work for a life--all this is far from the rule. At least twenty
members of the present and late Governments have been copious writers;
Mr. Gladstone and at least three or four of his late colleagues are
quite in the front rank of living authors--nay, several of them began
their career as literary men. It would be difficult to name an
important writer of the Victorian Age who has not at times flung
himself with ardour into the great social, political, or religious
battles of his time. Thackeray, Trollope, Green, Symonds, are possible
exceptions--examples of bookmen who passed their lives with books, and
who never wrote to promote "a cause." But all the rest have entered on
the "burning questions" of their age, and most of them with the main
part of their force. As a consequence "learning," as it was understood
by Casaubon, Scaliger, Bentley, Johnson, and Gibbon, as it was
understood by Littre, Doellinger, and Mommsen, may be said to have
disappeared in England. Cardinal Newman, Mark Pattison, Dr. Pusey,
were said to be very learned, but it was a kind of learning which kept
very much to itself. For good or for evil, our literature is now
absorbed in the urgent social problem, and is become but an instrument
in the vast field of Sociology--the science of Society.
This predominance of Sociology, the restless rapidity of modern life,
the omnipresence of material activity, fully account for the special
character of modern literature. Literature is no longer "bookish"--but
practical, social, propagandist. It is full of life--but it is a
dispersive, analytic, erratic form of vitality. It has a most
fastidious taste in form--but it often flings the critical spirit aside
in its passion for doing, in its ardour to convince and to inspire. It
is industrious, full of learning and research--but it regards its
learning as an instrument of influence, not as an end of thought. It
can work up a poem or an essay, as carefully as Mieris or Breughel
polished a cabinet picture--and it can "tear a passion to tatters," or
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