the rondel, and the villanelle, bringing an echo of De Banville, Villon, and Marot into English verse. His charming artifice seems a curiously exotic product in this age when poets searched for news of the state of their souls. Pensive charm and fragile sensibility mark his verse. A delicate flavor of the eighteenth century, which he loved for its elegance, its good form, and its grace, pervades many of his poems. That he was a genuine student of the eighteenth century is made evident by his biographies of Fielding, Steele, Goldsmith, Horace Walpole, Hogarth, Richardson, and Fanny Burney. The very pressure of that time is to be discovered in his three charming volumes of Eighteenth Century Vignettes.

Dobson, with his friends Andrew Lang and Edmund Gosse, the last of whom still lives, seems like a survival of the characteristic Victorian man of letters with leisure to read, charm of conversation, and a talent for making himself interesting in letters. Our day of the Higher Journalism is not likely to produce more of their type.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
AGE OF VICTORIA

The Victorian Age, as it gave way to the "naughty nineties," won the reputation it has since held among the moderns. To them it was a stuffy age, not daring to face the fierce facts of life, an age of false modesty and stiff convention, while it remained unconscious of the strong current of revolution that flowed by. It was the time of hoop skirts and side whiskers, of hideous upholstered furniture and worsted mottoes on the wall. It was likewise a time when prohibitions were given to pale innocence standing before a world whose book was severely

closed to it. In the end the world demanded an accounting. Now the veil was to be rudely torn away from stern reality, youth was to be instructed in all the mysteries of good and evil, and no traditional obstacle should interfere with the effort to obtain as full an experience as one's life might afford.

We may take our choice of the present or the past, admitting, whatever our choice, that the convention of one age is largely responsible for the license of the one that follows. And yet, as we glance back in retrospect on a time that already seems remote, we perceive that, in spite of much fumbling and much false reasoning and much dread of the future, there were giants in those days we have just reviewed. It is doubtful, indeed, if we can name many periods in history in which so many great men in every branch of literature and science have left their mark upon the culture of their country. It was a time of beginnings and transitions, when the critical spirit played upon every phase of life, when uncertainty before swift and revolutionary changes filled men's hearts with dread of an unpredictable future. It was above all the time when the middle class came into its own, the prosperous and Philistine middle class, which had to be educated out of its narrowness and its dogmas into the somewhat more flexible modern of to-day. From convention and a certain reaction from reality the world by an inevitable and entirely natural evolution has passed into the fearlessness of revolt.

The Victorian Age produced a body of poetry of a high order, but, like the Augustan Age, it was also distinguished by the development of its prose. Not only was it the heyday of the art of fiction, its contribution to the advancement of prose style was unusually

great. By the work of Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Thackeray, Newman, Stevenson, and Pater, English prose has gained much of its flexibility and its color. During this period the novel, as just stated, gained its greatest development, and, with the prose essay, became the instrument of either propaganda or an intensive study of human life; and poetry carried on the romantic tradition of the age preceding, less strange and wonderful but more concerned with the world of nature. Altogether it was an age that may take rank with the great productive ages of English letters both in accomplishment and in the initiation of new lines of endeavor. Since then the tradition of culture has been as completely shattered as if a bloody revolution had intervened to break all connection. Not yet have we found sure footing for our feet in the quagmire of revolutionary theory. New modes and new standards that must be discovered if the world is to remain on a stable basis are still in formation, and it would be difficult to foretell what may be the character of our literature in another generation.

H

CHAPTER IX

LITERATURE OF THE LAST GENERATION

ISTORIES of English literature have usually concluded with the death of Tennyson in 1892, but the present work, having for its chief aim a survey of tendencies and movements, would be incomplete without at least a brief review of the formation and progress of contemporary thought.

The last chapter has failed of its main purpose if it has not made clear that two forces have been at war during the generations since the accession of Queen Victoria, of which neither has yet gained a definite victory. The Victorian Compromise between the ancient orthodox creed and the new evolutionary science at last failed to satisfy, while neither the spiritual revival within the Church of England nor the religion of science has proved itself a permanent source of comfort. Social organization and improvement have become, it is true, increasingly scientific, but it is just as true that the philosophic bases of science have come under the fire of destructive criticism. Evolutionary progress has become a doubtful thing and even the initial assumptions of scientific thought have lost their hold upon investigators. Though many philosophical and scientific thinkers believe that the ancient absolutes of the moral and religious life have fallen before the attacks of scientific realism, the victory may prove more and more doubtful as time passes and

new standards are searched for and found. Just at present we seem to be living in a period of desperate experimentation, without clear aims or definite goal; only a critical spirit of inquiry tends to the destruction of the old postulates and a tentative hold upon whatever has the appearance of common reason.

Perhaps the most significant fact in the modern world, from an intellectual point of view, has been the international character of its thinking. The cosmopolitanism of art and thought has been greatly aided by the rapid progress of modern invention. Telegraphs, railroads, wireless, and at last radio, have made communication rapid and exchange of thought nearly instantaneous. For all except political purposes, Europe has become a great confederation, for which the only parallel in the past is the intellectual life of the Middle Ages.

With the progress of invention has come a vast increase in population and wealth, making more acute the social question which confronted earnest men during the early years of the reign of Victoria. Socialism and social experiments have engaged the minds of many writers of this generation, and a growing literature of social revolt against existing conditions has begun to find its place during these years. The humanitarian spirit has received an enormous impetus, until to-day it is impossible not to be keenly aware of the passionate endeavor to remedy the evils of our industrial system. Laws to regulate industrial relations, including limitation of hours of labor, old age and liability insurance, sanitation, and compulsory education, have been the direct result of this impulse. To deal with life on a basis of reality, untrammeled by any check from traditional ways of thinking, has been the effort in nearly every line of activity. This