CHAPTER VII - IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE

Summary

It is characteristic of this period of literature that, with exceptional vigour, it both provokes and defeats large historical generalisations. For its writers show an exceedingly high degree of historical self-consciousness and debate their problems in terms of ‘the needs of the age’, believing that theirs is an age which calls for radically new insights, approaches and departures of the mind. On the other hand, this feeling is but a symptom of the dissolution of all naively held common beliefs, a negative fact which makes it hard to find for the epoch any positive common denominator. Is it a scientifically minded, materialistic, positivistic age? Yes, it is the age of Comte, Feuerbach, Darwin, Marx and Herbert Spencer. Yet it is also romantic, idealistic and anxiously waiting upon the spirit of man and his cultural possessions. Its intellectual history would certainly be badly out of focus if no mention were made of Carlyle, Emerson, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. Is it an age estranged from religion? Certainly. Yet religious feelings run high, and not only feelings. There are such profound and dramatic religious thinkers as Kierkegaard and Cardinal Newman, and there is, in literature, the deeply religious genius of Dostoevsky. Is it a prosaic age? Very likely; yet it is also the age which invented and passionately practised the doctrine of ‘pure poetry’, and which revelled in the emotional abandon of Richard Wagner's music. Is it an age which believes in the innate power of man to embark on a voyage of infinite progress? It would no doubt be easy to answer in the affirmative were it not for the eager reception given—and by no mean hosts—to the metaphysical pessimism of Schopenhauer.