Page:Scottishartrevie01unse.djvu/61

literature is to a great extent an example of this truth. For never in the history of our country has culture been so wide as it now is, and on the other hand never was there so much literature lacking the creative element. How much, or rather how little, of all that is written in these days has that real, permanent quality which is the soul of all great literature! How little of it deals with life in the truest sense, and not with the accidents of life, or with mere theories concerning life ! Even some of the best work of a writer so great as George Eliot is marred by this latter tendency, and the name of those writers who are wholly given over to it is Legion. In some directions, however, real progress has been made. In the field of History the Dryas- dusts of the past have vanished before such writers as Carlyle, Froude, and Green. Historical literature has undergone notliincr short indeed of a revolution. The old arbitrary landmarks of kings and queens have passed away, and more rational, scientific divisions have taken their place. The doctrine of evolution has been applied to the phenomena of history, and where cliance and accident before reigned, order and progress are found. In no department of literature has more marked progress been made than in that of Criticism. When Jeffrey reigned supreme, there was no standard liigher than the fashion of the day, or the critic's unreasonable and unreasoning likes and dislikes. All this is now happily altered. The air has been cleared of prejudice and conventionality. The work done to effect this by such a book as the late Mr. Ai'nold's Essays in Criticism cannot be overesti- mated. It represents an epocli in the literature of criticism, if not indeed the beginning of a real idea of criticism. The hasty ' This will never do ' of Jeffrey is replaced by such teaching as the follow- ing : ' Criticism must be patient, and know how to wait ; and flexible, and know how to attach itself to things, and how to withdraw from them. It must ]" be apt to study and praise elements that for the fulness of spiritual perfection are wanted, even though they belong to a power which in the prac- tical sphere may be maleficent. It must be apt to discern the spiritual shortcomings or illusions of powers that in the practical sphere may be bene- ficent;' and again: 'Criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge.' We have, however, it may be feared, lost some- thing in another department, that of the Essay. ^A'"hat a laboured, ponderous, and intellectual pro- duct it has become in the present day, to what it was in Bacon's hands, or later in Addison's or Charles Lamb's ! The essay then was a dainty little dish — a sort of dessert ; now it is a solid meal de- manding a powerful digestion, and too often affording but a modicum of nourishment. We have no really great living essayist, though never did a literature possess so many essays. We read strenuously what our magazines place before us, and feel we have done our duty, but we do not return again and again to their pages with ever fresh delight as we do to the pages of those we have named. AVe apologise for our own inability to write such essays by the most careful editing of them. The Novel has been put to new and higher uses in our era, and has become a medium for the venti- lation of social abuses, and the discussion of the profoundest problems in philosophy and religion. It is not without significance that the novel of the present season — Robert Elsmere — is the history of spiritual doubt. Nowhere indeed is the intro- spective character of our literature more marked than in the novel. In such a work as Daniel Deronda, the culminating effort of George Eliot's genius, it attains quite a painful pitch. The development of this bias in the novelist's mind is steady throughout her work, and is in proportion to the degree in which she came into the full current of modern thought. Her ever-growing sympathy with the aims and methods of science is another phase of the same tendency, science being the application of the analytic method to Nature — ' Considering everywhere Her secret meaning in her deeds.' In Arnold the effect of science has been tlie culti- vation of a lofty, calm fortitude. ' And with joy the stars perform their shining, And the sea its long moon-silver'd roll ; Nor self-poised they live, nor pine with noting All the fever of some differing soul.' The scientific spirit has, however, affected literature in other ways. Its ideas of heredity and environ- ent have afforded a new standpoint for the literary student of human nature, and it may be said that in this respect we are on the borders of a land of promise in Literature. There have been writers, Iiowever, such as New- man and Rossetti, who have looked the scientific spirit in the face, and finding nothing ' In world or sun, Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye ; Nor thro' the questions men may try, The petty cobwebs we have spun,' to satisfy the aspirations of their intensely spiritual natures, have turned to those primal sources of in- spiration from which the great Elizabethans drew, when hope was fresh, and faith unchilled by the coldly analytic methods of modern science.