Poetry and Prose

This last was the initial source of inspira tion of one of the greatest humanists of the century, Thomas Carlyle. Beginning with translations of German writers and essays and excursions into German ideas, Carlyle, not far from the opening of the reign of Victoria, be came at once the prophet and the scourge of his countrymen. Moved by the same spectacle that had stirred Dickens and Kingsley, he pro ceeded somewhat illogically but very eloquently to demonstrate the futility of contemporary institutions, to decry the impotence of the democracy. and to point out the one way of salvation, the dominance of the °hero° whom he illustrated in several important works, as (1860), broadened the scope of his interests so that they included economic and social, as well as literary and artistic, questions. His influence has been very widely diffused, like that of Carlyle, and their contemporary human ist, Emerson. A third great chastiser of the evil which men do and think was Matthew Arnold, already mentioned as a poet. From about 1870 to 1880, his literary energies, origi nally devoted to poetry and next to literary criticism, were directed toward trying to make his stubborn island countrymen think rightly on political, literary and religious matters in ac cord with that formula which he continually characterized as °culture.° With these spiritual guides is to be named the great humanist, the friend and contemporary of Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, who, besides being an admirable technical student and expounder of logic and political economy, attempted to disseminate the principles of moderation, of justice, of right reason, and in all his works, as in his famous essays 'On Liberty' (1859) and 'The Subjection of Women' (1869), sowed the seed of righteousness. For a discussion of Mill's work as an economist and a philosopher, the general articles and the special article on Mill should be consulted, since it is out of the province of the present article to touch on scientific studies of the century except in so far as they relate to literature.

The humanistic movement in its earlier phases is often regarded as an aspect of what is called, for the purposes of classification, the romantic movement, the impulse, that is, which expressed the desire for individual expansion rather than the submission to the limits im posed by authority, and which implied the manumission of the human spirit and intellect from current and traditional bonds. In the religious field, the so-called Oxford Movement of 1833-41 is sometimes called romantic in that it was the work of a few young men who revolted at the religious custom of the time and endeavored to re-establish an earlier, and as they conceived it, a purer form of belief and worship. The Oxford Movement received at once its best exposition and severest criticism in the controversial autobiography of the originator of the movement, 'The Apologia Pro Vita Sua> of John Henry Newman, written in defense of his conversion to Catholicism. Newman stands in English literature as one of the great masters of finished prose of a formal but winning cast and as a specialist in some what technical religious controversy. The orthodox Anglican feeling of the time is best represented in the sermons and writings of Frederick Denison Maurice, Frederick Wil liam Robertson and Charles Kingsley, the novelist.

The more strictly critical movement, as re lated to literature, goes back to Coleridge and Germany. The dogmatic manner and air of finality which distinguished the pronouncements of the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviewers, found its descendant chiefly in the common sense criticism of Macaulay. Most of the

critics of the early decades of the century, Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey and others, were, in one way or another, frankly personal or de liberative rather than ex cathedra in their atti tude, and in Coleridge criticism tended to the ascertaining and expounding of principles rather than the assertion of dogmas. The early work of Carlyle, the next important critic after the group just named, was largely critical, and it busied itself with the exposition and in terpretation of Schiller, Goethe, Richter and other contemporary German writers, for the benefit of his countrymen. Carlyle, however, was too busy exploiting the doctrine of the "hero° and sounding the sins of his fellow men to become a literary critic of lasting influence. The main stream of critical tendency, up to the time of the modern scientific and philological schools, had sprung from the stimulating power of the German-derived Coleridgeianism. The chief tenets of that influence were the casting aside of authority in favor of appreciation: any work of art contained in itself the reason why it was good: and consequently an author's pur pose, his range, his total production and his vogue were things to be taken into considera tion. This principle passed naturally in the later Victorian period to the criticism of types, wherein criticism tended to become character ization rather than censure or commendation. Two great critics are illustrative of the tendency: Walter Bagehot (1826-88), unex celled for the vigor and brilliancy of his char acterizations of types of mind and art, and Walter Pater (1839-94), the polished ex pounder of artistic personality. The same tendencies, with different material and different emphasis, are to be observed in the work of such distinguished modern critics as Leslie Stephen, John Addington Symonds, Viscount Morley (1838-), and others. Matthew Arnold, poet and humanist, second to none in import ance as a critic, represents a reaction in favor of a more abstract and ideal standard. His torically important as having done much to en large the confines of English criticism and to rid it of insularity, he, nevertheless, was at variance with his contemporaries (as in matters of religion and politics) in asking for more authority and standardization of judgment, which standard is largely a matter of his own predilection.

Much of the critical study of literature during the period was dominated by the histori cal and the scientific method. That aspect of criticism, except in such invaluable work as Stephen's 'Dictionary of National Biography' and other excellent biographical works, is, how ever, less important in the field of literature proper than that of history and science. Though these subjects do not properly enter into the present article, they are so important that men tion of them cannot be wholly ignored. In history, besides such men as Carlyle, who wrote histories, and Symonds, the historian of the 'Renaissance,) there were, in the Victorian period, since the time of Hallam, such dis tinguished names as Milman, Grote, Macaulay, Harriet Martineau, Kinglake, Froude, Buckle. Freeman, Gardiner, J. R. Green, Lecky and Viscount Bryce. In philosophy and science the names of Lyell and Spencer are eminent, and the theory of natural selection as presented by Darwin and expounded by Huxley has pro foundly influenced the whole train of 19th cen tury. thought since the publication of (The Ongm of Species) (1859).

Bibliography.— References are so numerous that it is impossible for the preceding and the following section to make more than a general reference to the lists contained under the arti cles on the writers specifically named, though such books as Saintsbury's (History of Nine teenth Century Literature) • Stedman's (Victo rian Poets); Stopford Broo'ke's (English Liter ature) ; Palgrave's (Golden Treasury) (second series), and G. K. Chesterton's (Victorian Lit erature) may be cited.