CHAPTER XXV
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY—MIDDLE PERIOD
Literature, as a rule, must ever be on the side of liberty, for one conclusive reason among others—that liberty is the life of literature. Hence every man of letters is instinctively a partisan of freedom; and even should his political or religious opinions drive him to support a tyranny by which these are protected, or should he be willing to acquiesce in a despotism which maintains peace and encourages art, he must yet disapprove of restraint upon his own productiveness, and this inevitable concession implies all the rest. Poetry—and the remark may in its measure be extended to every department of intellectual labour implying creation or even construction—has been well said to represent the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest tninds, a virtue and felicity to be understood as referring solely to the intellectual sphere. That is, there is no activity so pleasurable as production, or, by consequence, anything so intolerable as restraint.
The history of European literature for the half-century following the fall of Napoleon is, therefore, in the main, that of a force enlisted to contend with the Governments and the various sinister interests which strove to ignore the Revolution and restore the state of affairs which had existed in the eighteenth century. Many illustrious
