TENDENCIES AND PROSPECTS OF LITERATURE.

By Professor Edward Dowden.

To present a balance sheet in things spiritual, in things of the mind, is not an easy task, and to venture on anticipations and conjectures as to the future is hazardous. But it is only too evident that the losses to literature in recent years have been great. The masters of the earlier school of Victorian literature have nearly all passed away, and even of those who made their fame between 1850 and 1870, the numbers have been sadly thinned. Of the race of the prophets, Mr Ruskin survives, but Mr Ruskin is now silent. In philosophy idealism has a venerable representative in Dr. Martineau, and a rival method of thought is supported by the indefatigable intellect of Mr. Herbert Spencer; but the work of Dr. Martineau and Herbert Spencer may be said to be virtually complete. In science the dean of the faculty is Mr. Huxley ; and Mr. Huxley has readied that grand climacteric in authorship when a collected edition of his writings can be issued. A great historical investigator of former years Bishop Stubbs is well and fully occupied in making history by his wise conduct of an English diocese. Our eldest poet of distinction, Mr Coventry Patmore, has lately proved himself to be an admirable essayist, but he has ceased to sing. Of Victorian authors death has already gained a large inheritance, in poetry, Tennyson, Browning, Elizabeth Browning, Rossetti, Clough, Henry Taylor; in prose fiction, Dickens, Thackeray, Lever, Lytton, George Eliot; in history, Grote, Milman, Macaulay, Freeman, Brewer; in theological and ecclesiastical study Newman, Keble, Pusey, Ward, Manning, Stanley ; in classical scholarship, Jowett; in the study of art, Symonds and, a few weeks since, Walter Pater ; in science Owen, Darwin, Tyndall, Romanes; in fields of literary activity too various to be comprehended under a single name, Thomas Carlyle. And these losses have not come singly but rather in quick succession or "in battalia." Three years ago Mr Edmund Gosse gave a satirical account of an imaginary election at the imaginary English Academy of Letters, and since then seven vacancies have been made by death in his group of academicians. How rich we were not long ago—it is well to bring home to ourselves that fact. Shall we add, " How poor we are to day ? "

No; we will not utter that melancholy word. It is not just to compare the possessions of any one moment with the losses of half a century. Had we been instituting such a comparison in the first year of the present reign, in 1837, we should have lamented the deaths of Byron, Shelley, Keats, Crabbe, Coleridge, Lamb, Scott; we should have said that Wordsworth had just stereotyped his collected poems, and might have rightly conjectured that Southey's work was done. We should probably have over looked the slender sheaf of Tennyson's early verse, we should have been puzzled or repelled by the author of Paracelsus; we could not have predicted that before long an Oxford graduate was to publish the first volume of Modern Painters. At any particular moment we are likely to regard the veterans as belonging to the past, and the young recruits as not to be reckoned. The period during which an author attains to fame and has not yet entered upon his decline is often a short period ; his best days of work are often those in which he is not recognised by his contemporaries, or, in presenting new ideas and novel combinations of feeling, is pronounced to be incoherent obscure, fantastic, lacking in sanity, in capable of true art. We count the corn in the ear, but the corn in the blade may be worth as much. We are always more fortunate than we know.

But there is another way of regarding the matter. We may dismiss personalities, and ask the question—Are the dominant ideas in literature at the present day creative ideas? Are the tendencies in literature productive tendencies ? It can hardly be doubted that when this epoch of ours is viewed from some standpoint in the future sufficiently distant to obscure petty details and reveal the central lines of force, the great facts which will be discerned are two—the growth of democracy and the progress of science. There are, indeed, fanatics and intellectual cranks who will assert that some petty gospel of their own is the supreme revelation of the nineteenth century ; for one it is the sorry gospel of pessimism; for another that a fable has lifted its leg or a ghost been photographed; for a third that a Mahatma has spoken ; and for a fourth that Daniel's prophecy of the little horn has found a new and true interpretation. As the stream moves forward it is natural that there should be eddies and rest less currents of recoil. They amuse the eye for a moment, and they do not interrupt the flow. We who are in that flow can note the points that we have passed, the bluffs that we have rounded, and can even look forward a little way to the reaches that lie ahead. The progress of democracy and the progress of science have come to impress us as something irresistible, something inevitable, which may perhaps be modified in their movement, but which cannot be turned back. And literature, sensitive as it is to every influence of the time, must needs have been affected by such potent influences as these.

The mere shifting of political power from the middle classes to the mass of the people has little direct bearing on literature. But the creation of a new and vast body of readers, with new needs and likings and aversions, must give rise to demands which will call forth a corresponding supply. It is probably true, as Mr. Gosse has maintained, that if we examine the highest examples of the noblest species of literature we shall be convinced that democracy has scarcely had any effect on them at all. An orator, said Mill, is heard; a poet is overheard. When poetry consciously aims at addressing the crowd, as Victor Hugo's poetry sometimes did, it tends towards the rhetorical and in so far it suffers injury. The true poet sings to liberate his mind, to double his joy, to release his pain. A great response of sympathy may rouse his highest powers, but he can be content with fit audience, though few ; singing really to satisfy his own artistic instinct, and sustained, if a damp and discouragement fall upon him, by heroic faith "in the whispers of the lonely Muse." But indeed we are assured by one who has made a study of Demos—Mr George Gissing—that poetry is not read, is not even tolerated, by the people. Once a month some exceptional applicant—generally " the wife of a tradesman" —asks over the counter of a Free Library for Longfellow or Byron ; but if the custodian offers a volume of verse to man or woman who comes simply for a book " they won't even look at it." "After fifteen years' observation of the poorer classes of English folk, chiefly in London and the south" —so writes Mr Gissing—" I am pretty well assured that, whatever civilising agencies may be at work among the democracy, poetry is not one of them." The most widely read of the chief poets of our generation, Tennyson, might be used, according to the evidence of the same expert, as a touch-stone to distinguish "the last of gentle folk from the first of the unprivileged." Mr. Swinburne's "Songs Before Sunrise" are inspired by democratic ideas ; but assuredly they are not favourites with the people. Mr. William Morris proclaims aloud his socialistic creed ; but Mr. Morris's poetry, like his furniture and his fabrics, and the costly issues from his Kelmscott press, is a luxury for those who live in leisured ease. When he writes for the people he almost ceases to be a poet and transforms himself into turbid orator in verse and an orator who fails to find a wide hearing.

And yet the democracy, if attached on the one hand to the actual, the immediate, and the real, on the other hand, and especially when thinking or feeling, as it were, en masse, is profoundly idealistic. His work of the day keeps the worker in touch with fact; a machine will stand no nonsense, and the operative must patiently and skilfully observe its law. When toil is ended he is disposed to snatch somewhat eagerly at the pleasure or amusement of the moment. And a vast amount of journalism has come into existence to meet his needs, to supply, in serious, specialised knowledge in aid and guidance of his daily task; if written for his season of rest, to furnish material for a moments diversion. A column, or several columns, of not over-subtle jokes, in which the selfish husband, the suspicious or acrid wife, the terrible infant, the fatuous youth or maiden, and the tyrannic mother-in-law figure as chief personages; a column of useful or useless information administered in a succession of minute but rapid doses; a column of personalities, a column of unrelated statements in statistics, a short but thrilling tale, an interview with some music hall heroine, answers to inquiries respecting incipient baldness or the treatment of warts, correspondence on some debatable topic such as "Why do not men propose?" or "Are fair women or dark the more constant?"— these make up the menu of dainty morsels offered for the entertainment of wearied toil. Let us be thankful, for it might be much less wholesome. But let us also admit that among the chief needs of our English people is some schooling in the choice of pleasures.

There is, however among the people an elite, and already this elite is seeking for higher pleasures of the mind. They cannot be arduous pleasures, and they cannot be prolonged. The tribe of poets at the present day is as numerous as the midges in mid-summer, and they wind their little horns prettily. But the poets with their editions of five hundred copies-manufacturers of dainty bibelots for drawingroom or boudoir— are chiefly read by one another. There is a club of rhymers to which no member is eligible who has been guilty of selling more than the authorised five hundred copies, and it is not known that any member has had to endure the pain of expulsion. Too often our rhymers ignore what the French term actuality. The novel, touching life, as it does, at many points, easy of access by the imagination, at once stimulating and soothing the feelings, is the epic form of to-day. And there has been to some extent a genuine revival in another province of democratic literature—the drama. But as the music hall, with its variety entertainment of dramatic " turns," competes with the regular drama, which exacts a more sustained attention, so the collection of short stories, with "turns" now humorous and now tragic or pathetic, is proving itself a formidable rival of the three volume or one volume novel. The short story demands art of all but the highest kind ; it sets forth an idea, records an impression, creates a character, presents a situation, interprets life, under limitations which require that every word should be vital and that every detail should be related to the centre. Mistakes may be retrieved in a campaign, but in a duel with rapiers to miss a point is fatal, and the short story is a brief, bright duel between the imagination of author and of reader. Already it has served to render our style of writing more sinewy and alert.

To give some wise schooling in pleasures— this is a chief function of the writer of genius who addresses a great democracy. To win the people a little way upward from the grosser and more vulgar forms of recreation is to do much. But at heart a democracy, as has been said, is profoundly idealistic, and another function of writers of the present day is to inform and guide that idealism. When a mass of men march together to a tune, it must be a simple tune ; when a mass of men think or feel together, they necessarily dismiss details and come under the dominance of some powerful abstraction. They must believe that the abstraction represents a multitude of interests, but it is the symbol, the banner that excites their enthusiasm and becomes a rallying point for their passions. We know what a magic there was during French revolutionary days in the words liberty, equality, fraternity ; and how many pitiless and sordid realities sheltered themselves behind these gleaming abstractions. No more important duty lies before the true teacher of the people than that of collating the dominant abstractions with facts, of perpetually revising them, of perpetually informing them with reality. It is a slow and difficult process; but it is the way of wisdom and of safety. We all need abstractions and generalisations; without their aid it is impossible to think. But they should be abstractions in touch with reality. And our hope for democracy lies in this—that with its constant intercourse with the actual, its tendency to abstractions, and its capacity for generous enthusiasms, it may, if guided and informed aright, attain to a sound and efficient way of thought.

The influence on literature of the scientific movement is no less apparent, perhaps is more apparent, than that of the democratic movement. All those departments of literature which have an affinity with science are active and progressive. Philology has passed from what we may call its mythical or imaginative period into the period of scientific study. Scholarship has become more exact. Monuments from the wreck of ancient civilisations, earlier than the Greek or Roman, are interpreted, ancient documents are deciphered ; we reconstruct from fragments the life of our remote forefathers, as Owen could reconstruct an extinct bird or reptile from the fossil bone. Even the sacred books of Scripture have been delivered over, for the service of us all, to the criticism of scientific scholarship and we have ceased to be alarmed lest religion—the divine breath of the spirit of man—should suffer from the correction of a date or the ascertainment of a disputed text. All the instruments of historical study have been advanced some degrees towards perfection. A great school of history has arisen, which, disdaining perhaps overmuch what is rhetorical, and studiously suppressing private passion and the prejudices of party, more than makes amends for certain losses by its disinterested effort to arrive at facts, to methodise them, to reduce them to their law. We miss the ease of Hume, the splendid emphasis and dramatic brilliancy of Macaulay; but we are more than compensated by the assurance that we are brought into closer contact with reality.

Even those provinces of literature which belong to the imagination, to sentiment and to what is unhappily termed "taste" have felt the influence of the methods and the results of science. Into the criticism of literature and art something personal must needs enter; but the critic need not make his idiosyncrasy his law. He can in a measure escape from his idiosyncrasy, or at least diminish the personal factor, and bring the work of art for final judgment before his complete mind, in which what is most trustworthy is surely no private and peculiar possession, but part of the common understanding of cultivated men. He can alter his attitude, shift his point of view to one nearer the centre, eliminate in some degree his error of parallax. He can do something towards ascertaining laws, wholly independent of his personality, which preside over literary phenomena. Taine's formula to account for the variations in literature, "the race, the environment, and the moment," is far from explaining all the facts ; but it furnishes a useful working hypothesis which at least serves us up to a certain point. The most vigorous and learned of living French critics, M. Branetière, has attempted to apply to the criticism of literature ideas derived from the scientific study of the development of species, though it must be admitted, with somewhat doubtful result. Still more remarkable than the influence of the scientific movement on literary criticism has been its influence on prose fiction. M. Zola put forth the theory which professedly lies behind his practise as a novelist in that remarkable volume of criticism, Le Roman Expérimental. In contrast with his romantic predecessors M. Zola will make a strictly scientific, an experimental study of life, and build up his invention from this study. Of course science can shirk no facts ; to it all things are pure, and therefore the naturalistic novel will shirk nothing, and according to the theory may disregard all those reserves of speech and imagination which have come into being as part of the slow and natural growth of civilisation. M. Zola is a writer of powerful genius and of resolute will. But his notion that the study of human nature and human life can be made experimental, in the true sense of the word, is either a piece of self-delusion or a piece of charlatanry. He enters upon laborious  investigations in this or that province of our social life, such as might be reported in a blue-book, but he attempts no experiments, and his observations are not made in the disinterested way of science—they are rather conducted so as to illustrate and confirm a preconceived view. Already the naturalistic novel in France seems to have run its course and to be somewhat discredited. Nevertheless, though M. Zola's method is misnamed experimental, and though in his collection of facts he ignores a multitude of the most important facts of human nature, his writings have co-operated with the scientific tendency by giving a powerful impulse to the study of social life in the way of observation. Writers of fiction will hardly now draw their facts, as Victor Hugo often did with a sublime audacity, out of the air. Their gaze is turned towards the actual world, and it cannot be ill that a writer who attempts to represent life should make his preliminary studies exact. Let him only observe widely enough, deeply enough, and interpret his facts aright, with the aid of a penetrative imagination, generous human emotions and a wise moral temper, and all will indeed be well.

Argus (Melbourne, Vic. ), 6 October 1894, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article8711347