ARTICLE II.THE UNREST OF THE AGE AS SEEN IN ITS LITERATURE.

UNREST is an internal condition or force, an attitude or manifestation of the spirit. In speaking of the unrest of an age, therefore, we are speaking of something which is immate rial and intangible: we can know it only by its effects and modes of operation, just as we know natural powers and laws by their effects and modes of operation. Unrest, then, may have its causes, development, and forms of expression, though they are subject to no ascertainable uniform laws and cannot be classified into a body of orderly and generalized truths. Again, it is a term relative, and not absolute. The natural spirit of striving and aspiration which is the heritage of the race, and which is expressed by the Stagyrite when he says, "Foede mundum intravi, anxius vixi, perturbatus morior."this natural restlessness, inseparable from the conditions of hu man life, is to be distinguished from the peculiar and aggrava ted form of unrest produced by any singular and exciting combination of circumstances such as the decline of religious faith.

All emotion, whether of pleasure or pain, finds its natural vent and appropriate expression in articulate speech. In this light we may look upon literature as a colossal record of the pleasures and pains of the human race. The characteristic feature, the main interest, the dominant spirit, of each age, has left its own imprint in the literature of that age. Whatever forms, then, this element of unrest may have assumed in the XIXth century, whatever modifications it may have undergone. we ought to be able, according to this principle, to find it in our literature. It is difficult, however, to indicate with exactness the line of demarkation between what is, on the one hand, literary, and what is on the other, non-literary; for nearly all the movements of an age so conspicuously an age of printing and books, social, political, scientific, religious alike, pass with extraordinary rapidity, insistence, and propriety, into some mould or other of literary expression, and, if they accomplish

little more, exert effects the most profound and permanent upon literature proper. Consequently, it will be necessary for us to review the evidence of the spirit of unrest, especially in its origin and causes, in several of the more important departments of mental activity.

In treating of this subject, we purpose, before proceeding to illustrate it by citation, analysis, and comment in literature, to go back to its origin, and in tracing the causes, for the most part as they occur, historically, in order of time, to show in outline the gradual development of the Zeitgeist from the French Revolution down to the present day.

The forces which have prepared the way for the germination. of modern unrest are not to be sought for in the immediate century. They have been evolving this complex product which is now before our eyes slowly, by successive stages through the past; their evolution has not, it will be observed, been uniform, any more than transformations in the geological strata or changes in the fauna; it has been attended with great and sudden catastrophes, crises in the history of ideas. Such were the birth and development of Christianity with its new body of aspirations and dogmas, the Reformation, the Revolution, the growth of the natural sciences, the decline of faith. These, and others which we shall mention further on, have been the events which, in the totality of their action and interaction, produced the unrest of our age, and were the occasion of accretions, modifications, new departures in the style, taste, and subjects of literature.

In general, the causes of this unrest arise from a clashing of a new order of things which arrive with an old order of things which linger. It is first of all a period of conflict of ideas and beliefs, of transition. The grand result, the fundamental fact which underlies every phenomenon, is the universal decay of faith. In all the activities of the human spirit there is a stream of complex influences, of antiquity, authority, and tradition on one hand, of doubt, denial, and revolt on the other, which surge to and fro in a too confined channel. At the same time, while we must recognize the mutual interaction of the past and the present, the independent and isolated force of the new order of things should not escape our attention. The salient feature

about the new order is that it is new, that it is a beginning. again, a departure, a voyage. Vous êtes appelés à recommen cer l'histoire, says Barère. It is the new problems which engage us, with their new factors, their new combinations, their results, which, it is to be hoped, will also be new.

First among the special causes which it chiefly interests us to notice is the French Revolution. It is only by regarding this mighty event as the slowly prepared product of forces long at work subtly and silently in the minds of men that it is possi ble to estimate understandingly the issues which followed it with such incredible rapidity and destructive power. These forces consisted in the spirit of reaction and revolt which rose up against the seventeenth century. In all its characteristics, this century was, to use a distinction of Compte, an organic period, in which there existed an unquestioned, positive creed, authori zing and actually holding more or less jurisdiction over men's thought and manner of life. "In history, in psychology, in morals, in politics, the thinkers of the preceding century, Pascal, Bossuet, Descartes, Fénelon, Malebranche, Labruyère, still partook of dogmatism. Religion furnished them with a complete theory of the moral world; after this theory, latent or expressed, they describe man and accommodate their observations to a preconceived type."* In the seventeenth century, then, Christianity in its existing form, sufficed for men's needs. Faith was the ruling power. Antiquity, authority, tradition, were still vital forces. Reason was subaltern.

The spirit of reaction and revolt which rose up against this state of things exhibited itself by that powerful dissolving agent, speculation; speculation along two main lines of thought --Democracy and Philosophy.†

It is difficult for us who stand in complete possession of the finished results of Democracy to appreciate all the name implies, and to grasp at once the magnitude of the transformation which its principles wrought in the ideas of equality, property, social position, etc., commonly held in the seventeenth century. We have to carry ourselves back in imagination to a system of things which embraced a monarchy hedged in by Divinely * Taine's Origines de la France Contemporaine [L'Ancien Regime]. The commonly received generalization of M. Taine.

appointed prerogatives, a splendid and dissolute court having the force of immemorial tradition, and an aristocracy in absolute possession of all the social and political patronage and immunities which remained over: a system of things which implied the absence of any middle class, and shut out it as well as the lowest class, from hope of advancement, and subjected them both to measures of oppression, injustice and violence. Suddenly, as if by the outburst of a volcano, whose fiery forces were invisible only because they were inner and beneath the surface the forces of speculation, indeed-there emerged the middle class. The results of this emergence may be roughly stated in saying that what had been the privilege of the few was now thrown open to all-prosperity in trade, opportunity to rise in political life, in the church, in private life, leisure, education, books, religion; all the avenues to human ambition. and ideal happiness were opened up to minds that had long been under the pressure of restraining conditions though ever striving with accelerated endeavor as the years went on to overcome and break through them. What discontent with the old order of things must have accompanied this vast change! What unfoldings of desire for the future! What accessions of hope! What gleams of ambition! What dreams of paradise! What excesses of folly!

While the Revolution was achieving these great social changes in France, in Germany it was effecting the same end by different agencies and in a different sphere, adapted to the national character of the people. In Germany it was a philosophic revolution, attacking use and event in the domain of ideas. The philosophers, departing from the example of the French Encyclopædists, discarded Locke and Descartes, and set out on original lines of investigation. The Fatherland was very much in the position of Athens when Paul preached on Mars' Hill. Speculation was just as rife, only not critical and polished and contemptuous but earnest, intense, impetuous. There was Kant with his schemes for the regeneration of the world by pure reason, declaring at the same time that the

* It was not thought essential to particularize the circle of thinkers known as the Encyclopedists-Diderot, Condillac, Helvetius, and others-inasmuch as they were forerunners of the Revolution, preceding and directing it, rather than reflecting its results.

problems of God, the world, and the soul are demonstrably insoluble; the teutonic followers of Rousseau, agitating the questions of happiness, education, a return to nature, and depreciating society, the arts, and the sciences; the caustic Herder seeking amid hissing ridicule to apply the principles which Lessing had evolved only a little while before, and bring back the poets to the great models, Homer and Shakespeare, a complete revolution by itself.

In general, philosophy went over to the abstract. In the search for causes they were not content, as M. Taine shows with a soul, atoms, fluids, cells, protoplasm; they believed truth must exist beyond not only dogmas and churches, but beyond even fact and observation. The outcome of this philosophy was what would naturally be expected, a jumbled mass of beliefs and aspirations, of vague desires after a higher beauty and an ideal happiness, of painful longings for the infinite. It was at this period, too, that more emphatic enunciation was given to these theories which have had their most extraordinary effect upon the ideas of the age in revolutionizing the education and indeed the whole circle of the pursuits of ordinary life, viz: the theory of progress, the theory of perfectibility of the race, and the theory of culture.

The mention of the Revolution, although the most obvious and powerful cause, has by no means exhausted the causes which have contributed to modern unrest. There are various other agencies, partly as minor and secondary causes within this comprehensive event, partly as aspects, and partly as consequences, which would leave out of sight the true significance of the movement did we fail to glance at some of them.

Among these is the famous Sturm und Drang period, just alluded to, though not sufficiently with regard to its produc tions, which were quite peculiar in their antecedents and in their influence on literary taste. Out of the transcendental mysticism which was so popular in that day, proceeded the strained and oftentimes ridiculous meanings which were at tached to the common intercourse and relationships of life. Love and friendship became a matter of "inner illumination. Men were exalted into gods. The lovely Countess Branconi wrote to Levater: "O toi, cheri pour la vie, l'âme de mon âme,