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Lewis. 10/. net. yln Intermediate Greeks Lexicon founded upon Liddell and Scott's Greek -English Lexicon 'from Homer to the close of Classical Attic Greek'. 16s. net. ^tn abridged Gree\ Lexicon, chiefly for Schools. %s. 6d. net. [October 1022. THE CENTURY OF HOPE *A Sketch of Western Progress from 1815 to the Qreat War BY F. S. MARVIN AUTHOR OF 'THE LIVING PAST' Truth justifies herself, and as she dwells With Hope, who would not follow where she leads? The Reclute SECOND EDITION OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 192 1 Y r* C y r~ y r- $", ; t "'/ "-> O, ■^S.-lGv / / OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY HUMPHREY MILFORD PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY ?>i PREFACE This little book attempts to look at Western history in the last hundred years from the same point of view from which The Living Past treated Western progress as a whole. It concentrates mainly on the chief centres of civilization in the West, and from them endeavours to exhibit the growth of humanity in the world, taking as a leading — though not exclusive — thought, the development of science and its reactions on other sides of national and international life. The war, which has filled all the period of its composition and came to a close just before it appears, has no doubt left a large impression on the work, though I have striven not to allow it to become the dominant feature. In one respect the war made clear what many have always held to be a cardinal truth in European politics, that good relations between France and England are a most valuable asset to Western progress — perhaps the most valuable of all — and that a study of the parallel development of the two countries is the most enlightening approach to an understanding of modern history. This, therefore, I have borne in mind throughout, though the con- tributions of other nations, and, especially towards the end, of the United States, find, I hope, due treatment so far as my narrow limits permit. So much for the purpose. A few words may be useful as to the general plan. There is an attempt throughout to combine a roughly chronological treatment with the form of short essays on successive great topics as they become prominent in the hundred years from 1815 to 1914. The chapters are therefore planned to take up as far as possible the most salient feature in the successive decades. Chapter I is introductory. Chapter II treats of the revival of liberalism — the principles of freedom in both domestic and foreign affairs — which is the most striking feature of 1815-30. Chapter III, on Literature, has perforce to traverse much the iv Preface same period from another point of view, going both backwards and forwards rather farther than Chapter II. Chapter IV, on the Birth of Socialism, follows this, because the socialistic agitation which set in after the Revolution of July, and is represented in England by the Chartists, becomes the prominent public feature until the Revolution of 1848. Chapter V, on Mechanical Science and Invention, turns on the railway and telegraph, which were introduced in the 'forties and 'fifties, and of which the triumph was symbolized in the First International Exhibition of 1851. Chapter VI, on Biology and Evolution, centres, of course, on the Origin of Species, which appeared in 1859. Chapter VII, on Nationality and Imperialism, deals mainly with the unification of Italy and of Germany, and the Civil War in the United States. These events are the most striking political facts in the decade 1860-70. Chapter VIII, on Schools for All, selects the Education Acts and the development of public and of higher education as the most salient events in the 'seventies. ■ Chapter IX, on Religious Growth, has necessarily a wide outlook, both before and after, but the death of T. H. Green and of several other religious leaders in the 'eighties seems to fix its place there. Chapter X, on the New Knowledge, is compelled to go back to Dalton and the Atomic Theory and forward to the dis- coveries in radio-activity. But the central portion, on astro- physics, relates to discoveries which were being made about three-quarters of the way through the nineteenth century. Chapter XI, on the Expansion of the West, falls naturally to the last decade of the nineteenth century, when friction was most acute between ourselves and France, and when, in Africa and in the Far East, the Western Powers seemed to be complet- ing their partition of the world. Chapter XII, on Social Progress, may be attached to the first decade of the twentieth century, for it was then that a policy of Social Reform was first adopted as its primary object by an English government supported by a large majority of votes, and began to be realized in measures like the Old Age Pensions and National Insurance Acts. Preface v Chapter XIII, on International Progress, is connected, para- doxically it may seem, with the second decade of the present century, which will always be remembered as the decade of the greatest of wars. Yet if. the war was the greatest, so also was the world-alliance for humanity and international law which brought it to a victorious conclusion. So also, we believe, will the world-union be the greatest, and most permanent, which will arise from the devastated earth and the saddened but determined spirits who are now facing the future with a new sense of hope, which enshrines our sorrows and has overcome our most oppressive fears. Is not the new and abundant harvest of poetry one of the best signs of life and hope ? Of the many friends who have assisted me with good counsel and encouragement, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Miss Melian Stawell, who has helped me most generously throughout, and notably in the revision of the proofs. To Mr. T. H. Riches I am indebted for reading Chapters V, VI, and X. and for his invariably sound and careful advice upon them ; and to Miss G. N. Dewar for kind co-operation on the Index. F. S. M. Beekhamsted, 17 Dec. 1918. PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION A Time Chart has been added to this issue, based on the general plan of the book, but rather more comprehensive in the facts which it records. A few explanatory notes are given in their place. The other improvements are due mainly to kindly criticisms which the author has received from various sources, among which he is bound to mention with special thanks the letters of Professor Hearnshaw, of King's College, London, and Professor Desch, of Glasgow. To the former some corrections in the political chapters are due, to the latter some additions to the chapters, especially X, on science. Of the more general criticisms the burden has been, ' Why not more about so-and-so ' — Tennyson or Browning in poetry, Mendel on evolution, &c. ? And the answer is the same in each case. The plan of the book — taking the salient feature in each decade and making the chapter turn on that— precludes any full treatment of the earlier and later development. Only allusion is possible. It is no doubt a defect, but it seemed better to give in its due place a rather more adequate account of Darwin, than to attempt a complete summary of the develop- ment of biological theories. On the general thesis the author stands to his guns. He does not believe that the hopefulness of the last century has been exhausted, but that the sources of hope are unimpaired, though our conclusions from them must be tempered by our wider experience. A more complete answer will be found in the introduction to the volume on Recent Developments in European Thought, shortly to be published by the Oxford Press. F. S. M. Berkhamsted, io Oct. 1919. CONTENTS I. The Legacy of the Revolution II. The Political Revival . III. The New Spirit in Literature IV. The Birth of Socialism . V. Mechanical Science and Invention VI. Biology and Evolution VII. Nationality and Imperialism VIII. Schools for All .... IX. Religious Growth X. New Knowledge on Old Foundations XI. The Expansion of the West . XII. Social Progress .... XIII. International Progress . Time Chart ..... Appendix on Books Index ...... PAGE i 23 49 83 in 135 i6t 188 215 238 263 290 316 34 2 347 3S3 THE LEGACY OF THE REVOLUTION The eighteenth century — in this respect like the Middle Ages — has borne some shrewd blows from moralists and historians. To be called an 'Age of Prose' is perhaps a bearable reproach, for it was very good prose. But it has also appeared to many of them as mainly a time of relaxation, of moral and political depravity, after the strenuous efforts and glorious achievements of the seventeenth century. Walpole after Cromwell, Louis XV after Richelieu, even Voltaire after Descartes — the change seems a measure of decadence. But if we approach the matter from another angle and ask for ourselves and the other nations of the West one simple but far-reaching question, the answer will lead to a different and rather remarkable conclusion. At what period in history did modern life begin, life really like our own ? If it is an Englishman who answers first, he would probably reply that it is in Dr. Johnson's time that he first begins to feel at home. He would find sympathy thefe, in the club with Goldsmith and Burke, which would be wanting even in the Mermaid Tavern or the parlour of Queen Anne. The Eliza- bethans and Milton and Cromwell are heroic figures, belong- ing rather to another world. But we might have talked to Dr. Johnson had we dared, and we should have loved to discuss the war with Fox, and compare Napoleon with the Kaiser. It is not.of course merely a question of language, though that counts for much. Many new things had lately entered into the national life, and still more were surging outside for entrance, of which the Elizabethans and even William of Orange had no 2170 £ 2 The Legacy of the Revolution inkling. There was the free speech of parliamentary leaders beginning to speak for a nation that was to govern itself. There was a new industry arising, which was to build the cities of the nineteenth century. There was a Britain overseas, asserting an independent life and pegging out estates for the free allied nations of the twentieth. If this. was so for England, it was even more clearly a new epoch for the United States, for Germany, and for France. To the United States the latter part of the eighteenth century was the actual beginning of their existence as a nation. The wave that carried the rest of us to new moorings raised them for the first time above the gulf of time. And they in their turn accelerated that movement of change which was beginning to run at full flood throughout the world. The Germans — and we must think of them primarily as under the leadership of Prussia — go back also to the latter part of the eighteenth century for the foundation of the national existence which they now enjoy. Territory enlarged, internal organiza- tion strengthened, national pride created and national speech approved, a new spirit in Lessing and Goethe which was beginning to clear away the shallow formalities imported from France and to found the great era of German thought : all this comes between the accession and the death of Frederick and is again something to the credit of the eighteenth century. Frederick the Great died just three years before the French Revolution began. The Revolution, which was to put the stamp of novelty on so many things which had been growing quietly beneath the surface, makes the end of the century a new starting-point for France, in some ways more complete than even the War of Independence for America. There can be no doubt for any Frenchman that his modern world begins with the men who destroyed the ancien regime, who organized the nation, codified the law, and made his country for the time The Legacy of the Revolution 3 the dominating force in Europe. What the Revolution meant beyond that and beyond France, we shall consider in a moment. But it meant at least that for France, and France therefore, even more than any other country, looks to the end of the eighteenth century for the beginnings of modern life. The coincidence of so much national interest on the same period in history must give pause to the detractors of the cen- tury, and provides all of us with a problem. The question which must occur is this, Was there not a common cause, or set of causes, operating at least throughout the Western World to produce results which have obviously much in common ; and if so, what were they? The only answer we can attempt here must be a brief one and must take a good deal for granted. For any- true answer in history leads the mind farther and farther back, never stopping at any one point as a real beginning but finding everywhere threads that connect the sequel with something earlier, and so on into the infinite past. But of this change into a modern world we may discern some outlines. There was a time when the Romans, having welded together the lands adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea, governed them as a unit, on principles partly derived from their own experience, partly from the practice and philosophy of the kindred Greeks. Then came another time, when this rule and unity had disappeared, and there was a welter of conflicting principalities, held together loosely by the surviving traditions of Rome and more strongly by a new power, centred also in Rome, but exercising control over men's minds and conduct on different principles and with a different object in view. Such was the mediaeval system, which lasted for some thousand years after the Roman Empire broke up in the fifth century a. d. This fresh attempt at unity broke down in its turn, and we may fix for convenience the fifteenth century as the date for the opening of another act in b 2 4 The Legacy of the Revolution the Divina Commedia of Man. But now it becomes more difficult to be sure of the characters and to hear all they say, for the stage is much vaster and we are soon taking part in the play ourselves. But we know that the action ever since has become more and more rapid than it was, and that we are now assisting at one of its most»tremendous scenes. It may be thought that we have reached a contradiction to that conclusion as to the eighteenth century with which we started. But the explanation is easy. We asked at what time in modern history can the nations recognize themselves : and this, as we saw, would be towards the end of the eighteenth century. But the pioneers and premonitions of modernity appear some centuries before. Columbus, Luther, Galileo — to take the first •great names that occur — were all pioneers of the modern world in which we live. Their influence began at once to spread in widening circles, but we may speak of 'modern history ' in the fullest sense when it has taken shape in social forms. Thus, the new lands discovered" by Columbus in the West are now the thriving settlements of millions, and a power- ful factor in the order and progress of the world. This was first appreciable at the end of the eighteenth century. The new ideal, too, of personal and public morals apart from the Church, first becomes prominent in the same century, when rulers like Frederick the Great and Joseph II avowed them- selves the ministers of their people, and the people themselves first realized, as in France, that their interests were the true end of government. And it is the same century which saw the final alliance first cemented between science and industry which, in spite of war, in spite of the blindness of many who are actually carrying out the work, has continued ever since to transform the social and economic condition of the West. Here is the work of Columbus, Luther, Galileo, and their compeers of the Renaissance in its social form. The Legacy of the Revolution j" Let us then see in a little more detail how these changes had taken effect in the four countries we selected. New lands, new knowledge, new religious, moral, and political energy, this was the fresh matter thrown into the melting-pot of Europe. America is the simplest case, for she was born on one of the new lands which the Renaissance had a dded to Western civiliza- tion, and she was reborn in the eighteenth century by an act of severance, political and religious, from the Old World out of which she sprang. Not till our own day did she return to that community of older nations who have the world's fortunes in their keeping, and she returned with a rich experience of know- ledge organizing industry, liberty shaping government, and religion released from tradition. Germany was the other extreme of the four, for in the eighteenth century she had the maximum of antiquated politi- cal machinery and the minimum of outlook for industry or expansion. The fratricidal slaughter and. destruction of the Thirty Years' War had postponed her development for a hun- dred years, but in the eighteenth century she resumed her place in the general movement. Frederick, so far as superficial culture went, borrowed from France and wrote French from preference till his dying dav. Meanwhile he developed in Prussia the type of strong government and thorough organization from which the whole world has learnt — and suffered — since, and which lends itself so well to the requirements of a society based on science allied with industry. It is on this side of the modern movement that Germany, under Prussian guidance, has become a type. But at the end of the eighteenth century there was also in Germany an array of great writers and thinkers who handled all the new knowledge of the age and prompted its spirit in the same direction as those of Britain or France. It was, however, in France and England that the tendencies of the age were most clearly marked, though they had contributed 6 The Legacy of the Revolution comparatively few to the pioneer figures of the fifteenth cen- tury. These came mostly from Italy, with stray names of fellow-workers from other lands ; for Italy was the original home of the New Birth of thought, as Greece was of the old. France and England took up the lead a little later, and they were better able to maintain it, for they had already achieved their social unity in national form. The nation is the typical group for modern history, and England and France were the two first countries to attain their nationhood. Both countries are geographically compact ; both stand in the European system, and both lean to the West. France is more central in Europe, Britain more oceanic. Near enough for constant intercourse, separate enough for national inde- pendence, they have developed on parallel but often contrasted lines, with frequent though diminishing hostility, always in modern times the leaders of European progress, now, as we believe, united in a permanent bond of friendship for freedom and mankind. When the new life of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had begun to flow in the veins of Europe, France and England responded first to the stimulus as nations, and in the seventeenth century it would be difficult to draw the balance between them. In splendour of form, in wealth and population, in general respect for the things of the mind, France was then our superior; but we could show a national spirit of freedom and activitv which ultimately placed our political order above the danger of violent revolution and gave us in the eighteenth century a definite preponderance of power. We owe this partly to that Puritan strain which made itself dominant for a time in the seventeenth century and has been a source of strength as well as narrowness to us ever since. In gifts to science, philosophv, and art we were perhaps at least as rich as they. For their Descartes or Pascal or Moliere, we had our Newton, our Milton, The Legacy of the Revolution 7 and our Locke. But in the eighteenth century the differences which were to be ultimately resolved in the revolutionary war became more accentuated. In that age the intellect of France outdistanced ours, while we were accumulating a superiority in national resources which in the conflict with Napoleon proved decisive. Above all we had two advantages. Politically the nation was united, and by the Revolution of 1689 it had acquired the means of making its will prevail in constitutional forms. Practically', both in government and in industry, we had a greater power of adapting means to ends. While the French were classifying the elements of chemistry and compiling an encyclopaedia of all the sciences, we had found out the way to govern India with a handful of settlers and to make a steam- engine which would really work. The crisis came when at the end of the century France, intellectually the most advanced of European countries, gave a violent impulse to the forward movement which was going on throughout the West. As with the Greeks, as with Galileo on his tower, as with Columbus poring over Tuscanelli's map, it was then, as always, the critical mind which moved. For if we accept the truth that not economic conditions nor geography nor the ambition of governments is theprimum mobile in human affairs but the Spirit of Man itself seeking greater freedom and expansion, then we are bound to turn to the movement of thought which preceded the Revolution as the chief explanation of its occurrence and its results. The men of the seventeenth century, looking back to the Greeks for inspiration and forward to the interpretation of Nature and the triumph of Man, had started a new impulse of human activity which came at the Revolution into violent contact with the old order in Church, Society, and State. England surmounted the crisis without a breach, but in France the conditions were sharply distinguished from our own. The Legacy of the Revolution In religion the old Catholic regime, after a period of doubt .in the time of Henri IV, had finally survived in nominal supremacy, while men's minds had drifted farther and farther away from her official doctrines. In England the multiplicity of ' Protestant variations ' had prevented the sharp conflict of orthodoxy and unbelief. The Crown in France had surrounded itself with a court of satellite nobles divorced from the land, and the burden of taxation fell upon a mass of peasantry, despised and neglected by those who lived on them and should have made their welfare the first object of concern. In England there was poverty enough and a drift of countrymen into the towns, but on the whole the landlords recognized a duty to their neighbours and lived among them, while the government of the State was in the hands of the same landlords, known to the people whom they had' to govern. In the middle of the century there was a general movement, felt more on the Continent than in England, towards a reform in administration, towards making the welfare of the people, as understood by their rulers, the main object of government. There was also a growing belief, born of the scientific movement of the previous age and especially of Xewton 5 triumphant generalizations, that the actions of men could, like the pheno- mena of nature, be reduced to simple principles and counted upon by philosophers and statesmen. The success of Frederick in Prussia was the best example of many similar attempts to govern on this plan. But France was in another case. Her Government was less capable and her people more enlightened than those of any other great State just before the Revolution began. Her Government was atrophied by selfishness and want of contact with the national life, and the nation was readier than any other to take its salvation into its own hands. The dominating mind in France, that general will which The Legacy of the Revolution 9 carried the nation through, the crises of six years and finally left it an instrument in the hands of Napoleon, was inspired by several of the general or philosophic ideas of the time, which, crude and misleading as they sometimes appear in revolu- tionary mouths, will be found among the foundations of the nineteenth century. There was the notion of the infinite per- fectibility of human nature which finds so noble an expression in Condorcet. There was the passion for freedom and nature in Rousseau. There was the belief in the unlimited power and right of the sovereign people. Now all this, and the subsequent work of the Revolution, showed itself to a conservative mind like Burke's only on its destructive side. ' Man is born free,' ran Rousseau's famous mottOj ' and everywhere he is in chains.' If this be so, the breaking of chains must be the preliminary' of any free movement ; but the chains of Rousseau are to Burke the sacred and indispensable traditions which hold society together. On this plane of thought the conflict is eternal. Every age, every man will look on the past primarily either as a thing to flee from or a thing to follow, will either prefer to build a house for himself or to live in 'his ancestors'. What we need is a temper or a principle which will take us above this unceasing clash, some ideal for the sake of which we shall be content to abandon our father's house even if we love it, some plan to guide us in building the new one for ourselves if we are com- pelled to do so. Can we out of the so-called ' principles of the Revolution ' extract any constructive principles of this order ? Clearly we can, and they will become more and more appa- rent as we proceed. Take the republican watchwords of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Each had its purely revolu- tionary or destructive side, often salutary enough. But each contains also an element of reconstruction and growth. To the man of 1789 Liberty implied in the first instance the ro The Legacy of the Revolution destruction of feudal obligations and, as the Revolution pro- ceeded, the destructive impulse spread to the abolition of all kinds of traditional authority. But it also carries with it the implication of freedom to develop the full capacity of the individual, and this capacity, as we are taught by the doctrine of perfectibility, is infinitely great. Equality meant in the height of the Revolution the striking down of any superiority : even the eminence of Condorcet or the science of Lavoisier weighed for nothing in their favour. But the idea of equality also contains the constructive notion that every human being should have an equal opportunity — so far as society can make it equal — of realizing his powers, and that every man should be equal before the law. Fraternity, though misused by republican armies when aggressive, was the most positive of all the watch- words, and, allied with freedom in the true sense, will be found a continuous force in society, growing in intensity down to our own time. Tolstoi, the figure of purest humanity in post- Revolutionary days, recreates the passion for us with no touch of violence, in the form of an ideal Christianity — a religion based on brotherhood and self-suppression. We know that all these good things were implicit in the ' principles of the Revolution ', and were sincerely and pas- sionately held by many of the actors in it ; but when we turn to their issue in the wars and reaction under Napoleon, still more when we compare the French ideals with the actualities of England, we are brought to an abrupt and bewildering pause. The world was not ripe ; the principles were inadequately thought out ; the means adopted were inconsistent with the ends proposed. Such are the various explanations that force themselves on the mind. Let us then retrace the main stages of the Revolution, having England mainly in our eye, and afterwards restate the under- lying principles with such corrections and enlargements as later The Legacy of the Revolution 1 1 experience has impressed upon mankind. It is only in this broader sense that the Revolution can be regarded as the seed- plot of the modern age. England, when confronted by the daring innovators of France, gave various response. There was the enthusiastic sympathy expressed by Wordsworth, but by no means confined to him. For the ideals of freedom and human progress, like all the greatest things in history, were current with us, and in Germany as well as in France. The spectacle of a great nation — the most famous in Europe — throwing off the fetters of an autocratic government, determined to control and to improve its fate, struck most intelligent observers with as much admira- tion as the Russian revolution aroused among us in 1917. They knew the lot of the French peasants to be a poor one — worse, travellers said, than anything in England. Men rejoiced to see them entering into a new state of being, where the prospect of individual power and happiness was open to them, and the face of every man would brighten with the joy of others. But there were other thoughts. It has never been the English way to obtain an object, however desirable, by a violent breach with the past. We love, like the ancient Romans, to find some way of attaining our end which seems naturally to follow on what has gone before. Cromwell, our greatest revolu- tionist, strove to the last to preserve the ancient forms, and lost his power when it was seen that between the old and new order there was no common link. The final settlement of 1689 suc- ceeded by keeping as close as possible to the ancient dynasty and constitutional law. This tendency of Britain's had been strengthened in the century which succeeded our own revolution. The Gtorges by their habits and language had thrown us back on ourselves. Scotland was at last assimilated, and the triumphs of Chatham East and West raised the national fervour again, in a larger 1 2 The Legacy of the Revolution theatre, to something like Elizabethan heat. Such was the background of Burke's immortal panegyric on constitutional order and social growth. The French portent and challenge came to men who had lived through and learnt all this. Across the channel, within sight of our coast, our rivals of the century were hewing down their own institutions right and left without restraint and without reverence. For this, though all were amazed, the wiser among us saw some reason, though a doubtful prospect. Then came the moral revulsion, abhorrence of the suffering inflicted on innocent people for reasons of State. Lastly, in the aggressive stage, the Revolution began to over- flow France and sweep away the rights and possessions of other people wherever they conflicted with its own interests : at this point the patriotism of 1793 was merged in the imperialism 01 Napoleon, and the whole world was driven to arms. We were so clearly right to resist Napoleon that it is the more necessary to insist on the value of the ideal elements in the earlier French movement. It was a light to the world, the flaming- np of subterranean fires which had been kindling the mind of Europe: and for France herself it burnt the dross and forged new tools. If we compare the state of England and France in 1815 when the fires had at last died down, there can be no doubt that, in spite of revolutionary exhaustion and her final defeat tinder Napoleon, the civilization of France had been in many points advanced beyond our own. Her population as a whole was awakened, as ours was to be in a milder form by the Chartist agitation. The French were from that time forward readv, under repression, for the rebound. Her soil, by the sale of Church land and the increase in peasant proprietors, besame able to support a far larger number of thrifty and contented people than our own. The Convention, on the eve of the Terror, had planned a general system of primary euu;ation which The Legacy of the Revolution 1 3 was a model for later years, and had actually established several higher schools in Paris of which we had no Conception until well on into the following century. It had compiled a code of law which Napoleon completed and issued in his own name. He himself, while doing little to supply the educational needs, reformed the financial, judicial, and administrative system and set a permanent stamp on the abolition of feudal privilege. Merit, if it could be recognized, was henceforth to be the rule of promotion and the guidance of France, a wholesome advance on the chance and scramble of a pure democracy, and a rule for which we have struggled with imperfect success ever since. Now Britain during her conflict had done none of these things, but she was passing through the acutest stage of a parallel revolution in industry. She had grown strong at sea and rich as a nation of shop-keepers. Her constitution, by weathering the storm, had gained fresh lustre and added strength. Factories at home, fresh possessions and expand- ing trade abroad, confirmed the nation in its policy of isolation and internal strength. But this strength itself was subject to serious abatement when one looked beneath the surface. The public debt had risen mountains high, a greater weight in proportion to our wealth than the Great War had imposed upon us after three years. But actually more injurious were the poverty and degradation of the manual workers. They had crowded into the towns, their wages were at the lowest point, and the remedial legislation of the nine- teenth century had not yet begun ; it was not in fact con- templated by the accepted philosophy of the day. For the movement towards freedom, which in France had swept away thrones and privilege, had taken in England the form of removing the ancient- restrictions on industry. The rules of apprenticeship, the limitations of the poor to their- own parish for relief, all regulations which might hamper the extension of 14 The Legacy of the Revolution that commerce by which we had defeated France, were relaxed in the name df liberty : but it was liberty without the content of a human life. The first small effort to ameliorate the lives o± yaung workers — the climbing bovs — was not made till after the turn of the century in 1802. Politically the stream of relorm which had begun to flow in the early days of Pitt was completely stayed. The removal of the least abuse in the political ma- chinery seemed like a step towards the abyss, and every one who asked for free speech or a free vote was a Robespierre in the making. Such, was, for the time, the contrast established between the two leading nations of the West. Yet beneath the surface the same streams of thought were surging on. In England, when the war was over and the reaction dying down, Adam Smith and Bentham became the guiding stars in the first period of reform. Both of them were international in the fullest sense and strongly influenced by the group of men who gathered round Diderot's Encyclofedie. The whole grou? in their turn, and all the philosophy of the day, drew largely from Hume, the most penetrating critical intellect of the age. There are continuous links on both sides, for Hume's thought goes back to Hobbes and the scientific movement of the seven- teenth century, while Kant in Germany begins by a reconstruc- tion based on Hume and is stimulated also by Rousseau, and Voltaire is largely indebted to Locke. And of the lesser but still important forces Helvetius, who sought by an analrsis of the- mind to establish the necessary identity of the interests of the individual and the whole community, set Bentham thinking, and thus leads in the early years of the nineteenth centurv to the doctrine of the utilitarians ; while Italy contributed Beccaria to the movement, who strove by an analvsis of penal legislation to strengthen the elements of humanity and reason. The Legacy of the Revolution i y The growth of a general or European frame of mind was never more clearly demonstrated than at the period when our sketch begins. But it is one thing to believe in and to realize this, and quite another to trace its workings in the manifold difficulties and turnings of practical life. Here is the supreme task which faces any one who attempts what may be called a philosophical view of history — to satisfy our reason which demands some justification of human doings from a rational standpoint with- out falsifying the facts which are so often full of perversity and unreason ; in short, to reconcile the ideal with the actual. The one plan, ordinarily followed in special histories, is simply to narrate the sequence of events in the particular department or period of study without regard to the general coherence or purpose of the whole. The other extreme, represented by such a writer as Hegel, is to consider the whole merely as the evolu- tion in time of one or two general ideas and to evacuate these of nearly all their content, of personal passion, accident, and mistakes. Either alternative is gravely erroneous, but surely the worst of all errors is to ignore or deny the validity of the ideal aspect which is just as real a fact' in the minds of men as the cannon-shot or the actions of leading individuals- — things only put in motion by human thought in the mass. We shall endeavour in the twelve short chapters which follcw to avoid the worst evils of either method while returning constantly to the main intellectual tendencies which seem to have marked the last hundred years of Western history. They are new in their concurrence in so many independent centres of civilized life, new entirely in many of their applications, new in the strength with which they are held by multitudes of men, not new of course in their appearance in the world. Such newness, without root or preparation in the past, would be, if conceivable at all, only an evidence of transitory illusion. But newness in the other sense, of a wide-spread application of great ideas which 1 6 The Legacy of the Revolution had before been regarded as the visions of isolated dreamers, we hold to be manifest in the period of our review. It was, and is, a moment of new life such as the world has seen more than once before even in the short span of man's recorded history. The advent of Christianity was such a time, when into a world just knit up by Greek thought and Roman action there came a new passion for moral purity and for living and loving in this world as a preparation for another. There came another moment somewhat like it when in the thirteenth century St. Francis and his fellows preached again a gospel of kindness and simplicity after the reconciliation of Catholic theology and Greek philo- sophy. But the new birth of humanity at the Revolution and after brought even a larger store of thought and force and idealism together. We need before entering on a more detailed review to disentangle what appear to be the leading motives in the drama. We should put first the growth of knowledge, and of know- ledge in that connected and ordered form which we call science. The dominance of this factor in modern life has not escaped, could not escape, the notice of any philosophic mind which surveyed the field. One may find it amply dealt with in such an utterance as Mr. Balfour's presidential address to the British Association in 1900. But it is a reminder which we in England have always needed more than an}' other great nation in the modern world, much more than our neighbours either in France or Germany. We gave the world the greatest herald of the coming change in Francis Bacon, and we have contri- buted at least as richly as any other people to the progress of the scientific knowledge which Bacon hailed. But we have never appreciated knowledge as a nation or made it an ideal as others have. Those Englishmen, like Bacon himself or in our own time Spencer, who spoke as prophets of the value of science have always found a readier hearing abroad and become greater The Legacy of the Revolution 1 7 heroes than at home. The French Encyclopedie of Diderot, which ushered in the Revolution, is an impressive symbol of respect for modern and coherent knowledge. It rallied the leading thinkers of France and gave them a platform which they could find nowhere else. They refer constantly to Bacon as their apostle and use his language to express their purpose. Like him they set out to found an ' empire of virtue ' and to increase human happiness by the growth and spread of science. Where shall we find such a group in England ? Hardly in that Club of Johnson's which was prevailingly Tory in politics, and did not attempt any work of sustained and collective intellectual labour. Perhaps the nearest parallel would be in Scotland, among the group of men who gathered round and followed Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart ; and there we should find an instructive contrast. The outcome of their intercourse, the nearest analogue as a piece of concerted effort by a group of advanced thinkers in Great Britain, was undoubtedly the Edinburgh Review, proposed by Sydney Smith in 1802 at the famous supper in Buccleuch Place and carried out by Jeffrey, Brougham, Horner, and Smith. Their motto, to be set beside the Encyclopaedists' ' empire of virtue by the spread of knowledge ', was Sydney Smith's, ' I have a passionate love for common justice and common sense'. For while the best mind in France has been devoted to ideal con- structions and to science, the corresponding preference has been given in England to business and practical life in politics and elsewhere. But this will not prevent us from seeing in the growth, application, and appreciation of knowledge the first of the leading traits which characterize the modern world. The difference arises from the fact that the comparative political freedom of England had given a greater scope to talent in that direction. We are now, a hundred years later, entering on a time when it will be impossible thus sharply to distinguish 2170 c 1 8 The Legacy of the Revolution between the different nations in the Western family. In the interval the English political habit has overspread the world, and we, in our turn, have been learning the general value and fruitfulness of knowledge. We have still far to ?o on that road. But in the end we shall have learnt to prize, to teach, and to apply it as we already have taken our full share in building it up. This scientific structure, embracing more and more of our own nature and the surrounding cosmos, with its attendant develop- ments in industry and wealth and population and its attendant organization and specialization both of thought and life, is the first and most important of all the salient features of the modern age. The second feature is less easy to define, but no less certain, when once we apprehend it. To some men — Lord Acton was one — it seems supreme, the end of all our life and effort : and they call it freedom. It means, among a hundred other things, the opportunity for every one of exercising more power in the direction of his own life and the life of the community in which he lives. We shall see in the next chapter how a movement of this kind began again with vigour as soon as the repression of the French war was withdrawn. But personal and political freedom is allied to much else in the development of man's life, and belongs really to a larger conception which is perhats better described in other words. There has been in this modern stage of history a progressive effort to gain for one's self and to secure for others a fuller life on all sides, the fullest life of which the individual is capable. This is the largest aspect in which v.e may regard the search for freedom ; and so reearded, the increase of knowledge by science, the deepening of thought in philosophy, the aspirations of the poet, the creations of beautv, are all seen to contribute their share to the ideal. But the poets have done most to build it up in men's minds. For us in Britain Burns and Wordsworth and Shelley were the most powerful The Legacy of the Revolution 15 voices, but a host of others join in chorus throughout the Western world. We shall see later how the literature of the age, and particularly the earlier part of it when the fervour of the revival was at its height, speak of a new ideal of life, free and full, in harmony with all sides of our own nature, in harmony too with something in surrounding nature which seems to call on us for a reply. To the reflective mind Wordsworth expresses this most fully ; to the simpler soul Burns is the trumpet-call, and the echo which his songs have roused throughout the English- speaking world, springs from the depth of passion. The social, friendly, honest man, Whate'er he be, 'Tis he fulfils great Nature's plan, And none but he. This is the basis of what is called the ' democratic ' movement in the nineteenth century ; and to this belief is added the necessary corollary that if the simple man, merely through his humanity, is the fulfilment of Nature, so he, by that very fact, can claim from society, as his own fulfilment, a share of all the goods that society has acquired. Hence the movement for social reform and popular education which we shall trace ; and we rank it second among the outstanding features of the modern world. If we call this, which to Lord Acton was freedom, by the wider name of the ' growth of soul ', another step will take us to the collective aspects of that growth which are no less obvious in the same age. The family, the town, the church, the State, have all such a real super-personal existence and affect us in ways distinct from the separate individuals who compose them. Of all these forms of collective being the Nation plays the largest part in modern history. Here again the nineteenth century is the period of chief expansion, not for a new or passing fashion, but for a fundamental condition of human life which had c 2 2C The Legacy of the Revolution o J been taking shape for age? and gained a special strength at the Revolution, France grave the national principle electric force by the violence of it; inrern.il struggle. So violent was it that in effect it was a new nation which flowed over Europe, doing vital work of r reservation and of propaganda. By neience at Valmv and Jemappes, by conquest with Napoleon. France consolidated herself within and inspired other nations without, some bv example, others by reaction. The Congress of ^ ienna and the 'Holy Alliance' which followed were unable for long to repress the current. First Greece and. through an un- broken course down to the tragedies of recent years, every part of Europe has since been struggling for a strong national system. Yet even nationality is overshadowed by the still larger growth which marks the century of our study. For by a strange, apparent contradiction the bitterest and most determined struggles of nationality have taken place in a world tending to greater unitv. We micht, in fact, speak with equal truth of the age of risine internationalism as of competing nations. This will become clearer as we proceed. Science and industrv have knit up the world, but it has not yet fully found its souL That soul is nascent, just as the soul of France was nascent in Jeanne Dare and born in the Revolution, and the soul of England stirred in Chaucer and was born with c-hakespeare. So in the world a wider consciousness, though nascent, has still to come. That we believe in its cominsr. even in the midst of the greatest war, is of all symptoms the most striking of an Ace of Hope. And in this quality of Hope we have another of the proiound characteristics of the aee. >ince the reforming pio- neers of the Revolution a hundred and fiftv vears aeo. men have been living for the future and believing in it as thev had never done before. Some writers have seen in this dominion of the future the principle of a religion, the solution of all the problems of our being. ^ e 3re content here to observe it, as everv The Legacy of the Revolution 21 student must, and to connect it with other aspects of modern life. With one other aspect the connexion is intimate and full of meaning. We have been living for the future and living in hope. Whence comes this assurance, on what do we rest this hope ? It is not a blind or instinctive confidence ; and no undeniable, external voice has in this recent period revealed it to us. We must unquestionably find the food for the belief, the impulse to the future, in the deeper knowledge and understanding of the past that has developed with it. It is an age of history as truly as an age of hope. And history has taken shape in the same years, no longer as a statement— true and well explained as may b.e — of what took place at any given epoch in the past, but as the revelation of an illimitable upward process in which mankind and all creation are labouring together from moment to moment and age to age. History in this full sense is also the child of the eighteenth, the adolescent of the nineteenth century. And history has helped immeasurably to fortify the early hopes of reformers by showing that, imperfect as we are and bloodstained as our path has been, we yet have risen already from a lower state and have it in us to advance to one still nobler. A life which hope can turn to, but to be won by effort and hastened by stronger effort — this is the guarantee of history. The historical spirit of the century is thus closely bound up with that inclination to look forward and work for a better future which is also a mark of the times. The two interests do not always dwell together in the same brain, and might seem, like those of nations and of humanity, to be antagonistic. But, as in that contradiction, so here, the opposition is ulti- mately to be resolved in a deeper unity, until at last we may feel that in passing from one to the other we are really studying the obverse and reverse, concave and convex, of the -same object. History can describe the past and give us some guaran- tee for the ideal future. It is for the poets to picture it and 22 The Legacy of the Revolution inspire the will. In that imaginative world, to which we turn in moments of aspiration and distant vision;, Shelley among English poets reigns supreme. The darkest moments 01 the reaction did not extinguish Hope in him and what he wrote in 1819, 1 exaggerated by passion as it is. might well be taken as the paean of modern Hope svmj in the hour of despair. At that day too, Time seemed to have grown grey in waiting for a better world ; and Hope alone of all Time's children was left, wandering distraught. At last, as she is lying in the street, waiting for the feet of Murder. Fraud, and Anarchy to trample her down, the u?htninj flashes and the clouds are seen piled up like giant; in the sky: and then the stars shine out and there seem; to come a new presence in the air. And when the prostrate people looked, the maid had risen and, ankle-deer in clcod, was yet walking on with a quiet mien. Suddenly she break; out with that tremendous son? in which patriotism, history, and humanity all conspire to stir the soul : Men of England, heirs of Glorv, Heroes of un.vritten storv, Nurslings of one mightv Mother, Hopes of her and one another ; Rise like lions after slumber ! 1 T-e-Ma.ko* Anarciv'. II THE POLITICAL REVIVAL We take certain dates and striking events in history as turning- points or starting-points in new epochs; and 1815 is one of them. But it would be a gross error to overlook the continuity of movements before and after the chosen point. France in 1815 lost all her conquests and returned to the monarchy of the ancien regime. But she had gained in the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods a fresh national spirit, a compactness and a readiness to act, which she had not known before. Her judicial and administrative system had been recast and strengthened, and her peasant proprietorship enlarged. In these respects she was now in advance of us. But we too had been moving, even in the time of the strongest reaction against the Revolution. The reforming spirit of 1780 of which Pitt was the constitutional spokesman was never quite extinct. In the sphere of administration, for instance, inquiries and reforms were being constantly discussed and sometimes carried out. In 1809 a law was passed forbidding the sale of public offices ; in 1812 a bill was introduced for the abolition of sinecures and the founding of pensions for public servants with the money saved : it was thrown out by the House of Lords but was not without certain indirect results. But the war and the king together were able to prevent any serious political changes, and the Prince of Wales, who had been the hope of Whigs and reformers when in opposition, became, when he succeeded as Regent and as George IV, a worse Tory than his father. We have to look outside government circles for the mainsprings of the reform which was to come. The growth of science and 1\ 'The Political Revival industry, and, on another line which must ultimately loalcscO with them, the growth of a new spirit of sincerity and humanity in religion, these were the deepest causes, and llieir action is clearly traceable even in the dark days bclore our proper story begins. Take three or four typical lines of anion on which far-reaching developments were to follow. The evangelical movement in religion, with Wesley as its leading figure, had preceded the end of the century. It was a revolt against the coldness and formality of current religion, sliiilly and closely analogous to the revolt against artificiality in literature lor which the great Romantics stand. The ' methodist ', outside the official order, despised by the ' world', might well feel some of that quiet confidence which marked the Clnislian ol t lie first and second century A. n. His lime was to come, not perhaps in the distant personal visions which sometimes attracted him, but in a new earth where all slaves would be free. The campaign for the freedom of slaves, in the technical sense, had practically been fought out before the nineteenth century began. In 1807 the oversea traffic in slaves was abolished. Jt was another manifestation of the growing belief in the value and dignity of the individual human soul. Wilbcii'orcc and Clarkson were prophets of the Revolution as truly as Rousseau or Shelley, and they found ardent sympathizers in the Trench Convention. It was a proper and necessary application of their principles to go further and say, if you are so anxious by Slate ai lion to prohibit certain relations between human beings abroad in the interest of the weak, why shrink from imposing, also in the interest of the weak, certain conditions on the employers of labour at home f Not slaves in the legal sense, the miserable pauper child in the factory, the half-starved, half- naked woman in the coal-mine, were quite as unable to defend them- selves as the negroes on a plantation. Are I hey less needy of sympathy and protection because they are while ? This light "The Political Revival if also was really determined in principle before our period begins. The first Sir Robert Peel had passed an Act in 1S02 protecting the climbing bovs, and Shaftesbury is in the succession of the humanitarians of the eighteenth century. Another humanitarian movement which arose in the eigh- teenth and led directly to the wider reforms of the nineteenth century was the agitation for the improvement of prisons, in which John Howard took the leading part. Howard's work was done before the Revolution broke out : he died in 1790. Mrs. Fry, who carried on the same task for women which Howard had begun for men, did most of her work in the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth eenturv in the full swing of the political movement which we are now to consider. There are two points- about all these and similar movements which should be laid to heart as soon as possible, and often re- called. One is their coincidence in historv. \\ e cannot avoid the conclusion that thev are varied symptoms of one common and general movement in the mind of man. The other point confirms this. The same people who interest themselves in one branch of philanthropic work are nearly always led, so far as their time and powers permit, to extend their efforts to kindred subjects. Howard went on from prison-reform to the study and amelioration of suiferers from the plague. Mrs. Fry built schools for children as well as reforming prisons for women. The cause of the young, the weak, and the suffering is closelr allied, and humanity is built up by manifold services. The movement for reform which we have called the ' Political Revival ' centres in England on the passing of the Reform Bill, and in France on the Revolution of July 1S50. There was, as we shall see, an actual connexion between the two events as between so many critical steps in the two countries. The French landmarks are significant of the general trend of thought and verv useful for us and other countries. The Resolution of 26 The Political Revival 1830 was middle-class lite our Reform Bill of 1S52. The Revo- lutions of 1848 were proletarian or working-class, and the corre- sponding movement in England came a little later in the Reform Bills of 1S67 and 1884. Corresponding with the demo- cratic imperialism of Xapoleon III we find a general reaction on materialistic and aggressive national lines which may be brought down roughly to the end of the century. Then, at last, with the new century we reach what we trust may be the permanent approximation of the liberal and reforming forces in the world, beginning to work out their problems of social progress deliberately and in consultation. The first phase which culminated in France in 1830 and in England two years later, while alike in its main features and issues, differed in its details just as the whole social and political systems of France and England then differed. The aim of the French Revolution of that time was to secure a svstem of con- stitutional government, ministers responsible to the elected chamber, and freedom of press and speech. The political issue for us in England appeared primarilv as a clearance of abuses which had overgrown the svstem of freedom and justice, which is the birthright of everv Englishman. So it has appeared at most of the crises in our national history, and it is well for us that we feel it so. The main public interest therefore in the first twenty vears after 1815 was political, devoted to the task of securing a mo:e perfect expression of the public will in both England and France. The Government in both countries was to act in accordance with what was then thought to be the best opinion of the nation. The story in England is a striking example of the political instinct of our people, and their concentration on one issue, remote apparently from the most urgent needs of the moment, and not in fact of immediate benefit to the great majority of those who were agitating to promote it. The Political Revival 27 For consider what were actually the most urgent needs of the country when the war with Napoleon came at length to a close. The first was, unquestionably, to relieve the poverty and distress of the people. Wages were extremely low and work was scarce. Some whole parishes were deserted by their inhabitants, who tramped the country in search of employment. The workhouses were teeming with inmates, and the poor law tended to increase, and not diminish, the number of paupers. The returning soldiers, for whom no foresight had been exercised by the State, swelled the stream of the workless poor. The price of corn was kept artificially high by corn-laws which were maintained by a landlord Parliament in the landlords' interest. To crown all this, came a succession of bad harvests ; that of 1 816 was specially bad. This, then, was the primary and most pressing need. Next to this the impartial well-wisher for his country's weal would have put better provision for the education of the people. Sunday schools had been started by Robert Raikes before the end of the eighteenth century, and benevolent persons such as Hannah More and Sydney Smith had been setting these up in various places for general instruction in the rudiments of reading and writing. But the supply was far too small and unorganized. The State knew nothing of it : and though George III and the Royal Dukes showed some interest in the schemes of Bell and Lancaster, just as Charles II had played with physical science, there was no attempt to support or regulate public education by State action until after the Reformed Parliament had met. Thirdly, in the order of national evils, our reformer would probably have put the barbarity of the law and the weakness and partiality of its administration. There were still, in 1818, 223 capital offences known to the law, and in the same year 107,000 persons were counted in gaols. And just as there was 28 The Political Revival barbarity and excess of legal precaution in the defence of property, especially of all property connected with land, so there was a deficiency, in many cases a complete absence, of legal protection for the weak and poor. Some slight obligations in the matter of children's health and instruction were imposed by Sir Robert Peel's first Factory Act of 1802, but the mass of the workers were entirely unprotected. The Combination Laws punished severely any attempt by the workers to enforce better wages by a strike or even by an agreement ; but no employer was ever punished for open agreements to lower wages. An un- employed workman could be sent to prison for refusing to accept work on the employer's terms. Yet in spite of all this it was the corruption and inadequacy of the parliamentary system which finally rallied all the re- forming forces in the country. It was this which brought us several times near a popular rising, and the insistence on this which made each successive step in the improvement of the representation — in 1867, in 1884, in 1918 — an easier and a more generally accepted reform. Men felt, as Mr. Gladstone after- wards said, that if you wished to shave easily, you had better first sharpen your razor. It was quite in harmony with the general political keenness of the working classes that their first demonstration after the war — at Spa Fields in 181 6 — displayed the tricolour and de- manded reform in a revolutionary spirit. The fires of France were still alight though smothered for the moment. Starving and oppressed, the predominant idea of the active-minded poor was not to rob or to destroy the rich, but to create a better political system which would guarantee happiness and justice to all alike. Unfortunately any suggestion of political reform, above all any overt connexion with revolutionary France, threw the governing class into a panic. It was the red flag of the Terror. Things were to become still worse before they began The Political Revival 29 to mend. The demonstration at Spa Fields in London was followed by another at St. Peter's Fields near Manchester in August 1 819, for in those days Lancashire followed London. This was repressed with loss of life. It inspired Shelley's 'Mask of Anarchy ', and was the nadir of the century. The Six Acts, passed in November of the same year, limiting the right of public meeting and penalizing political writing, were the turning-point. Public meetings were held all over the country to protest against a massacre that seemed to mock Waterloo. In the West Riding the meeting was presided over by the Lord Lieutenant, a great Whig landlord. It was the first step to the hearty union of Whigs and popular reformers which gave us the Act of 1832. In the decade which followed 1819, before the Revolution of 1830 gave the signal for our own constitutional change, there were three noteworthy political events, the repeal of the Combination Laws engineered by the incomparable and indefatigable Place, the Catholic Emancipation won by O'Connell, and the revival of a liberal policy abroad due to Canning. The last we shall deal with in its place later on. On the two former a word should be said before we pass to the struggle for the Reform Bill and its sequel. All the activities of Francis Place are of extreme interest, as coming between the era of revolution, war, and reaction, which culminates in 1 8 19, and that of the new age of social and political reconstruction which begins after the great Reform Bill. Place himself was one of the most remarkable and powerful characters who have ever influenced from the back- ground our national history. Beginning life as a journeyman tailor, he lived in his earlier years with his wife and the first one or two of his fourteen children in a single room in the heart of London on the smallest income which could have sustained life. But at that very moment he was fully resolved, first, to make a fortune ; second, to educate himself to the utmost limits of 3o The Political Revival his capacity; thirdly, to become a forceinpolitics in theinterests of the working class to which he belonged. This was in 1 795- Within twenty years he had built up a prosperous business as a tailor at Charing Cross, had accumulated in a room behind his shop what was probably the best library in London on modern social and political subjects, and had become the recognized friend and adviser of all the leading reformers of the day. His was the strongest practical head in the Mill, Grote, and Bentham group, and he alone kept the reforming party together in West- minster at the time when Westminster was the typical free constituency in the countrv. He took his part in all the forward movements of the time, supported the Lancastrian schools in their early days, protested against Peterloo, gained the repeal of the Combination Laws, invented the poster which ' stopped the Duke ' and secured the Reform Bill, drafted the People's Charter, and lived on to support the repeal of the Corn Laws. As a rule an enemy and merciless critic of both official parties, ■ of Whig perhaps even more than of Tory, he was yet the strongest advocate of an alliance at any time when, as in 185 1, it seemed the obvious means of reaching the goal. As a critic of the Whigs on the one side and the newborn Socialists on the other, he fits in admirably to this period of transition. The repeal of the Combination Laws exactly suited the temper and politics of Place and his closest allies, for it was a step towards the enlargement of personal freedom and the removal of a legal restriction which had operated in practice to the detriment of the poor and the advantage of the strong. ' Let workpeople and employers be free to make their own bargains without the interference of the State ' ; this was the gospel, and to it Place — the father of fourteen — added as a necessary corollary, ' Let working people restrict their families, so that there may not be so many of them competing for the same jobs.' The Political Revival 3 1 Both these propositions remind us, in their crude form, of how much had yet to be done by inquiiy, by reflection, and by organization before government could approach the scientific state which the men of the eighteenth century had thought so easy to attain. The fight over the Combination Laws took place in 1824 and 1825. The repeal of the laws against Catholics and Non- conformists was to follow in 1828 and 1829. The stiff reaction of the first years after the peace had begun to yield. The change in tone coincides with Canning's succession to Castlereagh in 1822, and his influence was largely responsible for it. The growth of freedom which now set in, the greater confidence in the reasonableness and right feeling of mankind, was not confined to foreign policy, where for six years Canning was supreme. We may trace it also in home affairs, which always take on a similar hue. In this case the connexion and the explanation are clear enough. Castlereagh had been Foreign Secretary and practically Prime Minister from 1810 to his death in 1822. His character was so good, his life so strenuous, and his prestige so great, that the leadership of Lord Liverpool was not much more than nominal. Now Castlereagh had been on the diplo- matic side as much responsible for England's triumph and Napoleon's defeat as Wellington was on the field. Together they stood for England in the eyes of Europe, and they rightly gained a corresponding weight in the counsels of their country- men at home. This weight was always thrown on the side of extreme caution, of the least possible change, and, if necessary, of forcible repression. Canning, inferior in character to either of them, was yet by mental outlook and by personal antecedents freer to take a new line. Doubtless we may trace his influence in the later diplo- matic papers of Castlereagh, which Canning used without 3 2 The Political Revival alteration after his accession to full power in 1822. Thus the policy of England advanced without a break from the caution and moderation of Castlereagh's attitude at the Congress of Vienna to the bolder line of encouraging the aspirations of struggling nationalities which was the glory of Canning and finally severed us from the .alliance of the reactionary Powers. After Canning's death in 1828, Wellington became Prime Minister within a year. By that time the die was really cast. Reform was bound to come in England and the bourgeois Revolution in France. But the Duke was then too old and too blind to read the signs. He agreed to give the Catholics their freedom, and then went out before the storm. It was his final term of power. For two short periods he joined Peel in later ministries and was still the staunch and patriotic friend of colleagues and of country. But the relief of the Catholics was his last, as it was his best, act of personal re- sponsibility. It was the leading political question in home affairs in the last years before Reform, and the concession by the Duke in 1829 prepared the way for the solution of the larger issue. When the Catholic religion, connected with traditions of disloyalty in England and with the recent re- bellion in Ireland, was at last declared no bar to office or a seat in Parliament, it began to dawn on many a timid mind that a larger and truer representation of the people might not be so terrible a risk. If we are to trust the Catholics, as even the Duke was at last prepared to do, may we not trust the whole nation ? So far as the Catholics were concerned, Pitt, who had aban- doned general reform under revolutionary stress, had remained liberal as long as possible. It was the well understood sequel of the Act of Union that, deprived of theirindependent Parliament, the Irish — including of course a Catholic majority — were to be free to sit at Westminster. But George III had found here an insuperable stumbling-block. His coronation oath to maintain The Political Revival 33 the Protestant religion appeared to him to forbid his consent, and Pitt resigned in 1801. The straiter Tories (Eldon through- out, the Duke up to the last practicable moment) suppor ed the King. Ireland herself, led by O'Connell, forced the pass. The Catholic* Association, dissolved and quietly reconstituted, refusing to pay taxes and threatening an insurrection, at last broke down the resistance when George IV was king. It gave England an example which Birmingham and many other towns were ready to take up in 1832. The Reform agitation which led to the first great Act will always remain a little epic of English political life. The absurd and wellnigh incredible anomalies which had to be removed, the pleasure mixed up with the abuses, the humours of the contest, the grim determination of the few, the skilful mar- shalling of all the reforming camps into one striking and ultimately irresistible force, the exaggerated hopes of the enthusiasts, the quiet acquiescence of everybody when the deed was done, all this, with its strength and its weakness, we are ready to believe is typically English. What we do not recognize so readily is the coincidence of our national timepiece with the moments of the European clock. This Reform, like the Reformation, like the Tudor monarchy, like the rise of science and the Industrial Revolution, was synchronous, though in a different tone, with events abroad and especially in France. The confusion and corruption of the old franchises have been so oft and so fully described in the history books that we need not dwell long upon them. One or two facts will suffice. Of 658 members of Parliament 424 were nominated either by government agents or by private individuals. These, therefore, were in no sense representative of the constituencies, and in many cases the constituencies themselves had ceased to exist. They might lie under the sea, like Dunwich, where the 2170 n 34 The Political Revival proprietor took a boat on the polling day and conducted the election some fathoms above the ancient borough. Or they might be deserted sites on ground like Old Sarum or Bute, where one elector returned the member. Many large modern towns, even Manchester and Birmingham, had no member, while the whole of Scotland had only 45 to Cornwall's 44. In the election of 1818 there had been only 100 contests; and of these the majority, owing to the loose and open method of voting, the mustering of their tenants by the landlords, the jovial intimidation which prevailed, could not by any stretch of imagination be considered as a serious expression of opinion. The election was rather a rowdy meeting on a succession of market-days ; and when the Duke declared, on the eve of the final contest, that it would have been impossible to devise a more perfect system if we were starting afresh, a shout of indignant laughter ran through the country. The Duke had no sense of humour, and though an excess of this quality has sometimes proved fatal to a statesman, its complete absence may on occasion be found almost equally inconvenient. For we had at this crisis, more perfectly combined than at any other moment in our history, all the strongest forces of the nation against the feudal inheritance of a handful of landlords and their dependents. There was the solid commercial interest of all the rising towns, centred in Birmingham. There was working- class opinion, organized by Place and his friends in London, expecting no doubt more from Reform than it was ever likely to give them, but determined that the change should be made. And clinching all these, and giving them voice, was the intel- lectual element which had been struggling to power for fifty years in newspapers, pamphlets, and reviews, and had found its most telling expression in the Edinburgh. The day of triumph had come at last, and one can still hear the echo in that immortal story of Sydney Smith's mass meeting at Taunton Castle in The Political Revival 3 y October 1831. There, before a keen and crowded audience of all classes, he acted, with vigorous gestures and every appearance ci ^nger, the great apologue of Dame Partington determined to sweep back the waves of the Atlantic. The speech was dispatched by special post to London to be read by Lord Grey and his colleagues in the Whig Cabinet, which was to carry reform in the next session. Grey had taken office in 1830 after the accession of William IV. When the new king's first Parliament met, the Duke had assured them that ' human nature is incapable of attaining at one stroke so great perfection ' as the British Constitution. True in one sense as this undoubtedly was, the House of Commons had refused to accept the assurance as a reason for not attempting to make the Constitution even more perfect. Though the new king was more favourable to reform than the old, stern measures were still needed to clear the last obstacle, the adverse majority in the House of Lords. The final stage came on a wrecking amendment of theLords in May 1832. For some days there was no Government. Grey refused to go on without assurances from the King. The Duke was egged on by the die-hards to take office, without Peel, against the Commons and the nation, and with increasing evidence that only armed force and a doubtful issue were before him. Birmingham and other places were preparing barricades on the new French pattern. Then came the famous placard 'to stop the duke go for gold'. It was struck out by Place among his friends in the library at Charing Cross, and by the aid of his associates soon posted all over the country. The mere beginning of the run on gold, added to the other symptoms, completed the enlightenment of King and Duke. Wellington accepted his defeat, and Grey returned to power with the necessary pledge to create peers. The placard deserves its place, besides Smith's apologue, in d 2 j 6 The Political Revival our national annals. It was the marching orders of the man of action beside the mot of the man of wit. Together they symbolize the union at this crisis of working-class Radicals and- middle-class Whigs. The first Reform Bill, in spite of the enthusiasm it aroused, was a very moderate measure of democracy. In this respect it was valuable rather for the removal of abuses than the wide extension of freedom granted. But it gave an impulse to other reform. Many measures were passed, and more discussed, in the ten years of Whig supremacy which followed. For as the Whigs had carried the Reform, they naturally dominated for some time the reformed Parliament which they had created. That Parliament, true to the principles of its founders, extended the representative system to the government of municipalities, first to Scotland in 1833, then to England in 1835, and, finally, after many years of conflict with the Lords, to Ireland in 1840. It carried out the humanitarian spirit of the earlier reformers, conspicuously in the abolition of slavery in the colonies. The abolition of the venal boroughs at home at once led to the public purchase of the slaves' freedom for .£20,000,000 in 1833. It carried further the amelioration of the criminal law which Peel had begun in 1821, when he removed 100 capital offences from the list. It set up a Central Criminal Court in 1834. On three other lines it commenced the work of social reform which becomes the predominant interest in the politics of later times. These three lines were education, poor law, and factory legislation. In education the first State grant was given to schools in 1833, and a Committee of Council appointed to inspect them in 1839. In poor law the great Act was passed in 1834 which formed unions from parishes, imposed a workhouse test, and endeavoured to check the growth of pauperism and of the poor-rates which in many places exceeded the annual rent of the land. In factory legisla- The Political Revival 37 t;on it passed the first serious Act, on Lord Shaftesbury's initiative, in 1833, prohibiting the employment of children under nine years of age, and limiting the work of women and young persons under eighteen to twelve hours a day. To reach the same point in French and European politics which we have now touched in home affairs we need first to retrace our steps. The Charter of 1814 under which the Bourbons returned to power was in some points, especially on paper, more democratic than the contemporary English system. The franchise, though high, was uniform, and every one was equal before the law and equally admissible to all public offices. So much of the Revolution was left unshakable. A good deal of the constitution was directly borrowed from ourselves : two chambers, one nominated by the Crown, the other the House of Representatives, elected by a small body of electors paying a considerable sum in taxes, from a still smaller body of those paying a still larger sum. There was thus legally constituted in France a ' governing class ' on a purely money basis, which one might compare instructively with those ' governing classes ' of England, which had grown up irregularly, as the nation grew, in the manner that Burke had taught us to prefer. The French Charter also borrowed from England the theory of 'ministerial responsibility '. The King's ministers were to answer to the chambers for the acts of government. But the Charter unfortunately also reserved to the Crown certain rights of making ' regulations for the safety of the State ', and the King was stated therein to have ' granted the constitution te his people ' by his own sovereign power. It was on this rock that the royal ship went down. The reign of Louis XVIII was a period of violent struggles between the rival parties in France, the ' liberals ' who aimed at widening the element of popular control, the 'ultras' or clericals who first took sanguinary vengeance on the old 38 The Political Revival republicans in the 'White Terror' and then definitely entered on that course of opposition to popular sovereignty and all freedom of thought which did not end till Dreyfus was set free. But while Louis lived the throne was safe. He was personally adroit and moderate, and averse from the extreme measures taken in his name. But towards the end of his reign, after the murder of the Duke of Berry, it became cle.ir that the State of France was unstable. Secret societies, called ' la Charbonnerie ' after the kindred Carbonari of Italy, began to flourish. The Duke of Berry, heir to the throne, was murdered in 1820. The ' ultra ' government replied by repression more and more severe. In 1823, just after Canning had given a more liberal turn to foreign policy in England, the ' ultra ' government in France, against the wiser feelings of the King and his prime minister \ illele, but in concert with the sovereigns of the ' Holy Alliance ', sent a French expedition to suppress a popular rising in Spain. The immediate effect was a temporary triumph for the ie- actionaries, and Charles X. who succeeded his brother in 1824, succeeded also to the most reactionary Chamber elected since the restoration, a chamber which at once voted itself seven years' power. It was like — and yet unlike — the blind confidence of the Iron Duke six years later in England. His eyes were always opened in time to save the country, though not his own system of government. Within eight years both systems, in England and in France, had crumbled never to revive. The relations between the Duke and the King of France in these last years before the Revolution of July are a curious study. Charles X, far from wishing to develop the French Charter on English lines, set out at once on a course of whittling down the scanty liberties which it provided. He declared that he would sooner saw wood than be king on the same conditions as a king of England. Various reactionary laws were passed The Political Revival 3 9 in the first three years of his reign, laws strengthening the rights of eldest sons, religious laws threatening savage punishments for thefts in churches, and, most serious and unpopular of all in France, laws penalizing the press by taxes and regulations — a worse edition of one of our own Six Acts. Public opinion was so much alienated that the next Chamber elected, that of 1 827, had lost nearly all its reactionary majority. After a year and a half of uneasy government with a more liberal ministry, the King, on the advice of the Duke of Wellington, appointed Prince Jules de Polignac as premier, a man more reactionary and less enlightened than himself. For Polignac, besides being a son of one of the earliest emigres of 1789, had actually refused to swear to the Charter by virtue of which his master was on the throne. He had, he believed, a personal mission from the Blessed Virgin to save the country by other means. Such was the guidance which drove France in 1829 to the Revolution of 1830. Another election in 1830 gave a chamber even more hostile than the last to the King's policy. Paris was now awake, and organized by the intellectual leaders of the country. Four royal ordinances promulgated in July set fire to the train. By a violent misuse of the dangerous clause in the Charter, the King attempted to introduce a new and more limited body of voters and annulled the recent elections. Within four days the barricades were up and the King and his Government had gone. The Farce de Quinze Ans was over. The fall of Polignac in France undoubtedly hastened the defeat of his friend and patron in England. The Duke had known him when French ambassador in London, and thought him the best agent for averting a revolution and saving the Bourbon monarchy. He misjudged the situation on both sides of the Channel, and his complete and speedy discomfiture in France gave hope and courage to his opponents at home. 40 The Political Revival For the Revolution of July was a brilliant success for all the Liberals of Europe. It was prompt, moderate, and almost bloodless. Instead of their excesses of 1792 the French of 1830 were glad to accept a constitutional king, cousin of the deposed monarch. They preserved and improved their Charter of 1814; they maintained their Code Napoleon, and began to apply in a quiet and systematic way the principles of 1789 which in the hands of their first apostles had led to ruin. Englishmen might be pardoned for thinking that the common sense which they had always professed, was on its way to become the law of Europe. But they must lose no time in setting their own house in better order. The new government in France showed its kinship with the reforming movement in England. The same ideas may con- stantly be traced prompting legislative action on humanitarian and moderate democratic lines. Municipalities were reformed and created. The criminal law was softened as in England. Prisons and asylums were brought under better control. In two important matters the French at one stride outdistanced us. Their fundamental law establishing primary schools coincides exactly with the beginning of State action in England. Guizot's law was passed in 1833, when the first grants were voted in England. But whereas the French law imposed the obligation of establishing schools on every commune, and is thus comparable to our School Board Act of 1870, the English Government of the same date only offered a dole of £20,000 to the existing societies. And in the matter of child labour, their first factory law of 1841 prohibited the employment of children up to twelve years of age. But we have now to consider the parallel activity of the two Western Powers in the larger issues of nationality and interna- tional concert. The French Revolution had brought into prominence, both in France and other countries, the spirit The Political Revival 41 of nationality, which is one of the two greatest factors by which the peace of the world must be ultimately settled. The revolutionary wars had been wound up at Vienna by a treaty and an alliance which were a narrow but honest effort to recon- cile competing State interests in a larger and permanent system. The line taken by the two liberal Powers in response to these two impulses forms in view of the future the most important study of the historian who has an eye on the ideal. We cannot in either case make out a clear and consistent policy developed from the first. We are compelled in both instances to recognize many deviations and a large admixture of selfish motives and mistaken judgement. Yet on the whole the action of France and England tends to a common goal of general good. The hundred years which elapsed before the Great War prepared them for the crucial moment when they were to be allied in a determined struggle to assert a new order of national justice and the free union of nations. The Congress of Vienna was sitting, amid the tense expecta- tions of Europe, during the interval between the defeat of Napoleon in 1 8 14 and his return for the 'Hundred Days' in 1815, and again after Waterloo ; but it failed in its greater object. It could not at that day establish a new and permanent polity for Europe on the principles of nationality and freedom which were beginning to inspire the hopes of the world. It led to the re-establishment of the status quo with certain changes mostly in the interests of those who had come strongest out of the fight. Holland and Belgium were united, and Sweden and Norway ; both unions were subsequently dissolved. England received the Cape of Good Hope and a few colonial islands. The great cases of nationality which called out for treatment — the Polish, the German, the Italian — were left unsettled, and the whole Eastern question was untouched. It gave a breathing space merely, but in the course of its 42 The Political Revival meetings the position of England and France were defined in relation to the three military Powers of the North and East — Prussia, Austria, Russia. Two great men had charge of their countries' interests at the Congress, Talleyrand and Castlereagh, and their actions from different motives tended to converge. It was Talleyrand's part to re-assert for France her due weight in the councils of Europe. It was Castlereagh's object to check the ambition of any individual Power and establish a stable equilibrium ; and he was charged by England to gain if possible one special object — the agreement of the Congress to the abolition of the slave trade. Both statesmen succeeded in their definite and limited objects and their pursuit brought the two Powers together. A further step towards their co- operation took place at the Congress of Troppau in 1820. The Eastern Powers, who after the Congress of Vienna had under the initiative of the Tsar Alexander drawn more closely together in the Holy Alliance, found themselves confronted by liberal risings in various parts of Europe. They went on to bind themselves to mutual help in suppressing any attempts, of the peoples to alter their governments. Alexander had attempted to inspire the Alliance with Christian principles. Metternich, the Austrian minister, had supported it in the interests of autocratic power. Both were agreed that any movements of nations against their legal sovereigns must be put down by force. This at Troppau the three Eastern Powers agreed to do in common, and to exclude from the European Alliance any State which had undergone a revolution of which they disapproved, until, ' by peaceful means, or, if need be, by arms, they had brought back the guilty State into the bosom of the Grand Alliance '. This was the climax of Metterniclr s ascendancy and the definite breach with the Western Powers. For Castlereagh had already in 18 19 protested against the policy of leaguing the Governments against the peoples, and at The Political Revival 43 Troppau the representatives of France and England were shut out. It was a significant prelude to the series of revolutions which from 1822 to 1835 altered the Governments of Greece, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal, all in the direction of national freedom and self-government and in each case with the assistance of England and France. But before this England and the United States had, from 1810 onwards, supported the fight of the South American colonies for freedom from Spain. Englishmen had fought as individuals for Bolivar in his heroic lifelong struggle for the independence and union of the South American states, and Castlereagh had intervened in 18 17 to prevent a European Congress from supporting the claims of Spain over them. Again, after the French expedition of 1823 had revived the hopes of Spain, a movement for European intervention was frustrated by England and the United States. At last it fell to Canning in 1825 to recognize the revolted colonies as independent, and to conclude commercial treaties with them. In this early case England gave the signal to the other Powers. The case of Greece brings France and England into joint action, and is a direct link with the politics of our own day. It is full of interest of every kind. The Turkish Empire was the part of the world where the idea of nationality was least developed and most deeply overlaid by a military depotism, alien in race and largely in religion. In the Balkans, the latent nationalities, much confused among themselves, were cherishing the memories of ancient greatness and national conflict with their present masters. When they regained their strength and full national consciousness, this alien mastership would be ended. With the decay of the Turkish power in the eighteenth century they began to stir, and north of Turkey lay the Musko- vite giant ready to abet every movement of the Christian 44 The Political Revival communities agains t their foe. Peter the Great at the beginning of the eighteenth century first avowed the Russian ambition by styling himself ' Petrus I Russo-Graecorum Monarcha '. Catherine II carried the idea farther and had her nephew baptized 'Cohstantine' in order to succeed to the Greek throne which was to be. The end of the century saw more than one abortive rebellion and the spread of a secret organization of Greek patriots to promote the independence of their country. In 1820 a war between Mehemet Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, and his nominal suzerain the Sultan gave the Greeks the oppor- tunity they sought. The revolt of the Greeks in the Morea was followed by a war of extermination on both sides. The Greek patriarch Gregorius was executed by the Turks, and pyramids of Greek skulls adorned the headlands. Three things drove Canning to take action with the passionate sympathy of Western Europe behind him. The first was the romantic ideal of the West, which, half history and half hope, was beginning to project new national forms for the future wherever common deeds and common Sufferings had laid a large foundation in the past. Greece struck this cultured imagination more strongly than any other land, and men dreamt with Byron that she might still be free, For standing on the Persians' grave, I could not deem myself a slave. Greece, the ancient mother ofmodern thought, thus became the leading case in the modern world of a struggling nationality brought to birth by the collective action of progressive Europe. The second motive, which led to England's intervention in 1823, was the apprehension of a war between Turkey and Russia,, as the result of which the Northern Power would, or might,- have become completely dominant in the East. This larger aspect of the problem came up again for solution in the Crimean The Political Revival 45 War, when for the first time the whole Balkan question passed under the joint review of the Concert of European Powers. On the first occasion, in 1823, England and France forced their' way in by the side of Russia to wrest from Turkey the indepen- dence of the most easily detached of her dominions, and the most sentimentally attractive. The third motive, the actual occasion for our intervention, was the necessity of making some one responsible for policing the seas of the Greek archipelago. The Turkish fleet was impotent, and piracy was rife. In 1823 Canning recognized the insurgents as belligerent. On this the Sultan made up his quarrel with Mehemet Ali, and, for the price of Crete, the Morea, Syria, and Damascus, an Egyptian fleet and army were sent to finish with the Greeks. In 1825 the Morea was overrun. In April 1826 Missolonghi, where Byron two years before had been drilling troops almost to the day of his death, fell at last. But in the same month the Duke of Wellington, who had been sent to Petrograd.by Canning to concert joint measures with the new Tsar Nicholas I, had^drawn up the protocol by which in three years' time Greek independence was secured. In the interval events hurried on. The Greeks made a formal application to England for help. Canning, relying on the agreement with Russia, went a step further and consented to a ' pacific blockade ' of the Morea, which would have starved out the Egyptian fleet locked up in Greek harbours. France had come in, and a treaty of the three Powers was concluded on the basis of the protocol. The Turkish and Egyptian fleets, shut in by the fleets of the three protecting Powers in Navarino Bay, showed fight, and were annihilated on October 20, 1828, by the Allies under Codrington the British admiral. The death of Canning had unfortunately preceded this famous battle by two months, and the weakened English Government 4 p rlose of the eighteenth So at the Romantic --^^^ th ere if again a and the begmntng oi th ^- J^ & ^ but its general ""^^^Scdt to discern. C0 Th name U or *»ther the want of a good name, perplexes us. ' R Critic ' is of all possible terms perhaps the least satisfactory. Literally it refers back to languages which derive from Latin, by association it suggests the creation of striking but unaccus- tomed visions of life. Nothing could be less like Wordsworth, or the main purpose, if not always the actual achievement, of Hugo. Let us search further and try to find the common points and connecting links without imposing any strain on our subject-matter, without ignoring the individuality of the men of genius who make up a ' movement '. Genius is complete but not isolated. This one assumption we must make at starting. The work of these poets and their successors, individual as each must be, distinguished as they also are by national divisions, has yet its common roots in the contemporary civilization of Western Europe, and has moulded the social life which followed, in some respects to common ends. To trace these is the histo- rian's primary object. The individual colours will brighten the picture and enliven us as we proceed. We are still perhaps too near these great men of a hundred years ago to give them their final place among the eminences. We are far enough away to discern the mountain chain, not yet far enough to place it in its due relations to those on other sides and behind them. So far mankind has not agreed that any one of the group will rank with the very highest of the past, with Homer or Dante or Shakespeare, though some might, even now give such a place to Goethe or to Victor Hugo, But on the group as a whole it may be safe to venture one or two conclu- sions. Has there ever been in the world before so rich an out- burst of creative power in literature within the same space of The New Spirit in Literature yi time, so varied, so well distributed among the leading nations, and, withal, so closely knit by common traits in its inspiration and its purpose ? The magnitude of the creative power is the first and most striking aspect. To most students the lifetime of Goethe seems to cover more of the best literature of Germany than all her other years ; and it is also the flowering-time in Germany for music and philosophy. For France the lyric and reflective poetry of the nineteenth century, especially its earlier portion, are of in- comparable value ; the bulk of their fiction falls within the same period, and their drama of the nineteenth deserves com- parison with that of the seventeenth century, the only other to be mentioned in their history beside it. In England our stretch of the greatest literature is longer — longer than that of any other people. Yet, putting Shakespeare out of the account, he would be a bold man who denied that the nineteenth century, especially its earlier portion, outweighed both in volume and in value any other period, some might even say the greater part of all the rest together. For in this time we have Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Browning, and Tennyson, as well as Scott and the greatest school of novelists in the world. It is attractive to set this great creative act of European mind beside the creations of other sorts proceeding at the same moment. Are they not all parts of one creation which is fashioning science, transforming industry, and widening liberty in parallel and related movements ? Man, it seems, was becom- ing conscious of all his powers at that revolutionary moment and found them more varied and of wider scope than even the Greeks or the men of the Renaissance, who had felt earlier stirrings of the same spirit. The infinite scope of science was now added to his aspirations and the possibility of organizing the whole world in the service of human good. We cannot doubt, though we cannot prove, that as with the Greeks of the E 2 j 2 The New Spirit in Literature fifth century b. a, as with the artists and men of science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a. d., so at the end of the eighteenth there was a real and intimate connexion between all these creative acts in science, literature, music, and liberty. A new spirit of freedom is, next to its creative power, the most striking general feature in the literature of the age. It is this which connects it most closely with the political movement which we have sketched. Lessing's is the clearest voice of the new freedom in Germany, Victor Hugo's in France, Wordsworth's in England. The accents must be as varied as Freedom is, as varied as the vision of the men who gave it utterance. To Germany, as to the ' Romantics ' a little later in France, the freedom meant primarily the breaking of the conventions with which the French stage had bound itself by a mistaken and narrow rendering of Aristotle. This may seem a small thing, and remote enough in origin and in distance from the main interests of human life. Yet, when the issue came to be fought out in France, all society was divided and an actual battle raged, as fierce as any contested election in politics. The ' unities ' in a play had become a symbol of a literature where everything — language, character, and action — was to follow the accepted types. Yet Shakespeare was the greatest figure in the whole world of drama, and he was unconscious of these categories of character, unities of time and place, conventions of language. As a creator he made men and women living and individual, and he used his material not as the topiary artist cutting live trees into dead birds, but as the sculptor using rough blocks for new and vivid shapes. Hence for Lessing, Goethe, Victor Hugo, new life for the drama called for the study of Shakespeare, and since the Puritan revolution the drama meant for France and for Germany incomparably more than it did for us. This was one aspect of the new freedom. Rousseau had expressed it in other forms — in a new gospel of The New Spirit in Literature. 53 freedom in education, and Diderot in a fresh and personal criticism of art. In England the drama does not express the change. We look rather to work of another kind, and find the same mark in Wordsworth's meditations on man and nature, in Byron's revolt and passion for liberty in his own days, in Shelley's visions of an ideal world. In all these there may be traced the same desire to break away from hampering traditions of the past, the same confidence that human nature, relying on its own impulses, may create a better world in the future, which were felt by Rousseau, Condorcet, Godwin, Turgot. Freedom, directness, and greater simplicity in language were to them, as to the French and German ' Romantics ', the badge of greater freedom of the spirit. For the new poets everywhere there was to be no court livery in the service of their mistress poetry. It is a fact akin to this that all these men get nearer to the truth of human nature. But here we must distinguish, and the distinction will throw light before and after in the line of literary evolution. The truth that these men aimed at in their delineation of life, was not the microscopic, photographic study of human nature which passes by the name of naturalism. Such study tends, as in later writers, such as Balzac and his successors, to an exaggeration of human faults. The search for truth of the earlier writers found it rather in the appreciation of those traits in character which tend to greatness. Idealism there must be in every work of art. Are we to look for it in a brilliant picture of the weak and little in our nature, thrown by a powerful magnifying light upon the screen, or in the delineation of those characters and those features in any character, which, subject to given trials of circumstance, become heroic, sometimes in action, sometimes in suffering, but always in growth ? This is also truth to nature, but truth developed to a higher power. j"4 The New Spirit in Literature It will be observed, of course, that in thus proceeding from the truth of human nature and idealizing it, the men of the new age in literature were doing no new thing. The greatest makers, Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, had done it before and thus won their immortality. The test of greatness is, in fact, precisely the same with the new school of poets. Wordsworth and Scott take men and women of their own world, the poor countryman of the dales, the Scotch peasant, the Covenanting preacher, and show them as heroic in their own sphere, acting with perfect truth to their own nature, as the chiefs of Homer or the Romans of Shakespeare. This is the glory of these new poets, and we can say it of no others before them since Shakespeare. But we come now to another feature in which the writers of the new age surpass those of any earlier period. It is not pri- marily an individual quality, but it is a debt which Scott, Victor Hugo, Thackeray, and all the writers of the time owe in varied measure to the spirit of the age. This is the historical spirit which we noted before as a general characteristic. Gibbon had lived, and Montesquieu ; the beginnings of history had been laid at the end of the eighteenth century. All succeeding writers appeal to history in different tones. Byron's free Greece of the future is the Greece of history. Shelley, the least attached to tradition, is constrained by the same spirit to appeal to the heroic past of England as well as the empire of Hellenic thought. Scott lived in a recreated past. Victor Hugo crowned his life's work by a Legends des Siecles. In this respect their truth to nature aimed at another and deeper aspect of the truth, for the poets, often unconsciously, were compassing the same task which the historians and philosophers had just begun of set purpose, i.e. to understand the being and destiny of Man by studying his becoming. It is the supreme task of interpretation, the comprehensive truth of which but The New- Spirit in Literature yy one facet here and another there will gleam through the minds of the greatest masters. Scott saw the past, but had no inkling of the forces which were transforming the present. Shelley saw a future so radiant that the present seemed but a procession of hideous crimes. Of the characteristics of the nineteenth century which we noted as emerging from the great industrial and political revolu- tion, two remain to be considered in their relation to the new spirit in literature ; they are, we believe, to be the most decisive in the end. One is the force of science, of organized knowledge, in framing and inspiring life. The other is the goal of human thought and activity, the community of all human beings con- spiring to a common end by diverse means. This is the problem of humanity, and it covers those partial aspects which we know as nationalism and the international question. Now both of these kindred forces and ideals begin to be felt in the poetry of the early century, but do not yet transfuse it. Their presence and their growth during our period are palpable enough. Most significant of all is their mutual relation. Those thinkers who appreciate best the meaning and the value of the scientific evolution are those to whom the ideal of humanity is most apparent. L Of all the poets of the time Goethe is the most scientific, and he is also strongly international in spirit. Science is to him primarily a noble and attractive object of human interest — perhaps the most attractive of all — at times e-s en more so than his own liege mistress poetry herself. At times he gives us also a glimpse of the organizing aspect of science as the product of joint human labour operating through the ages. But for the notion of science as the basis of social progress we have to wait. The social question, as we now understand it, did not exist till after the industrial revolution, and Goethe's mind is essentially pre- revolutionary. Wordsworth, as we shall see, takes us a step f6 'The New Spirit in Literature farther in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, where lie describes with marvellous insight both the right relation of poetry to science and the diffictritics which hinder its realization. And Shelley, through his higher imaginative power, expresses the future ideal of knowledge transfused by love and power, more perfectly than any other poet of the age. It is to him that man appeared not as men but as ' Man, a chain of linked thought, of love and might to be divided not '. In this, the sublime chorus in the Prometheus Unbound, he attains a fuller vision than even Victor Hugo, to whom ' science is beautiful and Aristotle great, but Socrates and Xcno greater still '. On the whole the great writers of the Romantic school arc more concerned to expound the heroic in the individual ',oul as supreme above any achievement of the collective mind. Jt is not till later in the century that writers appear, individually less magnificent, but primarily interested in the collective problem. Then the growth of science becomes the guiding thought and social progress the greatest subject. George Kliot is a type in Kngland, Sully Prudhomme in France, and they speak with a voice of philosophic reflection, pitched in a lower and less passionate key. From similar causes national sentiments are stronger in the earlier writers than any feeling of the unity of mankind. It was an age of rising nationalities when France was recovering her national strength and Byron was breathing new life into the crushed frame of Greece and Canning setting free young nations in the New World. Hence nearly all the great writers of the age are full of national enthusiasm, and even the rebels among them, such as Byron and Shelley, cannot escape from it. If, like Byron, they find nothing to inspire them in their own country's achievements, they find a spiritual home elsewhere. For heroism, when it once advances beyond the Cyclops' cave, muit have its fellows to work with, its traditions to feed on, its T:e New Sp/r:r in Ltreraiun $7 common coal of victory to attain. The larger ideal of .-: hero 0: humanim is as yet b'at faintly traced : it is apt to take the form merely of a Man of Sorrow;. Curlyle gives 1:5 no picture of the hero as Mar. of Science. But we can see its need in the national seli-comr.acer.cy of Englishmen in those early decades, in the lyriea. exaggeration 0: patriotism such as Motor Hugo's. But the iarrer meal is in the marine : it cams a philosorhic expression in man)- writers : one da)' it will find its sacred This new outburst of roetry may be dated irom that famous rear 1 when V^ crdsworth. Hegel, and Beethoven were born. I o. Scott's birth followed in I — I. Turner, the painter of five men were bom. makers of new things of the f.rst moment in the thought of Eurore. There is something kindred in their rerce. Tne two creut ns.riona- poets. Goethe :or Germanv. ^ ictor Hugo for France, are not unite in this group. Goethe .-.•wL—, rrg. ; ".v. Victor Himo is thirty veers later and is a child o: tne nineteenth centum.'. Goethe looks as much to the past as Huco looks to the future. But the hve men were on the watershed. From them the streams were descending, of which we will trace a few of the brightest stretches until they are lost tnese hmirs endeavouring especially to see the common roints tose.ect a veryfewof the acknowledged and most typical masters. 1 0. which, was remarkacle tor tne birth or so much cenius. to iSfc. when a fresh revolution had taken place in Eurcre and >lc Dr. A. C. Br^cLcv is £■•:; .".'.:> r :.:",■ _->:i C:—\:n ?'-::;. ~>v. j- 8 The New Spirit in Literature Wordsworth and Scott were dead, there can be no doubt as tc5 the most representative names. We must take Wordsworth and Scott in England, Victor Hugo and Balzac in France. To select these is not to give four first prizes for genius. Genius is an individual and incomparable thing, and who shall say that Shelley is not as great a genius as Wordsworth ? In some of the most brilliant poetic qualities, in imagery, in glow of language, in creative imagination, he js manifestly his superior. But Wordsworth holds so central a position in English poetry, brings together so many threads of religious and philosophic thought and has spread his influence so wide in later literature, that no one can dispute his claim to the most serious study if we would understand the part that England played in expressing the new spirit of the age. To some critics this has become so clear that one distinguished French historian of the nineteenth century tells us that ' Wordsworth is, or is to be, the true national poet of England '. x If this be so, we must yield an exclusive national possession of Shakespeare, and allow him to belong, like Homer, like Dante, like Goethe, primarily to all mankind. And clearly there is a sense in which this is true. There is a class of great poets for whom the world and humanity at large eclipse their national background. For all there are local roots and national and temporal attachments, but with some the branches spread so wide that they cover the earth and we are apt to lose sight of the narrower origin. Such were Homer and Dante, and Shake- speare and Goethe. Such was not Virgil or Milton or Racine. Such were not those whom we have mentioned as the most representative writers in France and England in the early nine- teenth century. Victor Hugo comes the nearest to universality but hardly reaches it, while Wordsworth, with all his kinship with German philosophy and all his early enthusiasm for the 1 M. £lie Halevy. The New Spirit in Literature yo French Revolution, ends as an Englishman of the English. Byron and Shelley are of course much more cosmopolitan than he, but ' cosmopolitan ' is not the proper name of this universal quality. The universal poets have all a strong and deep root in their local or national environment, but develop their nature to embrace mankind. Byron and Shelley rather turn to man- kind for comfort and redress against the ills, real and imagined, that they have suffered in their natural home. This is the mark of the cosmopolitan as distinguished from the more thoroughly human and universal quality of mind. Now of all the great writers who occupy the early part of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth most perfectly combines strong national feelings with a mind open to new thought. And all he received from without, from the impressions of nature and the converse of friends, from political revolutions and philosophic thought, he made his own and transmuted into one substance by an intensely individual and sympathetic temper. Thus, while not a great creative poet, in the Shake- spearean sense, not cosmopolitan in any sense, he became the first and most powerful of the philosophic poets, who, with the novelists, are the literary distinction of the nineteenth century. We find in him all those features which we analysed as the ideal legacy of the Revolution. ' We live by admiration, hope and love ', he tells us, and, in words that aim at science and might be taken as the motto of the age, Truth justifies herself, and as she dwells With Hope, who would not follow where she leads r 1 The Prelude gives us the ' growth of the Poet's mind '■ — his education and early history ; above all the interest and passion aroused in him by his visit to France in the summer of 1790, when the French were celebrating their first National Fete 1 The Recluse. 60 The New Spirit in Literature and hailing their king as first citizen and constitutional chief of a regenerated country. The generous enthusiasm, the love of freedom, the hope for the future found an echo in his soul which never died. He supported the revolutionists until Napoleon's aggression alienated him, as it alienated the other greatest prophet of freedom, born in 1770, Beethoven. Then came that period of deep depression which turned him to science and the inward vision, and in which his poetry and even his sanity were preserved by the constant love and companion- ship of his sister. 1 Lyrical Ballads, one of the milestones in English poetry, appeared in 1798. It was the result of a visit of Coleridge to Wordsworth at the time when Wordsworth was living in Somerset. The friendship there formed was decisive for Wordsworth in many ways. Coleridge was able to introduce his friend to the thought of foreign philosophers, especially of Spinoza. He gave him confidence in his own powers, and the stimulus of another point of view, kindred and yet different from his own. The influence of Coleridge thus deepened and widened his own individuality. Coleridge, a mystic, with his mysticism strengthened by his philosophic training, inclined to supernatural subjects for poetic treatment. He contributed ' The Ancient Mariner ' to their joint book. Wordsworth, inclined to simple subjects of common life, wrote 'We are Seven', ' The Idiot Boy ', and many more of his familiar short poems. But the collection also contained the ' Lines above Tintern Abbey ', and most of the poems showed that deep insight into the natural, that power of seeing something beyond the natural in the commonest object which is his peculiar gift. In 1800 a second edition was called for. A number of new poems were added, some of Wordsworth's best, ' Ruth ', 1 The Prelude, Book 11. The New Spirit in Literature 5i ' The old Cumberland Beggar ', ' Lucy Gray ' ; and he added a Preface, defending and explaining his poetry, which is one of the most important documents in English criticism. It stands to English poetry in much the same position in which Victor Hugo's Preface to Cromwell, published twenty-seven years later, stands to French. The contrasts as well as the communities of thought between the two manifestoes, equally famous in their own countries, are of the highest interest and significance. We will return to them when speaking of Hugo. The main points of Wordsworth's Preface are : his account of the nature of poetry itself and of the language in which it should be expressed. What is a poet, he asks, to whom does he address himself, and what language is to be expected of him ? ' He is a man endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature and a more comprehensive soul, than are sup- posed to be common among mankind ; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of theUniverse, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.' Wordsworth accepts the dictum of Aristotle that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing, for its object is truth, not individual and local, but general and operative ; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion. It is the image of man and of nature. And where the historian has a thousand obstacles of detail standing between himself and the person to whom he has to convey his picture, the Poet, granted his superior endowment of feeling and imagination, has no other obstacle except the necessity of giving pleasure to any human being ' possessed of that information which may be expected of him not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man '. 6 2 The New Spirit in Literature The necessity of producing pleasure is not to be regarded as a degradation of his art, but an acknowledgement of the beauty of the Universe and a homage to the native dignity of man, who knows and feels and lives and moves by the ' grand elementary principle of pleasure '. ' Pleasure', understood in this wide sense of 'Joy', a sense in which Wordsworth agrees with more than one of the great contemporary schools of philo- sophy, is the universal ingredient and stimulus to action. The man of Science has no knowledge except so far as he has pleasure, and the Poet works by creating in the minds of his hearers or readers that degree of pleasure which is inseparable from sympathy with the complex of ideas and sensations which surrounds us all, and which the Poet idealizes and evokes. The man of Science has also to recreate and evoke the actual, but he ' seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor ; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude ; the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, the im- passioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. He looks before and after ; he is the rock of defence for human nature, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, and language and manners, and laws and customs ; in spite of things silently gone out of mind or violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society. The objects of the Poet's thoughts are everywhere ; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. If the labours of the man of Science should ever create any material revolution,, direct or indirect, in our condition or in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep ho more than at The New Spirit in Literature 53 present ; he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if ever the time should come when these things shall be familiar to us as suffering and enjoying beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to man, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transformation, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of Man.' It is interesting to see this point recurring later in our century, when in 1906 we find Sully Prudhomme still lamenting the little influence exercised on the inspiration of poets by the prodigious conquests of science. But Words- worth's immediate lesson is that the Poet is the man of greater promptness in thinking and feeling the general passions and thoughts of men, and greater power in expressing them. Science, therefore, has to pass into the common stock before it will be matter for the Poet to deal with. He must, if he is to do his own work well,' express these matters of common interest in the language best fitted to put his reader into the closest communion with his own thought, and to give the appropriate pleasure in the highest degree. All rules of metre or of choice of language are dictated by these simple con- siderations. Metre also, he suggests, not only gives pleasure directly, but also enables us to bear a degree of pathos which is almost intolerable in prose. 1 It tempers and restrains our passion. In the longer poems — The Prelude and The Excursion with 1 Goethe makes a similar remark to Schiller about Faust. 6\ The New Spirit in Literature the lately published fragment of The Recluse — Wordsworth was labouring to express that complete synthesis of his ideas and feelings upon which he fell back after his early disillusion- ment with the Revolution. They are often long drawn out and full of passages little distinguishable from prose. But they are invaluable as the outpouring of a profound and faithful mind struggling to set forth in simple terms the beliefs which he had arrived at in a long life of concentrated thought. These beliefs contain a glimpse of the great truth, first dawning on the men of his day, that the mind of man is a progressive thing, gaining depth and power from age to age ; but he is dominated by the idea, in which also he was a spokesman of his time, that this evolving mind of man is in communion with something behind Nature, which has a kindred existence and is qualified in some deep and half-inscrutable way, to call out a response from the human soul. Byron and many more had also given expression to this feeling ; he tells us in Childe Harold : I live not in myself but I become Portion of that around me ; and to me High mountains are a feeling. But to Wordsworth it was a far deeper, more constant and more governing thought than to Byron or to any other man. He gave himself in all his later life to the lakes and mountains and the society of a few, simple congenial spirits in order that this frame of mind might be supreme ; and it is his reward, like that of other men — an Augustine, a Descartes, a Comte — who concentrate wholly on one line of thought, to become its immortal prophet and expositor. We may pass on to Sir Walter Scott through the medium of a sentence in Carlyle's essay on him. He says — it is one of many suggestive partial truths in the midst of a generally inadequate and unappreciative treatment — that ' a great man is ever, as the Transcendentalists speak, possessed by an idea '. The New Spirit in Literature 6j By this test we have judged Wordsworth great, and Carlyle would have us judge Scott not great. Obviously it is only a test of one type of greatness, and inappropriate to creative genius of vast and varied scope. Shakespeare would not be great, judged by this standard, nor Homer nor Moliere. Words- worth had this mark of greatness, as we have seen, and, of the greatest poets, Dante. Each had a philosophic moral idea which possessed him and transfuses all his work. Scott was a genius of the other order, receptive, creative, abundant. He was born in the year after Wordsworth, and bears many traces of the same environment. But his mind being of a different temper, he used his material to quite another purpose. He was from his earliest years fed on the wild legends of the Border country in which his own Scott ancestry played a large part. A born storyteller like the Homeric rhapsodes of ancient Greece, he began to think, in adult years, of how best to make use of the rich stores with which his mind was full. It was the raw material of epics such as the Norse Sagas or the books of Joshua and Judges, or the primitive lays which grew into the Iliad. Then some one introduced him to Christabel and to the German ballads of the Rhine, and he began his work in verse. He went on to translate Goethe's Gotz of the Iron Hand. But his poetry, which was at this time reckoned second only to Byron's, seems to us now too facile, too little analytic, with too little insight into character. In this respect he is clearly not in the main line of nineteenth-century development. But in other points, perhaps, of equal moment for our present purpose, he is fully representative of the age. As heartily as Wordsworth or •Hugo, he eschewed the stilted artificial images and language of the eighteenth century, and 6poke in simple words which glowed as they ran and carried the eager mind along with them. 2170 p 66 The New Spirit m Literature Many lines, such as the ' unwept, unhonoured, and unsung ', have become a part of ourselves. The prose romances, on which mankind has rightly decided to rest his chief fame, had been begun with W averley quite early in the century at the time of the first ballads ; but they were laid aside. In 1814 Waverley appeared, and from 1814 to 1832 when he died, the year of Goethe's death, followed the unmatched series. The tragic side of the story — the business speculations, the heroic labours to pay off debt, the premature exhaustion of a strong physique — this does not con- cern us here. We take with admiration and gratitude the greatest gift of British genius to the imaginative reconstruction of the past since Shakespeare, for we know that but for Scott long stretches of our national annals would still have lain but faintly illuminated in the national consciousness. Through him the France and Flanders of Quentin Durward — scene of our greatest struggle in the war — the Highlands of The Fair Maid of Perth, the Lowlands of Old Mortality, the England of Ivanhoe, have taken on as vivid a colour in our minds as the England of Shakespeare. Herein we touch Scott's chief link with the nineteenth century, and it leads us on to the great French master of romance, who carried the historical spirit a stage further, and combined with it a creative power in poetry of all kinds. Hugo was born in 1802, when ' ce siecle avait deux ans\ He is thus more entirely the child of the nineteenth century than either of the great masters of whom we have just spoken. He shows his modernity in a fuller appreciation of the historical process than either Scott or Wordsworth. Scott was historical by virtue of living in the past, but democracy had not dawned for him. Wordsworth had an inkling of the contributions of the past and shows it in various passages of The Prelude and The New Spirit in Literature 67 The Excursion, but his supreme interest was the unfolding of the individual soul in communion with nature and living men. To Victor Hugo the historical pageant was the dominant thought : he sees it moving on to the future as well as issuing from the past, and the future was a vision of democratic freedom and happiness and triumph. Here especially he represents the nineteenth century, and above all France. He was himself the son of one of Napoleon's generals, and spent a large part of his childhood in Spain, imbibing the language, the literature, and the spirit of that home of romance. That element, therefore, held through life a larger place in his mind than the philosophy of Germany or the science of the West. Devoted to his father, he was always loyal to his father's chief, and his later democracy and freedom in religion were grafted on a stem originally Catholic and authoritative, carefully nur- tured by his mother, a royalist of La Vendee. With him, too, there was a ' growth of the poet's soul ' towards freedom, and he gives some account of this in various passages of his work. In the Preface to Cromwell, at the age of twenty-five, he thjew down the gauntlet to the conventional spirit which still held the stage in France : it was taken up and the battle fought out on the production of Hernani three years later, in 1830. To compare and sum up the differences between this Preface and Wordsworth's is the essay in criticism which we suggested above. Brilliance and breadth in the Frenchman, thoroughness and profundity in the Englishman, would be on our balance-sheet. Hugo does not attempt to tell us what superiorities distinguish a poet's mind, nor does he touch the question of how poetry will ultimately appropriate and express the achievements of science. Here Wordsworth cuts deeper than Hugo, though his tool produces less finished, less varied, less attractive images. Hugo sets out to explain how different ages in history f 2 68 The New Spirit in Literature have been expressed by different types of poetry, and how the drama, if allowed to develop, would be the perfect and complete type of poetry. He is primarily a dramatist, as Wordsworth is a philosophic poet, and to him the drama is ' la poesie complete '. He decries any system of thought, but, like a true French- man, at once throws his sketch of poetic history into systematic form. When the primitive man awakes in the primitive world, poetry awakes with him. His first word is a hymn. His thought being fugitive and passionate, the earliest type of poetry is lyrical. Then as society settles round the priest and the king, another and more connected type of poetry appears. It is the epic which commemorates the migrations and conflicts of peoples. It sings of the lapse of ages, of nations, and of empires. Homer is born, who sums up and dominates all ancient society. Even the historians, with Herodotus at their head, were epic poets. The ancient drama is but another form of this all-per- vading epic. Not only are all their stories drawn from Homeric sources, but the same religious, heroic, gigantic spirit runs thrpugh them all. What the rhapsodes sang, the actors now declaim : that is all the difference. Then with Christianity a real change comes. Poetry becomes more spiritual, more true to nature, more full of melancholy and of the grotesque. Shakespeare at last appears, the summit of modern poetic art, combining by one supreme genius grotesque and sublime, comic and tragic. Shakespeare is drama itself, because he is the whole of life, seen at the angle of the stage. Here is another law of the three stages, to be set beside the kindred thoughts of Comte and Hegel, and recalling Vico's earlier suggestion of a triple sequence — divine, heroic, human. HegePs order, as given in his Aesthetic, is nearest to Hugo's, and must, one would think, have contributed something to the latter's. Hegel finds in art a progress from the ' Symbolic ', The New Spirit in Literature