greater part of the eighteenth century had shown amazing activity,
suddenly seems arrested with Rousseau; and in the latter years of the
eighteenth century there is absolutely nothing of even moderate quality
in the field of art. The same is true of England for the last thirty
years of the same century. Shakespeare's dramas were not produced till
his country had victoriously passed through the death-struggle of the
religious wars in the sixteenth century. The civil war of the Puritans
arrested poetry, so that for nearly thirty years the muse of Milton
himself withdrew into her solitary cell. Dryden carried on the torch
for a time. But prose literature did not revive in England until the
Hanoverian settlement. Political ferment kills literature: prolonged
war kills it: social agitation unnerves it; and still more the uneasy
sense of being on the verge of great and unknown change.
Take our Queen's reign of now some fifty-eight years (1837-1895) and
divide it in half at the year 1866. It is plain that by far the
greater part of the "Victorian" literature was produced in the former
half and quite the inferior part of it was produced in the latter half.
By the year 1866 we had already got all, or all that was best, of
Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, Lytton, Thackeray, Dickens,
Trollope, George Eliot, Disraeli, Kingsley, and others who lived after
that date. In 1865 Lord Palmerston died, and with him died the old
Parliamentary era. In the same year died Abraham Lincoln in the great
crisis of the reconstruction of the American Constitution. We attach
no peculiar importance to that date. But it is certain that both
English and American people have been in this last twenty-nine years
absorbed in constitutional agitations which go deep down into our
social system. We in England have passed from one constitutional
struggle to another, and we are now in the most acute stage of all this
period. Parliamentary reform, continental changes, colonial wars,
military preparations, Home Rule, have absorbed the public mind and
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