Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 07.djvu/138

* ENGLISH LITERATURE. 116 ENGLISH LITERATURE. new problems; but, 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 n j s time — the period of transition which covers the middle of the century. From the fact that his poetry is tinged throughout with half-de- spairing 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, he 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, but 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 but 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- r ess and liL'lit.' 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 altitude of two great contemporary authors, Rus- kin and Newman. For our purpose the dictator- ship so hmg held in matters of art by the one, as well as i lie notable and epoch-making ecclesiasti- cal career of the other. miiJ lie neglected; but we are bound to take account of their general in- fluence upon the thought and the writing of their day. Thej 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 tin- 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 he wrote of art. or of political economy, this lay at the very root "f Ruskin's firmest beliefs; and thus he was naturally forced 1" look backward rather than forward — away from the future with its increasing zeal for ma- terial progress, to the pas! oi the Middle Ages with its universal and vivid sense of the reality of the invisible ami the eternal. Newman's abhorrence of the intellectual anarchy of his day drove him in the same direction, and brought him. after much tossing ,, M troubled seas, 'to the haven where he would be.' Both of them me nee more opposed to Arnold; while the temper of his mind was purely classical, they came in different ways to share the spirit of the romantic movement in its revulsion from a pro- i present. The same attitude of mind was even more elj exemplified at the same time by the ■ i-e ol R school which powerfully affected both art an. I poetry, though it is only with the latter i hat we ore hei l The pre Raphaelite Brotherhood had not, at least in poetry, dis- i any new truths; then cry for a return lo nature, their appeal to the spirit ,,f wonder ami -■ hi human life, 1 had both been articu- i hall i 'nt ur earlier by  ordswoi I h ami Coleridge; 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 Chre- tien 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 ; but 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 ; but 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; hut 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 (heir matter. While his style is not perfect. while its recurrent antitheses, its emphasis upon I lie exceeding blackness of the black and the white ness of the white, becomes wearisome after a while, yet he was undoubtedly a great historian — if his- lorv be the vivid and delightful narration of past events so presented as to make them fit into the writer's preconceived seller f tilings. So was S later example of the method, .lames Anthony Froude; but the new generation has learned (to adopt once more an overworked phrase) that while such writing may he magnificent, it is not