About the
same time the later speculations of Comte began to attract public
attention in England, and the _Positive Polity_ was translated in 1875.
Between the years 1860-1875, there grew up in England an absorbing
interest in Social Philosophy, and a conviction that the idea of
invariable law offered a solution of the progress of society.
Evolution as an idea was in the air, and it was applied to Man as much
as to Nature. It is no part of our present purpose to trace its growth
from the scientific aspect. It is enough to note how it acted and
reacted on general literature.

Poetry began to hover round the problem of Evolution. It wrapped it in
mystery, denounced it with fine indignation, and took it for the text
of some rather prosaic homilies. Criticism fell into the prevailing
theory: so did history, and even romance. Philosophy and Science are
not the best foster-mothers of Poetry and Romance. Philosophy and
Science grew more solemn than ever; and Poetry and Romance lost
something of their wilder fancy and their light heart. Literature grew
less spontaneous, more correct, more learned, and, it may be, more
absorbed in its practical purpose of modifying social life.

The old notion of literature being a business apart from affairs, of
men of letters being an order, of an absorption in books being ample
work for a life--all this is far from the rule. At least twenty
members of the present and late Governments have been copious writers;
Mr. Gladstone and at least three or four of his late colleagues are
quite in the front rank of living authors--nay, several of them began
their career as literary men. It would be difficult to name an
important writer of the Victorian Age who has not at times flung
himself with ardour into the great social, political, or religious
battles of his time. Thackeray, Trollope, Green, Symonds, are possible
exceptions--examples of bookmen who passed their lives with books, and
who never wrote to promote "a cause." But all the rest have entered on
the "burning questions" of their age, and most of them with the main
part of their force. As a consequence "learning," as it was understood
by Casaubon, Scaliger, Bentley, Johnson, and Gibbon, as it was
understood by Littre, Doellinger, and Mommsen, may be said to have
disappeared in England. Cardinal Newman, Mark Pattison, Dr. Pusey,
were said to be very learned, but it was a kind of learning which kept
very much to itself. For good