Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 07.djvu/137

* ENGLISH LITERATURE. lie ENGLISH LITERATURE. of his gospel begins a new epoch in English Id- lers, connecting them for the first time clo elj and indissoluble with the life and the progress of the whole race. Addison had indeed written with a moral purpose, thinking to soften and re line the manners of London society; but Carlyle went much further than this, and set in motion springs which have never ceased to act. if we wish to bring home to ourselves how far we have traveled ander this powerful impulse, we have onlj to try to imagine sir Walter Scott read- ing, one need not go so far as to say the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward, 1ml even those of George Eliot. The eccentricities of Caflyle's style, which caught the ear for the moment and have tempted many a young writer into unhappy efforts at imitation, have passed away; but his spirit lived after him in the earnest, crusade against immemorial abuses which enlisted the best energies of widely differing minds. England was at last awake. On every side were the stir- rings of new life — in polities with the Reform Bill and I he Anti-Corn-Law League, and the teachings of the Owehites, for the first time called socialism; among religious teachers with the Broad Church movement of Maurice and Kingsley. and the Oxford Tractarian School, both of them full of social suggestion ; with the bold searching into the depths of the human heart by Tennyson and Browning. Thackeray cried out against shams in the very spirit of Sartor Resartus, and Ruskin's fiery heart could never rest while there was a wrong to redress, a man or a woman to raise to a higher plane of think- ing and living. 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 w-ork 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 ami 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 strong single souls, found satisfaction for his un- daunted optimism in showing what it was pi Bible for -inli souls to make of their life by courage and truth. His works have been well called "a pet maneni storehouse of energj foi the race, a storehouse to which for a long time to c it. will in certain moods always return." His wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, though she was long far re popular than he. i^ Chiefly interesting from the noble ami anient, way in which she throws her whole soul into the cause of i he oppressed, in England or in Italy. (Ime at. least, in her wonderful Sonnets from th* /'"/ tuguese, she rose bj her passionate love for her husband to realtj greal heights of poetry. A greater poet, however, probably the -t nolable among the women singers of England, was Chris- tina lln-rili, the sister of the pre-Raphaelite leader. A link between the prose fiction of the eigh teenth and that of the nineteenth century is nut found in Miss Austen, sure in dramatic instinct, unimpeachable in the construction of her plot and unerring in her observation of the external accompaniments of character as she is; she is a realist, presenting 'humors' (in Hen Jonson*s sense), and going little below the surface. Tin' 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 perceo- tion of the unseen. Afte* 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 wdio 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, but 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 J:o face