THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND LITERATURE.

In recent teaching of English History something has been done to promote the formation of a true feeling of the continuity of our national life by setting. aside the arbitrary landmarks furnished by the accession of kings, and by an attempt to space out the history of the people into its larger natural divisions. The landmarks of closing and opening centuries may seem yet more arbitrary or accidental than those placed at the beginning and ending of the reigns of kings. It happens, however, that each of the last three centuries closed with an event, or a series of events, which may be looked upon as marking the commencement of an epoch,—an epoch in the spiritual life of England, if not in her external history, and which is perceived with special distinctness when viewed in relation to literature.

In 1588, the galleons of the Spanish Armada were pulled down by the sea-dogs of Drake, or rolled at the mercy of the Orkney wreckers. An immense consciousness of power thrilled the nation into quicker life and more daring achievement. Then upon the stage the audacities of Marlowe's genius seemed hardly too extravagant. A more robust and maturer force lived and acted in literature after Marlowe had been lost. The last decade of that century saw the publication of the "Faerie Queen,"

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the "Ecclesiastical Polity," and the earliest Essays of Bacon; it closed with the trumpet note of Shakspere's "Henry V." still in the air. One hundred years later, 1688, William of Nassau landed at Torbay. Her dominion of the seas England may date from the battle of La Hogue; the temperate freedom, the security and order guaranteed by the Bill of Rights were as precious a possession, creating a new social and political life, and this again a new literature. It was not an age of ardour, enthusiasm, and ambitious power, but rather a constitutional period, loving compromise, moderation, and good sense, an age of clubs and coffee-houses, of wits and beaux, when poetry was not a prophecy but an accomplishment, when the minor moralities of hoop and furbelow claimed the reformer's attention, when philosophy came into the drawing-rooms, and conversed in irreproachable accent. Again a hundred years, 1789, and events long preparing in France were born into the light of day; the Deputies, with Mirabeau and Robespierre among them, were assembling at Versailles. Presently came Wordsworth, to gather a relic from the ruins of the Bastille. William Blake walked the streets of London, wearing the bonnet rouge as emblem of the arrived millennium. Burke announced the extinction of chivalry, and the advent of the age of sophisters, economists, and calculators. A little later, and England possessed a poetry for the first time not British so much as European. The Revolution still lightened and thundered through the days of the White Terror and the Holy Alliance, in the verse of Byron and Shelley.

Such a cataclysm as the French Revolution seems to

interrupt the continuity of history, yet in fact, though such a crisis may mark a period, there is no interruption. The Revolution is but an incident in a movement much larger than itself. To some democratic spirits 1789 dates as the year One; before it lies the chaos of the great monarchies and of feudalism; then in a moment the demiurge, Revolution, said, "Let there be light," and there was light. By a different class of thinkers the entire eighteenth century, the sæculum rationalisticum, is represented as a page inserted by Satan in God's history of the human race; the divine Author, having completed his chapter, which contains the story of the witch-burnings and the dragonnades, of Madame de Montespan and of Nell Gwynn, nodded over the best of all possible histories, when the author of evil with malicious glee slipped in his chapter of profanity, illuminated with the mocking face of his Voltaire, and the obscene posturings of his Rousseau. The date of each of these theories with respect to the eighteenth century is assuredly gone by. There are symptoms that we have begun to trace our ancestry without any longer hewing out of its trunk a portion of our family tree. Mr Mark Pattison's essay on "Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750," was one of the earliest studies of eighteenth century thought which can truly be called critical, and it has been fruitful of results. Mr Morley's "Burke," Rousseau," "Voltaire," and "Diderot," M. Taine's "Les Origines de la France contemporaine," Mr Hunt's "History of Religious Thought in England," Mr Leslie Stephen's "English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," are evidences that the period

of passionate hostility to the sæculum rationalisticum is at an end, and that the work of criticism is begun. We can venture to be just to what lies so far behind us across two generations of men. It is easy to foresee that the injustice to be feared for some time to come will be injustice to the reaction against the eighteenth century. To understand Coleridge is fast becoming more difficult than to understand Hume; what was the quickening air and light of philosophy to our fathers, changes for us into a theosophic mist, vaguely luminous; in the architecture of the Gothic revival, we are told, may be read "the decay and enfeeblement of reason;" even our furniture must rationalize itself, and remind us of the definiteness of design, the moderation and good sense of Chippendale.

Looking in a comprehensive way at the literature of the past eighty years, we may discern in its movement four chief tendencies. We must not define these too rigidly, or draw hard and fast lines; nor must we suppose that a human being can be explained and set aside by being classified and labelled. Still it is of use to observe and distinguish, as far as can be done in sincerity of disinterested criticism, the most powerful currents of the literature of our age. First, proceeding out of the last century, the revolutionary and democratic movement arrests our attention. Such names as those of Shelley, Byron, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Heine, Börne, remind us of its importance. Proceeding out of the last century also we perceive the scientific movement, not at first powerfully affecting literature proper, but of late years ever more and more tending to form a new

It will be felt at once imagination is being

intellectual stratum or bed from which art-products, appropriate to itself, may spring. how profoundly the modern influenced by the single idea of Evolution; and it may be noted as a significant incident that within' the last year our chief imaginative creator in prose has had to bear the reproach of suffering her genius to undergo what has been styled a "scientific depravation." The scientific and the democratic movements both contribute to create the school of thought represented even before the Revolution by Bentham, and subsequently by his followers, the school of utilitarian ethics and philosophical radicalism. Again, in opposition to the eighteenth century we observe two movements:-1. The Medieval Revival; 2. The Transcendental Movement.

We have here the large outlines of a map of nineteenth-century literature. In religion the Mediæval Revival became the Catholic reaction on the Continent, the Oxford movement in England; in art, it became Romanticism. 'But Romanticism is a name which covers many and various things. In Scott the interest in the middle ages is part of the aroused historical imagination of modern times; in Victor Hugo it is part of the reaction against the classical fadeurs of the last century, part of the modern demand for a richer life in art, more variety, keener sensations, greater freedom and animation; in Uhland it expresses the revival of national life in Germany; in others of the German romantic poets, it is a thin sentimentalism, united with an impotent desire to restore art by means of a fictive faith. The Transcendental Movement