opposes the empirical philosophy of the eighteenth century, not like the Medieval Revival by a return to a past age, or an appeal to authority, but by an appeal to something higher, more divine, in man, than the senses or the understanding; it opposes the mechanical deism of Paley and the mechanical atheism of La Mettrie by the discovery of God immanent and omnipresent in nature and in man. The German philosophical systems from Fichte to Hegel belong to this movement; it appears, modified by other elements, in the teaching of Wordsworth in his earlier years, of Coleridge, and of Carlyle; in the vague pantheism of Goethe; and in the lives and writings of that remarkable group of New England reformers, of whom Emerson and Theodore Parker have been the most widely known, and have indeed exercised an European influence.

It is important to note that as time went on, the spirit of the Revolution and the genius of transcendental philosophy approached, recognised each other as fellowworkers, or at least as fellow-enthusiasts on man's behalf, and joyously embraced. Even the Catholic reaction was for a time partially drawn into the great wave of democratic feeling; a strange composition of forces produced that eddy, from which Lamennais escaped to go forward in the pursuit of knowledge and of freedom, and from which others escaped to return to the calm of authority and the certitude of dogma.

In the Revolutionary movement and its development, we distinguish two degrees or stages. Although from the first the Revolution was rich in constructive forces, its earlier work was in the main destructive; the

new ideals and enthusiasms embodied in the watchwords "liberty, equality, and fraternity," were sought to be realized in the spirit of metaphysical thinkers and theorists; and the rights of the individual were more considered than the duties of man as a member of society. The Revolutionary movement in its first stage, then, was destructive, metaphysical, individualistic. From about 1830, dates a series of attempts at a revolutionary reconstruction, which should be positive and socialistic in character. How ready a soil the imagination of the time furnished to the germs in the air appears from the remarkable power exerted by the ideas of Saint-Simon upon Heine and Young Germany, by those of Pierre Leroux upon the enthusiastic genius of George Sand, and, by Fourier upon members of the Brook Farm Association.

The French Revolution, like every great national movement, both resumed the past and prophesied the future. We must beware of viewing it, in relation to literature, as an isolated phenomenon. There are at least three great influences succeeding one another, and closely connected-all earlier in date than 1830which we must distinguish: first, the Critical movement, or Aufklärung, which passed in the latter half of the eighteenth century from England to France, and was in most active progress from 1760 to 1790; secondly, the Revolution 1790-1800; thirdly, the wars of the Consulate and Empire 1800-1815. The literature of the early years of the present century is sometimes treated as if it were dominated by the second of these great movements alone; in fact, it exhibits the active

influence of all three, together with that of many lesser currents of tendency. It is well in considering the career of each important writer of the time, to note the date at which he reached early manhood. One born like William Godwin, in the commencement of the Seven Years' War, would have been exposed to the critical movement before the age of five-and-twenty, and would have advanced towards the Revolution together with that movement. In 1791, he had reached the midpoint of the Scriptural threescore years and ten, when in spite of public calamity which might befall the cause he cherished, he could (had his political idealism not sufficed to sustain him) still bear up and steer right onward, and was little likely to change his creed because some bright hopes became less bright. One born like Wordsworth, some fourteen years after Godwin, could hardly have drunk deep of the pre-Revolution philosophy, unless he were a youth of precocious intellectual power; he would not have come up out of the midst of the eighteenth century with the Revolutionary idea; but in the morning of life it would seem to him, when the splendours of the Revolution first appeared, that he moved in the great morning of the world. Faith in the immense promises of the time would be no mere product of the intellect, but a "pleasant exercise of hope and joy.”

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven."

But could such a faith bear the stress which the stern years brought? It had been a part of the dawn, and as the sun darkened before the noon, Wordsworth's

exercise of hope became a desperate hoping against hope, until at last he found abiding sources of light and strength elsewhere than in the European Revolution. One born like Byron, in the year before the meeting of the States-General, would be yet a child when Napoleon stilled the last struggles of Revolution under the sway of military despotism; he would have endured none of the trial and exhaustion which the early enthusiasts on behalf of democracy underwent, but he would be aware of a great void in the world surrounding him—of faiths that had fallen, of forces that had been spent. There is no environment more fraught with peril to a man framed with great capacities for joy than one which leaves him without a social faith, and throws him back upon his own craving heart and its unsatisfied passions.

We may describe the Revolution as consisting of three parts -the intellectual doctrine; the revolutionary emotions, hopes, hates, fears, ardours, aspirations; and, last, the actual facts of external history. These served as tests to exhibit the elements of which the natures of men exposed to their influence were constituted. If one's mind were nourished only by concrete fact informed by ideas, it might be difficult to view with tolerance a political doctrine which was still disembodied, still expecting to be incarnated in institutions; such was the case with Burke. If one's intellect were so purely theoretical that concrete facts were to it but illusions, and theories the only realities, then it might be possible to hold the revolutionary doctrine without a question or a doubt through all the failures of Constitutions, the fall of parties, and the ever-intensifying terror; such was the

case with Godwin.* If one possessed an essentially lyrical nature, the basis and substance of which consisted of emotion, it might disclose itself in such a fine indiscretion as that of Burns, when he a British exciseman-despatched his gift of four carronades to the French Convention, with an autograph letter. Real life, the step-mother of poets, reads hard lessons to her impulsive half-children, and Burns, whose carronades were captured at Dover, made piteous profession of his loyalty to the British Constitution, dearest to him of all things next after God, when he pictured to himself his wife and his little ones turned adrift into the world.

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey are commonly spoken of together in reference to the Revolutionary movement, as if the relations to it of all three were identical in kind. But, in truth, the test applied by the Revolution detected the differences of their characters quite as much as it revealed the presence of a common element. There was a certain sternness and stoicism at the heart of Wordsworth's enthusiastic joy. His intellect and emotions acted with consentaneity as long as the concrete facts of French history permitted this; hence his faith was ardent, and his emotions were massive. When, by the pressure of facts, he was driven into alienation from France, his distress was proportionately great and prolonged. In London, Wordsworth heard the greatest philosophical orator of England launch forth his magnificent ridicule against all systems built on abstract rights,—

It should be observed, however, that violent revolutions were, upon principle, condemned by Godwin.