in October, after the first frosts, summer may come again; a gentle, inactive summer, with here and there a day that is most Junelike. And a beautiful St. Martin's summer happened at the beginning of this century. Our fountain of song burst forth again, the late summer lasted until nearly two-thirds of the century were done, and in the seventies were seen the last days of summer weather. November came with the eighties, a wheezy, asthmatic bard with gray in his beard. In December, in the nineties, the English garden was white; the diminishing water from the fountain ascended for the last time; and now it stands stiff and cold in the air!

There comes a moment in the life of every nation when it crystallizes, and England crystallized with Cromwell. An iron. wind came out of the north, and Milton's magnificence is stern and cold; the feet of the colossus are beginning to freeze; the month is September, and his verse is perceptibly chiller than the warm, live stream of Elizabethan poetry. The frost continued; upon the first thin ice Pope did some excellent figure-skating; and it took fifty years or more to melt this first ice. Then spring came again, or was it a second summer which happened in our literature at the beginning of the century? No more to a nation than to an individual man does spring come again; the most we can hope for is a second summer. The fountain showered as joyfully as before, but there was sleep in the drooping boughs, and the water that surged, babbled and sang and flowed in noisy and deep streams had lost something of its primal freshness; nor was the temperature of the water equable. Keats is like a hot bath, Wordsworth is tepid, Byron steams like a glass of toddy, and Coleridge is drugged with various narcotics. Shelley is the sublime exception, and in the middle of our St. Martin's summer he stands a symbol of eternal youth. The greatness of none of these poets is in dispute; it is the sudden differences which they present that remind us that the month is October; and the poets that followed them are poets of the period. There are too many rectory gardens in Tennyson for the delight of any age except the Victorian age, and we cannot think of Rossetti singing in Elizabethan times; a little perhaps in the Italian Renaissance. Swinburne is our last universal poet; Atalanta is dateless; she seems to live in the eternal woods and hills of the morning, with the music of the Pastoral Symphony. The moralizing in "Jenny"

is surely as modish as her crinoline, which advertised "dainties through the dirt;" and the Sonnets are gold and enamel, curiously inwrought ornaments, rather than the spontaneous singing coming straight out of the heart of the springtime.

In the seventies many a pretty song passed unheeded, and it was not until the nineties, until Tennyson died and Swinburne's song had grown fainter, that people began to feel the absence of a great poet in London. For eighty years there had been an unbroken line of great poets, and suddenly there was not one; a frosty silence shivered in the ear, and we were all looking through the wintry woods where the waters stood like a great white stalk in the air. Here and there a few drops trickled through the ice, and these were collected in cups of many various designs, and whoever discovered a little muddy pool raised joyful cries, and the drinkers did not perceive that it was not spring but rain water they were drinking; water stagnant in some worn places, diluted perhaps with a few tricklings from the fountain. It was circulated in flasks of old Italian design, and in common tin flasks that the soldiers use. The palate had deteriorated, and in proportion as the water was brackish and filthy it was greedily swallowed. It suited a coarsened palate, and that this should happen in England, where poetry is a national art, is as strange as if music were to die out of the German ear, and Bayreuth were to mistake the disconnected scrapings of a Hungarian band for a Prelude by Bach.

II.

Our youth began in verse, and it is in verse that England has best told the troubled throbbing of the heart and the yearnings and visions which the mind follows after. From the beginning prose went to earn a mercenary wage in the subaltern employment of facts; and it is nearly true to say that only one English prose writer has lifted prose out of its anchorage in facts, and with sails woven out of noble harmonies sailed it down the star-lit streams of dream and vision; others have done this occasionally and partially, but only one has done it continuously. Only by one has prose been considered as verse has always been considered in England, as a medium through which we may obtain dream and ecstasy, as we attain dream and ecstasy through music and painting. The mission of prose in England has always been

limited to the service of real life, whereas the mission of painting and poetry and music has always had for its object the raising of our souls out of the lethargies of real life into a supersensuous heaven where the horizons are thrown back, and the soul is conscious of nothing but itself.

But the servitude of English prose to the things of this world began in the Elizabethan time, when men's eyes did not see so clearly the things of this world as they do now, and so the early servitude of prose was a comparatively light one; and though the English essay occupies an inferior position to the poem, whether dramatic or narrative, it still holds through the genius of Pater, Landor and De Quincey, a high place in our literature-a place so high that if all our prose literature were destroyed except the works of our essayists and translators, the inferiority between English prose and English verse would probably not strike any one except the discerning critic. It is our prose fiction that brings into striking relief the inferiority of the minds of those who worked in prose to the minds of those whose work is in verse; and that English prose fiction should be the weakest part of our literature is consonant with all that has been advanced here regarding the change which came over the national temper about two hundred and fifty years ago. Prose fiction appeared in England about a hundred years after Cromwell; it was a child therefore of our middle age. Twins, I should say, were born to us, for "Clarissa Harlowe" and "Tom Jones" appeared simultaneously. But the twins differed exceedingly from each other; one threw back to the early literature; the other dictated the form which the English novel was to take down to the present day. For so far as we are aware, there exists no instance in our literature of a deviation from the "Tom Jones" type of novel to the "Clarissa Harlowe❞ type of novel, and to appreciate the shallowness of the tradition. which has made our fiction, and the depth of the tradition which has made our poetry, we have only to understand the essential differences which divide these novels. That neither was written by a great writer does not affect the purpose of this article, which is to classify, rather than to stimulate our admiration for Fielding and for Richardson.

That there are some who cannot survive the loss of purity is the moral idea which Richardson's tale embodies. It is said of the ermine that it dies if its immaculate fur becomes stained, and

Clarissa's purity is as sacred to her; and though she has no fault to repent-if she had, the tale would be impossible-she dies because the sense of bodily purity is essential to her. The scheme at first sight seems monastic and crude, but if we look into our hearts we find it there sure enough. It is beyond reason that we should think, yet we can think, if only for a moment, that the snow is purer over which the shadow of an eagle's wings has not fallen than the snow across which the shadow has once fled. So the tale is the certain symbol of a moral idea, and symbolism is the characteristic of the literature which preceded it rather than the literature which followed it. Are not Shakespeare's Tragedies all symbols? and that the moral idea is often so deeply hidden in the work that it escapes the notice of the casual reader, that it is so deeply hidden that it escapes the observance of so acute a critic as Mr. Quiller Couch, should not deceive us. It is always there, and our appreciation of the beauty of the tale will be heightened by finding it.

On a former occasion when this important literary question was being debated in the press, I remember that Mr. Quiller Couch, to my surprise, challenged me to point to a moral idea in the Iliad. At the moment I was weary of the argument, and too indolent to answer him. But, surely, Helen is a symbol of man's constant pursuit of beauty, and that Homer was aware of the symbolism of his tale, can hardly be doubted. Why else should he have made the old men say when Helen passes them: "After all, she was worth it." These are not the words, but I remember a scene when a number of old men grouped on the wall see Helen passing and in a phrase equivalent to that which I have marked by inverted commas make clear the symbolism of the epic. And it is this symbolism which makes the Iliad the story of all human life; divest the story of its moral idea, and it will be the story for the Greeks alone; for beautiful verses written about a merely romantic episode are never immortal verses; the verbal felicities in little literature are as numerous as those in great literature, and by felicities of diction it is impossible to distinguish one from the other.

The certain sign by which we may distinguish the great from the small in literature is by asking ourselves if a story is symbolic; if it be a symbol, that is to say, if it be the outward sign of a moral idea.

III.

The publication of "Clarissa Harlowe" happened just before, or just after, the publication of "Tom Jones," and those novels suggest the last milestone of the old, and the first milestone of the new road. The old road was tragedy-that is to say, a story which symbolizes a moral idea; and the new road was comedy—that is to say, the study of the appearances of life, the habit in which man lives; and manners were chosen by England, and tragedy was chosen by France. Richardson discovered disciples in France but none in England. L'Abbé Prévost is one instance of the influence of Richardson in France, but the influence of Richardson on the French novel is not the subject of this article.

That England should choose comedy was inevitable, for England had already produced tragedy, and when once an art has been developed to the highest point in any country it declines, and then disappears from that country forever. So England paid no heed to Richardson, and with Fielding turned to manners for change and relaxation; and since Fielding the English novel has been abandoned to the notation of the manners and customs of the different classes. And so absorbed has England been in her love of the novel of manners that criticism has forgotten that all literature which relies on manners for subject-matter cannot outlive the social aspect which it describes. It cannot outlive itself; its life is the life of one generation; after that it lives the life of a ghost; it becomes the history of trivialities which have passed away. And glimmerings of this truth float about Thackeray's remark that no one since Fielding had dared to paint the portrait of a complete man. The remark is in constant use in the newspapers, the writers of the literary article quote it always approvingly, but it may be doubted if any one of these writers ever considered the remark; it is doubtful if Thackeray considered it; it is just one of those casual remarks which the public delights in, for it compromises no position, and its meaning is uncertain and vague. It is one of those remarks which save people from the trouble of thinking, of seeing to the end; it is like a pleasant cloud, it passes overhead, casting a little shadow, and the conversation can take another turn. But the time is opportune to consider the remark more severely, and the first thing that strikes us is the expression "dared to paint," for it would not have occurred to Thackeray to use these words if he had been speaking of a poet