INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

THE NEW AGE

Ar the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria the English nation grew "drunk with sight of power." There were miles of warships gathered at Spithead; feudatory princes from India and representatives of free peoples ruling over territories such as had never before owned allegiance to a single flag were assembled to do homage to the aged sovereign. The newspapers whose "frantic boast and foolish word" gave utterance to the feeling of the nation, and the nation from which those newspapers took their spirit, were not without excuse. But suddenly, upon ears still ringing with the blare of trumpets and hearts still elate with the proofs of material power, there fell the voice which proclaimed the insufficiency and the evanescence of all such power:

"Far called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!"

No more masterly expression was ever given to that sense of reaction which follows upon feverish activity and exalted hope. That such reaction must come is a law of life, and it is also a law that its depth must be proportional to the exaltation which has gone before. The mightier the wave, the greater and the more desolate is the stretch of naked shingle its reflux leaves exposed. All history shows that just as a physical stimulant exacts payment in the shape of a subsequent depression, so the

moral or intellectual stimulant must be followed sooner or later by a temporary lowering of spiritual vitality. The example of a St. Francis of Assisi for a time lifts his followers to a height altogether beyond the reach of the ordinary world; but literary satire and the sober documents of history are at one in their testimony that in the sixteenth century their successors had sunk below that world's level.

We see the same law at work in political history. The magnificent panegyric which Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles stands in sharp contrast with the laments of Demosthenes a century later for the want of those very qualities which the great historian represents as the special endowment of his countrymen. Both conceptions of the Athenian character are probably just they are certainly the conceptions of the men best qualified to discover the truth and to express it accurately. if so, is it not probable that the depression was largely due to reaction from the abnormal energy of the earlier Athenians? A still more familiar instance is to be found in the history of England. We know how deep and sincere were the moral earnestness and the religious feeling of the Puritans; and we know likewise the price which was paid when the Restoration relaxed the strain.

But

The same principle unquestionably holds in literature; and, as the artistic is the most sensitive of all types of human character, it would not be surprising to find the principle exemplified there more strikingly than anywhere else. We cannot ascribe to accident the fact that in the literatures of Greece, of Spain, of France, of England, the dominant forms have varied from age to age. Now the drama prevails, now the lyric, now the novel; in this generation poetry, in that prose; one century addresses itself mainly to the understanding, another to the imagination. It is no mere coincidence that chivalric romance has so prevailed in Spain, the land of the romantic conflict of Moor and Christian. There is more than bare chance in the fact that the golden age of the drama, par excellence the literature of action, was contemporaneous, alike in Athens and in England, with the period of highest political and individual energy; or again in the fact

that when England was arrayed in hostile camps we have on the one hand the cavalier literature of persiflage and on the other the lofty strain of Milton.

After each of these times of activity there has followed, in literature as in national life, a period of depression, sometimes, but not always, succeeded by a fresh revival. For Athens, after the glory of the drama and of history had passed, there still remained the glory of philosophy and of oratory. In Spain, the eclipse of romance was permanent. In France, the great age

of Louis XIV passes into the lower phase of the Encyclopædia, only to revive again in the marvellous burst of political life in which she led, and of literature in which she shared with, the rest of Europe. In England, the many-sided activity of the Elizabethans changes into the factional spirit of Cavalier and Roundhead, and that again sinks with the debasement of the court and of society into the ribaldry and license of the Restoration drama.

The same spectacle of rise and fall meets the eye when we turn to the great age of the French Revolution and compare it with the period immediately after its force was spent. No one can doubt that the Revolution was for Europe in general, both in national life and in literature, a time of heightened energy and productiveness. For more than twenty years the sword was hardly ever sheathed, and the whole Continent shook with the tramp of armies. It is true, war in itself is not productive; but De Tocqueville's L'Ancien Régime shows that the political ideas which set the armies in motion were eminently fertile. And who can doubt that in literature the thirty years or so during which "the gospel of Jean Jacques" swayed the thought of Europe were among the most productive in the history of the world? But when we look a generation forward, we see once more innumerable evidences of decline. War is exhausting; and in 1815 the nations found themselves the richer by a prisoner whom they feared even in captivity, and the poorer by hundreds of thousands of lives, by countless millions of money, and by multitudes of shattered hopes. For however clear it might be to De Tocqueville that the ideas of the Revolution were still

alive, for the moment its failure seemed to be complete, and the fascinating vision of liberty, fraternity and equality faded into the light of common day.

war was severe.

England had suffered from the great struggle far less than the continent of Europe. She had never felt the pressure of hostile armies on her soil, and for her the measureless waste of war had been in great part made good by the extraordinary development of her commerce. Yet even in England the reaction after the Prices were high; the artificial stimulus to trade was gone; the evils inherent in that industrial revolution which had been in progress for half a century were becoming more conspicuous; and there was as yet little or no factory legislation to check them. Moreover, the poor law has never, either before or since, been so unwisely administered: it was sapping the manhood of the nation, pauperising the poor, demoralising the well-to-do. There were bread-riots. Necessary and inevitable political reforms were delayed till, as the Duke of Wellington warned the nation, the choice lay between concession and civil war. In truth, the state of things was not far removed from a state of civil war. The windows of Apsley House were broken by an infuriated mob; there was a crisis when troops and artillery were held in readiness to sweep the streets of London; the Chartist movement grew; that warlike spirit in the civilian, which in the opening years of the century had been directed against a foreign foe, was now absorbed in contemplated civil strife. "You should have the like of this," said a young lawyer equipped as a volunteer to Thomas Carlyle. "Hm, yes," was the reply; "but I haven't yet quite settled on which side." The continuance of such a social state meant the death of hope, which is as indispensable in literature and art as Bacon knew it to be in politics.

A time of stress and strain, far from being inimical to literature and art, is in the highest degree stimulating, provided the ferment is due to the leaven of great ideas and of ennobling conflicts. The greatest periods of the world's literature have followed upon such times. The effect is due, not to the turmoil, but to the operation of the ideas which occasion the turmoil, or which are evoked by it. But there is nothing dignified, nothing vivifying,