428 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



people, and create, by way of reaction, a wave of national pride and 

 patriotic enthusiasm which culminated in the desire for a closer union 

 of the mother country and the colonies in the shape of an imperial 

 federation. A number of prominent writers, both in prose and in verse, 

 greatly contributed in making this idea popular. Froude in his Oceana 

 (1886) portrayed in vivid pictures the greatness and expanse of the 

 empire to the eyes of the British people, and Sir John Seeley, in his 

 lectures on The Expansion of England (1883), brought home to the 

 hearts and minds, first of the Cambridge students, and then of a wider 

 public, the necessity of an imperial union, and helped largely to foster 

 and spread the new idea among the professional classes. What 

 Seeley and Froude did in prose essays and addresses, Kipling expressed 

 in poetry and fiction. His warm and vivid sketches of Indian life 

 and manners went a long way towards creating a new interest in 

 India among the British public, while the powerful outburst of patri- 

 otic feeling in collections of poems like The Seven Seas, etc., which 

 indeed is sometimes not far from chauvinism, touched kindred strings 

 and found a rejoicing echo in the hearts of thousands of his country- 

 men. Nor was he the only patriotic singer in the field: the Boer War 

 especially produced quite a series of poems of a similar character. 

 Alfred Austin, the poet laureate, Swinburne, and others, being among 

 those who chimed in with the author of The Barrack Room Ballads and 

 The Seven Seas. All these writers paved the way for that chief polit- 

 ical representative of imperialism, Joseph Chamberlain, whose ambi- 

 tion it is to become the Bismarck of the British Empire. 



America, too, was not slow to respond to the appeal of the imperial- 

 istic spirit which in point of fact seems to pervade all nations at 

 present. Here again the men of letters had a considerable share in 

 the spreading of the new ideas. It was the epoch-marking works of 

 Captain Mahan above all that prepared the public for the far-sighted 

 and ambitious foreign policy which was inaugurated by President 

 McKinley and his counselors, and continued by the present Govern- 

 ment. 



Besides these political currents there are several of a purely literary 

 chanu-ter. One of the most remarkable features of English poetry 

 he second half of the nineteenth century is the predominance of 

 rmal, u-sthetieizing tendency. 



in the iige of Scott and Byron the material interest, was greatly 

 predominant in poetry. The descriptions of nature and of plain and 

 simple human conditions in Wordsworth's poems are conveyed in an 

 unpretending, sometimes even prosaic language; in Southey's and 

 Scott's works, it is the story itself and the culture-historical back- 

 ground; with Byron it is passion and the general view of the world; 

 it is philosophic and a-sthetic speculation with Shelley that form the 

 essential features in their poetry respectively and claim the reader's 



