which culture teaches us to nourish." The equality which he wishes, that on which his ideal state is founded, is of a type that cannot exist till civilization has reached a high stage. Like liberty, it waits as a final reward, and is not established as a first condition. His reading of history is far from the antitheses of the theoretical doctrinaire; - this form of government or that, best in all times, ideal, absolute. An aristocracy first, in the epochs of contraction, says Arnold; since a noble standard of life is the first need of social evolution, and to create it is the function of the aristocracy. To seek equality at too early a point, to consider it as a good in itself, irrespective of the stage of racial development, would be to materialize society; and here Arnold joins issue with socialistic thought, as he understands it, and agrees with those conservative thinkers who fear the rapid progress of an uninformed democracy. But once let a high ideal of living be determined, and equality becomes not only safe but essential to advance; for the race will never abandon an ideal once realized, but will raise all to its level. First to establish a lofty standard: then, through the action of the state, to realize conditions in which the free upward-striving instinct of men may make that standard universal, such is the order of social evolution. That we are nearly ready for the second type of effort, at least that events are forcing us toward it whether we will or no, Arnold at his best believes. How his predictions were to be verified, he himself would have been the most surprised to discover.

For of all the authors of the period we have studied, it may be said that they know not what they seek. If anything is clear from our review, it is that the whole time is an epoch of beginnings. It is better at invective than at close analysis, better at analysis than at reconstruction. Behind it lies the Revolution, with its vast ideal, its wide failure, its bewildering practical sequence. What lies beyond it? None of the men of the time could have foretold. Out of place in their own generation, they could identify themselves with the forces neither of conservation nor of advance; for conservation meant feudalism, and advance meant Laissez Faire. The sorrowful fervor of Carlyle, with its mingled compassion and contempt for hu manity, its hatred and assertion of individualism, its distrust of the laborers and reverence for labor, shows us a mighty but confused genius in the first stages of a great transition. Ruskin accents a similar position, but expresses with more fullness the longing for a society shaped into a rational spiritual organism, governed by vital and adequate law. Arnold brings a new spirit of reaction from sentiment; and his cool survey of the situation is more effective than any emotional outcry. Yet this least sympathetic of our critics is also the most. strongly at odds with his generation, advances most subversive demands for the overthrow of distinctions accounted sacred, and asserts the future power of the working-people as their ardent champions fail to do. In the literature of the Victorian age, the next century will see paradox after paradox.

It is the literature of the Privileged, hailing the Unprivileged as masters of the future; it combines an earnest quest for social authority with an entire scorn of the powers that be; it demands for every individual scope for complete self-realization, yet it demands also that free competition be abolished, that "liberty" should "receive new definitions," and that society should be organized with a fullness of law and strictness of oversight such as have so far been tolerated in no modern nation. In a word, it moves toward democracy, but democracy of a wholly new type. It is possible that our grandchildren will understand this literature better than we can understand it to-day, and that its seeming paradoxes may reveal to them unity of impulse where we can see only confusion. They may perceive a synthesis of forces in which all the inconsistencies of Victorian thought are solved. Such a synthesis the men of the time saw not at all; we to-day seem at times to catch faint glimpses of it, but as yet only as a possibility open to question. Will that synthesis be the social democracy of the future? Will it be the socialist state?

CONCLUSION

CONTEMPORARY ENGLAND

I

WHEN the whirlwind of the French Revolution had passed by, the centre of social passion was found, in England, in the heart of the poets. It remained there for quarter of a century. At the beginning of the Victorian age, it shifted, as we have seen, from the poets to the writers of prose. During fifty years, the prose authors whom we have considered were more thoroughly awake to the gravity of the social situation than any other group of men in England. Politics went serenely on its accustomed path; philanthropy was a modest thing, reforming prisons or founding hospitals, but happily unaware of the widespread social disease which neither strove nor cried, but endured in silence. The arts lamented the absence of great inspirations in modern life, and struggled to create their own inspiration from within and to become ends in themselves, an effort in which no human power has ever succeeded. Political Economy throve and grew fat in many volumes, doing much fine work, but building on a foundation far narrower than that actual humanity whose varying impulses are irreducible to obedience to the clev

erest set of mechanical laws. Only the great prose authors felt the irregular pulses of the fevered social organism, and mourned, pleaded, and hoped, as we have seen.

After 1880, the situation changed once more. Again the centre of social passion shifted; it passed over from literature to life. The age of vision belonged to the poets, the age of problem to the essayists and novelists; the age of experiment, in which we live, belongs to the men of action.

We have no longer any essayists of the scope or power of Carlyle, Ruskin, or Arnold. That fact is self-evident. It is harder to draw inferences concerning the novel, for fiction as a whole shows immense vitality: yet Du Maurier was a poor substitute for Thackeray, and Mrs. Ward is certainly an impoverished heir of George Eliot. There are many clever men of letters among us, each with a piquant pose of his own; and our generation has possessed at least one notable and delightful figure, William Morris, but none can say that literature offers as commanding figures to-day as it did in the days of our fathers. This does not mean that idealism is waning, but that it is absorbed into life. Where are the dreamers to-day? Most of them are not writing books. They are in

County Councils, on Boards of Arbitration, in Organized Charities, in Social Settlements. Let them begin, like Morris, with art and poetry; they are likely to end as he did with some active propaganda. They are not dreaming nor even preach