PROBLEMS OF ENGLISH LITERARY HISTORY 425 



Tractarian movement, Disraeli, in Sybil and other novels, advocated 

 the rights of the people from a social conservative point of view. 

 In decided opposition to the ascetic Tractarian spirit, but in pursu- 

 ance of the same general aim of ameliorating the condition of the 

 people, Kingsley, in The Saint's Tragedy (1848), Yeast (1848), 

 Cheap Clothes and Nasty (1850), and Alton Locke (1850) displayed 

 his ideas of Christian Socialism and muscular Christianity. Though 

 a promoter of trade-unions and cooperative societies, he has nothing 

 of a socialist radical in him. His novels exhibit a rare combination 

 of the stalwart bravery of the old Teutonic warrior with deep 

 Christian piety and humane social collectivism. 



A long series of other writers cooperated in the same direction: 

 Maurice, Hughes, Thomas Hood, Ebenezer Elliott, Thomas Cooper, 

 Bamford the Weaver, and, last but not least, Dickens. They all in 

 their turn and in their respective lines contributed to the develop- 

 ment of the idea of social reform, to a greater acknowledgment of 

 the rights of the people by the governing classes, and towards a 

 reaction against the liberal Manchester school. 



As time passed on the socialist doctrines by degrees consolidated 

 themselves to the present system, mainly communistic in character. 

 And here again some of the leading men of the purely literary world 

 were among the first to adopt the new ideas and impress them upon 

 the reading public. Inspired by Carlyle, Ruskin after 1850 imbibed 

 the social spirit. Socialism in his mind is strangely connected with 

 romanticism. He hated the nervous competition of the present 

 age, with its materialistic, commercial spirit and capitalistic organ- 

 ization of industry, he hated the modern division of labor which 

 reduced man to a machine, he had an innate aversion to engines and 

 factories, they disturbed his aesthetic sense, and he regarded their 

 introduction as the principal cause of the general discontent of the 

 laboring classes. In Fors clavigcra (1871-94) he called upon the work- 

 men of Great Britain to join him in order to save English country 

 life from the invasion of machinery. He longed for a return to 

 the primitive conditions of the Middle Ages where every artisan was 

 an artist. With all his sympathy for the social current, he had no 

 sense for the necessary development of things, like those people 

 of the present day who are unable to realize that the organization 

 of capital in the form of pools and trusts is merely the inevitable 

 reaction against the organization of labor and a necessary outcome 

 of the general economic development of our age. If Carlyle's social 

 opinions were deeply saturated with a strong moral and philosophic 

 sense, Ruskin's social theory may be described as an amalgamation 

 of socialist and aesthetic views. 



Starting from Carlyle and Ruskin. William Morris, in his Utopian 

 romance, Xcws from Xowhcrc (1890). in his Poems by the Way (1S91), 



