the stock-in-trade of the scenic novelist. It supplied the never-failing background for Carlyle's most impressive pictures; the infinities and the immensities give solemnity if not sublimity to some of the finest passages of Sartor Resartus and afterwards grew into a mannerism in his writings. But poetic imagination was most touched by it. No school of poetry but found it a treasure-house of simile and illustration and emotional stimulus. Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Rogers, Moore, Clough, Tennyson, all appeal to it when they mean to be most impressive. Later on, when the question of life and especially intellectual and emotional life on other worlds came to be hotly discussed and seemed to introduce a doubt into the doctrine of the atonement, the more religious section of the new audience began to shrink from their favourite science as sharing in the unorthodox reputation of all science.

2.

But that which shook theology to its centre again was the science that was deciphering the history of the earth. Geology, as soon as it began to throw back life on the earth millions of years, touched the interpretation of the Bible. The story of creation in Genesis became the arena of the hottest discussions of the century. Books like the Vestiges of Creation seemed to threaten the very foundations of religion for a time. Hugh Miller tried to stem the flood of doubt that broke into the sphere of theology, by taking the Mosaic account of creation as allegorical and attempting to reconcile it with the story that the rocks told. By his reverent treatment of the subject and his lucid half-poetical style he made the science popular with the orthodox section of the new audience. But the theory of development, which the record of the strata and their fossils seemed to point out and confirm, proved too much for his attempt at conciliation, and the two spheres became again divorced. Geology grew again into a word of evil omen, till biology set up for itself and took upon it the chief odium of the evolutionary theory and its proof. The great era of fertilisation of literature by these two sciences came later in the century. Yet Buckland and Lyell, Forbes and Murchison in geology, and Prichard and Owen and Carpenter in the history of living tissue did much to popularise the more striking discoveries and

speculations of the new sciences. And before the close of the period we find imaginative writers, like Ruskin in his Modern Painters, bringing them in as the best allies of art and poetry. It was indeed the new microscopic and speculative study of nature that had chiefly aided in revolutionising the picturesque style. Landscape and poetic description, even in the latter half of last century, had never got beyond the broader features of scenery. Now they entered into the minuter beauty of life upon the earth; they attempted truth of detail. And the worshipful sympathy with nature, that had become with Wordsworth the spirit of poetry, entered into painting and into prose literature. Turner is the best instance in the one, and Ruskin in the other. Whilst the novelists had to make description of scenery one of the features of their art; and as the century went on, it grew at once more subtle, more poetic, and more like the painter's art.

3. But the effect of science on the literature of the nineteenth century was far greater as an atmosphere round it than as a shaping, tutoring hand. Its general conclusions soon pass into the spiritual air we breathe and carry germs of health or disease. And imaginative work, as having a larger element of emotion in it, is the first to feel any change, however subtle, in the atmosphere of thought. Not the mere metaphors or similes or illustrations are changed, but its. very life. A new epoch-making idea, therefore, soon revolutionises the art of an age. And no period reveals such a change in spirit as the first half of the nineteenth century.

I.

Section 9.

For it was an era of marvellous expansion of thought by science. The curtain of the sky had been drawn and the human race had now infinity and eternity as the background of its drama. The spiritual eye gazed through worlds and systems that had no end and were yet all related to our own cosmic atom; it seemed, in tracing back the origin of the microcosm, to traverse countless æons of the past. The Prometheus Unbound of Shelley and the Sartor

G

Resartus of Carlyle best illustrate the effect of this delimitation of human view upon literature; the drama glories in the power of the human spirit to overleap all boundaries of time and space; and the eye of Teufelsdröckh is seldom off the stars and the ocean of being of which they are but the spindrift. It is true that Paradise Lost is as deeply immersed in stellar infinity; but it is as an external system, unrelated to the human system except through the campaigning genius of Satan. In these more modern books the infinities and eternities themselves are stirred to their depths by sympathy with human fate; the great worlds of night have "a tear for pity". It was this new sense of the kinship of the cosmos that transformed the poetic spirit in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. The eighteenth had felt nothing of it even though in the poems of Ossian the stars and the tempests are the commonest of stage properties. The human soul now ranged through space and time seeking and finding brotherhood a part of all that it had thought or known. Wordsworth and Byron, the idealist and the satirist, alike felt the new impulse to transcend the limits of mere human life and human senses. The one is ever linking the little tragedies of life on the earth with the destinies of the universe. The other in his Cain, and Heaven and Hell brings the Newtonian system to bear on the dramatisation of Genesis, and in Manfred makes the stars the confidantes of his world-anguished hero.

2. World-anguished was indeed the characteristic note of the new imaginative literature all over Europe-an amalgam of the revolutionism of the time and the sense of vastitude that science had given to thought. Kin as the human spirit now felt itself with infinity, it had been dwarfed and crushed by the decentralisation of the world on which it found itself. Even the planetary system was but an atom in the all; and what was the individual ego to that atom? A sadness, a self-pity came over the thoughts of men. And at the same time there came the revolutionary stimulus of the age in reaction against this imprisonment and overshadowing of the ego. Passion would revolt against the insignificance of man's destiny and place in the universe, as it had revolted against the yoke of his own customs and

in bloodshed overthrown their tyranny. The new worldanguish was bold as well as self-pitiful and in the poetry of Byron and Shelley would force its way into the shrine of being and free man from the limitations of his insignificance; it would assert his divinity, his equality with the best of the universe, his freedom in it. This deification of the human spirit, so common a poetic reaction from the world-anguish, was hardened into a creed too in the religion of positivism, which at once recognised the limitations of man and asserted his divine claims. In Byron it took the form of a cynical egotism that would laugh down creeds and moralities, and, finding itself still impotent, ended in pessimism, as with Leopardi, Schopenhauer, and, to some extent, Carlyle. In Shelley it became optimistic; belief in the power of revolution to overthrow all limitations of the human spirit ended in the passionate thought that only tyrants, and tyrannical laws and customs and creeds had to be removed, and man would reveal all his native divinity; the world would be as it ought to be. World-anguish, which indeed often pressed heavy on his mind, was not seldom transfigured during his creative efforts into world-happiness.

3. The new sense of man's kinship with the cosmos demanded a revision of philosophy as well as of the poetic art. And this revision was as usual accomplished in two ways that took opposite directions. Idealism, culminating in Hegel, sought the explanation of all the phenomena of the universe in spirit; positivism, taking its cue from Comte, immersed the whole of existence in matter; the one gloried in speculation, the other was content to observe and await the result of observation. The expansion of scientific thought made the positive view of life the most victorious and progressive; it seemed to fit into all the new inventions and discoveries and methods of discovery. It falls into the background during an age in which science is unproductive; the utilities then seem of little avail in the world of thought, and matter seems the barren element. A period like the nineteenth century with its exceptional triumphs of observation and reasoning on observation could not fail to adopt the positive attitude even in literature. But its greatest successes during the earlier half of our century

were in logic and history. It led to the renascence of Baconian logic, the enthusiastic study of those mental forms that are suited more to investigation and to the proof of the results of observation than to subtlety of conclusions. Induction seemed again a new thing and completely overshadowed deductive logic. So in history the past had to be re-observed from the new point of view; documentary evidence became the all-important factor in writing of the past; the methods of the law-courts became the methods of historical research; and research and the correct presentation of facts triumphed over interpretation. Yet even in the speculative treatment of history the positive attitude had its successes. Buckle and others took the new materialistic views of life and applied them to the past; they tried to find the sources of historical events and developments and characteristics in the material conditions and surroundings.

4. As a rule the positive mode of viewing life is unfertile in the realm of pure imagination. For it insists on limiting all flights of the mind to the range of facts. It makes the speculative faculty move in harness and yokes it to observation. Imagination has to become a patient drudge that awaits the bidding of the senses. Not yet had realism come into fiction with its professions of scientific purpose and scientific method. Had it appeared early in the century, it would have meant a period meagre in imaginative literature. For realistic portraiture and picture have soon to pass into mere photography. The positive method. affected poetry and fiction only so far as to import the results of the new sciences into them as illustrations, figures, and even atmosphere; the truths that astronomy, geology, and biology taught about the universe and man's place in it became new starting-points for imaginative flights. And poetry and fiction breathed a freer air in the new infinitudes of space and time that science seemed to give them.

5. It is ever the idealistic view of life that gives fertility to the imaginative literature of a period, the view that the spirit is the creative element, the only true existence in the world. And during the nineteenth century science on its more speculative side has more and more tended to confirm this view; for it has in its progress broken down the barriers