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PREFACE.

THIS volume contains the substance of a course of lectures delivered in Cambridge, and repeated in part in Philadelphia, during the winter of 1881-82. This statement will, it is hoped, incline the reader to overlook the direct appeals to his memory and attention, which may be permissible to one reading aloud to a friendly audience, although less pardonable in the formality of print.

In preparing this book for the press I have endeavored to make the references to the works of other writers as full and as exact as possible, but I would once more explicitly acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. J. A. Symonds, whose volumes on Italian literature have been of constant service; to Mr. Leslie Stephen, whose "History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century" is a thorough exposition of many subjects barely mentioned by me; to Mr. Karl Hillebrand's profound “German Thought," and to Mr. Alexandre Beljame's “Le Public et les Hommes de Lettres." This last-mentioned book I have made use of continually, especially in the pages on the periodicals that preceded the Tatler, on Pope, and on Addison. Mr. Beljame's thoroughness and precision make his volume of inestimable value to

the student of the first half of the last century, and I am the more desirous of insisting in this place upon my obligations to him because his suggestiveness is so manifold that continual reference to his pages would have been monotonous. The literary histories of Hettner, Biedermann, Julian Schmidt, and Koberstein have been frequently consulted, and seldom in vain.

It will be noticed that this book is by no means a complete history of the literature of the last century: many important authors, like Prior and Smollett, have but a word given them; Fielding receives no full discussion; and many other writers are not even mentioned. My aim, however, has been rather to supplement the histories by pointing out, so far as I could, the more evident laws that govern literature. I have accordingly tried to show the principles that went to the formation of the literature of the last century, and also the causes of its overthrow. Many will doubtless be unwilling to subscribe to the belief that letters are controlled by laws. Mrs. Oliphant, a writer who deserves and receives the respect of all her many readers, affirms, in her admirable" Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth and the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century" (i. 7 and 8), that "every singer is a new miraclecreated if nothing else is created-no growth developed out of precedent poets, but something sprung from an impulse which is not reducible to law." If this statement is correct, literature forms a singular exception to what has seemed a universal rule. When we consider Mrs. Oliphant's delightful novels we find them occupying a normal position in the development of fiction, with their exact drawing of life and avoidance of direct

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moral teaching. Mrs. Oliphant acknowledges the existence in society of "a slow progression, which, however faint, however deferred, yet gradually goes on, leaving one generation always a trifle better than that which preceded it, with some scrap of new possession, some right assured, some small inheritance gained. From age to age the advance may be small, yet it is appreciable. . . . New modifications and conditions arise, the public sense is awakened, or it is cultivated, or at all events it is changed. . . . The reforms from which we hoped most, the advances for which we struggled most strenuously, do not produce all the good we expected; but we cannot, nor would we, undo them. In everything there is a current onward, perhaps downward, but never back. . . . The principle indeed changes from time to time. It comes to a climax. . . . All is not absolute good or advantage to the human race; but yet the race is stepping onward, it discovers new powers, it learns new ameliorations, and if it also makes proof of novel sufferings and dangers, it finds new defences and medicines for them. . . . It is in fact a real progress through a thousand drawbacks, and every age leaves some foundation upon which the next can build." This lucid description of the gradual progress of society might, it seems to me, apply perfectly to literature, but this, and its application to art, Mrs. Oliphant denies, because we have not advanced upon Shakspere, Bacon, Chaucer, and Fra Angelico. This is, in brief, her reason for limiting the extent to which law may be affirmed to exist. According to her, and to a very current opinion which she represents, literature and art are outside of law.

Yet if we are unwilling to regard art and literature as miraculous, may we not be justified in supposing that there is some confusion in thus limiting the rules that govern the human mind in its other relations? Does it follow from the proposition that literature is governed by law that there should be a regular gradation of genius? that Dryden's plays should be superior to Shakspere's, and Dean Milman's to both? If these expectations are disappointed, is the law of progress at fault? I think not. Those who agree with Mrs. Oliphant in finding progress in political history certainly cannot find, let us say, in the arguments uttered a few years ago in Congress in favor of what was called the Force Law, an advance upon the position that was taken in Parliament, nearly two and a half centuries ago, against Charles I.; yet no one will deny the general advance in personal freedom throughout the civilized world since that day, and that in this country liberty is not a mere oratorical catch-word. The great literary glory of the reign of Elizabeth was but one expression of the same fervor that inspired Drake and Raleigh; and in our own time, when literature appears to languish, Mrs. Oliphant's own novels are expressing the same wider interest in the people that in politics makes itself felt as the spread of democracy. The construction of an arrears - of- rent bill is less dramatic than was the attempt to arrest the five members of the House of Commons, just as Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus" is more thrilling than any novel of the realists, but one is as much governed by law as the other, is equally the result of antecedent causes. To ask nothing but heroics of literature would be like demanding

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