Concerning the frigates and sloops of our predecessors, their place is now taken, and their duties will be done, by the classes of vessel known generically as cruisers, protected or unprotected. The protection, the defensive element of strength, has reference mainly to the engines, to the motive power. The battery, the offensive factor, tends upon the whole to revert more and more to the development of fire, to utilizing the length of the vessel by multiplying the number of guns and diminishing their individual size; and the tendency is increased by the fact that, as such ships are expected to fight only vessels of their own kind, their probable target is penetrable by light guns. Speed is the great element in the efficiency of cruisers, and whatever the speed in smooth water, a great advantage inures to larger ships in heavy winds and seas. As for “armored” cruisers, of which there are many, they belong rather to the class of battle-ships than of cruisers. Whatever the advantages of the particular ships, the name suggests a regrettable confusion of purpose, and, in practice, a still more regrettable departure from homogeneity.
A. T. Mahan.
LITERATURE
“Time and space,” a noble philosopher has observed, “are but hallucinations.” It may be so, and from the point of view of the metaphysician ours may have been merely a “so-called nineteenth century.” Certain it is that to judge literature in blocks of centuries is to make a convenient but illogical cross-division. The early, and perhaps the most important, literary influences of the century were in existence long before 1801. Thus, if we look at whatever is now called fin de siècle, at violent antagonism to tradition and convention, at discontent of every sort with everything—with rank, wealth, morality, law, marriage, the family—we find that this passion was as noisy and self-complacent a hundred years ago as it is to-day. The French Revolution was the lurid playground of “New Women,” full of what they supposed to be new ideas. The German drama of 1780–1800, now best remembered by the parody called “The Rovers,” in the Anti-Jacobin, was replete with the humorless paradoxes and strained situations of Ibsen. The shortest way to an understanding of the antiquity of our “new ideas” is, in fact, a study of the Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin.
Romance, again, as far as romance depends for her effects on desperate deeds, on the rhetoric of noble brigands, on the phantasms of the sheeted dead shivering down dark passages among skeletons, on clanking chains, and on distressed damsels, was as much alive in the end of the eighteenth century as at any age of literary history. Goethe, Schiller, Bürger, Mrs. Radcliffe, all following in the Gothic wake of honest Horace Walpole and his Castle of Otranto, were preparing the ground for Scott and Dumas. Once more the old “popular” elements so necessary to literature (which, like Antæus, regains vigor on touching mother-earth) had been wholly absent from the poetry and prose of the last reigning Stuart and of the first two Hanoverian kings of England. But, about 1770–1780, literature had returned to its archaic popular sources. Percy had made volks-lieder fashionable, Fergusson and Burns had revived the rustic muse of Scotland, and Macpherson had given mankind a draught, though an adulterated draught, from the cup of the sorceries of the Celtic enchantress. In opposition to the urban self-restraint and contented complacency of the Augustan age, Rousseau had preached the pleasures of virtue, sentiment, and of a “blessed state of Nature”; young Werther had gotten him a stool to be sad upon, like Master Stephen: weeping was the mode. Rousseau, as Mr. Pater once observed in conversation, was “the grandmother of us all,” and as tearful as Mrs. Gummidge in David Copperfield. Meanwhile the “emancipation” born of science had set in; people thought they knew all about everything; the elder Darwin could explain the universe without a God, quite as easily as any modern Darwinian, if not so elaborately. He may not have been always correct in his theories and facts, still, there they were, and they were “emancipating.” Yet, far from being laughed out of court by the gratifying progress of science, a more mystical religion and a life more austere had come in from the preaching of Wesley, who was practically the parent of our neo-Catholicism in its varying forms. The “Oxford Movement,” with all the strange after-symptoms which it has left behind it, is directly descended from Wesley. Thus romance, sentiment, freedom and variety in poetic form, philanthropy, revolt against the past, return to and reverence for the past, scientific doubt, weariness of life, love of nature, wistful belief, relapse on the forms of the Church, and everything else which stamps the literature of the nineteenth century were alive and active in the last half of the eighteenth century. The year 1801 made no sudden break. The nineteenth century merely went on evolving the principles, revolutionary or reactionary, of the last half of the eighteenth century.
Thus Crabbe, the precursor of whoever, Englishman, American, Frenchman, or Slav, has written of the sombre tragedies of the poor, was born in 1754. Blake, whose perfectly un-Augustan rhapsodies and mystic lyrics were made fashionable about 1870, was born in 1757, out of due time, for his best side is Elizabethan in quality. Burns, born in 1759, is as much at home in the nineteenth century as Tolstoï, while Godwin could not be more “advanced,” or Mary Wollstonecraft more of “a New Woman,” if the former belonged to our “Forward Liberals” and the latter perorated at congresses of her sex. The first twenty-five years of Miss Austen belong to the eighteenth century; yet, except for a certain “old-fashioned” primness of style, she is the first, and, beyond all doubt, the greatest of all nineteenth-century “realistic” novelists of domestic life. For, though a “realist,” she is a humorist, and the combination is almost unexampled. Your common realist is a gloomy thing, with no more sense of the comic than M. Zola.
Of the new poets, revolutionary in metre and matter, Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, and Southey were born in 1770–1774; they were mature before the nineteenth century dawned. His northern home, among the hills and lakes, fitted Wordsworth to be the austere and mystical poet of nature and of man in relation to nature. Born a poet, his genius was determined by his environment, while his ardent sympathy with the Revolution at once turned his attention to the unregarded poor, and inspired his not wholly successful attempt to shake off the trammels of Augustan “poetic diction,” the survival of the Latinism of Boileau and Pope. Later, of course, Wordsworth became the Tory, the patriot, the Churchman, and the Stamp Collector. But his poetical creed he never consciously changed, though he often lapsed from it unconsciously. If Scott was to be a poet at all he was fated to be influenced by the New World, not in its emancipated ideas, but in its wistful return to the Old World of reivers, spearmen, claymores, goblin, ghost, and fairy. The Border ballads lulled his cradle and were the joy of his childhood and manhood. All tradition murmured to him her charms of Border and Highland legend; every ruined abbey and castle had its tale for him; to Ettrick and Yarrow he needed not to say, like Lady John Scott, “Have you no message for me?” He never had a touch of the Augustan horror of mountain and torrent, never a touch of the Augustan contempt of “Barbarism.” Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels of terror went to the molding of his genius, as the novels of Miss Edgeworth (born 1767) suggested fiction about the lives and manners of his own people. In his return to the past he came, like Lamb, on the Elizabethan drama, and, unlike Lamb, on the unpublished documents of the Tudor age, the age of desperate resistance to England. But Scott would never have been exactly the poet that he was if he had not heard “Christabel” recited. “Christabel,” the entirely original utterance of a genius which, at first, was a child of the enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The early ideas of Coleridge were the ideas of Rousseau and of Bernardin de Saint Pierre, who was, like Coleridge, but more energetically, a seeker for an ideal land where pantisocracy might flourish and a clown might be the poet’s “brother.”
In poetry, in poetic form, Coleridge was the real and daring innovator, inspired by the eighteenth century reaction against convention, and played on like an æolian harp by every wind of his mystic spirit. His reaction was too violent even for Lamb; his originality too extreme even for Wordsworth. In him, of all our later poets, the “unconscious self” was the strongest and the most free, and of all our poets he had the hardest battle with the dull Augustan survival in such critics as Jeffrey. To them all the ripened fruit of the blossoming time of the late eighteenth century, the poetry of Scott and of Wordsworth, was but dimly intelligible, but Coleridge was the most unintelligible of all. From the Germany of the late eighteenth century came one of Scott’s springs of poetic action; from the Lenore of Bürger (a popular ballad rewritten) and from the Götz von Berlichingen of Goethe. These were the days when Scott longed to possess a skull and cross-bones, and in a love-letter dilated on his choice of a sepulchre. But what came to Coleridge from Germany was the late eighteenth century’s reaction against the truly “common-sense” ideas of Hume, the philosophy of Kant, Schelling, and Fichte. In this field, too, he was unintelligible (and no wonder), but he was but adapting the ideas of 1770–1800, and the neo-Hegelians of Oxford are doing the same thing. A reaction against the materialism of common-sense was inevitable; Mesmer, Swedenborg, and Kant began what survives in the hands of the Master of Balliol and of Professor William James.