WOMAN IN LITERATURE

Miss (or Mrs ) E. R. Chapman proves her claim to be heard on "The Marriage Question in Modern Fiction" (John Lane) by her earnestness, vigour, and eloquence. She is one of the foremost of the champions of the "feminine woman" in this idle and decadent age. Her main plea, which is urged with singular acuteness and fervour, is in favour of the indissolubility of the marriage tie, and in strong opposition to tho school of later day philosophers who tell sad stories from the hilltops and elsewhere on what is supposed to be the woman's side, illustrating the superior blessing of freedom in the sexual contract, of marriage with limited liability—the wife to be taken, like tho piano, on "easy terms"—on the three or seven year's system. On this text Miss (or Mrs ) Chapman dilates with extraordinary energy, exposing with much force of language the fallacy that this so-called "freedom" is calculated to promote either human happiness or morality— least of all, that it is likely to benefit the woman. In good round terms, this new champion of the sex rates both the advanced woman and the male writer who, under pretence of a superior morality, advocates the loosening of the marriage tie. She insists that there can be no hope for the new generation which has "in so many directions strayed from the path of saints"—a generation which "tolerates the Rougon-Macquart novels, which exonerates Verlaine, which accepts Walt Whitman as poet, Maeterlinck as dramatist, and Nietzsche as philosopher." She believes in the ultimate triumph of idealism—"the ideal," she declares in the sense of human experience, transfigured by human genius, will always be, as it has always been, inseparable from true art. What is now practised and defended as "realism"—on the false and delusive principle of "art for arts sake," which should rather be, in Tennyson's phrase, "art for man's sake"—is not liberty at all, but "the freedom to flaunt a sickly and one-sided pessimism, to riot in every kind of neurotic perversion and morbid whim and to vend all manner of homographic wares without restriction." Thus far Miss (or Mrs ) Chapman will carry all her healthy-minded readers with her. But when she extends her privileges to the denouncing of the marriage laws as not founded on the absolute equality of tho sexes, and the claiming that all the grounds of divorce should be the same for man and woman, she argues in a spirit which is too entirely feminine, and nearer railing and shrieking than reasoning. The chapter on "The Disparagement of Woman in Literature" is especially characterised by all those peculiar defects which man has so long attributed to the other sex. What are we to say to a woman who is not even content with Shakespeare as a delineator of woman in literature, holding that the creator of Imogen and Isabella, of Rosalind, Miranda, Desdemona, of Sylvia and Cordelia, "was not great enough to rise above the normal standard in this matter," because he remained unconvinced, as his jokes about woman show, that the female sex was in no way inferior to his own?

Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Saturday 12 June 1897, page 13

THE PASSING OF THE SUPERNATURAL.

Women have a way of their own of looking at things. On all subjects the feminine judgment is interesting: on some it is indispensable. It was perhaps inevitable that a day should come on which female voices should claim to be heard with respect as critics of modern fiction. That women write novels everybody knows. That women read novels is patent to all. Indeed, an eminent librarian recently declared that ninety-five per cent. of novel readers are of the gentler sex. The time was ripe, therefore, for the penning, in a feminine hand, of some authoritative critique of our recent fiction. Few things are more desirable, on general principles, than an equitable division of labour; but the arrangement by which the women do all the reading and the men all the reviewing certainly leaves much to be desired. At length a change has been effected: a woman has spoken. A very Portia-like Daniel has come to judgment in the person of Professor Dorothy Scarborough. This learned and estimable lady is a Doctor of Philosophy, and occupies the Chair of English Literature at the Columbia University. It is always considered indelicate, in polite society, to hazard any conjecture as to a ladies age ; but if her years are to be estimated from the number of books that she has read, Professor Scarborough must be far beyond the age at which ladies are sensitive on that point. She appears to have taken the entire realm of romance as her province, and to have diligently explored every inch of it. If there is a novel that she has not read, she gives no hint of so glaring an oversight. Nothing seems to have escaped her. Did she, one wonders, read those thousands of volumes just for the fun of the thing? or did she wade through them as a matter of duty, in order to be able to give us a conscientious and well-informed opinion? In the former event her appetite for novels must establish a record for voracity which will stand unbroken for many a long, long day. In the latter case, her painstaking diligence and exemplary thoroughness will be the admiration and the envy of all beholders. However that may be, she has read all the novels that our generation has produced, and, not to put too fine a point upon it, she does not think much of them !

Miss Scarborough—to drop for the nonce her academic titles and distinctions—thinks that our twentieth century romances are too much alike; she thinks that they lack splendour and imagination, she thinks that they are utterly void of any ethical significance ; and she thinks that, as sorrow's crown of sorrow, they are destitute of any recognition of the supernatural. With the first and second of these complaints we are not at present concerned. Boiled down, they amount to this: that we have not yet produced in our time a writer possessed of the audacity that will embolden him to leave the beaten track, and of the intellectual brilliance that will enable him to direct the human fancy on a flight that shall be wildly new. So far, incredible as it may seem, our Portia is commonplace: she feels as we all feel : she says what we have all said : she is guilty of repeating a mere parrot-cry; and she probably knows it. But her third and fourth impeachments are much more interesting and suggestive. She feels that the novelist grovels: he never soars. She does not charge him with being immoral ; but he is non-moral. It is not that he is black; but he is not white. He is drab: he is colourless: he is neutral : he is unconvincing. The question is: Is this so? And if we have perforce to admit the soft impeachment, a second inquiry emerges. Why is it so? Mr. John Bailey, usually a particularly reliable guide on such matters, was, not so long ago, disclosing a very similar question. Why has the ethical note languished in the fiction of these later days? Mr. Bailey believes it to be a revolt against the hyper-ethical tendency of an earlier generation. The great Victorian writers were all of them stern and unbending moralists. Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot; they are all alike; each of them can say with Cowper that "he has done what he could in hopes to do good." They may call their works novels or essays or poems or what they will, but, in point of fact, they are all of them sermons. Then came the inevitable rebound. The general reaction against Victorian sobriety, Mr. Bailey says, is nowhere more pronounced than in the field of fiction. Our younger writers resemble a clergyman's son who has been brought up too strictly, and who makes up his mind to see life for himself. The last subject which interests him is that morality of which he always heard too much at home. Just because the writers of fifty years ago were everlastingly preaching, the writers of to-day go to the opposite extreme. The serious and ethical literature of the great Victorians is anathema to them. The poets hate Tennyson ; the novelists loathe George Eliot; the artists abhor Ruskin. It is all very unreasonable; it is highly absurd; but it is along this line that the glut of non-ethical literature has come.

But Dr. Scarborough goes further. The writers of the old school gloried in the supernatural. If it took no more exalted form, it took the form of a ghost story. But, whatever the form, it was always there. They felt that it ought to be there. Carlyle in England and Fichte in Germany set it before them as their bounden duty. "Men of letters," said Carlyle, "are a perpetual priesthood, from age to age teaching all men that a God is still present in their life. In the true literary man there is thus over a sacredness: he is the light of the world: the world's priest; guiding it, like a sacred pillar of fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time." In his analysis of the great masters, he finds in them all a certain prophetic quality. Fichte says much the same. Beneath all outward and material things, he says, there is the divine idea. Most men are too busy or too blind to discern it. They live among the superficialities, practicabilities, and shows of the world, not dreaming that there is anything divine under them. "But the man of letters is sent hither specially that he may discern for himself, and make manifest to us, this same divine idea." In contrasting such language with the vocabulary of the modern novelist, it becomes plain that we are witnessing the swinging of the pendulum. Fifty years ago every penman thought himself a preacher. He was not only ethical : he was aggressively, excitedly, offensively ethical.  He not only recognised the supernatural: he dragged it in willy-nilly ; and if he could introduce it in no other way he gave us a haunted house or a churchyard ghost. We are witnessing the inevitable rebound. The pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. But let Dr. Dorothy Scarborough be of good heart. The swinging cannot last for ever. Sooner or later we shall find the golden mean. We shall be neither fervidly sanctimonious nor frigidly secular. We shall learn, partly by reviewing our own earlier excesses, to see the whole, and to see each part of that whole in its true perspective. And when that day dawns, our literature will reflect things, not in some distorted or disfigured fashion, but in all their inherent naturalness and charm.

Mercury (Hobart, Tas. : 1860 - 1954), Saturday 7 December 1918, page 6

MODERN FICTION AND CORELLI

The remarkable development of the modern novel during recent years has been a cause of much discussion and much criticism. The tendency appears to have been to depart more and more from the old-fashioned romance, in which love and crime or love and war were the themes, and in which the ending was invariably happy, with virtue rewarded, vice punished ; while a sound of wedding bells and a shower of rice and old shoes left the reader and writer perfectly satisfied with themselves. Whatever might have been said of this class of novel from the critical or literary standpoint, the moral tone was generally sound and healthy. But recently a taste appears to have grown up for novels dealing with strange and bizarre objects, or for novels discussing social and other problems, some of which are drawn from revolting phases of human experience. The success of the "realists" — Zola and de Maupassant-— in France set a small school of followers at work in England who, within the more confined space of public license allowed there, tried to do what had been done in France. These writers succeeded at any rate in reproducing the worst qualities of the French writers, without the really great, though perverted, talent of their models. Then the problem novel held away for some time, though the revolt against it was speedy, and if the book-sellers' reports are to be trusted, the discussion of problems never had the vogue in the novel that it had on the stage.

The chief characteristic of this particular school of modern fiction is its low moral tone. And the strange thing about it is that most of these writers ape the lofty tone of the preacher, and from a high moral altitude presume to deliver lectures upon morality to the world at large. Take Mr. George Moore's revolting studies of the adventures of domestic servants ; or of what he is pleased to paint as a picture of Irish middle-class life, such as may be found in works like "Esther Waters" and "A Drama in Muslin." These read like verbatim reports from the witness-box at a police or a divorce court. Yet Mr. Moore's lewdness is regarded in some quarters as the expression of the views of a heaven-sent moralist; and the recent exclusion of his books from the railway bookstalls of England by Messrs. Smith and Son — a respectable firm of booksellers— was regarded in certain quarters somehow as a blow to liberty and progress. But leaving Mr. Moore's open plunges into the seamy side of life to the readers who love lewdness for its own sake, we come to another writer who has cast a glamour over the modern reader —if we are to judge by the circulation of her novels— to an extent hitherto unparalleled. We refer to that strange personality known as Miss Marie Corelli. Miss Corelli sprang into vogue as a novelist by a novel called "A Romance of Two Worlds," in which she dabbled in speculations upon occult forces, and invented a creed called the Electric. In this novel, by means of a highly coloured descriptive style—by the aid of what a celebrated reviewer once called the "lurid colour of the child's penny paint-box"— she obtained a great vogue amongst thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands of persons whose judgment was incapable of appreciating the low literary value of the books.

If we follow Miss Corelli's works in succession, we will find the same lurid hues in her word-painting, and a strange atmosphere of nastiness, both in subject and treatment ; becoming more pungent with each successive book. Strong, powerful, dramatic, we allow — but betraying in each work the evidences of a diseased intellect. Is it possible that anyone can peruse "Vendetta," " Wormwood," or "Barrabas" without recognizing certain evidences of a perverted imagination, which, while assuming the airs and attitudes of a preacher of morals, puts forth an upside down morality, a topsy-turvy view of life, and an inverted estimate of all things human and Divine ? As to the regard in which the writer is held, there is the evidence of the enormous sale of her works, and the fact that she is believed by a certain class of ignorant persons to be the greatest writer of all time, infinitely superior in all respects to Shakespeare and Dante. And there is little doubt that Miss Corelli has the same exalted estimate of her own powers.

For some time past the eyes of writers of fiction have been turned towards the Catholic Church. This may possibly be in consequence of that growth of the influence of Catholicity which is the most remarkable characteristic of the Nineteenth Century. We find that such respectable writers of fiction as Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Mr. Hall Caine, Mrs. Voynich, Robert Buchanan, and Mrs. Craigie (" John Oliver Hobbes ") have turned towards certain aspects of Catholic life for material. The treatment of the theme by some is reverential ; by others hostile. There is another type of writer, such as Mr. Joseph Hocking, who uses his novel, "The Purple Robe," for the purpose of making a polemical attack upon the Catholic Church. The writer probably finds it easier to attack the Church that way than by argument or authority. But none of these writers have gone to the length of recklessness and blasphemy which have been reached by Miss Corelli in "Barrabas," and in her latest work, "The Master Christian." She had, indeed, in the "Sorrows of Satan," gone far enough ; but, as the scathing criticism of the QUARTERLY REVIEW showed, this was a mere plagiarism— a conscious or unconscious "cerebration" of a certain school of French writers whose blasphemies and inverted morals have earned for them the name of "The Satanic culte." Although to the cultured few the vagaries of Miss Corelli's transpontine Prince Rimanez were only the subject of laughter, the fact that she has such a large acceptance amongst the multitude of readers of fiction makes hers a sinister influence.

In her latest "blast" this literary virago devotes her attention to the Catholic Church, and in her usual highly-coloured style freely criticizes it, condemns it, and lectures the Hierarchy from his Holiness downwards. It seems hardly credible that the hardihood even of Miss Corelli could go to the length of introducing Our Divine Lord into such a work of fiction as this; but she has done this, and has put into His mouth some 500 pages of sententious and puerile vapourings in her own well-known style. This is the book of which we learn a hundred thousand copies of the first edition have been printed. It constitutes an attack upon the Catholic Church by one who exercises a certain amount of sway amongst an unthinking, sensation-loving public. Its effect upon the Church will probably equal the effect of a mosquito alighting truculently upon the Himalaya Mountains. But as a sign of the decadence of modern fiction from the stately romance of Scott, the brilliant narrative style of Thackeray, the high moral purpose of Dickens, it has a mournful significance.

We turn with relief from the nauseous school of Miss Corelli to the brilliant work of such men as Dr. William Barry, whose well-deserved vogue as a writer of fiction has increased, and is still increasing with with each successive work. We have recently had the pleasure of reading his latest work of fiction — "Arden Massiter," and we hope in a subsequent issue to publish a review of the book. For freshness and brilliancy of style we know of no modern author who rivals Dr. Barry. His other works, such as "The New Antigone," " The Two Standards," and "The Wizard's Knot," show the same characteristics. Dr. Barry does not model his style upon the " child's penny paint-box school," but for pure, clear, and picturesque English he is unrivalled. He takes us into the regions of pure romance, and though we find, as in "Arden Massiter," the life of modern Italy (from peasant to prince) treated by the author, we are not dragged through the gutters of "realism," or assailed with odours from an unhealthy moral atmosphere. We are taken into the real atmosphere of romance-— pure, healthy, and beautiful. We turn with relief to this author from the tainted school of fiction of Miss Marie Corelli and her French inspirers, the conspicuous qualities of which are bad literature, bad morals, and bad taste.

Freeman's Journal (Sydney, NSW : 1850 - 1932), Saturday 27 October 1900, page 11

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

ENGLISH INFLUENCE ON FRENCH THOUGHT.

 A generous Frenchman has summarised in the July number of the "Fortnightly Review" the effects of the "influence of English thought on the French mind." Had an Englishman written this shining tribute to the distinctive genius of his countrymen, he might have been accused of national vanity, but coming as it does from the pen of M. Yves Guyot, the acknowledgment carries at once high literary authority and the stamp of impartiality. Few students of political philosophy have failed to observe the unbroken chain connecting the "Social Contract" of Rousseau with the doctrines promulgated by John Locke, who was in a sense the academic father of the French Revolution. The theory that society is a contract between the individuals composing it, and the sovereignty of the people, was first put forward by Locke, and it was upon this and the contrasting study of rational absolutism contained in the writings of Hobbes that Rousseau based his epoch making work, so that, strangely enough, the famous principles enunciated in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence may be distinctly traced by a circuitous route to that very England against which the American standard was raised. The Byronic cult in France and other Continental countries is also a commonplace of literary history, but it remained for M. Guyot to reveal the wide extent and remarkable dominance of the literature of England upon the mind of its gayer and more severely classical neighbour. The adherence of the French school to the dramatic unities upon the stage, to the syllogistic method in the investigations of science and the speculations of philosophy are often supposed to have been accompanied by a somewhat supercilious contempt for the more irregular style of Englishmen in literature and their patient exploration and reverential regard for facts in the domain of research. How Voltaire described Shakespeare as "a drunken barbarian," and how the French playwrights feared to stage "Hamlet" with the ghost lest the audience should laugh at the solemn scenes, are ancient gibes which the English have quoted unceasingly against themselves.
 M. Yves Guyot, tells another story. The British reader begins to suspect that he has hitherto suffered from the complaint of modesty in a more acute form than it generally appears in insular races. Voltaire's laugh at Shakespeare was, it appears, but the other and witty French side of a genuine admiration—so genuine that it took the sincere form of imitation. For it seems that the great Frenchman's Brutus was taken from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Zaire from Othello, two scenes; of Mahomet from Macbeth, and the spectres of Eliphile and Semiramis from Hamlet. This is not mere literary speculation, but is confirmed by Voltaire's personal acknowledgement. He described Shakespeare as a "genius full of strength and fecundity," and after his stay in England wrote:—"We have gained from the English their sinking funds, the building and working of vessels, power of attraction, differential calculus, the seven primary colours, inoculation, we shall insensibly take their noble freedom of thought and their profound disdain for all scholastic twaddle." But the admiration of English methods neither began nor ended with Voltaire. French Huguenot refugees before his time had contrived to circulate translations of English writers among their countrymen and the Abbe Prevost, Desmarzeaux, Rapin de Thoyras, Beat de Muralt, with others, sang the praises, made known the ideas, and told France the wonderful history of the English nation. In economics and political philosophy the British influence was at first strongest. J. B. Say embodied in his French works on economy the doctrines of Adam Smith, and to this day the academic economists promulgate the principles which Smith and his successors laid down, although it may be correctly stated in the words of M. Guyot that "economic science was the result of collaboration between French and English." Montesquieu has given French clarity to the constitutional divisions of power traced through the development of English Parliamentarism, and the study of Bacon, Locke, Hobbes, and others modified the Gallic habit of following blindly the sophistic style of reasoning inherited from the Greeks. Bacon, as is well-known, was the originator of inductive reasoning, so that from his method springs the scientific achievement of the last two centuries. And all along, as M. Guyot emphasises, the influence of Englishmen has been pre-eminent in scientific inquiry. "They transformed our methods," says M. Guyot, "in natural science." Newton, Lyell, Darwin, Spencer, these in succession are the finger-posts along the road of discovery, and they have been noted and followed by Frenchmen as often and as systematically as by Englishmen.
 In the field of pure literature the English influence has been especially powerful. In the eighteenth century the splendid realism of Defoe and Swift stamped itself on the French mind; and the nineteenth century novelists of Britain have been the stimulation of the French school. Henri Heine at the Salon of 1831, counted no fewer than thirty pictures representing episodes of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. "Alfred de Vigny," says M. Guyot, "borrowed Cinq Mars from him Merrimee borrowed the Chronique de Charles IX., Victor Hugo Notre Dame de Paris. Balzac les Chouans, and, as for Alexandre Dumas, he drew all his theatrical pieces and novels therefrom." But the Wizard of the North was not the only British inspirer of French fiction. Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot have had their influence especially in teaching the art of representing homely scenes and manners, the peculiar genius of the English in literature as it is of the Dutch in painting. In the drama Shakespeare's influence has been great since 1827, although the ideas derived from him have been recast in a French mould. From the beginning of literary intercourse between France and England Frenchmen seem to have outdone us in generous tributes to the national character. The Abbe Prevost, early in the eighteenth century, declared that "there is no country where one finds so much straightforwardness; so much humane feeling, such just standards of honour, wisdom, happiness, as among the English." Beat de Muralt, a Bernese, in a series of letters written in 1694 and 1695, declared :—"Among the English there are persons who think more strongly and who have those strong thoughts in greater number than intellectual men of other nations." And M. Yves Guyot himself, in summing up the results of his study upon the subject submits the following propositions:—
 1. The chief intellectual influence, is liberty; England has freed French thought, French science, from the "authority" argument; Shakespeare freed our theatre from the Aristotelian rules ; Locke and English institutions taught the rest of the world the true conditions of political liberty.
 2. The second form, which is a consequence of the first, is the scientific form. It is Bacon against Plato, Newton against Descartes, Lyell against Cuvier.... . It is reality opposed to the assertions and subtleties, which we inherited from the Greek sophists.
 And after tracing the purely literary influence he concludes:—
 In short, the intellectual influence of the English over the French taught the latter to subordinate their subjective conceptions to objective method, and to learn the character and utility of the competition in politics, in economics, and in biology.
 What M. Yves Guyot has shown is, after all, one side of the interaction of character upon character. There is in the English mind a certain love of substance, of plainness, and of seeking out the roots of things. Despite all their hypocrisy, as Meredith has observed, there is a genuine fibre of moral integrity running through the nation. This it is, perhaps, which impels Englishmen to discard mere forms as useless surplusage, or to disregard the character of the form so that the body it envelops, be sound. "No matter how the head lie so that the heart be right," jested a great Englishman when upon the scaffold. And this is a truth which penetrates to the marrow of the nation's bones. But while it is pardonable to believe these things of ourselves, especially when they are said by a foreigner, there is another side to be revealed. It is the influence of French thought upon the English mind. Locke studied in France, and what have we not learned from French wit, French chivalry, French clarity of vision and augustness and directness of expression ? When we come to modern times did not the French Revolution react upon England and upon the world, and was it not really the thunder of Democracy that shook the Bastille? Have not Rabelais and Balzac, Montaigne, and Voltaire, Taine, and St. Beuve, Hugo, and even Zola influenced our literature? Are not Laplace and, Pasteur intellectual brethren of Newton and Darwin? What do not chemistry and biology, astronomy, and engineering owe to Frenchmen? In the republic of letters language is the only barrier to that freedom of intercourse which strengthens and enriches thought, while in the region of pure science achievement speaks all tongues.

West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 - 1954), Saturday 1 August 1908, page 10

DR. LUDWIG STEIN ON THE ENGLISH.

———+———

THE MOST PRACTICAL PEOPLE

IN THE WORLD.

 ———+———

Professor Dr. Ludwig Stein, the Dean of the Philosophical Faculty at Berne University, and author of several philosophical and sociological works, who has also translated the autobiography of Herbert Spencer into German, delivered a lecture recently at Berne on "The English Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century."

The Professor's introductory words are given as follows in the "Anglo-German Courier" :—
 "Englishmen have always been realists, and have never indulged in dreams. While we Germans, were dreaming in our studies and building philosophical empires Englishmen sent their ships out to conquer empires. . . . .
"The English standpoint in philosophy has always been that the individual is real and not the universal ; the individual is the chief thing in the State ; the individual is the aim and the State is the means. Therefore, in England there was never an idolising of the social classes and of the State, as exists still on the Continent. According to English ideas, the individual always has been the central point with regard to economy, religion, and politics. Pronounced individualism is to the present day the most characteristic trait in English philosophy. English philosophy is but little occupied with 'transcendental' questions. The Englishman fulfils his religious duties on Sunday ; during the week he does not trouble himself about abstract questions.
 "One must be careful not to judge the character of the English people by the foolish, commonplace remarks that are so often spread about them. One must not think that the Englishman, with his disagreeable qualities we so often see in Switzerland, is the true type of the Englishman. This would be quite wrong. The impolite inconsiderate Englishmen we often see here are mostly parvenus — tailors or bootmakers, who, having got rich are making their Switzerland trip. He who sees the Englishman in his home is enchanted with his politeness and distinction. Of course, like all distinguished people, the Englishman of this type is reserved. In the English people there is a sound and sensible national vigour— the vigour of an ambitious man, who goes straight forward towards his goal without troubling himself about insoluble questions. This is his principle in life and philosophy.
 "In all the works of English thinkers there is splendid lucidity. We must never forget what we owe to the English people. Englishmen have solved the mystery of how to make a revolution — not a riot, but a total reorganisation of the State. An Englishman gave first to the world Magna Charta and the Habeas Corpus Act — those grand guarantees for individual freedom. . . . Who gave us the new physics ? Roger Bacon foreshadowed it in the thirteenth century ; then Newton ; in the nineteenth century, Herschel, Faraday, Maxwell, Crooks. Who gave us the new chemistry ? Boyle. Who showed new methods in medical science ? Harvey, the discoverer of the blood. Who made the great discoveries in biology ? Erasmus and Charles Darwin ; after them Hooker, Huxley, Wallace.
" England has also produced great poets. Think of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and Shelley. With regard to the other arts, think of the painters —Whistler, Turner, Beardsley, Alma Tadema, and the Pre-Raphaelites. In literature the names of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Walter Pater are in the first rank. To the greatest historians of all times belong Buckle, Gibbon, and Macaulay. In philosophy England is not behind any cultured nation. All great systems have their representatives in England— inductive logic in Bacon, materialism in Hobbes, the constitution on representative principles, the new psychology, the theory of knowledge in Locke, psychology also in Hartley and Priestley, idealism in Berkeley, scepticism in Hume. The most practical people in the world gave us the most practical science. Classical political economy was created, by Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus. In the nineteenth century there follow them Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, the men who understood the Positivism of August Comte incomparably better than Frenchmen themselves. In John Stuart Mill there are united all the chief traits of the character of the English people as in a cone of light."

Penshurst Free Press (Vic. : 1901 - 1918), Friday 20 July 1906, page 1