The times. [volume] (Washington [D.C.]) 1897-1901, 1901-03-10
By ANDREW LANG.

ours may be merely a "so-called nine
teenth century" Certain it is that tc
nudge literature in blocks of centuries
is to make n convenient but Illogical
cross-diyision. The early, and perhaps
the most important literary influences
of the century were in existence long
before lS0l Thus if we look at what
ever is now called fin de steele, at violent
antagonism to tradition and convention
at discomfort of every sort with every
thing-with rank, wealth, morality, law
marriage the family-we find that this
passion was as noisy and self-complacent
a hundred years ago as it is today. The
French Revolution was the lurid play
ground of New Women" full of what
they supposed to be new ideas. The Ger
man drama OF 17S0-1S00, now best remem-
bered by the parody called The Rovers,
in the anti-Jacobin. was replete with the
humorless paradoxes and strained situa-
tons Of Ibsen. The shortest way to an
understanding of the antiquity of our
new ideas" is, in fact. a study of the
poetry of the anti-Jacobin.
Romance, again, as far as romance de-
ponds for her effects on desperate deeds,
on the rhetoric of noble brigands, on the
phantasms of the sheeted dead SILVER
ing down dark passages among skeletons
on clanking chains and on distressed dam
sells, was as much alive in the end of the
last century as at any age of literary
history. Goethe. Schiller. Burger, Mrs
Radcliffe. all following in the Gothic wake
of honest Horace Walpole and his Castle
of otranto," were preparing the ground
for Scott and Dumas. Once more the old
popular elements so necessary to ntera-
,fphr inc ~fernr
on touching mother earth) had been whol-
ly absent from the poetry and prose of the
last reigning Stuart and of the first two
Hanoverian Kings of England. But,
about 1770-17S0, literature had returned to
its archaic popular sources survivals in
present tradition. Percy had made volks-
ieder fashionable Ferguson and Burns
had revived the rustic muse of Scotland,
and Macpherson had given mankind
draught. though an adulterated draught,
from the cup of the sorceries Of the Gel
tic enchantress In opposition 10 the ur-
ban self-restraint and contented compla-
cency of the Augustan age, Rousseau had
preached the pleasures of virtue. senti-
rnent, and of a blessed state of nature:"
young Werther had gotten him a stool
to be sad upon. like Master Stephen;
weeping was the mode. Rousseau. as Mr..
Pater once observed in conversation, was
the grandmother Of US ALL and as tear
full as Mrs. Gummidge in David Copper
field" Meanwhile the emancipation" born
of science had set in; people thought they
knew all about everything; the elder Dar-
win could explain the universe without a
God, quite as easily as any modern Oar
winian, if not so deliberately He may not
have been always correct in his theories
and facts still, there they were, and they
were "emancipating." Yet, far from be- |
Ing laughed out of court by the crafty |
ing progress of science, a more mystical /
religion and a life more austere had come |
n from the preaching of Wesley, who was |
practically the parent of our neo-Cathol- !
cism in its varying forms. The oxford !
with all the strange after |
symptoms which it has left behind it, is |
directly descended from Wesley. Thus |
sentiment, freedom, and variety |
In poetic form, philanthropy, revolt |
against the past, return to and reverence |
for the past, scientific doubt. WEAKNESS of |
life, love of nature, wistful belief relapse |
on the forms of the Church and every !
thing else which stamps the literature of /
Ire nineteenth century were alive and ac-
tive in the last half of the eighteenth CEN /
The nineteenth century merely went on
evolving the principles. revolutionary or
Of the last half of the eight
zenith century.
Thus Craobe, the precursor Of whoever,
American, Frenchman. or
siav. has written Of the sombre tragedies
II the poor, was born in l754 Blake,
whose perfectly un-Augustan rhapsodies
md mystic lyrics were made fashionable
about 1870 was born in 1851 out of due
lime. for his best side is Elizabethan in
quality. Burns, born in 1853, is as much
At home In the nineteenth century as
Tolstoi, while Goodwin could not be more
advanced" or Mary Wollstonecraft more
# New Woman" II the former belong
ID TO our Forward Liberals and the lat
er perforated at congresses Of her sex. !
rhe frst twenty-five years of Miss Austen
,elong to the eighteenth century; yet, ex-
'ept for a certain "old-fashioned" prim-
less of style, she is the first. and beyond
III doubt. the greatest, Of all nineteenth
century realistic" novelists of domestic
ife For. though "realist," she is a
iumorist, and the combination is almost
Your common realist is
,loomy thing. with no more sense Of the
omic than NJ. lola.
OF the new poets. revolutionary in metre
nd matter. Wordsworth, Scott Cole
idge, and Southey We're born in l77O-1T4;
hey were mature before our century
awned. His northern home, among the
Ills and lakes, fitted Wordsworth to be |
he austere and mystical poet of nature !
nd Of man in relation to nature. Born n |
oct, his genius was determined by his ,
environment, while his ardent sympathy ;
18th the Revolution at once turned his
ttention TO the unregarded poor, and in |
pired his not wholly successful attempt
. shake off the trammels of Augustan !
poetic diction," the survival OF the Latin.
I'M of Boileau and Pope Later. of ,
purse, Wordsworth became the Tory. the
atriot, the churchman, and the stamp {
1lloctor. But his pOetical creed he never
changed, though he often 6
psed from 1t unconsciously. II Scott was S
, be a poet at all he was fated to be in 4
uenced by the New World. not in its 7
ideas, but in its wistful re- $
irn 10 the Old World Of reivers, spear !
len. claymores. goblin. ghost, and fairy. {
he Border ballads lulled his cradle and 4
ere the joy of his childhood and man h
bod. All tradition murmured to him her a
harms Of Border and highland legend. L
;ery ruined abbey and castle had fits tale d
y him; TO Ettrick and Yarrow he need q
nee - say, like Lady John Scott, Have y
~ He 0essage for me?" He ro-e had
~ the Augustan horror Of noun +
-. nevgf a touch OF the Q
OF "Barbarism." \
kotranto'' and Mrs. a
aror went to the n
IS the novels of \
. suggested fc- n
manners of his q