VICTORIAN LITERATURE.

THE literature of the Elizabethan age was the flowering through art of a new faith and a new joy—a faith in the spiritual truths recovered by the Reformation movement, a joy in the world of nature and of human life as presented in the magic mirror of the Renaissance. Within a decade of years having for its centre the year of Queen Elizabeth's accession, were born Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Chapman, Daniel, Drayton, Marlowe, Hooker, Bacon, Shakspere. Never before or since in England were such prizes drawn in the lottery of babies. Never before or since had the good fairies who bring gifts to cradles so busy a time. But it was not until Elizabeth's reign had run more than half its course, and these boys were grown to man's estate, that the great summer of literature showed its flowers and fruit. The "Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity," the six books of the "Faerie Queene," the "Essays" of Bacon, "Romeo and Juliet," "As You Like It," and "Henry V." belong to the last period of Elizabeth's reign, that which opens with the defeat of the Armada; and many writings which we commonly class under the head of Elizabethan literature" King Lear" and "The Tempest," "The Advancement of Learning," "The History of the World," "The Alchemist" and "The Silent Woman" are named Elizabethan only because they continue the

same literary movement and carry it on through the period which had hardly culminated before her death.

excess.

The literature of the reign of Queen Anne was the expression of the better mind of England when it had recovered itself through good sense and moderation of temper from the Puritan excess and from the Cavalier Enthusiasm was discredited, and faith had no wings to soar; but it was something to have escaped the spiritual orgies of the saints and the sensual riot of the king's new courtiers; it was something to have attained to a sober way of regarding human life, and to the provisional resting-place of a philosophical and theological compromise. Addison's humane smile, Pope's ethics of good sense, and the exquisite felicity of manner in each writer, represent and justify the epoch.

Our own age has been named the sæculum realisticum; men of science have claimed it as their own, and countless pæans have been chanted in honour of our material and mechanical advancement. Yet it is hardly less distinguished by its ardours of hope and aspiration, by its eager and anxious search for spiritual truth, by its restlessness in presence of spiritual anarchy, by its desire for some spiritual order. It has been pre-eminently an age of intellectual and moral trial, difficulty and danger; of bitter farewells to things of the past, of ardent welcomes to things as yet but dimly discerned in the coming years; of dissatisfaction with the actual and of immense desire; an age of seekers for light, each having trouble too plainly written upon his forehead.

If a precise date must be chosen separating the present period of literature from that which immediately pre

cedes it, we shall do well to fix on the year 1832. In that year the Bill for the representation of the people placed the future destiny of England in the hands of the middle classes, and a series of social and political reforms speedily followed. In that year died a great imaginative restorer of the past, and also a great intellectual pioneer of the future. Amid his nineteenth-century feudalisms, within sound of the old Border river, Scott passed away, murmuring to himself, as he lay in his bed, some fragment of the Litany or verse from the venerable hymns of the Romish ritual. On an autumn evening his body was laid in the resting-place of his forefathers amid the monastic ruins of Dryburgh. It was in London, just at the close of a fierce political struggle, that Jeremy Bentham died. To the last he had been "codifying like any dragon"; when he heard the verdict of his physician, that death was inevitable, the cheerful utilitarian thought first of a practical application of his own doctrine. "Very well," he said serenely, "be it so; then minimise pain," and so departed, leaving his viscera to be dissected for the benefit of mankind, and his skeleton when duly arrayed to do the honours at University College.

By the year 1832 the flood-tide of English poetry had withdrawn from the shores which had lightened and sung with the splendour and music of the earlier days of the century. It was eleven years since Keats had found rest in the flowery cemetery at Rome; ten years since Shelley, in a whirl of sea-mist, had solved the great mystery that had haunted him since boyhood. Byron's memory was still a power, but a power that constantly

waned. Southey had forsaken poetry, and was just now
rejoicing over the words, Laus Deo, written on the last
page of his "History of the Peninsular War;" surely
at last those "subsecive hours" were at hand in which
he might bring to a fruitful outcome the great labour of
two-and-thirty years, his never-to-be-written "History
of Portugal." It was in 1832 that Wordsworth, con-
scious of the loss of the glory and the freshness of his
earlier manhood, and conscious also that he had never
forfeited a poet's prerogative, wrote those lines prefixed
to his complete works, in which he exhorts the heaven-
inspired singer to fidelity and contentment, whether he
shine as
a great star in the zenith or burn like an
untended watch - fire on the ridge of some dark
mountain :-

"If thou, indeed, derive thy light from Heaven,
Then, to the measure of that heaven-born light,
Shine, Poet! in thy place, and be content."

Few of Wordsworth's poems of later date than 1832 can be said to dart their beams with planetary influence from the zenith. Yet there is no fond self-pity in his lines, as there are in those which Coleridge, compassed about with infirmity, printed in that same year, 1832, in Blackwood's Magazine, under the title "The Old Man's Sigh":

"Where no hope is, life's a warning

That only serves to make us grieve

In our old age,

Whose bruised wings quarrel with the bars of the still

The text was afterwards altered, and the poem was made a portion of "Youth and Age."

Coleridge, indeed, had but a brief waiting before release from the cage was granted him. "Saw Coleridge in bed," writes Crabb Robinson (April 12, 1832).

66

'He looked beautifully-his eye remarkably brilliant —and he talked as eloquently as ever." The voyager through strange seas of thought still held men with his glittering eye and told his tale of wonder, but his voyaging and his work were indeed over. This year,

1832, which we have taken as the line of division between Victorian literature and that of the first literary period of the nineteenth century, was also the year of the death of an illustrious poet whose earlier verses had delighted Burke and won the approval of Johnson, and whose later writings were celebrated by Byron and had been the solace of Scott's dying days. Crabbe, whose life and poetry thus served to link together two widely different epochs of literature, touched the boundary of a third era, but his foot was not permitted to pass beyond the limit.

A student of the poetry of the age of Elizabeth who happens to be also a reader of the poetry of our own time, can hardly fail to be impressed by one important point of contrast between these two bodies of literature. The poets of the Elizabethan age-excepting, perhaps, Spenser seem to have got on very happily and successfully without theories of human life or doctrines respecting human society; but our nineteenth-century poets are almost all sorely puzzled about certain problems of existence, and, having laboured at their solution, come forward with some lightening of the burden of the mystery, with some hope or some solace; or else they