reformers fancied themselves to be reviving the age of Shakespeare and Milton. When the heart usurps the functions of the head, even a progressive development will appear to be retrograde. The same cause obscures the true nature of the movement which we have now to consider.

VII. THE LITERARY REACTION.

113. The opening of new intellectual horizons, the discovery of new instruments in the struggle with nature, the failure of the old organisation to meet the wants of a rapidly growing society, the failure of the old scholasticism and Catholicism to satisfy the intellect or the imagination, had led to the great outbreak which we call the Reformation and the Renaissance. Another crisis due to similar causes was about to take place. The revolt against the old dogmatism had not been sufficiently thorough. There was still dead social and intellectual tissue which had to be expelled. Though the old theological dogmas had become mere mummies, dead relics of their former selves, the scepticism which showed their inanity could not replace them by a new synthesis, or afford satisfaction to the ordinary intellect of mankind. On one side, therefore, we have a dogmatism growing ever more frigid and lifeless; and on the other, a crude empiricism which takes fundamental questions for granted, or guides itself by the first hasty dictates of superficial observation. Corresponding to this, we have, in the imaginative sphere, frigid allegories in place of vivid symbols; mere personified abstractions for the living beings of the old mythology; and a conscious obedience to mechanical formulæ in place of the old free play of the imagination; for authority we have hollow demonstrations, and incessant arguing in place of appeals to the emotions. Simultaneously we have a vigorous, but too often prosaic, realism. The ordinary facts of everyday life are seen forcibly, but they are stripped of romantic association or philosophical significance. We do not see contemporary events as part of a vast series carrying us back to the dim past and inscrutable future; nor as standing out against a background of mystery. The divorce of

philosophy from reality has impoverished both. Religious symbols which excite no genuine emotion, and facts which are never seen as lighted up by religious meaning, can evidently suggest no great imaginative work. The English literature, indeed, of the eighteenth century reflects the many admirable qualities of its writers, though it reflects them in an obscure mirror. Human nature does not vary, as we are sometimes given to assume, by sudden starts from one generation to another. I do not doubt that Englishmen a hundred years ago had as much imaginative power, as much good feeling, and at least as much love of truth as their descendants of to-day. I am only endeavouring to explain the conditions which limited for a time their powers of utterance, and then led them to find new modes of expression for the most perennial of human feelings. This last process took various forms. The last half of the century was marked in literature by the slow development of three distinct processes of reaction. A few hints, necessarily of the briefest and most imperfect kind, may sufficiently indicate their relation to previous modes of thought, and the peculiar nature of the English development. The sentimentalists represent, we may say, the vague feeling of discontent with the existing order of thought and society; the romantic and the naturalistic school adopted different modes of satisfying the yearning thus excited.

V 114. Wesley amused himself in one of his peregrinations with Sterne's 'Sentimental Journey.' 'Sentimental!' he asks in his journal; 'what is that? It is not English. He might as well say "Continental."" It would be rather difficult to answer Wesley's question with precision, after all our experience of the thing signified. Sentimentalism seems to be a name for several allied phases of thought which graduate imperceptibly into each other. It is the name of a kind of mildew which spreads over the surface of literature at this period to indicate a sickly constitution. It is the name of the mood in which we make a luxury of grief, and regard sympathetic emotion as an end rather than a means-a mood rightly despised by men of masculine nature. It is, again, the name of the disposition to substitute feeling for logic, and therefore

1 Journal, February 11, 1772.

to avert our eyes from facts whenever facts suggest unpleasant contemplations. But it may also be used to mean the sympathy of the good Samaritan for the sick and wounded in the struggle whom the orthodox Pharisee passes by with his official non possumus. It sometimes implies the tendency to substitute a rose-coloured ideal for a faithful portraiture of life; and sometimes the power of detecting the real beauty which is concealed from vulgar observers by their dread of vulgarity.

115. It would be futile to attempt to consider this fluctuating mood as closely correlated to any definite logical process. We may say, in a general way, that the growth of sentimentalism was symptomatic of a social condition daily becoming more unhealthy. In France an intelligent noblesse, having no particular duties to discharge, was beginning to play at philanthropy. In England, though the dissociation of the upper classes from active life was not so wide, there was a daily increasing number of rich and idle persons, who found the cultivation of their finer feelings a very amusing luxury. The virtue called 'sensibility,' which became so popular towards the end of the century, which was petted by the namby-pamby and Rosa-Matilda schools, and which was gently satirised in Miss Austen's novels, is the more colourless form of the sentiment which has recently taken theological masks. The man of feeling' of those days would in these days be a ritualist or a neopagan; and 'the tear of sensibility,' which used to bedew the eye of the fine ladies of the time, would be offered before the altar which has succeeded in adorning itself with lighted candles. We may trace the growth of the sentiment far back in the century. Wesleyanism was, in one sense, a development of sentimentalism. Wesley and his followers thought the symbols of the official theism too vague and effete for practical use, and tried to restore the old vivid concrete mythology. The writings of Shaftesbury may exemplify the kind of empty declamation against which they revolted. When we read his Hymn to Nature, we see that the feelings excited by so vague a deity can only give birth to a vague pomposity. Nature does not really excite the keen emotions appropriate to the old God, and we must not contemplate the new idol

too closely. It must be draped in all the apparatus of oldfashioned classical magniloquence.

116. But, when Wesleyanism came to be adopted by the more refined classes, a kind of compromise had to be effected. The modern imagination cannot feed upon the supernatural alone. The scenery of the lake of fire and brimstone became tiresome in the long run to contemporaries of Hume, however little they might be conscious of his direct influence. And thus, the religious world, naturally affected by the taste of its secular rival, tried to transplant into its own literature some of the faded charms of the Shaftesbury school of eloquence. Hervey's 'Meditations' (1746-7), for example, was one of the most popular books of the century; and it bears to Shaftesbury the same kind of relation which Young bears to Pope. Hervey was an attached disciple of Wesley; and a man of some cultivation and great fluency of speech. He tried to eclipse the worldly writers in their own style of rhetoric. The worship of nature might be combined with the worship of Jehovah. He admires the stupendous orbs,' and the immortal harmonies, but he takes care to remember that we must die, and meditates, in most edifying terms, amongst the tombs. Such works can hardly be judged by the common literary canons. Writings which are meant to sanctify imaginative indulgences by wresting the ordinary language to purposes of religious edification are often, for obvious reasons, popular beyond their merits. Sacred poetry and religious novels belong to a world of their own. To the profane reader, however, the fusion of deistical sentiment and evangelical truth does not seem to have been thoroughly effected. There is the old falsetto note which affects us disagreeably in Shaftesbury's writings. Hervey, after all, lives in the eighteenth century, and though, as his Theron and Aspasia' proves, he could write with sufficient savour upon the true Evangelical dogmas, the imaginative symbolism of his creed is softened by the contemporary currents which blend with it.

117. Hervey's chief book, the Meditations,' was, according to Southey, not more laudable in its purpose than vicious in its style, and therefore one of the most popular ever written. Dipping into its pages at random, we find every

where specimens of that queer eighteenth-century euphuism of which Shaftesbury set, perhaps, the earliest example, mixed with phrases which recall the unction of the popular Evangelical preacher. If Hervey wants to say that certain herbs are useful medicinally, he observes that they 'impart floridity to our circulating fluids, add a more vigorous tone to our active solids, and thereby repair the decay of our enfeebled constitutions.' 'Breathe soft, ye winds!' he exclaims; 'O spare the tender fruitage, ye surly blasts! Let the pear-tree suckle her juicy progeny, till they drop into our hands and dissolve in our mouths! Let the plum hang unmolested upon her boughs till she fatten her delicious flesh, and cloud her polished skin with blue.'' It is easy to conceive how this false gallop of rhetoric shades off into unctuous addresses to Christ, and is heightened by descriptions of decaying bodies or of hell-fire. Hervey's magniloquence is precisely of that kind which disgusts a cultivated reader, and passes with the half-educated for true eloquence. Very similar bombast is now manufactured with equal volubility to attract the readers of cheap newspapers; nor is it necessary to give further examples of a kind of rhetoric with which we are only too familiar.

118. Its interest for us consists chiefly in the fact that Hervey represents the blending of two streams of sentiment; of the religious unction of Wesleyanism, which is more explicitly given in his Theron and Aspasia,' and that vaguer enthusiasm for nature represented soon afterwards by Ossian and by Rousseau. His books may be described as a transitional form between the nature-worship of the deists, which was felt to be wanting in fire, and the nature-worship of Wordsworth, which had not yet dawned upon the world; the whole being rendered palatable to the ordinary reader by the admixture of Evangelical theology. Another writer who represents a somewhat analogous attitude is Henry Brooke, whose Fool of Quality' (1760, &c.), admired by Wesley and republished in later years by Kingsley, is a bewildering mixture of religious mysticism with poetical sentimentalism. Brooke's intellectual genealogy seems to be traceable to Behmen on the one hand and to Rousseau on the other; whilst a curious strain of Irish eccentricity runs through the

'Reflections on a Flower-Garden.'