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