Poetry began to hover round the problem of Evolution.  It wrapped it in mystery, denounced it with fine indignation, and took it for the text of some rather prosaic homilies.  Criticism fell into the prevailing theory:  so did history, and even romance.  Philosophy and Science are not the best foster-mothers of Poetry and Romance.  Philosophy and Science grew more solemn than ever; and Poetry and Romance lost something of their wilder fancy and their light heart.  Literature grew less spontaneous, more correct, more learned, and, it may be, more absorbed in its practical purpose of modifying social life.

The old notion of literature being a business apart from affairs, of men of letters being an order, of an absorption in books being ample 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 tumble its note-books into a volume all in a heap.  It has no “standard,” no “model,” no “best writer”—­and yet it has a curious faculty for reviving every known