The same attitude of mind was even more definitely exemplified at the same time by the rise of a school wide!' powerfully affected both art and poetry. though it is only with the latter that we are here concerned. The pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had 11.1, at least in poetry, d covered any new truths; their cry fur a return nature, their appeal to 'the spirit of wonder and mystery in Inunan life,' had both been artien lal•41 n tialf•century earlier by Wordsworth (!oleridge; but to a new generation their teaching came with a new value. The preeminence of Rossetti has overshadowed a number of lesser men who yet deserve much more than oblivion: John Lucas Tupper, for example, an admirable poet now scarcely known, of one of whose lyrics Rossetti himself said that had it been the writ ing of Edgar Poe it would have enjoyed a world wide celebrity. But the chief of the school, in spite of gloomy clouds such as in different ways overshadowed the lives of a singularly large pro portion of the great authors in the century, pro duced a large amount of verse characterized alike by poignant appeal to the heart and by gorgeous and colorful word:painting. Even more com pletely than Rossetti, William Morris was at tracted by the purely picturesque quality of the Middle Ages; but he is more external, less of a mystic than the others of the group. His strong est point is his consummate ability to tell a smooth and flowing tale, in the manner of Chr(• Hen de Troyes and others of the old French romancers, though with an occasional note of a purely modern pessimism. Greater poets, in deed, there have been; hut from Chaucer to our own time, scarcely a greater story-teller in verse.
A similar tendency toward escape from the pressure on the one hand of the colorless materi alism of dominant modern science, and on the other of the moral seriousness which character izes the greater part of the English poetry of the last half-century may be found in Swinburne. His mastery of technique, his power of creating marvelous effects of rhythm and melody, are un surpassed; and the death of Tennyson and Browning left him alone to be the unquestioned chief of English singers, though his rebel atti tude toward the social order robbed him of the glory of the laurel. The morbid excesses of his earlier work, conceived in the spirit of a decadent paganism, alienated many readers from him; hut they have been succeeded by a noble presentation of higher motives, the characteristically English ones of a love of freedom and of the sea and of the innocent beauty of children. his very power over his instrument has tempted him at times to play tricks with it, to be careless of the sense in the intoxication of a riot of beautiful sounds and sights: but his touch is always that of a mas ter. Promise for the future of English poetry has appeared in the work of several younger men, notably Stephen Phillips. Francis Thompson, William Watson, John Davidson, and in the more serious verse of Kipling.
Macaulay has already been mentioned as a type of the English thought of his generation; but he may stand also as a representative in the nineteenth century of that school of historians of which the eighteenth produced such brilliant ex amples—the artistic school, who rested their claim to distinction more upon their manner than upon their matter. While his style is not perfect,
while its recurrent antitheses, its emphasis upon the exceeding blackness of the black and the white ness of t lie white, becomes wearisome after a while, yet tic undoubtedly a great historian—if his tory be the vivid and delightful no tint ion of past events so presented as to make them fit into the writer's preelmeeived scheme of things. So was a later example of the method, James Anthony Fromle; the new generation has learned (to adopt once more an overworked phrase) that while such writing may he magnificent, it is not history. Carlyle was not so far wrong when lie said that Macaulay had written his history to prove that. Providence was on the side of the Whigs; and the deductive method, abandoned long before by science, still reigned in the work of the historian. It was succeeded by the truer method which now holds possession of the field—the calm, patient, minute investigation of the actual records of the period under study, and the presentation of results as found. This reaction, illustrated by the prodigious learning and calm judgment of such men as E. A. Freeman, S. R. Gardiner, and William Stubbs, and largely asso ciated with the University of Oxford, has at times, like all literary reactions, shown a tend ency to go too far in the opposite direction, and present a mere undigested mass of facts; but the scientific securing of them once established, the selection and composition which art requires will, it may be hoped, bring historical writing once more into the higher regions of literature.
In the province of pure literature, that which is cultivated for its own sake, much excellent work has been done by an increasing number of men, and, as already remarked, criticism has be come a separate department. While no single critic holds the supreme dictatorship of Matthew Arnold, a substantial gain has been made by the progress of the comparative method, which treats English literature not as an isolated phe nomenon, but as part of a vast general move ment. For adequacy of equipment. George Saints bury is probably the first of these later crit ics; hut the appreciation of Edmund Gosse and the refined versatility of Andrew Lang, the philosophic insight of Dowden and Shairp, must have a word of mention. In definite con trast. to these, who are men of letters pure and simple, stand the natural scientists and sonic later philosophers, who value the written word only as a means of expression and diffusion for their thought; the names of Darwin and Tyndall and Huxley. of Herbert Spencer and John Morley and Arthur Balfour, cannot be passed over in even a purely literary review, so great has been their influence on the general evolution of thought, and hence of its expression.