Few stranger paradoxes are to be found in literary history than this of our greatest pessimist and cynic tranquilly pursuing the priestly functions of the religion of hope and love. But the paradox of Swift was the paradox of his age; Augustan literature had lost the social with the spiritual outlook. It dreamed no dream of progress, it lifted the banner of no ideal. It despised while it depicted humanity. It was content to analyze its own present, with scorn that turned to jest or sob, according to its mood. Perhaps no phase of civilization has ever been more deeply imbued with the conviction of its own finality. No trouble stirred it, nor was it, seemingly, visited by compunction, save when occasionally, of a sudden, some great soul like Swift fell into fatal despair. In France, Voltaire and Rousseau were, during the next quarter-century, to live and cry aloud: the one was to awaken in men's hearts a new passion of brotherhood, the other was to awaken in their minds a new sense of superiority to the established fact. In England itself, Hobbes and Locke had already flung thought back upon its own authority, and bidden the human reason, irrespective of tradition, create what universe it would. Despite all appearance, the age of authority, the age of finality, the age of conventions, was doomed. The French Revolution drew near; and democracy came in its train. PART II THE ENGLAND OF OUR FATHERS CHAPTER I OUTLINES I LESS than a century passed between the woeful helplessness of Swift and Shelley's exultant cry of welcome to freedom: 66 Come, Thou, but lead out of the inmost cave Wisdom." 1 A great race experience lay behind this invocation. For a brief moment, men of affairs, philosophers, and poets had joined in one fervent song. "The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return," 2. so they had chanted, with triumphant assurance of victory. French wit and English thought, and the personal passion of a Genevese, had all contributed to the most abstract of theories, that of the equal rights of men. Suddenly this abstract idea had 1 Shelley, Ode to Liberty. 2 Ibid., Chorus in Hellas. struck itself into the actual. There it found itself reinforced by the demand of a positive need: by suffering, first pitiful, then vehement, finally, as events advanced, maddened by a new sense of power. The revolutionary spirit, which was the outcome of this union of an ideal with a craving, succeeded for the time only in overturning the things that were; but in its failure it generated a hope that cannot die. From that day to our own, all life has been lived and all literature produced in the presence of that hope. "Une immense espérance a traversée la terre," whatever the unrest or discouragement of modern literature, this its reader can never forget. The French Revolution introduced a disturbing force into the sphere of politics, and made dynamic a new ideal in the sphere of thought. Meanwhile another revolution was in progress; it proceeded more quietly, but brought with it yet more important readjustments of the whole social system. This was the industrial revolution which at the end of the last century followed the introduction of machinery. It was not initiated by a dramatic display, and its effects were slow in gaining recognition for they worked below the surface, reaching chiefly the inarticulate classes. But it meant upheaval from the depths, and the time was to come when the surface should feel the stir. To ignore misery in another island, misery produced by natural, unhuman causes like famine, was one thing; to ignore misery in the very midst of civilized England, misery accented if not produced by fresh conditions of national development deliber. ately adopted, was another thing, and not so easy. Nineteenth century literature, then, is the expression of a period profoundly different from any that had gone before. The times of arrest in which Swift wrote are over; the stately and simple movement of national expansion in the Renascence lies far in the past; the majestic immobility of the feudal system is hard for even the imagination to reproduce. In the modern world, all things waver, safeguards and protections seem to elude the hand that would grasp them, and forces both occult and obvious work in bewildering complexity, moving at once toward destruction and renewal. The greatest safeguard of true order as of true liberty -the Christian Church is singularly little in evidence during the first half of the nineteenth century. As we remember the rôle of the Church in the eighteenth century, we cannot wonder that when the time of social trial came, she should have been found pitifully wanting. Christianity has factors both revolutionary and conservative and there are crises where each is needed. But probably every one would now agree that the Church made a grievous mistake when, in the mighty upheaval of thought and life at the end of the last century, she allied herself with the conservative forces of respectability. She could not do otherwise her social fervors and her spiritual vitality always ebb and flow together, and that was the period of her spiritual ebb-tide. But the result was inevitable and righteous, she was given sor rowfully little share in the great onward movement of life. The spiritual ideals of any age are to be read best through its imaginative art: this art, in the England of the early nineteenth century, is not Christian; indeed, it is barely cognizant of Christianity. Neither poetry nor prose draws its social passion from her inspiration, nor solves its social problems through her aid. It would have been a bitter thing to Langland, and even to More, to see the Christian Church least effective at the time of most heart-searching change. Thus unguided, unrelated, helpless, with foundations slipping away in all directions, the thought of the century began. No one man could express such a period. We can select one writer to be a fair representative of the Middle Ages, of the Renascence, of the eighteenth century: to gain even hints of the social moods, desires, and sorrows of modern times, we must know not one author only, but many. Each author expresses not a stable state of things, but one which, whether he knows it or not, is in constant flux under his very eyes. To understand the social bearing of modern literature is then not easy, but the attempt is rewarding as well as difficult. The heirs of the Revolution were the English poets; and to study the social ideals of our literature and leave them out is almost to omit Hamlet from his play. Yet their poetry is too great to handle as a detail, and the scope of this book will not allow a more extended treatment. Their splen |