
 The hands of martyrs had wrought in it, Tyndale, 
 Rogers, Cranmer ; and so it prospered by violence 
 and by favor, till at length it came forward under 
 the solemn endorsement of the English Church, 
 and tacitly of the nation, its own work through its 
 most devout scholars, its varied beliefs, and the 
 years of its most intense religious life. It has 
 thus grown into a reverence and honor among 
 us, which lead us to draw back from change, and 
 to forget, when further revision is thought of, that 
 bold diligence to which its own merits are due. 
 
 Correspondingly did the Bible gain in general 
 influence. In 1543 the translations of Tyndale were 
 proscribed by parliament. Any portion of the 
 Bible, under penalty of imprisonment, was denied 
 to "women (except noble or gentle women),, artif- 
 icers, apprentices, journeymen, serving men, hus- 
 bandmen, and laborers." This was a remnant of 
 the hostility with which his work had been met at 
 the outset. But previously to this, the Great Bible
 
 So THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 had been opened in the churches for public reading, 
 and many earnest and disputatious groups had 
 gathered about it. " Classes and households were 
 divided. On the one side were the stern citizens 
 of tiie old school, to whom change seemed to be 
 the beginning of license ; on the other young men 
 burning with zeal to carry to the utmost the spirit 
 ual freedom of which they had caught sight."* 
 
 The withholding of one rendering only gave oc- 
 casion to another ; and that the partisans of both the 
 Bishop's Bible and the Geneva version, represent- 
 ing the extremes of religious sentiment, should 
 finally have accepted King James' version is a 
 proof of the candor and carefulness that gathered 
 into it the excellencies of previous work. A wider 
 circulation of the Scriptures, a more profound in- 
 terest in them, and a better understanding of them, 
 were thus the fruits of the jealous advocacy, the 
 earnest attack and defense of successive editions. 
 That a kindred spirit prevailed on the continent, 
 though in a less degree, is seen in the fact, that, 
 in addition to Latin versions, a French, an English, 
 an Italian, and a Spanish Bible, proceeded, in a 
 brief period, from Geneva and Basle. 
 
 Incident to this religious activity, this earnest 
 and critical study of the Scriptures, there was a 
 large amount of theological composition. Writers 
 of this class have always been numerous in Eng- 
 land. It is true, indeed, that the productions of 
 but very few of them have obtained an acknowl- 
 edged position in our literature, but they have not 
 
 ♦ History of the English Bible, p. no.
 
 THEOLOGICAL COMPOSITION. 8l 
 
 for that reason failed to have a powerful hold on the 
 national mind. Forces for the moment very effi- 
 cient, frequently miss any direct mastery over later 
 periods. They reach these in their influence only 
 by being absorbed into earlier times, and thus 
 welling the stream as it flows by. Immediate and 
 remote control turn on different principles. If one 
 is so in sympathy with his own generation as to 
 impress himself strongly, actively upon it, he almost 
 necessarily passes away with it. If one, in his 
 works, catches a prophetic forecast of coming truth, 
 or an excellence of art that has not been reached, 
 he naturally fails of appreciation by those about 
 him, and waits for the opening doors of a coming 
 century before he finds his own audience. Each 
 man casts anchor as he may, early or later in the 
 stream of human life, and holds fast where first, 
 with ploughing flukes, he begins to grapple the 
 popular mind. Most theological composition springs 
 from a present exigency of thought, and tarries 
 with its direct work in the times which evoke it. 
 Nevertheless, in shaping those times, it is most 
 efficient, most diffusive, and, above all forms of 
 production, gives that undertone of social senti- 
 ment by which artistic work is to be controlled. 
 What the Raphaels of the world are to paint is de- 
 termined by what they find in it, in its heart, its 
 affections, when they come. What the Miltons 
 of the world are to sing must be settled by the 
 themes which win men's thoughts. Theological 
 composition, therefore, has always affected literature 
 beyond its literary merit, since it has not been 
 4*
 
 82 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 by this merit that it has acted, but by the moral 
 tonic there has chanced to be in it for men's minds. 
 Great waves spring up only on deep and large 
 waters ; theology deepens and broadens that intel- 
 ligence whose rise and fall in atc constitute the 
 record of literature. 
 
 Polemics are not instantly favorable to literary 
 art, but rather the reverse. It is not till the first 
 crackling flame abates, and genial, ruddy coals re- 
 main on the hearth, that men settle down with slip- 
 pered feet into that state, at once active and placid, 
 that favors art. The headstrong impulses of re- 
 form are unfavorable, in their first expenditure, to 
 the coy, creative play of the imagination ; but, if 
 successful, they are sure to be followed by the suit- 
 ors of art, entering gayly into the larger life that 
 has been won for them. In a general way, the na- 
 tions of Europe rank in literature according as their 
 moral life has issued in honest, searching specula- 
 tion, or in blind belief and unbelief. It has been 
 characteristic of Italy and Spain, that they have 
 fallen, in a powerless, unfruitful way, into supersti- 
 ■ tion and infidelity, each passive and hopeless like 
 the other ; and neither of these states have reached 
 the literary life of which they gave the promise. 
 France has had a bolder, more decisive infidelity, 
 provoking a more critical and earnest belief, and 
 she has ripened a correspondingly extended litera- 
 ture. Germany has been held, especially in mod- 
 ern times, in vigorous conflict by a most searching 
 and critical belief and unbelief, and her intellectual 
 labors have been prodigious, her literature surpass-
 
 THEOLOGICAL INFLUENCE. 83 
 
 ingly fruitful. England, above all European nations, 
 has been marked by sober, thoughtful, predominant 
 belief, often disturbed, but never shaken, by skepti- 
 cism ; and she presents a literature certainly as 
 varied, as abundant, as continuous, as powerful as 
 that of any other nation. The foundations of this 
 ethical strength were laid in English society, just 
 previous to the Elizabethan period, the first creative 
 period in our literary art. 
 
 The traces of this theological action are also in 
 our language. A large accession of words of 
 Latin origin came to it in the sixteenth century. 
 The style of More and Ascham, of the early part 
 of the century, is purer and simpler than that of 
 the prose writers of the Elizabethan age. There 
 are in these, both an increase of Latin words, and 
 a more complex, involved construction. An easy 
 narrative style gives place to one of weighty and 
 complicated thought, to assertions laden, not merely 
 with a primary purpose, but with many secondary 
 and qualifying ideas. The sentences often march 
 with a heavy regimental tread, as if each were a 
 section, or a company, in itself. They drag along 
 formidable words, and loosely attached clauses, like 
 heavy guns, and are only saved from being tedious 
 and cumbersome by the vigor of the thought, or the 
 vividness of the imagery. Grammatical relations 
 are not simple, or closely knit, and sometimes fail 
 altogether. This tendency to roll up the sentence 
 in masses, this plethoric habit of thought, a con- 
 struction crowded full of conditions and adjuncts, 
 with its natural accompaniment of a Latin vocabu-
 
 84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 lary, belonged to prose composition all through this 
 first creative period. This style was the product 
 of vigorous thought, of active and uncritical facul- 
 ties, that delivered sentiments in the gross, waiting 
 for a period of more leisure and art to break them 
 up, sort and arrange them 
 
 The following passage from the Areopagitica of 
 Milton, illustrates the swelling sentence, the fresh 
 spring torrent of thought. 
 
 " First, when a City shall be as it were besieg'd 
 and blockt about, her navigable river infested, in- 
 rodes and incursions round, defiance and battell oft 
 rumor'd to be marching up ev'n to her walls, and 
 suburb trenches, that then the people, or the 
 greater part, more then at other times, wholly tak'n 
 up with the study of highest and most important 
 matters to be reform'd, should be disputing, reason- 
 ing, reading, inventing, discoursing, ev'n to a rarity, 
 and admiration, things not before discourst or 
 written of, argues first a singular good will, con- 
 tentednesse and confidence in your prudent fore- 
 sight and safe government, Lords and Commons ; 
 and from thence derives it self to a gallant bravery 
 and well grounded contempt of their enemies, as if 
 there were no small number of as great spirits 
 among us, as his was, who when Rome was nigh 
 besieg'd by Hanibal, being in the City, bought that 
 peece of ground at no cheap rate, whereon Hanibal 
 himself encampt his own regiment." 
 
 While the revival of classical learning tended to 
 these results in style, they were in part also the 
 fruit of polemics. Theological discussion has so
 
 HOOKER. 85 
 
 mucA of it taken place in Latin, that its vocabulary 
 is closely united to that language ; while its logical 
 forms of assertion and limitation, statement and ex- 
 •.".eption, tend to involved and composite sentences. 
 Hooker, the first great prose writer of the Eliza- 
 bethan age, shows the best results of the theologi- 
 cal habit of mind. Sound, searching and liberal in 
 thought, he presents a style massive, semi-fluent, 
 pushing and formidable ; yet from time to time 
 breaking into a more easy and animated flow. By 
 universal consent, he takes rank among great Eng- 
 lish writers. A tendency which could thus early 
 ripen an author of so much power and skill, could 
 get to itself such a head, vindicates easily and at 
 once its claims to large literary influence. 
 
 The second agency which gave the conditions of 
 the creative period was the revival of classical learn- 
 ing. Greek scholars and literature were cordi- 
 ally entertained in Italy early in the fifteenth 
 century. The overthrow of Constantinople, in 
 the middle of that century, merely accelerated a 
 movement already well under way. A progress 
 in classical learning followed, which, during this 
 and the following century, with a fluctuating move- 
 ment, extended throughout Western Europe, Eng 
 land being among the latest to feel it. This classical 
 scholarship stood in diverse relations, at different 
 places and different times, to the spirit of reform. 
 It preceded and accompanied it, rather than fol- 
 lowed it, in Europe. In Italy, the popes welcomed 
 this revival, and it there chiefly accelerated art, then 
 passing forward to its great achievements. Art felt
 
 S6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 a double tendency, a Christian bias and a classical 
 one, or — in contrasted language — a pagan one. It 
 gave itself, on the one side, with devout belief to 
 religious themes, and, on the other, to the resusci- 
 tation of Greek and Latin mythology. When en- 
 countered by no strong reformatory current, classi- 
 cal knowledge tended to this division of effects. 
 Some added it as mere culture to previous charac- 
 ter ; and others, awakened as from a dream to this 
 wonderful Greek and Roman world, so full of civili- 
 zation and art, yet without a Christian faith, them- 
 selves lost the sense of necessity and certainty in 
 their creed, and became skeptical of a system that 
 could in so many things be taught of the past. 
 Classical art and classical letters, so alien to Chris- 
 tianity, could not win their sesthetical hold on the 
 sentiments without weakening the foundations of 
 belief already feeble, and introducing feelings quite 
 out of harmony both with the purity and the cre- 
 dulity of former faiths. Thus there was an opportu- 
 nity given for the formation of an opinion adverse to 
 the classics, as impure, irreligious, heathenish. 
 
 There was another, however, and very different 
 relation which this knowledge came to assume. The 
 appeal being very universally taken by reform to 
 the Scriptures, a spirit of searching inquiry into 
 these sources of truth sprang up. An extended 
 acquaintance with Latin and Greek became a ne- 
 cessity to the reformer, if he would master old, or 
 form new, versions of the Bible ; and classical 
 scholarship allied itself closely, in Erasmus, Luther, 
 Heza, Tyndale, and many others, to the Reforma-
 
 CLASSICAL LEARNING. 87 
 
 don. This was especially true in England, so that 
 to call one a Greek, a lover of Greek letters, was 
 equivalent to pronouncing him a heretic. While 
 this was the deepest and the prevailing affinity of 
 the new culture, it met with variable favor accord- 
 ing to the wisdom of times and parties. 
 
 Classical learning, then, both by belief and un- 
 belief, both as an instrument and a discovery, as 
 giving a deeper hold on the facts of revelation and 
 redisclosing the facts of an earlier world, wrought 
 liberty, enthusiasm, progress. Greek and Latin 
 letters have ever since been strongly influential on 
 English literature, with a power varying primarily 
 with the knowledge and tastes of the individual, and 
 secondarily with the age to which he has belonged. 
 
 An unfavorable literary result of this revival of 
 knowledge, were the conceits and pedantry of style 
 to which it led. Not only was the language em- 
 barrassed and choked with its new words, remote 
 allusions, tricks of expression, dodges of thought, 
 became popular, and vitiated, in a measure, the 
 composition of even the best writers. Knowledge 
 overpowered invention, and the resources of ex- 
 pression its simplicity and purity. This tendency, 
 in an earlier form, is especially traceable to Lilly, 
 and from one of his works is named Euphuism. 
 He himself characterizes it as a thing of "fine 
 phrases, smooth quips, merry taunts, jesting with- 
 out meane and mirth without measure." Later, 
 assuming the form of pedantry and a play upon 
 words, it constituted a distinguishing feature of the 
 school of writers termed metaphysical. It evidently
 
 88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, 
 
 finds no direct support in classical composition, nor 
 indeed in any knowledge, but was rather a fashion, 
 springing from a pedantic and facetious play of 
 thought, with resources not yet wholly bent to 
 simple and worthy service. 
 
 A next general force, though as yet very feeble, 
 were the incipient movements of science. These 
 were felt in Italy as early as the close of the fif- 
 teenth century. Leonardo da Vinci was followed 
 in the sixteenth century by Galileo, whose labors 
 gave rise at the opening of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury to a vigorous Italian school in natural philoso- 
 phy. Copernicus and Tycho Brahe and Kepler 
 were taking the first steps of progress in Germany. 
 Natural science did not achieve large results in 
 England till the next period ; but it now found at 
 least one great mind in sympathy with its spirit 
 and methods, and able to expound them. All rec- 
 ognize the wonderful force of thought that be- 
 longed to Bacon. Craik thus chronicles the gen- 
 eral impression: — "They who have not seen his 
 greatness under one form have discovered it in an- 
 other ; there is a discordance among men's ways 
 of looking at him, or their theories respecting him ; 
 but the mighty shadow which he projects athwart 
 the two by-gone centuries lies there immovable, and 
 still extending as time extends." * This command- 
 ing position was gained, not by actual discoveries, 
 not by a sufficient, much less a final, exposition of 
 the laws of progress ; but by a thorough and 
 large apprehension of the general character and 
 
 * English Literature and Language, vol. i. p. 613.
 
 BACON. 89 
 
 value of the new inductive method, which had 
 scarcely come into clear appreciation even with 
 those who were using it ; was directly opposed to 
 prevalent modes ot .nquiry ; and was destined, by 
 its expansion in every department of science, to 
 rule the future, and constitute its chief glory. In- 
 ductive as opposed to deductive reasoning ; obser- 
 vation as contrasted with speculation; a careful, 
 cautious inquiry into things as compared with logo- 
 machy, a loose legerdemain of words, had as yet 
 found no sufficient presentation. This task fell to 
 Bacon. He thus confirmed and hastened on the 
 new movement by justifying it to itself, by bring- 
 ing it into the presence of a clear and well-sus- 
 tained theory, and by exalting its immediate and 
 practical value. Those who came after Bacon in 
 natural science, both in England and elsewhere, 
 were glad to recognize this statement and defense 
 of their method, and accept the force of this great 
 mind, which had made a way for them ; which had 
 pronounced, with such insight and power, upon the 
 bent and value of the new philosophy. Bacon thus 
 practically announced, compacted and organized an 
 intellectual movement, the most fresh and fruitful 
 of any within the Christian era. It mattered little 
 that he unduly depreciated the deductive logic; 
 that he missed of seeing that it makes up with in- 
 duction the double enginery of thought ; that Aris- 
 totle commands a moiety of the realm of mind : it 
 it mattered little that he failed skilfully to use his 
 own system, or master its details of application ; he 
 did conceive clearly, vigorously the new direction.
 
 90 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 the new purpose, the new method of inquiry, and, 
 establishing and defending it, he passed it over to 
 others to develop and apply. In this later genera- 
 tions have busied themselves, and, surprised anew 
 in every decade with the abundance of their re- 
 turns, they yield larger and larger honor to him, 
 who, in such ringing, penetrating tones, proclaimed 
 "fruit "as the object and test of inquiry. Bacon 
 fell in readily with the external, practical cast of 
 British thought ; nay, he gave it the most emphatic 
 and influential statement it has ever received. He 
 looked upon the mastery of the physical world as 
 a great end of knowledge, saw how careful and 
 thorough must be the observation which should 
 lead to this result; how cautious must be that 
 transfer of things to thoughts, of objective realities 
 into appropriate conceptions and language, if we 
 would not have our reasoning illusion, a dodging 
 from one empty form of expression to another ; and 
 how many prejudgments, the mere debris of habit, 
 individual or social, hide the truth, and require to 
 be cleared away before the virgin rock is again laid 
 bare. 
 
 Bacon, indeed, failed to understand the scope 
 of his philosophy, the varied resources, the diversi- 
 fied ingenuity of thought, with which it was to be 
 carried into all branches of physical knowledge ; 
 but this was a matter of course, since the centuries 
 that have intervened have only partially revealed 
 the subtile analysis and diversity of method requi- 
 site in the different lines of inquiry. 
 
 While Bacon gave this positive push to physical
 
 BACON. 91 
 
 science, he indirectly affected less favorably intel- 
 lectual and moral science. His influence tended 
 to the oversight of that large element of deduction, 
 which mental philosophy must always present ; and 
 to fasten on ethics the utilitarian temper that per- 
 vades physical inquiry. We may look upon him as 
 indirectly a source of that materialistic philosophy 
 and those prudential morals which have found so 
 much acceptance with Englishmen. We would 
 make no unkind inference, but in Bacon's own his- 
 tory, utility, in the low bent of its aims, egregiously 
 miscarried, and a life of magnificent scope and con- 
 comitants fell into reproach and shameful estimate. 
 Bacon lacked practically, as he did theoretically, 
 the upward bias of pure reason ; insight into tran- 
 scendental truths, letting drop their motives from 
 heaven, not gleaning them in prudent husbandry 
 from the earth. 
 
 The religious and the scientific spirit thus fur- 
 nished to the Elizabethan age its two great prose 
 writers, Hooker and Bacon, and from that time 
 onward, the passing collisions and slow coalescence 
 of these two tendencies have been most fruitful in 
 thought. Science has been aggressive, religion has 
 stood on the defence, and deeper insight, sounder 
 opinion, more philanthropic sentiment, have sprung 
 from the conflict. In style, Bacon united to logical 
 power a vigorous imagination. Language thus com- 
 pounded, like transparent glass, lets in not only light, 
 but with it, and incidental to it, image after image 
 from the outside world, and makes of vision a feast 
 t^ the soul. His essays best present him as a writer
 
 92 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 A fourth general force, rousing the national mind 
 to activity, was the national enterprise, thti geo- 
 graphical discoveries of the period. We can hardly 
 appreciate the mental expansion, the breaking down 
 of boundaries, the sudden rarity, that came to 
 thought by the discovery of the new world ; or the 
 precision and unity imparted to geography and as- 
 tronomy by the circumnavigation of the globe. 
 The diameter of the globe, a first unit, a standard 
 of reference in celestial calculations, was thus se- 
 cured ; and we might now know from what we went 
 forth, and to what we returned. Classical learning 
 restored the by-gone world, exploration disclosed a 
 new world, laden with new hopes for the future ; a 
 fresh realm of romance and possibilities brought 
 along side, moored to, the old historic continent, 
 exhausted and wayworn. The English, in the last 
 portion of the sixteenth century, were entering 
 heartily into these discoveries, were full of the in- 
 quiring, adventuresome spirit they begot. They 
 added enterprise to discovery, and, as in Drake, 
 helped themselves to Spanish wealth, as opportunity 
 offered, with a temper as unscrupulous as that with 
 which the Spaniard won it. At no time has the 
 world seen more daring and resolute navigators, 
 mingling large and petty motives into enthusiastic, 
 werviceable character. Drake, Frobisher, Davis, 
 Raleigh led the nation in that maritime enterprise, 
 which has ever since given expansion to the na- 
 tional character. The additions which such a tem- 
 per brings to literature may not be very palpable, 
 and in their most palpable forms are no sufficient
 
 INVENTION. 93 
 
 index of the entire effect. The nautical novel has m 
 part expressed this predilection of Englishmen, and 
 serves to show how bold and breezy national tastes 
 have been kept by this love of the sea. The poet- 
 ry, the direct results of these sympathies, as Byron's 
 apostrophe to the ocean, offers, in an outspoken 
 form, what is always a latent element in Englis' 
 character, imparting scope and strength to feeling. 
 A final agency we have to mention as introdu- 
 cing the new epoch is invention. The two early 
 inventions, the conditions of later ones, giving 
 general safety and general knowledge, were slowly 
 working their effects into and transforming so- 
 ciety. Gunpowder and the printing press, both 
 democratic, the one lifting up the middle class in 
 intelligence, the other tumbling down the aris- 
 tocratic class from their pedestal of personal 
 prowess, unhorsing them with utmost ease as they 
 pranced on their mail-clad chargers, were progress- 
 ing in serviceableness, adding to themselves those 
 concomitant inventions, on which their value de- 
 pends. Cannon and small arms in the one direc- 
 tion, paper, type, and their easy mechanical appli- 
 cation in use in the other, grew out of these 
 initial steps, and have again and again shifted 
 their forms and methods of production, as these 
 inventions have shown the power that is in them. 
 In the Elizabethan period these secondary steps 
 were well under way, and the blind giants of me- 
 chanical force were getting to work at those stu- 
 pendous labors they have since accomplished. As 
 warming up by their activity, they make contemp-
 
 94 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 tible all previous exertion by that which follows, 
 we are ready to cry, Hold, this will ruin us ; an- 
 other book, another paper, and we are buried in 
 hopeless ignorance under this multiplicity of the 
 material of knowledge ; another monitor, another 
 needle-gun, another mitrailleuse, and we are un- 
 done, having lost all our labors thus far, and sunk 
 the value of past production in this omnipotence of 
 a too headlong, incautious present. 
 
 The success of the reformation was due, in 
 large part, to the aid given it by the press. New 
 versions of the Bible, rapidly scattered, gained and 
 confirmed the popular mind. Persecution was far 
 less efficient, and it became impossible to hunt out 
 and eradicate the multiplied and inconspicuous mes- 
 sengers of reform. The incentives to literary labor 
 were also slowly on the gain. Authorship ceased 
 comparatively to be an expense, gradually became 
 remunerative, and now may bring a princely for- 
 tune. There came to it also a compensation quite 
 as valuable, the pleasure of wide influence, of send- 
 ing out a work that should go in a silent way to un- 
 known households, and bespeak the kind attention 
 of strangers. The intellectual world was gathered 
 in large assemblies by this invention, and listened 
 with redoubled interest to the rapid responses 
 drawn out. 
 
 Gunpowder brought to an end barbaric inunda- 
 tions ; gave the civilized nations a vast superiority 
 over the uncivilized ; put them in easy immediate 
 possession of the world, as the Spaniaids and I^ng- 
 Ush on this continent; between themselves lodged
 
 INVENTION. 95 
 
 power with those most progressive, and inventive; 
 transferred the arts of war yet more from the body 
 to the mind ; and, without exorcising the savage 
 fiend of strife, put restraint upon it, and made it 
 more just in its awards. Not only was the civilized 
 world made impregnable to barbarism, and barbar- 
 ism surrendered everywhere to civilization ; not 
 only did invention become the basis of power ; the 
 physically weak were armed with weapons that 
 made them formidable, and mere bullying became 
 comparatively impracticable. Invention, the best 
 product of the laboring mind, took increasing pos- 
 session of that mind, gave it thoughtfulness, and 
 weight in the councils of men, and made it heedful 
 of the intellectual life about it. Invention, commit- 
 ting the implements of war to the hands of industry, 
 rendered national wealth an essential feature of na- 
 tional power. War became a question of finance ; 
 and the manufacturer, merchant, broker, citizen, 
 proportionately gained power in its decisions. Those 
 who created, and those who held, wealth, were prime 
 factors in the product of national greatness ; a city, 
 a seat of industry, became a centre of strength ; and 
 the productive, economic forces, gaining their true 
 position, lifted up with them the popular element. 
 
 No later inventions are comparable with these 
 initial ones, in their transforming character, unless 
 it be that of the application of steam as a motive 
 power. This has wonderfully compacted the world ; 
 shifted its centres and methods ; and permeated it 
 everywhere with the most rapid, interlaced and 
 compositQ circulations. But these gains, marvellous
 
 g6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 as they are, would have been utterly impossible 
 without the previous safety, science and civilization 
 due to gunpowder and the printing press. 
 
 Such were the general and growing conditions 
 of activity in this creative period. A wakeful at- 
 tention had come to men in all departments, and 
 while in religion they were claiming the rule of 
 their own spirits; in science, discovery, invention, 
 they had entered on the rule of the world. 
 
 We have now occasion to speak but briefly of 
 the foreign and domestic influences which acted in 
 a more limited way on the Elizabethan age. Chief 
 among the first was classical scholarship. The 
 most vigorous translation of Homer, that of Chap- 
 man, belongs to this period. The great poets were 
 either thoroughly permeated with the classical spirit, 
 and laden with its poetical images and myths, like 
 Milton ; or were, like Shakespeare, cognizant of these 
 works of the past as standards of taste, and an un- 
 failing source of material. No poet was so inde- 
 pendent as not to feel somewhat this restored life, 
 and the most commanding drew on its wealth with 
 the utmost freedom. The nearer and freer le- 
 gends of mediaeval and chivalrous life, however, 
 mingled with the classical story, and were often 
 the weightier element of the two. 
 
 The second foreign influence was Italian litera- 
 ture. This was more controlling than in any pre- 
 vious or subsequent period. It disclosed itself in 
 translations of Tasso and Ariosto ; in constantly 
 returning Italian themes in the English drama, as in 
 Romeo and Juliet; in poetical measures, as in that
 
 SURREY. 97 
 
 ol Spenser; and in the kinds of poetry. Surrey 
 was most immediately the medium through which 
 Italian poetry affected our literature. A translation 
 of two books of Virgil by him gave the first exam- 
 ple of English blank verse, a form taken from Italy. 
 He also introduced under the same influence son- 
 nets, so long a favorite variety with our poets, and 
 gave a beginning to our lyrical poetry. Lyrical 
 poetry, as the product of subtile, refined sentiment, 
 falls to a somewhat late period in national devel- 
 opment. Its origin in Southern France, and cul- 
 tivation in Italy had been the result of the extreme 
 development of chivalry, and the languid refine- 
 ment of Southern tastes. These chivalrous senti- 
 ments belonged in a high degree to Surrey, and 
 united him, on his visit to Italy, with an easy nat- 
 ural affinity to its literature. Yet an English tem- 
 per so far aided him, that his composition showed 
 more simplicity and sobriety than his models, and 
 we have in him the lyric spirit with little of that 
 extreme vaporing tenderness which had begun to 
 attach to it in Italy. He was followed and aided 
 in this branch of poetry by Wyatt. Thus Italy 
 gave us, through one in whom the rough English 
 character was subdued to utmost courtesy, our 
 earliest lyric strains, single notes from its sunny 
 vineyards and olive groves, floating northward to 
 our more rugged climate, dropping as they came 
 their heat of passion, and taking in its place the 
 glow of manlier sentiments ; as coals that ceasing 
 to smoulder burn again in the draught of strong 
 winds. 
 
 5
 
 98 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Most noticeable of the domestic forces that 
 affected the period was the firm, peaceful, conserv- 
 ative government that fell to the long reign of Eliz- 
 abeth. As advanced as any English rule had yet 
 been, unless it be the brief reign of Edward VI., in 
 religious liberty, and in its general policy, it never- 
 theless held firmly to its own ground, checking 
 rather than quickening progressive elements. 
 Though the new, in Protestantism, as opposed to 
 the old, in Catholicism, was accepted, that division 
 of elements which resulted in Puritans and royal- 
 ists was still incipient, and thrust back by an author- 
 ity at once strong and popular. Peace at home, 
 with a sense of power and responsibility abroad, 
 prevailed, and kept the national mind alert in the 
 midst of leisure. An intense antagonism to 
 Spain, and the faith represented by it, animated 
 and consolidated the national sentiments. 
 
 Another marked feature of this reign, enhanced 
 by the sex, position and character of Elizabeth, was 
 the chivalrous spirit which belonged to the court 
 and nobility. Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh 
 • were men of a fascinating character, and one which 
 attached to this particular period in history. That 
 which was most truly refined and just in chivalry 
 lingered longest ; as a perfume, overpowering at first, 
 becomes sweetest as it is ready to pass away. A 
 gentle courtesy and subdued undertone of admira- 
 tion gave a color and flavor to society not other- 
 wise obtainable, and tinctured strongly poetic sen- 
 timent. Chivalry, as a controlling institution, om- 
 nipresent, imperious, smothered as much virtue as
 
 SOCIAL STATE. 99 
 
 it called forth. It lay a damp, heavy cloud on the 
 landscape ; when it lifted here and there, if it re- 
 vealed glittering surfaces, they were decked with 
 cunning frost-work, rather than with healthful, spon- 
 taneous life. But now, when the sun had been for 
 some time up, wlicn these exhalations of the night 
 were about to pass away, they softened down into 
 a warm, roseate mist, casting the lightest shadows, 
 and giving the most unspeakable charms. 
 
 Literature still belonged almost exclusively to 
 the upper classes, but these had been increased in 
 the cities by many rich citizens, into whose hands 
 power was daily falling. They were growing up to 
 be that body of the nation, to which nobility is as 
 secondary as pauperism. Dramatic literature was 
 far more comprehensive than romance literature, 
 and gathered a more promiscuous audience. In 
 the reign of Elizabeth, remnants of slavery were 
 still found, and husbandmen led a coarse and brut- 
 ish life; vagrancy and crime were inadequately sup- 
 pressed by severe laws, unequally administered. 
 Sixteen hundred executions are put down as the 
 yearly average in England alone, and seventy-two 
 thousand fell to the entire reign of Elizabeth. 
 While, therefore, the wealthier classes were numer- 
 ous enough to call forth and reward the genius of 
 Shakespeare, they were still in close contact with 
 an unkempt population, the coarsest staple of 
 human kind. Amid the losses of such a state, 
 there was this gain, that thought and speech pre- 
 served a straightforward, vigorous, idiomatic tone, 
 ready to do rough service in rough places.
 
 IP 
 
 lOO THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 This fact served to hold in check those changes 
 incident to the revival of learning. Latin words 
 spread more slowly into the body of speech, and 
 popular forms of composition, as the drama, were 
 less choked by them. The dramatic writers of the 
 period were usually graduates of the universities, 
 and also men of the world ; they united two vocab- 
 ularies, a classical and a popular one, and thus had 
 power above and below. 
 
 This period presents both branches of literature, 
 poetry and prose ; though the former has a decided 
 ascendancy in quantity and quality. We have 
 abundant prose, however, faithful to its own func- 
 tion, a presentation of truth ; and this with an ex- 
 cellency of manner which gives it a place in litera- 
 ture. Prose, more earnest and less artistic than 
 poetry, more single and less popular in its pur- 
 pose, born of thought rather than of feeling, ne- 
 cessarily reaches literary excellence later. Thus 
 during this entire period, while poetry was mount- 
 ing to a point which it has hardly since transcended, 
 prose remained more or less embarrassed by its 
 own resources, and labored through unwieldy sen- 
 tences, not native to the vigor of our tongue. It 
 did its work by strength rather than by skill, and 
 reached by power what it missed in grace. Prose 
 had come to a manly birth, but was waiting to be 
 bred by the repose and cultivation of later times. 
 
 Poetry, vigorous and creative though it was, had 
 not fully recognized its own province. Many sub- 
 jects were treated by it more appropriate to prose, 
 and giving no sufficient play to the imagination
 
 THEMES OF POETRY. lOI 
 
 The form of poetry should co-exist with a poetical 
 substance, and if the theme be essentially didactic, 
 It is in vain that it is loaded with the imagery of 
 the fancy. Stone good for a wall may be too coarse 
 for statuary ; topics, admirable in prose, yield in- 
 sufficient feeling to poetry. Examples of these un- 
 poetical themes are. The History of the Civil Wars, 
 a poem by Daniel ; Nosce Teipsum, a Proof of Im- 
 mortality, by Davies. In so vigorous a period it was 
 natural that plants should spring up at points that 
 could not finally afford them nourishment. The 
 just division of the field of literature, giving to each 
 portion its own products, was a later growth of 
 judgment and taste, one not yet quite complete.
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 Influence of Climate on National Character. — Spenser. — Shake- 
 speare. — Milton. — Spenser's Character. — His Relation to the 
 Past. — Faery Queen. — Character as a Poet. — The Drama. — 
 Classical, French and English Drama. — Origin of English 
 Drama. — Shakespeare, power of, morality of. 
 
 So many are the causes involved in any com- 
 plex effect, that an oversight of a portion of them 
 is inevitable. It is also natural, that once made 
 aware, in a particular direction, of this neglect, we 
 should forthwith give the newly discovered agent 
 more than its share of weight. The same partial, 
 the same limited power of the mind, is shown alike 
 in its too restricted and its too intense appreciation. 
 Thus, having waked up to the fact that soil and 
 climate have something to do with national charac- 
 ter, we hasten to the conclusion, that these are the 
 chief and controlling forces in its formation ; and 
 that the families of men are but a higher flora, a 
 more varied fauna, whose tendencies and capacities 
 are impressed upon them by their environment; 
 taking care to include in this, not merely the miner- 
 alogy of the earth, the meteorology of the heavens, 
 the make of the land, — its mountain fastnesses, or 
 open plains, its secluded position or commercial ad- 
 vantages — but also the accumulated results of these 
 forces long since wrought into the national stock. 
 Thus the serious and sombre phases of English 
 
 ho2)
 
 EFFECTS OF CLIMATE. IO3 
 
 character, its stern purpose and stolid animality, its 
 severe restraints and brutal outbursts, its vigorous 
 moral conflicts with itself and with others, are as- 
 cribed to the climate of England, damp and deject- 
 ed, often driving the inhabitants into indoor life, 
 putting them to effort in their pleasures ; and to its 
 soil, low-lying, fertile, penetrated and close bound 
 by the sea, yielding no hilarity, no exhilaration of 
 sunshine and upland to the spirits, yet rewarding 
 labor with plentiful food ; more generous to diges- 
 tion than to imagination, more liberal in utilities 
 than beauties. We are not disposed to deny, and 
 we strive not to underrate, these physical infl.u- 
 ences ; but they are far from sufficient to explain 
 fully any type of national character. We find no 
 reason for this entire transfer of causation to the 
 physical world, as if mind went for nothing among 
 primitive forces. Lands do not yield given nations 
 as they do given fruits, under defined qualities of 
 soil and limits of temperature ; and if they did, in 
 this correlation of conditions and products, there 
 would still be included the inscrutable living agency. 
 Irish character, ripened under much the same phys- 
 ical conditions with English character, is yet very 
 unlike it. Races have varied and independent en- 
 dowments, and by constitutional and acquired bias 
 either control or greatly modify the effects that 
 reach them from the external world. 
 
 The ethical quality which undoubtedly belongs 
 to English as contrasted with French character 
 is not a result of climate. It exists in very dif- 
 ferent degrees in the three political divisions of
 
 I04 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 the empire, Ireland, Scotland, England ; and the 
 explanation of this varying intensity is to be found 
 in the religious history of each of these sections. 
 The force of religious ideas, their form of manifes- 
 tation, have been very distinct for centuries in Eng- 
 land and in France ; and this fact, on which the 
 character of each nation to-day hinges, has not 
 been the result of diversity of soils simply, but of 
 sentiments as well, of a variety in the ingredients 
 of manhood rather than in those of matter, in the 
 way in which free, unique and responsible powers 
 have been unfolded. Into this national complexity 
 have entered many forces, but supreme among 
 them all have ruled those pristine elements which 
 make up character, first individual, then national , 
 establishing themselves at points, thence enlarging, 
 interlacing, and growing into a net-work of living 
 and relatively homogeneous dependencies. Certain- 
 ly we cannot concede a primitive power to the plant, 
 to the material molecule, and deny it to man. 
 So Germany, side by side with France, and so Spain, 
 stand each contrasted with it in national traits. 
 
 National character is not something superin- 
 duced from without ; is not rugged features, grim 
 facial outlines, and a gruff bearing caught from the 
 cold peevish air, from the warfare of man with un- 
 generous nature ; it is not a mood of the heavens, 
 which, by sympathy, he has gradually transferred 
 to his own constitution, casting this in the same 
 mould, with the same strife of tendencies ; it is 
 rooted in deep, measurably independent, constitu- 
 tional forces, abiding with him as their centre ; even
 
 INDIVIDUALS. 105 
 
 as matter possesses a character, and is faithful to 
 it. Thought, manners and Uterature receive their 
 coloring from the way in which this national germ 
 shows itself in the mind and heart of a people, as 
 a distinctive, national type. 
 
 Having seen the general influences at work on 
 and through English character in the Elizabethan 
 period, we now turn to consider what individual 
 creative power added to them, what it wrought be- 
 yond the range of results level to the time and pe- 
 riod in its graded, normal activity. There are al- 
 ways in a great age here and there significant clus- 
 ters of forces to which we can only give an individ- 
 ual name, whose power we cannot trace beyond 
 those wonderful personalities in which they inhere ; 
 men who make the period as well as are made by it 
 In this era we dwell upon three of these, Spenser, 
 Shakespeare and Milton. We know of no necessary 
 causes which laid down the frame-work of powers 
 for any one of these three men ; yet through those 
 power-s came, in large part, the Elizabethan age. 
 Without these three it might have been a high table- 
 land, with them it adds thereto some of the no- 
 blest altitudes of the globe. 
 
 Though all working under the conditions pre- 
 sented by the period, these men stood in very dif- 
 ferent relations to it. The bent of his own genius 
 decided for each the form of his works, and gave 
 them a very diverse direction. Spenser looked stead- 
 ily toward the past ; was quietly conservative in his 
 temper, and dreamy in his cast of mind. Milton 
 turned to the future. Fier)'', almost fierce in pur-
 
 I06 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 pose, under the strenuous impulse of principles, 
 he reined in thought and imagery alike to the firm 
 march of ideas. Shakespeare's time is the present, 
 an omnipresent present, that roots its creations any- 
 where, and sets them a growing under the sunshine 
 of the hour, as easily and freely as if that place and 
 time were all the earth. 
 
 We speak first of Spenser. The past with its 
 imagery, its illusions, its pomp of life, and poetical 
 dreaminess, descended upon him, and completely 
 drank up his quiet, unpractical spirit. With restless, 
 yet untiring importunity, he sought from queen and 
 courtiers those means which should leave him to the 
 free indulgence of his tastes. He congratulated 
 himself 
 
 " That even the greatest did not greatly scorne 
 To heare theyr names sung in his simple layes, 
 But joyed in theyr praise." 
 
 Though adulation was not a grateful task to 
 him, he was content to prosper by it, rather than 
 turn to those practical, commonplace labors that 
 command subsistence. 
 
 " Calme was the day, and through the trembling ayie 
 Sweete-breathing Zephyrus did softly play 
 A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay 
 Hot Titians beames, which then did glyster fayre; 
 When I (whom sullein care, 
 Through discontent of my long fruitles~e stay 
 In princes court, and expectation vayne 
 Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away 
 ^ Like empty shadows, did afflict my b ayne,) 
 Walkt forth to ease my payne 
 Along the shoare of silver streaming Themmes." 
 
 Irritated by delay and ill success, he complains, in
 
 SPIRIT OF SPENSER. IO7 
 
 his Teares of the Muses, of the overshadowing in- 
 fluence of polemical discussion. He regards it as 
 the creeping forth of " barbarism and ignorance," 
 instead of the restlessness of a new era. The fas- 
 tidious poet, anxious only to set in order one more 
 vision of the past, had little sympathy with any dis- 
 cussion, however vital, " without regard or due de- 
 corum kept." He knew nothing of the germs of 
 greater centuries yet to come that were budding 
 under his feet. He was only in haste to participate 
 in the pageant of life that was passing, or to escape 
 to the poetic glories of the life that had already 
 passed. 
 
 Spenser was a poet, not a philosopher ; his mind 
 was more fruitful of images than of judgments. 
 Appearances had so strong a hold upon him as to 
 conceal underlying principles. Such minds are slow 
 to leave realities, a good achieved and a like good 
 dreamed of, to embark on an ocean of revolutionary 
 ideas in quest of new worlds. There is enough in 
 the present, to call forth desire, enough in the past 
 to furnish the decoration and tinsel of their dreams. 
 They are forced onward by no sense of pervasive 
 wrong, nor pressed to labor for a future cast in a 
 better mould. If patriotic, they find patriotism in 
 loyalty ; if devout, devotion attaches them to the 
 hoar and ven rable institutions of the established 
 faith. They overlook its evils, and chasten and 
 subdue its spirit to their own quiet, trusting moods. 
 Such was Spenser. He asked only to dream, and 
 he thought it hard that men would not at once give 
 him the opportunity of dreaming, and share with
 
 I08 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 him his delight in the glowing imagery of his visions. 
 This pleasure at length came to him. In the retire- 
 ment of Kilcolman, Ireland, on an estate granted 
 him by Elizabeth, he composed the larger share of 
 his works, above all the Faery Queen. Adown this 
 flowing vision, as along a pure, gentle, beautiful 
 winding stream, he floated many a long summer's day, 
 and never reached its end. However, as the gift of 
 the queen lost something of its grace by the strong 
 rapacious hand which plucked it from the heart of 
 Ireland, so the poet did not escape the retribution 
 which clung to it. An insurrection broke out in 
 this land of chronic violence. His house was burnt, 
 an infant child perished in the flames, and he fled 
 to England, where he died shortly after. Justice 
 and repose are exotics in this unfortunate island ; 
 they neither cling as hardy shrubs to its hillsides ; 
 nor are they successfully planted by a fostering 
 hand in its cultivated fields. 
 
 Spenser gathered up his chief strength in one 
 poem, the Faery Queen. This, though so far su- 
 perior to the past as not to be of it, bears through- 
 out an archaic impress. It is the genius of the writer 
 that holds it aloof from its affinities, lifts it above its 
 kin, and puts it among the best productions of the 
 new epoch, while belonging in type and form to the 
 tedious and dreary works of a retreating age. It 
 Is allegorical, a device by which so many drooping 
 imaginations had striven to give motion to dull 
 themes : Hawes, writing of Dame Commyte, and 
 Lady Grammar, and Dame Logic. It seemed to be 
 thought that by the trick of a name the life of poetr)
 
 ALLEGOKY, IO9 
 
 could be made to descend upon and quicken the 
 meiest rubbish of knowledge ; that a personal appel- 
 lation would bring breath to the nostrils of any the 
 rudest image of clay ; that a title, however ill be- 
 stowed, had all the charms of rank at its command ; 
 and that Lady Grammar, born with such ease of 
 this formal fancy, was as veritable, sympathetic and 
 inspired a being as any of the family of poetry. 
 Thus also a little later, Fletcher, in his Purple Island 
 undertook the absurd task of allegorizing into poetry 
 an anatomical description of the human body. Spen- 
 ser's poem is an allegory, and great notwithstanding ; 
 partly, perhaps, because he often strays so freely, 
 unmindful of the perplexed, tangled and broken 
 threads of primary, secondary and even tertiary de- 
 pendencies he has left behind him. Allegory puts 
 the steed of the muses- in harness ; it must draw by 
 hill and by valley ; descending to the ocean or 
 mounting along the clouds its moral is ever behind 
 it, and with a pedler's precision, it drops a precept at 
 every door it passes, or adds it may be some new la- 
 ding of didactic import. The ingenuity of the alle- 
 gory is also at war with the inventions and freedom 
 of the poet. It gives him a line along which he 
 must move, rather than leaves him open to impulse 
 at liberty to choose any way and all ways. Allegory 
 is a cunning method of getting rollers under a truth 
 too heavy to be moved by hand, an ingenious device 
 for sliding a forgotten, unacceptable block of precep- 
 tive lore into the way of the workmen, as they rear 
 the building of national or private character. It 
 is essentially didactic, and hardly of service even in
 
 no THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 instruction, where the mind of the pupil is vig- 
 orous, receptive and eager. To be acceptable 
 in a lengthy form it must be accompanied, as in 
 Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, by vigorous personi- 
 fication, often sweeping into forgetfulness its indi- 
 rect lessons, and swallowing up the mind with first 
 impressions. Apollyon makes as good a fight as 
 Coeur de Lion, 
 
 The allegory of Spenser is at times, as in parts 
 of the first book, quite direct ; but more frequently 
 the poetic fancy spurs freely forward, and leaves her 
 didactic companion to hobble on as he may, or to 
 tarry, till taken up again on some more sober and 
 easy excursion. 
 
 The imagery of the poem, long and varied 
 as it is, is all drawn from chivalry. It thus 
 wanders through a past already becoming to the 
 cotemporaries of Spenser remote and unreal ; an 
 unlocated, enchanted, and vast forest, roamed 
 over by men and women magnified in every 
 quality, fanciful in action, extravagant in emotion. 
 The thoroughness with which the mind of Spen- 
 ser was imbued with the sentiment of chivalry 
 is astonishing. He is never at a loss. He brings 
 forward his knights and ladies in exhaustless va- 
 riety, and enters upon each new combat, with 
 fresh spirit, and lends it novel incidents. Chiv- 
 alry was not with him, as with the court of Eliz- 
 abeth, a courtesy of intercourse, a gloss of man- 
 ners, the lingering splendor of a bygone life ; his 
 poetic sentiments, his virtues, his sober thoughts, 
 all responded to it, all sprang into being under its
 
 CHIVALROUS SPIRIT OF SPENSER. Ill 
 
 conditions, inarched forth under its banners, van- 
 quished or suffered defeat under the guise of its 
 heroes. A certain shadowy, unreal character ne- 
 cessarily falls to the personages of the poem, so 
 wholly are they the children of the fancy, so little 
 of realistic or historic light is there in the eye that 
 marshals them, so much of interpretation, of persona 
 and local rendering. They play a part to the 
 mind so fictitious and conventional, aside entirely 
 from allegory ; are so simply its own creations, that 
 we watch them and move with them, in a dreamy, 
 unreal way. Moreover the whole country, the field 
 of their exploits, is one unmapped, with no earthly 
 whereabouts. It enlarges before us as we move 
 into it, and, an unknown region, holds any and 
 everything in reserve. Its surprises fail to surprise 
 us, so evidently are its creations feats of poetic 
 legerdemain. 
 
 Hence it is, that the Faery Queen, though a nar- 
 rative poem, is rather a panorama of visions, a series 
 of dreams, in which old characters return to us from 
 we know not whence, and new ones meet us, and 
 provoke no inquiry into their origin ; causal con- 
 nections are lost sight of; anything and anybody 
 are anywhere, that is where they chance to be 
 wanted, where the fancy puts them ; and we, suffi- 
 ciently occupied with the light, easy interplay, as in 
 a night vision, put no questions, and make no com- 
 plaints. 
 
 One result of this, however, is, that the poem 
 gets no movement as a whole ; there is no direction 
 in the stream ; like the dragon's tail, it is "in knots
 
 112 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and many boughtes upwound." This was inevit- 
 able. The plan of Spenser predetermined the re- 
 sult. Twelve virtues, headed by religion, rose be- 
 fore the mind of Spenser ; the discipleship of 
 private morality, to be followed by twelve others, 
 the guardians of public faith. To each was to be 
 devoted a book of twelve cantos, with its own 
 champion, its own suitable adventures, and inci- 
 dental relations to the Queen of Faery Land, and 
 to Arthur, its model knight. These virtues be- 
 came indistinct in personification, features blended 
 The adventures of their respective heroes lacked 
 suitableness and variety, the multiplied figures in 
 motion lost identity, whirled on in a maze of un- 
 real achievements, and remained interesting only 
 by the grace and novelty of their evolutions. It 
 was impossible on this slight plan to give either 
 progress, connection or division to the poem ; the 
 result actually reached was inevitable The labor 
 was too great even for the strength of Spenser. 
 Every step exhausted the imagery and interest at 
 his disposal ; the allegorical thread was often 
 broken, even lost for long periods together ; simi- 
 lar positions reappeared ; and he was not able 
 again to reach the elevation and consistency of the 
 first book. 
 
 In length also this poem belonged to a past 
 which deemed nothing tedious, felt little of the 
 hurry of time, and waited patiently for the end 
 of the longest and laziest action. The concentra- 
 tion and energy of intellect which characterize an 
 age of achievement were scarcely known. Writers
 
 FAERY QUEEN, A RELIGIOUS POEM. II3 
 
 in philosophy and poetry spun, like ever patient in- 
 sects, inexhaustible webs for simple and meagre 
 ends, their work often hanging in the winds without 
 one poor fly to grace the issue. This gentle, yet 
 undying motion of Spenser, in which he seems 
 borne on by the innate vigor of the imagination, 
 rather than by any purpose in view, any necessity 
 of the action, situation or characters, is seen in his 
 full and rich comparisons. The metaphor delays, 
 not the thought, impels it on rather ; is the long, 
 sudden, startling leap it takes in reaching its object. 
 The classical comparison, on the other hand, rolls 
 on in stately fashion, like a large orbed wheel ; or 
 even spins pleasantly on its axis without progress. 
 This is with Spenser a favorite figure. 
 
 The Faery Queen is not merely a moral, it is a 
 religious poem. His own words are applicable to 
 him. 
 
 " The noble hart, that harbours virtuous thought, 
 And is with childe of glorious great intent, 
 Can never rest untill it forth have brought 
 Th' eternall brood of glorie excellent." 
 
 His was a devout and earnest mind, and this it 
 was that enabled him to transfuse riotous war, and 
 at times sensuous imagery, with a gentle and pure 
 spirit. His work was a dream, a panorama of 
 dreams, an unending sport of the imagination, an 
 easy circling flight of fancy, and his scenes lose 
 the cruel passions of conflict, the grossness of lust, 
 and the contamination of physical contact. We 
 wander with him backward and forward through 
 his vague land of visions, as free from soil as the
 
 114 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 sunlight, glancing lightly on the clean and the 
 unclean. 
 
 Spenser was one of those sincere, imaginative 
 spirits who need never forsake the past, no matter 
 how dark and evil its fashion, for they find not the 
 mischief that is in it; they subject it to their own 
 impressions, casting over it the indistinctness of 
 evening light, concealing deformities, magnifying 
 distances, and bringing even to coarse common 
 place an undefinable harmony. Like a glorious 
 sunset, Spenser closed a long dark day with a 
 splendid vision. As such a sunset is said to give 
 the promise of the hours next to open, so he 
 borrowed the force and spirit of the Elizabethan 
 age, that he might render the new in prediction 
 on the fading sky of chivalry. Spenser was a 
 poet for poets. He brings inexhaustible refresh- 
 ment to the imagination. We are not compelled 
 to read ; we wander as in a beautiful garden, we 
 rest at pleasure, at pleasure resume our walk, or, 
 restored in spirit, leave it altogether. From this 
 mellow light of Spenser, which is at once evening 
 »and morning, we pass to Shakespeare, who gives 
 us the bold, clear discoveries of midday, and that 
 a gala day, in which foreigners and citizens of 
 every rank crowd and jostle each other in the 
 streets, sport in the public squares, move in pomp 
 along the thoroughfares, and make of life a grand 
 ever varying spectacle. 
 
 Among the art forms of the Elizabethan era, one 
 was pre-eminent, the drama. It engrossed the 
 best talent of the time, and attained an eminence
 
 THE DRAMA. II5 
 
 from which later productions of the kind have 
 fallen rapidly off. The English drama, though 
 not altogether alone, is peculiar in form. Its pur- 
 pose is by dialogue purely to unfold striking 
 phases of character, grouped in action either 
 about a single or several leading personages. 
 With careless and vanishing distinctions, it main- 
 tains two forms, that of comedy and that of 
 tragedy, both elements easily uniting in the same 
 play, with a general preponderance of the one, 
 sufficient to define and confirm the ruling senti- 
 ment. The English drama is quite unlike the 
 classical, and also unlike the French drama. The 
 latter occupies a position somewhat between the 
 other two, lays more stress than the English play 
 on the elegant, easy evolution of the dialogue, 
 the intellectual tournament of thought and senti- 
 ment ; cares less for variety and force of inci- 
 dents, and for the vigor of character which these 
 express ; clings far more closely to the forms 
 and rules of the art as shaped under classical 
 models ; and is intolerant of the broad, bold, 
 easy, careless sweep of events found in the works 
 of Shakespeare and of his cotemporaries. The 
 classical drama rests on another idea, and occu- 
 pies the other extreme from that which falls to the 
 English. The chorus, stationary in the centre of 
 the stage, rehearsing many events, giving lyrical 
 utterance and interpretation to the restricted 
 action as it progressed, was the formal, the con- 
 trolling, external feature of the Greek drama, and 
 led to a limitation in time and place, ind in th^
 
 Il6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 number of actors, quite foreign to the spirit of 
 our stage. The force or inner power of the 
 Greek tragedy is as peculiar as its form ; it is 
 a rapid, mental change under a sudden accumula- 
 tion of events, the quick rending of a soul by a 
 final Nemesis, its struggle with forces gathering at 
 once with fearful intensity. This gives it the nature 
 of a catastrophe ; the spirit being searched. Job- 
 wise, through and through by the din and rever- 
 beration of multiplied calamity, by the sharp, light- 
 ning strokes of judgment. 
 
 The English drama owes its form to its histori- 
 cal origin. It was not the product of a pure and 
 critical aesthetical sentiment; a keen relish of a 
 complete, concise and symmetrical image. It 
 moved leisurely, laughingly, with varied and pro- 
 tracted enjoyment, through a series of events, 
 loosely united by ordinary causes ; because it had 
 slowly grown up by a presentation, rather than by 
 a concentration and idealization, of facts ; and en- 
 joyed these in their native flavor and spirit. Its 
 idealization lay rather in increasing the relish of 
 events, making them spicy with humor and passion, 
 than, as in the Greek tragedy, in selecting, com- 
 bining, compacting them into one hungry ordeal of 
 woe, over whose blistering ploughshares, with naked 
 feet, the victim was to hasten on as he could. 
 
 The miracle play, dating back as far as the 
 twelfth century, rehearsed to the populace in the 
 monastery, or in the street? of the city, the Bible 
 history, accompanied with the rudest caricature, 
 the coarsest joke, the most incongruous additions.
 
 EARLY PLAYS. Ii; 
 
 The liistory was greatly humbled, but it was made 
 real, and put within the reach of the grossest 
 minds. If Gabriel, the messenger sent to Mary to 
 ask her if she would be God's wife, loses all celes- 
 tial complexion, and issues forth on the rude service 
 of a feudal lord, yet the three parties are present, 
 in vigorous presentation, to all minds. The miracle 
 plays were accompanied and followed by the morali- 
 ties, with a broader range of subjects, the lives of 
 saints and legendary church history. These again 
 gave occasion to the interludes, shorter and yet 
 more secular pieces; and these by slow gradations 
 to that comic and tragic rehearsal of events which 
 constituted the earliest drama, and ripened into the 
 scenes of Shakespeare. The later secular forms 
 slowly took the place of the earlier religious ones, 
 while, from beginning to end, the play was a free 
 representation of events more or less remote from 
 each other, and animated by a comic or tragic sen- 
 timent. Thus the English drama owes its final 
 form to its free and historic development, and its 
 real spirit and power to those great artists who laid 
 hold of it as it was, and unfolded it according to its 
 inherent character and tendencies. A verdict, grow- 
 ing in unanimity with each advancing year, has 
 placed Shakespeare first among dramatic writers. 
 Though honored by his cotemporaries, this position 
 certainly was not by them granted to him. Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher were more sought after. Web- 
 ster includes him, yet with secondary commenda- 
 tion, among those of whom he cherished a good 
 opinion. Shakespeare is not merely in advance
 
 Il8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 of the play-writers of his own and of subsequent 
 times, but so far in advance as to leave a long 
 unoccupied stretch behind him. The galaxy of 
 writers associated with him, clustering thick, 
 with varied and brilliant powers, about him, owe 
 their supreme impression to his over-balancing 
 light. No one of them can stand comparison with 
 him, and each of them fades before the eye, when 
 singled out for the purpose. The plays, for in- 
 stance, of Jonson, all weigh light when put con- 
 jointly against one of the superior dramas of Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 The time of Shakespeare was indeed favorable 
 to his genius, but that time was shared by Beau- 
 mont, Fletcher, Massinger, as well, and left the 
 busy, fertile writers, that swarmed up into the 
 warm, creative sunshine of that day, to drop into 
 comparative oblivion. One light only burns clear 
 for all ages through the haze of intervening years, 
 and its pre-eminence therefore must be attributed 
 to those independent personal powers which genius 
 holds within itself. The times may furnish ma- 
 terial, may give or remove limitations, but the 
 germ of growth is ever in the mind that harbors 
 it. The one inscrutable force, which no philoso- 
 pher can fully explain, is Shakespeare himself. 
 
 Close communion with men, free, bold, unre- 
 serv^ed — men of vigorous limbs, strong appetites, 
 impetuous passions, and many of them of keen in- 
 tellect ; a language receiving large additions, un- 
 trammelled by criticism, pliant and productive in 
 the hand of masters ; society awakened by new
 
 SHAKESPEARE. 1 IQ 
 
 thoughts and stirring convictions, just conscious of 
 the life of coming centuries that was rising within 
 it, and not as yet heated and parted by religious 
 and political passion, nor filled with the limited and 
 headlong bias of conflicting elements ; these were 
 the conditions under which Shakespeare, and with 
 him many more of like occupation, grew up in 
 strength, in London, the centre of English life ; 
 ripened their powers in the daily use of them in 
 their chosen avocation ; themselves on the stage, 
 saw and felt constantly the conditions of success 
 and failure ; and entered into the most direct, in- 
 tense, living experience of the principles of their 
 art. These were rare circumstances, rare forces, 
 but Shakespeare was rarer than they all. Without 
 him, and the few who stood nearest to him, dark- 
 ness would have overtaken that epoch as easily as 
 another. It would have disappeared as the flush of 
 one among an hundred sunsets, and been thought 
 of no more. 
 
 What were these powers of Shakespeare, by 
 which this age is made inextinguishable by the cen- 
 turies which roll over almost all things the darkness 
 of oblivion, brushing from the earth the life of to- 
 day, that they may make ready for that of to-mor- 
 row ; armies camping where many another has 
 camped, yet without intrusion, collision of spears 
 or clatter of musketry ? The drama calls above 
 every other form of composition for the rapid, va- 
 ried, complete creation of character. This power, 
 this complication of powers, Shakespeare possessed, 
 and it was his art. Characters that are .<^trongly
 
 120 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 conceived, entire and living, take care of them 
 selves, as easily and inevitably as do the men who 
 are like them. It is the imbecile and the mechani- 
 cal only that are in the way, either in nature 
 or in art. A true character contains and com- 
 mands a plot ; while a plot that runs before its 
 characters, leaves them all manakins. Whatever 
 rank we give this power among powers, that rank, 
 in a supreme degree, falls to Shakespeare. He 
 was able from within to raise up, and therefore 
 easily to work in word and action, the most di- 
 verse and varied characters ; these were the abun- 
 dant, living, lively offspring of his fecund imagi- 
 nation. They traversed the stage, and occupied it 
 unendingly with humorous and tragic incidents, be- 
 cause these passions were in them, and they were 
 to the manner born. This supreme command of 
 human nature, this ability to make it shift its form 
 and color every instant, as a cloud that fades or 
 glows in sunlight, also enabled him to treat with 
 equal felicity those allied, unlike forms that hover 
 on the bounds of the rational, yet range beyond 
 them, the spirit, the witch, the monster, the idiot, 
 the half-dazed, or one altogether insane. As cari- 
 cature, if successful, must grow out of that which 
 is real, must be a distortion aptly put upon it, so 
 the supernatural and the unnatural will only obey 
 those who are masters of nature. 
 
 This creative power is not imagination, though 
 it wakes imagination to its highest efforts; nor 
 judgment, though judgment constantly moderates 
 and consolidates its work; nor sympathy, though
 
 SHAKESPEARE. 121 
 
 sympathy, in the putting forth of this strength, gives 
 hfe to it and receives it from it each instant ; nor 
 memory, though memory draws for it upon the 
 crowded recollections of active and eventful years ; 
 nor yet perception, the combined intuition of the 
 senses and the reason, though this lies nearer the 
 nucleus than any other one act; it is all these, in- 
 terfusing and feeding each other, till the mind be- 
 comes a fruitful field, in which a fertile soil waits 
 on refreshing showers, and these on the seeds of 
 tender plants, sturdy shrubs, and towering trees. 
 Such a prolific soul was Shakespeare's, and his cre- 
 ations came up in like abundance, and grew with the 
 same overshadowing strength and luxuriant ease of 
 life. His relation to art, it is not, therefore, difficult 
 to define. He reached it by the inevitable force of 
 his faculties. To bind the genius of one nation, 
 when it attains such vigor as did that of the English 
 people in Shakespeare, to the rules of art applicable 
 to another time and climate, is to miss utterly the 
 freedom which belongs to every creative impulse. 
 As the flora of one region, or the beauty of one 
 sky, is not that of another, so the literature of each 
 period stands by the force of the life that is in it. 
 Influen'.e, instruction may lead to high art, but not 
 imitation. To insist on any absolute excellence in 
 Grecian architecture, or sculpture, or poetry, not to 
 be departed from, is to make over all subsequent 
 time to mediocrity. It is the office of genius, not 
 to fulfil another's law, but to disclose the law of its 
 own nature, and of its own age. This Shakespeare 
 did ; he emphasized and completed the bold, free, 
 6
 
 122 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 rugged drama for which Enghsh Hfe and history 
 had prepared the way. He thus accomplished the 
 work centuries had been laying out for him. This 
 energetic English temper or form he carries with 
 him, no matter where he casts the scenes of his 
 drama ; and while it is one which grew up histori- 
 cally from his age and nation, and was brought to 
 its sovereign proportions by the strength of his 
 single nature, it is all the more that of true art, 
 because of these native, living, consistent forces 
 which were unfolded in it. Taine says of Shake- 
 speare, that his master faculty is "an imagination 
 freed from the fetters of reason and morality." 
 Trained in a more quiet and obedient school, one 
 »ess passionate and less inspired, he regards the 
 English stage as presenting a dramatic literature 
 of "raving exaggerations," whose "ideas all verge 
 on the absurd ; " but the catholic critic will recog- 
 nize in this language the judgment of one suddenly 
 falling upon an art too new and strong for him, and 
 mistaking, therefore, its very vigor and life for law- 
 lessness. He has passed from the garden to the 
 forest, and the trees seem to him awkward and dis- 
 proportioned through excessive growth, through the 
 impress of the struggles by which they have at 
 length overtopped their fellows, and occupied with 
 sturdy branches the upper air. A little time, more 
 familiarity, might lead him to discover a majesty 
 and freedom here, quite beyond the tempered and 
 proportionate life that he has left. 
 
 Undoubtedly Shakespeare accepts the English 
 method and impulse, with its restrictions upon it,
 
 SHAKEhPEARE. 123 
 
 with its peculiarities, its own possibilities within it; 
 but these, when pushed to their limits by his 
 strength, are quite sufficient U)r a great and com- 
 plete art. This narrowness, on the one side, and 
 vigor, on the other, may be seen in the women of 
 Shakespeare. His ideal is the English ideal. His 
 best creations, those in which he gathers up the 
 beauties of his art, are full of love, patience, de- 
 pendence; quick in insight, yet without mastery; 
 incomplete in themselves, and waiting to attach 
 themselves to some centre of manly force and life, 
 from which, as flowers whose roots are hidden in 
 the crevice of a rock, they may rise and blossom in 
 fragile beauty. He knows also the termagant, that 
 worse than masculine nature, which, breaking its 
 close confinement, does itself every species of vio- 
 lence under the wayward impulse that rules it, 
 driven far beyond its own will by the severity of a 
 censure it cannot soften ; but he knows little of 
 v/oman as a self-contained and independent power, 
 as ruling within herself, measurably complete in 
 her own nature, and thus able to rule and thrive 
 with others. 
 
 Falstaff, his chief humorous creation, is also 
 very English in character, and quite opportune to 
 Ihe English drama. His humor is in his flesh, his 
 blood, his action, quite as much as on his tongue. 
 He is full of vitiosity, without being hateful; his 
 very grossness saves him from our anger, and we 
 feel that he plots no mischief, save as he is driven 
 to it by a coarse, unconquerable, appetitive nature. 
 Our moral sense is apologetic toward him, as is our
 
 124 'illli rillLOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 gesthctical sentiment to an interesting, though un- 
 couth, specimen of animal life. We feel that he is 
 as yet scarcely bred above his physical impulses, 
 and that only in the line of cunning and vanity ; 2 
 fact so palpable as to make praise and blame mis- 
 directed, when applied to his actions. In short, ht 
 finds entrance and countenance in a furtive way 
 through a momentary remissness of an overtired 
 moral sense, without essentially vitiating its gen- 
 eral judgments, or abating its force. He is no 
 Italian villain, whom we must know, and knowing 
 hate. 
 
 Taine speaks of Shakespeare as a " Nature 
 poetical, immoral, inspired," also as " void of will 
 and reason." These adjectives we think can not be 
 so grouped, and each retain its full force. To be 
 immoral is to lack in part, in one direction at least, 
 poetical inspiration ; for the noblest creations of 
 character would be thereby shut out from the vision 
 of the soul. What, then, is Shakespeare's relation 
 to morality .-• He is not certainly a religionist ; he 
 is not a moralist. He neither fashions precepts, 
 nor makes it his business directly or indirectly to 
 enforce them. Is he therefore immoral .'' Then is 
 nature immoral, human history and the record of 
 daily life ; for it is these that Shakespeare repro- 
 duces. If he does not so construct his plot, so 
 manipulate his characters, as to give peculiar and 
 brilliant light to moral issues, no more does he pervert 
 ami cover them up. He allows the moral forces, 
 among other real natural forces, to flow on with 
 events, to exercise their own share o' control over
 
 SHAKESPEARE. 125 
 
 them, and to come out, from time to time, in terrific 
 thunder shoclcs of retribution. He merely fails, as 
 a showman, to arrest the spectacle, invite attention 
 and rehearse the unmistakable lesson. At bottom, 
 Shakespeare, instead of being an immoral, is a 
 moral writer ; because he handles powerfully and 
 truthfully natural, real forces ; those which in th 
 world shape character, control its development, 
 gather up its issues. In this region to be true, to be 
 complete, is in the most important of all ways to be 
 moral ; and to be untrue and incomplete, though a 
 thousand tags of morality be tacked to the story, 
 or woven into it as its deceitful labels, is to be im- 
 moral. It is with the interior combination of opin- 
 ions, sentiments, choices, that the artist has to do, 
 — and the true moralist as well — with the natural 
 issue of events, and the ripe fruits of character ; and 
 these all proceed under the laws, and disclose the 
 facts of the world, as God ordains them. The 
 drama, the novel, the history, the biography, so pre- 
 senting them, is moral ; has in it the precise moral- 
 ity which governs and illuminates the world. His- 
 tory is not printed in raised letters for the morally 
 blind to read ; it is not a Sabbath-school book for 
 children, devising for each sin an instant disaster ; 
 yet it is, with all its crimes, its atrocities, its ninety- 
 nine unrighteous acts, and its one hundredth virtu- 
 ous one, so far moral as to be God's great and inex- 
 haustible revelation of morality ; that wherein he 
 discloses character, uncovers good and evil, and 
 leads ultimately to the light the excellent, the 
 admirable, all that men do in their secret soul's
 
 126 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 honor. The religionist and the sensualist may make 
 the same mistake, that of calculating the orbit of ac- 
 tion from too small an arc. See deeply, see broadly, 
 follow conduct with the patience of Providence, and 
 there is no room for two opinions. The higher the 
 art, therefore, the more certainly it reaches nature 
 in its balance of motives, and in the issues of action, 
 the more certainly is it moral. This morality belongs 
 to Shakespeare. When crime, as in Macbeth ; or 
 guilt, as in the King of Denmark ; or villainy, as in 
 lago ; or avarice, as in Shylock, come before us, 
 they do so in their own character, and we have no 
 other thing to say of them, than when, in the trag- 
 edy of history under the ordering of a higher hand, 
 they move across the real stage of life. Shake- 
 speare, also, by his high artistic power, was lifted 
 into a purer region than that which belonged 
 to his cotemporaries; felt less the need of low in- 
 uendo, and vulgar ribaldry ; could win and command 
 attention by the vigor of his primary movement, and 
 thus ordinarily holds on his way without soil from, 
 the defilement about him. That which is low, he 
 touches lightly, and never makes his feast of it. He 
 is full of resources, and these render him select and 
 confident in his ground. As nature is knit to 
 morality, and in fellowship with its purity, so is and 
 must be its every great master. It is the petty 
 limitations, the sad restrictions men have put on 
 morality, its shallowness and barrenness, a clear- 
 ness gained by the loss of all depth and power, that 
 have led them to think of Shakespeare as immoral, 
 and of the world as immoral ; and that too, per-
 
 SHAKESPEARE. 12/ 
 
 chance, while allowing God, in their conception of 
 him, to absorb by foreordination all the sins of men 
 into his own constitution. What we most need 
 are eyes to see Ahat Ciol is ibout, and in this 
 every great artist helps us. 
 
 The works of God are broader than our broaucac 
 works, fuller of sympathies, richer in beauties, mor 
 fruitful in affections. It is the part of inspiration to 
 see some new portion of this wealth, and of teach- 
 ableness to be taught it. 
 
 Shakespeare is moral, then, by the full torrent 
 and truthfulness of his overmastering genius, and 
 immoral by the ooze and drainage of adjacent 
 times. Shakespeare is surprisingly impersonal. 
 He has written much, yet we know very little of 
 him — William Shakespeare. He is back of his 
 characters creatively, not sympathetically. He 
 yields them one and all, without haste, without 
 delay, to the laws of the world into which he has 
 brought them. This one fact gives him a serene 
 moral elevation. It is also surprising that Shake- 
 speare should have been so apparently indifferent to 
 posthumous fame. In the years that intervened 
 between his retirement and his death, he seems to 
 have done nothing for the editing or publishing of 
 his plays ; but to have left them to their chances, an 
 abandoned literary progeny. There is in this a won* 
 derful alienation from ordinary human feeling.
 
 LEClUkE VI. 
 
 *^'\ on, hh j'f^nth rmnhood, old age. — Criticism on his Work'. 
 
 A Transition Period. — Revolutionary Times Critical. — (a) Antagon 
 ism of political Parties. — The Literature of each. — lludibras. — 
 The Drama. — Its Degeneracy, reasons of, — (i) Pecuniary Inter- 
 ests, — (2) Moral Influences, — (3) Scenic Effects, — (4) Unfitness 
 of Deep Emotions for a Spectacle. — {i>), Antagonism between 
 French and English Tendencies ; (c), between Criticism and Cre- 
 ation. — Dryden, position, character, powers. 
 
 The third great name of the Elizabethan age is 
 that of Milton. As Spenser's stands at its com- 
 mencement, opening its portals backward on the 
 past, where the glow of the fading day of chivalry 
 still rests on the horizon ; so does Milton step forth 
 at its close, as one who has caught the prophetic 
 force of its spirit, and sees the light of new ideas, 
 of dawning ages, deeply penetrating the spaces be- 
 fore him and about him. Spenser is animated by a 
 gentle, erudite and meditative spirit, a piety and 
 poetry that soften and veil the harsh, unholy facts 
 of life ; that rearrange and represent them with a 
 mellow light that quite conceals the conflicts of 
 good and evil, and brings to the world as it is, and 
 yet more to it as it has been, a cheerful and benign 
 aspect. He is the poet of conventional forms, and 
 a conventional religion. Shakespeare moves amid 
 the sturdy, strong passions that play into and under 
 social events, whether they be right or wrong. 
 He is the poet of natural, constitutional forces, 
 
 (128)
 
 MILTON. 129 
 
 and thus of natural religion and morality. He 
 deals with the fearful shocks of the moral world ; 
 because the intellectual atmosphere of the human 
 soul is penetrated and convulsed by them. There 
 can be no terrific storms without these thundev- 
 claps of justice, this sharp lightning of conscience; 
 and Shakespeare is the poet of natural religion, be- 
 cause he cannot otherwise present nature. Milton 
 is the poet of definite and progressive dogma, a re- 
 vealed religion that lives to conquer, that casts off 
 the past, and bestirs itself in perpetual resistance 
 and struggle to win a new future. The religious 
 sentiment had divided itself. A portion lingered ; 
 another portion pushed onward, accepted the civil 
 and reformatory conflicts of the hour, and gave 
 itself unreservedly to a social and religious ideal. 
 This spirit the soul of Milton gathered with full 
 force into itself. His life was spent beyond the 
 calm of the strictly Elizabethan age. He ripened 
 under the conflict of its dissevered elements, adopt- 
 ed its progressive forces, and opened the way be- 
 fore them. In a reactionary hour, that brought 
 quiet and neglect to his old age, he gave, in poetry, 
 a rehearsal, in their grandest phase, to the same 
 ideas that had ruled his actions. 
 
 Milton was the poet of revealed religion under 
 its Puritanic type. The style and thought of Mil- 
 ton are native to this earnest and extended insight 
 of his mind. From the beginning he manifested 
 the same scope and majesty. He always spread a 
 broad wing, and floated serenely ; moving at ease 
 from peak to peak. His literary life dropped into 
 6*
 
 130 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. 
 
 three periods, youth, manhood, and old age ; and 
 each, under one general impulse, fell to different 
 and fitting tasks. The Hymn on the Nativity right- 
 ly opened his literary labors. There were gathered 
 with this into his early life secondary poems, brief 
 morning flights of the imagination, which serve to 
 disclose the nature of the powers he held in reserve 
 for the real labors of the day. These first hours of 
 song were displaced by a long, sultry midday, in 
 which Milton, forgetful of poetry, gave himself to the 
 vigorous championship of ideas — ideas the most sig- 
 nificant the world then held, the most formidable in 
 action, the most pregnant in theoretical and practical 
 results, ideas that plucked at thrones and laid the 
 foundations of commonwealths. Without regret, 
 driven by the earnestness of his own nature, Milton 
 turned to the conflict of argument, and called up his 
 imagination only that it might arm and furnish forth 
 the truth ; and send it as a thundering train of 
 artillery to speedy conquest. The storm having 
 passed by, a sombre, reactionary evening haviiig 
 set in, the heavens still cloaked with clouds, the 
 'blind warrior, finding nothing more to be done, in 
 this hush of the senses turned again to poetry, and 
 in the ripeness of a ripe mind took up his great 
 labor. 
 
 An epic poem on King Arthur had been among 
 the early dreams of Milton. From this the stern 
 midday duties of his life had diverted him, not only 
 diverted him, but fitted him for quite another 
 theme. Long tossed in the most protracted, pro- 
 gressive and critical conflict of the century, he
 
 MILTON. 131 
 
 naturally found himself, at its close, nerved for 
 the narration of a more real and pungent strife 
 than that of the thrice told tales of chivalry. His 
 eye was directed to the earliest, highest, most ger- 
 minant struggle of spirits, rebellious to the moral 
 law ; one that opened the wide chasm that di- 
 vides hell from heaven, and sowed broadcast on 
 earth the seeds of sedition. Here the full ten- 
 sion of his thoughts, his deep-toned sentiments, 
 found sufficient and sympathetic play. There is 
 still preserved in the library of Trinity College, 
 Cambridge, a dramatic sketch by Milton, on the 
 same theme as Paradise Lost, the fall of angels 
 and of men. This was not completed, or at least 
 published. It seems probable that the subject 
 may have opened unexpected vistas, and been 
 recommitted in his mind for this later and larger 
 presentation. 
 
 The style of Milton, not less than his depth 
 of conviction and stirring experience, fitted him 
 for the labor he undertook. So thoroughly pos- 
 sessed was he by classical scholarship, so crowded 
 was his imagination with antique imagery, that 
 nothing but the most overruling and dominant 
 impulse could give to him originality, could se 
 afloat and convoy these borrowed treasures of traf- 
 fic. Under an independent and superior thought, 
 they gave scope and grandeur to the movement, 
 <ind richly furnished it out with scenic effect. 
 
 The subject of Paradise Lost is such as to 
 render impossible a treatment satisfactory to all 
 minds. Many would deny it any treatment, as in
 
 132 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 some of its branches an unapproachable theme, 
 one to be left in the high, unsearchable places of 
 thought. This, in absolute, philosophical criticism, 
 would seem to be the true view. There is of ne- 
 cessity a jar and collision, when the infinite and 
 transcendant are made to enter finite limits, and 
 that too under the unfamiliar forms of another's 
 imagination. Yet when we remember that this is 
 done in the person of Christ ; when we recall the 
 comparatively rude way in which, without reproach, 
 it had been accomplished in painting, a much 
 more sensual art than poetry, we believe that 
 this first criticism should be waived, and the poet 
 held only to the strongest, purest, most simple 
 pitch of the imagination, as he makes for us a 
 visible way through the invisible things of God. 
 
 This grandeur is conceded to Milton in ap- 
 proaching these dread unattainable precincts, this 
 Shekinah of our religious thoughts. Do we not 
 find, however, both in his presentation of the Deity 
 and of Adam, some of the blemishes of a temper 
 too positive and dogmatic .■* Art is not only not 
 didactic, it will not allow the didactic spirit to 
 disguise itself under its work. The Deity of the 
 highest ethical art must not utter and enforce 
 theology ; nor should Adam, in the ruddy fulness, 
 the sensual cast of our earliest physical life, im- 
 press upon Eve the principles of a school of phi- 
 losophy. The criticism made upon Milton that 
 seems to us best to hold against him is, that he was 
 not always able perfectly to divorce himself from 
 his dialectics, and, as the pure creative artist, to
 
 MILTON. 133 
 
 hold his conceptions, those of Gotl and of Adam, 
 aloof from every bias ; the one in the grandeur 
 of his impartial, self-poised nature, the other in 
 the simplicity and typical freedom of his unper- 
 verted and unwrought character. A positive tem- 
 perament, advocacy, controversial aims, are un- 
 favorable to art, as they warp and limit the ma- 
 terial, and distort it to a special purpose. There 
 is no fullness, no repose in them, and hence these 
 fail to be found in their creations. The intensity oi' 
 the Puritan spirit, so far as it lifted Milton high 
 up in religious sentiment, was favorable, most 
 favorable, to his poetical inspiration ; so far as it 
 bound him under pains and penalties to a limiterll 
 and precise formula, it narrowed his imagination, 
 and gave close-at-hand and harsh limits to its 
 creations. 
 
 Milton is also criticised for imparting to Satan 
 heroic elements ; we think unjustly. Satan is not 
 to Milton personified sin, he is a real, historic char- 
 acter; and neither philosophy, nor religion, and 
 still less poetry, requires that such an one, on the 
 instant, through his whole constitution, should be 
 turned to weakness and corruption by the touch of 
 evil. There are no such utter overthrows, such 
 violent and complete transitions, in the spiritual 
 world. Sin is an insidious mischief, that does a 
 slow, unwholesome, subtile work. It should find 
 access to an archangel under the disguise of a 
 noble, independent, courageous impulse, and, once 
 seated in the heart, turn it steadily to adamantine 
 pride and hardness, with such phosphorescent flashes
 
 134 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 of flyine:; virtue as the decayed, irritable mood of a 
 great soul may suffer. Religious art too often mis- 
 takes sin, fails of its true paternity, and true descent, 
 by not tracing the slow, sure way in which it un- 
 knits the virtiious nature, loosens the passions, 
 and, abolishing one divine law after another, turns 
 all things into misrule, anarchy and night; the bit- 
 ter and exasperate brood of appetite and lust. If 
 we discern this fearful and steady descent of sin, it 
 is far more dreadful than one mad plunge, which 
 annihilates distance, and puts instantly the damned 
 one beyond the range of vision and sympathy. Even 
 physical spaces must be traversed, and so defined 
 for the mind. 
 
 " Nine days they fell ; confounded chaos roar'd, 
 And felt tenfold confusion in their fall 
 Through his wild anarchy." 
 
 This epic of Milton has helped to close the 
 door on the epic of mere war and violence, and to 
 affect a transfer of the truly heroic into more purely 
 moral realms. Henceforward we wait on the bat- 
 ties of spirits, and the struggle of invisible and 
 spiritual powers. 
 
 We have placed Milton in the Elizabethan age, 
 not because he belongs there in a mere time 
 division, but because of his affinity with the great 
 inventive spirits that composed it. As a root 
 sends up, at a distance from the parent stock, a 
 rival tree, so did this first creative force, binding 
 back Milton in close sympathy to Spenser, after its 
 own proper era had passed by, yield one moie of its 
 most vigorous products, planted in the middle of
 
 A TRANSITION PERIOD. 1 35 
 
 .ne following period. Eras lie inrerlaced, new 
 forces rising in the heart of an old age, old forces 
 lost to the eye in the heart of a new age. 
 
 We now turn to a transition period, the last half 
 of the seventeenth century, lying between one of 
 criticism and one of creation It is a period of vio- 
 lent contrasts. Society was broken up by extreme 
 tendencies, and literature was divided and shaped 
 by the spirit of the party to which, in its several 
 forms, it was attached. The liberty of thought be- 
 gotten by the reformation in England had been 
 genuine and general. The nation, though aroused 
 and strengthened by it, had, in the reign of Eliza- 
 beth, been held together. Under her successors 
 religious and political liberty became closely united, 
 and rapid, earnest minds began to draw off into 
 distinct parties. The most progressive tendency, 
 primarily religious, secondarily political, was that 
 of the Puritans. Against them the royalists, the 
 supporters of the established church and govern- 
 ment, were arrayed. As in all revolutionary times, 
 moderate and intermediate opinions became power- 
 less, and an open conflict, ripening into civil war, 
 swept away minor differences, consolidating the two 
 extreme parties that held the field. Reform is 
 rarely universal. It involves, therefore, separation, 
 the parting of elements, which have been compara- 
 tively homogeneous, mutually restraining each other 
 from extreme tendencies. No sooner, however, do 
 the portions of society begin to divide, to stand in 
 direct repulsion, than, electric equilibrium being 
 overthrown, we have two defined and intense poles
 
 136 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 of counteraction. Opposite tendencies, which be- 
 fore checked, now irritate and enhance, each other; 
 and cause the attitude of both parties to become 
 more extreme than it would be, if each were left to 
 its own free bent. The sweeping away of interven- 
 ing persons and parties, the steady concentration 
 of hostile camps, the looking upon every act and 
 measure first of all in its belligerent character, the 
 blinding and distorting effect of mutual hatred, all 
 serve to give a violent wrench and warp to the minds 
 of either division, and force upon them an extreme, 
 and often irrational, attitude, begotten of collision, 
 and quite opposed to sober, constructive, propor- 
 tionate thought. 
 
 It is this which makes reformatory periods so 
 critical. A dividing line appears, and men are 
 driven to the one side or the other, often sadly 
 against the minor tendencies of their constitution. 
 Those who are reluctant to cast up accounts, to 
 strike a balance, or to settle, by leading considera- 
 tions, their method of action, find themselves tossed 
 about by a conflict they cannot still, and at length 
 compelled to shelter themselves under opinions 
 they would never willingly have accepted. The 
 reign of Elizabeth had been one of coalescence, and 
 thus of mutual restraint; those of James and of 
 Charles were marked, first by separation, then by 
 intense strife. 
 
 The Puritan character was not the product of 
 peace, but of war ; it had grown up beaten on and 
 bowed by severe winds. It showed in every limb 
 and twig the twist of the strong currents in which it
 
 PURITAN CHARACTER. I37 
 
 had stood, and with which it had battled. We may 
 laugh at the rigor of its precepts, its social austerity, 
 its stubborn creed, but these had been nic.de a ne- 
 cessity to it by the nature of the conflict on which it 
 had entered. If religious laxity and social license 
 are to be withstood, they will immediately drive the 
 reformatory party into vigorous, pitiless, unsympa- 
 thetic attack. Only thus can they separate them- 
 selves, and become belligerent. Total abstinence 
 is the offspring of general intoxication. Thus the 
 two parties in England forced each other to the last 
 results of their respective tendencies. The warfare 
 was not one merely of principles, but of principles 
 wrought into social life, compacted and extravagant- 
 ly developed in tastes, manners and literature. 
 
 The Puritan, scrupulous, unbending, severely in 
 earnest, was railed at as a fanatic, bigot and hypo- 
 crite. The royalist, irreligious and reckless, cling- 
 ing to the easy and comfortable shelter of old forms 
 in government and faith, easily fell iuto levity and 
 lewdness, and seemed to his adversary little better 
 than a papist or an infidel. • On the one hand re- 
 buke, on the other ridicule, increased their mutual 
 aversion. The courtier felt that he defied the Pu- 
 ritan in defying decency ; and the Puritan rejected 
 the follies of the world the more warmly for being 
 the follies of the royalist. When we can hate our 
 own and God's enemies at the same time, we are 
 wont to hate with a will. 
 
 To carry this movement to its extreme limit, 
 nothing was needed but a transfer of power back- 
 wards and forwards from party to party, that each
 
 138 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 in turn might suffer the tyranny of the other. This 
 took place in the overthrow which the troops of 
 Cromwell brought to the throne. The contempt of 
 the royalist for the Puritan was then lost in hatred. 
 When, therefore, at the restoration, embittered 
 not instructed by misfortune, he once more gained 
 control, took possession of society, opened the the- 
 atres, and assumed the guidance of literature, it 
 is not strange that there was such an outbreak 
 of immorality and misrule as England had not be- 
 fore witnessed. The evil was so excessive as to 
 cure itself A reaction set in, resulting in the rev- 
 olution of eighty-eight. The harshness of the an- 
 tagonism was once more softened down, and the 
 elements were again so far blended as to make so- 
 ciety possible and bearable. Thus way was made 
 for a new era in society and literature. 
 
 In this rocking, revolutionary age, by which the 
 nation was carried forward from Elizabeth to 
 William and Anne, from Shakespeare to Pope and 
 Addison, we have only conflicting and transition 
 tendencies, conflict itself involving a transfer and 
 readjustment of forces, the overthrow of an old 
 equilibrium and the construction of a new one. 
 
 The first of these conflicts is that of the relig- 
 ious, political and social parties now glanced at, 
 each a passionate and partial development, though 
 the one was generally just and right in its ten- 
 dency, and the other as generally wayward and 
 wrong. Art, seeking balance, proportion, beauty 
 in its products, suffered on either side, yet not 
 equally. In the sound, earnest, progressive spirit
 
 PURITAN CHARACFEK. I39 
 
 i)f the Puritans, there were hidden germs of 
 growth; in the worn out, effete, corrupt spirit of the 
 cavaher, there could finally be found nothing but 
 death, though the glow and flush of a free, reckless 
 life still lingered. The Hudibras of Butler pre- 
 sents, perhaps, the best literary embodiment of this 
 party. Full of wit, indicating large resources of 
 knowledge, it is sensual, disconnected and radically 
 false to the characters it satirizes. We are sur- 
 prised at the wasted ability and blind bitterness it 
 evinces. That satire of this extreme and disjointed 
 character should be the best literary effort of the 
 royalists, while the Puritans were nourishing the 
 genius of Milton, and from their lowest ranks, by 
 the strength of the spirit that ruled them, bringing 
 forth the rare talents of Punyan, shows with whom 
 alone a genuine and productive purpose was found. 
 Dislike may beget malignant satire, culture may 
 call forth wit, levity may make sprightly a licen- 
 tious stage, and the gayety of polite society may 
 concentrate these products into a period of ephem- 
 eral brilliancy, but nothing noble and sincere will 
 thus be created, passing on for the admiration of 
 subsequent generations. In lyrical poetry two con- 
 flicting sentiments, the devotional and the amatory, 
 held the field. As in Herbert and Lovelace, strong 
 contrasts were everywhere present. 
 
 The literature of a theological and practical 
 character fell largely to the Puritans. This, 
 through its didactic ends and transient uses, neces- 
 sarily held an insignificant place in letters. The 
 drama, early attacked by the Puritans, passed into
 
 140 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH UTEkATUKE. 
 
 the hands of the royaUsts. Suppressed during the 
 Commonwealth and Protectorate, it was revived at 
 the Restoration, under the most immediate influ- 
 ence of the court party. The consequence was that 
 the drama, while marked with some high intellect- 
 ual qualities, more especially those of wit and in- 
 sight, now became more corrupt than ever before, 
 had in it less constructive power, and disconnected 
 itself from this time onward almost wholly from 
 literature. 
 
 Passing this period, only here and there do we 
 find one eminent in literary art, as Goldsmith and 
 Sheridan, whose reputation is at all associated with 
 the theatre. The later writers of the drama, as 
 Shelley, Byron, Browning, look for an audience and 
 a criticism entirely disconnected from the stage ; 
 their plays are of a purely literary character ; while 
 those whose productions have been primarily com- 
 posed for the theatre are, most of them, scarcely 
 known in the literary world. Thus play-writing has 
 either sunk to a practical, money-making art ; or, 
 reserving itself for literature, has forgotten the ex- 
 ternal, immediate ends that in the outset gave rise 
 to it. This separation followed close upon the 
 drama of the Restoration, most of whose products, 
 rank with profligacy, have fallen into that decay 
 which now so speedily overtakes this class of 
 composition. 
 
 The abasement of this period was found, not 
 merely in outspoken licentiousness and vile inu- 
 endo, but in the entire construction of the play. 
 Sexual intrigue Vv'as made a chief line of adventure,
 
 THE THEATRE. I4I 
 
 a crusade against female virtue the passion of every 
 spirited courtier, his traditionary field of arras ; 
 while husbands, fathers, brothers were the Saracens 
 and Turks who unlawfully held the holy land. No 
 deeper corruption of human thought and activity 
 is to be conceived of, and the occasional virtue 
 of some rare character, made to turn on sexua 
 purity, served only to show, in the extravagant sen- 
 timent that was gathered about it, that men sinned 
 wittingly, and caught single glimpses, though very 
 false and partial ones, of the heaven from which 
 they had been cast out. When the most ordinary 
 possession of a pure mind is exalted into a rhapsody 
 of virtue, we see at once how fearfully men have 
 fallen off from the familiar laws of morality. The 
 corruption of the many, men and women, no more 
 betrays the fatal secret of the low, appetitive life 
 all were leading, than the sentimental enshrine- 
 ment of here and there a heroine, whose mantle of 
 honor is after all little more than the ordinary pu- 
 rity of her sex. This debasement in the substance 
 of thought and sentiment easily united itself to a 
 like decay in form. Thus the dignity of blank 
 verse often gave way to the more external, sensual 
 effect of rhyme ; or the comedy, stooping altogether 
 to the portrayal of indecency and vice, lost fellow- 
 ship with fine art, became prose, and satisfied the 
 coarse minds it fed with the mere garbage of vul- 
 garity, flung out in the quickest, easiest fashion. 
 
 The degenerac)' of the practical drama thus 
 commenced has remained with us, in a greater or 
 less degree, for various reasons. A theatre is a
 
 142 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH L ITE R A T U K.E. 
 
 money-making institution, and must, therefore, 
 strive to interest as many as possible. Its appeals 
 must be to the masses seeking amusement. Hence 
 it is confined to large cities. In these cities its 
 efforts must be directed to those in search of pleas- 
 ure, and therefore to those quite partially, rather thai: 
 to those highly cultivated ; to those desiring coarse 
 stimulus, rather than to those in love with refined 
 sentiment. Such is the spirit of a theatrical audi- 
 ence, not merely from their native quality, but fron: 
 the time devoted to this amusement, and the part 
 it plays of hilarity and excitement in their daily 
 lives. The theatre is thus compelled to bow to a 
 money necessity, a relatively menial service, and so 
 to miss, in whole or in part, its own aesthetical end. 
 This falling ofif from purity has all along been 
 felt, was felt during the restoration, had been pre- 
 viously felt. In the period under consideration it 
 called for censure, provoked hostility on the part of 
 earnest minds, and thus early created a moral sen- 
 timent, which, to the present hour, pressing hard 
 upon the theatre, has accelerated its downward 
 tendencies If the most intelligent and moral re- 
 fuse to be pleased, and withhold their patronage, 
 much more must the classes less critical in these 
 respects be gratified. The patrons must control 
 the play. Thus the theatre, as a rule, in recent 
 times, has been forced below the level of high art, 
 first, by the interested monetary motives that govern 
 it ; and, second, by an adverse moral sentiment, 
 passing it over still more unreservedly to sensuous 
 pastime and pleasure, to comedy and farce. This
 
 THE THEATRE. I43 
 
 degeneracy of the theatre has been partial and va- 
 riable, rather than complete, relative rather than 
 absolute. There have been places and spasms of 
 improvement, and the general moral elevation of 
 society has told powerfully here as elsewhere. 
 
 This downward literary tendency the theatre 
 has also accepted and confirmed by its manage 
 ment. Its expenditures on scenic effects have been 
 of the most lavish character. Herein the modern 
 stands in striking contrast with the early stage. 
 
 The rush-strewn boards that Shakespeare trod 
 almost under the open sky, lounged on by a ban- 
 tering nobility, pressed close by a rude, noisy 
 crowd, had little in common with the luxury, the 
 gaslight, the brilliant, sensuous appeals of the 
 modern theatre ; and we may easily believe, that 
 the hold on reality in action was in the same 
 stern spirit, as were these coarse, homely relations 
 to facts. 
 
 Every possibility has been exhausted to amuse 
 and delight men through their senses, thus trans- 
 ferring the chief effect from the intellectual to the 
 physical world. A newspaper critic gives the fol- 
 lowing description of one of these modern plays : 
 " It includes a burning house, a modern bar- 
 room, real gin cock-tails, a river-side pier, a steam- 
 boat in motion, the grand saloon or state-cabin 
 of the steamboat, the deck of the same, the wheel- 
 house, the funnels, and the steamboat in flames; 
 and all these objects are presented with singular 
 fidelity to their originals." Here is a show in it- 
 self quite sufficient to captivate the popular mind.
 
 144 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE, 
 
 Sentiment and character would be a gratuitous ad- 
 dition. It prepares us to hear a Hive critic say 
 of a similar play, " It is not a work of literature, 
 but a work of business. The piece is a rough 
 conglomeration of the nothings of the passing 
 hour — objects and incidents drawn, but not al- 
 ways drawn with accuracy, from the streets, the 
 public conveyances, the haunts of profligacy. 
 These nothings are offered for their own sake, 
 and not made tributary to any intellectual pur- 
 pose whatever." It may be doubted whether 
 readings do not now furnish a more pure intel- 
 'ectual rendering of dramatic composition than 
 Joes the stage. 
 
 Another cause which depresses the theatre, 
 without affecting the drama as a written product, 
 Is the unfitness of high ethical sentiment, magnan- 
 imity, faith, love to constitute a public spectacle 
 for a mixed, careless, critical audience of cold, su- 
 perficial amateurs, such as are wont to frequent 
 our theatres. Fine scenery, violent declamation, 
 showy beauty, and rich attire invite a battery of 
 opera-glasses ; not so the deep, secret emotions 
 with which the heart wrestles, nor its holiest af- 
 fections, nor its purest adorations ; these all draw 
 back till they can disclose themselves, like the 
 opening flower, in a light t?\at quickens and re- 
 news them. How the idle claps, following hard 
 on a scene of pathos, tumble down the airy fabric 
 of our sympathies, like a card house, and choke 
 us again with the dust of a noisy, conventional 
 life.
 
 FRENCH AND ENGLISH ART. 145 
 
 The literary drama and the theatre parted 
 company, because the hmited and sensuous aims 
 of the one were not consistent with the high bent 
 of the other ; and the separation dates from this 
 deep decline of the English stage. 
 
 A second conflict which reveals the agencies 
 at work in this transition period was that be- 
 tAveen French and English art. The French lit- 
 erature was now ready to exert a strong influ- 
 ence on the English mind. Easily uniting itself 
 to the classical taste, with which it is so closely 
 affiliated, it constituted the chief foreign power 
 which affected this period. The English court 
 was in close sympathy with France. There it had 
 spent the years of its banishment, and returned, 
 emulous of the tastes and refinements of its al- 
 lies. The brilliant reign of Louis XIV. was in 
 progress, the great epoch of French letters. 
 Dryden, the earliest critic of England, favored 
 in many respects the new refinements, as they 
 were thought, of art. French words, chiefly of a 
 polite, social cast, found their way into our 
 language. Rhymed verse was introduced into 
 the drama, and it, in keeping with this change, 
 strove to assume in dialogue the sprightly refine- 
 ment, wit and declamatory force of the French 
 stage. These tendencies were in conflict with the 
 freedom and vigor of the previous age, with its 
 thorough English spirit. Thus Dryden, with eyes 
 couched by the new criticism, was led to say, 
 " Let any man who understands English read 
 diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, 
 7
 
 146 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and I dare undertake, that he will find in every 
 page either some solecism of speech, or some 
 notorious flaw in sense." 
 
 This new art, and this freedom and refinement 
 of manners, which the English at this time thought 
 to win under the lead of the French, resulted in a 
 feebleness, coarseness and debauchery, which those 
 whom they imitated have been quite ready to laugh 
 at. Says Taine of these years, "There were two 
 classes, natural beings on the one hand, and artifi- 
 cial ones on the other; the first, with the coarseness 
 and sharaelessness of their primitive inclinations, the 
 second, with the frivolities and vices of worldly 
 habits ; the first, uncultivated, their simplicity re- 
 vealing nothing but their innate baseness ; the sec- 
 ond, cultivated, their refinement instilling into them 
 nothing but new corruption."* 
 
 English character is so little allied to French 
 character, that it is at once made unsound and 
 superficial by imitation. The moral force is central 
 in the Englishman. It is and must be momentarily 
 operative for good or evil in his action. The French ■ 
 'man more easily leaves it one side, or out of sight, 
 and can reach a free surface life, in a measure for- 
 getful of it. Hence sin, social sin, always bears a 
 deeper, more gross and sanguinary tinge with riie 
 English than with the French. They are com- 
 pelled to recognize their own indecency, and it 
 thus becomes a double irritation. They strike every 
 instant against the moral law, and feel the wound- 
 ing recoil. Their eyes are open in each transgres- 
 
 * Taine's English Literature, vol. 1. p. 512.
 
 THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH. I47 
 
 sion to their new infamy, and they are proportionately 
 intoxicated and maddened by it. The French, as 
 skaters upon the ice, ghde gracefully along on a 
 surface sentiment, an aesthetical tendency, and 
 rarely pierce the film to the waters beneath, which 
 support it, seldom penetrate the depths of their own 
 moral being; the English sail on an open sea, they 
 are restrained by a heavier, less manageable ele- 
 ment, they bear more with them, and tack and turn, 
 not in mere sportiveness, but in the pursuit of some 
 proportionate good, while collision is irretrievable 
 shipwreck. They cannot reach the gayety and in- 
 difference of the Frenchman, and for them to affect 
 it, is to betray themselves at once into folly and 
 corruption. No man is so cold and shameless as 
 an Englishman, a Lord Chesterfield, built upon a 
 French model. He is to the native born French- 
 man what a skating rink is to the mountain lake : 
 first there is a thin layer of ice, and then a thick 
 layer of mud, with no interior flow, no depth, no 
 beauty between them. A Frenchman and an Italian 
 when they drive, crack the whip over the heads and 
 about the ears of their horses, as if urging them on 
 with a fusilade of musketry. The animals soon 
 learn that this is only the froth and hilarity of mo- 
 tion, and maintain a quiet trot. An English horse 
 would be maddened beyond control by such stimu- 
 lus, and dash off in a break-neck race. His nerves 
 are too many, and too much alive, to endure this 
 extravagance of stimulus. Like his master, he 
 must have a sober rule, or run away altogether. 
 The third conflict of the period was allied to
 
 148 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 this one of nationalities, it was that between crea- 
 tion and criticism. We have termed the era a transi- 
 tion one. It lay between the two most distinct, 
 pronounced and vigorous stages in English literary 
 life. Bold, independent movement, powerful inven- 
 tion, belonged to the previous age. Its teachers of 
 art were few, of the cast of Jonson, who, with an au- 
 thoritative temper, enclosed art very much within 
 his own personal bias, was neither very attentive to 
 it himself beyond his predilections, nor very suc- 
 cessful in enforcing it upon others. The most mas- 
 tered art only by that mastery of their own re- 
 sources which belongs to power. In the period we 
 are now considering, invention, having gathered the 
 first harvest, was gleaning autumnal fields. It felt 
 also the force of that new, colder, more critical 
 phase of thought, which was approaching. Litera- 
 ture had expended its projectile power, and was be- 
 ing swept in by a rhetoric, esoteric tendency which 
 had sprung up in the cultivated mind, ready to con- 
 trol every free, aberrant thought. Times of transi- 
 tion are often inferior alike to those which precede 
 them and those which follow them. They offer no 
 perfect, no single and sufficient impulse, but are 
 distracted and distorted by conflicting forces. Dry- 
 den is full of criticism, yet presents no sustained and 
 consistent practice under it. He has moments of 
 original power, but these are lost in the waste inter- 
 vals of imperfect art. Neither tendency being ex- 
 clusively trusted to, but both in turn betrayed, each 
 fails to justify the writer. There is art enough to 
 offer a ready standard to censure, there is native
 
 TRANSITION. 1 49 
 
 force enough to make us uneasy and regretful un- 
 der the restrictions of a stumbling, hesitating art. 
 
 The transition persons, in whom the new move- 
 ment first appeared, are usually given as Waller 
 and Denham ; and this, in large part, from the esti- 
 mate in which Dryden, Pope and their cotcmpora- 
 ries held these poets. "Well placing of words for 
 the sweetness of pronunciation was not known till 
 Mr. Waller introduced it," says Dryden. And 
 again, "The excellence and dignity of rhyme were 
 never fully understood till Waller taught it in lyric ; 
 and Denham in epic poesy." Pope terms the latter 
 of these, the "Majestic Denham." That poets so 
 secondary as these two, whose excellence is at best 
 ^o formal, should have initiated a new tendency, 
 goes to show how cold and lifeless was the school 
 of poetry ready to come forward. In this conflict 
 between criticism and invention, the royalist and 
 French influence favored the former. Though these 
 themselves were transient forces in English society, 
 united with an inherent tendency toward critical 
 art, of which we shall speak more fully in connec- 
 tion with the next period, they were able to give 
 form for a full century to English literature. 
 
 The undisputed chief of this transition time was 
 Dryden, a man every way typical of it. He may be 
 set down as the first autocrat in the realm of Eng- 
 lish letters ; as the founder of that dynasty in whose 
 line of descent are found Pope and Johnson. The 
 very fact of such an authority is significant. Lit- 
 erary rule in the club and coffee-house falls to the 
 critical, rather than to the inventive mind. Crea-
 
 150 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, 
 
 tion is coy, lifts a man more or less away from 
 his fellows, may diminish, rather than increase, his 
 control over them ; and brings with it stimulus, in- 
 direct guidance, rather than instant, definite govern- 
 ment. Criticism, on the other hand, is at once in- 
 telligible, is dictatorial, and arraigns before itself all 
 parties. Shakespeare was not in his generation, at 
 the Mermaid, such a ruler as Dryden in his ; in- 
 deed the reins in that earlier period fell rather to 
 Jonson, the critic of the Shakesperian circle. The 
 seat of Dryden's authority was Will's coffee-houscj 
 and he owed his influence to the fact, that he united 
 the critical function to his creative power; that he 
 enforced art by that theory and precept which make 
 the critic the expounder of his own times, rather 
 than by that genius which pushes its possessor in 
 r.dvance of his age, conquering for him a kingdom 
 :n the future. Dryden held easy and sovereign 
 sway as one who most skilfully inquired into, court- 
 ed and controlled the literary predilections of the 
 period. 
 
 His character led him to conciliation and con- 
 cession. He was governed by no supreme, ele- 
 vated impulse, he was a devotee to no theory, but 
 with considerable insight and power of adaptation, 
 adjusted his action to the predominant impressions, 
 the passing circumstances. He undertook literary 
 labor as work, and wrought at it as one apprenticed 
 to the business, rather than as one who felt chiefly 
 ihe control of inspiration, who built above and be- 
 yond the style about him, by impulses transcending 
 it. He bound himself to furnish a certain number
 
 DRYDEN. 151 
 
 of plays each year, and, like a shrewd contractor, 
 tried to fill the order in a manner agreeable to the 
 taste of those who gave it. In one play, breaking 
 through this tacit contract with his times, he signal- 
 izes the fact by the title, " All for Love." He him- 
 self says : " 1 confess my chief endeavors are to 
 delight the age in which I live. If the humor of 
 this be for low comedy, small accidents, and rail- 
 lery, I will force my genius to obey it." 
 
 If his genius, as he flatteringly terms it, had 
 been greater, he could never have bowed it to this 
 servile work. It would, in sheer wilfulness, in sim- 
 ple self-assertion, have refused the ser\dtude. As 
 it was, it couched like the strong ass Issachar, be- 
 tween two burdens. Seeing that rest was good, 
 and the land pleasant, it bowed the shoulder to 
 bear. So much was his vision, his intellectual 
 vision, above his practical bias, that in the end he 
 confesses, " I have been myself too much of a lib- 
 ertine in most of my poems, which I should be well 
 contented, if I had time, either to purge, or to see 
 them fairly burned." 
 
 So far did he allow the badness of the passing 
 years to push him from the purposes of art, that 
 Walter Scott says of him, " His indelicacy was like 
 the forced impudence of a bashful man." We are 
 led to wish in him either more or less power ; more, 
 that he may better command adverse influences ; 
 or less, that he may sink under them unregretted. 
 The weakness of Dryden was a moral one, a want 
 of firmness, coherence and vigor in those ethical 
 impulses which direct and keep true the intellectual
 
 152 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 powers. There was no one central fire in his nature, 
 which, with a lifting current, gathered up and ele- 
 vated his thoughts, stirred the flame, or bore its 
 sparks in one brilliant shower toward heaven. 
 
 This weakness of the faith elements is seen in 
 his religious belief. He drifted from Puritanism 
 through the Church of England over into Catholi- 
 cism, resting at length under a charge of mercen- 
 ary tergiversation. There are two classes, who, by 
 a bias of nature, are inclined toward the Catholic 
 Church. The erudite, on whom antiquity has pro- 
 foundly impressed itself, whose piety is of a medi- 
 tative, poetic cast ; and who, like fragile and beau- 
 tiful blue-bells, care not so much for the depth of 
 the soil they thrive in, as to feel the rock, un- 
 broken, earth-centred, just beneath them ; and 
 those with whom religion is a matter of necessity 
 rather than choice, a thing of fears and supersti- 
 tions, and who covet the shelter of a church which 
 will take all risks upon itself, and guarantee its 
 disciples on easy terms. Dryden seems to us to 
 belong to the second class. A superstitious feel- 
 ing is shown in his casting the nativity of his son ; 
 and his restlessness under religious influences, yet 
 sensitiveness to them, in his dislike of the clergy. 
 
 " Kings and preests are in a manner bound, 
 For reverence sake, to be close hypocrites." 
 
 How did this ethical weakness in Dryden affect 
 him in art? He is admitted to have possessed fine 
 powers. Passages of striking beauty are found in 
 his works ; but they are thinly scattered, and do 
 not cluster anywhere in such number or order as
 
 DRYDEN. 153 
 
 to constitute one great work. His plays are so 
 polluted, that we no more covet their wit than the 
 garments that smoulder with buried kings. He 
 wrote them avowedly under the mean, mercantile 
 inspiration of the sentiment, " He who lives to 
 please, must please to live." Falling by these 
 words of shrewd concession from the heights of the 
 moral world, there happened to lie under him, for 
 his reception, nothing but the sensuality of a court 
 society, just passing out of life by spontaneous 
 decay. Here, at this altar of lust, he ministered, 
 and his plays have perished with it. In his ruling 
 sentiment, just given, he struck the key-note of 
 dissolution in the English drama, of its sad dissolv- 
 ing melody. Ceasing to be filled with its own life, 
 and anxious only for immediate gains, it has sunk 
 from an art to an avocation ; and its composers, 
 from artists to playwrights. Only great actors en- 
 able it for a brief period to return to the tragedies 
 of Shakespeare. 
 
 His poems are largely satirical, didactic, po- 
 lemic. The excellencies that lie on this low grade, 
 he attained ; conciseness of thought, aptness of ex- 
 pression, pomp and majesty of language, an occa- 
 sional beautiful image, critical prefaces rivalling in 
 interest the poems that follow them, lively versions, 
 vigorous translations, and an increasing mastery of 
 the formal conditions of verse. Against these at- 
 tainments lie the facts, that his works as a whole 
 are heavy, tedious ; that they never quite justify his 
 talent ; that he seems to feel a better impulse than 
 that which he obeys ; to work at little things with 
 7'
 
 154 1HE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 passing visions of greater ones ; and in the end is 
 content, that his poems, for the most part, should be 
 burned, a sentiment in which he and the world may 
 well be at one again. Says Voltaire of him " An 
 author who would have had a glory without a blem- 
 ish, if he had only written the tenth part of his 
 works." '•'•" 
 
 To us his weakness is that of the circle in which 
 he moved. He lacked virile, moral force, which is 
 to the poet what it is to the man, the spring, the 
 coil of his intellectual mechanism, driving his ideas, 
 giving them firm rotation, and causing them to 
 cleave to the function and motion that are in them, 
 as the earth revolves under its own gravitative im- 
 pulse. The moral nature is looked on as merely 
 formal, didactic, preceptive ; it is rather the very 
 essence, the organizing power of spiritual life ; and 
 unless one is by it thrown at some point into sym- 
 pathy with pregnant principles, geared into the per- 
 manent world of ideas, belted to human progress, 
 his work must be cold and poor and transient, wait- 
 ing on oblivion. 
 
 • Voltaire, p. 83.
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 The balance of Two Periods, the Creative and the Critical. — The 
 School of Pope — its Value — Relation to Poetry and Prose. — 
 Causes which produced it, {a) Natural Sequence of Criticism on 
 Creation, {/>) External Influences, {c) Science and Philosophy of 
 the Time. 
 
 Social Spirit of the Period. — Improved by Literature. — The Papers 
 of Steele and Addison. — Service of. — Qualities of Literary Lead- 
 ership. — Chief Men — Swift and Pope, Steele and Addison. 
 
 Two periods in English Literature stand in nat- 
 ural equipoise, both great under their own specific 
 forms, the creative period of the time of Queen 
 Elizabetli, and the critical period of the time of 
 Queen Anne. We have spoken of the transition un- 
 der Dryden by which English Letters passed over 
 from Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, to Pope, Swift 
 and Addison. This period of pre-eminent art is held 
 in very different honor by different critics, and has 
 been assigned a rank varying from the highest al- 
 most to the lowest. The early portion of the eigh- 
 teenth century was long regarded as the Augustan 
 age of England. Its spirit ruled the entire century, 
 and only slowly lost ground at its close. It was the 
 reduction of its influence, the reaction against it, 
 that gave occasion to a second creative period at 
 the commencement of the present century, This 
 artistic tendency, made ready for in a half-century, 
 dominant during two-thirds of a century, and de- 
 clining in the remaining third, exhibits two phases, 
 
 (^55)
 
 156 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 the first under Tope and Addison, the second undei 
 Johnson. The key-note of its spirit and method 
 was most clearly given early in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury by Pope, who was its best embodiment. 
 
 In the aesthetical product there are two constitu- 
 ents, the substance and the form. Though these 
 are much less separable than the way in which they 
 are sometimes spoken of would seem to imply, they 
 may, by the manner in which they are contemplated 
 by the mind in its productive attitudes, give quite 
 diverse results. The intellectual substance of a 
 conception may remain much the same, and yet its 
 emotional force be materially modified by minor 
 variations of expression ; as the same clouds accept 
 a hundred shades of beauty according to the light 
 that falls upon them. The emotional element is 
 much more subtile and evanescent than the intel- 
 lectual one, and comes and goes on conditions so 
 delicate, that we are more cognizant of the results 
 than of the means by which they are wrought. 
 
 The form and spirit are so mutually dependent, 
 that they only exist in and by each other. There 
 can be no modification of the one member without 
 a corresponding change in the other. But the 
 mind, in its analytic, creative act, can bend its at- 
 tention to the spiritual substance of its conception, 
 made up as this is of thought and feeling; or it 
 may direct its constructive vision to the form which 
 the product is to assume. In the one attitude, the 
 mind is more thoroughly creative, in the other, 
 more carefully critical; in the one, it works more 
 from within, and thinks of the form only as the con-
 
 THE SCHOOL OF POPE. . 157 
 
 ception grows into it, and necessitates it ; in the 
 other, it works more from without, allows the ex- 
 pression to react constantly on the idea, and give 
 law to its expansion. In the first instance, we se- 
 cure a living product, whose seed is in itself; in the 
 second, an artistic or architectural or critical pro- 
 duct who^e plan has run before it, and shaped it. 
 
 We speak in this bald way of the two methods, 
 that of Shakespeare and that of Pope, though they 
 rarely or never stand apart as complete and exclu- 
 sive attitudes of mind. Creation is not so absolute 
 as this would imply, nor is criticism so formal. 
 They are rather as the foci of an ellipse, which to- 
 gether define the curve ; but in one or other of 
 which its gravitating, illuminating centre, its sun, is 
 located, holding the planet to its orbit, defining its 
 periods, its degrees of light and darkness, heat and 
 cold. 
 
 In the school of Pope, it was the critical func- 
 tion that was uppermost. This did not arise by ac- 
 cident, or by the force of circumstances merely ; he 
 early proposed to himself this precise kind of effort. 
 Mr. Walsh, " The knowing Walsh," as Pope styles 
 him, addressed him this counsel at the opening of 
 his career, which met with acceptance : " We had 
 several great poets," said he, "but we never had 
 one great poet that was correct ; and he advised me 
 to make that my study and aim." A poet whose 
 superiority over other great poets is to be found in 
 his correctness, this is the project of Pope and his 
 friend. The scheme evidently promises more 
 formal than substantial merit. Technical precision
 
 158 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 may be reached, but what will become of greatness ? 
 There is danger that those birds of the free, upper 
 air will hardly consort with the new-comer, not- 
 withstanding the careful preening of his every feath- 
 er. The dash and whirl of the thunder-cloud begel 
 some ruffled plumage. The idea of great poets, 
 who are not in the main correct poets, either springs 
 from confusion of thought, or belittles correctness 
 into a studious observance of the secondary rules 
 of composition. To this labor, then, of cold, out- 
 side scrutiny, Pope and his cotemporaries set them- 
 selves. The favorite measure of the time, a rhymed, 
 decasyllabic, two-lined stanza, was especially predis- 
 posed to a monotonous neatness of movement, an 
 antithetic structure of the thought, an adroit, quick 
 turn of the expression, which should make them- 
 selves sensible each instant, like waves that strike 
 the shore under firm winds, in one unbroken ca- 
 dence. Probably this poise and thrumming of the 
 thought, by which it fell into the cold pulsations of 
 an unvarying rhythm, have never surpassed the point 
 of neatness attained by Pope, and accomplished all 
 that art of this mechanical grade could reach. 
 
 The real value of this kind of excellence it is 
 not easy to determine with precision, different 
 minds estimate it so differently. The cotempora- 
 ries of Pope, and a large portion of those who im- 
 mediately followed him, gave him rank among the 
 first English poets. Critics of the present cen- 
 tury have fallen off, many of them greatly, from this 
 high praise ; though some still speak of him in 
 terms of the warmest eulogy. Thackeray says,
 
 POPE. 159 
 
 "Besides that brilliant genius and immense fame, 
 for both of which we should respect him, men of 
 letters should admire him as being the greatest lit- 
 erary artist that England has seen." ••'•■ Is there not 
 either a disparagement of art in this passage, or an 
 exaggerated valuation of the excellencies of Pope ? 
 Either Shakespeare and Milton are not artists, o 
 they are, according to this judgment, inferior in art 
 to Pope. If they are not artists, what on the whole 
 is art worth .-* or if they are artists, is it in the trivi- 
 alities of a trade whose drift is execution, or in the 
 sublime forces of creation that Pope surpasses 
 them .-* If in the first, what does the implied praise 
 amount to? if in the second, how does the world 
 misunderstand itself With a like feeling Thackeray 
 speaks of the close of the Dunciad : " In these as- 
 tonishing lines Pope reaches, I think, to the very 
 greatest height which his sublime art has attained, 
 and shows himself the equal of all poets of all time. 
 It is the brightest ardor, the loftiest assertion of 
 truth, the most generous wisdom, illustrated by the 
 noblest poetic figure, and spoken in words the apt- 
 est, grandest and most harmonious." f When we 
 read this passage, and then turn to the lines of 
 Pope referred to, the praise seems to us excessive. 
 
 " She comes ! she comes 1 the sable throne behold 
 Of night primeval, and of Chaos old ! 
 Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay, 
 And all its varying rainbows die away. 
 Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, 
 The meteor drops, and in a flash expires. 
 
 * English Humorists. f Ibid.
 
 l60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 As one bv one. at dread Medea's strain, 
 The sick'ning stars fade off th' etherial plain ; 
 As Argus' eyes, by Hermes' wand oppressed, 
 Closed one by one to everlasting rest ; 
 Thus, at her fell approach and secret might, 
 Art after Art goes out, and all is night. 
 See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled, 
 Mountains of casuistry heap'd o'er her head ! 
 Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before. 
 Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. 
 Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires, 
 And unawares. Morality expires. 
 Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine; 
 Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine. 
 Lo ! thy dread empire, Chaos, is restored. 
 Light dies before thy uncreating word ; 
 Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall, 
 And universal darkness buries all." 
 
 The thought in this passage barely sustains the 
 expression. It is not the breaking out of senti- 
 ments that hft and impel upward the language. 
 
 It may help us in a just estimate of this period, 
 as compared with the creative periods that went 
 before it and followed it, to observe the direction 
 which its critical temper gave it. Three leading 
 poems of Pope are the Essay on Man, a didactic 
 poem; The Dunciad, a satire; and The Rape of 
 the Lock, a mock-heroic poem. Thus none of 
 them lie in the most central fields of a creative im- 
 agination, but only skirt them. It is merely the 
 slopes and lowlands of Parnassus that are here cul- 
 tivated, made to blossom with the nutritious lentils 
 of philosophy, or sown to the dragon teeth of satire, 
 or purpled over with the poppy, yielding its mock 
 visions, its weird and sportive fancies. The high,
 
 POPE. l6l 
 
 the holy, the real ; the epic, the dramatic, the lyric ; 
 achievement, conflict, the song that searches the 
 heart with its tender, echoing sentiments, are all 
 forgotten in favor of a cold philosophy, culling pre- 
 cepts, and neatly putting chance principles in aim- 
 less prudential fashion ; in favor of the bitter words 
 of genuine hatred, and the mock words of ironical 
 respect. 
 
 We shall also remember to advantage, in 
 judging these artists, the relatively high estimate 
 they themselves made of poets of quite secondary 
 powers, of the calibre of Waller and Denham, in 
 contrast with Spenser and Shakespeare. 
 
 Not only was the poetry of the time largely 
 didactic, it was outranked, if not absolutely, yet 
 relatively, by the literary prose of the period. 
 The relative position of prose in English litera- 
 ture has never been higher than at this date. 
 This excellence may fairly be regarded as the dis- 
 tinguishing literary feature of the age. Addison 
 and Swift and Steele gave prose new force and 
 beauty, devoted it to ends as sesthetical at least 
 as those which engaged poetry, and made it a 
 rival in public attention. The satire of Swift was 
 more varied and vigorous than that of Pope, and 
 lost little or nothing by its prose form. The es- 
 says of Addison were filled with sentiments more 
 gentle and delicate, and hardly less imaginative 
 and complete, than the best which belonged to the 
 poems of the critical school. It is plain, then, 
 that this period forsook the higher regions of art, 
 set poetry and prose to much the same tasks,
 
 l62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 gathered and folded in one enclosure its flocks 
 and herds whether from the rocks above or the 
 meadows below, and entered on a safe, serviceable, 
 dilettant husbandry of its resources, far more ad- 
 vantageous to the reflective and critical than to 
 the inventive faculties ; to prose, in its patient, 
 plodding functions, than to poetry, in its bold in- 
 sight, free aspirations, and tender, sympathetic 
 responses. 
 
 Poetry had already reached the central prin- 
 ciples of art, principles which lie a primitive 
 frame-work of strength in all products of a truly 
 great and original cast. It had thus compara- 
 tively little to expect from art, and lay open to the 
 danger of a petty, superficial and exasperating criti- 
 cism, that, forgetful of form as the expression of in- 
 terior force, should refine upon it as a distant ele- 
 ment, and, proud of minor corrections, set up in- 
 flexible methods and dead canons for the making 
 of living things. Prose, on the other hand, an 
 object hitherto of much less careful and refined 
 attention, less sensitive in its structure, more 
 •homely and useful in its purpose, was quite ready 
 to be profited by a new infusion of art, to be 
 shaped as an instrument more aptly to its ends, 
 and to accept at once a more artistic form and 
 office. It was rescued from the harsh and ex- 
 clusive service of dialectics and dogmatism, re- 
 tained by the fancy and social sentiments, and 
 set to a task of mingled pleasure and instruction. 
 Thus the profiting of the period accrued to prose 
 rather than to poetry ; this for the first time be-
 
 CRITICISM FOLLOWS INVENTION. 1 63 
 
 came a fine art, and in the essay, took rank as 
 an aesthetical product. 
 
 The causes which produced this artistic period 
 were various. In the first place, a natural, al- 
 most inevitable, literary movement involved it. 
 Great originality and inventive power cannot last 
 long. There is not strength enough to sustain 
 them, to hold unweariedly the gigantic stride 
 they involve. Fortune is too sparing in her gifts 
 of genius to the race for this. But at the ad- 
 vanced position reached by invention, when the 
 general mind is yet lively and restless, an ocean 
 swept by a storm that cannot at once sink into 
 repose, criticism and art take up their tasks with 
 peculiar advantage. Unable to rival in new 
 fields of effort the works before them, poets and 
 writers are nevertheless too much lifted and 
 quickened by past successes to fall into mere 
 servile imitation. They become pupils, inquire 
 into the method and details of previous products, 
 and conceive the idea of perfecting them. They 
 have before them abundant material, from Avhich 
 to derive the rules of art, to which to apply them; 
 they nurse a critical taste, and reach a pleasant 
 sense of personal power, not to say superiority 
 in laying down the precepts of more careful and 
 considerate work. Thus it almost inevitably hap- 
 pens, that each great philosopher has his dis- 
 ciples, who correct and expand his system ; each 
 painter of inventive power is followed by a school 
 of not unworthy men, who go forward to apply 
 the new idea, develop its possibilities, and lay
 
 164 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 down its rules. An age of invention, in expend- 
 ing itself, naturally gives rise to one of art. 
 
 Such was the sequence of the age of Pope 
 upon that of Shakespeare, growing out of it un- 
 der the transition period of Dryden. It could 
 scarcely happen otherwise than that the later 
 poets, losing the powerful, free impulse of the 
 earlier ones, should strive to replace it by 
 greater painstaking, should set themselves the 
 feasible labor of refining upon their method. 
 
 The same influences, moreover, which had 
 wrought for art in the transition period, still re- 
 mained operative. The commanding age in French 
 literature, that of Louis XIV., was still in force; 
 and though political events less favored than in 
 previous years the transfer of the French spirit, 
 the French literature itself was more controlling 
 than ever. Pope's Essay on Criticism unites itself 
 to the precepts of Boileau and of Horace, and shows 
 whence the current of his ideas descended to him. 
 The classical influence was yet more independently 
 powerful at this time than the French. The renais- 
 sance spirit was uppermost in France and in Eng- 
 land, and as has been usual with it in art, begot 
 imitation and servitude rather than power. Arnold 
 says of Pope, "The classical poets soon became his 
 chief study and delight, and he valued the moderns 
 in proportion as they had drunk more or less deeply 
 of the classical spirit. The genius of the Gothic or 
 Romantic ages inspired him at this time with no 
 admiration whatever. He can find no bright spot 
 in the thick intellectual darkness from the downfall
 
 CLASSICAL INFLUENCE. 165 
 
 •sf the Western Empire to the age of Leo X." ** 
 Mow impossible is it even for that which is best to 
 confer unmingled good ! How much barren, un- 
 fruitful admiration has Greek art, poetry, sculpture 
 and architecture, begotten ; drawing the thoughts 
 of men backward, and binding them to that already 
 done, rather than inspiring them for new achieve- 
 ment ! The German must build his national Wal- 
 halla as a Greek temple, and adorn the palaces of 
 his princes with Grecian stories, and that too when 
 descended from an ancestry who could help to 
 strike out and carry forward the bolder and more 
 inspired styles of Gothic architecture. The classi- 
 cal spirit, revived in remote races and times, devotes 
 those who implicitly receive it to comparative ster- 
 ility. They can scarcely restore the past, certainly 
 not enlarge it ; and in the effort to do this, they 
 waste the present and lose the future. The Greek 
 is what he is to us because he was intensely true to 
 himself, nursed and honored his own life. On these 
 conditions only shall we command the generations 
 that are to follow. They will hold lightly the 
 shadowy outlines of an older life that we may be 
 found painfully yet faintly renewing. 
 
 Taine says, "The arts require idle, delicate 
 minds, not stoics, especially not Puritans, easily 
 shocked by dissonance, inclined to sensuous pleas- 
 ure, employing their long periods of leisure, their 
 free reveries, in harmoniously arranging, and with 
 no other object but enjoyment, forms, colors and 
 
 * ArnoM's English Literature, 245.
 
 1 60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EMGLISH JLITERATUKE. 
 
 sounds.""'' This is the Frenchman's view of ail, 
 and the one that partially prevailed in England 
 at this period, prevailed so far as such sen- 
 timents could find transfer to the more earnest, 
 practical, English mind. What it achieved we 
 see, the results hardly commend the theory. 
 When the artist has no other object than en- 
 joyment in view, we believe that he will find 
 great difficulty in realizing even this. High pleas- 
 ure, like real excellence, is born of a more sturdy, 
 and powerfully directed spirit. Witness the severe 
 temperament and indomitable ideas that ruled 
 Michael Angelo. It is the execution of cherished 
 purposes, obedience to ideas, that confers pleasure, 
 not pleasure that enthrones ideas. High enjoyment 
 is ever incident to high action. 
 
 Another influence, aiding this tendency to art, 
 were the science and the philosophy of this and the 
 previous period. When natural science is pre-emi- 
 nent over philosophy, when philosophy leans to 
 materialism, to an interpretation of the laws of 
 mind by those of matter, to a reference of knowl- 
 edge exclusively to the perceptive and analytic fac- 
 ulties, we are sure to have a cool and critical, rather 
 than a warm and creative, social atmosphere ; one 
 of skepticism and overthrow, rather than of belief 
 and spiritual construction. Science plays a most 
 inevitable and essential part in progress ; but it 
 does not, especially in its earlier stages, when it is 
 coming in contact with many inadequate beliefs, and 
 overthrowing them, give inspiration to the higher, 
 
 * English Literature, vol. i. p. 332.
 
 SCIENCE, ITS INFLUENCE. 1 67 
 
 intuitive, trusting, ethical impulses of the soul. It 
 tends to a wavering, uncertain and superficial senti- 
 ment on all questions that pertain to man and his 
 destiny, a sentiment like that which pervades the 
 Essay on Man, one of whose fundamental conclu- 
 sions Pope is said to have exactly reversed under 
 a transient wind of criticism. The philosophy of 
 Locke, the science of Newton, the skepticism of Bo- 
 lingbroke, were affiliated forces, largely good in 
 themselves, with an immeasurable overbalance of 
 good in their results ; yet begetting an adventurous, 
 uncertain, unbelieving temper, disinclined to pledge 
 itself unreservedly to any spiritual faith, to any 
 principle or precept of religious belief; and hence 
 ready for a cool rendering of the heart, an outlook 
 of immediate pleasure and comfort on society and 
 art. There cannot be devotion, heroism, sacrifice 
 in the primarily skeptical spirit ; and hence there 
 cannot be profound sympathy with that art in which 
 the human soul is tossed by deep, unquiet emotions, 
 refusing to be lulled into the rest of the passing 
 hour, but seeming to feel far off forces at work be- 
 low the horizon, the promises of invisible good, the 
 presages of invisible evil. The things astir in the 
 unseen world affect such a mind, and will not leave 
 it solely attentive to the lazy, measured rhythm of 
 a summer's day. It floats on a sea alive with the 
 long swell of distant tempests. Science had begun 
 its work of demolition ; philosophy aftrighted, was 
 forsaking its own principles, and seeking grounds 
 of alliance with the new tendencies; religion with 
 too little power to modify its belief, to take new po-
 
 l68 THE PniLOSOPH\ OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 sitions, to reform and restate and redefend its prin- 
 ciples, was losing hold on the minds of many, and, 
 like a wall that is shaken, began to show unexpected 
 traces of weakness and insecurity. It was ceasing 
 to rule by authority, and had not yet learned to 
 rule by reason. There was thus a loss in enthu- 
 siasm. Men were seized with worldly prudence, 
 were not ready for the long ventures of the spiritual 
 world, its patient waiting, and impalpable promises ; 
 they cast about them for a more immediate good, a 
 more hasty and formal pleasure. This is the ten- 
 dency which art, that has become artistic, exacting 
 and sensitive, is ready to accept, finding its office 
 in contributing a gloss of superficial excellence, an 
 elegance open to the senses, which, if it holds no 
 weighty claims against the future, redeems the 
 present to good cheer and elegant culture. The 
 lake ripples and sparkles in the sunshine, and we 
 stop not to ask what skeletons of death are hidden 
 under its waters. These were the days of unbelief 
 and feeble belief that were later to call forth the 
 reasonings of Butler, and the zeal of the Wesleys. 
 The political and social spirit which belonged 
 to the reigns of William and Anne, was more vigor- 
 ous and healthy than that of the previous period. 
 The close, sultry, feverish air that attended on the 
 Stuarts, surrounding them, like the pent-up breath 
 of a night revel, to which the morning freshness of 
 a new day has not yet found entrance, had begun 
 to clear away. In the struggle of liberty, the cir- 
 cuit of aggression, resistance, reaction and com- 
 promise had been completed. The commonwealth
 
 POLITICAL EVENTS. 1 69 
 
 had been followed by the restoration; this hi turn 
 intolerable had been succeeded by the revolution, 
 and William came to the throne the representative 
 of progressive and revolutionary, yet constitutional 
 and monarchical, liberty. Thus was closed in mu- 
 tual concession and the permanent gains of good 
 government the most violent series of events that 
 has fallen to the peaceful progress of England. 
 The political parties of this reign ceased to be fac- 
 tions, and struggled with each other for the guid- 
 ance of a government which neither proposed to 
 modify or resist. The Tories by affiliation and de- 
 scent had taken the place of the royalist. Their 
 central idea was authority ; for them the chief vir- 
 tue of a subject was submission. This party was 
 principally composed of intelligent and designing 
 leaders, of ignorant and prejudiced followers. No 
 party, as our own national experience abundantly 
 shows us, responds with so firm and patient a front 
 to the rallying cry, as one in which the cunning of 
 the few is mated with the credulity of the many. 
 It is this inevitable union of intrigue and ignorance 
 that sustains selfish and unscrupulous power. Well 
 might such a party urge passive submission ; the 
 high in state and church profited by it, the low 
 knew no other loyalty or religion. The leaders 
 gladly held what they had ; the followers easily re- 
 signed what they never hoped to have. Words are 
 better rallying forces than ideas for the masses of 
 men ; they involve for their partisans no discus- 
 sions, and hence no divisions ; they exact from 
 chiefs no concessions, and hence look to no sacri- 
 8
 
 I/O THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 fices. All that was hereditary, stubborn, uncon- 
 cessive and selfish in English society settled by its 
 own weight and downward bent into the Tory 
 party. All, on the other hand, that was liberal, 
 active and progressive, yet sufficiently moderate to 
 hope for power, belonged to the Whigs, the politi- 
 cal descendants of the Round-heads. Parties bid- 
 ding for power, eager-eyed for the possibilities of 
 success, are always more or less corrupt, warped 
 from their true tendencies. Individual ambition 
 will strive to lay hold of and use the party organiza- 
 tion for its own private ends. Submission will be 
 enforced by urging the necessities of the party, and 
 thus its unity and zeal will throw it only the more 
 completely into the hands of the unscrupulous. The 
 right to think is the right to bolt. Aside, however, 
 from personal distractions, the central sympathy, the 
 prevailing purpose of the Whigs, was constitutional 
 liberty. They included the liberal, independent, 
 thoughtful minds of the nation, the midway men, 
 who have much to gain and much to lose, who love 
 their own thoughts, and covet the power to form 
 and execute their own plans. These two parties, 
 Tory and Whig, representing the old extremes, 
 had drawn so near together as to lay aside the 
 sword, and enter on a perpetual parley of words 
 and measures, a competition for the control of a 
 sovereignty both were prepared to respect. 
 
 A corresponding improvement was taking place 
 in public manners and morals. The literature of 
 the period more than concurred with this; it 
 advanced it in a positive way. The papers which
 
 THE PAPERS OF STEELE. I/l 
 
 originated with Steele, and included the best efforts 
 of Addison, were a social evangel. The corrupt dra- 
 matists of the previous reign, who owed so much of 
 their taint to the court whose patronage they 
 sought, had passed away. William, with little lit- 
 erary sympathy, did not merely bring with him a 
 sounder, more wholesome life, one of more earnest 
 and serviceable purposes, he was inclined to leave 
 letters to a more independent and thus to a more 
 healthy development. The neglect of courts is 
 often better than their favor. The liberty and dis- 
 interestedness of art are both essential to its high- 
 est excellence. The moment it becomes a retainer, 
 and is compelled to make itself agreeable, it loses 
 the inspiration of freedom, the guidance of its own 
 creative insight. Patronage is to art a qualified 
 good. 
 
 These papers, which now came forward to take 
 the place in literary influence of the drama, and 
 which present the prose of English literature in its 
 very best dress, sprang from a broad, generous, and 
 skilfully conceived purpose. They aimed at what 
 they did much to accomplish, a social regeneration. 
 They depended on the general patronage, taken in 
 its most fluctuating form, and thus rested on their 
 own merit. They were able to soften public senti- 
 ment, to correct taste, improve manners, and bear 
 with them a genial ethical spirit, only as they could 
 instruct and delight their readers, and increase theii 
 numbers. They were admirably fitted to this pur- 
 pose. . Short, returning at brief intervals, with no 
 close connection and with great variety of contents,
 
 1/2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 they could hardly fail to awaken attention, and keep 
 alive curiosity. They were exactly fitted to the 
 times. They were a fresh and palatable invention, 
 and came to the club and the coffee-house with 
 pleasing topics, offering a creditable variety of fare. 
 Nothing could exceed the ingenuity with which 
 these papers were devised, and the skill with which 
 they were written. We may also add, that this 
 effort was animated by a correspondingly high pur- 
 pose. Says Addison, in the sixth number of the 
 Spectator, " It is a mighty shame and dishonor to 
 employ excellent faculties and abundance of wit 
 to humor and please men in their vices and follies." 
 Again in the tenth number he says : — " I shall en- 
 deavor to enliven morality with wit, and to temper 
 wit with morality, that my readers may, if possible, 
 both ways find their account in the speculation of 
 the day. And to the end that their virtue and dis- 
 cretion may not be short, transient, intermitting 
 starts of thought, I have resolved to refresh their 
 memories from day to day, till I have recovered 
 them out of that desperate state of vice and 
 folly, into which the age has fallen. The mind 
 that lies fallow but a single day sprouts up in fol- 
 lies that are only to be killed by a constant and 
 assiduous culture. It was said by Socrates, that he 
 brought philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit 
 among men ; and I shall be ambitious to have it 
 said of me, that I have brought philosophy out of 
 closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell 
 in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee- 
 houses."
 
 IHE PAPERS OF STEELE. 173 
 
 This purpose, thus distinctly announced, was 
 carried forward with great fertility of resources, 
 variety of methods, and vivacity and ease of style. 
 Pure, idiomatic, simple English afforded fresh, 
 flexible expression ; while satire, allegory, imper- 
 sonation, the changing characters of a club, letters, 
 and many a nameless conceit besides, served to 
 diversify and support the critical function. The 
 inventions of Addison were exhaustless, and a 
 benignant temper and graceful fancy adorned 
 them all. These papers were very successful in 
 their own time, and have since remained classics in 
 our literature. They owe their success, first, to the 
 nobility of their purpose, and afterward to their 
 humor, variety, good sense, moderation, and ele- 
 gance. Each of these qualities they possess in a 
 high degree. The mirth of these pieces is mild, 
 pervasive humor, imparting a pleasant glow of 
 thought, and wooing the reader along a sunny, 
 cheerful path. Satire is constantly directed against 
 every form of social offence, but it is that genial 
 satire which awakens attention to a fault rather 
 than censures it, and enables us to look with the 
 discrimination of a stranger at our own actions. 
 
 Of the second quality, Addison himself says, 
 " There is nothing which I study so much, in the 
 course of these my daily dissertations, as variety." 
 Yet the arc which he and his friend Steele trav- 
 ersed was not the entire circle of human passion. 
 It usually excluded profound emotion, whether of 
 awe, pathos, terror, anger or indignation. Strong 
 feeling, rising like a hurricane to sweep away
 
 174 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITLRATURE. 
 
 opposition, was consonant neither with their tem- 
 per nor purpose. They looked for reform, but a 
 reform that should be initiated in pleasure, and 
 flow on of its own sweet will in the channels of 
 enjoyment opening before it. Hence they swept 
 round from satire to reflection, and reflection back 
 to satire, through a luminous curve of whimsi- 
 cality, caricature, story, portrait, description, alle- 
 gory, criticism and speculation. 
 
 The cardinal quality of these papers is their 
 good sense ; this never forsakes them. Their 
 philosophy presents it in a penetrative, their 
 humor in a pungent, form. Their criticisms on 
 society are as just as they are amiable. Their 
 analysis is correct and practical, their moral re- 
 flections, impressive and natural. This good sense 
 was most effective in securing uniform success. 
 It gave a restraint and proportion to what was 
 said that made it difficult to be resisted, and im- 
 possible to be controverted. Whatever the object 
 of satire, the pedantry of learning, the conceit of 
 rank, the foppishness of dress, the frivolity of eti- 
 quette, the prejudice of partisanship, the same 
 sober, sound opinion underlay and sustained the 
 attack. 
 
 Moderation was even more worthy of commenda- 
 tion then than now. The art of achieving a true 
 success is found very much in tempering zeal to a 
 just moderation. Steel that is too hard is fractured 
 at every blow ; draw the temper too much and it 
 becomes iron. The Damascus blade, with its 
 tough and steady edge clings to that nice line that
 
 ADDISON. 175 
 
 divides excess and deficiency. From this middle 
 region, Steele seems to have been inclined to range 
 upward, and Addison downward. He complains of 
 Addison, that "he blew a lute when he should sound 
 a trumpet ; " yet the lute notes of the one went 
 farther than the trumpet tones of the other. 
 
 The crowning quality of these papers, as work- 
 of literature, is their elegance. This made of prose 
 a fine art, and ranked its best productions, with 
 those of poetry, among the permanent products of 
 taste. This excellence was fully achieved, for the first 
 time in our literature, by Addison ; and since his day 
 elegant culture has found constant expression in 
 prose. The art of Addison is far less cold and 
 critical than that of Pope. It preserves its free- 
 dom, and moves with a simplicity and ease, that 
 are open indeed to error, but are also able to make 
 that error seem slight and unimportant. There is 
 in his style no opposition between nature and art ; 
 the substance and form remain inseparable, the 
 thought lifting itself into light and being at once, 
 rising in a single creative act out of the chaos of 
 material. 
 
 The force of the moral element is freely dis- 
 closed in these works of Addison. Many graces 
 and much good-will come to his aid, as he marks 
 out a pure and reformatory path, and accepts the 
 bias and freedom and boldness of his best impulses 
 in pursuing it. Prose touched the meridian of art 
 at the same instant that it culminated in a catho- 
 lic, wholesome and sincere spirit. There was in- 
 deed much in the temperate, mild form of the ethi-
 
 iy6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 cal impulse to favor this sensitive and considerate 
 art. More force would have been less appreci- 
 ative, less careful ; would have rushed in a heed- 
 less, headstrong way to its goal. It also favored 
 prose as against poetry, and a poetry of art, as 
 against one of creation. Inspiration is the life of 
 poetry, emotion its very substance ; and these are 
 easily lost under those quiet, aesthetic tendencies 
 which ripen prose. Poetry is likely to predomi- 
 nate in a vigorous age, and to master those strong 
 spirits, whose tension of soul is sufficient for its 
 service. 
 
 The supremacy which fell to a single person in 
 the previous period was in this divided. During 
 the reign of Charles, a reckless and corrupt temper 
 controlled literature. This spirit Dryden accepted, 
 and consolidated his authority under it. In the 
 reign of Anne, different opinions found recognition 
 in popular productions, and the influence of the 
 leaders of literature was affected by their political 
 sentiments. Pope and Swift were Tories, Addison 
 and Steele Whigs, and this fact was one ground 
 of divided authority. The temper of the two typi- 
 cal literary leaders, Pope and Addison, was a farther 
 occasion of separation. Pope, sensitive, exacting 
 and irritable, was early displeased with Addison, 
 misinterpreted the counsel he gave him, and found 
 in him too mild, or, as it seemed to Pope, too cold, 
 a temper for his own moods of bitterness. Addi- 
 son could not unite with Pope in his harsh, person- 
 al asperities. The irritation of Pope passed intc 
 aversion, and the two maintained as unfriend!}
 
 LEADERSHIP. 1/7 
 
 a relation as the gentleness of Addison would 
 admit. 
 
 The natural powers of neither of these leaders 
 fitted them for the undivided control which fell to 
 Dryden. Pope was too feeble in body, and too ir- 
 ritable in disposition, to venture on the late hours, 
 exposure and hard-won supremacy of the club and 
 coffee-house. Addison was too diffident and taci- 
 turn, too select and retiring in his tastes, to seek or 
 to enjoy the public and familiar intercourse of a 
 literary coterie, or at least to make it a means of 
 self-assertion and uncontroverted authority. Hence 
 there arose a quiet partition of power in the domain 
 of letters. Addison, in the line of regal de- 
 scent, held sway at Button's, opposite Will's. He 
 gathered to himself Budgell, Tickell, Phillips, Steele. 
 Pope, unable to endure the physical strain which 
 the rollicksome clubs of the coffee-house put upon 
 their members, and with a secret disrelish of de- 
 pendence, retired to Twickenham, and there, in 
 his own villa, maintained a more moderate and 
 splendid court. Swift was strongly attached tc 
 him. Garth, Arbuthnot, Bolingbroke, Gay, Prioi 
 belonged to his circle of friends. 
 
 These four men, Swift and Pope, Steele and 
 Addison, gave by their individual characteristics 
 the controlling personal elements to the age, and 
 constituted two groups of rival power, but unlike 
 temper. Indeed the secondary vigor and artistic 
 force of the time are seen in the absence of any 
 overshadowing personal power. The composite 
 tendency had the upper hand of separate life. 
 8*
 
 178 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Swift possessed a sharp, most incisive mind, 
 which he was wont to use as the cruel weapon of 
 morbid, exacting, unhesitating passions. He was 
 powerful to do mischief and had the practical pre- 
 dilection for it of a street brawler. He was himself 
 incapable of happiness, and could not but worry 
 and wound those whom he approached, and those 
 the most who were the most attached to him. His 
 insanity and idiocy were the physical and spiritual 
 fruits of a morbid temper, and were, as germinant 
 seeds, long and deeply hidden in his constitution. 
 The contempt, almost hatred, of men, shown in his 
 satires, evinces a mind at war with itself, ceasing 
 to delight in its own activities, chafing at its pur- 
 suits, and clashing in a mad way with its own good 
 an-d the good of others. The most undeniable tal- 
 ent and wayward temper united to make him for- 
 midable, one who was sure to inflict injury, though 
 the portion which fell to his enemies was hardly 
 greater than that which he brought to himself and 
 his friends. He won love to outrage and waste it; 
 he gained power to plant fierce, bruising blows in 
 'the teeth and eyes of men, leaving to accident and 
 prejudice to decide who should be his adversaries. 
 Yet, viewed from within, his character at times as- 
 sumed quite another appearance, and was lighted 
 up by generous and sincere emotion. We are led 
 to feel that he himself was overborne by those 
 biting passions which made him, in so much of 
 his outward activity, the fierce assailant, the bitter 
 ind cruel satirist. 
 
 Pope was a man of great and obedient talent—
 
 POPE. 179 
 
 some would say of genius. He brought ample re- 
 sources to the tasks he set himself, but there was 
 less inspiration in them, either of belief or of feel- 
 ing, than in those of any other great poet. The 
 invocation with which his Essay on Man draws to 
 an end, well expresses his temper and his triumphs 
 
 "Come then, my friend, my genius, come along; 
 Oh master of the poet and the song ! 
 And while the muse now stoops, or now ascends. 
 To man's low passions, or their glorious ends, 
 Teach me, like thee, in various nature wise. 
 To fall with dignity, with temper rise; 
 P'ormed by thy converse, happily to steer, 
 From grave to gay, from lively to severe ; 
 Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease. 
 Intent to reason, or polite to please." 
 
 Here is the diplomatist of letters, who coolly 
 studies his times, the temper of men's minds, and 
 adroitly guides his steps among them. He drives 
 his Pegasus in embossed harness, in tricksy fashion. 
 Pope added to an irritable self-consciousness some- 
 thing of the biting passion of Swift. They were 
 confederate and rival masters of satire. 
 
 The second fraternity, that of Steele and Addi- 
 son, was most gentle and humane. Steele exem- 
 plified the strong, heedless, generous impulses of 
 his Irish nationality. He would have been consist- 
 ently good, had he not so relished the pleasures 
 which lie on the border-ground of evil. These he 
 gathered, tearfully cast away, and recklessly gath- 
 ered again ; his sins each time giving a new pur- 
 chase and provocation to his virtues. While we 
 owe much to him, and feel a sympathy with him,
 
 l80 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 paled in the light of his powers by the over-shadow- 
 ing presence of Addison, we yet accept as our 
 chief debt his indirect service in calling Addison 
 to the support and development of the first serials, 
 the Tatler and the Spectator. 
 
 Addison's tact, skill and resources were those 
 of genius. A spontaneous fecundity and power of 
 adaptation had fallen to him, and Steele stepped in 
 at the critical moment to determine the form of the 
 result. Addison led a prosperous and pleasant life, 
 and, with a kind and generous nature, scattered 
 freely its blessings. His chief fault was social ; he 
 sometimes smothered the fires of intellect in the va- 
 porings of intoxication, an inverted torch quenched 
 in its own oil. Addison occupies in English litera- 
 ture a place only second to that of its great mas- 
 ters. We admire the balance, goodness and fruit- 
 fulness of his faculties, yet can hold intercourse 
 with him without the separation and awe of sur- 
 passing greatness. A polished shaft in the temple 
 of letters, we are more struck with the beauty of 
 workmanship than with the weight supported. Our 
 tribute to him is one of good-will even more than 
 of admiration, though admiration is never wanting. 
 It is not often that so large a social obligation adds 
 itself to a literary one ; we put as the supreme 
 point in the man the purity of his spirit, the gener- 
 osity of his temper, and rejoice that his excellent 
 work stands fast by the altar of worship. There 
 are two deeply shaded walks, the one at Oxford, 
 the other at Dublin, associated with the name of 
 Addison. They well express the gentle, meditative.
 
 ADDISON. l8l 
 
 benignant temper of the man, drawing inspiration 
 from the quietness of nature, and giving it in the 
 quietness of his own soul. The points of loving 
 contact between man and the external world help 
 to define the qu^^lily of tliat secret life which the 
 mind cherishes. They disclose its most free and 
 tender affinities, and that on which it is fed day 
 by day.
 
 I.FCTUKE VTTI. 
 
 Relations of Periods. — Contrast between tlie First and Second 
 Phase of the Critical Period, (tr) In Prose Conipusition, (/') In 
 Style. — Johnson's Style. — Pre-eminence of Prose. — Theology. — 
 Metaphysics. — Political Science. — History. — Oratory. — Rhet- 
 oric. — The Novel. — Authority of Johnson. — Grounds of. — Char- 
 acter of his Criticism. 
 
 We are now to speak of the second phase of the 
 artistic period, falling to the middle of the eigh- 
 teenth century. Again we see that periods, as in- 
 dicating the prevalence of particular influences, 
 have no definite bounds. There is very little in 
 intellectual forces, either in their origin or their 
 end, which is instantaneous or abrupt. They over- 
 lie each other, interpenetrate each other, and grad- 
 ually grow out of each other, under the slow victory 
 of new tendencies, under the slow expenditure of 
 old ones. Associated conditions secure a gangli- 
 onic centre, and increase and diminish in power as 
 we approach or recede from it , while the forces 
 that are to rule a subsequent age are already 
 springing up among them. The art which in Eng- 
 lish literature had culminated in Pope and Addison 
 did not pass away quickly. It was a vigorous and 
 deep-rooted tendency, and did not easily yield pos- 
 session of the national soil. It assumed a second 
 form before it began to give ground to the forces 
 that supplanted it. There was far too much strength, 
 
 (1S2)
 
 SECOND PHASE OF THE CRITICAL PERIOD. 1 83 
 
 too much freshness and individuality of thought, too 
 httle extravagance and affectation of method, too 
 much common sense and English sympathy, in the 
 writers of the reign of Queen Anne to allow them 
 to be easily pushed aside. For one full generation 
 after them, the literary momentum of their works 
 was unabated; and only slowly, as the last century 
 was drawing to a close, and the present century was 
 opening, did vigorous reactionary tendencies dis- 
 close themselves. 
 
 Yet the second phase of this period, that which 
 is marked by the autocracy of Johnson, differed in 
 some decided features from the first, under the 
 divided rule of Pope and Addison. In the early 
 portion, poetry and prose stood in fair equipoise. 
 The influence of Pope was not secondary to that of 
 Addison. If he is not to be ranked with the great 
 creative minds of our literature, yet this was not 
 the feeling of his cotemporaries concerning him. 
 There were no honors which they of his own time, 
 or the times immediately subsequent, were disposed 
 to withhold from him. That he has fallen to a 
 lower position is due to the verdict of later judges. 
 The artist who rules by art, who, in the inciiiient 
 conflict that is always springing up between creation 
 and art, sides with the latter, almost always leads 
 his generation. Art, passing from its unconscious 
 and creative to its conscious and preceptive stage, 
 in its clear, critical, formal procedure, flatters our 
 vanity of knowledge, and meets with easy and quiet 
 admiration. It is only when it strikes upward or 
 outward in growth farther than we can follow it,
 
 184 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 that it is compelled to wait for a first, second, or 
 third generation to reach its level, and enter into its 
 spirit. Art that is merely garnering the past is 
 popular ; it is only when it attempts to break new 
 ground for the future, that it encounters the barriers 
 of prejudice. 
 
 In the later portion of this period, no one in 
 poetry stood up in the place of Pope. No one pos- 
 sessed equal weight with him, or could for a moment 
 challenge his rank. Poetry that many would now 
 prefer to that of Pope belonged to the time of John- 
 son, yet there was no poet who was so productive, 
 who held the same available power, or could com- 
 mand any considerable part of the influence which 
 fell so easily to the corypheus of art. Quantity has 
 some weight even in poetry, and the prodigal abun- 
 dance of a fruitful mind gives to it a position it can- 
 not claim by any single production, though that pro- 
 duction be its very best. The second moiety of the 
 artistic period differed then from the first, in the pre- 
 eminence of one mind, and differed from it and 
 from every previous period in our literature, in the 
 pre-eminence of prose over poetry. As the poems 
 of Johnson are related to his other works, so was 
 the poetry of his time to its prose productions. 
 There is an unmistakable predominence of this sec- 
 ondary branch of literature, which indicates the 
 period to be one peculiarly degenerate in art. 
 Poetry had become sparse, sporadic, and was wait- 
 ing for a new development ; prose was prolific, domi- 
 nant, critical, taking vigorous possession of new 
 fields.
 
 ASCENDENCY OF PROSE. I85 
 
 The reason for this, or rather one reason for it, 
 it is not difficult to render. Criticism always makes 
 for the relative enlargement of prose in several 
 ways. Art, in its critical, speculative bearing, is a 
 triumph of the intellect over the emotions, and is 
 thus an extension of the sphere of thought. The 
 didactic spirit is uppermost, and finds in prose its 
 ready and fitting instrument. The dominant ten- 
 dency is one which stands in direct, intrinsic affinity 
 with this simple, and, for mere truth, primary, form 
 of composition, and cannot fail, therefore, often to 
 prefer it. The impulse which at another time would 
 expend itself in a poem, will now be taken up by a 
 critique ; and a dissertation on method will be sub- 
 stituted for performance. Further, art being every- 
 where active as a formative, external force, will lay 
 hold of prose, reshape it, give it new excellencies, and 
 be proportionately enamored of it. There was little 
 for the critical feeling merely to prefer in the poems 
 of Pope above the papers of Addison. In some 
 respects, the latter held the advantage as against 
 the former. Their beauties were fresh, spontaneous 
 and natural. Poetry was passing its zenith, prose 
 was mounting to it. This was for the first time 
 coming into the power that belonged to it, while 
 that was only gathering a second and inferior har- 
 vest. The intrinsic force of the two, their spon- 
 taniety, was naturally proportioned to this fact. This 
 fact, then, so peculiar to the period, of the ascen- 
 dency of prose, we hold to be a direct issue of the 
 cold and critical temper which ruled in literature, 
 calling the thoughts into unwonted activity, and
 
 1 86 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 proportionately restricting the spontaneous expres- 
 sion of the emotions. Those wrought best in 
 poetry who, like Goldsmith, were inevitably emo- 
 tional, and could not be driven from the fastnesses 
 of a tender, passionate nature, by the fashion of the 
 time, or the ridicule of men. 
 
 Another diiTerence is found between the earlier 
 portions of the century and its later years in the 
 style of Johnson as contrasted with that of Ad- 
 dison. Johnson, in accepted tendencies, in the 
 grounds of his critical judgments, was in the line 
 of direct descent from Addison ; though, by the 
 formation of his own mind, he was very diverse 
 from him. Following in the same form of com 
 position, he supplemented the Tatler and Spectator 
 with the Idler and Rambler, and these papers 
 closed this chapter of prose art in our literature. 
 In their moral tone, social purpose, and critical 
 spirit, the unequal portions contributed by Ad- 
 dison and Johnson to the splendid completion of 
 Steele's fortunate conception, were identical ; in 
 aptness of execution and ease in style they were 
 very different. These two men, working with one 
 spirit and under similar circumstances, admirably 
 illustrate the importance of the factor of original 
 endowment. The manner of Addison was impos- 
 sible to Johnson ; his rugged and ponderous nature 
 utterly forbade it. Johnson puts himself in inev- 
 itable and unfavorable contrast with Addison by 
 a style inflexible, weighty, not to say heavy, and 
 full of a controlling mental habit. He thus 
 brought a powerful, personal element to the por-
 
 THE STYLE OF JOHNSON. 1 87 
 
 tion of the period he so strongly influenced. The 
 tendencies of his own nature must be added to 
 those of his time, as second to them only in 
 weight. His style has been thought to owe its im- 
 pression to the choice of less familiar words, es- 
 pecially those of Latin origin, and thus to fall 
 easily into pomposity. This is scarcely a suffi- 
 cient statement of the case. His style acquires 
 its chief characteristics from the penetrating, analytic 
 mind of the author. This imparted a reflective, 
 discriminating form to his language, and led to 
 a choice of words critical and explicit. His com- 
 position is full of antithesis ; he carefully balances 
 the thought, limits it on this side and on that, 
 and exhibits it in various relations. An exact 
 poise of ideas and correspondence of considera- 
 tions accompany him in his composition, whether 
 it be grave or humorous ; while passages made 
 cumbersome by words merely, are infrequent. 
 He himself has ridiculed this pretentious verbiage 
 in Rasselas. " To live according to nature," said 
 the philosopher, " is to act always with due regard 
 to the fitness arising from the relations and qual- 
 ities of causes and effects ; to concur with the 
 great, unchangeable scheme of universal felicity ; 
 to co-operate with the general disposition and 
 tendency of the present system of things. The 
 prince soon found that this was one of the sages 
 whom he should understand less as he heard him 
 more." 
 
 Johnson himself was not often misled by the 
 pomp of words, or occupied by mere sound. A
 
 l88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 thoughtful and dignified manner, inborn to the 
 style in his very conception of the topic, prepared 
 the way with him for a full and formal phrase- 
 ology. The idea was no more colloquial than the 
 manner in which he put it. It was not a choice 
 of words, but a ponderous quality and gait of 
 mind, that made Johnsonese so distinguishable a 
 style. The classical taste which Johnson shared 
 with his time, served indeed to color the large 
 vocabulary to which his discriminating, analytic 
 thought gave occasion, and helped to impart an 
 appearance of pomposity. 
 
 The following examp'e from the Idler, of 
 March 15, 1756, shows the well defined, formal 
 path by which he threaded his way through the 
 most familiar topic. " I lived in a state of celi- 
 bacy beyond the usual time. In the hurry, first 
 of pleasure and afterward of business, I felt no 
 want of a domestic companion ; but becoming 
 weary of labor, I soon grew weary of idleness, 
 and thought it reasonable to follow the custom of 
 life, and to seek some solace of my cares in 
 female tenderness, and some amusement of my 
 leisure in female cheerfulness. 
 
 " The choice which is long delayed is commonly 
 made at last with great caution. My resolution 
 was to keep my passions neutral, and to marry only 
 in compliance with my reason. I drew upon a page 
 of my pocket-book a scheme of all female virtues 
 and vices, with the vices which border on every vir- 
 tue, and the virtues which are allied to every vice. 
 I considered that wit was sarcastic, and magnanim-
 
 JOHNSON. 189 
 
 ity imperious ; that avarice was economical, and 
 ignorance obsequious, and having estimated the good 
 and evil of every quality, employed my own dili- 
 gence and that of my friends to find the lady in 
 whom nature and reason had reached that happy 
 mediocrity which is equally remote from exuberance 
 and deficiency." 
 
 The humor of this composition lies very much in 
 the deliberate, cautious manner in which a great, 
 unwieldy mind moves among trifles ; selects the few 
 points that promise a plausible support in its pro- 
 gress, and tempers itself to a good-natured tender- 
 ness toward the safety and pleasure of others. So 
 an elephant might walk among sportive children. 
 
 Here is a stiffly outlined portrait of Square Blus- 
 ter : " He is wealthy without followers ; he is mag- 
 nificent without witnesses ; he has birth without 
 alliance, and influence without dignity. His neigh- 
 bors scorn him as a brute ; his dependants dread 
 him as an oppressor; and he has the gloomy com- 
 fort of reflecting that if he is hated he is likewise 
 feared." 
 
 Johnson, though grounded in the same princi- 
 ples of criticism, stood in marked contrast to the 
 simple, genial Addison, and united with him to 
 illustrate the very different phases which one school 
 of art may present. 
 
 Addison and Johnson were alike primarily prose 
 writers. In this department lay their chief work and 
 their crowning excellencies. Both, however, ven- 
 tured into the field of poetry, with something of the 
 boldness that falls to criticism, yet with unequal sue-
 
 IQO THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 cess. The Cato of Addison received the highest 
 praise from Voltaire, and is one of the best plays of 
 the Franco-English school. Few have done the 
 Irene of Johnson any reverence. 
 
 Having sketched the relations of the two por- 
 tions of the artistic period, we wish to deepen two 
 impressions concerning its later years ; first, the 
 rapid development of prose ; second, the coldly 
 critical dictatorship of Johnson. We have seen 
 these two things to lie in the normal development 
 of the forces at work. Prose henceforward in 
 English literature is varied, artistic, voluminous, 
 spreading far and wide into many realms of thought, 
 like a swollen torrent that has escaped its mountain 
 fastnesses, and covers the plain, leaving rich allu- 
 vial deposits on every arable field. Theological 
 composition, which more than any other kind of 
 prose constituted the continuous, central current of 
 this stream, was scarcely abated in its practical, 
 stereotyped form, while in its defensive, speculative 
 aspects, it showed new vigor. The age was critical, 
 not formally so in art merely, but centrally so in 
 thought also, and this too increasingly. New de- 
 partments of knowledge were rapidly opening in 
 the natural sciences, new methods of investigation 
 were gaining ground. The minds of men were put- 
 ting in many directions bolder questions, which 
 called for other than conventional answers. This 
 movement was met in a vigorous and truly national 
 method by such writers as Berkeley, I'alcy and But- 
 ler. New defenses were thrown uji to suit the new 
 attack. A force was developed within the church
 
 THEOLOGICAL COMPOSITION. IQI 
 
 (vhich showed the hold of Christian truth on the 
 mind to be vital and sufificient. While Methodism 
 was giving new proof of this practical control, its 
 theoretical force was as signally shown by its 
 apologists. The works of some of these authors 
 are remarkable for their insight, as Butler's 
 Analogy ; others for beauties of style and clcarnes 
 of statement, as Paley's Natural Theology, and 
 Horse Paulinae ; and others for a combination of 
 these characteristics, as Berkeley's Alciphron. 
 
 Metaphysics was relatively more fruitful even 
 than theology. The Positive Philosophy has rightly 
 grouped these two phases of thought, for they are 
 closely dependent. In this field, the writings of 
 Hume at this time mark an era ; most modern un- 
 belief traces its line of descent through him. Often 
 sophistically met, rarely indeed answered, and re- 
 quiring for their complete refutation a profounder 
 philosophy than has yet been attained by us, at 
 least with any generality, his views have slowly 
 penetrated the purely scientific mind, till they are 
 now entrenched in it as an invincible prejudice 
 against the supernatural, against every distinctively 
 spiritual view. A philosophy so immediate and 
 fatal in its theological inferences could not but call 
 forth much activity in this department, and the 
 Scotch school of metaphysicians, Reid, Stewart, 
 Hamilton, began to follow in a reactionary line ; 
 while an equally able series of writers developed 
 the tendencies included in the works of Locke and 
 Hume. 
 
 Thus it fell to metaphysics to commence a skep-
 
 192 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 cicism suicidal to its own line of investigation. Its 
 overthrow was ?i fclo dc sc, not the work of physics. 
 It is due to Hume, pre-eminently a metaphysician, 
 and to an argument to its very core metaphysical, 
 more than to any other one agency, that mental sci- 
 ence has fallen into such general disrepute, and been 
 so far lost in physical inquiries. The end is not yet. 
 We here only mark the fact, that the earlier sieges 
 were laid, and the first manifest breaches opened, 
 at this pregnant, critical period, in the invasion of 
 the laws of mind by those of matter. No discus- 
 sion more central was ever sprung upon the thoughts 
 of men than the one involved in miracles ; and the 
 loud acclaim with which, from time to time, the vic- 
 tory of the scientists is rung out, only shows how 
 far off the real issue of the battle is. The most ob- 
 vious English date of the origin of this universal 
 and irrepressible controversy, which colors every 
 department of knowledge, and is daily gathering its 
 pros and cons from every field of thought, is found 
 in the prose of this time. 
 
 From the cold speculative outlook of this era, 
 there came denials which set at jar and controversy 
 the two elements of creation, the natural and the 
 supernatural, and strove to reduce under the rigid 
 formalism of immutable law its entire handiwork. 
 No discussion could be more purely critical, yet 
 more profoundly significant, than this. It rested 
 with it to decide in religion, philosophy and art 
 whether we were to have the mere colored rind of 
 wax fruitage with which to staunch our hunger, or 
 the inscrutable, unformulated life of free and inex-
 
 HISTORY. 193 
 
 hanstible forces — a being offered not as a finality, 
 a finished product, but as a first term in the vocab- 
 ulary of wisdom and of love. 
 
 The speculative, germinant character of the 
 epoch is also seen in political, social science. The 
 English constitution and law found presentation 
 and historical discussion in The Commentaries of 
 Blackstone ; and Political Economy, in the works 
 of Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, rose to the pro- 
 portions of a distinct science. That wakefulness 
 of thought is h'^re first shown which has since 
 busied itself with so many social questions, past, 
 present and future. 
 
 Indeed no one thing more discloses the char- 
 acter of a period than its estimate of historical 
 inquiries, and historical methods of investigation ; 
 than a tendency to look for the explanation of 
 present states and facts in their relation to pre- 
 vious ones. Herein is a due appreciation of the 
 force and continuity of causes, indicating a 
 thorough scientific and reformatory tendency. In 
 this period there arose a very conspicuous group 
 of historians, grading upward in the order given, 
 Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, the last being from 
 our present point of view, the most interesting. 
 History has two complete products, which it 
 slowly approaches. The first is a narrative of 
 events, correctly and exactly sketched, propor- 
 tioned one to another by intrinsic value, by the 
 aggregate of human-weal involved in them, and 
 rendered with the light and coloring of real life 
 upon them. The historic picture thus shows 
 9
 
 194 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 knowledge, insight, and feeling. It is no bald 
 outline, nor do its leading figures lack the sym- 
 metry and support of a thoroughly wrought back- 
 ground of those conditions and companions of 
 life which lend to them pre-eminence and value. 
 Nor are the historic events merely given in light 
 and shade, they are deeply tinged by the sym- 
 pathies, passions, affections which made them, in 
 their own day, living experiences of the gene- 
 ration then passing. The second product is phi- 
 losophical, a philosophy of histoi " The narrative 
 now clings to the connection of causes. It treats 
 slightly chronological dependencies. It cares not 
 to be full in the statement of facts ; it would 
 gladly assume a knowledge of these, and only 
 brings them forward as they serve to mark the 
 line of action, of significant forces transmitted 
 through them, and modified by them. It searches 
 for the channels, the deep undcr-currents, on 
 which have floated down the pomp of historic 
 events. Its facts are buoys and light-houses 
 along this line of progress. The eddies and 
 'shallows and silent pools which are mere topog- 
 raphy, failing to define the strength and direction 
 of currents, the interlacing lines of force, it 
 passes in rapid survey. It seeks only to outline 
 ev^ents, and give their osseous frame-work, on which, 
 as fulcrums and levers, the muscular and nervous 
 energy of the time has been expended. 
 
 These two i^roducts are reached by a long road. 
 Legendary and historical traditions ; chronicles of 
 easy credulity; annals with barren dates, mere
 
 HISTORY. 195 
 
 pegs divested of the tapestry which should hang 
 upon them ; histories that busy themselves only 
 with kings and warriors, with the trappings, the 
 glitter and clatter of life ; historic criticism that 
 pulls to pieces this poetry of the past in search of 
 the scattered, germinant facts out of which imagi 
 nation has grown its luxuriant, tangled and fanciful 
 narratives ; the philanthropic estimate of human 
 life, that seeks for it in quantity and quality wher- 
 ever found ; the philosophic impulse, that wishes to 
 master causes, and through them effects, all these 
 lie between the beginning and the end of history, 
 between the period in which the human mind takes 
 pleasure in dream-land, cloud-land only, and that 
 in which it strives to repeat the glowing dyes of 
 fancy in the sombre fields of its daily experience, 
 setting more store by the simple flowers at its leet 
 than by the crimson banks of color that come and 
 go as transient shore-lines of flitting vapor. 
 
 Gibbon claims especial attention, because his 
 work made so sudden and decided an advance in 
 history. It is possessed by the critical spirit, deals 
 constantly with causes, and presents a style quite 
 in keeping with the formal rhetorical tendency of 
 his time. The v^ery objection which has been taken 
 to him, that he over-estimates the natural agencies 
 connected with the propagation of Christianity, and 
 under-estimates, or altogether overlooks, the super- 
 natural ones, indicates an excellence in his method, 
 while it discloses the unsympathetic and somewhat 
 barren nature with which he performed his too 
 purely intellectual work. Neither he, nor the spirit
 
 196 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. 
 
 « 
 
 of the times which he expressed, was aglow with 
 conviction, nor alive to the hopes and fears of life, 
 its emotional issues near at hand and far off. Gib- 
 bon presents in a cold, it is true, yet in a clear, 
 striking and valuable form some of the best results 
 of the new critical tendency in the then fresh de- 
 partment of history. 
 
 Another branch of literature, that of oratory, 
 reached remarkable excellence in this last half of the 
 century. Chatham, Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Erskine, 
 Pitt, Grattan form a group not since equalled. 
 The greatest of these, Burke, well presents in his 
 personal history the influences which attended on 
 and secured this growth of eloquence. Bold politi- 
 cal criticism, new political principles, and wakeful in- 
 dependent sympathies, furnished the conditions and 
 grounds of his oratory. A period that is fresh and 
 vigorous in thought, exacting in style, and aroused 
 by urgent, practical, yet national interests, gives 
 the best possible conditions of eloquence. The 
 years under consideration were of this character. 
 Its critical spirit was at once formal and substan- 
 tial, rhetorical and philosophical, brilliant in state- 
 ment and bold in speculation. Weighty political 
 interests, no longer amenable to laws of conquest 
 or of violence, gave occasion for the enunciation of 
 new principles in the government of colonies that 
 had suddenly grown into national strength in the 
 progress of English commerce. Allied to this ora- 
 tory, were the Letters of Junius, which carried po- 
 litical criticism to the height of boldness, force and 
 severity.
 
 THE NOVEL. I97 
 
 As was to be expected, rhetoric and criticism as 
 arts began to receive some of their best contribu- 
 tions. The works of Campbell, Kames, Blair, have 
 been for a century manuals in this department 
 Blair, though light in calibre, copious and some 
 what superficial, has by his simplicity, clearnes 
 and correctness held his ground against many mod 
 ern writers. He well presents in precept those 
 formal excellencies of style of which he found such 
 ample illustration in Temple, Addison, Atterbury. 
 
 We urge this unusual productiveness of the 
 period in prose at only one more point, the novel. 
 From a merely literary, artistic view, the novels of 
 this era, when we consider their number, variety 
 and merit, constitute its most interesting, as they 
 do its freshest feature. The novel is the last stage 
 of prose in its progress toward poetry, and the first 
 field that offers congenial cultivation as an author 
 declines from verse. The novel of this period was 
 reached in both ways. Sterne, Smollett, De Foe 
 climbed up to this art-level from humbler labor ; 
 Fielding turned back to it from dramatic poetry. 
 That the barometrical column should have rested in 
 literature at this point, unable to rise permanently 
 above it, shows how rare and light the intellectual 
 atmosphere had become by continuous criticism, 
 and that it was waiting to be toned again to its usu- 
 al tonic force and productive power by a revolution, 
 a storm of sentiment, seeking the conditions of new 
 and higher order in freedom, and in living, spiritual 
 convictions. 
 
 De Foe possessed the measure of genius which
 
 198 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 attaches to thorough reahzation. He sought and 
 attained the minute truthfuhiess, the verisimihtude 
 of the pre-RaphaeUte art. But as this perfect mas- 
 tery of details was animated and directed by no un- 
 usual insight into forces, nor knowledge of principles, 
 he only reached, as in Robinson Crusoe, the level 
 of an excellent story, an object-book, the delight of 
 boys. Richardson adopted the most cumbersome 
 form of story-telling, that of letters. This method, 
 in its tedious indirection, is to the novel what dialogue 
 is to philosophical discussion, a piece of mechanism 
 fitted to check the thought, iron it thin, and deliver 
 it in the largest number of sheets. Richardson's 
 patient assiduity was at one with his chosen method. 
 By minute invention and almost insensible accre- 
 tion, he worked up his plots, entangling his charac- 
 ters in a net not the less severe in its constraint, 
 nor tragical in the issues involved because of the 
 thousand gossamer threads of which the insect in- 
 genuity of the author had spun it. Aiming directly 
 as he did, at moral influence, it yet may well be 
 doubted whether the sensual passions which he 
 chose to delineate will admit to advantage of this 
 slow, anatomical exposure. 
 
 Fielding is every way different. His narrative 
 is easy, his characters genuine and spirited. Moral- 
 ity is not with him a law, and his scenes and heroes 
 are often vicious and vulgar. Yet a certain nobility, 
 generosity or sincerity of nature goes far to redeem 
 those whom the author likes ; while opposite vices 
 stamp with legible censure his real reprobates. 
 Truth to English nature and sympathy with manly
 
 THE NOVELISTS. I99 
 
 quality perf im in Fielding, to a degree, the work 
 of morality. 
 
 Smollett is much less worthy of commendation. 
 He tells a story, not with the zest of insight and a 
 loving appreciation of character, but as men re- 
 hearse in bar-rooms tales made up of grotesque and 
 gross incidents, and coarse physical jests. He 
 generally gathers his material from a low region, 
 and has little disposition to shake it clean in the 
 getting. The English novel has hardly touched a 
 lower point than in Smollett. The prying, sensual 
 inuendo of Sterne, alive to mischief, is yet redeemed 
 by greater humor. Such was the industry of prose 
 composition in this period, opening all the veins of 
 thought that have since been so assiduously wrought. 
 
 The second fact to which we were to revert was 
 the rule of Johnson. There is nothing quite like it 
 in our literature. The great minds of our English 
 race had come and gone, but none of them had held 
 such absolute authority. Nor was this due to any 
 inferiority of power in the literary cotemporaries of 
 Johnson. No cluster of names in any one period 
 brings before us greater or more varied talent, than 
 those of Reynolds, Burke, Fox, Goldsmith, Garrick, 
 Gibbon, Sheridan, Adam Smith, and VVarton. We 
 may be sure that it was no easy, indolent supremacy 
 which such men as these yielded to Johnson. 
 
 A singular instance of the deference paid him 
 appears in the round-robin addressed him by Burke, 
 Gibbon, Sheridan, and others requesting a slight 
 modification of the epitaph he had written on Gold- 
 smith. If there was some intentional humor in this
 
 200 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 method of appeal to the hterary leader, making the 
 thunderbolt of his wrath harmless by the circle of 
 points that drew off and dissipated its impatient 
 fire, there was also in it a sincere regard, and an 
 unwillingness, on the part of these men, each great 
 in his own way, singly to injure his feelings, or 
 provoke his resentment. Johnson, in his later 
 years, held a quiet, undisputed supremacy. This 
 was due, as we have intimated, in its first ground, 
 to the fact that the period, as one of criticism, pre- 
 pared the way for immediate and personal control 
 on the part of any one pre-eminent in this art ; and, 
 in its second ground, to the character of Johnson. 
 
 Sound intellectual qualities, common sense, 
 continuous and protracted composition, led him to 
 criticism, and, in spite of his dictatorial tendencies, 
 kept his conclusions within safe and acceptable 
 limits ; vigorous thought sustained what he wrote 
 and said. While this is true, he was greatly defi- 
 cient in that profound, philosophic spirit, in that 
 unbiassed opinion, that calm, ready candor and deli- 
 cate sympathy which deepen, while they moderate, 
 the mind's action. His was the attitude of the con- 
 troversialist, who sees clearly on his own side, feels 
 to the full all the prejudices that sustain him, and 
 is conveniently blind to the positions of an adver- 
 sary. He was acute and analytic rather than pro- 
 found and comprehensive. His powers were thor- 
 oughly disciplined in spirited, personal intercourse, 
 and the free methods of conversation. He used 
 arguments as weapons, now of defence, now of 
 offence, with very little quiet, thorough investiga-
 
 JOHNSON. 201 
 
 tion of the whole subject. Like a professional sol- 
 dier, he took up arms and laid them down again 
 without primary reference to the justice of the cause. 
 His own opinions, such as had fallen to him with 
 an honest, but strongly biassed nature, were the 
 ground which he set himself to defend in sturdy, 
 English fashion. He could enjoy victory, and suffer 
 keenly under defeat. Goldsmith said of him, " There 
 is no getting along with Johnson, if his pistol misses 
 fire, he knocks you down with the butt of it." Yet 
 even then he knew how to give either the force of 
 wit or the color of truth to the blow. Burke 
 affirmed of him, that "Whatever side he advocated, 
 he gave good reasons." Clear-minded men are of 
 all persons most sophistical when they choose to 
 be ; most easily convince themselves and others 
 of the justness of what they pi'opose. 
 
 To this keen rather than clear insight; to this 
 wilful rather than firm bent of mind, Johnson added 
 in conversation quick, dexterous, unsparing wit. 
 This rendered him a formidable adversary. It gave 
 a precision to his blows that made them instant!) 
 effective. He rebukes in this wise the timidity of 
 Bolingbroke, who would not allow the publication 
 of his works till after his death: "Sir, he was a 
 scoundrel and a coward, a scoundrel for charging a 
 blunderbuss against religion and morality; a cow- 
 ard because he had not resolution to fire it off him- 
 self, but left a half-crown to a beggarly Scotchman 
 to draw the trigger after his death." Miss Hannah 
 More expressed to him surprise that a poet, who 
 had written Paradise Lost, should compose such 
 9*
 
 202 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 poor sonnets. He silences the critic without the 
 labor of vindicating the maligned poems, without 
 perhaps himself appreciating them. " Milton, mad- 
 am, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from 
 a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry- 
 stones." 
 
 If we add to these qualities the reputation which 
 attached to him from his diversified, protracted and 
 successful literary labors, and the evidence he 
 always gave of an honest, upright and even tender 
 nature, we see sufificient personal grounds for his 
 influence. This massiveness and soundness of 
 mind and heart were not to be hidden by a little 
 irritability of temper, nor grossness of appetite, nor 
 coarseness of taste. That he could command devo- 
 ted and disinterested affection is seen in Boswell. 
 The unmeasured contempt that Macaulay has ex- 
 pressed for the friend and biographer of Johnson is 
 not altogether deserved. There is a sincerity of 
 admiration, and a forgetfulness of personal claims 
 in Boswell, which call for some lenity. If he had 
 possessed more pride, and a more irritable egotism, 
 he would doubtless have escaped the scorn which 
 has been so freely bestowed upon him, but he 
 would also have lost the pleasure of much profitable 
 intercourse, and we a most enjoyable narrative. 
 Let us be content with our own nettlesome inde- 
 pendence, and not deride the assiduity of one who 
 could profit by the virtues of a rare, good man even 
 in submission to his petty faults. As long as we 
 concede so much to the duplicity and intrigue of 
 ambition, to complaisance that is prompted by in-
 
 JOHNSON. 203 
 
 terest, we may grant something to the vanity and 
 adulation of an unequal friendship. 
 
 The control which Johnson exercised especially 
 concerns us as expressing the critical character and 
 appreciation of the period. There is much to be 
 commended in Johnson as a critic ; his common 
 sense and breadth of intellectual activity stood him 
 in good stead. Yet there is in him a lack of emo- 
 tional insight, and a tendency to seek everywhere 
 formal excellence rather than inherent power. This 
 is seen in his unqualified acceptance of Pope and 
 Dryden, and his evident relish of their art. In his 
 Lives of the Poets, he gives the famous verses of 
 Denham addressed to the Thames, 
 
 " O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream 
 My great example, as it is my theme ! 
 Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull ; 
 Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." 
 
 and adds, that " Since Dryden has commended 
 them, almost every writer for a century has imitated 
 them." After a slight criticism he proceeds to say, 
 "The passage, however celebrated, has not been 
 praised above its merit." The thought and imagery 
 of these verses doubtless constitute them a neat 
 piece of poetic work, but not one fitted to be the 
 text of a century, and the model of a school. So 
 used they could hardly fail to tether the fancy. 
 They compare but poorly, we think, with the kin- 
 dred lines of Wordsworth : 
 
 " O, glide fair stream 1 forever so 
 
 Thy quiet soul on all bestowing, 
 
 Till all our minds forever flow 
 
 As thy deep waters now are flowing.*
 
 204 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 In the same spirit he echoes Pope's praise of 
 Dryden : 
 
 *' Wal er was sm oth ; but Dryden taught to join 
 The varying verse, the full resounding line, 
 The long majestick march, and energy divine." 
 
 This in spirit and form is as brim-full of sound 
 as the march of boys to drum and fife. With feel- 
 ings akin to those which led to this commendation 
 of Pope's, Johnson accepts under protest the 
 blank-verse of Milton, "verse only to the eye," as 
 an ingenious critic had pronounced it. He prefers 
 the heroic, rhymed measure to which so much of 
 our English poetry has timed its dreary, methodical 
 march, as soldiers that plod wearily through a 
 dull day. 
 
 It was this opinion, with kindred faults in his 
 estimate of Milton, which led Cowper in his Letters 
 to say, " As a poet Johnson has treated Milton with 
 severity enough, and has plucked one or two of the 
 most beautiful feathers out of his Muse's wings, and 
 trampled them under his great foot. I am con- 
 vinced that he has no ear for poetical numbers, or 
 that it was stopped by prejudice against the har- 
 mony of Milton's. Was there ever anything so de- 
 lio htful as the music of Paradise Lost ? It is like 
 that of a fine organ, has the fullest and deepest 
 tones of majesty, with all the softness and elegance 
 of a Dorian lute — variety without end, and never 
 equalled. Yet the doctor has little or nothing to 
 say upon this copious iheme, but talks something 
 about the unfitness of the English language for 
 blank-verse, and how apt it is, in the mouths of
 
 JOHNSON. 205 
 
 some readers, to degenerate into declamation. Oh, 
 I could thresh his old jacket, till I made his pen- 
 sion jingle in his pocket !" •••■ Doubtless, yet the 
 doctor so attacked, with unmollified temper and 
 fresh sagacity, would have broadened his principles 
 of criticism, and, in doughty championship, stamped 
 hard the grounds of debate without once surrender 
 ing them. His definition of genius, given in the 
 life of Cowley ; and of poetry, in his Preface to 
 Shakespeare, both exhibit the same preponderance 
 of intellectual, formal action over intuitive, spon- 
 taneous power. " The true genius," he says, " is a 
 mind of large general power, accidentally deter- 
 mined to some particular direction." What is here 
 assigned to accident is rather the very essence of 
 genius. The irrepressible impulse betrays the 
 force that predetermines it, the genius that con- 
 trols it. His is a definition of talent, not of genius ; 
 and the men of this artistic age were men of talent 
 rather than of genius. 
 
 " The end of writing," says Johnson, " is to in- 
 struct ; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleas- 
 ing." Exactly, Pope would have said ; hardly, 
 Shakespeare would have replied. Under this defi- 
 nition he proceeds to criticise the great dramatist 
 in this wise : " He sacrifices virtue to convenience, 
 and is so much more careful to please than to in- 
 struct, that he seems to write without any moral 
 purpose. * * His precepts and axioms drop 
 casually from him; he makes no just distribution 
 of good or evil. r>or is always careful to show in the 
 
 * Reed's British Poets, vol. ii. p. 18.
 
 206 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked." If John- 
 son had censured Shakespeare as wanting a lieart) 
 appreciation of virtue, a sufficiently deep insight 
 into it, and noble sympathy with it, his criticism 
 would have had some hold ; but certainly the poet 
 can be excused for not making over, in the way 
 here commended, his dramas to didactic morality. 
 
 Johnson puts in a personal shape, and lends 
 personal force, to the great feature of his period. 
 He is in intimate action and reaction with it. The 
 life about him serves to explain much that is in 
 him ; yet he, by his individual vigor, gives an ulti- 
 mate element to it also. It is thus always. Men 
 are not ciphers, in search of some integer of the 
 physical world to give them value. They them- 
 selves are a final law to much that is around them. 
 What proportions of heat and cold, of wet and dry 
 agents, were able to give, then and there, to Eng- 
 lish society, the positive character known as John- 
 son } A solid Doric column, chipped into outline 
 and assigned position by circumstances, he never- 
 theless chiefly interests us by the rugged strength 
 of his own native texture. 
 
 Hawthorne thus speaks of him : " I was but 
 little interested in the legends of the remote an- 
 tiquity of Lichfield, being drawn here partly to see 
 its beautiful cathedral, and still more, I believe, be- 
 cause it was the birthplace of Dr. Johnson, with 
 whose sturdy English character I became acquaint- 
 ed at a very early period of my life, through the 
 good offices of Mr. Boswell. In truth, he seems as 
 familiar to my recollection, and almost as vivid hj
 
 JOHNSON. 207 
 
 his personal aspect to my mind's eye, as the kindly 
 figure of my own grandfather. * * Beyond all 
 question I might have had a wiser friend than he. 
 The atmosphere in which alone he breathed was 
 dense ; his awful dread of death showed how much 
 muddy imperfection was to be cleansed out of him, 
 before he could be capable of spiritual existence 
 he meddled only with the surface of life, and never 
 car^d to penetrate farther than to plough-share 
 depth ; his very sense and sagacity were but a 
 one-eyed clear-sightedness. I laughed at him 
 sometimes, standing beside his knee. And yet, 
 considering that my native propensities were to- 
 ward Fairy Land, and also how much yeast is gen- 
 erally mixed up with the mental sustenance of a 
 New Englander, it may not have been altogether 
 amiss, in those childish and boyish days, to keep 
 pace with this heavy-footed traveller, and feed on 
 the gross diet that he carried in his knapsack. It 
 is wholesome food even now. And then how Eng- 
 lish ! Many of the latent sympathies that enabled 
 me to enjoy the Old Country so well, and that so 
 readily amalgamated themselves with the Ameri- 
 can ideas that seemed the most adverse to them, 
 may have been derived from, or fostered and kept 
 alive by, the' great English moralist. Never was a 
 descriptive epithet more nicely appropriate than 
 that ! Dr. Johnson's morality was as English an 
 article as a beefsteak." * 
 
 This English character of his was after all his 
 chief excellence. Though it could not, under a 
 
 * " Our Old Home," p. 142.
 
 208 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 spiritual exigency, blossom into flowers, like Aaron's 
 rod, it nevertheless could and did bring many a 
 sturdy buffet to the back of fools. One who so em- 
 bodies national traits as did Johnson those of the 
 English tends strongly to confirm them. He pre- 
 sents them in their most effective and brilliant form, 
 one in which they best win the sympathy and com- 
 mand the respect of the nation. Though the faults 
 of such an one are as salient as his virtues7 the 
 glamour of the latter disguise the former, and cause 
 them, in their milder aspects, to pass for piquant 
 eccentricities. The force, therefore, with which a 
 nation realizes itself in a man like Johnson makes 
 him a new and vigorous agent in its history.
 
 LECTURE IX. 
 
 A statement of the periods of English Literature, and of their lela 
 tions to each other. 
 
 Second transition period. — Churchill, Akenside, Thomson, Gold- 
 smith, Gray, Collins, Cowper, Burns. — Forces at work to pro- 
 duce a new era, {a) Revival of early English Poetry, Percy's 
 Reliques, Warton's History of English Poetry, {^)) German In- 
 fluence, Relations of France, Germany and England, {c) Political 
 and Social Questions, (</) Philosophy and Religion, — Skepticism. 
 
 We have now advanced sufficiently far in Eng- 
 lish Literature to point out completely and finally 
 the dependence on each other of its several periods, 
 as we divide and designate them. Aside from the 
 individual, the national and the foreign influences 
 at work in them, we draw attention to their natural 
 sequence, as indicating a connection which went 
 far to determine their character, and more particu- 
 larly that of later ones. The first or initiative 
 period was arrested by the retrogressive one, and 
 literature made a second start in the first creative 
 period, that of Elizabeth. This, by an easy, natural 
 transition, passed into the first critical period, the 
 so called Augustan age of Pope and Johnson. This 
 again, with a more obscure transition closing the 
 eighteenth century, gave place to a second creative 
 period, the opening years of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, the years of Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Words- 
 worth. This has been followed by our own times, 
 
 (209)
 
 2IO THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 an age more marked by diffusion, the volume and 
 variety of literature, than by any one pre-eminent 
 quality of it. Indeed its quality is largely deter- 
 mined by this very fact of its universal circulation ; 
 that, for the first time, literature is percolating down 
 through all classes, and seeking to quicken them all. 
 We shall strive later to show how this diffusion has 
 been occasioned. We now refer only to the order 
 of sequence between the three great eras, the de- 
 terminative epochs, of our literary art, the first cre- 
 ative period, the first critical, and the second cre- 
 ative, each separated from the other by years of 
 transition. Our own age is in turn, doubtless, one 
 of transfer, though the diffusive powers of modern 
 civilization have come in to impress upon it its most 
 salient features. 
 
 The first of these three periods being given, it 
 tended to draw after it the other two in order ; as 
 the wave heaped up before the wind furrows the sea 
 behind it, and is then followed by a second. We can- 
 not expect a creative era to last long. The forces 
 at work too much transcend ordinary experience. 
 'The clustering in of influences and the sudden un- 
 folding of national genius under them are as neces- 
 sarily transient as fruit to the plant, or summer to 
 the seasons. When, however, these forces begin to 
 abate, they do not subside at once. Though none 
 are able to open up in art new directions, or quite 
 equal its masters in old ones, there are many who 
 can catch something of the spirit abroad, and who 
 are able, in various ways, to perfect the movement 
 already initiated. The products of art that were
 
 DEPENDENCE OF ART ON CREATION. 211 
 
 secured while the inventive power, in its first in- 
 tensity, was at work in the national mind, now, on 
 its partial decline, give both the occasion and the 
 principles of criticism. The busy workmen cease 
 indeed to quarry the living rock, but they chisel dili- 
 gently at the Titanic blocks already lifted from their 
 bed. In architecture no sooner has the new style 
 struck its initial idea, found a master under it, and 
 been pushed to a magnificent realization, than many 
 come in to modify, mingle, manipulate ; uniting the 
 new to the old, exhausting the new in its manifold 
 applications. 
 
 Genius can scarcely discern all that is in it, or 
 stop to unfold it. Talent .can hardly fail to take up 
 with critical delight this unfinished work, flattered 
 at once by laboring with the masters of art, and 
 seeming to improve upon them. Genius gives 
 occasions, suggestions to talent ; and talent patron- 
 izes genius, while really doing its servile work. 
 Criticism follows invention, completes it, and makes 
 its gains permanent in rules and principles. It pre- 
 pares the national taste, in its moderated, habitual 
 action, fully to appreciate and relish great works. 
 It enters analytically into the good achieved, and 
 makes way ultimately for its more thorough appre- 
 ciation. 
 
 But art easily forgets and oversteps these its 
 natural limits. As it is liable to mistake, in the 
 very outset, the power to criticise and improve fcr 
 superiority, so is it afterward inclined to delight in 
 rules and lines of order, aside from any complete- 
 ness or fulness of life expressed by them. Criti-
 
 212 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. 
 
 cism at the beginning, true criticism, is very de- 
 lightful. It is passing beneath the form to the force 
 which controls it, and seeing the two in their inter- 
 dependence. But when the fatal excess that is in 
 it overtakes it ; when it dreams that because the 
 form expresses the force, the force may be reached 
 through the form, it passes rapidly into superficiality 
 and coldness, wearying at length its most devoted 
 disciples. Thus in the art referred to, architecture, 
 the expansion of a style is almost sure to lead to 
 degeneration, to the excesses of a profligate, ill- 
 governed fancy, and thus to be brought to an un- 
 timely end. 
 
 But when the harvest of invention has been 
 gathered, and the rich field exhaustively gleaned by 
 criticism, there must needs be a second seed-time. 
 None can say how long the winter of discontent 
 that follows the barrenness of mere criticism will 
 last, but it must be brought to a close by a second 
 creative period, a vigorous, independent reaction in 
 some direction. The new period is provoked by 
 the manifest, call for it, by the disrelish and ennui 
 of the hour ; and sooner or later national forces, if 
 vigorous, will respond to this claim upon them. 
 
 Thus the three periods which interlock the 
 other periods of English literature, and disclose the 
 inter-dependence of its history, succeeded each 
 other. Shakespeare initiated the movement, Pope 
 refined upon it, Wordsworth rebelled against the 
 excesses of criticism, and returned anew to nature. 
 Creation led to art, and art, having faithfully spun its 
 last silken thread, lay a dead chrysalis, till a new life
 
 THE SECOND TRANSITION. 21 3 
 
 was ready to eat asunder its sepulchral cerements, 
 and betake itself again to the air. 
 
 In the present lecture, we are to deal with a 
 second transition, to trace, in individual poets of the 
 closing half of the eighteenth century, tlie changes 
 by which poetry finally passed from the school of 
 Pope to the freedom indicated by Wordsworth. It 
 was an unpoetical period, the critical tendency was 
 very slowly expending itself, and giving place to 
 new impulses ; so slowly that for sixty years there 
 was no poet of the first rank, scarcely one undenia- 
 bly of the second rank. Churchill, so popular in 
 his own day, so nearly forgotten in ours ; a rival 
 then in fame to Dryden and Pope, now known 
 chiefly by name, seems to have carried to its last 
 and most superficial form the rhetorical, satirical 
 phase of poetry. Akenside, didactic in matter, 
 stiffly classical in manner, with a coldly poetic eleva- 
 tion of diction, was not fitted to help his age onward 
 either in freedom, depth or boldness. When a poet 
 gives himself to an analytic rehearsal and eulogy of 
 the pleasures of the imagination, we may be pretty 
 sure that his poems proceed neither from the bold, 
 battling flights of phantasy, nor from the loving, 
 cooing frenzy with which it feeds and nestles it 
 callow young. The mood of mind in which we 
 write about the passions is not that in which we 
 most strongly feel them. 
 
 Thomson presents one element of progress, a 
 glowing and fairly faithful description of natural 
 beauties. Of this inspiration he seems to have 
 drunk much deeper than his predecessors. If he
 
 214 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 had added to this love of nature equally earnest hu- 
 man sympathies, and could have given these the 
 bent of a creative purpose, he would have possessed 
 the endowments of a great poet. As it was, his 
 power was too unsupported and single to yield 
 large results. He justifies his chosen subjects to 
 himself, and gives them an apologetic introduction 
 to his readers, in a formal appeal to the ruling 
 poetic taste, 
 
 " Such themes as these the rural Maro sung 
 To wide imperial Rome, in the full height 
 Of elegance and taste, by Greece refined." * 
 
 He is thus reassured, since Greeks and Romans 
 had done the like, that it is safe, poetically and con- 
 ventionally safe, for an Englishman to sing of 
 "fostering breezes," "softening dews," and "tender 
 showers." So cold an enthusiasm and fearful a 
 search for precedents might well be followed by a 
 feeble dressing up of homely things in poetic ver- 
 biage, like the following : 
 
 " Hushed in short suspense, 
 The plumy people streak their wings with oil, 
 To throw the lucid moisture trickling off." f 
 
 Or this : 
 
 " Urged to the giddy brink, much is the toil, 
 The clamour much, of men and boys and dogs, 
 Ere the soft fearful people to the flood 
 Commit their woolly sides. " J 
 
 When we can wash sheep in a way no more 
 
 straightforward than this, our muse is too dainty 
 for husbandry. 
 
 * Spring. f Ibid. ^ Summer.
 
 THOMSON. 215 
 
 Observe the coldness of the following personifi- 
 cations : 
 
 " Half in a blush of clustering roses lost, 
 Dew dropping Coolness to the shade retires; 
 There, on the verdant turf, or flowery bed, 
 By gelid founts and careless rills to muse : 
 While tyrant Heat, dispreading through the sky, 
 With rapid sway, his burning influence darts 
 On man and beast and herb and tepid stream."* 
 
 Such abstractions as coolness and heat are here 
 personified without the slightest descriptive clue by 
 which the imagination can give them a bodily form ; 
 or rather any form which the fancy may assign 
 them springs up instantly to contradict and make 
 absurd their nature and functions. Imagery that is 
 present as comprehension is absent, and steals 
 away on its approach, is at war with any complete- 
 ness of thought. Thomson, though in vassalage 
 to his times, is in part saved from them by the 
 dreamy sympathy of his nature with the physical 
 world about him. He has this one point of living 
 contact and hence of freedom and power. So far 
 we stand indebted to him. 
 
 There was in Goldsmith no such force or inde- 
 pendence of intellectual character as to free him 
 from current impressions, or lead him to new re- 
 sults. There was, however, in his Irish heart a 
 tenderness and a profusion of sympathies that take 
 from his poems all coldness, and lift them above the 
 school to which they belong. His personal and his 
 poetic merits both rest on the same emotional basis. 
 
 Perhaps no one poem is a higher, a more suc- 
 
 * Sammer.
 
 2l6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 cessful expression of the type of poetry under dis- 
 cussion than Gray's Elegy. We would rank it witn 
 the productions of the critical school, not because 
 of the date of its composition, but because it owes 
 so much of its excellence to the exactness and easy 
 elegance of its form. With no peculiar depth of 
 insight, or vigor of imagination, it confers unfailing 
 pleasure, by its naturalness of sentiment, its sim- 
 plicity and aptness of expression. In the highest 
 work, adverse tendencies always meet; form and 
 substance concur. Hence any unusual strength in 
 either element is sure to bring with it fair power 
 in the other. While there is this unity of qualities 
 In the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, its 
 predominant excellence seems to us to lie in the 
 studied simplicity and exactness of expression, in the 
 easy precision with which the sentiment assumes the 
 imagery, and both, the metre and rhyme, gliding on 
 with them the clearest and most peaceful of streams. 
 In Collins we meet with a poet of a much bolder 
 spirit. His own time no more accepted him than 
 he it. His poems were received with almost com- 
 plete neglect, and rose to rank slowly by their own 
 buoyancy. There belong to Collins a new intensity 
 of emotion, a vividness of personification, a broader 
 sweep of imagination, which decidedly distinguish 
 his composition from that of his cotemporaries, and 
 impart to the reader a sense of larger, freer, glad- 
 der motion. As a vigorous bird proportions his 
 curves of flight to his power of muscle, so Collins 
 adopts a more varied and continuous rhythm. His 
 successive impulses gather up and weave together
 
 COLLINS. 217 
 
 more lines, and we are borne on the stronj^ wing of 
 a single image through a series of varying melodies, 
 that will not fall apart into brief, measured stanzas. 
 This is observable in the opening of his Ode to 
 Liberty ; also in his Ode to the Passions : 
 
 ♦' Who shall awake the Spartan fife, 
 And call in solemn sounds to life, 
 The youths, whose locks divinely spreading, 
 Like vernal hyacinths in sullen hue, 
 At once the breath of fear and virtue shedding. 
 Applauding Freedom, loved of old to view? 
 What new Alcaeus, fancy-blest, 
 Shall sing the sword, in myrtles drest, 
 At wisdom's shrine awhile its flame concealing, 
 (What place so fit to seal a deed renown'd ?) 
 Till she her brightest lightnings round revealing, 
 It leap'd in glory forth, and dealt her prompted wound." 
 
 This fearless and impassioned movement of Collins 
 put him out of sympathy with the tame, restricted 
 temper about him. He had anticipated the season, 
 and must needs wait the approach of coming sum- 
 mer months. 
 
 We now pass farther on in the century, and meet 
 with two poets quite divorced from the old, and, in 
 very different ways, ready to usher in the new, 
 Cowper and Burns. The connection of Cowper 
 with the approaching and better spirit of poetry is 
 quite generally recognized. Says Craik : " As the 
 death of Johnson closes one era of our literature, so 
 the appearance of Cowper as a poet opens another. 
 * * His opinions were not more his own than 
 his manner of expressing them. His principles of 
 diction and versification were announced, in part, in 
 the poem in which he introduced himself to the
 
 2l8 THE PHILOSOPHY OP ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 public, his Table-Talk, in which, having intimated 
 his contempt for the 'creamy smoothness ' of modern 
 fashionable verse, u^here sentiment was so often 
 
 " ' Sacrificed to sound, 
 And truth cut short to make the period round,' 
 
 "he exclaims, 
 
 " • Give me the line that ploughs its stately course, 
 Like a proud swan, conquering the stream by force : 
 That, like some cottage beauty, strikes the heart, 
 Quite unindebted to the tricks of art.' " • 
 
 Cowper recognized the formality and rigidity 
 into which literature had fallen under the influence 
 of Pope, and complains of him that he has 
 
 "Made poetry a mere mechanic art, 
 And every warbler has his tune by heart." 
 
 This independent criticism shows that he caught 
 sight of a new era, and designedly hastened its 
 coming. To the last degree timid and self-distrust- 
 ful, his mind nevertheless moved independently 
 and vigorously under its own laws. This inner 
 strength and courage of the soul, are quite distinct 
 from confidence in action, and are often met with 
 without it. Indeed the timidity with which such a 
 mind retires upon itself leaves it only the more free 
 to follow its own bent. It was the seclusion of a 
 diffident nature that hemmed Cowper about, and 
 left him to his own independent judgment. 
 
 The fresh impulse which Cowper brought to 
 poetry is found in the genuineness, depth, and per- 
 vasive character of his sentiments. While his 
 
 * English Literature and Language, vol. ii. p. 372.
 
 COWPEK. 219 
 
 poems have in them much that might be thought 
 didactic, this matter is given in so natural, reflect- 
 ive, and yet more, in so emotional, a manner as 
 quite to escape the censure that might be implied 
 in the word. The thought does not, predetermined, 
 so much seek for the image and rhythm wherewith 
 to enforce itself, as flow out in an incidental living 
 way from the scenes and objects present to the 
 poetic imagination. It is not thought, but its cold 
 statement, or perceptive enforcement, that poetry 
 rejects. Cowper has a large measure of that power 
 which brings interpretation to natural objects, and 
 looks upon them with a rapid interplay of sugges- 
 tions, uniting the visible to the invisible, and lend- 
 ing to passing events a scope otherwise quite be- 
 yond them. Especially is he able, in the manner 
 of Wordsworth, to see and feel the twining and in- 
 tertwining of facts and sentiments, which often so 
 closely bind the buoyant spiritual mind to the phys- 
 ical world, and make this the resounding loom in 
 which are woven with wonderful rapidity, variety, 
 and beauty the patterns of its highest and noblest 
 thoughts. The quiet, earnest, subtile, pure, perva- 
 sive mind of Cowper made him a poet by the innate 
 force and character of its conceptions. There is 
 everything in his history to confirm the view, that art 
 finds its germ in natural endowment, and nothing 
 to sustain the theory, that it can be compassed by 
 external conditions. Attached to one of the least 
 mteresting portions of England, he was yet pre-em- 
 inent in his love of nature, and penetrating obser- 
 vation of it ; in close intercourse with the devotees
 
 220 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 of Calvinism, his poetry is marked by sympathy 
 and tenderness of sentiment ; diffident and distrust- 
 ful beyond self-control, his verse moves, as he fain 
 would have it, with the quiet force of a swan breast- 
 ing the stream, seeking and, to the full, enjoying 
 its own. 
 
 The devoutness of Cowper was too deep, di- 
 rectly, formally to control his poems. ' It and they 
 grew together out of his entire intellectual and 
 emotional life. Religious sentiment and spiritual 
 insight gave the same strong traits to his produc- 
 tions that they imparted to his character. Without 
 these he would have been another man and another 
 poet. Though his religious views received a severe 
 and melancholy cast, which, concurring with natural 
 temperament, led him at times within the limits of 
 insanity, this spiritual vitality was not less the nor- 
 mal disposition of the man; and was connected 
 with a volatile temper deeply im.pressible by mirth 
 and the quiet joys of life. Though his nature made 
 answer most fully to religious sentiment, it was with 
 no loss of the attachments which fall to a lively 
 temperament. 
 
 Burns imparted to poetry an impulse at once 
 like that given by Cowper and diverse from it. 
 Both were in a high degree natural, spontane- 
 ous, sincere ; but the sincerity of the one was 
 that of a melancholy and devout temper, and 
 that of the other of a joyous and passionate one 
 Few characters so elicit sympathy and regard, 
 passing into regret and sadness, as that of Burns. 
 With large and generous impulses and an eager
 
 BURNS. 221 
 
 relish for pleasure, he sought it impetuously, and 
 missed it early and almost utterly. His warm, 
 emotional nature made him as ready to impart 
 as to receive enjoyment, yet his fatal haste and 
 disobedience brought the same bitterness to 
 others as to himself. His love was as deadly as 
 the hate of another man. The flowers he plante 
 lost their fragrance, and the blossoms he plucked 
 distilled blood upon his fingers. We share some- 
 thing of his resentment and impatience at the 
 stern, cold, cruel features of the social life and 
 religious faith of his country, yet we are forced 
 to remember, that out of his own more tender 
 sentiments, as expressed in the Cotter's Saturday- 
 Night, there came no strength, no power to 
 plant, to harvest, or to enjoy the good he cov- 
 eted. His own failure was early and complete. 
 
 As a lyric poet Burns deserves the name of 
 great. In the most essential qualities of this 
 form of verse ; in fire, tenderness and naturalness, 
 none have surpassed him. The earnest devotion 
 of Cowper united him in meditative sympathy to 
 nature ; the warm passions of Burns set him 
 aglow with human interests, and made him the 
 poet of tender, heroic, mirthful, wilful impulses. 
 He keenly felt, and uttered melodiously what 
 he felt ; and by this force of a strong, impetuous 
 nature became a fresh, creative poet, working vigor- 
 ously for the new era. With lively and sympathetic 
 feelings he entered into the homely experiences of 
 life about him, both frolicsome and serious, gay and 
 soml^re; rendered them with his own appreciation,
 
 222 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and colored them with his own transfiguring fancy. 
 The human sympathies of Burns wrought Uke the 
 spiritual sympathies of Covvper, and put him, at 
 times, as in the Mountain Daisy, in living con- 
 cord with nature. 
 
 The class to which Burns belonged, the dia- 
 lect in which he wrote, his limited education, 
 all lightened the weight of conventional influ- 
 ences, and left him chiefly to the push of his 
 own nature as he produced his lyrics, first for 
 himself, and later for the world. Though Burns 
 stands at the entrance of the new period, none 
 of the great poets that followed surpassed him 
 in individuality of faculties, a freedom which yet 
 left him in full mastery of a varied and most 
 melodious verse. Here again in the life of 
 Burns we have a large, constitutional, original 
 element, which shaped itself into the develop- 
 ment of his times without being governed by it. 
 Pope had been made the subject of admiring 
 study by Burns, yet cast no reflection of him- 
 self in the dancing, sparkling, rollicksome stream 
 of his verse. 
 
 We now turn, having touched a few of the 
 significant features of transition in the works of in- 
 dividual poets, to the general forces which helped 
 to bring about a new intellectual activity, a fresh 
 era of invention. We have referred to the wea- 
 riness into which art, mere art, finally falls, the 
 ennui which forces the spirit to some new 
 form of activity. But this is a negative rather 
 than a positive force, a divorce from the past
 
 INTEREST IN EARLY ENGLISH POETRY. 223 
 
 rather than a promise of the future. We still need 
 to see what awakening energies, what living 
 ideas, were then at large in the intellectual 
 world, to take the guidance of a new movement, 
 and impart to it impulse. 
 
 A literary influence which accompanied and 
 indicated this change of taste was an increase, 
 interest in early English poetry. The nation, weary 
 of the products of classical criticism, turned to the 
 fresh, wild fruits of its own literary youth, and 
 sought in its early ballads the relish it had lost in 
 didactic art ; as old age seeks to renew its lan- 
 guid appetites with the fruits that delighted its 
 boyhood. It is always a sign of health when a 
 people is interested in itself, its history, its art, 
 and the tendencies native to its growth. A 
 submission to foreign law, and a sedulous imi- 
 tation of works more or less alien to the soil 
 and temper and wants of a people, are the 
 marks of flagging invention, and the precursors 
 of still farther decay. 
 
 The publication, in 1765, of Percy's Reliques 
 of Ancient English Poetry was a leading and very 
 influential indication of the wakefulness of the 
 nation to its own work. " I do not think," said 
 Wordsworth, " that there is an able writer in verse 
 of the present day, who would not be proud to 
 acknowledge his obligations to the Reliques ; I 
 know that it is so with my friends; for myself I 
 am happy to make a public avowal of mine own." 
 Walter Scott, who felt so pre-eminently, and who 
 BO fully followed out, this tendency to legendary
 
 224 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and romantic history, to restored nationalism, says : 
 " From this time," the date of his reading the 
 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, " the love 
 of natural beauty, more especially when com- 
 bined with ancient ruins, or the remains of our 
 fathers' piety or splendour, became with me an 
 insatiable passion, which, if circumstances had 
 permitted, I would willingly have gratified by 
 travelling over half the globe." So ready and 
 inflammable was the material prepared for these 
 living coals, unraked from the ashes of departed 
 years. The Reliques were largely composed of 
 the lyrics of earlier and later writers. The bal- 
 lads yielded the key-note, and then gave place to 
 the melody of more modern verse, the most free 
 and national in its character. Lyric poetry, less 
 ambitious than other forms, more close to the 
 individual sentiment, is wont to be the refuge of 
 the most genuine, simple and passionate strains ; 
 to be most deeply infused with the national temper. 
 The impression made by this work of Percy's 
 was confirmed by Warton's History of English 
 Poetry. This history covers the early years of our 
 literature broadly and thoroughly, and indicates at 
 once enthusiasm and patient research. The awak- 
 ened interest in the past is also indicated by the 
 literary forgeries of the time. These sprang up 
 in connection with the general interest that attend- 
 ed on historical research. Evidently Macpherson 
 and Chatterton found something in this eager tem- 
 per of the public mind which prepared the way for 
 their deceptions.
 
 GERMAN LITERATURE. 225 
 
 A second literary element, which marked and 
 helped to cause the shifting spirit of the period, was 
 the incipient influence of German literature. Im- 
 mediate entrance was given to it through Walter 
 Scott, and still more, through Wordsworth and Cole- 
 ridge. Coleridge was well fitted for the reception 
 both of its philosophy and poetry. His methods of 
 thought concurred with his knowledge to render 
 German influence powerful with him. From this 
 date onward German literature has been gaining 
 ground in England and America, and has for many 
 years been quite the most vigorous of European 
 forces. England, France and Germany, together 
 supreme in philosophy, science and art, hold toward 
 each other independent and diverse positions. The 
 artistic element, in its more separate and complete 
 form, belongs to France. The active, the brilliant, 
 the formal, in social organization, in social inter- 
 course, in criticism, in creation, are found with the 
 French ; the sluggish, practical, powerful and use- 
 ful rest with the English ; while to the German 
 belongs the theoretical, the speculative, the pro- 
 found, the laborious. The three occupy in refer- 
 ence to each other the points of a triangle. For 
 the English to draw near the French is to be quick- 
 ened in execution, but to lose weight ; to be made 
 critical, captious and superficial : for them to draw 
 near the Germans is to deepen and enlarge inquiry; 
 is to be renewed in thought, and enlivened in in- 
 vention. 
 
 Taine reproaches the English as lacking philos- 
 ophy. The reproach is not just, and, if it were,
 
 226 THE rillLOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 would come but poorly from a Frenchman. The 
 philosophical tendency is not as controlling in Eng- 
 land as it has been in Germany ; nor is it likely to 
 flash out in as extreme, rapid, and perchance brilliant 
 speculation as in France ; yet, as we shall later 
 show, as settled, consistent, continuous and fruitful 
 a philosophical movement has fallen to England as 
 to either of the other two. The philosophy of Eng- 
 land shows a history far more independent than 
 does that of P'rance, and one, we believe, whose 
 results have kept much closer to the truth than the 
 speculations of either France or Germany. 
 
 It is now urged, and with a measure of correct- 
 ness, that the scientific temper is one of relative 
 indifference to the bearing of the results reached by 
 inquiry ; that it schools itself to accept one result as 
 freely as another. As against controlling preju- 
 dice, this claim must be granted, not, we think, 
 as against every cautious, constitutional tendency. 
 The English, as contrasted with the Germans, pur- 
 sue philosophy distrustfully, with a predisposed and 
 Interested spirit. Questions of religion, of society, 
 and of government are so present to their specula- 
 tions, that they are always forecasting the issues 
 and tendencies of a theory, suffering practical exi- 
 gencies to react upon it, and turning aside from 
 troublesome conclusions. It may be questioned 
 whether the fruits of their philosophy have for this 
 reason been less valuable. Additional caution, re- 
 peated consideration by various minds, a stern re- 
 sistance to extreme, erratic tendencies, have been 
 the result, and have made the gains of thought, if
 
 THE PRACTICAL TEST. 227 
 
 slower, less bold and captivating, more safe and 
 reliable. The German mind, from its intellectual 
 freedom, from this very divorce of its speculative 
 processes from practical questions, its separation 
 from the interests of the hour, — for in Germany one's 
 philosophy is especially disconnected from his so 
 cial, political and religious relations, — has lost some 
 of the balance and steadiness which the retardation 
 of immediate and material interests would have im- 
 posed upon it. Moreover, the practical relations of 
 a theory do afford a partial, even though it be an 
 inadequate, test of its correctness. The German 
 mind, with all its subtlety, breadth of knowledge, 
 and boldness of inquiry, seems not especially well 
 fitted to weigh evidence, and to reach reliable con- 
 clusions. A wild, dreamy speculation sweeps in 
 upon it from this side, and is shortly followed by 
 another as erratic from that side. It is impossible 
 for any of us to preserve an ideal attitude of indiffer- 
 ence to evidence, and to be prepared to weigh it ex- 
 actly and completely as it is offered. If the thoughts 
 were thus to loosen themselves, to drop the great 
 burden of practical issues and previous conclusions 
 that sober them, they would be seen to play fitfully, 
 like idle weathercocks, rather than to mark deep 
 undercurrents, like anchored buoys. The new as 
 new, the fresh theory because it is the last theory, 
 our thoughts as our own have a peculiar hold on the 
 mind, and should be met by the inertia of old ten- 
 dencies. An index that plays with some friction 
 shows the stronger forces, and escapes the fluctua- 
 tions of lighter ones. An Englishman can hardly
 
 228 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 be as extreme and visionary as it is possible for 
 a German to be, and because he has more of this 
 national habit of mind upon him, feels more of its 
 conservative tendencies. Now this inertia of a 
 nation, putting to perpetual use its knowledge, does 
 often embarrass philosophy, but often saves it also ; 
 makes it stupid at times, it is true, but always ren- 
 ders it serious, and faithful to whatever has been 
 entrusted to it. 
 
 The English, as contrasted with either Germans 
 or Frenchmen, owe much to their political organiza- 
 tion, to their compact, slowly developing, social and 
 religious life, by which every question assumes a 
 national bearing, and is kept at all hazards within 
 the limits of safety. If much is due to the boldness 
 of individual thought, much also is due to the slow, 
 half-instinctive movement of a nation, as it creeps 
 hesitatingly on in its organic development. This 
 judgment of every theory by its power to play 
 safely into the daily facts of life is a wholesome re- 
 straint on erratic speculation, is allied in philosophy 
 and religion, in the checks it affords, to those of- 
 fered in science by the special phenomena under 
 discussion. 
 
 At this second creative period in her literary 
 history, England began to come in contact with the 
 freer, bolder, more speculative mind of Germany, and 
 to be awakened by it. The English make awkward 
 disciples of the French, as a slow practical person 
 appears poorly in the presence of one audacious, 
 quick-witted and accomplished. They unite more 
 hopefully to the obscure, patient and intellectually
 
 CONTRASTS OF NATIONAL CHARACTER. 229 
 
 productive Germans ; turning readily to an imme- 
 diate purpose, and presenting on their valuable side, 
 the fruits of these diligent laborers. The practical 
 strikes hands advisedly with the theoretical, and is 
 sure of the larger half of the common harvest. 
 The ore that is brought to the mine's mouth is thus 
 quickly reduced, and made marketable. 
 
 In a characterization of nations, only a general 
 and partial truth is aimed at, or can be reached. 
 Individual exceptions will spring up on all sides. 
 England, France, Germany, have each many citi- 
 zens who share the national virtues, and in large 
 measure escape the national faults. Certainly the 
 individual never appears to better advantage than 
 when, availing himself to the full of the nation's re- 
 sources, he yet tempers them all to a broader and 
 more catholic spirit ; the Englishman adding to his 
 own firm-footedness the nimble celerity of the 
 Frenchman, and the sustained strength of the Ger- 
 man ; or the German enlivening his thoughtful path 
 with the vivacity of French insight, and bending it 
 to the sober, serious purposes of his Saxon kins- 
 man ; or the Frenchman, casting the brilliancy of 
 his national spirit over the solid substance in char- 
 acter of the other two. It is also to be remembered, 
 that national tendencies are always the most clearly 
 shown in social, political and religious questions, 
 and in philosophy and criticism as they bear upon 
 these. In sciertce the conditions of progress are 
 more fixed and independent, and personal bias is 
 less influential. All nations are more nearly one 
 oh those topics which pertain less immediately to
 
 230 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. 
 
 character. The order of European influence has 
 been Italian, French, German ; and the long arm 
 and strong hand now rest with Germany. 
 
 This creative period was also profoundly affected 
 by political causes. The movement toward religious 
 liberty which had been so efficient a force in the 
 Elizabethan period had at length, under favoring 
 circumstances, issued in an equally decided and 
 extended claim for political liberty. The religious 
 precedents and drift of the past had not been more 
 sharply questioned, nor its conclusions more broadly 
 denied on general principles by the Protestant Ref- 
 ormation, than were the opinions pertaining to so- 
 ciety and government by the American Revolution. 
 This revolution, while favored by circumstances, 
 had not been their blind result. It had not been 
 made ready by mere physical forces ; with these 
 there had been a steady ripening of opinions, a 
 practical use and theoretical proclamation of the 
 principles of political freedom. This revolution was 
 not allowed, therefore, to transpire in the dark, its 
 underlying truths obscured by the turmoil of con- 
 flict, or lost sight of in the interests of the hour. It 
 was ripened by convictions, and accompanied by 
 the clearest announcement of its justifying reasons. 
 Its social bearings were thus much more important 
 than its immediate political ones. Though it was 
 the starting point of a great nation, it helped to set 
 in motion, and gave a permanent, unmistakable 
 form to social truths, which overleap all national 
 bounds and carry discussion and commotion every- 
 where.
 
 RIGHTS. 231 
 
 Questions of government and social organiza- 
 tion have, from that hour to the present, been the 
 themes of the most earnest, enlarged, varied and 
 urgent consideration. The destiny of the leading 
 civilized nations has been rescued, in part, from the 
 blind flow of physical forces, from the awards of 
 battle, and shaped by a conscious and ever return- 
 ing struggle for enlarged rights, for social gains to 
 be secured and fortified under new organizations. 
 
 England was compelled to take a prominent 
 part in the practical, passing solution of these prob- 
 lems. True to her history, she was divided in sen- 
 timent against herself, throwing her physical weight 
 chiefly upon one side, and her moral weight largely 
 upon the other. The American Revolution was 
 followed by the French Revolution, in part begot- 
 ten, and certainly hastened by it. The first kindled 
 those latent tendencies which wildly flamed out in 
 the second, on a broader field, in the midst of more 
 valuable and critical interests, and with less of the 
 restraint either of reason or surrounding circum- 
 stances. Questions of rights thus received at once 
 an emphasis which did not allow them to be set 
 aside. Here again England was a leading belliger- 
 ant, was driven by her sluggish, jealous and conser- 
 vative temper into an extreme attitude of resistance, 
 out of harmony, at least in the outset, with her 
 own best sentiment, and finally covered up and 
 made admissible only by the extravagance of the 
 French, and that blind martial mania of theirs 
 which slowly resolved the entire controversy into 
 one of conquest.
 
 232 THE I'HILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 We can hardly in our country and in our time, 
 when questions of government, and our rights 
 under it, are in constant discussion, and are every 
 day finding an easy and safe settlement, appre- 
 ciate the shock which these inquiries brought at 
 the beginning, before men had become accus- 
 tomed to them, or society supple under them ; 
 when they carried with them the imminent danger 
 of such bloody crises, and half-fruitless struggles, 
 as those of the French Revolution. 
 
 In these political and social conflicts, the 
 second brood of the Spirit of Liberty, we have a 
 force fitted to stir the mind of England scarcely 
 less deeply, and quite as broadly as those religious 
 rights which called forth its earlier strength. The 
 leading minds of the incoming period were borne 
 rapidly forward by these incentives. Johnson re- 
 sisted the progressive spirit. He personified the 
 stubborn English temper, slow to acquire anything 
 new, and yet slower to part with anything old ; 
 that accepts with composure the revolutions of 
 the past, but has no sympathy with those of the 
 present. Burke, less timid, favored for a time 
 revolution, and lost sympathy with it only in its 
 excesses. 
 
 Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, were carried 
 away with the first enthusiasm of liberty, and 
 slowly returned to a conservative temper as ex- 
 perience, reflection, constitutional tendencies, or 
 disastrous revolution restored to each the balance 
 of thought. 
 
 Shelley, Byron, Landor remained more extreme
 
 REVOLUTION. 233 
 
 in temper, Shelley especially drank to intoxication 
 of the glowing promises of speedy, social regene- 
 ration. All the great minds of the period en- 
 countered at once these questions of liberty, and 
 were aroused to fresh activity, strange hopes, or 
 sudden alarms by them. It is to be observed, 
 however, that those somewhat secondary in ability 
 were alone shaken from permanent composure ; 
 while the larger minded and more sedate ones 
 came slowly to receive the promises of revolu- 
 tion with abatement, and to cling to the old, as 
 at least presenting the soil out of which the 
 new must grow, and by which it must be nour- 
 ished. The slow organic evolution of society 
 held the thoughts of those sobered by experi- 
 ence, and taught the continuity of events, as 
 against all violent and precipitate change. There 
 is very little difficulty in society that is simply 
 one of organization, and can be sufficiently 
 met by constitutional shifts. The wise caught 
 the lessons of the French convulsions before the 
 revolutionary drama was half closed, while the 
 enthusiastic were left to misunderstand events, 
 to look wearily about for the reasons of failure 
 when the last sad scene was over. 
 
 In philosophy and theology, the influences 
 at the close of the eighteenth century were vig- 
 orous and progressive. Science was rapidly en- 
 larging its acquisitions in all directions. The 
 skepticism of Hume was calling forth a new 
 school of Scotch metaphysicians. The critical, ma- 
 terialistic, utilitarian tendency of English thought
 
 234 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 was meeting with farther enlargement by such vig- 
 orous men as James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. 
 
 Coleridge was a zealous party to these in- 
 quiries, and gave new emphasis to the truths 
 of our higher, our intuitive nature. By his ex- 
 tended influence, especially through the medium 
 of conversation, he was able to carry these dis- 
 cussions into literary circles, and quicken and 
 deepen interest in the profound questions of 
 our being. The practical religious life of the 
 nation, strengthened by the zeal of many able 
 and devout men, held the grounds of faith with 
 stubborn resistance to the skeptical philosophy 
 of the time, and with the changing methods of 
 defense which the advance of inquiry made ne- 
 cessary. Since the time of Locke there has been 
 no material cessation in the conflicts in the Eng- 
 lish mind between science, philosophy and religion. 
 The later lines of struggle, however, those which 
 rest back on the reason, the intuitive nature of 
 man, were beginning to be more clearly taken, as 
 this second creative period came forward ; and 
 helped to enlarge and deepen its spiritual impulses. 
 
 The conflict was also made more intense by 
 a reflex wave of English philosophy returning to 
 it through the French. The tendencies to ma- 
 terialism latent in the doctrines of Locke had 
 been more rapidly and fearlessly unfolded in 
 France than in England, and had there taken 
 their secondary form of religious unbelief and 
 revolutionar}^ social theories. The celerity and 
 recklessness of the French mind enabled it to
 
 CONVERGING TENDENCILS. 235 
 
 give back, as the startling infidelity of Voltaire, 
 and the destructive socialism of Rousseau, what 
 it received as a safe, quiet denial of innate ideas. 
 So differently do the same seeds of thought ripen 
 in distinct national soils ! On this period were 
 converging the political revolutions which sprang 
 from Puritanism, and those quickened by the fe- 
 verish theories of French materialism. If the 
 sober-minded were thrown forward by the one, 
 they were quickly flung backward by the other. 
 On this period were ccnverging the tenacious, 
 slowly-progressive theology of the English mind, 
 its deep-seated, half-unconscious materialism, al- 
 ways prone to shirk and deny its own corol- 
 laries ; the abstruse theories of Germany, too re- 
 mote to be- to many either the grounds of be- 
 lief or unbelief ; and the extreme, startling and 
 varied social and religious skepticism of the 
 French, alarming the most tender and deep 
 sympathies of the soul. It is not strange that 
 many minds, so played upon, became erratic, 
 and that retreat followed quick upon advance. 
 Thus the century opened, a pregnant spring- 
 time, in which the useful, the beautiful and the 
 worthless struggled together for sun-light. 
 
 Every quarter of the civilized world was 
 coming to be subject to intense influences from 
 every other. Assertions, which went forth as 
 harmless speculations, came back as revolution- 
 ary frenzy. Nothing was at rest, nothing un- 
 assailable ; nor had men yet learned the value 
 of revolution, the power and worth of a mere
 
 236 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 change of organization. The hopes of men were 
 as extravagant as their thoughts were feverish, 
 and they were ready in all directions, to make 
 short roads to the millennium, and take by vio- 
 ence the kingdom of heaven. On this religi- 
 ious and political ferment the century opened, 
 and set itself to the task of eliminating its false- 
 hoods and embodying its truths. 
 
 The interlacing of different tendencies, the 
 striking modifications which national and indi- 
 vidual character brought to the same fundamen- 
 tal principles, are seen in the social, political 
 philosophy of Locke as expanded in England, 
 in America, in France ; and also in the posi- 
 tion of free, protestant Holland, sheltering in 
 the seventeenth century the Puritans of Eng- 
 land, and in the eighteenth the skeptics of 
 France ; giving its types, now to an English 
 Bible, now to the Social Contract of Rousseau ; 
 and becoming at length the "great printing press 
 of France." * It fell to this century to decide 
 between nation and nation, statement and state- 
 ment ; and to discover that truth is truth only 
 as it is wrought into coherent, social and in- 
 dividual life. 
 
 * Rousseau, vol. ii. p. 57.
 
 LECTURE X. 
 
 Tlie First and Second Creative Periods Contrasted. — Tht Weight 
 to be Attaclied to Individual Influence, Spencer, Taine.-— Scott 
 — B}Ton. — Coleridge. — Wordsworth. — Shelley. 
 
 The second creative period, the first thirty 
 years of the present century, finds but one rival 
 era in our literature. In this, as in that, revolu- 
 tionary forces were at work, and the minds of men 
 were awakened by various and powerful causes. 
 As then, though foreign influences were active, 
 native, national tendencies were pre-eminent. En- 
 gland, in the first instance, stood proudly on the de- 
 fensive, the champion of Protestantism ; and now, 
 at least as she deemed it, of national constitutional 
 development. No continental wars have been to 
 England more significant than the struggles with 
 Philip II. and Napoleon I. In each instance, she 
 awaited a great invasion ; and in each the conflict 
 of arms was united with one of opinions. 
 
 This second period was equally fruitful with the 
 first, and more varied in its productions. It does 
 not, indeed, reach quite the elevation of the Eliza- 
 bethan era ; it lies under the shadow of one or two 
 of the great men of the earlier age ; but, this admit- 
 ted, it shows a more diversified, vigorous and perva- 
 sive literary activity than even that first outburst of 
 life. In it, as in every great literary period, poetry 
 was clearly pre-eminent, and this, notwithstanding
 
 238 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 the fact that prose, in an unbroken and enlarged 
 volume, came down from the previous time. In- 
 quisitive, laborious, artistic prose multiplied in all 
 directions, and added to its previous forms its most 
 careful essays and best novels. Criticism, especi- 
 ally in the review, the magazine, the journal, began 
 that prodigious productiveness which has at length 
 filled every portion of our atmosphere with its float- 
 ing spores, springing up as moss and lichens on 
 every stalwart trunk ; or as the literary must and 
 mildew of the time on every decaying thing. 
 
 Notwithstanding this unchecked power of prose, 
 working for science or art, for use or pleasure, as it 
 was able, poetry was the distinguishing feature of 
 the time, and this under its best forms. Narrative, 
 dramatic, lyric poetry prevailed, and when the di- 
 dactic element was present, it took so meditative, 
 intuitive, emotional a form as to impart a new, more 
 spiritual, more profoundly poetic temper to our lit- 
 erature. 
 
 We now turn, having spoken of the character 
 of the period and the general forces at work in 
 it, to the individuals who fixed its precise type, 
 and made it exactly what it was — to Scott, Byron, 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley. There is earnest 
 discussion as to what shall be done with the indi- 
 vidual in a philosophy of history. Some are willing, 
 as Spencer, so to magnify the aggregate of external 
 conditions ; the influence of climate, race, cultiva- 
 tion, the accumulated products of descent ; the 
 precise circumstances of the time and pla.:e on 
 which he has fallen ; the social movement into
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL. 239 
 
 which he is educated, as to leave him hardly more 
 than a waif on a mighty current, whose direction 
 and force he may indicate, but can do very little to 
 control. Others, with much less reason, far more 
 superficial in observation, are struck with the prom- 
 inent part that a few great men take in affairs, and 
 are ready to look upon them as the chief forces a 
 work, as giving direction to events by their single 
 volition. To these Spencer makes answer : 
 
 " If, not stopping at the explanation of social 
 progress as due to the great man, we go back a 
 step, and ask. Whence comes the great man ? we 
 find that the theory breaks down completely. •••■ * 
 Along with the whole generation of which he 
 forms a minute part ; along with its institutions, 
 language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudi- 
 nous arts and appliances, he is the resultant of 
 an enormous aggregate of causes that have been 
 co-operating for ages. * * If, disregarding 
 those accumulated results of experience, which 
 current proverbs and the generalizations of psy- 
 chologists alike express, you suppose that a New- 
 ton might be born in a Hottentot family, that a 
 Milton might spring up among the Andamanese, 
 that a Howard or a Clarkson might have Fiji pa- 
 rents, then you may proceed with facility to ex- 
 plain social progress as caused by the actions of 
 great men. But if all biological science, enforcing 
 all popular belief, convinces you that by no possi- 
 bility will an Aristotle come from a father and 
 mother with facial angles of fifty degrees ; and that 
 out of a tribe of cannibals, whose chorus in prepa-
 
 240 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLiSH LITERATURE. 
 
 ration for a feast of human flesh is a kind of rhyth- 
 mical roaring there' is not the remotest chance of 
 a Beethoven arising ; then you must admit the gen- 
 esis of the great man depends on a long series of 
 complex influences which has produced the race in 
 which he appears, and the social state into which 
 that race has slowly grown. If it be a fact that the 
 great man may modify his nation in its structure 
 and actions, it is also a fact that there must have 
 been those antecedent modifications constituting 
 national progress before he could be evolved. Be- 
 fore he can re-make his society, his society must 
 make him. So that all those changes of which he 
 is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in 
 the generations which give him birth. If there is 
 to be anything like a real explanation of these 
 changes, it must be sought in the aggregate of con- 
 ditions out of which both he and they have arisen."* 
 This presentation of Spencer has force as against 
 the limited view of his adversaries, and is to be pre- 
 ferred to the flippant theory of Taine, which refers 
 so much of the history and character of Englishmen 
 to external conditions. " They are," says he, "never 
 comfortable in their country, they have to strive 
 continually against cold or rain. They cannot live 
 there carelessly, lying under a lovely sky, in a sul- 
 try and clear atmosphere, their eyes filled with the 
 noble beauty and happy serenity of the land. They 
 must work to live ; be attentive, exact ; close and 
 repair their houses, wade boldly through the mud 
 behind the plough, light their lamps in their shops 
 
 * Popular Science Monthly.
 
 TAINE. 241 
 
 during the day. Their climate imposes endless in- 
 convenience, and exacts endless endurance. Hence 
 arise melancholy and the idea of duty. Man nat- 
 urally thinks of life as a battle, oftener of black 
 death which closes this deadly show, and leads so 
 many plumed and disorderly processions to the si- 
 lence and eternity of the grave. All this visible 
 world is vain ; there is nothing true but human vir- 
 tue, — the courageous energy with which man attains 
 to self-command, the generous energy with which 
 he employs himself in the service of others. On 
 this view he fixes his eyes ; they pierce through 
 worldly gauds, neglect sensual joys to attain this. 
 By such internal action the ideal is displaced ; a 
 new source of action springs up — the idea of right' 
 eousness." ■••'•■ 
 
 It would seem strange that the unbearable mud 
 and weather, in themselves not less abundant in 
 earlier than later times, left the Saxons so blood- 
 thirsty a brood, such lawless revellers, and yet 
 wrought righteousness in the English. If France 
 lacks conscience in lacking clouds, misses reflection 
 in missing the dismal retinue of storms, the English 
 may indeed congratulate themselves on elemental 
 conflicts which, displacing those of men, leave the 
 streets of their capital unstained with blood, and 
 beat out the germs of hasty, cruel and futile revolu- 
 tion. We should hardly have looked for so much 
 moral power in a drizzling rain, but if it be what 
 Taine thinks it, we may well compose ourselves to 
 its frequent return. On the whole, we accept the 
 
 * History of English Literature, vol. i. p. lOl. 
 II
 
 242 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 philosophy of the Englishman, laboring though he 
 does under the epithet "unphilosophical," as against 
 this ready theory of the Frenchman, 
 
 The truth would seem to be, that, setting aside 
 foreign forces often very influential, a nation's 
 growth in kind and degree is determined by exter- 
 nal conditions of climate, soil, position ; by consti- 
 tutional national character and general cultivation, 
 accumulated and transmitted in physical and intel- 
 lectual and moral descent ; and by individuals. 
 Which of these three is the more controlling it may 
 not be easy to decide, nor do they always maintain 
 toward each other the same ratios of force. As 
 national character becomes vigorous, external con- 
 ditions are cast into the background. It is only in 
 the earlier, the incipient stages of growth, that these 
 seem to have a decisive control, and then over the 
 direction rather than over the degree of activity. 
 They constitute the conditions of necessity, and 
 doors of opportunity, which in the beginning com- 
 pel and invite action, but which, if growth follows, 
 are soon overmastered by the forces which it sup- 
 ' plies. The English are now commercial by a 
 stronger fact than the possession of harbors. 
 
 In striving to strike the balance of power be- 
 tween the nation and the individual, between its 
 combined movement as controlling its personal life, 
 and its personal life as shaping and reshaping 
 its combined movement, we are to bear in mind, 
 that the two agencies are so interlaced as to be 
 inseparable in their action. The individual worker, 
 the great man, holds both elements in himself;
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL. 243 
 
 he adds the personal type to the national type, 
 and gives new efficiency to the general bias by the 
 individual bent of soul that he brings to it. If it be 
 true, as Spencer says, that before he, the man of 
 genius, can remake society, society n>ust make him, 
 it is also true, that when he is actually at work on 
 society, his efficiency is due more to what he brings 
 to the common stock of qualities, than to these 
 stock-qualities as held by him ; more to the moral 
 altitude given him by personal endowments above 
 the table-land of national character, than to the 
 height of these plains themselves, whereon are 
 mustered the nation. It is the head and shoulders 
 of his own supremacy that give him dominion, 
 though this dominion is to be expended in actual 
 work on the level of the faculties which belong to 
 his race. 
 
 These two forces, the race-force and the person- 
 al force, mutually limit each other. If genius is 
 conditioned for its quality to the nation to which it 
 belongs, the nation is also conditioned upon the 
 presence of men of genius to express, intensify, and 
 make effective in growth the national strength. If 
 talent, for its efficiency, is dependent on the intel- 
 lectual and moral state of those with whom it 
 labors, so are these, in turn, dependent on their 
 leaders for the full realization of their next step of 
 progress. The nation and the individual grow to- 
 gether, and are, therefore, in instant living inter- 
 play. Each is what it is through the other, and 
 neither can hold independent ground. If we wish 
 critically to estimate their claims, we shall be able
 
 244 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 to do it best, not by watching the erratic, brilliant 
 career of genius, to whom all forces seem second- 
 ary ; nor by turning to the slow, irresistible steps of 
 national growth, which, in the steady progress of 
 centuries, sinks into seeming insignificance the 
 individuals who have been partakers in it ; but by 
 more carefully observing the momentary interplay 
 of national and private life, by which the one is 
 slowly transmuted into the other. 
 
 In this common growth the individual is always 
 primary. He alone thinks, he alone advances with 
 a self-sufficing force. Take the nation at any stage 
 of progress, early or late ; it must be gotten beyond 
 that stage by the new views, the discoveries, inven- 
 tions, prowess of persons. It will remain inert till 
 some one man, or class of men, move, pioneer the 
 way, and teach others to follow. So all progress has 
 been achieved. The growing point is in every case 
 the individual. The position he shall start from is 
 determined for him by the nation, that is by previous 
 individual workers, the men of genius and talent 
 that have gone before him ; but the next step of 
 progress, for himself and the nation, he must take. 
 The individual, therefore, is always primary, initial, 
 the seat of living activity ; while the nation is sec- 
 ondary, residuary, receptive, the trunk-growth, or, 
 as in the ^coral, the rock-growth, left behind. The 
 terminal buds on a tree owe their position to the 
 organic development that has preceded them ; but 
 this growth has all been initiated by them, as must 
 be all farther growth. All that is really additive, 
 then, is due to the individual, while preservation.
 
 MEN OF GENIUS. 245 
 
 continuity, the conditions of increase, come from 
 the nation. The nation is the storehouse wherein 
 are treasured the fruits of individual labor. 
 
 In reference to society, to the nation, the men 
 of genius, so far as they have genius, are supernat- 
 ural forces, that is, forces unexplained by their 
 antecedents. As men normally endowed with the 
 national constitution, tastes, disposition, they are 
 natural products, sufficiently explained by the cir- 
 cumstances of their birth. In the conditions under 
 which their powers are expended, the work that falls 
 to them, and the general limits of its efficiency, they 
 are also included in the national development. But 
 in so far as they have genius, in so far as they tran- 
 scend the national type, as they are a peculiar and 
 personal power, they remain unexplained, are an 
 original and independent source of influence. We 
 have no recipe for the production of a Shakespeare, 
 no hint as to the causes which will yield a Bacon. 
 Shakespeare, as Shakespeare, is a primitive, super- 
 natural power in English history ; working indeed 
 under the conditions of that history, but not in- 
 cluded in them or explained by them. He expounds 
 history, our literary history, more than that history 
 can ever expound him. If genius is altogether a nat- 
 ural product, one of ways and means, it is to us, as 
 yet wholly ignorant of its productive conditions, as a 
 supernatural force, one that comes and goes without 
 challenge. The soil may determine what trees 
 shall be present in a forest, those already in posses- 
 sion may still farther restrict its form of growth, 
 but the vital force of each species has helped to
 
 246 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITER ATUKt.. 
 
 decide, and must continue to decide, its make-up. 
 Great is the constitutional force of society at any 
 one moment ; but into it, the force of a thousand 
 individuals has already been wrought ; into it other 
 independent spirits, in part only its own progeny, 
 may press their way, and, living influences, living 
 in and with the national life, may move as it moves, 
 yet cause it to swerve more and more under their 
 steady pressure. The constitutional vigor of soci- 
 ety, great as it may be, is yet plastic to the indi- 
 vidual hand, and in time may receive any form from 
 it. To this last element in the second creative 
 period, that of genius, we now turn. 
 
 The outside influences which went to the com- 
 position of Walter Scott, as a poet and novelist, are 
 very obvious. The national character and history 
 were vigorously at work in him. An intimate 
 knowledge of the minstrelsy of the Scottish border, 
 and of its wild traditions ; a spirit thoroughly im- 
 bued with the mediaeval, chivalrous temper, softened 
 and transfigured by a poetic imagination ; and 
 familiarity with the natural beauties of Scotland, 
 with an enthusiastic appreciation of them, united to 
 give shape and tone to his works. He was not a 
 product of the present, nor of the past, but of the 
 past history of his country as transfigured by the 
 present, sifted of its harsh features, and wrought 
 into the lively, humane dreams of poetry. These 
 historic forces were not merely felt and transferred 
 by Walter Scott, he had a peculiar affinity with 
 them. He transformed them in the presentation, 
 and gave them a power and life native to himseU
 
 WALTER SCOTT. 247 
 
 What he added to them by a glowing fancy is as 
 observ^able and essential as the material itself. The 
 trend of the banks accounts for the bed of the stream, 
 but not for the torrent that fills it. This is fed by 
 the deep fountains of the earth and the passing 
 clouds of heaven ; the great forces of nature are 
 every moment busy with this labor. 
 
 Walter Scott was endowed with the powers of 
 a very large and loving observation of outside life. 
 With comparatively little spiritual penetration or 
 interpretation, he easily seizes in nature and in man 
 their sensible, significant features. The insight 
 involved in this, and it is very considerable, belongs 
 to him ; but he does not go much beyond it. He 
 renders actions in their outside spirit and power, 
 but does not care to analyze them, to study their 
 sources, relations, issues. He gives a glowing, ac- 
 tive picture, renders in a lively way the flow of 
 events, and leaves us to query as we will about the 
 impulses, the good and the evil that are in them ; 
 to search for the problems of life they contain, and 
 the answers they make to them. Yet there is so 
 full a rendering of character, such a catching of the 
 flavor of men and things, that we are at once 
 endowed with the lively observation of our author, 
 and may, though we are not provoked to, go 
 deeper than he in our inquiries. The light, 
 fleeting impressions with which he crowds the im- 
 agination are well shown in his picture of Loch 
 Katrine in the morning light, 
 
 " The mountain shadows on her breast 
 Were neither broken nor at rest ;
 
 248 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 In bright uncertainty they lie, 
 
 Like future joys to fancy's eye." 
 
 Thus he touches the symbol and the meaning 
 beneath it, the action and the life that prompts it, 
 and lets the two glide on together, without division 
 or discussion. With this temper of mind, so personal 
 to him, so spirited, active and objective, Walter 
 Scott deals with wholesome, energetic, out-door 
 forces. Reaching little that is either direct or high 
 in intellectual stimulus he puts us in contact with 
 robust life, and extracts mental health from physical 
 inspiration and courageous action. The morbid, 
 mean and cowardly skulk away ; the faithful, mag- 
 nanimous and bold are in the foreground. 
 
 The likings and tastes of Walter Scott were at 
 one with the spirit of his works. Chivalrous, aristo- 
 cratic proclivities, in their best form, entered largely 
 into his character. He had little in common with 
 modern democracy ; the amenities, sympathies, and 
 social dependencies of the old regime he thoroughly 
 appreciated. The revolutions of his own time had 
 slight effect upon him. While others were stirred by 
 their social promise, he, called into actual service 
 by the threatened invasion of Bonaparte, was com- 
 posing his Marmion, as he walked " his powerful 
 steed up and down upon the Porto Bello sands within 
 the beating of the surge, and nOw and then plunged 
 in his spurs, to go off as at a charge with the spray 
 dashing about him."* So lightly did these events, 
 ploughing deep furrows in more philosophical minds, 
 slide over or lose themselves in his pre-engaged 
 
 * Reed's English Poets, vol. ii. p. 81.
 
 WALTER SCOTT. 245 
 
 fancies. Walter Scott was a very genuine man, 
 though a somewhat antiquated one. His strong 
 bias makes him limited in the range of his works. 
 He left poetry and turned to fiction, as he himself 
 said, because he "felt the prudence of giving way 
 before the more forcible and powerful genius of 
 Byron." Had he not also exhausted the particular 
 vein of poetry which his tastes and attainments 
 fitted him to work? Endless production was here 
 an impossibility. The material at his disposal be- 
 came more available in the novel than in the poem. 
 A monotony of form had begun to show itself as the 
 result of a monotony of matter. Variety is a sterner 
 necessity in high art than in fiction, and the want 
 of it is more immediately apparent. The very 
 felicity of adaptation of material, language, metre 
 in the best of Scott's poems cut him off from con- 
 tinuous production. Emphatic in their kind, they 
 could not return again and again. He grew weary, 
 and others were weary with him. It is true, more- 
 over, that Byron's works " wonderfully excited and 
 intoxicated the public mind at first, and for a time 
 made all other poetry seem spiritless and weari- 
 some." Scott stands alone in his poetic works. 
 Some may hastily depreciate them ; none can speak 
 slightingly of their execution. 
 
 Personal passion was to Byron what national 
 romance was to Scott. Strong, restless, ungovern- 
 able emotion, seldom beneficent, often startling and 
 destructive, underlay his volcanic nature. An 
 irritable, overbearing self-consciousness, the pro- 
 duct of lawless, selfish impulses, of appetites and
 
 250 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 passions keenly alive to pleasure, and forever baf- 
 fled in its pursuit, of a soul in proud wilfulness 
 and real strength refusing to be taught, was the 
 distinguishing spiritual feature in the character of 
 Byron. He was constitutionally immoral in the 
 sense that he constantly felt, and as constantly 
 chafed at, moral law. The infidelity of the time 
 wrought no repose in him. He did not accept un- 
 belief indifferently, quietly as a philosophy ; he fled 
 to it as a poor defense against belief, as a refuge 
 from the bitter rebukes and endless strifes of his 
 own restless spirit. He was intensely immoral 
 because he felt so intensely the moral law, and so 
 struggled to break his way through it. He could 
 not for a moment overlook or forget it. Mere stu- 
 pidity, mere brutishness and mere speculation were 
 alike impossible to him. He took the fears of un- 
 belief, the extinguished hopes of materialism, home 
 to a high poetic temperament, that to its very core 
 revolted against them, and could only have been as- 
 suaged, lifted, inspired by pure and profound belief. 
 From the strife about him for social liberty he gath- 
 ered little save more wind for the flame of his own 
 passions. With the restraints of liberty he had no 
 sympathy, and was only once blessed by its spirit, 
 v/hen helped for a brief period by the Greek revo- 
 lution into a more generous and objective life. 
 
 The intense, passionate nature of Byron, while 
 it was the propelling force of his art, yet robbed him 
 of that large, catholic success which his lively wit, 
 fruitful imagination, and quick intuition of beauty 
 seemed to promise. It narrowed down his percep-
 
 BYRON. 251 
 
 lions of character, and at the same time perverted 
 them. His ideal man and his ideal woman stand 
 over against each other, complements in passion, 
 but alike false to the true nobility of their sex. 
 On the one side are pride, strength, disobedience, 
 indulgence ; on the other concession, devotion, 
 the smothered fires of a soul that cannot escape 
 beyond the heat of its own narrow, intense, blind 
 life, but must needs, with none of the rallying 
 forces of self-respect, smoulder and perish in it. 
 There is in the one no patience, no restraint, no 
 magnanimity, no nobility ; in the other there is no 
 worthiness, no independence, nothing holy and 
 uncontaminate. The poems of Byron are compara- 
 tively lost, by the lie which, hidden in his own 
 soul, so often reappears in them ; by the futile 
 and ever renewed effort to unite beauty, first to 
 license and then to the sullen, resentful moods of 
 impotent rebellion. His wit, as in Don Juan, thus 
 plays phosphorescent about things dead and cor- 
 rupt ; his pathos springs suddenly up with no suf- 
 ficient nourishment in the worth of the characters 
 that call it forth ; his yearnings for that which is 
 better are only regrets, momentary rents in hurry- 
 ing, wind-sped clouds. His cry is a single, plain- 
 tive, despairing note, as of a bird lost in the 
 darkness : 
 
 " No more, no more, oh never more on me 
 The freshness of the heart car fall like dew. 
 Which out of all the lovely things we see 
 Extracts emotions beautiful and new." 
 
 Don Juan, the work on which Byron squandered
 
 2^2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 his ripest intellectual strength, lacks most of all the, 
 beauty of character, the coherence of healthy, 
 wholesome life. It more than any other of his 
 poems is breaking out everywhere with his own 
 corrupt, defiant spirit, hastening on to death. The 
 flowers grow, but they are passion flowers, and we 
 catch the rank odors of the saturated soil that bears 
 them. The mischief which his own nature wrought 
 in him is seen in this increased distortion of his 
 works, in the intense resentment it called forth in 
 him against any restraint or criticism, and in his 
 personal antipathies to those of a nobler spirit. 
 
 The immorality of Byron's works consists super- 
 ficially in their licentiousness ; far more deeply and 
 pervasively in his confounding lawlessness with 
 strength, accepting proud despair as the portion of 
 the soul, and presenting pleasure as the bait by 
 which free, noble spirits are caught and hopelessly 
 entangled in the net-work of malign world-forces, 
 the providences of a demiurge. He had no power 
 to perceive the beauties of faith, or the loving guid- 
 ance and strength of the God of the faithful. Byron 
 is fitted to captivate bold, active, restless, unreflect- 
 ive spirits, who have not yet exhausted the foun- 
 tains of their physical life, and can still give a dash 
 of freedom and a relish of appetite to rebellion ; but 
 the sober, disciplined, deepened, dispassionate mind 
 finds increasingly less to love and to cherish in him. 
 
 "The Byron-fever is in fact a disease belonging 
 to youth, as the whooping-cough to childhood — 
 working some occult good no doubt in the end. It 
 has its origin, perhaps, in the fact that the poet
 
 BYRON. 253 
 
 makes no demand either on the intellect or the con- 
 science, but confines himself to friendly intercourse 
 with those passions whose birth long precedes that 
 of choice in their objects — whence a wealth of emo- 
 tion is squandered. It is long before we discover 
 that far richer feeling is the result of a regard bent 
 on the profound and the pure." ■■'■ 
 
 Byron himself is the best antidote to his works. 
 That life and those poems put side by side, and 
 read together, are a chapter in ethics which few can 
 mistake. As the rocket is driven aloft by the reac- 
 tion, the spurn of its own spiteful forces, and, reach- 
 ing the upper air, explodes in yellow, purple and lurid 
 light, so Byron forced his way upward with scorn 
 and repulsion, flamed out in wild, explosive, bril- 
 liant excesses, and disappeared in darkness made 
 only the more palpable. 
 
 " Man's a strange animal, and makes strange use 
 Of his own nature." 
 
 As Scott was the poet of the chivalrous temper 
 of the past, so was Byron the poet of the wild, pas- 
 sionate, lawless one of the present — a bold, appeti- 
 tive spirit, spurning resentfully at restraint. Each 
 added genius to a constitutional tendency of society, 
 and secured a large following. 
 
 Coleridge and Wordsworth were closely united 
 by friendship, by an agreement tempered by a 
 diversity of tastes, and by a union of sentiments. 
 They both accepted with the generosity and impet- 
 uosity of youth the new hopes of liberty ; and bGth, 
 as years ripened the understanding, came to see 
 
 * Alec Forbes, by MacDonald.
 
 254 'IIIE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 more clearly its conditions and limitations. Southey 
 shared with them this oscillation between the en- 
 thusiasm of sentiment and the caution of judgment, 
 the latter gaining with him early and easily the 
 mastery. 
 
 Coleridge possessed the most undeniable and 
 wide-ranging genius of any one of his time. Its 
 practical force, its sustained insight were greatly 
 restricted by a vacillation, a weakness of will, which 
 loosened his powers, and lost for them their true 
 pivot of revolution, their smoothness and harmony 
 of action. His naturally enervate temper was en- 
 hanced in early life by the lack of vigorous disci- 
 pline, and later by an indulgence in opium. He 
 thus fell into pitiful imbecility, taxing for support 
 the charity of friends, and craving from the charity 
 of Heaven a forgiveness that issued in no new 
 strength. Thus natural gifts so varied and so great 
 that they only called for patient and wise use to 
 put him among the few great masters of men were 
 humbled and in a measure lost. 
 
 Philosophy, a philosophy that sprang from and 
 expressed the insight of the soul, was the seat of 
 his strength ; but philosophy was so united in him 
 to a creative fancy, that as many remember the 
 poet as the sage. These two even-handed gifts 
 made him the very best of critics ; and appreciative, 
 suggestive criticism became a third endowment. 
 The influence of these three gifts was enhanced 
 by their harmony, and by his unusual conversational 
 powers ; or better, perhaps, by his ability to impress 
 himseli upon others in harangues which took the
 
 COLERIDGE. 255 
 
 place of conversation. If what Carlyle says of him 
 be partially true, "I have heard Coleridge talk, 
 with eager, musical energy, two stricken hours, his 
 face radiant and moist, and communicate no mean- 
 ing whatsoever to any individual of his hearers, cer- 
 tain of whom, I for one, still kept eagerly listening 
 in hope, " * the force and inspiration of the man wh 
 could hold, and, on these hard conditions, suffi- 
 ciently reward, superior men, ever reluctant to be 
 mere listeners, are only the more apparent. He 
 says farther, " Coleridge's talk and speculation was 
 the emblem of himself; in it as in him a ray of 
 heavenly inspiration struggled, in a tragically inef- 
 fectual degree, with the weakness of the flesh and 
 blood." t 
 
 The centre of his philosophy was a stern resist- 
 ance to materialism, a reintroduction of spiritual 
 intuitions, a reassertion of the reason. This gave 
 new faith to his love of freedom, new devotion to 
 his religious belief, deeper insight to his criticism, a 
 loftier inspiration to his poetry. 
 
 An enervate will, and that too in connection 
 with an indulgence that was undisguised sin before 
 the keen, rebuking eye of his own soul, was espe- 
 cially fatal to the upward, poised, independent flight 
 that belonged to his spiritual temperament. All 
 are struck alike by the fragmentary character of his 
 work. His great poems are comparatively brief; 
 some of them odes that could receive form under a 
 single, undivided impulse, the subtly woven words 
 
 • Introduction to Coleridge's Poems. Little & Brown, 
 t Ibid.
 
 256 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 springing at once from the emotion, as "the flame 
 from its feeding oil." This "sublime man," as Car- 
 lyle calls him, possessed of "a prophetic or magician 
 character," to whose actual endowments men were 
 ready to add a halo of mystery, wielded an influence 
 quite beyond the direct results of his works. He 
 gave truths, easily lost to the English mind, a fresh 
 lighting up, and startled with them, when he did 
 not disperse, the shadows of materialism. It is 
 minds like his that furnish turning points of thought. 
 By them we pass a headland, or double a continent, 
 and find new waters and new tracts before us. If 
 we are tempted profoundly to regret the dislocated 
 products of such a mind, the vast fields of broken 
 ice-floe that it sends drifting by, we are yet propor- 
 tionately impressed by the brilliant lights ; the 
 strange, weird forms ; and deep, exhaustless and 
 inscrutable forces, that are here. Coleridge, as 
 Coleridge, appeals to the thoughts and imagination 
 hardly less than if he had carefully planned and 
 perfectly finished his works. The quick view that 
 we catch from some bold Alpine summit finds the 
 foil of its wealth, its fascination to memory, in the 
 very indistincness and haste that make us wish to 
 return to it. Carlyle acknowledges with too little 
 appreciation the great fragmentary thoughts that 
 fell from the lips of Coleridge. They sometimes 
 found the richest soil, and brought forth their one 
 hundred-fold. Wordsworth, DeQuincey, Hazlitt pre- 
 sented minds with whom a suggestion was a harvest. 
 Wordsworth is in important respects the fore- 
 most poet of the period under consideration. He
 
 WORDSWORTH. 257 
 
 gave with deliberate purpose through a long life 
 his undivided and growing powers to his own favor- 
 ite pursuit. He coveted success, not so much as 
 an ambition as a thirst of the soul for high spiritual 
 insight and an effective, sufficient rendering of the 
 things seen. 
 
 " Blessings be with them — and eternal praise, 
 Who gave us nobler lives, and nobler cares — 
 The poets, who on earth have made us heirs 
 Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays ! 
 Oh ! might my name be numbered among theirs, 
 Then gladly would I end my mortal days." 
 
 Wordsworth is among the most voluminous of 
 English poets, — the omnipresence of the poetic sen- 
 timent was an article of his creed and practice — 
 and none of them have more decided or original 
 characteristics. He was the centre of the Lake 
 School, a name that sprang from local connections, 
 and turned, in its application, more on personal 
 friendship and sympathy, a general concurrence of 
 feeling, than on a single theory of art shared by its 
 members. Southey was most nearly united to 
 Wordsworth in critical views, but between their 
 poems there is no close agreement. The ability of 
 Wordsworth, his steadfastness and faithfulness, won 
 him pre-eminence in the new movement ; and with 
 these, other causes concurred. He announced a 
 theory of poetry, and gave it in his works extreme 
 illustration. He suffered the harshest criticism, 
 and slowly conquered bitter, dominant prejudice by 
 expansion in his own line of effort under his own 
 conceptions. This forcing growth against the ac-
 
 258 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 cepted canons of art, laid down by the acknowledged 
 critics of the day, like Jeffrey, and under the con- 
 tempt of popular poets, like Byron, drew attention 
 and sympathy to the independent power that 
 achieved it. Wordsworth has hence been assigned 
 a position that hardly belongs to him. He has 
 been looked on as founding a school of poetry, giv- 
 ing birth to a new era, rather than as one who best 
 embodied and most completely presented a spirit 
 that had in various forms, for years, been gaining 
 ground in English literature. Though not the first, 
 he is the highest, and most central, summit in the 
 mountain range skirting the new realm of poetry ; 
 and stands disclosed, quiet, serene, eternal in the 
 clear transforming light of an earnest, reflective im- 
 agination. 
 
 It is not altogether strange that Wordsworth 
 should have met with severe criticism. His theory 
 of art was not well put ; some of its illustrations, as 
 The Idiot Boy, were extreme ; while criticism, bur- 
 dened with a large inheritance of conventional opin- 
 ions and conventional praise descending from Pope, 
 his cotemporaries and subsequent admirers, was 
 still inclined to the cold, formal and preceptive in 
 art. The pith and truth of the theory of Words- 
 worth, as shown by his poems, are found in the fact, 
 that all forms of life have in them poetical elements, 
 and require only a sensitive, intuitive presentation 
 for their disclosure. Herein lies the genius of 
 Wordsworth, that with intense, pervasive feeling ; 
 quick, penetrative sympathy, he is able to move 
 among all objects, touching the lowest in human
 
 WOKDSWOKTH. 259 
 
 life, and those in nature most remote from ordinary 
 insight, and bear everywhere with him an inspira- 
 tion and a rendering that disclose their hold upon 
 the human soul, their share in the problems of the 
 universe. This is what he has actually done, and 
 this we may well believe is what he intended to do. 
 His own statement, however, of his principles of 
 art is not convincing, and seems to have been 
 shaped in part by contradiction, by resistance to 
 the coldly elevated and critical spirit that had gone 
 before him, and whose influence was still predomi- 
 nant. He described "his object as being to ascer- 
 tain how far the purposes of poetry might be ful- 
 filled by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection 
 of the real language of men, in a state of vivid sen- 
 sation." Herein he failed to do full honor to the 
 appreciation, the interpretation, that always abide 
 with the poet, and which so distinguish him from 
 other men. "He goes out of his way to be at- 
 tacked." '•'•■ How easily Wordsworth's omnivorous 
 poetic fancy invites ridicule, the criticism of Taine 
 suffices to show. 
 
 Wordsworth affords an admirable illustration of 
 a new tendency in art, mounting rapidly into full 
 power, and henceforth made dominant, by virtue 
 of its contact with one soul in which it lights and 
 feeds the flames of genius. An influence before 
 but dimly perceived became speedily enthroned, 
 and gave a date for a new intellectual dynasty. 
 
 The social and political forces were at first as 
 keenly felt by Wordsworth as the poetical ones, 
 
 * Lander's Conversations.
 
 260 THF PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATOUt. 
 
 though his own strong spirit tempered them to 
 moderation as he slowly and painfully struggled 
 back to the footing of experience and faith. His 
 placid, thoughtful and retiring disposition could 
 hold no terms with fruitless and bloody revolution. 
 He loved too well the peaceful promise of nature 
 and society. He thus prays in behalf of his own 
 nation : 
 
 " Oh that with soul-aspirings more intense, 
 And heart-humiliations more profound, 
 This people/ long so happy, so renowned 
 For liberty, would seek from God defense 
 Against far heavier ill — the pestilence 
 Of Revolution, impiously unbound ! " 
 
 How diverse this from the feeling which had led 
 him earlier to exclaim of the French Revolution : 
 
 " O pleasant exercise of hope and joy ! 
 For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood 
 Upon our side, we who were strong in love 1 
 Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. 
 But to be young was very heaven ! " 
 
 It is not easy for us fully to understand the 
 darkening down of the entire spiritual heavens 
 incident to the bitter disappointments of blind, futile 
 progress, which has served to express the pas- 
 sions of men, rather than to establish their con- 
 victions. It is not easy to get again the foothold 
 of faith after the shock and paralysis attendant 
 on the overthrow of too sanguine hopes. Words- 
 worth was a reflective, meditative poet. It was not 
 the form and garniture of the world that he loved to 
 present, but its emotional foice, its suggestions to 
 the spiritual nature. It was not action in human
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 261 
 
 life, but its under-current of sentiment, that he 
 delineated. He is especially undramatic, for it is 
 not the surface-play of events that occupies him, 
 but the secret nurture of the soul, its half blind 
 responses to the circumstances that try it. Words- 
 worth above all other poets calls for a spiritual 
 sympathy of his readers with himself On this 
 condition only we pass with him those invisible 
 lines which divide mere facts from the Elysian 
 fields of the poetic fancy. Says Taine, "When I 
 shall have emptied my head of all worldly thoughts, 
 and looked up to the clouds for ten years to re- 
 fine my soul, I shall love this poetry. Meanwhile, 
 the web of imperceptible threads by which Words- 
 worth endeavors to bind together all sentiments 
 and embrace all nature, breaks in my fingers ; 
 it is too fragile ; it is a woof of woven spider web, 
 spun by a metaphysical imagination, and tearing 
 as soon as a solid hand tries to touch it." ■••'•" 
 
 Ought not Taine to have asked, How came 
 this man to spring out of English mud and Eng- 
 lish utihties ? Genius, even in an English soul, 
 breaks, in a troublesome way, the cobweb threads 
 of a too ingenious philosophy. Tenuous as are the 
 connections of Wordsworth's poetry, they are too 
 strong for the reasoning of Taine. 
 
 To the great personal forces represented in 
 Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, there are to 
 be added others of diverse and somewhat inferior 
 pov/er, Crabbe, Southey, Moore, Keats, and above 
 all, Shelley. In vigor and boldness of poetic fac- 
 
 * History of Eng. Literature, vol ii. p. 262.
 
 262 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 ulties, Shelley is scarcely surpassed by any. No 
 region was too remote, too ethereal for his sus- 
 tained and sweeping flight, no path was so slight 
 or sinuous as to be altogether lost under his 
 searching eye. In him the imaginative impulses 
 were in excess ; he felt commonplace too weakly, 
 ?.nd returned to it, and its ally, common-sense, too 
 rarely. He was instantly lost to the slow, plod- 
 ding steps of judgment. Above all the poets of 
 his time, he was fired with revolutionary hopes, 
 and struggled resentfully on toward the better times 
 which the successive stages of change served only 
 to postpone. He found himself at war with religion, 
 with society, and government, a war prompted by 
 the compass and humanity of his sentiments, and 
 a resistance to restraints whose ground he failed to 
 comprehend. Shelley needed only more sober and 
 solid thought, a mind ballasted by more common 
 and cheap qualities, to have moved among the high- 
 est. The poetic elements super-abounded, and 
 allowed him to be driven before a whirlwind of 
 sentiment, which found in him magnificent, though 
 'too often wild, utterance. What his biographer 
 says of Landor, — who also deserves more attention 
 than he receives — was equally true of Shelley ; 
 though the one was impelled more by will, and the 
 other by affection : " What was wanting in his 
 books and in his life was submission to some kind 
 of law." «' 
 
 The beauty of his poetry never quite covers 
 with its verdure the volcanic forces at work under 
 
 * Life of Landor, p. 676.
 
 SHELLEY. 263 
 
 it. A sense neither of safety and sufficiency noi 
 of quiet hope settles down on his landscape. 
 We are dealing with agencies that work with 
 terrific energy, nor always with a sober fore- 
 sight of results. One cannot but love Shelley, 
 and delight in him. The generosity and eleva- 
 tion of his sentiments cleanse him from the soil 
 that attaches to the selfish passions of Byron. 
 We can but wish that a safe substratum of 
 thought had upheld and nourished all this splen- 
 dor of imagination, this enthusiasm of soul. He 
 thus states his own purpose in his preface to 
 The Revolt of Islam : 
 
 " It is an experiment on the temper of the 
 public mind, as to how far a thirst for a hap- 
 pier condition of moral and political society sur- 
 vives, among the enlightened and refined, the 
 tempests which have shaken the age in which 
 we live. I have sought to enlist the harmony 
 of metrical language, the ethereal combinations 
 of the fancy, the rapid and subtle transitions of 
 human passion, all those elements which essen- 
 tially compose a poem, in the cause of liberal 
 and comprehensive morality ; and in the view of 
 kindling within the bosom of my readers a vir- 
 tuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty 
 and justice, that faith and hope in something 
 good, which neither violence nor prejudice can 
 ever totally extinguish among mankind." 
 
 Who can fail to sympathize with this daunt- 
 less effort of a noble mind, though it misses the 
 conditions of success, or breaks restively through
 
 264 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 them when they lie before it ? Shelley was as 
 foreign to the English temper on one side, as 
 Wordsworth on another, and both must find in- 
 terpretation and honor in the depths of natures 
 akin to their own. Such men bring to us the 
 trying test of appreciation, by which we define 
 our place among men, and settle what in heaven 
 and earth lies open to us.
 
 LECTURE XI. 
 
 Last three centuries. — Present period one of diffusion. — Science, 
 Lectures, History. — Chief features, the novel and the news- 
 paper. — Character of the novel, its divisions, its office. — 
 Newspapers, their multiplication, advantages, disadvantages. — 
 Promise of the times. 
 
 The last three centuries, the seventeenth, eigh- 
 teenth and nineteenth, have each opened with de- 
 cided Uterary tendencies. The first dawned in the 
 clear, growing light of the Elizabethan era, when 
 the early forces of our literature were in full play ; 
 the second came forward with less fascination, with 
 more tame and tempered light, as our Augustan 
 age of art ; and the third restored us again to the 
 impassioned powers and dewy freshness of our na- 
 tional growth, broke once more in a day of crea- 
 tive energy, clothed anew with beauty and with 
 strength. The middle of this century, which open- 
 ed so auspiciously, it is too early to characterize 
 in its relation to those periods that have gone 
 before and those that are to follow. Not till the 
 issues of an age are seen, can we certainly say for 
 what it is making ready, in what direction it is 
 modifying the life it has received. Certainly, these 
 midway years of the present century, are not dis- 
 tinctively creative in art, as compared with those 
 that preceded them. They seem rather to indicate 
 a gentle subsidence of those inventive powers which 
 
 12 (265)
 
 266 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 SO exultingly lifted the national mind in Scott, 
 Byron, Wordsworth. 
 
 The present may prove the slope and expansion 
 of these high summits into beautiful and arable 
 plains, to be joined again on their farther side to 
 rival mountain ranges ; or it may be, so wakeful is 
 the critical feeling with us, but the opening of one 
 of those prairie stretches of great fertility and 
 slight diversity, consoling the appetites rather than 
 inflaming the imagination of men. 
 
 The present is a prose rather than a poetic era, 
 and this by the bulk, central body and quality of 
 its productiveness. There is, perhaps, more poetry 
 written to-day than ever belbre, and much of it is 
 very good ; but there are very few poets who com- 
 mand the attention of the English nations, — those 
 distinct or united nationalities, that have laid down 
 liberal boundaries of present and future power in 
 every quarter of the globe. It is difficult, indeed, 
 to send a tidal wave along these conjoint, mobile 
 lines of language and literature, spreading through 
 every branch of the great English people, and few art 
 doing it. Questions of science, new theories, new 
 fictions, chase each other more rapidly around the 
 English globe, than new poems. 
 
 While, however, it is a prose period, one of very 
 diversified and very busy inquiry, of sharp and 
 destructive criticism, of bold theory, and of practical 
 reform everywhere, and especially among English- 
 men, cisatlantic and transatlantic, it can better be 
 considered, waiting for its final literary relations to 
 disclose themselves, as one of diffusion. In this
 
 A PERIOD OF DIFFUSION. 267 
 
 particular, it is broadly and nobly distinguished 
 from every age that has gone before it. This very 
 startling fact of diffusion, this spread of richly-laden 
 waters over every cultivated field, this leaving a 
 deposit of thought, not merely along conventional 
 lines in rich river bottoms, but over the scant and 
 remote acres of the poor, may have little interest 
 for mere literati, but is of profound concernment 
 to the philanthropist. Above all ages, our own 
 deserves honor for this enlargement of thought, 
 this scattering everywhere of some scant measure 
 at least of the treasures of literary art. From this 
 practical side, we shall chiefly consider this practi- 
 cal period, this period, that halts a little in the 
 merely intellectual march of the race, that it may 
 send its voice abroad and backward, gathering on 
 every side enlarged numbers into the fellowship of its 
 strength, and waiting to compact its ranks, before 
 it renews its advance. 
 
 The scientific is, on the whole, the pre- 
 dominant phase of thought with us. Philosophy 
 suffers disparagement ; historical, religious and 
 social dogmas are kept in perpetual agitation and 
 irritation by the bearings on them of the scientific 
 spirit, its theories and its facts. This science reaches 
 the people in inventions and discoveries, in in- 
 numerable lines of industrial improvement. It is 
 not content, however, with this ; popularized in a 
 great variety of ways, it seeks and everywhere finds 
 an enlarged and enlarging audience. This can- 
 not be called an age of oratory, for the same reason 
 that it is not a poetic one ; but certainly, no period
 
 268 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 ever beheld so many who have sought the general 
 ear for purposes of instruction. If the resounding 
 oration has been displaced by the more modest 
 lecture, this truly has been attended with results 
 as benign and as far-reaching as have ever fallen 
 to oratory. It has become the office of speaking 
 more frequently to present and expound the truth 
 than to enforce it, and into this branch of in- 
 struction men spring up everywhere by tens, by 
 hundreds, by thousands. 
 
 The love of facts, near and remote, that belongs 
 to science, shows itself also in history. Historical 
 research, criticism and composition, have been 
 greatly enlarged in the present period. The phi- 
 losophy of history, the leading forces that have 
 wrought in it, have been diligently sought into by 
 such men as Hallam, Buckle, Lecky, Stanley, Tylor, 
 while history in the common acceptance of the 
 term has been voluminously written with more than 
 wonted insight into the connection of events, and 
 more than wonted wisdom in their selection. Kings 
 and conquerors have ceased to occupy the entire 
 historic stage, and the condition, customs and opin- 
 ions of the masses of men, claim their share of 
 attention. The list of historical writers has never 
 been larger, or indicated better perception or more 
 power, either here or in England, than during the 
 forty years which have just passed away. Macau- 
 lay, Grote, Arnold, Merivale, Rawlinson, Milman, 
 Mahon, Froude, Kinglake, Freeman, Bancroft, 
 Prescott, Motley, constitute but leading figures in 
 the laborious group.
 
 THE NOVEL AND THE NEWSPAPER. 269 
 
 The two departments of literature, however, 
 which have had the widest popular influence, and 
 are most characteristic of the period as one of diffu- 
 sion, are the novel and the periodical. Gathering 
 the last in its manifold forms under one term ex- 
 pressing the most typical member of the group, we 
 may say, the novel and the newspaper are the mos 
 peculiar and influential of the literary forces at work 
 at the present time. The novel is the most purely 
 artistic prose production, and is most closely allied 
 to history, also with us particularly ambitious of 
 literary excellence. The novel adds poetic to prose 
 qualities. The creative faculties are uppermost in 
 it, since it calls out and orders events in the strict 
 development of a subjective purpose, in the expres- 
 sion and execution of a conception. The poem is 
 not more plastic, does not more wait on the mould- 
 ing touch of the thought which creates it, than does 
 die novel. 
 
 As primarily and immediately does the novel 
 deal with the emotions. All emotions, under every 
 variety of condition, fall to it, and one supreme emo- 
 tion, one supreme sympathy, waits habitually upon 
 It, that of love. All that can be made of human life 
 in its conjoint and individual unfolding, in its serial 
 forces, is open to the novelist ; and none, therefore, 
 can seaich more deeply the human spirit, put 
 together more constructively its passions and im- 
 pulses, or trace more consecutively and freely its 
 types of character, the varieties and issues of its 
 action. No field can be more free, more interest-
 
 270 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 ing, closer to the human heart, and to human life 
 than that traversed by the novel. 
 
 While it has free access to these highest ele- 
 ments of poetry, while it is charged with no cum- 
 bersome, didactic duty, but can hold itself open to 
 the allurements of pleasure, it is still possessed of 
 much more liberty than the poem. Criticism, 
 theory, insight, observation of every sort can be 
 woven into the narrative, making its progress in- 
 structive and brilliant. It is not held to the close 
 conditions of the drama. It can talk of, as well as 
 through, its characters. The novelist, as a third 
 party, can interpret, criticise, open up on unexpect- 
 ed sides his personages, cast on them, and bring 
 out of them every variety of side-light. At all 
 events, this is the style of the English novel, and 
 we hold it to be the true liberty of this prose poetry. 
 The novelist is not bound to evolve, in and under 
 his characters and their actions, his entire thought, 
 leaving the reader, as before a painting, to pene- 
 trate and unfold the conception as he is able. The 
 novelist stands on more intimate terms than this 
 with his audience. He is present in his own per- 
 son, in his own studio, and may throw out such 
 lively hints, or give such clues of thought as he 
 thinks best, provided always that he keeps all eyes 
 directed to the characters delineated, and unites in 
 an easy, livmg way, every sentiment to their devel- 
 opment. This personality of the writer and pro- 
 gress with us from one to another picture in his art- 
 gallery, constitute a large part of the attraction of 
 the novel. It moves in an easier, more familiar
 
 THE NOVEL. 271 
 
 and less commanding way than the poem, and has 
 a thousand chances offered to say what is upper- 
 most. Not merely in preface and initial chapters, 
 but in any moment of leisure, it takes up its readers 
 on familiar terms of cheerful gossip, and binds them 
 to itself with new links of sympathy. 
 
 Works of fiction may be divided into romances 
 and novels. The two differ from each other in the 
 element of truth. The typical novel has this com- 
 plete. It adheres to the line of characters it has 
 chosen to delineate, with thorough and exact repre- 
 sentation, striving to make them clearly drawn 
 counterparts of those real persons whom they rep- 
 resent. The romance lacks truth, and that in the 
 worst of all ways, by insensible departures, by ex- 
 cessive coloring, by glaring and false lights. The 
 romance chooses its characters from remote, unfa- 
 miliar quarters, gives them a fanciful elevation in 
 power and prowess, surrounds them by novel cir- 
 cumstances, verges on the supernatural or passes 
 its limits, and makes much of fictitious sentiments, 
 such as those which characterized chivalry. The 
 poor, sensational novel has points of close union 
 with the earlier romance, represented by Walpole 
 in The Castle of Otranto. 
 
 It is against the romance element, ever likely 
 to appear in historical novels, as it appears in history 
 itself, when it runs like a child after the glittering 
 march and sonorous sounds of war, that most of 
 the moral objections to works of fiction hold. Un- 
 reality, giddy show, easy victory, the sensuous 
 gliding on of a dream, are, indeed, most enei vating
 
 2/2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 to the moral nature, and evaporate the sweet, 
 genuine sentiments of the heart in a dry, hot, 
 peevish and indolent atmosphere. The novel, so 
 far as it adheres to truth, and treats of life broadly, 
 descending to the lowest in grade, deeply and with 
 spiritual forecast, seeing to the bottom, is not only 
 not open to these objections, but rather calls for 
 the reverse commendation. 
 
 The novel is divisible into two general kinds, 
 the pictorial and the ethical. Pictorial novels may 
 be subdivided into four kinds : those which deline- 
 ate, under historic characters, the traits of a nation ; 
 those which give renewed life to a period present or 
 remote ; those which present a particular rank in 
 society ; or a particular calling in life : or historical, 
 descriptive, social and professional novels. Ethical 
 novels may be divided in two classes : those which 
 enforce some especial reform ; and those which offer 
 a general study of character : or reformatory and 
 creative novels. No novel is purely of one kind. 
 They are classified by predominant features. The 
 most strictly historic novel will still present a study 
 of characters, and may offer a good epitome of the 
 manners of a particular period or of a certain rank. 
 Yet most works of fiction are constructed under 
 such definite aims as to assign them readily, by 
 predominant tendency, to one or other of these 
 classes. We see from what quarter the light enters 
 the picture, the rays come in aslant from left or 
 right. 
 
 Of historic novels, many of the works of Walter 
 Scott, as Kenihvorth, afford an example Of nov-
 
 THE NOVEL. 273 
 
 els presenting a particular period, or descriptive 
 novels, the Hypatia of Kingsley offers an illustra- 
 tion. Of the social novel, bringing forward a given 
 grade of social" life, Mansfield Park and Emma, by 
 Miss Austen, may be adduced as instances. Of 
 professional novels, having also a national and his- 
 torical cast, we find examples in the nautical tales 
 of England, as those of Marryat. Pictorial novels 
 have all an historic character, though the word, his- 
 torical, is more strictly applied to those works of 
 fiction in which historic characters appear, thus 
 giving the closest attachment of the narrative to 
 history. This use of one or more historic names, 
 may, after all, be a secondary feature, and the real 
 historic element be found in the care and exactness 
 with which imaginary facts reflect in their form real 
 ones. This they may do very imperfectly under 
 the most familiar historic names, and very perfectly 
 without such names. That novel is truly historic 
 which puts us in living contact with a given phase 
 of national life. The pictorial novel is always pri- 
 marily presentative in its character whichever of 
 the forms it takes. 
 
 The ethical novel belongs to a higher class than 
 the pictorial novel. It presupposes this, and adds 
 something to it. It seeks historic truth, but more 
 than historic truth. It renders life, and at the same 
 time renders in it some of its deeper lessons. It 
 translates it into an earnest spiritual language. It 
 is not content with facts, near or remote, with living 
 and veritable persons. Like advanced history, it 
 hankers after the philosophy of these facts, and gives 
 12*
 
 2/4 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 them a definite drift in solution of some of its own 
 theories, or ideals, or impressions of society. When 
 this is done in a limited way, in the enforcement of 
 a particular phase of progress, we have the reform- 
 atory novel, of which the Caleb Williams of God- 
 win, a writer very deeply imbued with the liberal 
 and progressive spirit, is an early example ; and 
 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Mrs. Stowe, a recent one. 
 The narrative, however life-like and real, is made 
 to offer a constant mirror to certain conditions of 
 society for the sake of the censure and the senti- 
 ments thus elicited. A reformatory and satirical 
 purpose thus runs through the works of Dickens, 
 sufficient, in some instances, to classify the novel, as 
 in Bleak-House and Nicholas Nickleby. 
 
 The second ethical novel, the highest novel, 
 that of character, makes a study of human life, not 
 so definitely in the interest of any one reform, but 
 penetratively and profoundly, in view of its many 
 issues. This novel is most strictly ethical, as is all 
 composition which deals searchingly with the human 
 heart. It cannot fail to have a decided moral flavor. 
 Dombey and Son by Dickens, Vanity Fair by 
 Thackeray, Romola and Middlemarch by Mrs. Lew- 
 es, are illustrations. This ethical tendency, this pre- 
 dominance of character, human character, the seat 
 of moral life in its thousand phases, each as cer- 
 tainly ethical as it is rational, is the leading index 
 of power in the novelist. 
 
 All the kinds of fiction of which we have spoken 
 are good or bad, as they disclose discreetly and in- 
 tuitively, under the drift of the writer's feeling, char-
 
 THE NOVEL. 2/5 
 
 acter. This is the crowning quality, and the novel 
 IS poor without it. In whatever class, therefore, 
 the particular work of fiction may stand, it ap- 
 proaches this last class according to its excellence ; 
 and if no one feature is so predominant in it as this, 
 then it falls to this highest division. Thus, Romola 
 by Mrs. Lewes, though an historic novel in one as- 
 pect, and a descriptive one in another, is rather an 
 ethical novel, so pre-eminently is it a study of char- 
 acter, of human nature in its deep and permanent 
 bearings. To return to a former comparison, the 
 landscape, always the same, owes its transient ex- 
 pressions to the light and mist and clouds, the float- 
 ing unbraided beams of morning, the intense, accu- 
 mulated splendor of broken storm-clouds, or the 
 brilliant long-lined cirri of evening, fading, trem- 
 bling into night. If one of these effects is singled 
 out and strongly treated, it classifies the picture 
 more than the fields, woods, mountains, which lie 
 under this play of the heavens upon them. Yet, 
 there is always the scene itself to be studied, and 
 so presented, that while we have no hesitancy in 
 discerning the wonderful lights and shades at work 
 in it, these are all woven into the landscape itself, 
 and find their utterance through it. 
 
 A relativ'ely cheap excellence in the novel, are 
 the surprises, doublings and rapid evolutions of the 
 plot. To be hurried on by events, and exhilarated 
 by the mere swiftness of the current as it glides into 
 the lapids, is a child's pleasure, and one that with- 
 draws the eye sensibly from those many beauties, 
 near and remote, which make the voyage profitable.
 
 2/6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and cause it to linger in the memory as if we had 
 floated down a stream on whose enchanted shores 
 were grouped, with strange disclosure and divina- 
 tion, things past and things to come. A novel of 
 adventure is a boy-book, and when we hasten on 
 under the excitement of a story, a temper of weak 
 and boyish curiosity overtakes us. The ethical 
 novel implicates its events in its characters, and 
 gives them intensity, as we impart meaning to com- 
 mon words, by the impulse put in them. The great 
 novelist finds a tendency to cling close to ordinary 
 life for it is events like these that are daily unlock- 
 ing the souls of men, and startling circumstances 
 serve to divert attention from character, to confuse, 
 prejudice and overbear its development. The child, 
 playing by the pond, scarcely thinks of the wind 
 and the water in their constant fellowship and won- 
 derful interplay, so interested is he in the imme- 
 diate fortunes of his little vessel, its freightin-g, its 
 voyage, and its wreck. In like manner, to mere 
 sport, does the feeble novelist reduce the events of 
 life, starting his characters, like mimic boats, with 
 rudders fixed for the farther shore, righting them 
 with the power of a superior deity under the squalls 
 and mishaps of the voyage, and directing the eye 
 always to the outside action of these empty nonde- 
 scripts, and the gallant way in which they reach the 
 predetermined port. 
 
 There is no more profound, philosophical and 
 moral study than that of the novelist, when he con- 
 ceives a character, puts it in action and into inter- 
 action with other spiritual entities, like and unlike
 
 THE NOVEL. 2'J^ 
 
 itself; sets, as it were, the varied currents of physi- 
 cal, social, intellectual forces, good and evil, at play 
 upon it ; and then strives to follow out results, not 
 make them, as they flow from the double and com- 
 plex causation of the outer and inner world, of the 
 heavy yet mobile waters of life, acted upon by the 
 invisible winds that come stealing forth from un- 
 known spiritual realms. It is only that genius 
 which intuitively reads, which intuitively and re- 
 flectively unfolds, characters and events, that can 
 watch over its creations, and make them disclose 
 to duller minds all the forces, above and below, 
 that determine their final haven. It is because 
 this work is often done in so childish a way, in so 
 false and incomplete a way, in so wicked a way, 
 that the novel suffers such deserved censure, and 
 constitutes a dangerous, wasteful, or vulgar literary 
 element. 
 
 No period has equalled our own in this depart- 
 ment. Its names stand among the first. This is 
 the era of fiction ; Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer, 
 Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Lewes, are not likely soon 
 to be equalled. The creations of Dickens, out- 
 lined with a few strong strokes, almost of caricature, 
 united to our sympathies by the abounding humor 
 and humanities of the author ; the more carefully 
 delineated, but less liked and less familiar person- 
 ages of Thackeray, often built up under the cold 
 criticism of the writer, rarely evoked under his 
 affection; and the men and women whom George 
 Eliot brings before us, full of physical and intel- 
 lectual life, a life that begets appetites, passions,
 
 2/8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATCIRE. 
 
 noble impulses, lending itself to every variety of 
 incentive, and disclosing many secret springs of 
 conduct ; these are not soon to be forgotten. 
 
 The novel, moreover, is interesting as the field 
 in which woman has fought her first literary battle, 
 and won her first victory. Here, she stands with 
 the foremost. The intuitions of her nature, her 
 quick sympathies, and the lively, searching activity 
 into which these are called by the daily conditions 
 of her being, have made this with her a favorite 
 method of composition. 
 
 The newspaper, like the novel, mingles freely 
 good and evil in its literary results, with even a 
 more decided advantage in general knowledge. 
 The quarterly and the daily stand at the two ex- 
 tremes of the periodical press as regards time, 
 and equally so as regards matter and circulation. 
 The dailies discuss those current themes which 
 attach to the hour, and few of which extend beyond 
 it ; and present the ephemeral news, the mere 
 sheen and dust of the marching host. The quar- 
 terlies cling to the abstract, theoretical, general ; 
 keep thought alive, and return often to those social, 
 philosophical, religious principles which are built 
 together as the framework of society. The periodi- 
 cal assumes an evanescent or permanent value in 
 proportion as it approaches the one extreme or the 
 other. The periods of gestation in the animal king- 
 dom are scarcely more indices of varying strength 
 than are the times of return which belong to serials. 
 The highest literary influence falls, perhaps, to the 
 monthly, equally removed from the slow ponderous
 
 THE NFWSPAPER. 2/9 
 
 movement of the review and the rapid execution of 
 the journal. 
 
 The starthng facts concerning the periodical 
 press, are quantity, and, this being considered, 
 quality and rate of increase. Though the review 
 dates back to the opening of the century, and the 
 daily to a period a little earlier, the rate of increase 
 has been so accelerated, that the influence of the 
 newspaper press may be said to belong distinctively 
 to the last forty years. In the United States, the 
 circulation was in 1850 twenty-fold that of 18 10; 
 in the next ten years it more than doubled, and 
 reached in i860 an annual aggregate of nearly 
 a thousand million copies. The years intervening 
 between this period and the present, have shown 
 a corresponding growth. Every age and class 
 and calling, and scientific and literary taste, have 
 been addressed, each with its own appropriate pub- 
 lications. Our time not only stands alone, it is a 
 constant miracle to itself in its productiveness. It 
 swarms with the ephemera of literature, and only 
 the happiest and most diversified mechanical art 
 makes possible this creation and diffusion of printed 
 matter. The steam-press is a royal instrument, 
 and right royally gives to the four winds all that 
 the busy mind of man can furnish or crave. 
 
 Though there is much to be deprecated in the 
 press, though it imparts a whirl and dizzy rapidity 
 to life otherwise unknown, a gossipy and trivial 
 character to daily thought ; though it drags to light 
 much that should be left in darkness, awakens a 
 prurient curiosity, and confounds notoriety with
 
 280 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 fame, yet as an educating, quickening, propelling 
 power, it offers the most peculiar and pleasing feat- 
 ure of our time. 
 
 It especially favors the discussion of social, 
 reformatory questions. These questions, rife at the 
 opening of our century, have multiplied with its 
 succeeding years. In minor and graver forms, they 
 are constantly coming and going. The newspaper 
 press offers the best facilities for the rapid evolution 
 and solution and disposal of these problems. At- 
 tack and defence, assertion and denial, are immedi- 
 ate and from all sides. The entire community is 
 sought out by these organs of the press, and held 
 to constant deliberation on every question of gener- 
 al interest. It at once receives from every variety 
 of temper, of interest and of power a corresponding 
 form of presentation. The substance of its facts 
 and theories is rapidly sifted out, and the results, 
 as far as they are practical and tangible, speedily 
 reached. The grades of intellectual insight repre- 
 sented in these periodicals, from the confident, hasty 
 and bold journal, to the cautious, conservative, 
 thoughtful review, favor this result ; each accord- 
 ing to the light that is in it, taking up, in one way 
 or another, the discussion. The effect has been, 
 that in England and America, where the press is 
 rapid, free, prolific, social questions have lost most 
 of their revolutionary power. Any theory, however 
 radical, however great and urgent the interests in- 
 volved in it, may be propounded and considered 
 without endangering or loosening the ties of society 
 and government. The latest reform in America,
 
 THE NEWSPAPER. 28 1 
 
 vvnicli has cost mobs and revolutions, was that of 
 anti-slavery, and this seems to have cleared finally 
 the atmosphere of those storm elements which 
 could not rest till they had filled the heavens from 
 side to side with the roar of their ineffectual 
 thunder. 
 
 In the United States, the census of i860 gave 
 the following ratio, expressing the relation of peri- 
 odicals to each other, according to their avowed 
 purpose. Eighty per cent, were devoted to politics, 
 seven per cent, to religion, seven to literature, and 
 six tc miscellaneous objects. As politics admits of 
 a great variety of secondary ends, the proportion 
 of attention devoted to it is not as great as it seems 
 to be. The political journal universally unites to its 
 partisan purposes the duties of a newspaper; and 
 these, save in the crises of politics, are by far its 
 greater labor. It is the medium for the rapid treat- 
 ment of all passing questions of general interest, 
 whether of a scientific, religious or social nature. 
 
 This portion of the press, therefore, more than 
 any other, indicates the force held in constant readi- 
 ness to circulate theories, chronicle pertinent facts, 
 report and enlarge discussion, and in every way 
 keep the public mind simmering and seething till 
 the moral power of a topic is exhausted. Such are 
 the physical and intellectual appliances which a 
 free press offers to social progress, and, as a result, 
 ten years are frequently more fruitful in England 
 and the United States of growth, than whole cen- 
 turi(^s of an earlier regime. These two countries 
 owe their general exemption from bloody revolution.
 
 282 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and that in connection with rapid development, to 
 nothing more than to a free, pervasive press, draw- 
 ing the innocuous thunderbolt from every political 
 cloud. 
 
 The most delicate questions of political policy, 
 social police, commercial regulation, of education, 
 of religion, and the adjustments of law to exception- 
 al territorial conditions, as in Ireland, are constantly 
 before the people of England, and peacefully reach- 
 ing with each year, a safer, more just and philan- 
 thropic solution. So powerfully have this diffusion 
 of intelligence through the press, this confronting, 
 quickly and thoroughly, every measure with the re- 
 sults which social experience and philosophy are 
 ready to assign it, this steady exposure of chronic, 
 constitutional evil, wrought for progress, that, at no 
 time, have the reformatory forces been compelled to 
 heap up in sheer violence, and deal physical blows 
 against the barriers of truth. 
 
 A second result of the newspaper press, is the 
 vigor of public sentiment, issuing more and more 
 in its soundness, sobriety and candor. Sprightly, 
 racy, incisive, the daily and weekly press must 
 be ; this is with it a necessity of existence. Its 
 best articles live on the hurried attention of a mo- 
 ment, are sandwiched in between courses at the 
 breakfast-table, between items of business in an 
 active morning, fall to the moments of transfer from 
 place to place in lines of labor, or are caught by the 
 weary eye at the close of a day's toil. To hold the 
 time thus stolen, to improve this opportunity, which 
 never returns, to impart a new, a sensible force to a
 
 THE NEWSPAFEK. 283 
 
 mind already spinning on its axis like a wiiipped 
 top, the editorial must be quick, decisive, energetic. 
 This demand, so urgent, will not seem to tend at 
 once to soundness and soberness of judgment, but 
 we believe that these qualities are reached, and in 
 a very high degree, by this active observation, this 
 continuous and protracted meeting of the varying 
 problems of many years. 
 
 A practical sobriety of judgment is a marked 
 characteristic of the English and American mind, 
 and we believe this is to be attributed, in large part, 
 to the rapid business way in which it is called on 
 to meet and answer the many questions of the hour. 
 The most eccentric judgment, the most remote 
 theories are found with those pre-eminently spec- 
 ulative. The mind dwelling by itself, suffering 
 little contradiction, and giving optical clearness and 
 enlargement to its own speculations, is the one that 
 wanders farthest from soundness, breadth and 
 sobriety of opinion. Extreme as are many of the 
 statements current in the press, increasing insight 
 and reliability of judgment fall to the veteran 
 journalist. Like the business man of many years and 
 many complexities, he hits easily and quickly on the 
 practically safe course, on the average chances. 
 The sins of extravagance and chimera come back 
 so often and so surely to vex the guilty for their 
 correction and the correction of the public ; journal- 
 ism so strengthens the general memory, and so often 
 confronts to-day with yesterday, the events of this 
 year with the theories of last, that sobriety of 
 opinion and practical prudence, become, more and
 
 284 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ExVGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 more, the criteria of power. English journals are as 
 remarkable for the sober, sure-footed principles they 
 bring to every passing phase of lite, as tor the 
 testy, vigorous way in which they are applied. Wis- 
 dom, which takes the form of a wide-reaching sa- 
 gacity, is an offspring of journalism in an intelli- 
 gent, thoughtful community. The severe and con- 
 stant criticism to which journals are wont to subject 
 each other tends to the same result, brings home 
 every mistake, and furnishes the strongest motives 
 for its correction. 
 
 This vigor and temperance of thought issue 
 also in candor. Notwithstanding all the political 
 abuse prevalent, no period has approached our own 
 in candor. The numberless occasions for minor and 
 larger differences, the rapid changes which public 
 sentiment undergoes, and the many instances in 
 which unexpected conclusions are reached, concur 
 to secure caution of statement and candor of advo- 
 cacy, whatever the truth defended. We doubt not, 
 moreover, that truth is more sincerely coveted, and 
 more quietly enforced now than hitherto, when the 
 search for it is so free and uncontrolled, and the re- 
 sults to be reached by it in practical life, in society 
 and in science, are so momentous. Vigor and can- 
 dor and universality of inquiry, do all that can be 
 done to call forth in English society the penetration 
 and patience, the wise demand and wise conces- 
 sion, which leave the social elements to constant 
 and peaceful readjustment ; nor do the malice, mis- 
 representation and falsehood of the hour, perma- 
 aently affect the result.
 
 THE NEWSPAPER. 285 
 
 Public sentiment, with whatever indei./endence 
 and soundness may belong to it, finds also, in times 
 of social and political corruption, its most vigorous 
 application to the prevalent evil through the press. 
 Our own recent history has served to bring this 
 redemptive power clearly forth. Exposures, cen- 
 sures, measures of redress, incentives to fresh effort 
 have, in our struggle with municipal corruption and 
 a wide-spread mal-administration in every branch 
 of government, come chiefly from bold, earnest and 
 independent journals. These have rallied and 
 combined the people in each reformatory move- 
 ment, and held the common mind steadily to the 
 duty and labor of correction. Journalism, in some 
 of its branches, seems likely to rank among the 
 most incorruptible of public agents. 
 
 This pervasive power and freedom of the press 
 make popular education effective, and at once 
 soften and confirm the influence of the pulpit. With- 
 out this constant use and enlargement of knowl- 
 edge, its mere rudiments are of little avail, and the 
 machinery which most diligently awakens the popu- 
 lar mind on the greatest variety of themes, and in 
 reference to the most practical interests, is that of 
 the press. The people are kept in movement, are 
 put to the use of their knowledge by the newspaper 
 above all other agencies. Without this, the rudi- 
 ments of education would be of small account. 
 
 The pulpit is liable to become circumscribed, 
 rigid and conventional in its methods, except as the 
 common mind is stimulated by other intellectual 
 considerations, and brings a somewhat independent
 
 286 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and critical temper to tlie Sabbath's discussions. 
 The more stern and pressing the necessity laid on 
 the pulpit for grounding and regrounding its 
 strength in broad, rational and suggestive truth, 
 the better for its permanent hold on the people. 
 Its prescriptive power and privileges are its greatest 
 enemies, those which put its common-sense, its 
 vigilance and its piety to sleep. The pulpit is 
 helped by the press as an independent rival power ; 
 one that has its own standards and brings them to 
 bear unsparingly. 
 
 The power of the press emanates chiefly from 
 the great cities. These are the seats of its most 
 influential organs ; not only does the metropolitan 
 journal itself have the largest circulation, and that 
 among the most intelligent, it exerts a strong in- 
 fluence on the weaker journals, scattered through 
 the country. The press, therefore, is an assertion 
 of the intellectual life and strength of cities, and a 
 flowing of it forth over all parts of the land. The 
 rusticity and deadness formerly found in country 
 and village have largely disappeared, and the re- 
 mote citizen is put in daily and living contact with 
 the great seats of national activity. There is thus 
 a pronounced circulation which carries the life- 
 blood briskly through the body politic, equalizes 
 the advantages of position, knits the nation together 
 in knowledge, and imparts a common urbanity to 
 its members. 
 
 It may be said against this and much more that 
 may be urged for the periodical press, that it is in 
 large part instrumental, that it is a great whisper-
 
 PERIODICAL PRESS. 287 
 
 ing gallery, carrying light things and scandaloua 
 things and wicked things a long way to many ears 
 that might otherwise happily have missed of them ; 
 that the press is often but the tell-tale mechanism 
 of disgraceful national gossip, that has nothing 
 whatever to recommend it. Granting freely the 
 truth of this and other accusations, still we must 
 remember, that village-gossip is better than family- 
 gossip, town-gossip is better than village-gossip, 
 state-gossip than town-gossip, and national-gossip 
 than either. Gossip loses something of its bane- 
 fulness, obscurity and petty personality and private 
 hate at every remove, and the country scandal of a 
 low tavern is as much more concentrate, vicious 
 and unclean than that of a news-room or county 
 paper, as its range is more restricted. Simply to 
 get men out of doors, away from the trite, stupid 
 vulgarity of their cronies is a great gain. A 
 national interest and the air of national intelligence 
 make way for national truth, and these for universal 
 truth. 
 
 It may also be urged against the press, that 
 it gives ready circulation to vice. The accusation 
 is most true. Such, however, is not the natural 
 fellowship even of news, much less of popular dis- 
 cussion. Pestilence may fly on the wings of morn- 
 ing, but these more often distil the dewy fragrance 
 of abounding life. Publicity is allied to light, and 
 favors virtue. Vice, as a rule, has more to gain 
 from concealment than exposure. It settles as a 
 miasma in dark and secluded places, rather than 
 on wind-swept slopes under open heavens.
 
 288 THE PHILOSOPHY OF F.NGIJSH LITERATURE. 
 
 The literary accusation is thought to lie strongly 
 against newspaper influence, that it debauches lan- 
 guage, introducing questionable words and street- 
 phrases, passing them from one grade of literary 
 recognition to another, till, forgetful of their low 
 extraction, they are able in quiet effrontery to 
 usurp good society. Here, too, there is truth in 
 the statement ; but the fact expressed by it has 
 also its compensations, and by no means unim- 
 portant ones. Mere formal criticism, a cold con- 
 ventional pedantry, the literary barrenness that 
 overtakes letters from time to time, encounter re- 
 sistance in the somewhat coarse yet vigorous 
 popular appetite ; and language is kept more 
 flexible, lithe and nervous, than it otherwise would 
 be. The purely literary tendency cannot safely 
 be left to itself. It is too overwrought and fini- 
 cal. If it is wedded to creative power, well ; but 
 when this is wanting, its place may be supplied 
 in part by the popular impulse, by the homely, 
 changeable, but always lively service to which lan- 
 guage is put in the newspaper world. As a 
 matter of fact, recent years have been charac- 
 terized by a large number of critical works on 
 the English language. Some of our periodicals 
 assiduously cultivate style, and many works of 
 the present time could be pointed out, which 
 show a high popular estimate of pure, simple 
 composition. It remains to be shown that the 
 language has really been injured by the free- 
 dom and license of the popular press. Depart- 
 ure at one point from the staidness of ordinary
 
 PERIODICAL PRESS. 289 
 
 labor no more incapacitates us to return with 
 relish to it at another, than does the raciness 
 of conversation unfit us for the formalities of 
 sober speech. 
 
 One pronounced tendency, which has been with 
 us through the entire century, is literary criticism, 
 bold, fearless criticism in all departments. This 
 is the fruit of the large and varied audience 
 which the press gives to every leading work. 
 The world's estimate of it, the discrepancies of 
 opinion which it calls forth, are as instant and 
 inevitable as the sympathetic approval or censure, 
 or the divided feeling that runs through the 
 gathered multitude, listening around a political 
 stand. Aside from systematic and direct criticism, 
 aside from that involved in discussion, there are 
 many popular writers who, with open, inquiring 
 eye, arraign topic after topic before them for 
 judgment. Our popular novelists are often of 
 this character, Dickens, George Eliot, George 
 MacDonald ; and in more general literature, Carlyle, 
 Ruskin, Emerson. Such men are personified criti- 
 cism, who search all they see. 
 
 The present diffusion of literature, so hopeful 
 a sign to philanthrophy, does, indeed, intensify the 
 struggle for literary life. In the tossing of the 
 multitudinous waves, much floats for a little that 
 is of slight value, and works that can ill be 
 spared are occasionally engulphed, overwhelmed 
 by things more trivial but more buoyant. Com- 
 posite tendencies, the half-unconscious conjoint 
 movement of many minds, interlocked in thei*"
 
 290 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATUPvK. 
 
 lifa, take the place of individual leadership, and 
 thus the conditions of progress are removed, more 
 and more, from the hands of single men. Some 
 pictorial interest, some individual development, 
 may seem to be lost in this upheaval, this up- 
 lising of the masses, this general diffusion and 
 stir of intellectual life ; but an organic, social 
 growth, that indicates a conquering force at work 
 freely on many minds, is much the more stable, 
 and, at bottom, much the more stimulating and 
 spiritually interesting, development. 
 
 Moreover, the man of genius finds this com- 
 pensation, that his works and words, though losing 
 some of their primary, magical force, nevertheless 
 enter into the final product with a more in-tellec- 
 tual, free, conscious control than ever before. 
 They drop like living things among living things, 
 and though their direct, obvious sway is lost, the 
 powers really evoked by them are more subtile, 
 more pervasive, more permanent than hitherto. 
 He who possesses the intelligent popular mind, holds 
 the highest, deepest dominion that belongs to 
 •man. The night suits well with auroral flash, 
 but the day, in its accumulated glories, floating 
 the sun-beams on a sea of light, as, many and 
 divergent, they lie along in tranquil strength, is 
 'A better image of social joy and life.
 
 LECTURE XII. 
 
 English Philosophy materialistic. — Bacon, Ilobbes. — Ctuhvorth.— 
 Locke. — SItaftesbitry, Clarke, Berkeley. — Hartley, Priestley, 
 Hume, Paley, Fientham, IJain. — JMackintosh, IV/iewell. — Spencer, 
 J. Mill, J. S. Mill. — Keiil, ffamiltou, Maitsel. — Contradiction, 
 
 The present lecture will be devoted to English 
 Philosophy, the undercurrent of belief that has up- 
 held our intellectual life. England has been re- 
 markable, on the one side, for a commercial, prac- 
 tical temper ; on the other, for an earnest, inde- 
 pendent, religious spirit. Assiduous traffic and 
 remote, irresponsible colonization have co-existed 
 in each later generation with earnest piety and 
 zealous philanthropy. The philosophy of Eng- 
 land has had one decided and growing tendency, 
 compared with which every other development in 
 mental science has been sporadic and transient 
 This prevailing drift of speculation has been on 
 the side of material, rather than spiritual interests ; 
 though the piety of the nation has steadily held 
 it back in the national mind from the logical con- 
 clusions contained in it. Religion has waged a 
 double war with greedy practical tendencies and 
 stubborn speculative ones. The continuous growth 
 of English philosophy has been materialistic, 
 though the imputation has almost always been 
 repudiated, and the last finishing deductions been 
 forbidden. 
 
 (291)
 
 292 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Let US understand our terms. Idealism ulti- 
 mately resolves all facts, phenomena, into mental 
 states. This has found very little acceptance 
 with the English. Realism divides, with the 
 strongest lines, mental from physical facts, 
 and believes that the mind has sufficient proof of 
 both. This must needs be the underlying philos- 
 ophy of religion and daily life, though it has 
 rarely, aside from the Scottish school, found clear 
 statement in England. Materialism, in its com- 
 plete form, identifies mental with physical facts. 
 
 Few, in any country, have had the hardihood 
 to state and defend it in this, its last position. 
 From typical realism to typically complete mate- 
 rialism, there is a long and gentle slope, down 
 which English philosophy will be found, from 
 century to century, slowly sliding. When refusing 
 with Spencer to accept either materialism or 
 idealism, it is yet fully open to the charge of a 
 materialistic tendency, because it is ever over 
 laying the mind with the laws of matter ; subdu 
 ing its true spiritual domain, and subjecting it, as 
 conquered territory, to the principles and forces 
 of physical science. If this philosophy has not 
 poured down headlong like a river into the morass 
 and lowland, it has like a flexible, dissolving gla- 
 cier, though seeming to hang on the hill-side, 
 slowly crept hither. The glacier, with its gelid 
 stream, turbid with the debris of rock it has 
 ground to powder in their mountain fastnesses, 
 forcing its slow way to the fields and flowers 
 below, and disappearing as fast as it reaches
 
 MATERIALISTIC TENDENCY. 293 
 
 their warmth and life, yet from its frozen, mobile 
 centre thrusting forward new masses of ice, is 
 a symbol of the unceasing push of materialism, 
 grinding along its hard, tortuous way, among the 
 beliefs and hopes of men. 
 
 This descent of thought with its reactions and 
 exceptions, we wish to maik. We can only do 
 this clearly, in so brief a space, by confining at- 
 tention to some central point in philosophy, 
 some especially significant feature, whose position 
 shall serve to determine the changes going on 
 about it. Such a feature we find in the origin 
 of knowledge, the faculties involved in knowing. 
 Realism must hold to two sets of powers, one, 
 which receives the impressions of the physi- 
 cal world, and, as inseparable therefrom, of the 
 mind also — since a sensation has a double aspect, 
 pertaining both to mind and matter, involving 
 both ; and another, which lays hold of, analyzes 
 and rationally divides these phenomena, and 
 attributes each, under its own laws, to its ap- 
 propriate sources. Thus the facts of a certain 
 transaction, as, for instance, the firing of a build- 
 ing, are perceptively received. The mind then 
 inquires, under ideas present to it by its own 
 intuitive force, where it occurred, when it occurred, 
 why it occurred, and the thought-process therein 
 completes itself. Any falling off from this duality 
 of the mind, its passivity and activity, its power to 
 receive and to use independently, rationally, what it 
 receives, is sure to result in idealism or material- 
 ism. If the active power prevails, and the mind is
 
 294 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 set constructively at its own mental facts, if the 
 power of logical evolution is made to contain 
 and overrule all others, till the material of thought 
 is included in the forces of thought, we reach 
 idealism. If passivity prevails, if the mind is 
 made simply receptive under the play of sen- 
 sations, then we steadily approach materialism. 
 This has been the bias for centuries of the Eng- 
 lish school. It has busied itself in denying and 
 belittling the active, original faculties of mind, 
 and studiously developing those which turn on 
 its sensational, receptive power. We shall make 
 this idea — the source of our knowledge — the 
 guiding light of our discussion. If we know 
 whence our knowledge comes, we thereby define 
 what it is, how far it reaches, and the nature 
 of the issues it involves. If it come by the 
 senses only, all talk of a spiritual world is delusive 
 and visionary. 
 
 Sir Francis Bacon was the pivot on which English 
 thought turned decidedly and finally to the physical 
 world. The movement, as he proposed it, was 
 necessary and most profitable, but, none the less, 
 it was partial. He directed attention from deduc- 
 tion to induction, from the forms of thought to 
 an inquiry into the very subjects and objects of 
 thought. This effort favored most decidedly natural 
 science. It sought a physical basis for knowledge, 
 and opened the senses as its chief avenue. See- 
 ing and hearing became the conditions for thinking, 
 and the external world suddenly sprang forward in 
 study as a rival to the mind. This tendency was
 
 BACON. 29$ 
 
 altogether healthy, healthy for philosophy itself, for 
 this, too, needed to be reinvigorated by a new hold 
 on facts. It is set down by us as the initiative of 
 materialism only because it, in turn, became exces- 
 sive and one sided. All deductions to be fruitful 
 must rest on exact statement, or exact observa- 
 tion ; and when the premises have become feeble, 
 fluctuating, verbal, remote from the facts they seem 
 to represent, then the conclusions are futile and vis- 
 ionary. The galvanic current is due to acids in in- 
 stant action on metals, a fresh surface of the one 
 must be exposed constantly to the dissolving agency 
 of the other. So must thought and fact stand 
 in constant, living reaction, if the evolved force 
 is to be abundant and effective. The world in 
 the time of Bacon had few well-established facts, 
 its premises were mainly word-facts, and its reason- 
 ing, hence, idle word constructions, the chopping 
 of logic, logomachy. Yet the bent, excellent in 
 itself, which thought received from Bacon, was phys- 
 ical, and easily became opposed to true mental 
 science, in which other elements play so important 
 a part. 
 
 Hobbes is the next name in our sketch, and in 
 him materialism is more declared. Indeed, he 
 so far overstepped his time, and was so little able 
 to support his extreme views, that his influence on 
 philosophy lingered a good deal in rear of his own 
 opinions. The points at which he gave a decided 
 materialistic impulse to thought, were liberty and 
 right. He denied the applicability of the notion of 
 liberty to the will itself, and affirmed every man
 
 296 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, 
 
 free, who is physically free to follow his own 
 choices. The choice, itself, like other activities, is 
 determined by the influences at play upon it. This, 
 the often-repeated view of English philosophy, 
 doubly favors materialism. It denies, in its most 
 central acts, the original force, spontaneity of mind ; 
 traces into and through it those external, physi- 
 cal influences which act upon it ; and beholds these 
 simply in a new form in its out-going and on-going 
 action. Thus the material current is no more 
 stayed in its flow by man than by beast, by beast 
 than by plant, by plant than by rock. Each modi- 
 fies it, includes it, and is included b^ it in a more 
 subtile way as we pass upward, that is all. This 
 view also favors materialism, because the very idea 
 of liberty, an intuitive perception, is denied. Neces- 
 sity and chance, its opposite, are all that are recog- 
 nized, and human freedom, it is affirmed, must be 
 one or the other of these. 
 
 Hobbes, in morals, adopted, in its grossest form, 
 the doctrine of utility. This doctrine, always, as we 
 believe, false in theory, becomes practically coarse 
 and unendurable, or proximately elevated and ser- 
 viceable, according to the author's estimate of 
 human nature, of its predominating impulses, and 
 the circle of its enjoyments. Hobbes held human 
 nature very low, and riglrt became consequently 
 with him, little more than the law or ravin of rude 
 appetites, the eager assertion of selfishness. Here, 
 again, we have materialism, not merely in the 
 coarseness which these doctrines assumed, but in 
 the denial of that original, ultimate law in our con-
 
 HOBBES. 297 
 
 stitution, the law of right, which the human reason, 
 by its own penetration and with its own power, 
 sets up. 
 
 Though the deepening current of EngHsh phi- 
 losophy, its transmitted and almost national force, 
 has lain in one direction, there have always been 
 dissenting voices, some of them of clear and start- 
 ling emphasis. It is our purpose to speak, how- 
 ever, of the schools of philosophy, of its continuous 
 lines of development, and to pass, with slight men- 
 tion, those side efforts which, oftentimes more 
 valuable than the prevailing line of thought, were 
 yet unable to secure any general following. It is 
 impossible to settle exactly the degree of prevalence 
 of any one form of philosophy at any one time ; we 
 can only infer that those speculative streams, which 
 flow steadily on with enlargements in each succes- 
 sive generation, do, for the most part, draw the 
 national mind. Yet, even this inference is not 
 always correct. 
 
 Next succeeding Hobbes is Cudworth, a fine 
 representative of the dissenting tendency. His 
 philosophy is Platonic in its cast. A few others 
 labored with him, and they represented the older, 
 better phases of thought unsubdued to the new 
 temper and at war with it. 
 
 The next great name in the line of material- 
 istic succession is that of Locke. So full are his 
 works, and so influential have they been both in 
 England and on the Continent, that modern English 
 philosophy dates from him. A philosopher does 
 not owe his position exclusively to the novelty, or 
 13*
 
 298 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 to the logical force of the views presented, but 
 largely to their acceptance as issuing from him, 
 their subsequent reference to him, and their historic 
 connection through him. Locke gave such an 
 enunciation of his view of the origin of knowledge, 
 that it entered in a central, germinant principle of 
 many subsequent forms of thought. It was just at 
 this point, that Locke was peculiarly influential. 
 His view became almost axiomatic with his dis- 
 ciples. The materialistic philosophy followed his 
 lead, rarely stopping to rechallenge his premises. 
 We give his opinion in his own words : " Let us, 
 then, suppose the mind to be, as we say, white 
 paper, void of all characters, without any ideas ; 
 how comes it to be furnished .-' Whence comes it 
 by that vast storehouse, which the busy and bound- 
 less fancy of man has painted on it, with an almost 
 endless variety .-* Whence has it all the materials 
 of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in 
 one word, from experience ; in that all our knowl- 
 edge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives 
 'tself. Our observation, employed either about 
 external, sensible objects, or about the internal 
 operations of our mind, perceived and reflected on 
 by ourselves, is that which supplies our under- 
 standings with all the materials of thinking. These 
 two are the fountains of knowledge whence 
 all the ideas, we have, or can naturally have, do 
 spring."* 
 
 He then proceeds more definitely to state the 
 sources of knowledge to be two, — sensation, reflec- 
 
 * Human Understanding, B. II. chap. i. sec. 2,
 
 LOCKE. 299 
 
 tion; meaning by reflection, the mind's observation 
 of its own acts and states, now usually termed con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 As Hobbes had called forth from Cudworth a 
 strong declaration of the inborn conceptions of the 
 mind, so he in turn gave occasion to a staunch 
 denial by Locke of innate ideas, and this clear as- 
 sertion of experience as the sole ground of knowl- 
 edge. The struggle thus opened is not one merely 
 of words; whether "innate ideas" expresses well 
 or ill our original intuitive knowledge, but whether 
 we have any such knowledge ; whether mental 
 states are not in their entirety the primary or sec- 
 ondary products of sensation. This Locke affirmed 
 them to be, and would not grant in thought the 
 presence of any element not traceable to the senses. 
 Thus time and space, the most obviously super- 
 sensible of ideas, he yet refers to this origin. 
 
 The point was clearly put, and vigorously de- 
 fended, that the mind contributes nothing to the 
 material of thought, but that this is always either 
 directly sensible objects, or the states of mind 
 which sensible objects have occasioned in it. The 
 mind may occupy itself with objects, or with the 
 sensations, feelings, these objects occasion ; it can 
 go no further. It were truer to the spirit of the 
 philosophy to say : These occupy the mind, expend 
 themselves on its passive powers, and there repro- 
 duce the order and the connections that are in 
 themselves. The image is orderly and beautiful, 
 because the objects are so which cast it upon the 
 screen, — the blank sensorium of the soul. White
 
 ^00 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 paper expresses the maximum power in the mind 
 itself. The fruits of this philosophy we shall find 
 so clearly unfolded at its next step of development, 
 that we shall delay their consideration till that is 
 given. It belonged to Hume, following in the line 
 of succession, to develop this view with a startling 
 consistency and recklessness of consequences. 
 Never did a philosophy, that touched daily belief 
 everywhere, stand so at war with it, as that of 
 Hume. Never did a philosopher inquire in so 
 quiet and indifferent a way, what are the conclu- 
 sioiis locked up in his premises, and proceed to open 
 them, not stopping to remember, or seeming to care 
 that he was dealing with the box of Pandora. 
 Though the eye passes at once from Locke to 
 Hume in the development of materialism, a consid- 
 erable period lies between them, and demands 
 some notice, especially for the reactionary efforts in 
 philosophy called out by the works of Locke. The 
 first of these, following immediately upon Locke, 
 was the effort of Shaftesbury to reassert the power 
 of the mind, and emphasize anew, especially in 
 ethics, its contribution to our judgments. There 
 is this change impressed on the phraseology of the 
 realists by their controversy with the disciples of 
 Locke. They cease to speak of " innate ideas," a 
 conception which came from Plato, and defend the 
 intuitive powers of the mind. Samuel Clarke is 
 next to be mentioned in the line of defense. He 
 renewed the a priori argument for the being of God. 
 Such force did he attribute to the mind's concep- 
 tions that he thought them to carry with them a suf-
 
 BERKELEY. $01 
 
 ficient proof of an external reality, a view quite at 
 war with the doctrine that referred all belief to ex- 
 perience. He also took up the defense of liberty^ 
 and attempted to rescue the ethical nature from the 
 degradation cast upon it as the enforcement of con- 
 \ entional motives of interest. He saw in it a 
 power by which the mind discerns the " fitness of 
 things," and enforces it as a law. 
 
 The most extreme reaction to the Lockian phi- 
 losophy, is presented by Berkeley. His point of 
 attack was the connection between sensations and 
 the external objects to which they are referred. 
 The mind was to Locke simply the paper on which 
 these images, together with the secondary states 
 which they called forth, were received. Thus the 
 power of mind stood at its minimum, and the power 
 of matter at its maximum. 
 
 As, however, the sensation is known to the 
 mind only as a sensation, an image, not at all as an 
 external, physical fact, Berkeley denied that there 
 was present any sufficient proof of the being of this 
 fact to which the sensation had been so confidently 
 ascribed. He affirmed that the sensation is to the 
 mind a first and final product, and that there is no 
 going back of it to some material source, to which 
 admittedly the senses can gain no access. Thus 
 the mind was instantly divorced again from its 
 thraldom to matter, and its own states were con- 
 ceived as more wholly its own, and of a more truly 
 spiritual nature than ever before. This was an 
 adroit turning of the flank of the enemy ; but it 
 gave entrance to idealism, so uncongenial to Eng-
 
 302 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 lish thought. It beat clown the old difficulties only 
 to raise up as many more new ones. 
 
 Such was the resistance offered to materialism in 
 the period between Locke and Hume. It was 
 straggling in its character, and tended rather to the 
 more rapid unfolding of the obnoxious view than to 
 its arrest. In the progress of materialism itself, we 
 are brought up to the time of Hume, of Hartley 
 and Priestley. Hartley was a little earlier than 
 Hume, and Priestley a little later. Hartley's con- 
 tribution was made in connection with the associa- 
 tion of ideas. This subject had been treated by 
 Locke, but Hartley gave it an enlargement, a rigid 
 ■physical development, that made it henceforth a 
 characteristic doctrine of materialism. 
 
 If all the material of thought is furnished to the 
 mind, thought itself, it might be said, remains. It is 
 the mind, after all, that analyzes, compares, unites 
 this material, and builds it together in the rational 
 structures of thought. This power of the mind to 
 institute and order its own processes became the 
 point on which the attack was now opened by 
 Hartley. Not only is the material of thought given 
 it, the very nature and flow of that thought, it was 
 said, is determined by the external connections of 
 the things which ideas represent. Objects come 
 to the mind in sensation, already grouped in place 
 and time. The repetition of a sensation, inducing 
 in each instance a like physical activity of the brain 
 as its condition, tends to make that activity in its 
 completeness easy and natural to the organization 
 which is subject to it. Such a sensation, returning
 
 HARTLEY. 3O3 
 
 to the mind without the presence of the external 
 object, through this easy proclivity to it already 
 induced in the nervous centres by its frequent repe- 
 tition, is an act of imagination ; if immediately asso- 
 ciated in the mind v^ith its previous presence, it 
 becomes an act of memory. To the mind as blank 
 paper there is now added a receptive, retentive 
 repeating power. 
 
 But these first associations of objects are not 
 stable. The same object reappears in many ex- 
 ternal connections. The varying history of the in- 
 dividual serves also to unite objects in many 
 internal collocations of thought and of feeling. 
 Moreover, one, two, three or four intervening 
 objects may be dropped, and the remainder form a 
 new secondary union, and thus with flexible condi- 
 tions the juxtaposition, the association, of objects, 
 is constantly varied, and weaker and stronger con- 
 nections of every grade of intensity are formed 
 between them. Ideas thus become, through ex- 
 ternal connections, through past dependencies, 
 through accidental conjunctions, united in various 
 ways in the mind, and there, in connection with 
 their repeated appearance, gain a certain deter- 
 minate power over it, by a tendency fastened on 
 the brain to renew its previous states. If by the 
 force of a new sensation, any one of these ideas is 
 plucked at, it comes up from the depths of the 
 mind, like a net secured by a single strand, draw- 
 ing after it many others, through various lines of 
 attachment. These connections have all been 
 woven into the material of thought by the swift un-
 
 304 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 observed shuttle of past events, and hence the 
 mind is no more indebted to itself for the flow of 
 its thought, and the junction of particular ideas, 
 than is a river to some presiding deity that con- 
 gregates, disperses and arranges its particles. Here 
 was a long stride toward materialism. 
 
 A German or Frenchman would have readily 
 and quickly taken the shorter steps that remain, but 
 the English mind is religious, practical, and will 
 hold stolidly fast on the steepest declivities, if a flat 
 denial of the ordinary truths of life and morality 
 must accompany the descent. Priestley, in farther 
 expanding this view of Hartley's, could talk of God 
 and duty, when the words were scarcely more appli- 
 cable to his psychological mechanism than to a 
 power-loom. 
 
 Hume, by far the greatest, and by far the most 
 unscrupulous, philosopher in this school of thought, 
 was retarded by no such outside considerations. 
 With a singularly clear and quiet mind, never to be 
 abashed by its own conclusions, he ripened and 
 made to burst forth as in a single summer day, the 
 thousand winged seeds of mischief that lay hid in 
 this one pregnant pod, — this composite thistle-head, 
 — that all knowledge is the product of experience. 
 
 We shall give concisely the leading propositions 
 of the system of Hume in their order of dependence. 
 We do this because of its logical completeness, its 
 central position and historical value in English 
 philosophy. Opposed and concurrent systems have 
 alike been shaped by it. Hume restates the doctrine 
 o( Locke as recrards the orierin of knowledge in this
 
 HUME. 305 
 
 lom. The phenomena of mind are divisible into 
 impressions and ideas. " The difference betwixt 
 these consists in the degrees of force and HveHness 
 with which they strike upon tlie mind.""-' Impres- 
 sions include sensations, emotions ; ideas, "the faint 
 images of these in thinking." His fundamental 
 proposition is that all ideas are " derived from im- 
 pressions which are correspondent to them, and 
 which they exactly represent."f " All our ideas are 
 copied from our impressions. "^I Thus Hume makes 
 those impressions, which we attribute to the exter- 
 nal world, echo and re-echo themselves in the mind, 
 and these first voices with their receding, fainting 
 responses, are all the facts of mental science. 
 Hence, as a first conclusion, space and time are not 
 distinct ideas, but " merely of the manner or order 
 in which objects exist."§ Space and time as we 
 accept them are flatly denied, and they are identi- 
 fied with that order which they in fact impart and 
 explain. Other conceptions are pushed aside in 
 like fashion. " The idea of existence is the very 
 same with the idea of what we conceive to be ex- 
 istent."|| " We have no other notion of cause 
 and effect but that of certain objects, which have 
 always been conjoined together."^ In this fashion 
 is all the original furniture of the mind disposed of, 
 and it is left, swept and garnished, for the unob- 
 structed entertainment in reflection and re-reflection, 
 of those images which date their origin from sen- 
 sation only. The next weighty conclusion, there- 
 
 * Hume's Philosophical Works, vol i. p. 15. f Ibid., p. 18. 
 
 X Ibid., p. 99. § Ibid., p. 60. | Ibid., p. 92. ^ Ibid., p. 124.
 
 306 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 fore, is that " all reasoning consists in nothing but 
 comparisons,"* an observation of the agreement or 
 disagreement of these fleeting impressions. At this 
 point it is, that the theory of Hartley helps out that 
 of Hume, for impressions by their very association, 
 their reiterations, are made to compare themselves ; 
 to sort, locate and put themselves into union, like 
 boulders, gravel and sand in a river-bed. 
 
 The next deduction is still more striking. Be- 
 lief turns upon the liveliness of the impression and 
 hence of the idea. " Belief is nothing but a strong 
 and lively idea derived from a present impression 
 related to it."f Hume is thus led to admit that 
 belief is a thing of sensation rather than of thought. 
 In his own words, " Belief is more properly an 
 act of the sensitive than of the cogitative part of our 
 nature.''^ A good echo is audible, a weak one is 
 not ; a lively idea is believable, a feeble one is not. 
 The mind has no more agency in its own beliefs, 
 than the ear in the sounds it receives ; a clear 
 voice can be heard, an obscure one cannot. The 
 notion of continued, distinct, external existence, as 
 • that of our own personal identity, is due entirely 
 to the imagination. This acquires a certain ten- 
 dency, a kind of momentum, by which it reproduces 
 objects not present in sensation, and leads us to 
 believe therefore in their continuous being. The 
 upshot of this system is absolute skepticism. For 
 nothing is a subject of belief, that is not at the 
 moment vividly impressed on the mind, and every- 
 
 * Hume's Philosophical Works, vol. i. p. loo. 
 
 f Ibid., p. 140. t 1^'tl- P- 233-
 
 GROUNDS OF BELIEF. 307 
 
 thing that chances to be so impressed, is worthy, at 
 least for the moment, of acceptance. BeUef neces- 
 sarily shifts like the shadows of each passing day. 
 The noonday light of belief, — that is, of vivid impres- 
 sion, — travels round and round the earth, but it 
 tarries nowhere ; and each position is in turn over 
 taken by the darkness and shadows that follow hard 
 in the rear. Argument, knowledge, is a barren 
 transfer of the mind from point to point ; the men- 
 tal, like the physical, eye takes in new views only 
 to lose old ones. He says, " The skeptic still con- 
 tinues to reason and believe, even though he 
 asserts that he cannot defend his reason by rea- 
 son."* The weary traveller travels by a fatality 
 of unrest without hope or real joy. Nothing can 
 exceed the candor of Hume's conclusions. He says, 
 " I have already shown that the understanding, 
 when it acts alone and according to its most gener- 
 al principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not 
 the lowest degree of evidence in any proposition, 
 either in philosophy or common life. We save 
 ourselves from this total skepticism only by means 
 of that singular and seemingly trivial property of 
 the fancy by which we enter with difficulty into re- 
 mote views of things. "f That is to say, the vivid- 
 ness of ideas is constantly changing, therefore 
 nothing is worthy of permanent belief. We must 
 give ourselves in floating fancies to the impression 
 uppermost, and lucky is it that we drift on so very 
 slowly. Out of this fortunate sluggishness of our 
 faculties, by which they hold at least for a little the 
 
 * Hume's Philosophical Works, vol. i. p. 237. f Ibid,, p. 330.
 
 308 THE I'HILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 impressions made on them, spring the congruity and 
 order of daily life ; near and passing impressions 
 having this advantage, that they are at harmony 
 with themselves. We are indebted to our dulness 
 for what we seem to know. Hume touches on his 
 own feelings under these irrefragable deductions, 
 " The intense view of these manifold contradictions 
 and imperfections in human reason, has so wrought 
 upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to 
 reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon 
 no opinion even as more probable or likely than 
 another."* His farther pursuit of philosophy was 
 a mere matter of pleasure, therefore, and diversion. 
 Plume did not stop with these purely speculative 
 results ; he touched on all sides practical questions, 
 the immateriality of the soul, miracles, future life. 
 He. denies the possible proof of miracles, legitimate- 
 ly enough from one view of his doctrine, strangely 
 enough from another. He starts with referring all 
 knowledge to experience, this knowledge, in its most 
 solid form, a miracle contradicts ; very well, but has 
 not our philosophy issued in the conclusion that all 
 belief is a question of liveliness of ideas .'' Those, 
 therefore, who accept miracles, show by this very 
 fact a belief grounded on ideas sufficiently vivid to 
 occasion it, and thus to justfy them in it. Thus 
 Hume cannot be more rational in denying miracles 
 under his ideas, than are his opponents in accepting 
 them under the impression present to their minds. 
 In short, a philosophy that makes it absurd to hold 
 fast to any conclusion, cannot destructively criticise 
 
 * Hume's Philosophical Works, vol. i. p. 331.
 
 HUME. 309 
 
 any opinion ; for one opinion is at least as good as 
 another, and vindicates its right to be by the mere 
 fact that it exists. That I hear a voice, proves to me 
 the being of the voice. 
 
 The practical conclusions of Hume's philosophy, 
 self-destructive as they were, were, nevertheless, 
 very nettlesome to the religious and philosophical 
 world, and called. forth, on the one side, farther ex- 
 pansion, and, on the other, more systematic attack. 
 We will turn first to affiliated views. It may be 
 asked, why should the system of Hume, and those 
 systems in continuation of his, be called materialis- 
 tic, when they do not so much as decide on the 
 existence of the external world ? We answer, be- 
 cause their whole constructive force is derived from 
 the sensational side of our being. Sensations, which 
 represent matter and material law, control mind, 
 completely subordinate it to the fixed, necessary 
 forces or tendencies contained in them. This is 
 the sense in which we say of Hume, of Spencer, 
 they are materialistic. 
 
 In ethics, the utilitarian view has been defended 
 by Paley, Bentham, Bain. Paley was an able 
 writer on the proofs of Christianity, yet bases his 
 ethical system on the skeptical, materialistic view 
 of obligation. He found in his spiritual philos- 
 ophy, no higher inspiration, no weightier law for the 
 duties of ordinary life, than came to Hume in abso- 
 lute unbelief, generalizing a transient law of action, 
 from the unsubstantial fleeting facts afloat about 
 him, — the gains and losses that fall to us under 
 them. The belief and unbelief of England often
 
 3IO THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Strike hands on this question of morals, intimate as 
 it is to daily life and character. 
 
 Bentham is most remarkable for bold, dogged 
 assertion, English-wise. One might think the 
 question of the foundation of obligation in morals 
 had ceased to his mind to be one of abstruse in- 
 quiry, and was regarded as a point involving good 
 sense and veracity, to be disposed of by positive 
 averment, so contemptuous is he of his adversary. 
 He settles the question as one Englishman says of 
 another, with " a masculine, muscular, graphic, nar- 
 row, thick-headed ability." 
 
 Bain is the latest, most elaborate and thorough 
 defender of utilitarian morals. 
 
 His works are to be read with great advantage, 
 though the reading should be accompanied with 
 the most complete dissent. English morals, though 
 muddy and murky with the soiled sediment of self- 
 interest, have their commercial value. The river 
 Thames, vexed and turbid, though not much as a 
 mirror of the heavens, floats a deal of shipping, and 
 is every way a godsend to trade. English philoso- 
 phy has worked hard at the utilities involved in 
 ethics. Yet, it is a pity that one's home should be 
 lighted with ground-glass, not because he cannot 
 thus see the dinner on his table, but because he 
 loses the long range of vision of the outside world. 
 A law of morals that is deduced shrewdly from pas- 
 sing events may give a good deal of successful 
 guidance in daily life, but we cease to discover in 
 it the far-reaching light of eternity. .Esthetics 
 has shared these sensual limitations of ethics in
 
 MORALS. 311 
 
 England, and beauty has become, as to Jeffrey and 
 Alison, the fruit of associations fleeting and acci- 
 dental. 
 
 The opposite view of morals has also had its 
 defenders, but their works have been less united, 
 less the part of a system, and have possessed 
 secondary power over the national mind, at least 
 as represented in the agents of progress. Chief 
 among these defenders, should be put Sir James 
 Mackintosh and of later writers, Whewell. The 
 former had the support which sprang from his con- 
 nection with Scottish philosophy, the only contin- 
 uous speculation, aside from materialism, that con- 
 stitutes, on British soil, a school. 
 
 The philosophy of Hume has found its line of 
 descent to our own time through James Mill, John 
 Stuart Mill, and Spencer. The philosophy of 
 Spencer is essentially an independent, vigorous re- 
 construction and re-argumentation of the doctrines 
 of Hume; though, it must be said, with far more 
 belief and consequently with far more momentum. 
 The novelty of impression which begot such skep- 
 ticism of his own conclusions in the mind of Hume, 
 seems, in consistency with the theory that iteration 
 breeds conviction, to have disappeared on farther 
 familiarity, and the assertions of Spencer have ap- 
 parently a very sufficient and undoubted hold on 
 his own mind. Every reader of the two philoso- 
 phies must be struck with their general identity, 
 and with the fact that the germ of the one is wholly 
 contained in the other ; and yet with this great di- 
 versity of conviction between them. Their agree-
 
 312 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 ment is not the general agreement, that both refer 
 knowledge to experience, but a close correspond- 
 ence of secondary propositions. Thus, the evolu- 
 tion of the ideas of space and time is similar, 
 though the discussion of Spencer is more patient 
 and complete. Their resolution of all knowledge 
 into resemblance is the same ; also their reference 
 of belief to what may be called the sensational, 
 physical hold of ideas on the mind ; their assertion 
 of an inability to affirm anything of the existence of 
 the external world, of mind and of God, or of the na- 
 ture of any of them. Both alike deal only with im- 
 pressions, and the ideas or states of mind directly 
 consequent upon them, and thus wholly identify 
 physical, social, mental events in their evolution, 
 their law of progress. To this evolution Spencer 
 has devoted much time in very fruitful labors, 
 and has chiefly used his philosophy as an in- 
 strument in this field of inquiry. Evolution in man 
 and in society is with him only a more complex, 
 physical process than that which has from the be- 
 ginning proceeded in inorganic and organic matter. 
 Between Hume and Spencer, lie the works ot 
 two powerful minds in close sympathy with them. 
 The Mills, in vigor of thought, worthily stand be- 
 tween the two. The leading work of James Mill is 
 an Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind. 
 He gets much the old start in sensations, and in 
 ideas the lingering traces of sensations, and, under 
 the fruitful law of association, proceeds to develop 
 these into imagination, memory, belief. The road 
 is one which many feet have travelled from the time
 
 MILL. 313 
 
 of Locke, till it has become the beaten path of sen- 
 sationalism, each succeeding investigator bringing 
 new relations and a little new light to its details. 
 
 The leading philosophical work of John Stuart 
 Mill is one on logic, the inductive logic, which he 
 strives to establish to the exclusion of fundamental 
 truths, — of deduction as primitive proof. Therein, 
 and in many other ways, he shows his adherence to 
 the school whose development we have briefly traced, 
 (i) The initial feature of it is sensation as the ex- 
 clusive source of knowledge. (2) From this follows 
 the resolution of mental facts into floating phenom- 
 ena, united only by laws of association ; (3) phenom- 
 ena, from which nothing in any direction can be 
 predicated concerning real being. (4) One ulti- 
 mate relation includes all others, that of resem- 
 blance ; while (5) belief is the transient force of 
 existing connections in the mind. (6) Every idea 
 that will not accept this solution is denied, or modi 
 fled or falsely referred. These conclusions may be 
 reached in different forms or partially missed. 
 They are none the less in the system. To these 
 John Stuart Mill added (7) induction or observa- 
 tion as the complete, exclusive source of proof. 
 This also is undeniable, if experience is our only 
 means of knowledge, and all knowledge is expressed 
 under resemblances ; for induction is the union 
 by experience of agreeing things and facts. For 
 inductive logic, Mill has done much, and here lies 
 his chief merit. The deductive logic, however, re- 
 turns instantly to us as the moiety of a complete 
 system, when we recognize intuitive truths. 
 14
 
 314 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 It remains now only to speak of the opposing 
 Scottish school, immediately called forth by Hume, 
 and whose chief philosophers were first Reid, last 
 Hamilton, with Stewart and others associated with 
 them. 
 
 Reid took his appeal against the conclusions 
 of Hume afresh to the common-sense, or common- 
 consciousness of the race. He claimed anew the 
 intuitive force of the mind, and strove to lead by 
 means of it to a fresh view of the doctrine of 
 perception. Locke and Hume had neither of them 
 any means of establishing a belief in the external 
 world. There are two ways by which this space 
 between mind and matter, sensations and the 
 objects to which they pertain, can be bridged 
 over. The sensation can be regarded as exclu- 
 sively a mental fact or state, and then, by the 
 idea of causation, referred to external being as a 
 source or cause ; or the sensation may be regarded 
 as a conjoint product in which both mind and 
 matter are present and directly recognizable. 
 Neither explanation was open to the philosophy 
 of Locke. He did not accept the intuitive act 
 of mind by which it reaches the cause in the 
 effect, he could not, therefore, pass from the 
 sensation to a real exterior source of it. Neither 
 did he find in the sensation itself two constitu- 
 ents which the mind immediately perceives. He 
 accepted the traditional view of perception, that 
 it is a detached state confined wholly to the 
 mind itself. His philosophy had then no method 
 of establishing the being of matter. Reid and
 
 REID. 315 
 
 Hamilton have both labored at length this doc- 
 trine of perception. Reid's appeal to the common- 
 sense of men, was taken without sufficient an- 
 alysis, and hence bears a dogmatic character. He 
 has left it uncertain, whether he regarded sen- 
 sation itself as a direct contact with the exter- 
 nal world, or whether it is instantly completed 
 by an intuitive action of the mind, and the 
 reference of effects to causes becomes the medium 
 by which this union is effected. We suppose him 
 to have obscurely held this last view. Hamilton 
 ascribes to him the first. Hamilton maintained 
 staunchly, and, as it seems to us, very mis- 
 takenly, the doctrine of immediate, direct knowl- 
 edge of physical objects in perception. 
 
 The Scottish school, more especially Hamilton, 
 while far in advance of the Lockian philosophy, 
 was most unfavorably affected by it, and was un- 
 able to construct a consistent, complete system. 
 We feel more inclined to censure than to praise it. 
 
 The action it assigns the reason, the central, in- 
 tuitive faculty of the soul, is very insufficient. The 
 division recognized b;^ Coleridge, of the sense, the 
 understanding and the reason, is more fertile in 
 growth than the entire philosophy of Hamilton. 
 We make complaint of inadequacy against this 
 philosophy, and of limitations cast upon it by pre- 
 vious thought, at many points. Hamilton and 
 Mansel are both enslaved by the idea of the con- 
 ceivable and inconceivable, the imaginable and 
 unimaginable, as setting the limits of belief ; and 
 on this ground, reject, as against the insight of
 
 3t6 the philosophy of English literature. 
 
 the reason, a knowledge of the infinite. Here, 
 they are virtually back in the old slough of sensa- 
 tions, and ideas their shadows, as the sum of 
 knowable things. 
 
 Again, the idea of causation does not arise with 
 Hamilton from the power of the mind, but from its 
 impotency rather, its inability to think or conceive 
 a thing into nonentity. Here he is practically 
 with Hume, and makes causation a notion fastened 
 upon us by the imagination, instead of a cardinal 
 fruit of the reason. Once more, having thus re- 
 moved the idea of causation, he strives to make 
 sensation do its work, and affirms us to be directly 
 conscious of matter and mind. This, we believe, to 
 be pure assertion, thrown in to help out the self-con- 
 stituted weakness of his system. Having closed 
 up the door to the real being of mind and of mat- 
 ter, he makes this rent in the wall to supply its 
 place. The doctrine is plausible only because sen- 
 sation is a complex process which results in a knowl- 
 edge of the outside world, and, falsely looked on 
 as a single, simple act, may be said directly to reach 
 that result. 
 
 The drift of English thought down through 
 Hobbes, Locke, Hartley, Hume, J. Mill, J. S. Mill 
 and Spencer, we have seen to be steadily toward 
 materialism. The chief resistance has been offered 
 by the religious convictions of the nation. It is 
 these that have made the word, materialist, oppro- 
 brious, and one which few of the school have been 
 willing to accept. 
 
 The reluctance of this school to admit the
 
 CONTRADICTIONS. 317 
 
 adjective, materialistic, while struggling to make 
 absolute and universal those necessary connections 
 which are the characteristic of the physical world, 
 and the complete expression of physical force, is 
 but one of its inconsistencies. It is true, the pos- 
 sibility of strict materialism or strict idealism has 
 been lost to it, since the existence of matter and 
 mind are both unproved ; but the appearances with 
 which this philosophy does occupy itself, are, in 
 every one of their connections, those ascribed to 
 physical being. Though the floating facts of our 
 experience are only film deep, in the depth and 
 coherence that do belong to them, they are fixed, 
 necessary, and hence, in essence, physical. 
 
 This philosophy also started with a predilection 
 for induction, and later, through Mill, declares this to 
 be the sum of logic. Yet no system has been 
 more exclusively deductive, more in the face of all 
 experience, than that of Hume, who, after all, is 
 the central mind of the school. Start with his 
 simple, assumed premise, the nature of knowledge, 
 and every subsequent step is evolved with almost 
 the exactness and the freedom from observation 
 which belong to mathematics. 
 
 Again, this philosophy, so purely deductive, so 
 skeptical of the very being of the external world, 
 strikes hands with natural science as its coadjutor, 
 and stands in close affinity with it. Religion, on 
 the other hand, as over-speculative, and dealing with 
 unsubstantial ideas, it censures and shuns. This 
 from a philosophy that has to do with images only, 
 and cannot transcend the merest film of being in
 
 3l8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 any direction ; that confessed in its corypheus, thai 
 its pursuit was a question of pleasure merely ! 
 Contradictions and inconclusiveness can scarcely 
 go farther. If all is dream, one should certainly be 
 t^ft to dream the dream most pleasant to him. A 
 philosophy of dreams, what has it to do with sci- 
 ence } It should stand affiliated with any easy 
 wayward thought ; if that thought be either brilliant 
 or consoling. 
 
 There is in this development of the English 
 mind, especially if we regard the ethical bearing of 
 the points in discussion, a slow, sedimentary set- 
 tling of commercial sentiment and principles, which 
 turn on a sense of present well-being, from among 
 the loftier, more lucid and spiritual elements of 
 thought, and their patient, half-mechanical com- 
 bination into those stratified products, those grow- 
 ing deposits of successive generations, known as 
 sensationalism. Indeed, if the system be true, this 
 is rather an exact physical, than a figurative state- 
 ment of the process. This philosophy is strictly a 
 resultant habit, a slowly acquired chronic tendency 
 » of brain, depositing and completing its beliefs in 
 residuary fashion from age to age. 
 
 We trust that the implied half of the simile will 
 also prove true, and that the clarified waters above, 
 the elements relieved of this sordid contact, will be 
 only the more thoroughly and brilliantly permeated 
 with the light of Heaven, that direct light, which 
 the reason of man mediates to the human soul. 
 
 THE END.
 
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