history.  Dickens made a series of novels serve as onslaughts on various social abuses; and George Eliot’s heart is ever with Darwin, Spencer, and Comte, as much as it is with Miss Austen.  Ruskin would sacrifice all the pictures in the world, if society would transform itself into a Brotherhood of St. George.  Tennyson has tried to put the dilemmas of theological controversy into lyric poetry, and Psychology is now to be studied, not in metaphysical ethics, but in popular novels.  The aim of the modern historian is to compile a Times newspaper of events which happened three or four, eight or ten centuries ago.  The aim of the modern philosopher is to tabulate mountains of research, and to prune away with agnostic non possumus the ancient oracles of hypothesis and imagination.

Our literature to-day has many characteristics:  but its central note is the dominant influence of Sociology—­enthusiasm for social truths as an instrument of social reform.  It is scientific, subjective, introspective, historical, archaeological:—­full of vitality, versatility, and diligence:—­intensely personal, defiant of all law, of standards, of convention:—­laborious, exact, but often indifferent to grace, symmetry, or colour:—­it is learned, critical, cultured:—­with all its ambition and its fine feeling, it is unsympathetic to the highest forms of the imagination, and quite alien to the drama of action.

It would be a difficult problem in social dynamics to fix anything like a true date for this change in the tone of literature, and to trace it back to its real social causes.  The historian of English literature will perhaps take the death of Walter Scott, in 1832, as a typical date.  By a curious coincidence, Goethe died in the same year.  Two years later Coleridge and Lamb died.  Within a few years more most of those who belonged to the era of Byron, Shelley, Scott, and Sheridan were departed or had sung their last effective note.  The exceptions were Wordsworth and his immediate Lakist followers, Landor and Bulwer, of whom the latter two continued to produce.  The death of Scott happened in the year of the Reform Act of 1832; and here we reach a political and social cause of the great change.  The reformed democratic Parliament of 1832 was itself the reaction after the furious upheaval caused by the Revolution of 1789, and it heralded the social and legislative revolution of the last sixty years.  It was the era when the steam-power and railway system was founded, and the vast industrial development which went with it.  The last sixty years have witnessed a profound material revolution in English life; and the reaction on our literature has been deep and wide.