The St. Louis Republic. [volume] (St. Louis, Mo.) 1888-1919, 1901-03-10

wealth. morality. law. marriage 'he ianh.
we find that this passion was as NOISY anu
self-complacent a hundred years ago as ~
is to-day. The French Revolution was the
lurid playground of New Women" full OF
wha. they supposed to be new Ideas. The
German drama of 17SO-1S00, now best remem-
bered by the parody called The Rovers.'
in the anti-Jacobin. was replete with the
humorless paradoXes and strained situa-
lions 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 shivering
down dark packages among skeletons on
clanking chains and on distressed damsels,
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 Otran-
TO-" were preparing the ground for Scott
and Dumas. Once more the old popular
elements so necessary to literature (Which.
like Antaeus. regains vigor on touching
mother earth) had been wholly absent from
the poetry and prose OF the last reigning
Stuart and of the first two Hanoverian
Kings of England. But. about 1770-17S0. lit
erature had returned to its archaic popular
sources survivals in present tradition. Percy
had made volks-lieder fashionable. Fergu-
son and Burns had revived tho rustic muse
of Scotland. and Macpherson had given
mankind a draught. though an adulterated
draught. from the cup OF the sorceries of
the Celtic enchantress. In opposition to
the urban self-restraint and contented COM
placency OF the Augustan age. Rousseau
had preached the pleasures Of virtue, senti-
ment, 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 grand
mother of us ALL" and as fearful as Mrs.
Gummidge in David Copperfield. Meanwhile
the emancipation" born of science had set
in: people thought they knew all about ev-
%erything; the elder Darwin could explain
the universe without a God. quite as easily
as any modern Darwinian, IL not SO elab-
orately. He may not have been always cor
rect in his theories and facts. still. there
they were. and they were "emancipating."
Yet. far from being laughed out Of court
by the gratifying progress OF science, q
more mystical religion and a life moro aus
tere had come in from the preaching OF
Wesley, who was practically the parent OF
our neo-Catholicism in its varying forms.
The oxford Movement" with all the
strange ~after-symptoms which It has left
behind it. is directly descended from Wes-
ley. Thus romance, 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 everything
else which stamps the literature of the
Nineteenth Century were alive and active
in the last half Of the Eighteenth Century.
The year 1901 made no sudden break. The
Nineteenth Century merely went on evolv-
ing the principles. revolutionary or reac-
tionary. Of the last half Of the Eighteenth
Century,