round, seeking rest and finding none, in the little excitements that every empty novelty can bring them. How do these feelings impress themselves on the literature of to-day?

In the first we have the philosopher-the self-dependent seeker after truth. He battles vainly against the cruelty and injustice that he sees all around him. Foiled, he stands firm, with pale thoughtful brow, bearing up with almost Promethean grandeur. But at length he must yield. He is no Titan, as Prometheus was. Despair and melancholy seize upon him, or a cynical sneer rises to his lips. Is not this despairing melancholy deeply impressed on our literature?

"I falter where I firmly trod,

And, falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope through darkness up to God,

"I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.”

I need hardly quote more. Our greatest poet only too often speaks thus. In such moments "when the light is low and all the wheels of Being slow," when "Nature, red in tooth and claw with ravine, shrieks against his creed," the modern poet ofttimes gives way. It is not, as Taine asserts, that we are physically and mentally weaker than our ancestors. It is that in the new quest for unseen truth such as the ancients

never dreamed of, the poet or the philosopher often, when brought face to face with the terrible phantom of nature, losing the only faith that can sustain him, sinks abjectly to the ground. It is from such reasons that what Taine says is only too true: "Digust, mental and bodily degradation, disease, impotence, madness, suicide, at the best a permanent hallucination or a feverish raving-these are nowadays the ordinary issues of the poetic temperament."

As regards those who would satisfy our longings for truth by pointing to sensuous enjoyment as an end, we shall best be silent. "Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa."

The writers that answer the demand for novelty and excitement are legion; the supply is equal to the demand, and both are immense. They deal in incidents and feeling, neither having the slightest upward tendency; mere finite existencies. It is not that they are commonplace trivial incidents and feelings,-even such may, if properly used, teach us much and direct our thoughts higher. By no means. They are of the first order of magnitude-monstrous-both incidents and feelings. To this class belongs almost every sensational play and sensational novel of the day. And when they belong also to the class that we have passed over, they are not only contemptible but injurious.

The motive that is so sadly wanting in our modern literature and art is faith-no mere blind belief, however

obstinate, no mere complacent optimism-but a living energizing faith in the fact that all this unintelligible tangle of the natural world is in very truth working together for good; a faith stronger far than the faint-hearted "trust" taught us by Tennyson.

"Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill...

Behold, we know not anything;

I can but trust that good shall fall

At last-far off--at last, to all,

And every winter change to spring."

We want some of that grand restraint and repose that we see in the Greeks, before we can produce great works of art. With us it is not to be that Promethean sublimity of defiance, that self-reliance of a self-collected soul, but the calm strong faith in the "final goal of ill." Without this motive we either fritter away our lives with toys and inanities; or else struggle in our inability to stem the stream, and sink with a cry of despair or a cynical defiance.

We have, I think, at present* a writer, and one who has secured a powerful grasp on the public attention, who is an instance of the last type. I cannot but think that the highest teaching of all the writings of George Eliot amounts to nothing more than a lofty and mournful agnosticism. The mysterious web of life is woven for us, perhaps more deftly and in more

* 1878.

vivid colours than by any other writer, with the sole exception of Shakespeare. But we are left gazing at the tangled maze of things, while the writer seems to smile at us with sad lips, and to say, "This is all. The rest is silence."

The poet, the novelist, the playwright, has yet to be born who will tell us what life means. He will teach us to have that faith in the deep inner harmony of things, in the good that is to be the final goal of ill, which he himself possesses. He will love to exhibit all the nobler diviner tendencies of man struggling victoriously upwards through the perplexities and trials of earthly things. In this way alone will he secure that form which is necessary for art. Abandoning the defiant attitude of Shelley, he will assume his faith—and a still stronger and deeper faith than his in the unseen, and his works will possess a majesty and a repose far more grand than even that of ancient art.

CHAPTER IV.

THE MEDIEVAL SPIRIT AND THE REVIVAL.

IN order that we may have some rough and temporary stepping-stone across the ages that separate ancient literature from the poetry of which I wish especially to treat-namely that which arose towards the end of the eighteenth century,-I must now offer a slight sketch of the fundamental characteristics of these ages. In doing this I must, though most unwillingly, leave almost untouched many deeply interesting subjects, such as the rise of early romantic poetry, the marvellous phenomenon of the "Divine Comedy” of Dante, and the origins of our English literature. These subjects, if treated at all, must be treated fully, and to do this does not lie within the scope of my present scheme. I shall therefore, without any attempt to trace the movement in chronological order, speak in general terms of the spirit that (as it appears to me) characterizes the intervening age, and then of the chief reasons to which we may ascribe that wonderful new-birth of natural feeling which we call the Renaissance, or Revival.