BOOK IV

MODERN LIFE.

CHAPTER I.

Ideas and Productions.

L Changes in society-Rise of democracy-The French Revolution-Desire of getting on-Changes in the human mind-New notion of causes-Ger man philosophy-Craving for the beyond.

IL Robert Burns-His country-Family-Youth-Wretchedness-His yearnings and efforts - Invectives against society and church-The Jolly Beggars-Attacks on conventional cant-His idea of natural life-of moral life-Talent-Spontaneity-Style-Innovations-Success-Affectations Studied letters and academic verse

in the Excise-Disgust-Excesses-Death.

-Farmer's life-Employment

III. Conservative rule in England-The Revolution affects the style onlyCowper-Sickly refinement-Madness-Retirement-The Task-Modern idea of poetry-Of style.

IV. The Romantic school-Its pretensions-Its tentatives-The two ideas of modern literature-History enters into literature-Lamb, Coleridge, Southey, Moore-Faults of this school-Why it succeeded less in England than elsewhere-Sir Walter Scott-Education-Antiquarian studies -Aristocratic tastes-Life-Poems-Novels-Incompleteness of his historical imitations-Excellence of his national pictures-His interiorsAmiable raillery-Moral aim-Place in modern civilisation-Develop ment of the novel in England-Realism and uprightness-Wherein this school is cockneyfied and English. V. Philosophy enters into literature-Lack of harmony in the style-Wordsworth-Character-Condition-Life-Painting of the moral life in the vulgar life-Introduction of the gloomy style and psychological divisions -Faults of style-Loftiness of his sons-The Excursion-Austero beauty of this Protestant poetry—Shelley- · Imprudences― Theories-Fancy-Pantheism—Ideal characters-Life-like scenery-General ter· dency of the new literature-Gradual introduction of continental ideas.

L.

N the eve of the nineteenth century began in Europe the great

ON modern revolution. The thinking public and the human mind

changed, and underneath these two collisions a new literature sprang

up.

The preceding age had done its work. Perfect prose and classical style put within reach of the most backward and the dullest minds the notions of literature and the discoveries of science. Moderate monarchies and regular administrations had permitted the middle class to develop itself under the pompous aristocracy of the court, as useful plants may be seen shooting up under trees which serve for show and ornament. They multiply, grow, rise to the height of their rivals, envelop them in their luxuriant growth, and obscure them by their density. A new world, commonplace, plebeian, thenceforth occupies the ground, attracts the gaze, imposes its form in manners, stamps its image in the n ind. Towards the close of the century a sudden concourse of extraordinary events displays it all at once to the light, and sets it on an eminence unknown to any previous age. With the grand applications of science, democracy appears. The steam-engine and spinning-jenny create in England towns of from three hundred and fifty thousand to five hundred thousand souls. The population is doubled in fifty years, and agriculture becomes so perfect, that, in spite of this enormous increase of mouths to be fed, one-sixth of the inhabitants provide from the same soil food for the rest; importations increase threefold, and even more; the tonnage of vessels increases sixfold, the exportation sixfold and more. Prosperity, leisure, instruction, reading, travels, whatever had been the privilege of a few, became the common property of the majority. The rising tide of wealth raised the best of the poor to comfort, and the best of the well-to-do to opulence. The rising tide of civilisation raised the mass of the people to the rudiments of education, and the mass of citizens to complete education. In 1709 appeared the first daily newspaper, as big as a man's hand, which the editor did not know how to fill, and which, added to all the other papers, did not produce yearly three thousand numbers. In 1844 the Stamp Office showed 71 million numbers, many as large and as full as volumes. Artisans and townsfolk, enfranchised, enriched, having gained a competence, left the low depths where they had been buried in their narrow parsimony, ignorance, and routine; they came on the scene, forsook their workman-like and supernumerary's dress, assumed the leading parts by a sudden irruption or a continuous progress, by dint of revolutions, with a prodigality of labour and genius, amidst vast wars, successively or simultaneously in America, France, the whole of Europe, founding or destroying states, inventing or restoring sciences, conquering or acquiring political rights. They grew noble through their great deeds, became the rivals, equals, conquerors of their masters; they need no longer imitate them, being heroes in their

2

1 See Alison, History of Europe; Porter, Progress of the Nation.

In the Fourth Estate, by F. Knight Hunt, 2 vols, 1840, it is said (i. 175 that the first daily and morning paper, The Daily Courant, appeared in 1709 TR.

turn like them, they can point to their crusades; like them, they have gained the right of having a poetry; and like them, they will have a poetry.

In France, the land of precocious equality and finished revolutions, we must observe this new character-the plebeian bent on getting on: Augereau, son of a greengrocer; Marceau, son of a lawyer; Murat, son of an innkeeper; Ney, son of a cooper; Hoche, an old sergeant, who in his tent, by night, read Condillac's Traité des Sensations; and above all, that thin young man, with lank hair, hollow cheeks, dried up with ambition, his heart full of romantic fancies and grand roughhewn ideas, who, a lieutenant for seven years, read twice through the whole stock of a bookseller at Valence, who about this time (1792) în Italy, though suffering from itch, had just destroyed five armies with a troop of barefooted heroes, and gave his government an account of his victories with all his faults of spelling and of French. He became master, proclaimed himself the representative of the Revolution, declared that the career is open to talent,' and impelled others along with him in his enterprises. They follow him, because there is glory, and above all, advancement to be won. 'Two officers,' says Stendhal, 'commanded a battery at Talavera; a ball laid low the captain. "So!" said the lieutenant, "François is dead, I shall be captain." "Not yet," said François, who was only stunned, and got on his feet again.' These two men were neither enemies nor wicked; on the contrary, they were companions and comrades; but the lieutenant wanted to rise a step. Such was the sentiment which provided men for the exploits and carnages of the Empire, which caused the Revolution of 1830, and which now, in this vast stifling democracy, compels men to vie with each other in intrigues and labour, genius and baseness, to get out of their primitive condition, and raise themselves to the summit, whose possession is assigned to their union or promised to their toil. The dominant character now-a-days is no longer the man of the drawing-room, whose place is certain and his fortune made, elegant and unruffled, with no employment but to amuse and please himself; who loves to converse, who is gallant, who passes his life in conversations with highly dressed ladies, amidst the duties of society and the pleasures of the world: it is the man in a black coat, who works alone in his room or rides in a cab to make friends and protectors; often envious, feeling himself always above or below his station in life, sometimes resigned, never satisfied, but fertile in inventions, lavish of trouble, finding the picture of his blemishes and his strength in the drama of Victor Hugo and the novels of Balzac.1

There are other and greater cares. With the state of human society, the form of the human mind has changed. It has changed by

a natural and irresistible development, like a flower growing into a fruit, like a fruit turning to seed. The mind renews the evolution which it had already performed in Alexandria, not as then in a deleterious atmosphere, in the universal degradation of enslaved men, in the increasing decadence of a dissolving society, amidst the anguish of despair and the mists of a dream; but lapt in a purifying atmosphere, amidst the visible progress of an improving society and the general ennobling of free and elevated men, amidst the proudest hopes, in the wholesome clearness of experimental sciences. The oratorical age which declined, as it declined in Athens and Rome, grouped all ideas in beautiful commodious compartments, whose subdivisions instantaneously led the gaze towards the object which they would define, so that thenceforth the intellect could enter upon the loftiest conceptions, and seize the aggregate which it had not yet embraced. Isolated nations, French, English, Italians, Germans, came to draw near and know each other after the shaking of the Revolution and the wars of the Empire, as formerly the separate races, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Gauls, by the conquests of Alexander and the domination of Rome: so that henceforth each civilisation, expanded by the collision of neighbouring civilisations, can pass beyond its national limits, and multiply its ideas by the commixture of the ideas of others. History and criticism grew as under the Ptolemies; and from all sides, throughout the universe, at all points of time, they were engaged in resuscitating and explaining literatures, religions, manners, societies, philosophies: so that thenceforth the intellect, enfranchised by the spectacle of past civilisations, could escape from the prejudices of its country. A new race, hitherto torpid, gave the signal: Germany communicated over the whole of Europe the impetus to the revolution of ideas, as France to the revolution of manners. These good folk who smoked and warmed themselves by the side of a stove, and seemed only fit to produce learned editions, found themselves suddenly the promoters and leaders of human thought. No race has such a comprehensive mind; none is so well endowed for lofty speculation. We see it in their language, so abstract, that beyond the Rhine it seems an unintelligible jargon. And yet, thanks to this language, they attained to superior ideas. For the specialty of this revolution, as of the Alexandrian revolution, was that the human mind became more capable of abstraction. They made, on a large scale, the same step as the mathematicians when they passed from arithmetic to algebra, and from the ordinary calculus to the calculus of the infinite. They perceived, that beyond the limited truths of the oratorical age, there were deeper unfoldings; they passed beyond Descartes and Locke, as the Alexandrians beyond Plato and Aristotle: they understood that a great architect, or round and square atoms, were not causes; that fluids, molecules, and monads were not forces; that a spiritual soul or a physiological secretion would not account for thought. They sought religious sentiment beyond dogmas, poetic beauty beyond rules, critical

truth beyond myths. They desired to grasp natural and moral powers themselves, independently of the fictitious supports to which their predecessors had attached them. All these supports, souls and atoms, all these fictions, fluids, and morads, all these conventions, rules of the beautiful and religious symbols, all rigid classifications of things natural, human and divine, faded away and vanished. Thenceforth they were nothing but figures; they were only kept as an aid to the memory, and as auxiliaries of the mind; they served only provisionally, and as starting-points. Through a common movement along the whole line of human thought, causes draw back into an abstract region, where philosophy had not been to search them out for eighteen centuries. Then was manifested the disease of the age, the restlessness of Werther and Faust, very like that which in a similar moment agitated men eighteen centuries ago; I mean, discontent with the present, the vague desire of a higher beauty and an ideal happiness, the painful aspiration for the infinite. Man suffered from doubt, yet he doubted; he tried to seize again his beliefs, they melted in his hand; he would sit down and rest in the doctrines and the satisfactions which sufficed his predecessors, and he does not find them sufficient. He expends himself, like Faust, in anxious researches through science and history, and judges them vain, dubious, good for men like Wagner,' pedants of the academy and the library. It is the beyond he sighs for; he forebodes it through the formulas of science, the texts and confessions of the churches, through the amusements of the world, the intoxications of love. A sublime truth exists behind coarse experience and handed-down catechisms; a grand happiness exists beyond the pleasures of society and the delights of a family. Sceptical, resigned, or mystics, they have all caught a glimpse of or imagined it, from Goethe to Beethoven, from Schiller to Heine; they have risen towards it in order to stir up the whole swarm of their grand dreams; they will not be consoled for falling away from it; they have mused upon it, even during their deepest fall; they have instinctively dwelt, like their predecessors the Alexandrians and Christians, in that splendid invisible world in which, in ideal peace, slumber the creative essences and powers; and the vehement aspiration of their heart has drawn from their sphere the elementary spirits, 'film of flame, who flit and wave in eddying motion! birth and the grave, an infinite ocean, a web ever growing, a life ever glowing, ply at Time's whizzing loom, and weave the vesture of God.''

Thus rises the modern man, impelled by two sentiments, one democratic, the other philosophic. From the shallows of his poverty and ignorance he rises with effort, lifting the weight of established society and admitted dogmas, disposed either to reform or to destroy them, and at once generous and rebellious. Then two currents from France and Germany at this moment swept into England. The dykes there Goethe's Faust, sc. 1.

The disciple of Faust.