The character of so powerful a literature cannot be defined in one single term, each and all would be partial and inadequate. Mere formulæ are not sufficient for a thorough comprehension of the intricacies and many-sided nature of English literature any more than for that of any other literature, nation, or individual. To determine the full importance of a literature we must ascertain the strength of its poetic force. But what a vast number of other questions does this suggest!

This inmost core of English literature cannot be excelled in strength, richness, or beauty. We must apply to it the same standards of comparison as we should use in the criticism of any other work of mankind. So closely interwoven are the threads of the literary connexion between all great national literatures that it is fruitless to consider any single one without constant reference to kindred literatures among the later products of culture. English literature has exceeded all others in the harmony of the artistic effects of its prose and its poetry, as well as in its facile adaptation to either form. In England the balance is evenly maintained; in France, an artificial prose, in Germany lyric poetry, predominates.

It is this very comparison with French literature that justifies us in laying stress on the poetic claims of English writings. Real, deep feeling, a lively appreciation of men and things, and the full force of a genuine poetic expression, the capacity "to adopt the world with full expression of the same," which Goethe declares to be the mark of a true poet-these qualities are found in the very highest degree united in English poetry.

The literature of England has produced immortal masterpieces representing every class of literary composition. In verse, it is a notable rival of its German sisters, and in the poetic tournament of the nations, no second voice, save the German, has given forth a sound of equal might and purity, though it may be that no English poet has equalled Goethe in probing the inmost depths of the soul.

In prose narrative, English writers were the pioneers from the middle of the eighteenth century. For a whole century, the English assumed the lead which the French had enjoyed after the close of the Middle Ages, and it was not till the last quarter of the nineteenth century that France regained her former place.

England's supremacy in drama, rivalling even the productions of the ancient Greeks, is vouched for beyond all question by the mere name of Shakespeare. At the proper time and place, we shall be prepared to prove, not only that Shakespeare was the greatest dramatist, but that he was the greatest of a band of great dramatists, and further, that no nation, not even excepting the French, has so strong a claim as the

English to the title of the nation of drama. From this, as from other aspects of the progress of the literature of a nation, we must omit the present, in which the critic happens to live: as to the low standard of the drama in the England of to-day, opinion, even in that country, is unanimous.

"No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseized of his freehold, or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any otherwise destroyed; nor will we go upon him, nor send upon him, but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land."

To be a free man under the law is the very breath of life to an Englishman, and throughout nearly seven centuries which have elapsed since the above lines were inserted in Magna Charta, although freedom in England has at times been imperilled by threats or actual force, it has never been infringed for any length of time.

All who know England will entirely agree with Macaulay, that English historian who has done more than any other writer to form the mind of the English people, that there is freedom in the breath of English air, in the very touch of English soil. Whatever ills may overtake England through jealousy or ignorance, it can never lose the right to claim to be the home of free men. Slavery, at no time ever very dominant in England, expired of itself without any special law as early as the fifteenth century.

When a nation has thus grown up in the strong air of freedom, we naturally expect its literature to have a distinct stamp, and in this we are not disappointed. Apart from its strikingly poetical cast, nothing is more remarkable, especially from a foreigner's point of view, than this vigorous atmosphere of freedom. We find it expressed in no idle forms of speech; rather we see it running like a stream of life-giving blood through the whole body of the people and pervading their writings. Englishmen have always had a very practical conception and experience of freedom. Long before they had produced a constitutional literature, they gave Edward I. (1295) a Parliament to assist him in his defence of the freedom of his people; they deposed Richard II. (1399) for maintaining that the king's pleasure was the sole or first law of the land. England has been, from time immemorial (with few deviations, as will be seen from time to time in these pages), and still is, the home of free speech, and, above all, of the real freedom of the Press, controlled only by a high public morality.

Mackintosh gave utterance to no idle boast when, a century ago, he declared in Parliament: "One asylum of free discussion is still inviolable. There is still one spot in Europe where man can freely exercise his reason on the most important concerns of society, where he can boldly publish his judgment on the acts of the proudest and

most powerful tyrants. The Press of England is still free. It is guarded by the hearts and arms of Englishmen; and I trust I may venture to say that, if it be to fall, it will fall only under the ruins of the British empire."

Putting political views on one side, no student can approach English literature without feeling something of the breath of freedom which it exhales. Let me give a striking instance: could any other literature have produced an historical drama, in which freedom was so developed as it was under Elizabeth and James I.? People have become so accustomed to freedom in England that the historical plays of Shakespeare have been, until lately, scarcely ever brought forward in proof of this. But we must not forget that, in Richard III., Shakespeare depicted an English king who had not been dead a hundred years, and in Henry VIII. he portrayed Queen Elizabeth's own father. Compare with this the French stage, on which, till 1793, not a single piece ventured to touch on the history of its own country, or even the German stage of to-day, e.g. the royal theatres in Berlin, at which no play, founded on the history of the royal house of Prussia,1 is allowed to be produced without special permission.

We find no limitations as to choice of subjects or their treatment. Even in earlier times, English poets enjoyed entire freedom, secure in the protection afforded by poetical feeling and good taste. Not even for a single generation did Englishmen tolerate a slavish mode of expression, though France, since the time of Malherbe (1600), had submitted to this yoke for more than two centuries. England has thus never known an Academy after the pattern of the French Academy. Even Pope, who, like Boileau, ruled supreme over English taste, experienced the power of English freedom and self-will, and how short was his reign, compared with that of Boileau, whose influence has acted as a gag upon French poetry even into this nineteenth century.

The office of Poet Laureate is the only institution in England at the present day that recalls the poets of the French Academy, but the courtier's sonnets carry no weight with them and only raise a smile.

If we compare English with the earlier periods of French literature, we find this trait ascendant,—a trait arising from an innate sense of freedom, "a manly pride in the presence of the sovereign."2 There is all the love and reverence of the free man for his rightful ruler, but no flattery, to shame both king and subject, which was the most

1 In September, 1897, at Frankfort on the Oder, the police prohibited the performance of Der Burggraf, as dealing with the history of the Hohenzollern family, and yet the same play was sanctioned in Cologne.

2 Schiller.

repugnant feature of French literature at its pretended zenith in the seventeenth century, under Louis XIV.

Nor must we forget, in close connexion with this characteristic of freedom in the literature of England, its genuine national side. English literature is the most national of all literatures since the birth of Christ. By this we mean that it has not only kept its purely English character in spite of all foreign influences and admixtures, but has never been produced only for a class or for a court, but always for the nation at large. To this, the deepest of all roots, it owes its very strength. It is the essence of patriotic writing in its very best sense. There is true patriotism, but its audience is always the nation at large. England encompasses the world with its predominant language and its political training; it has made entire quarters of the globe English, yet its literature shows little trace of cosmopolitanism.

There have been times, even in England, when its writings were tinged with courtliness, but not for long, and never in the same degree as in France. Chaucer was a courtier, but not a court poet. The masters of English poetry have ever been the poets of the nation. The difference between French and English poetry can be most simply expressed as the difference between the utterance of a courtier and the voice of a patriot. Since the Renaissance, French literature has had, down to our own times, a far smaller public than English literature in its own land. What was the public of Corneille, or Racine, or even Molière, compared with the public to which Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher appealed?

To this very day, the greatest French lyric poets and novelists cater for a smaller literary class than the writers of poems and tales in England. The literature of England has always stood in the closest connexion with the people, and has not been content to rely on the capricious fancy of a court or of a class. It is owing to this that so much of the wealth of its early poetic treasures has survived in full vigour, while whole centuries of the literature of its neighbours have fallen into utter oblivion.

Country life has always had the greatest attraction for the English. This is due to their habits of life, their political development and, most of all, to their natural bent. To take one instance; the English nobility was never a mere appendage of the court as in France, and thus condemned to remain in the capital. We can hardly call to mind any more striking proof of the difference between the nature of French and English literature than the contrast between Boileau, lost without his Paris, and his intellectual kinsman, Pope, solitary in his Twickenham retreat. Throughout the ages of English literature we can always catch the echo of new and deeper tones from the inborn

love of nature. We note this first in Chaucer (p. 54); we find it deeper and more pronounced in Spenser; it forms the background in a number of Shakespeare's dramas; we hear it rushing with irresistible force, through a temporary barrier of French influence, in the poetry of Burns, of the Lake school, of Lord Byron; in the verses of Shelley it swells to a height that can scarcely be surpassed. The poetry of England nowhere shows its Germanic origin more than in its life in the bosom of nature, whereas French writings—as indeed those of all the Romance literatures-remind us of the close atmosphere of a stuffy room. To turn from French to English literature seems like leaving a dusty ballroom full of witty people of fashion; one steps from an artificial world of affected customs and conventional gestures into the peaceful shade of the forest, and inhales deep satisfying draughts of the pure air of life.

This perpetual contact with nature gives English literature its imaginative vigour as well as its robust appreciation of actuality. The romanticists of France and Germany did not become one in their homage to the power of imagination, or even claim the rights of discoverers in this province, till long after Shakespeare, that master of imagination, had created his romantic drama. In the romance of the eighteenth century the English were far in advance of the French realists and naturalists in recognising "the ordinary plainness of things." They were superior to the French in one gift, that of humour, and in this they have only been equalled or approached by the Germans among great literary peoples. In all periods of English literature, we find continual traces of this noble gift of nature, smiling through tears, of sly jests in earnest, of humour tempered by seriousness. French writers show more wit, more so-called mental cleverness (esprit), than English. Yet nothing can become more monotonous than wit, nothing so wearisome as such mental nimbleness. English literature displays a larger share of human kindness than the French.

All really great poetry is religious; that is, its basis rests on the sacred foundation of an ideal, a supernatural conception of the world. Since the days of the Greeks or the Jews, no people has ever taken the religious side of life so earnestly as the English, no people has ever saturated its literature so thoroughly with religion. If we hold that the Jews forfeited all claims to culture and art by their bigoted devotion to religion, we must also admit that the English, in the seventeenth century, came very near to sacrificing their art and literature to religious fanaticism. It is almost a matter of doubt whether the balance between human and divine love was ever again struck in England in the same way as in the days of Shakespeare. We can trace back

1 Schiller.