The case of France is indeed conclusive proof how suddenly political turmoil kills imaginative work.  French literature, which during the 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 stunned it with cataracts of stormy debate.  We are all politicians, all party-men now.

There is upon us also, both in England and in America, a social ferment that goes deeper than any mere constitutional struggle.  It is the vague, profound, multiform, and mysterious upheaval that is loosely called Socialism—­not Socialism in any definite formula, but the universal yearning of the millions for power, consideration, material improvement, and social equality.  The very vagueness, universality, and unbounded scope of the claim they make constitute its power.  All orders and classes are concerned in it:  all minds of whatever type are affected by it:  every political, social, or industrial axiom has to be reconsidered in the light of it:  it appeals to all men and