The names of Tennyson and Browning, though both these poets lived until the agitations of the thirties seemed ancient history, are connected chronologically as well as by their work with this period, their first books having appeared at the opening of this stirring decade. Both con tinued for over half a century, in widely differ ing ways, to express or to stimulate and inspire the thought of thousands of readers—of more thousands than the words of any English poet had ever reached before. Tennyson's audience was by far the larger, if perhaps less fit; he made less appeal to intellectual alertness, and the average reader, who turned away puzzled from most of Browning, felt at home in the easy and at times commonplace sentiment of the Laureate. The work of In Memoriam was per haps the most valuable that its author did for the thought of his age; it was the courageous facing of the new discoveries and theories in science, which seemed likely to make an end of belief in a spiritual world, and the showing that this world, and poetry which knows its ways so well, were not to perish before the Darwinian hypothesis. But in form, in technical achieve ment, in the flawless finish of his style through all the kinds of poetry which he attempted, he has had few equals. There is scarcely one of his great predecessors whose peculiar excel lence he has not caught, fusing them all into a style unmistakably his own. Browning had far less perfection of finish, but much more robust ness of nature and of thought. Tennyson be lieves in and preaches constantly an overruling law which shall ultimately bring order out of chaos; his brother, not rival, poet (there was no room for jealous emulation in either of their souls), since his chief interest was in the life of st rong single souls, found satisfaction for his un daunted optimism in showing what it was pos silde for such souls to make of their life by courage and truth. llis works have been well ealled "a permanent storehouse of energy for the race, a storehouse to which for a long time to come it, will in certain moods always return." his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, thong!' she was long tar more popular than he, is chiefly interesting from the noble and :ardent way in which she throws her whole soul into the cause of the oppressed, in England or in Italy. Once at least, in her wonderful Sounds from the Por togocse, she rose by her passionate love for her husband to really great. heights of poetry. A greater poet., however, probably the most notable among the women singers of England, was Chris tina Rossetti, the sister of the pre-Raphaelite leader.
A link between the prose fiction of the eigh teenth and that of the nineteenth century is not found in Miss Austen, sure in dramatic instinct, unimpeachable in the construction of her plots, and unerring in her observation of the external accompaniments of character as she is she is a realist, presenting 'humors' (in Ben .Jonson's sense), and going little below the surface. The connecting link is rather a woman less known and less considered, Maria Edgeworth, who sug gested the right use of local color to Scott, and who saw that an effort at accurate portrayal of the seen need not hinder a vivifying percep tion of the unseen. After Scott the novel greatly widened its scope, to deal, as did the drama under Elizabeth, with all the problems which human life has to face. Three writers who made their fame in this department express the temper and depict the people of the middle of the century Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot. Their absorption in the social problems which we have seen coming to the front made them realists, and with succeeding generations they have suffered from this attitude. Dickens especially, whom twenty or thirty years ago it was heresy to decry, is now far less read, for the reason given above in the treatment of the Elizabethan real ists: his questions are no longer actual—we are not moved by the delays of Chancery or by ancient abuses in prison discipline—and his peo ple, living as they were to his contemporaries, are to us no more actual than the quaint figures of old sporting prints. Thackeray's problems
have more of the permanent about them, and while his leisurely, discursive manner has become old-fashioned, and his inability to construct a consistent plot is apparent, he must always hold a very high place in English fiction. George Eliot is not only remarkable for having, as a woman. been among the first to take her place by the side of the men in strenu ous discussion of public questions; more than either of the novelists just named, she saw life steadily and saw it whole: and far more than they, she reflects the questioning. uneasy temper of her generation in regard to the great problems of the soul. Not alone in her novels. hut in the poetry of Arnold and Clough, does this same spirit find expression.
Arnold, like Aaron of old, stands between the dead and the living—between the old faiths, the old attitude toward life, so largely outworn and discarded. and the new temper of hopefulness in the development of the race and its ability ,to face new problems; unlike Aaron. he holds no smoking censer of propitiation to slay the plague which he feels to be devouring his generation. In thought he is thus eminently characteristic of his time—the period of transition which covers the middle of the century. From the fact that his poetry is tinged throughout with half-de spairimr melancholy. it is rarely appreciated at its full value until the illusions of youth have passed away; like his master Wordsworth, he is the poet of middle age. But in his prose, even more classical in its quality than his verse, lie has appealed to a wider class and done a more enduring work. He is the supreme critic of the early Victorian period. not only in the literature, lint in life as well. He turned from the deep prob lems in which he saw no hope, and devoted him self to preaching the lower but still valuable gospel of Culture. Carlyle and he represent per fectly Heine's antithesis between the Hebraic and the Hellenic elements in human nature: the one holding up an ideal of stern, uncompromising devotion to duty, and promising no reward hut the approval of the conscience; the other inculcat ing the broad, free, mobile open-mindedness of the Greeks—the apostle. in the phrase which he borrowed from Swift and made his own, of 'sweet ness and light.' Opposed to Arnold's urbanity, to the temper which has caused him to be called 'a spiritual man of the world•' stands in sharp contrast the attitude of two great contemporary authors, Rus kin and Newman. For our purpose the dictator ship so long held in matters of art by the one, as well as the notable and epoch-making ecclesiasti cal career of the other, must be neglected; but we are bound to take account of their general in fluence upon the thought and the writing of their day. They were alike in more than one external feature of their magnificent prose: no nineteenth century styles, for instance, show more abun dantly and more happily the effect of a lifelong saturation in the majestic and beneficent English of the Authorized Version of the Bible. But they have a deeper kinship in their equal insistence upon the reality of the unseen, the spiritual world. Whether lie wrote of art or of political economy, this lay at the very root of Ruskin's firmest beliefs: and thus be was naturally forced to look ba•ltwa•d rather than fo•ward—away front the future with its increasing zeal for ma terial progress, to the past or the Middle Ages with its universal and vivid sense of the reality of the invisible and the eternal. Newman's abhorrence of the intellectual anarchy of his day drove him in the same direction, and brought him. after nitieh tossing on troubled seas, 'to the haven where he would be.' Both of them are thus once more opposed to Arnold; while the temper of his mind was !rarely classical. they came in different ways to share the spirit of the romantic movement in its revulsion from a pro ie and sordhi present.