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* ENGLISH LITERATURE. 117 ENGLISH LITERATURE. history. Carlyle was not so far wrong when he said that Macaulay had written his history to prove thai 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 some 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. But the novel has in the last generation so overshadowed other forms of literature as to justify its treatment in these closing paragraphs with the same approach to exclusiveness as the drama claimed in the Elizabethan period. It would have been both hopeless and profitless to attempt to enu- merate with any fullness of characterization the vast multitude of novelists that the last century has produced, or even the Detter-known among them — in the earlier period Bulwer and Disraeli and Charles Reade, Anthony Trollope and the Brontes, and the Kingsley brothers; and in more recent times Blackmore and Mrs. Oliphant and Mallock, and Black and Mrs. Ward and 'Lucas Malet.' and especially Kipling, and a score of others whose names will occur to any reader. But there are three names which may fitly re- ceive less summary treatment — not only because two of them stand at least. after a long diversified career, unquestionably at the head of their craft, and because the third by a beautiful and inspiring life and an intimate charm of personality revealed in every line of his work has also won a very special place of his own. They are singled out also, in aeeonlaneew it 1 1 I lie venela] ('heme of I 1 1 I ■ I I I iele. as typical of the attainment and the outlook in their kind of work. The first and possibly the greatest of them. George Meredith, is in some sense the successor of ' leorge Eliot the successor in development, though, for actual chronology, he published his first hook before her- appeared. We have already noted her work in the study of social questions and her portrayal Of the char- acteristic menial temper of her day; it remains to call attention, for the connection of thought, to the ethical import of her novels, to her rigor- ous insistence on the reign of law in the develop' ment of moral character. Meredith, though he works not so much through individuals as through types, though his method is often elusive, deals mainly with the inevitable working out and consequence of one or another moral quality. His style is often called obscure, like that of Broun ing, with whom he has many analogies; but his marvelous insight into the springs of human action, his ripe philosophy, and his genial humor compensate the reader for any effort of attention. To Meredith, man, his work in the world, his development of himself, is the centre of interest. To an equally great novelist, Thomas Hardy, man is but an insignificant and feeble crea- ture, moving helplessly through a world con- trolled by gigantic forces, pitiless, implacable — a world conceived in a spirit not unlike that .Eschylean gloom and awe of the forces of Nature and Fate which we saw to pervade the poetry of the pagan Saxons. Life to him is pure tragedy, relieved only by flashes of a grim irony as bitter as, though more resigned than, Swift's. His attitude expresses one aspect of the temper of the closing nineteenth century, its weariness of the insistent discussion of questions of right and wrong which so occupied its central period. A totally different means of escape, one offered with the light-heartedness of a child who breaks out from tedious lessons to play, is that of Robert Louis Stevenson, the third of the authors chosen to lead to a conclusion. His style is noteworthy for its deliberate artistic finish and grace, quali- ties which he shared with a brilliant contempo- rary master of form, Walter Pater. It is probable that his essays, in which he expresses a whole courageous and hopeful philosophy of life, will in the end hold a higher place than his fiction ; but for the moment it will he well to direct the attention to the latter, which marks the rounding off of our survey of the nineteenth century with a return to the romanticism that began it, and reminds us once more of one of the chief func- tions of all literature, which is to lift us above the sordid atmosphere, the corroding cares of that 'struggle for life' which modern science pre- sents to us as our only occupation, into a brighter and more joyous world. BiBLiocRApny. For excellent selections, con- sult: Craik. English Prose Selections (5 vols.. London, 1893-91!) ; Ward. English Poets (4 vols.. ib., 1880-8.'?) ; Palgiave, Golden Treasury of Eng- lish Songs and Lyrics (ib., 1877; second series, ib., 1897) ; Morris and Skeat, 8pe cimens of Early English (Oxford. 1879) ; Skeat, Specimens of English Literature, 1394-1579 (ib., 1871). For general outlines, Ry- land. Chronological Outlines of English Litera- ture (London, 1890) ; Ten Brink, History of Eng- lish Literature, translated by Kennedy (New York, 1883) ; .lusserand, Literary History of the