Violent political
struggles check it: an absorption in material interests checks it:
uniformity of habits, a general love of comfort, conscious
self-criticism, make it dull and turbid. Now our age is marked by all
of these. From the age of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, the French
genius produced almost no imaginative work of really European
importance until it somewhat revived again with Chateaubriand in the
present century. Nor in England can we count anything of a like kind
from the death of Goldsmith until we reach Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth
after an interval of forty years. In the United States the great eras
of imaginative production have been those which were free from
political and military struggles.

The case of France is indeed conclusive proof how suddenly political
turmoil kills imaginative work. French literature, which during the
greater part of the eighteenth century had shown amazing activity,
suddenly seems arrested with Rousseau; and in the latter years of the
eighteenth century there is absolutely nothing of even moderate quality
in the field of art. The same is true of England for the last thirty
years of the same century. Shakespeare's dramas were not produced till
his country had victoriously passed through the death-struggle of the
religious wars in the sixteenth century. The civil war of the Puritans
arrested poetry, so that for nearly thirty years the muse of Milton
himself withdrew into her solitary cell. Dryden carried on the torch
for a time. But prose literature did not revive in England until the
Hanoverian settlement. Political ferment kills literature: prolonged
war kills it: social agitation unnerves it; and still more the uneasy
sense of being on the verge of great and unknown change.

Take our Queen's reign of now some fifty-eight years (1837-1895) and
divide it in half at the year 1866. It is plain that by far the
greater part of the "Victorian" literature was produced in the former
half and quite the inferior part of it was produced in the latter half.
By the year 1866 we had already got all, or all that was best, of
Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, Lytton, Thackeray, Dickens,
Trollope, George Eliot, Disraeli, Kingsley, and others who lived after
that date. In 1865 Lord Palmerston died, and with him died the old
Parliamentary era. In the same year died Abraham Lincoln in the great
crisis of the reconstruction of the American Constitution. We attach
no peculi