424 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



realistic of human characters and nature painted from life, seem to 

 begin a new period in the history of Oriental subjects. And the rise 

 of the Japanese in the last decades and their successes in the present 

 time may perhaps result in giving another impulse to the literature 

 of the West, and may transfer the interest in the Orient from the 

 eastern border of the ancient Grseco-Roman world to the shores 

 of Cathay and the Land of the Rising Sun. 



Let us now turn to another group of problems which challenge 

 the acumen of the literary historian, in the field of recent literature, 

 where everything is moving and developing, where literature itself 

 is busy with the solution of problems. It is an indispensable task of 

 the literary historian to grasp the main currents of modern literature, 

 to recognize and appreciate the problems with which it is engaged, 

 to understand and describe them in their origin and development, 

 and to contribute to their solution. 



After the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo, England had the 

 uncontested sway of the sea. The result was an enormous increase 

 of trade and commerce, but together with this unprecedented rise 

 of commerce and national wealth a certain narrow-minded utili- 

 tarianism and commercial spirit seized hold of the majority of the 

 British people and invaded even the policy of the Government. It 

 was the period of unlimited individualism, of the Manchester doc- 

 trine which had the command of British politics for several decades 

 of the middle nineteenth century. But in the second half of the 

 century two different reactions set in against this policy of utilitarian- 

 ism and individualism: the social or humanitarian and the imperial- 

 istic movement, which both had their reflection in literature. 



The former is the older of the two. It ran parallel with, and was 

 antagonistic to, the free-trade movement of the liberal parties by 

 which it was only temporarily outstripped. The reform of 1832 had 

 principally fulfilled the desires of the middle classes; it left the 

 laborers unsatisfied. It was this feeling of disappointment in the 

 working classes that gave rise to the first utterances of a socialist 

 spirit in the Chartist movement. Among the first to recognize its 

 essence and importance was Carlyle, who in his books on Chartism 

 (1839) and Past and Present (1843) pointed out its significance and 

 made an attempt at a just appreciation of it. The ideas he puts 

 forth in these works are those of a strong opponent to the individual- 

 ist laissez-faire doctrine, and of an ardent believer in collectivism, 

 in this respect disclosing him as an adherent of the spirit of the 

 Middle Ages, for which he otherwise had little admiration. 



If Carlyle's writings were more or less historical, economic, and 

 philosophic treatises, the new ideas were not slow to invade also the 

 field of belles-lettres proper. Strongly influenced by the Oxford 



