44. THE TREND OF THOUGHT AND LITERATURE IN THE 19TH CENTURY. General Characteristics.—An almost unprece dented development or expansion of intellectual energy characterized the opening years of the 19th century in Great Britain. The emancipat ing influences, which had produced the French Revolution, were then working in England at their acme of strength, and were generating an intellectual as well as a political and social reformation, which steadily gathered force as the century grew older. The new tide of thought found at the outset its loftiest manifes tation in purely imaginative literature. The mighty revival of imaginative literature, amid which the century opened, is only comparable with that of the age of Shakespeare. The highest intellectual energy of the nation seemed to find, at the beginning of the epoch, its com plete and most congenial expression in the de partments ofpoetr and fiction. Between the years 1800 and 1:V.5 the works of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, lane Austen and Sir Walter Scott were the chief triumphs of the intellectual movement which was clarify ing man's mental vision and remodeling his aspirations.
After the first quarter of the century the creative literary activity of England showed some signs of exhaustion. But the ebbing was then of short duration. The tide of intellectual energy in the sphere of literary endeavor quickly rose again. The torch that had been lighted by Wordsworth and Shelley, Byron and Scott, Lamb and Coleridge, soon flamed anew in the hands of Tennyson and Browning, of Dickens and Thackeray, of Macaulay and Carlyle, of Ruskin and Matthew Arnold.
With the sixth decade of the century, a radi cal change came over the intellectual horizon of the nation. The intellectual spirit no longer contributed the whole of its richest sustenance to the field of great imaginative writing. It long continued to nourish splendid imaginative effort; only when the century closed did the purely imaginative energy, which had flowed on almost continuously from the first, grow slug gish and tame. But midway through the cen tury the intellectual spirit proved fertile enough to produce in new glory and luxuriance a see and and a very different type of intellectual f mit. During the last five decades, the intellec tual spirit gave a fresh and unexampled impetus to scientific inquiry and to speculation concern ing the character and capacity of all animate and inanimate nature. For a generation the poets and novelists, the critics and historians, divided the honors of intellectual exertion with scientific investigators like Darwin, Wallace, Huxley and Tyndall, and with philosophers like John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Hill Green and Leslie Stephen.
When the century was reaching its end, the spirit of scientific inquiry was producing no triumphs so heroic as those associated in the middle years with the names of Darwin and his disciples. But scientific energy was at the close of the epoch still giving notable proofs of activity, while literary energy was comparatively torpid. In the last half of the period science and pure literature may fairly be credited with having slowly changed their relative places in the empire of the British intellect. Pure litera ture which held the place of predominance at the beginning of the era yielded it to science before the end. The mass of available intel lectual energy which had gone at the outset to the making of poetry and fiction, of history and criticism, was ultimately diverted to the cause of science. In general terms, the gradual and peaceable succession of science to the throne which had been occupied by imaginative litera ture may be said to mark the trend of British thought and literature in the 19th century.
Homogeneity of the Imaginative Effort.— For the purpose of detailed study of the litera ture of the century it might be convenient to divide it into four chronological sections — each corresponding with one quarter of the period. But there is an essential homogeneity about the whole of the century's literary effort, which renders chronological division undesirable in a brief survey. Specious grounds may be urged for separating the century, in however rapid a general view of its thought and literature, into at least two periods, the one ending and the other beginning at the accession of Queen Vic toria in 1837. In 1837 the literary giants of the opening years of the century either were dead or had ceased to write. Among poets, Byron (1788-1824), Shelley (1792-1822), and Keats (1795-1821) had passed away. Wordsworth (1770-1850) had ceased to be a poetic force, save in the sight of admirers more zealous than discreet. Of writers of fiction, Jane Austen had been dead 20 years and Sir Walter Scott five. Among essayists whose work conferred on the literature of the century one of its most dis tinctive charms, Charles Lamb, the genial king among such literary artificers, did not survive beyond 1834; Hazlitt died in 1830, and although De Quincey and Leigh Hunt lived more than 20 years longer, their best work was done in the pre-Victorian epoch.