In literature also the dates agree.  Dickens, most typical of all early Victorians, died in 1870.  George Eliot’s last great novel, Daniel Deronda, was published in 1876.  Victor Hugo’s greatest poem, La Legende des Siecles, the imaginative synthesis of all the ages, appeared in the ’seventies.  There have been many writers since, with Tolstoi perhaps at their head, in whom the fire of moral enthusiasm has burnt as keenly, nor have the borders of human sympathy been narrowed.  Yet one cannot fail to note a less pervading and ready confidence in human nature, a less fervent belief that the good must prevail if good men will only follow their better leading.

Here then is our period, marked in public affairs by a progress from one conflict, desperate and tragic, between two of the leading nations of the West, to another and still more terrible which swept the whole world into the maelstrom; and marked in thought by a certain dispersion and depression of mind, a falling in the barometer of temperament and imagination, but also by a grappling with realities at closer quarters.  No wonder that some have seen here a ‘tragedy of hope’ and the ‘bankruptcy of science’.

But it must be noted at once that these obvious landmarks, though striking, are in themselves superficial.  They require explanation rather than give it, and in some cases an explanation, much less tragic than the symptom, is suggested by the symptom itself.  We may at least fairly treat them at starting simply as beacon-hills to mark out the country we are traversing.  We have to go deeper to find out the nature of the soil, and travel to the end to study the vista beyond.

In making this fuller analysis of man’s recent achievement, especially in the West, the first, and perhaps ultimately the weightiest, element we have to note is the continued and unexampled growth of science.  Was there ever a more fertile period than the generation which succeeded Darwin’s achievement in biology and Bunsen’s and Kirchhoff’s with the spectroscope?  Both have created revolutions, one in our view of living things, the other in our view of matter.  In physics the whole realm of radio-activity has come into our ken within these years, and during the same time chemistry, both organic and inorganic, has been equally enlarged.  All branches of science in fact show a similar expansion, and a new school of mathematicians claim that they have recast the foundations of the fundamental science and assimilated it to the simplest laws of all thinking.  Some discussion of this will be found in the chapter on philosophy.

It may serve as tonic—­an antidote to that depression of spirits of which we have spoken—­to consider that such an output of mental energy, rewarded by such a harvest of truth, is without precedent in man’s evolution.  No single generation before ever learnt so much not only of the world around it but also of the doings of previous generations.  For since 1870 we have been living in an age as much distinguished for historical research as for natural science.  If mankind is now to go down in a wrack of war, starvation, bankruptcy, and ruin, the sunset sky at least is glorious.