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Title: Halleck's New English Literature
Author: Reuben P. Halleck
Release Date: January 8, 2004 [EBook #10631]
Language: English
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HALLECKS'S NEW ENGLISH LITERATURE
by REUBEN POST HALLECK, M.A., LL.D.
Author of "History of English Literature" and "History of American
Literature"
PREFACE
In this _New English Literature_ the author endeavors to preserve the
qualities that have caused his former _History of English Literature_
to be so widely used; namely, suggestiveness, clearness, organic
unity, interest, and the power to awaken thought and to stimulate the
student to further reading.
The book furnishes a concise account of the history and growth of
English literature from the earliest times to the present day. It lays
special emphasis on literary movements, on the essential qualities
that differentiate one period from another, and on the spirit that
animates each age. Above all, the constant purpose has been to arouse
in the student an enthusiastic desire to read the works of the authors
discussed. Because of the author's belief in the guide-book function
of a history of literature, he has spent much time and thought in
preparing the unusually detailed _Suggested Readings_ that follow each
chapter.
It was necessary for several reasons to prepare a new book. Twentieth
century research has transformed the knowledge of the Elizabethan
theater and has brought to light important new facts relating to the
drama and to Shakespeare. The new social spirit has changed the
critical viewpoint concerning authors as different as Wordsworth,
Keats, Ruskin, Dickens, and Tennyson. Wordsworth's treatment of
childhood, for instance, now requires an amount of space that would a
short time ago have seemed disproportionate. Later Victorian writers,
like Meredith, Hardy, Swinburne, and Kipling, can no longer be
accorded the usual brief perfunctory treatment. Increased modern
interest in contemporary life is also demanding some account of the
literature already produced by the twentieth century. An entire
chapter is devoted to showing how this new literature reveals the
thought and ideals of this generation.
Other special features of this new work are the suggestions and
references for a literary trip through England, the historical
introductions to the chapters, the careful treatment of the modern
drama, the latest bibliography, and the new illustrations, some of
which have been specially drawn for this work, while others have been
taken from original paintings in the National Portrait Gallery,
London, and elsewhere. The illustrations are the result of much
individual research by the author during his travels in England.
The greater part of this book was gradually fashioned in the
classroom, during the long period that the author has taught this
subject. Experience with his classes has proved to him the
reasonableness of the modern demand that a textbook shall be definite
and stimulating.
The author desires to thank the large number of teachers who have
aided him by their criticism. Miss Elizabeth Howard Spaulding and Miss
Sarah E. Simons deserve special mention for valuable assistance. The
entire treatment of Rudyard Kipling is the work of Miss Mary Brown
Humphrey. The greater part of the chapter, _Twentieth-Century
Literature_, was prepared by Miss Anna Blanche McGill. Some of the
best and most difficult parts of the book were written by the author's
wife. R.P.H.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION--LITERARY ENGLAND
CHAPTERS:
I. FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066
II. FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066, TO CHAUCER'S DEATH 1400
III. FROM CHAUCER'S DEATH 1400, TO THE ACCESSION OF ELIZABETH, 1558
IV. THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 1558-1603
V. THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660
VI. FROM THE RESTORATION, 1660, TO THE PUBLICATION OF PAMELA, 1740
VII. THE SECOND FORTY YEARS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 1740-1780
VIII. THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837
IX. THE VICTORIAN AGE, 1837-1900
X. TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE
SUPPLEMENTARY LIST OF AUTHORS AND THEIR CHIEF WORKS
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. Woden.
2. Exeter Cathedral.
3. Anglo-Saxon Gleeman. (From the tapestry designed by H.A. Bone).
4. Facsimile of beginning of Cotton MS. of Beowulf.(British Museum).
5. Facsimile of Beginning of Junian MS. of Caedmon.
6. Anglo-Saxon Musicians. (From illuminated MS., British Museum).
7. The Beginning of Alfred's Laws. (From illuminated MS., British
Museum).
8. The Death of Harold at Hastings. (From the Bayeux tapestry).
9. What Mandeville Saw. (From Edition of 1725).
10. John Wycliffe. (From an old print).
11. Treuthe's Pilgryme atte Plow. (From a MS. in Trinity College,
Cambridge).
12. Gower Hearing the Confession of a Lover. (From Egerton MS.,
British Museum).
13. Geoffrey Chaucer. (From an old drawing in the MS. of Occleve's
Poems, British Museum).
14. Canterbury Cathedral.
15. Pilgrims Leaving the Tabard Inn. (From Urry's Chaucer).
16. Facsimile of Lines Describing the Franklyn. (From the Cambridge
University MS.).
17. Franklyn, Friar, Knight, Prioress, Squire, Clerk of Oxford. (From
the Ellesmere MS.).
18. Morris Dancers. (From MS. of Chaucer's Time).
19. Henry VIII, giving Bibles to Clergy and Laity. (From frontispiece
to Coverdale Bible).
20. Book Illustration, Early Fifteenth Century. (British Museum).
21. Facsimile of Caxton's Advertisement of his Books. (Bodleian
Library, Oxford).
22. Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_. (From DeWorde's Edition, 1529).
23. Early Title Page of _Robin Hood_. (Copland Edition, 1550).
24. William Tyndale. (From an old print).
25. Sir Thomas Wyatt. (After Holbein).
26. Facsimile of Queen Elizabeth's Signature.
27. Sir Philip Sidney. (After the miniature by Isaac Oliver, Windsor
Castle).
28. Francis Bacon. (From the painting by Van Somer, National Portrait
Gallery).
29. Title page of _Bacon's Essays_, 1597.
30. John Donne. (From the painting by Jansen, South Kensington
Museum).
31. Edmund Spenser. (From a painting in Dublin Castle).
32. Miracle Play at Coventry. (From an old print).
33. Hell Mouth in the Old Miracle Play. From a Columbia University
Model.
34. Fool's Head.
35. Air-Bag Flapper and Lath Dagger.
36. Fool of the Old Play.
37. Thomas Sackville.
38. Theater in Inn Yard. (From Columbia University model).
39. Reconstructed Globe Theater, Earl's Court, London.
40. The Bankside and its Theaters. (From the Hollar engraving, about
1620).
41. Contemporary Drawing of Interior of an Elizabethan Theater.
42. Marlowe's Memorial Statue at Canterbury.
43. William Shakespeare. (From the Chandos portrait, National
Portrait Gallery).
44. Shakespeare's Birthplace. Stratford-on-Avon.
45. Classroom in Stratford Grammar School.
46. Anne Hathaway's Cottage, Shottery.
47. View of Stratford-on-Avon.
48. Inscription over Shakespeare's Tomb.
49. Shakespeare--The D'Avenant Bust. (Discovered in 1845).
50. Henry Irving as Hamlet.
51. Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (From the painting by Sargent).
52. Falstaff and his Page. (From a drawing by B. Westmacott).
53. Ben Jonson. (From the portrait by Honthorst, National Portrait
Gallery).
54. Ben Jonson's Tomb in Westminster Abbey.
55. Francis Beaumont.
56. John Fletcher.
57. Cromwell Dictating Dispatches to Milton. (From the painting by
Ford Maddox Brown).
58. Thomas Fuller.
59. Izaak Walton.
60. Jeremy Taylor.
61. John Bunyan. (From the painting by Sadler, National Portrait
Gallery).
62. Bedford Bridge, Showing Gates and Jail. (From an old print).
63. Bunyan's Dream. (From Fourth Edition _Pilgrim's Progress_, 1680).
64. Woodcut from the First Edition of Mr. Badman.
65. Robert Herrick.
66. John Milton. (After a drawing by W. Faithorne, at Bayfordbury).
67. John Milton, AEt. 10.
68. Milton's Visit to Galileo in 1638. (From the painting by T.
Lessi).
69. Facsimile of Milton's Signature. 1663.
70. Title Page to _Comus_, 1637.
71. Milton's Motto from _Comus_, with Autograph, 1639.
72. Milton Dictating _Paradise Lost_ to his Daughter. (From the
painting by Munkacsy).
73. Samuel Butler.
74. John Dryden. (From the painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller, National
Portrait Gallery).
75. Birthplace of Dryden. (From a print).
76. Daniel Defoe. (From a print by Vandergucht).
77. Jonathan Swift. (From the painting by C. Jervas, National
Portrait Gallery).
78. Moor Park. (From a drawing).
79. Swift and Stella. (From the painting by Dicksee).
80. Joseph Addison. (From the painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller,
National Portrait Gallery.)
81. Birthplace of Addison.
82. Richard Steele.
83. Sir Roger de Coverley in Church. (From a drawing by B.
Westmacott).
84. Alexander Pope. (From the portrait by William Hoare).
85. Pope's Villa at Twickenham. (From an old print).
86. Rape of the Lock. (From a drawing by B. Westmacott).
87. Alexander Pope. (From a contemporary portrait).
88. Horace Walpole.
89. Thomas Gray.
90. Stoke Poges Churchyard.
91. A Blind Beggar Robbed of his Drink. (From a British Museum MS.)
92. Samuel Richardson. (From an original drawing).
93. Henry Fielding. (From the drawing by Hogarth).
94. Laurence Sterne.
95. Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. (From a drawing by B. Westmacott).
96. Tobias Smollett.
97. Edward Gibbon. (From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds).
98. Edmund Burke. (From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, National
Portrait Gallery).
99. Oliver Goldsmith. (From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds,
National Portrait Gallery).
100. Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. (From a drawing by B. Westmacott).
101. Goldsmith's Lodgings, Canonbury Tower, London.
102. Dr. Primrose and his Family. (From a drawing by G. Patrick
Nelson).
103. Samuel Johnson. (From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds).
104. Samuel Johnson's Birthplace. (From an old print).
105. James Boswell.
106. Cheshire Cheese Inn To-day.
107. Robert Southey.
108. Charles Lamb. (From a drawing by Maclise).
109. Bo-Bo and Roast Pig. (From a drawing by B. Westmacott).
110. William Cowper. (From the portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence).
111. Cowper's cottage at Weston.
112. John Gilpin's Ride. (From a drawing by R. Caldecott).
113. Robert Burns. (From the painting by Nasmyth National Portrait
Gallery).
114. Birthplace of Burns.
115. Burns and Highland Mary. (From the painting by James Archer).
116. Sir Walter Scott. (From the painting by William Nicholson).
117. Abbotsford, Home of Sir Walter Scott.
118. Scott's Grave in Dryburgh Abbey.
119. Loch Katrine and Ellen's Isle.
120. Walter Scott. (From a life sketch by Maclise).
121. Scott's Desk and "Elbow Chair" at Abbotsford.
122. Jane Austen. (From an original family portrait).
123. Jane Austen's Desk.
124. William Wordsworth. (From the portrait by B.R. Haydon).
125. Boy of Winander. (From the painting by H.O. Walker, Congressional
Library).
126. Wordsworth's Home at Grasmere--Dove Cottage.
127. Grasmere Lake.
128. William Wordsworth. (From a sketch in _Fraser's Magazine_).
129. Rydal Mount near Ambleside.
130. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (From a pencil sketch by C.R. Leslie).
131. Coleridge's Cottage at Nether-Stowey.
132. Coleridge as a Young Man. (From a sketch made in Germany).
133. Lord Byron. (From a portrait by Kramer).
134. Byron at Seventeen. (From a painting).
135. Newstead Abbey, Byron's Home.
136. Castle of Chillon.
137. Byron's Home at Pisa.
138. Percy Bysshe Shelley. (From the portrait by Amelia Curran,
National Portrait Gallery).
139. Shelley's Birthplace, Field Place.
140. Grave of Shelley, Protestant Cemetery, Rome.
141. Facsimile of Stanza from _To a Skylark_.
142. John Keats. (From the painting by Hilton, National Portrait
Gallery).
143. Keats's Home, Wentworth Place.
144. Grave of Keats, Rome.
145. Facsimile of Original MS. of _Endymion_.
146. Endymion. (From the painting by H.O. Walker, Congressional
Library).
147. Thomas de Quincy. (From the painting by Sir J.W. Gordon, National
Portrait Gallery).
148. Room in Dove Cottage.
149. Charles Darwin.
150. John Tyndall.
151. Thomas Huxley. (From the painting by John Collier, National
Portrait Gallery).
152. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (From the drawing by himself, National
Portrait Gallery).
153. Thomas Babington Macaulay. (From the painting by Sir. F. Grant,
National Portrait Gallery).
154. Cardinal Newman. (From the painting by Emmeline Deane).
155. Thomas Carlyle. (From the painting by James McNeill Whistler).
156. Craigenputtock.
157. Mrs. Carlyle. (From a miniature portrait).
158. John Ruskin. (From a photograph).
159. Charles Dickens. (From a photograph taken in America, 1868).
160. Dicken's Home, Gads Hill.
161. Facsimile of MS. of _A Christmas Carol_.
162. William Makepeace Thackeray. (From the painting by Samuel
Laurence, National Portrait Gallery).
163. Caricature of Thackeray by Himself.
164. Thackeray's Home where _Vanity Fair_ was Written.
165. George Eliot. (From a drawing by Sir F.W. Burton, National
Portrait Gallery).
166. George Eliot's Birthplace.
167. Robert Louis Stevenson. (From a photograph).
168. Stevenson as a Boy.
169. Edinburgh Memorial of Robert Louis Stevenson. (By St. Gaudens).
170. George Meredith. (From the painting by G.F. Watts, National
Portrait Gallery).
171. Thomas Hardy. (From the painting by Winifred Thompson).
172. Max Gate. (The Home of Hardy).
173. Matthew Arnold. (From the painting by G.F. Watts, National
Portrait Gallery).
174. Robert Browning. (From the painting by G.F. Watts, National
Portrait Gallery).
175. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (From the painting by Field Talfourd,
National Portrait Gallery).
176. Facsimile of MS. from _Pippa Passes_.
177. Alfred Tennyson. (From a photograph by Mayall).
178. Farringford.
179. Facsimile of MS. of _Crossing the Bar_.
180. Algernon Charles Swinburne. (From the painting by Dante Gabriel
Rossetti).
181. Rudyard Kipling. (From the painting by John Collier).
182. Mowgli and his Brothers. (From _The Jungle Book_).
183. The Cat That Walked. (From Kipling's drawing for _Just-So
Stories_).
184. Joseph Conrad.
185. Arnold Bennett.
186. John Galsworthy.
187. Herbert George Wells.
188. William Butler Yeats.
189. John Masefield.
190. Alfred Noyes.
191. Henry Arthur Jones.
192. Arthur Wing Pinero.
193. George Bernard Shaw. (From the bust by Rodin).
194. James Matthew Barrie.
195. Stephen Phillips.
196. Lady Gregory.
197. John Synge.
[Illustration: LITERARY MAP OF ENGLAND]
[Illustration: LITERARY MAP OF ENGLAND]
NEW ENGLISH LITERATURE
INTRODUCTION
LITERARY ENGLAND
Some knowledge of the homes and haunts of English authors is necessary
for an understanding of their work. We feel in much closer touch with
Shakespeare after merely reading about Stratford-on-Avon; but we seem
to share his experiences when we actually walk from Stratford-on-Avon
to Shottery and Warwick. The scenery and life of the Lake Country are
reflected in Wordsworth's poetry. Ayr and the surrounding country
throw a flood of light on the work of Burns. The streets of London are
a commentary on the novels of Dickens. A journey to Canterbury aids us
in recreating the life of Chaucer's Pilgrims.
Much may be learned from a study of literary England. Whether one does
or does not travel, such study is necessary. Those who hope at some
time to visit England should acquire in advance as much knowledge as
possible about the literary associations of the places to be visited;
for when the opportunity for the trip finally comes, there is usually
insufficient time for such preparation as will enable the traveler to
derive the greatest enjoyment from a visit to the literary centers in
which Great Britain abounds.
Whenever an author is studied, his birthplace should be located on the
literary map. Baedeker's _Great Britain_ will be indispensable in
making an itinerary. The _Reference List for Literary England_ is
sufficiently comprehensive to enable any one to plan an enjoyable
literary pilgrimage through Great Britain and to learn the most
important facts about the places connected with English authors.
The following suggestions from the author's experience are intended to
serve merely as an illustration of how to begin an itinerary. The
majority of east-bound steamships call at Plymouth, a good place to
disembark for a literary trip. From Plymouth, the traveler may go to
Exeter (a quaint old town with a fine cathedral, the home of _Exeter
Book_,) thence by rail to Camelford in Cornwall and by coach four
miles to the fascinating Tintagel (King Arthur), where, as Tennyson
says in his _Idylls of the King_:--
"All down the thundering shores of Bude and Bos,
There came a day as still as heaven, and then
They found a naked child upon the sands
Of dark Tintagil by the Cornish sea,
And that was Arthur."
Next, the traveler may go by coach to Bude (of which Tennyson
remarked, "I hear that there are larger waves at Bude than at any
other place. I must go thither and be alone with God") and to unique
Clovelly and Bideford (Kingsley), by rail to Ilfracombe, by coach to
Lynton (Lorna Doone), and the adjacent Lynmouth (where Shelley passed
some of his happiest days and alarmed the authorities by setting
afloat bottles containing his _Declaration of Rights_), by coach to
Minehead, by rail to Watchet, driving past Alfoxden (Wordsworth) to
Nether-Stowey (Coleridge) and the Quantock Hills, by motor and rail to
Glastonbury (Isle of Avalon, burial place of King Arthur and Queen
Guinevere), by rail to Wells (cathedral), to Bath (many literary
associations), to Bristol (Chatterton, Southey), to Gloucester (fine
cathedral, tomb of Edward II), and to Ross, the starting point for a
remarkable all day's row down the river Wye to Tintern Abbey
(Wordsworth), stopping for dinner at Monmouth (Geoffrey of Monmouth).
After a start similar to the foregoing, the traveler should begin to
make an itinerary of his own. He will enjoy a trip more if he has a
share in planning it. From Tintern Abbey he might proceed, for
instance, to Stratford-on-Avon (Shakespeare); then to Warwick,
Kenilworth, and the George Eliot Country in North Warwickshire and
Staffordshire.
Far natural beauty, there is nothing in England that is more
delightful than a coaching trip through Wordsworth's Lake Country
(Cumberland and Westmoreland). From there it is not far to the Carlyle
Country (Ecclefechan, Craigenputtock), to the Burns Country (Dumfries,
Ayr), and to the Scott Country (Loch Katrine, The Trossachs,
Edinburgh, and Abbotsford). In Edinburgh, William Sharp's statement
about Stevenson should be remembered, "One can, in a word, outline
Stevenson's own country as all the region that on a clear day one may
in the heart of Edinburgh descry from the Castle walls."
If the traveler lands at Southampton, he is on the eastern edge of
Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Dorchester in Dorsetshire being the center. The
Jane Austen Country (Steventon, Chawton) is in Hampshire. To the east,
in Surrey, is Burford Bridge near Dorking, where Keats wrote part of
his _Endymion_, where George Meredith had his summer home, and where
"the country of his poetry" is located.
In London, it is a pleasure to trace some of the greatest literary
associations in the world. We may stand at the corner of Monkwell and
Silver streets, on the site of a building in which Shakespeare wrote
some of his greatest plays. Milton lived in the vicinity and is buried
not far distant in St. Giles Church. In Westminster Abbey we find the
graves of many of the greatest authors, from Chaucer to Tennyson.
London is not only Dickens Land and Thackeray Land, but also the
"Land" of many other writers. We may still eat in the Old Cheshire
Cheese, where Johnson and Goldsmith dined.
Those interested in literary England ought to include the cathedral
towns in their itinerary, so that they may visit the wonderful "poems
in stone," some of which, _e.g_., Canterbury (Chaucer), Winchester
(Izaak Walton, Jane Austen), Lichfield (Johnson), have literary
associations. For this reason, all of the cathedral towns in England
have been included in the literary map.
REFERENCE LIST FOR LITERARY ENGLAND:
Baedeker's _Great Britain_ (includes England and Scotland).
Baedeker's _London and its Environs_.
Adcock's _Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London_.
Lang's _Literary London_.
Hutton's _Literary Landmarks in London_.
Lucas's _A Wanderer in London_.
Shelley's _Literary By-Paths in Old England_.
Baildon's _Homes and Haunts of Famous Authors_.
Bates's _From Gretna Green to Land's End_.
Masson's _In the Footsteps of the Poets_.
Wolfe's _A Literary Pilgrimage among the Haunts of Famous British
Authors_.
Salmon's _Literary Rambles in the West of England_.
Hutton's _A Book of the Wye_.
Headlam's _Oxford (Medieval Towns Series)_.
Winter's _Shakespeare's England_.
Murray's _Handbook of Warwickshire_.
Lee's _Stratford-on-Avon, from the Earliest Times to the Death of
Shakespeare_.
Tompkins's _Stratford-on-Avon_ (Dent's _Temple Topographies_).
Brassington's _Shakespeare's Homeland_.
Winter's _Grey Days and Gold_ (Shakespeare).
Collingwood's _The Lake Counties_ (Dent's County Guides).
Wordsworth's _The Prelude_ (Books I.-V.).
Rawnsley's _Literary Associations of the English Lakes_.
Knight's _Through the Wordsworth Country_.
Bradley's _Highways and Byways in the English Lakes_.
Jerrold's _Surrey_ (Dent's County Guides).
Dewar's _Hampshire with Isle of Wight_ (Dent's County Guides).
Ward's _The Canterbury Pilgrimage_.
Harper's _The Hardy Country_.
Snell's _The Blackmore Country_.
Melville's _The Thackeray Country_.
Kitton's _The Dickens Country_.
Sloan's _The Carlyle Country_.
Dougall's _The Burns Country_.
Crockett's _The Scott Country_.
Hill's _Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends_.
Cook's _Homes and Haunts of John Ruskin_.
William Sharp's _Literary Geography and Travel Sketches_ (Vol. IV. of
_Works_) contains chapters on _The Country of Stevenson, The Country
of George Meredith, The Country of Carlyle, The Country of George.
Eliot, The Brontë Country, Thackeray Land_, The Thames from Oxford to
the Nore_.
Hutton's _Literary Landmarks of Edinburgh_.
Stevenson's _Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh_.
Loftie's _Brief Account of Westminster Abbey_.
Parker's _Introduction to the Study of Gothic Architecture_.
Stanley's _Memorials of Westminster Abbey_.
Kimball's _An English Cathedral Journey_.
Singleton's _How to Visit the English Cathedrals_.
Bond's _The English Cathedrals_ (200 illustrations).
Cram's _The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain_ (6 illustrations).
Home's _What to See in England_.
Boynton's _London in English Literature_.
GENERAL REFERENCE LIST FOR THE STUDY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE[1]:
_Cambridge History of English Literature_, 14 vols.
Garnett and Gosse's _English Literature_, 4 vols.
Morley's _English Writers_, 11 vols.
Jusserand's _Literary History of the English People_.
Taine's _English Literature_.
Courthope's _History of English Poetry_, 6 vols.
Stephens and Lee's _Dictionary of National Biography_ (dead authors).
_New International Cyclopedia_ (living and dead authors).
_English Men of Letters Series_ (abbreviated reference, E.M.L.)
_Great Writers' Series_ (abbreviated reference. G.W.).
Poole's _Index_ (and continuation volumes for reference to critical
articles in periodicals).
_The United States Catalogue_ and _Cumulative Book Index_.
SELECTIONS FROM ENGLISH LITERATURE[2]:
*Pancoast and Spaeth's _Early English Poems_. (P. & S.)[3]
*Warren's _Treasury of English Literature, Part I_. (Origins to
Eleventh Century: London, One Shilling.) (Warren.)
*Ward's _English Poets_, 4 vols. (Ward.)
*Bronson's _English Poems_, 4 vols. (Bronson.)
_Oxford Treasury of English Literature_, Vol. I., _Beowulf to
Jacobean_;
*Vol. II., _Growth of the Drama_; Vol. III., _Jacobean to Victorian_.
(Oxford Treasury.)
*_Oxford Book of English Verse_. (Oxford.)
*Craik's _English Prose_, 5 vols. (Craik.)
*Page's _British Poets of the Nineteenth Century_. (Page.)
Chambers's _Cyclopedia of English Literature_. (Chambers.)
Manly's _English Poetry_ (from 1170). (Manly I.)
Manly's _English Prose_ (from 1137). (Manly II.)
_Century Readings for a Course in English Literature_. (Century.)
CHAPTER I: FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066
Subject Matter and Aim.--The history of English literature traces
the development of the best poetry and prose written in English by the
inhabitants of the British Isles. For more than twelve hundred years
the Anglo-Saxon race has been producing this great literature, which
includes among its achievements the incomparable work of Shakespeare.
This literature is so great in amount that the student who approaches
the study without a guide is usually bewildered. He needs a history of
English literature for the same reason that a traveler in England
requires a guidebook. Such a history should do more than indicate
where the choicest treasures of literature may be found; it should
also show the interesting stages of development; it should emphasize
some of the ideals that have made the Anglo-Saxons one of the most
famous races in the world; and it should inspire a love for the
reading of good literature.
No satisfactory definition of "literature" has ever been framed.
Milton's conception of it was "something so written to after times, as
they should not willingly let it die." Shakespeare's working
definition of literature was something addressed not to after times
but to an eternal present, and invested with such a touch of nature as
to make the whole world kin. When he says of Duncan:--
"After life's fitful fever he sleeps well,"
he touches the feelings of mortals of all times and opens the door for
imaginative activity, causing us to wonder why life should be a fitful
fever, followed by an incommunicable sleep. Much of what we call
literature would not survive the test of Shakespeare's definition; but
true literature must appeal to imagination and feeling as well as to
intellect. No mere definition can take the place of what may be called
a feeling for literature. Such a feeling will develop as the best
English poetry and prose: are sympathetically read. Wordsworth had
this feeling when he defined the poets as those:--
"Who gave us nobler loves and nobler cares."
The Mission of English Literature.--It is a pertinent question to
ask, What has English literature to offer?
In the first place, to quote Ben Jonson:--
"The thirst that from the soul cloth rise
Doth ask a drink divine."
English literature is of preëminent worth in helping to supply that
thirst. It brings us face to face with great ideals, which increase
our sense of responsibility for the stewardship of life and tend to
raise the level of our individual achievement. We have a heightened
sense of the demands which life makes and a better comprehension of
the "far-off divine event" toward which we move, after we have heard
Swinburne's ringing call:--
"...this thing is God,
To be man with thy might,
To grow straight in the strength
of thy spirit, and live out thy life
as the light."
We feel prompted to act on the suggestion of--
"...him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on striping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things."[4]
In the second place, the various spiritual activities demanded for the
interpretation of the best things in literature add to enjoyment. This
pleasure, unlike that which arises from physical gratification,
increases with age, and often becomes the principal source of
entertainment as life advances. Shakespeare has Prospero say:--
"...my library
Was dukedom large enough."
The suggestions from great minds disclose vistas that we might never
otherwise see. Browning truly says:--
"...we're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred tunes nor cared to see."
Sometimes it is only after reading Shakespeare that we can see--
"...winking Mary buds begin
To ope their golden eyes.
With everything that pretty is."
and only after spending some time in Wordsworth's company that the
common objects of our daily life become invested with--
"The glory and the freshness of a dream."
In the third place, we should emphasize the fact that one great
function of English literature is to bring deliverance to souls weary
with routine, despondent, or suffering the stroke of some affliction.
In order to transfigure the everyday duties of life, there is need of
imagination, of a vision such as the poets give. Without such a vision
the tasks of life are drudgery. The dramas of the poets bring relief
and incite to nobler action.
"The soul hath need of prophet and redeemer.
Her outstretched wings against her prisoning bars
She waits for truth, and truth is with the dreamer
Persistent as the myriad light of stars."[5]
We need to listen to a poet like Browning, who--
"Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted, wrong would triumph.
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake."
In the fourth place, the twentieth century is emphasizing the fact
that neither happiness nor perpetuity of government is possible
without the development of a spirit of service,--a truth long since
taught by English literature. We may learn this lesson from _Beowulf_,
the first English epic, from Alfred the Great, from William Langland,
and from Chaucer's _Parish Priest_. All Shakespeare's greatest and
happiest characters, all the great failures of his dramas, are sermons
on this text. In _The Tempest_ he presents Ariel, tendering his
service to Prospero:--
"All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure."
Shakespeare delights to show Ferdinand winning Miranda through
service, and Caliban remaining an abhorred creature because he
detested service. Much of modern literature is an illuminated text on
the glory of service. Coleridge voiced for all the coming years what
has grown to be almost an elemental feeling to the English-speaking
race:--
"He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small."
The Home and Migrations of the Anglo-Saxon Race.--Just as there was
a time when no English foot had touched the shores of America, so
there was a period when the ancestors of the English lived far away
from the British Isles. For nearly four hundred years prior to the
coming of the Anglo-Saxons, Britain had been a Roman province. In 410
A.D. the Romans withdrew their legions from Britain to protect Rome
herself against swarms of Teutonic invaders. About 449 a band of
Teutons, called Jutes, left Denmark, landed on the Isle of Thanet (in
the north-eastern part of Kent), and began the conquest of Britain.
Warriors from the tribes of the Angles and the Saxons soon followed,
and drove westward the original inhabitants, the Britons or Welsh,
_i.e._ foreigners, as the Teutons styled the natives.
Before the invasion of Britain, the Teutons inhabited the central part
of Europe as far south as the Rhine, a tract which in a large measure
coincides with modern Germany. The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons were
different tribes of Teutons. These ancestors of the English dwelt in
Denmark and in the lands extending southward along the North Sea.
The Angles, an important Teutonic tribe, furnished the name for the
new home, which was called Angle-land, afterward shortened into
England. The language spoken by these tribes is generally called
Anglo-Saxon or Saxon.
The Training of the Race.--The climate is a potent factor in
determining the vigor and characteristics of a race. Nature reared the
Teuton like a wise but not indulgent parent. By every method known to
her, she endeavored to render him fit to colonize and sway the world.
Summer paid him but a brief visit. His companions were the frost, the
fluttering snowflake, the stinging hail. For music, instead of the
soft notes of a shepherd's pipe under blue Italian or Grecian skies,
he listened to the north wind whistling among the bare branches, or to
the roar of an angry northern sea upon the bleak coast.
The feeble could not withstand the rigor of such a climate, in the
absence of the comforts of civilization. Only the strongest in each
generation survived; and these transmitted to their children
increasing vigor. Warfare was incessant not only with nature but also
with the surrounding tribes. Nature kept the Teuton in such a school
until he seemed fit to colonize the world and to produce a literature
that would appeal to humanity in every age.
The Early Teutonic Religion.--In the early days on the continent,
before the Teuton had learned of Christianity, his religious beliefs
received their most pronounced coloring from the rigors of his
northern climate, from the Frost Giants, the personified forces of
evil, with whom he battled. The kindly, life-bringing spring and
summer, which seemed to him earth's redeeming divinity, were soon
slain by the arrows that came from the winter's quivers. Not even
Thor, the wielder of the thunderbolt, nor Woden, the All-Father,
delayed the inevitable hour when the dusk of winter came, when the
voice of Baldur could no longer be heard awaking earth to a new life.
The approach of the "twilight of the gods," the _Götterdämmerung_, was
a stern reality to the Teuton.
[Illustration: WODEN.]
Although instinct with gloomy fatalism, this religion taught bravery.
None but the brave were invited to Valhalla to become Woden's guest.
The brave man might perish, but even then he won victory; for he was
invited to sit with heroes at the table of the gods. "None but the
brave deserves the fair," is merely a modern softened rendering of the
old spirit.
The Christian religion, which was brought to the Teuton after he had
come to England, found him already cast in a semi-heroic mold. But
before he could proceed on his matchless career of world conquest,
before he could produce a Shakespeare and plant his flag in the
sunshine of every land, it was necessary for this new faith to develop
in him the belief that a man of high ideals, working in unison with
the divinity that shapes his end, may rise superior to fate and be
given the strength to overcome the powers of evil and to mold the
world to his will. The intensity of this faith, swaying an energetic
race naturally fitted to respond to the great moral forces of the
universe, has enabled the Anglo-Saxon to produce the world's greatest
literature, to evolve the best government for developing human
capabilities, and to make the whole world feel the effect of his
ideals and force of character. At the close of the nineteenth century,
a French philosopher wrote a book entitled _Anglo-Saxon Superiority,
In What Does it Consist?_ His answer was, "In self-reliance and in the
happiness found in surmounting the material and moral difficulties of
life." A study of the literature in which the ideals of the race are
most artistically and effectively embodied will lead to much the same
conclusion.
The History of Anglo-Saxon England.--The first task of the
Anglo-Saxons after settling in England was to subdue the British, the
race that has given King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table to
English literature. By 600 A.D., after a century and a half of
struggle, the Anglo-Saxons had probably occupied about half of
England.
They did not build on the civilization that Rome had left when she
withdrew in 410, but destroyed the towns and lived in the country. The
typical Englishman still loves to dwell in a country home. The work of
Anglo-Saxon England consisted chiefly in tilling the soil and in
fighting.
The year 597 marks an especially important date, the coming of St.
Augustine, who brought the Christian faith to the Anglo-Saxons.
Education, literature, and art followed finding their home in the
monasteries.
For nearly 400 years after coming to England, the different tribes
were not united under one ruler. Not until 830 did Egbert, king of the
West Saxons, become overlord of England. Before and after this time,
the Danes repeatedly plundered the land. They finally settled in the
eastern part above the Thames. Alfred (849-900), the greatest of
Anglo-Saxon rulers, temporarily checked them, but in the latter part
of the tenth century they were more troublesome, and in 1017 they made
Canute, the Dane, king of England. Fortunately the Danes were of the
same race, and they easily amalgamated with the Saxons.
These invasions wasted the energies of England during more than two
centuries, but this long period of struggle brought little change to
the institutions or manner of life in Anglo-Saxon England. The
_witan_, or assembly of wise men, the forerunner of the present
English parliament, met in 1066 and chose Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon
king.
During these six hundred rears, the Anglo-Saxons conquered the
British, accepted Christianity, fought the Danes, finally amalgamating
with them, brought to England a lasting representative type of
government, established the fundamental customs of the race, surpassed
all contemporary western European peoples in the production of
literature, and were ready to receive fresh impetus from the Normans
in 1066.
The Anglo-Saxon Language.--Our oldest English literature is written
in the language spoken by the Angles and the Saxons. This at first
sight looks like a strange tongue to one conversant with modern
English only; but the language that we employ to-day has the
framework, the bone and sinew, of the earlier tongue. Modern English
is no more unlike Anglo-Saxon than a bearded man is unlike his former
childish self. A few examples will show the likeness and the
difference. "The noble queen" would in Anglo-Saxon be _s=eo aeðele
cw=en_; "the noble queen's," _ð=aere aeðelan cw=ene_. _S=eo_ is the
nominative feminine singular, _ð=aere_ the genitive, of the definite
article. The adjective and the noun also change their forms with the
varying cases. In its inflections, Anglo-Saxon resembles its sister
language, the modern German.
After the first feeling of strangeness has passed away, it is easy to
recognize many of the old words. Take, for instance, this from
_Beowulf_:--
"...ð=y h=e ðone f=eond ofercw=om,
gehn=aegde helle g=ast."
Here are eight words, apparently strange, but even a novice soon
recognizes five of them: _h=e, f=eond_ (fiend), _ofercw=om_
(overcame), _helle_ (hell), _g=ast_ (ghost). The word _ðone_, strange
as it looks, is merely the article "the."
...therefore he overcame the fiend,
Subdued the ghost of hell.
Let us take from the same poem another passage, containing the famous
simile:--
"...l=eoht inne st=od,
efne sw=a of hefene h=adre sc=ineð
rodores candel."
Of these eleven words, seven may be recognized: _l=eoht_ (light),
_inne_ (in), _st=od_ (stood), _of_, _hefene_ (heaven),_sc=ineð_
(shineth), _candel_ (candle).
...a light stood within,
Even so from heaven serenely shineth
The firmament's candle.
Some prefer to use "Old English" in place of "Anglo-Saxon" in order to
emphasize the continuity of the development of the language. It is,
however, sometimes convenient to employ different terms for different
periods of development of the same entity. We do not insist on calling
a man a "grown boy," although there may be no absolute line of
demarcation between boy and man.
Earliest Anglo-Saxon Literature.--As with the Greeks and Romans, so
with the Teutons, poetry afforded the first literary outlet for the
feelings. The first productions were handed down by memory. Poetry is
easily memorized and naturally lends itself to singing and musical
accompaniment. Under such circumstances, even prose would speedily
fall into metrical form. Poetry is, furthermore, the most suitable
vehicle of expression for the emotions. The ancients, unlike modern
writers, seldom undertook to make literature unless they felt so
deeply that silence was impossible.
The Form of Anglo-Saxon Poetry.--Each line is divided Into two parts
by a major pause. Because each of these parts was often printed as a
complete line in old texts, _Beowulf_ has sometimes been called a poem
of 6368 lines, although it has but 3184.
A striking characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry is consonantal
alliteration; that is, the repetition of the same consonant at the
beginning of words in the same line:--
"Grendel gongan; Godes yrre baer."
Grendel going; God's anger bare.
The usual type of Anglo-Saxon poetry has two alliterations in the
first half of the line and one in the second. The lines vary
considerably in the number of syllables. The line from _Beowulf_
quoted just above has nine syllables. The following line from the same
poem has eleven:--
"Flota f=amig-heals, fugle gel=icost."
The floater foamy-necked, to a fowl most like.
This line, also from _Beowulf_ has eight syllables:--
"N=ipende niht, and norðan wind."
Noisome night, and northern wind.
Vowel alliteration is less common. Where this is employed, the vowels
are generally different, as is shown in the principal words of the
following line:--
"On =ead, on =aeht, on eorcan st=an."
On wealth, on goods, on precious stone.
End rime is uncommon, but we must beware of thinking that there is no
rhythm, for that is a pronounced characteristic.
Anglo-Saxon verse was intended to be sung, and hence rhythm and accent
or stress are important. Stress and the length of the line are varied;
but we usually find that the four most important words, two in each
half of the line, are stressed on their most important syllable.
Alliteration usually shows where to place three stresses. A fourth
stress generally falls on a word presenting an emphatic idea near the
end of the line.
[Illustration: EXETER CATHEDRAL.]
The Manuscripts that have handed down Anglo-Saxon Literature.--The
earliest Anglo-Saxon poetry was transmitted by the memories of men.
Finally, with the slow growth of learning, a few acquired the art of
writing, and transcribed on parchment a small portion of the current
songs. The introduction of Christianity ushered in prose translations
and a few original compositions, which were taken down on parchment
and kept in the monasteries.
The study of Anglo-Saxon literature is comparatively recent, for its
treasures have not been long accessible. Its most famous poem,
_Beowulf_, was not printed until the dawn of the nineteenth century.
In 1822 Dr. Blume, a German professor of law, happened to find in a
monastery at Vercelli, Italy, a large volume of Anglo-Saxon
manuscript, containing a number of fine poems and twenty-two sermons.
This is now known as the _Vercelli Book_. No one knows how it happened
to reach Italy. Another large parchment volume of poems and miscellany
was deposited by Bishop Leofric at the cathedral of Exeter in
Devonshire, about 1050 A.D. This collection, one of the prized
treasures of that cathedral, is now called the _Exeter Book_.
Many valuable manuscripts were destroyed at the dissolution of the
monasteries in the time of Henry VIII., between 1535 and 1540. John
Bale, a contemporary writer, says that "those who purchased the
monasteries reserved the books, some to scour their candlesticks, some
to rub their boots, some they sold to the grocers and soap sellers,
and some they sent over sea to the bookbinders, not in small numbers,
but at times whole ships full, to the wonder of foreign nations."
The Anglo-Saxon Scop and Gleeman.--Our earliest poetry was made
current and kept fresh in memory by the singers. The kings and nobles
often attached to them a _scop_, or maker of verses. When the
warriors, after some victorious battle, were feasting at their long
tables, the banquet was not complete without the songs of the _scop_.
While the warriors ate the flesh of boar and deer, and warmed their
blood with horns of foaming ale, the _scop_, standing where the blaze
from a pile of logs disclosed to him the grizzly features of the men,
sang his most stirring songs, often accompanying them with the music
of a rude harp. As the feasters roused his enthusiasm with their
applause, he would sometimes indulge in an outburst of eloquent
extempore song. Not infrequently the imagination of some king or noble
would be fired, and he would sing of his own great deeds.
We read in _Beowulf_ that in Hrothgar's famous hall--
"...ð=aer was hearpan sw=eg,
swutol sang scopes."
...there was sound of harp
Loud the singing of the scop.
In addition to the _scop_, who was more or less permanently attached
to the royal court or hall of a noble, there was a craft of gleemen
who roved from hall to hall. In the song of _Widsið_ we catch a
glimpse of the life of a gleeman:--
"Sw=a scriðende gesceapum hweorfað
gl=eomen gumena geond grunda fela."
Thus roving, with shapéd songs there wander
The gleemen of the people through many lands.
The _scop_ was an originator of poetry, the gleeman more often a mere
repeater, although this distinction in the use of the terms was not
observed in later times.
The Songs of Scop and Gleeman.--The subject matter of these songs
was suggested by the most common experiences of the time. These were
with war, the sea, and death.
[Illustration: ANGLO-SAXON GLEEMAN. _From the tapestry designed by
H.A. Bone_.]
The oldest Anglo-Saxon song known, which is called _Widsið_ or the
_Far Traveler_, has been preserved in the _Exeter Book_. This song was
probably composed in the older Angle-land on the continent and brought
to England in the memories of the singers. The poem is an account of
the wanderings of a gleeman over a great part of Europe. Such a song
will mean little to us unless we can imaginatively represent the
circumstances under which it was sung, the long hall with its tables
of feasting, drinking warriors, the firelight throwing weird shadows
among the smoky rafters. The imagination of the warriors would be
roused as similar experiences of their own were suggested by these
lines in Widsið's song:--
"Ful oft of ð=am h=eape hw=inende fl=eag
giellende g=ar on grome ð=eode."
Full oft from that host hissing flew
The whistling spear on the fierce folk.
The gleeman ends this song with two thoughts characteristic of the
poets of the Saxon race. He shows his love fur noble deeds, and he
next thinks of the shortness of life, as he sings:--
"In mortal court his deeds are not unsung,
Such as a noble man mill show to men,
Till all doth flit away, both life and light."
A greater _scop_, looking at life through Saxon eyes, sings:--
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."[6]
The _scop_ in the song called _The Wanderer (Exeter Book)_ tells how
fleeting are riches, friend, kinsman, maiden,--all the "earth-stead,"
and he also makes us think of Shakespeare's "insubstantial pageant
faded" which leaves "not a rack behind."
Another old song, also found in the _Exeter Book_, is the _Seafarer_.
We must imagine the _scop_ recalling vivid experiences to our early
ancestors with this song of the sea:--
"Hail flew in hard showers.
And nothing I heard
But the wrath of the waters,
The icy-cold way
At times the swan's song;
In the scream of the gannet
I sought for my joy,
In the moan of the sea whelp
For laughter of men,
In the song of the sea-mew
For drinking of mead."[7]
To show that love of the sea yet remains one of the characteristics of
English poetry, we may quote by way of comparison a song sung more
than a thousand years later, in Victoria's reign:--
"The wind is as iron that rings,
The foam heads loosen and flee;
It swells and welters and swings,
The pulse of the tide of the sea.
Let the wind shake our flag like a feather,
Like the plumes of the foam of the sea!
* * * * *
In the teeth of the hard glad a weather,
In the blown wet face of the sea."[8]
Kipling in _A Song of the English_ says of the sea:--
"...there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead."
Another song from the _Exeter Book_ is called _The Fortunes of Men_.
It gives vivid pictures of certain phases of life among the
Anglo-Saxons:--
"One shall sharp hunger slay;
One shall the storms beat down;
One be destroyed by darts,
One die in war.
Orre shall live losing
The light of his eyes,
Feel blindly with his fingers;
And one lame of foot.
With sinew-wound wearily
Wasteth away.
Musing and mourning;
With death in his mind.
* * * * *
One shall die by the dagger,
In wrath, drenched with ale,
Wild through the wine, on the mead bench
Too swift with his words
Too swift with his words;
Shall the wretched one lose."[9]
The songs that we have noted, together with _Beowulf_, the greatest of
them all, will give a fair idea of _scopic_ poetry.
BEOWULF
The Oldest Epic of the Teutonic Race.--The greatest monument of
Anglo-Saxon poetry is called _Beowulf_, from the name of its hero. His
character and exploits give unity and dignity to the poem and raise it
to the rank of an epic.
The subject matter is partly historical and partly mythical. The deeds
and character of an actual hero may have furnished the first
suggestions for the songs, which were finally elaborated into
_Beowulf_, as we now have it. The poem was probably a long time in
process of evolution, and many different _scops_ doubtless added new
episodes to the song, altering it by expansion and contraction under
the inspiration of different times and places. Finally, it seems
probable that some one English poet gave the work its present form,
making it a more unified whole, and incorporating in it Christian
opinions.
We do not know when the first _scop_ sang of Beowulf's exploits; but
he probably began before the ancestors of the English came to England.
We are unable to ascertain how long _Beowulf_ was in process of
evolution; but there is internal evidence for thinking that part of
the poem could not have been composed before 500 A.D. Ten Brink, a
great German authority, thinks that Beowulf was given its present form
not far from 700 A.D. The unique manuscript in the British Museum is
written in the West Saxon dialect of Alfred the Great's time
(849-901).
The characters, scenery, and action of _Beowulf_ belong to the older
Angle-land on the continent of Europe; but the poem is essentially
English, even though the chief action is laid in what is now known as
Denmark and the southern part of Sweden. Hrothgar's hall, near which
the hero performed two of his great exploits, was probably on the
island of Seeland.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF BEGINNING OF COTTON MS. OF BEOWULF.]
TRANSLATION
Lo! we, of the Gar-Danes in distant days,
The folk-kings' fame have found.
How deeds of daring the aethelings did.
Oft Scyld-Scefing from hosts of schathers,
From many men the mead seats [reft].
The student who wishes to enter into the spirit of the poem will do
well to familiarize himself with the position of these coasts, and
with a description of their natural features in winter as well as in
summer. Heine says of the sea which Beowulf sailed:--
"Before me rolleth a waste of water ... and above me go rolling
the storm clouds, the formless dark gray daughters of air, which
from the sea in cloudy buckets scoop up the water, ever wearied
lifting and lifting, and then pour it again in the sea, a mournful,
wearisome business. Over the sea, flat on his face, lies the
monstrous, terrible North Wind, sighing and sinking his voice as in
secret, like an old grumbler; for once in good humor, unto the ocean
he talks, and he tells her wonderful stories."
Beowulf's Three Great Exploits.--The hero of the poem engaged in
three great contests, all of which were prompted by unselfishness and
by a desire to relieve human misery. Beowulf had much of the spirit
that animates the social worker to-day. If such a hero should live in
our time, he would probably be distinguished fur social service, for
fighting the forces of evil which cripple or destroy so many human
beings.
Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, built a hall, named Heorot, where his
followers could drink mead, listen to the scop, enjoy the music of the
harp, and find solace in social intercourse during the dreary winter
evenings.
"So liv'd on all happy the host of the kinsmen
In game and in glee, until one night began,
A fiend out of hell-pit, the framing of evil,
And Grendel forsooth the grim guest was hight,
The mighty mark-strider the holder of moorland,
The fen and the fastness."[10]
This monster, Grendel, came from the moors and devoured thirty of the
thanes. For twelve winters he visited Heorot and killed some of the
guests whenever he heard the sound of festivity in the hall, until at
length the young hero Beowulf, who lived a day's sail from Hrothgar,
determined to rescue Heorot from this curse. The youth selected
fourteen warriors and on a "foamy-necked floater, most like to a
bird," he sailed to Hrothgar.
Beowulf stated his mission, and he and his companions determined to
remain in Heorot all night. Grendel heard them and came.
"...he quickly laid hold of
A soldier asleep, suddenly tore him,
Bit his bone-prison, the blood drank in currents,
Swallowed in mouthfuls."[11]
Bare-handed, Beowulf grappled with the monster, and they wrestled up
and down the hall, which was shaken to its foundations. This terrible
contest ended when Beowulf tore away the arm and shoulder of Grendel,
who escaped to the marshes to die.
In honor of the victory, Hrothgar gave to Beowulf many presents and a
banquet in Heorot. After the feast, the warriors slept in the hall,
but Beowulf went to the palace. He had been gone but a short time,
when in rushed Grendel's mother, to avenge the death of her son. She
seized a warrior, the king's dearest friend, and carried him away. In
the morning, the king said to Beowulf:--
"My trusty friend AEschere is dead... The cruel hag has wreaked
on him her vengeance. The country folk said there were two of them,
one the semblance of a woman; the other the specter of a man. Their
haunt is in the remote land, in the crags of the wolf, the
wind-beaten cliffs, and untrodden bogs, where the dismal stream
plunges into the drear abyss of an awful lake, overhung with a dark
and grizzly wood rooted down to the water's edge, where a lurid
flame plays nightly on the surface of the flood--and there lives not
the man who knows its depth! So dreadful is the place that the
hunted stag, hard driven by the hounds, will rather die on the bank
than find a shelter there. A place of terror! When the wind rises,
the waves mingle hurly-burly with the clouds, the air is stifling
and rumbles with thunder. To thee alone we look for relief."[12]
Beowulf knew that a second and harder contest was at hand, but without
hesitation he followed the bloody trail of Grendel's mother, until it
disappeared at the edge of a terrible flood. Undaunted by the dragons
and serpents that made their home within the depths, he grasped a
sword and plunged beneath the waves. After sinking what seemed to him
a day's space, he saw Grendel's mother, who came forward to meet him.
She dragged him into her dwelling, where there was no water, and the
fight began. The issue was for a time doubtful; but at last Beowulf
ran her through with a gigantic sword, and she fell dead upon the
floor of her dwelling. A little distance away, he saw the dead body of
Grendel. The hero cut off the head of the monster and hastened away to
Hrothgar's court. After receiving much praise and many presents,
Beowulf and his warriors sailed to their own land, where he ruled as
king for fifty years.
He engaged in his third and hardest conflict when he was old. A
firedrake, angered at the loss of a part of a treasure, which he had
for three hundred years been guarding in a cavern, laid waste the land
in the hero's kingdom. Although Beowulf knew that this dragon breathed
flames of fire and that mortal man could not long withstand such
weapons, he sought the cavern which sheltered the destroyer and fought
the most terrible battle of his life. He killed the dragon, but
received mortal hurt from the enveloping flames. The old hero had
finally fallen; but he had through life fought a good fight, and he
could say as the twilight passed into the dark:--
"I have ruled the people fifty years; no folk-king was there of them
that dwelt about me durst touch me with his sword or cow me through
terror. I bided at home the hours of destiny, guarded well mine own,
sought not feuds with guile, swore not many an oath unjustly."[13]
The poem closes with this fitting epitaph for the hero:--
"Quoth they that he was a world-king forsooth,
The mildest of all men, unto men kindest,
To his folk the most gentlest, most yearning of fame."[14]
Wherein Beowulf is Typical of the Anglo-Saxon Race.--_Beowulf_ is by
far the most important Anglo-Saxon poem, because it presents in the
rough the persistent characteristics of the race. This epic shows the
ideals of our ancestors, what they held most dear, the way they lived
and died.
I. We note the love of liberty and law, the readiness to fight any
dragon that threatened these. The English _Magna Charta_ and _Petition
of Right_ and the American _Declaration of Independence_ are an
extension of the application of the same principles embodied in
_Beowulf_. The old-time spirit of war still prevails in all branches
of the race; but the contest is to-day directed against dragons of a
different type from Grendel,--against myriad forms of industrial and
social injustice and against those forces which have been securing
special privileges for some and denying equal opportunity for all.
II. _Beowulf_ is a recognition in general of the great moral forces of
the universe. The poem upholds the ideals of personal manliness,
bravery, loyalty, devotion to duty. The hero has the ever-present
consciousness that death is preferable to dishonor. He taught his
thane to sing:--
"Far better stainless death
Than life's dishonored breath."
III. In this poem, the action outweighs the words. The keynote to
_Beowulf_ is deeds. In New England, more than a thousand years later,
Thoreau wrote, "Be not simply good; be good for something." In reading
other literatures, for instance the Celtic, we often find that the
words overbalance the action. The Celt tells us that when two bulls
fought, the "sky was darkened by the turf thrown up by their feet and
by the foam from their mouths. The province rang with their roar and
the inhabitants hid in caves or climbed the hills."
Again, more attention is paid to the worth of the subject matter and
to sincerity of utterance than to mere form or polish. The literature
of this race has usually been more distinguished for the value of the
thought than for artistic presentation. Prejudice is felt to-day
against matter that relies mainly on art to secure effects.
IV. Repression of sentiment is a marked characteristic of _Beowulf_
and it still remains a peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Some
people say vastly more than they feel. This race has been inclined to
feel more than it expresses. When it was transplanted to New England,
the same characteristic was prominent, the same apparent contradiction
between sentiment and stern, unrelenting devotion to duty. In _Snow
Bound_, the New England poet, Whittier, paints this portrait of a New
England maiden, still Anglo-Saxon to the core:--
"A full, rich nature, free to trust,
Truthful and almost sternly just,
Impulsive, earnest, prompt to act,
And make her generous thought a fact,
Keeping with many a light disguise
The secret of self-sacrifice."
No matter what stars now shine over them, the descendants of the
English are still truthful and sternly just; they still dislike to
give full expression to their feelings; they still endeavor to
translate thoughts into deeds, and in this world where all need so
much help, they take self-sacrifice as a matter of course. The spirit
of _Beowulf_, softened and consecrated by religion, still persists in
Anglo-Saxon thought and action.
THE CAEDMONIAN CYCLE
Caedmon.--In 597 St. Augustine began to teach the Christian religion
to the Anglo-Saxons. The results of this teaching were shown in the
subsequent literature. In what is known as Caedmon's _Paraphrase_, the
next great Anglo-Saxon epic, there is no decrease in the warlike
spirit. Instead of Grendel, we have Satan as the arch-enemy against
whom the battle rages.
Caedmon, who died in 680, was until middle life a layman attached to
the monastery at Whitby, on the northeast coast of Yorkshire. Since
the _Paraphrase_ has been attributed to Caedmon on the authority of
the Saxon historian Bede, born in 673, we shall quote Bede himself on
the subject, from his famous _Ecclesiastical History_:--
"Caedmon, having lived in a secular habit until he was well advanced
in years, had never learned anything of versifying; for which
reason, being sometimes at entertainments, where it was agreed for
the sake of mirth that all present should sing in their turns, when
he saw the instrument come toward him, he rose from table and
returned home.
"Having done so at a certain time, and gone out of the house where
the entertainment was, to the stable, where he had to take care of
the horses that night, he there composed himself to rest at the
proper time; a person appeared to him in his sleep, and, saluting
him by his name, said, 'Caedmon, sing some song to me.' He answered,
'I cannot sing; for that was the reason why I left the entertainment
and retired to this place, because I could not sing.' The other who
talked to him replied, 'However, you shall sing.' 'What shall I
sing?' rejoined he. 'Sing the beginning of created beings,' said the
other. Hereupon he presently began to sing verses to the praise of
God."
Caedmon remembered the poetry that he had composed in his dreams, and
repeated it in the morning to the inmates of the monastery. They
concluded that the gift of song was divinely given and invited him to
enter the monastery and devote his time to poetry.
Of Caedmon's work Bede says:--
"He sang the creation of the world, the origin of man, and all the
history of Genesis: and made many verses on the departure of the
children of Israel out of Egypt, and their entering into the land of
promise, with many other histories from Holy Writ; the incarnation,
passion, resurrection of our Lord, and his ascension into heaven;
the coming of the Holy Ghost, and the preaching of the Apostles;
also the terror of future judgment, the horror of the pains of hell,
and the delights of heaven."
The Authorship and Subject Matter of the Caedmonian Cycle.--The
first edition of the _Paraphrase_ was published in 1655 by Junius, an
acquaintance of Milton. Junius attributed the entire _Paraphrase_ to
Caedmon, on the authority of the above quotations from Bede.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF BEGINNING OF JUNIAN MANUSCRIPT OF
CAEDMON.]
TRANSLATION
For us it is mickle right that we should praise with words, love
with our hearts, the Lord of the heavens, the glorious King of the
people. He is the mighty power, the chief of all exalted creatures,
Lord Almighty.
The _Paraphrase_ is really composed of three separate poems: the
_Genesis_, the _Exodus_, and the _Daniel_; and these are probably the
works of different writers. Critics are not agreed whether any of
these poems in their present form can be ascribed to Caedmon. The
_Genesis_ shows internal evidence of having been composed by several
different writers, but some parts of this poem may be Caedmon's own
work. The _Genesis_, like Milton's _Paradise Lost_, has for its
subject matter the fall of man and its consequences. The _Exodus_, the
work of an unknown writer, is a poem of much originality, on the
escape of the children of Israel from Egypt, their passage through the
Red Sea, and the destruction of Pharaoh's host. The _Daniel_, an
uninteresting poem of 765 lines, paraphrases portions of the book of
_Daniel_ relating to Nebuchadnezzar's dreams, the fiery furnace, and
Belshazzar's feast.
Characteristics of the Poetry.--No matter who wrote the
_Paraphrase_, we have the poetry, a fact which critics too often
overlook. Though the narrative sometimes closely follows the Biblical
account in _Genesis_, _Exodus_, and _Daniel_, there are frequent
unfettered outbursts of the imagination. The _Exodus_ rings with the
warlike notes of the victorious Teutonic race.
The _Genesis_ possesses special interest for the student, since many
of its strong passages show a marked likeness to certain parts of
Milton's _Paradise Lost_. As some critics have concluded that Milton
must have been familiar with the Caedmonian _Genesis_, it will be
instructive to note the parallelism between the two poems. Caedmon's
hell is "without light and full of flame." Milton's flames emit no
light; they only make "darkness visible." The following lines are from
the _Genesis_:--
"The Lord made anguish a reward, a home
In banishment, hell groans, hard pain, and bade
That torture house abide the joyless fall.
When with eternal night and sulphur pains,
Fullness of fire, dread cold, reek and red flames,
He knew it filled."[15]
With this description we may compare these lines from Milton:--
"A dungeon horrible, on all sides round.
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible.
...a fiery deluge, fed
With ever burning sulphur unconsumed."[16]
In Caedmon "the false Archangel and his band lay prone in liquid fire,
scarce visible amid the clouds of rolling smoke." In Milton, Satan is
shown lying "prone on the flood," struggling to escape "from off the
tossing of these fiery waves," to a plain "void of light," except what
comes from "the glimmering of these livid flames." The older poet
sings with forceful simplicity:--
"Then comes, at dawn, the east wind, keen with frost."
Milton writes:--
"...the parching air
Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire."[17]
When Satan rises on his wings to cross the flaming vault, the
_Genesis_ gives in one line an idea that Milton expands into two and a
half:--
"Swang ðaet f=yr on tw=a f=eondes craefte."
Struck the fire asunder with fiendish craft.
"...on each hand the flames,
Driven backward, slope their pointing spires, and, rolled
In billows, leave i' th' midst a horrid vale."[18]
It is not certain that Milton ever knew of the existence of the
Caedmonian _Genesis_; for he was blind three years before it was
published. But whether he knew of it or not, it is a striking fact
that the temper of the Teutonic mind during a thousand years should
have changed so little toward the choice and treatment of the subject
of an epic, and that the first great poem known to have been written
on English soil should in so many points have anticipated the greatest
epic of the English race.
THE CYNEWULF CYCLE
Cynewulf is the only great Anglo-Saxon poet who affixed his name to
certain poems and thus settled the question of their authorship. We
know nothing of his life except what we infer from his poetry. He was
probably born near the middle of the eighth century, and it is not
unlikely that he passed part of his youth as a thane of some noble. He
became a man of wide learning, well skilled in "wordcraft" and in the
Christian traditions of the time. Such learning could then hardly have
been acquired outside of some monastery whither he may have retired.
[Illustration: ANGLO-SAXON MUSICIANS. _Illuminated MS., British
Museum._]
In variety, inventiveness, and lyrical qualities, his poetry shows an
advance over the Caedmonian cycle. He has a poet's love for the beauty
of the sun and the moon (_heofon-condelle_), for the dew and the rain,
for the strife of the waves (_holm-ðroece_), for the steeds of the sea
(_sund-hengestas_), and for the "all-green" (_eal-gr=ene_) earth. "For
Cynewulf," says a critic, "'earth's crammed with heaven and every
common bush afire with God.'"
Cynewulf has inserted his name in runic characters in four poems:
_Christ_, _Elene_, _Juliana_, a story of a Christian martyr, and the
least important, _The Fates of the Apostles_. The _Christ_, a poem on
the Savior's Nativity, Ascension, and Judgment of the world at the
last day, sometimes suggests Dante's _Inferno_ or _Paradiso_, and
Milton's _Paradise Lost_. We see the--
"Flame that welters up and of worms the fierce aspect,
With the bitter-biting jaws--school of burning creatures."[19]
Cynewulf closes the _Christ_ with almost as beautiful a conception of
Paradise as Dante's or Milton's,--a conception that could never have
occurred to a poet of the warlike Saxon race before the introduction
of Christianity:--
"...Hunger is not there nor thirst,
Sleep nor heavy sickness, nor the scorching of the Sun;
Neither cold nor care."[20]
_Elene_ is a dramatic poem, named from its heroine, Helena, the mother
of the Roman emperor Constantine. A vision of the cross bearing the
inscription, "With this shalt thou conquer," appeared to Constantine
before a victorious battle and caused him to send his mother to the
Holy Land to discover the true cross. The story of her successful
voyage is given in the poem _Elene_. The miraculous power of the true
cross among counterfeits is shown in a way that suggests kinship with
the fourteenth century miracle plays. A dead man is brought in contact
with the first and the second cross, but the watchers see no divine
manifestation until he touches the third cross, when he is restored to
life.
_Elene_ and the _Dream of the Road_, also probably written by
Cynewulf, are an Anglo-Saxon apotheosis of the cross. Some of this
Cynewulfian poetry is inscribed on the famous Ruthwell cross in
Dumfriesshire.
Andreas and Phoenix.--Cynewulf is probably the author of _Andreas_,
an unsigned poem of special excellence and dramatic power. The poem,
"a romance of the sea," describes St. Andrew's voyage to Mermedonia to
deliver St. Matthew from the savages. The Savior in disguise is the
Pilot. The dialogue between him and St. Andrew is specially fine. The
saint has all the admiration of a Viking for his unknown Pilot, who
stands at the helm in a gale and manages the vessel as he would a
thought.
Although the poet tells of a voyage in eastern seas, he is describing
the German ocean:--
"Then was sorely troubled,
Sorely wrought the whale-mere. Wallowed there the Horn-fish,
Glode the great deep through; and the gray-backed gull
Slaughter-greedy wheeled. Dark the storm-sun grew,
Waxed the winds up, grinded waves;
Stirred the surges, groaned the cordage,
Wet with breaking sea."[21]
Cynewulf is also the probable author of the _Phoenix_, which is in
part an adaptation of an old Latin poem. The _Phoenix_ is the only
Saxon poem that gives us the rich scenery of the South, in place of
the stern northern landscape. He thus describes the land where this
fabulous bird dwells:--
"Calm and fair this glorious field, flashes there the sunny grove;
Happy is the holt of trees, never withers fruitage there.
Bright are there the blossoms...
In that home the hating foe houses not at all,
* * * * *
Neither sleep nor sadness, nor the sick man's weary bed,
Nor the winter-whirling snow...
...but the liquid streamlets,
Wonderfully beautiful, from their wells upspringing,
Softly lap the land with their lovely floods."[22]
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ANGLO-SAXON POETRY
Martial Spirit.--The love of war is very marked in Anglo-Saxon
poetry. This characteristic might have been expected in the songs of a
race that had withstood the well-nigh all-conquering arm of the vast
Roman Empire.
Our study of _Beowulf_ has already shown the intensity of the martial
spirit in heathen times. These lines from the _Fight at Finnsburg_,
dating from about the same time as _Beowulf_, have only the flash of
the sword to lighten their gloom. They introduce the raven, for whom
the Saxon felt it his duty to provide food on the battlefield:--
"...hraefen wandrode
sweart and sealo-br=un; swurd-l=eoma st=od
swylce eal Finns-buruh f=yrenu w=aere."
...the raven wandered
Swart and sallow-brown; the sword-flash stood
As if all Finnsburg were afire.
The love of war is almost as marked in the Christian poetry. There are
vivid pictures of battle against the heathen and the enemies of God,
as shown by the following selection from one of the poems of the
Caedmonian cycle:--
"Helmeted men went from the holy burgh,
At the first reddening of dawn, to fight:
Loud stormed the din of shields.
For that rejoiced the lank wolf in the wood,
And the black raven, slaughter-greedy bird."[23]
_Judith_, a fragment of a religious poem, is aflame with the spirit of
war. One of its lines tells how a bird of prey--
"Sang with its horny beak the song of war."
This very line aptly characterizes one of the emphatic qualities of
Anglo-Saxon poetry.
The poems often describe battle as if it were an enjoyable game. They
mention the "Play of the spear" and speak of "putting to sleep with
the sword," as if the din of war were in their ears a slumber melody.
One of the latest of Anglo-Saxon poems, _The Battle of Brunanburh_,
937, is a famous example of war poetry. We quote a few lines from
Tennyson's excellent translation:--
"Grimly with swords that were sharp from the grindstone,
Fiercely we hack'd at the flyers before us.
* * * * *
Five young kings put asleep by the sword-stroke
Seven strong earls of the army of Anlaf
Fell on the war-field, numberless numbers."
Love of the Sea.--The Anglo-Saxon fondness for the sea has been
noted, together with the fact that this characteristic has been
transmitted to the more recent English poetry. Our forefathers rank
among the best seamen that the world has ever known. Had they not
loved to dare an unknown sea, English literature might not have
existed, and the sun might never have risen on any English flag.
The _scop_ sings thus of Beowulf's adventure on the North Sea:--
"Swoln were the surges, of storms 'twas the coldest,
Dark grew the night, and northern the wind,
Rattling and roaring, rough were the billows."[24]
In the _Seafarer_, the _scop_ also sings:--
"My mind now is set,
My heart's thought, on wide waters,
The home of the whale;
It wanders away
Beyond limits of land.
* * * * *
And stirs the mind's longing
To travel the way that is trackless."[25]
In the _Andreas_, the poet speaks of the ship in one of the most
charming of Saxon similes:--
"Foaming Ocean beats our steed: full of speed this boat is;
Fares along foam-throated, flieth on the wave,
Likest to a bird."[26]
Some of the most striking Saxon epithets are applied to the sea. We
may instance such a compound as _=ar-ge-bland_ (_=ar_, "oar";
_blendan_, "to blend"), which conveys the idea of the companionship of
the oar with the sea. From this compound, modern poets have borrowed
their "oar-disturbéd sea," "oaréd sea," "oar-blending sea," and
"oar-wedded sea." The Anglo-Saxon poets call the sun rising or setting
in the sea the _mere-candel_. In Beowulf, _mere-str=aeta_,
"sea-streets," are spoken of as if they were the easily traversed
avenues of a town.
Figures of Rhetoric.--A special characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry
is the rarity of similes. In Homer they are frequent, but Anglo-Saxon
verse is too abrupt and rapid in the succession of images to employ
the expanded simile. The long poem of _Beowulf_ contains only five
similes, and these are of the shorter kind. Two of them, the
comparison of the light in Grendel's dwelling to the beams of the sun,
and of a vessel to a flying bird, have been given in the original
Anglo-Saxon on pages 16, 17. Other similes compare the light from
Grendel's eyes to a flame, and the nails on his fingers to steel:
while the most complete simile says that the sword, when bathed in the
monster's poisonous blood, melted like ice.
On the other hand, this poetry uses many direct and forcible
metaphors, such as "wave-ropes" for ice, the "whale-road" or
"swan-road" for the sea, the "foamy-necked floater" for a ship, the
"war-adder" for an arrow, the "bone-house" for the body. The sword is
said to sing a war song, the slain to be put to sleep with the sword,
the sun to be a candle, the flood to boil. War is appropriately called
the sword-game.
Parallelisms.--The repetition of the same ideas in slightly
differing form, known as parallelism, is frequent. The author, wishing
to make certain ideas emphatic, repeated them with varying
phraseology. As the first sight of land is important to the sailor,
the poet used four different terms for the shore that met Beowulf's
eyes on his voyage to Hrothgar: _land, brimclifu, beorgas,
saen=aessas_ (land, sea-cliffs, mountains, promontories).
This passage from the _Phoenix_ shows how repetition emphasizes the
absence of disagreeable things:--
"...there may neither snow nor rain,
Nor the furious air of frost, nor the flare of fire,
Nor the headlong squall of hail, nor the hoar frost's fall,
Nor the burning of the sun, nor the bitter cold,
Nor the weather over-warm, nor the winter shower,
Do their wrong to any wight."[27]
The general absence of cold is here made emphatic by mentioning
special cold things: "snow," "frost," "hail," "hoar frost," "bitter
cold," "winter shower." The absence of heat is emphasized in the same
way.
Saxon contrasted with Celtic Imagery.--A critic rightly says: "The
gay wit of the Celt would pour into the song of a few minutes more
phrases of ornament than are to be found in the whole poem of
_Beowulf_." In three lines of an old Celtic death song, we find three
similes:--
"Black as the raven was his brow;
Sharp as a razor was his spear;
White as lime was his skin."
We look in Anglo-Saxon poetry in vain for a touch like this:--
"Sweetly a bird sang on a pear tree above the head of Gwenn before
they covered him with a turf."[28]
Celtic literature shows more exaggeration, more love of color, and a
deeper appreciation of nature in her gentler aspects. The Celt could
write:--
"More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her
skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands
and fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray
of the meadow fountain."[29]
King Arthur and his romantic Knights of the Round Table are Celtic
heroes. Possibly the Celtic strain persisting in many of the Scotch
people inspires lines like these in more modern times:--
"The corn-craik was chirming
His sad eerie cry [30]
And the wee stars were dreaming
Their path through the sky."
In order to produce a poet able to write both _A Midsummer Night's
Dream_ and _Hamlet_, the Celtic imagination must blend with the
Anglo-Saxon seriousness. As we shall see, this was accomplished by the
Norman conquest.
ANGLO-SAXON PROSE
When and where written.--We have seen that poetry normally precedes
prose. The principal part of Anglo-Saxon poetry had been produced
before much prose was written. The most productive poetic period was
between 650 and 825. Near the close of the eighth century, the Danes
began their plundering expeditions into England. By 800 they had
destroyed the great northern monasteries, like the one at Whitby,
where Caedmon is said to have composed the first religious song. As
the home of poetry was in the north of England, these Danish inroads
almost completely silenced the singers. What prose there was in the
north was principally in Latin. On the other hand, the Saxon prose was
produced chiefly in the south of England. The most glorious period of
Anglo-Saxon prose was during Alfred's reign, 871-901.
Bede.--This famous monk (673-735) was probably the greatest teacher
and the best known man of letters and scholar in all contemporary
Europe. He is said to have translated the _Gospel of St. John_ into
Saxon, but the translation is lost. He wrote in Latin on a vast range
of subjects, from the _Scriptures_ to natural science, and from
grammar to history. He has given a list of thirty-seven works of which
he is the author. His most important work is the _Ecclesiastical
History of the English People_, which is really a history of England
from Julius Caesar's invasion to 731. The quotation from Bede's work
relative to Caedmon shows that Bede could relate things simply and
well. He passed almost all his useful life at the monastery of Jarrow
on the Tyne.
Alfred (849-901).--The deeds and thoughts of Alfred, king of the
West Saxons from 871 until his death in 901, remain a strong moral
influence an the world, although he died more than a thousand years
ago. Posterity rightly gave him the surname of "the Great," as he is
one of the comparatively few great men of all time. E.A. Freeman, the
noted historian of the early English period, says of him:--
"No man recorded in history seems ever to have united so many
great and good qualities... A great part of his reign was taken up
with warfare with an enemy [the Danes] who threatened the national
being; yet he found means personally to do more for the general
enlightenment of his people than any other king in English history."
After a Danish leader had outrageously broken his oaths to Alfred, the
Dane's two boys and their mother fell into Alfred's hands, and he
returned them unharmed. "Let us love the man," he wrote, "but hate his
sins." His revision of the legal code, known as _Alfred's Laws_, shows
high moral aim. He does not forget the slave, who was to be freed
after six years of service. His administration of the law endeavored
to secure the same justice for the poor as for the rich.
Alfred's example has caused many to stop making excuses for not doing
more for their kind. If any one ever had an adequate excuse for not
undertaking more work than his position absolutely demanded, that man
was Alfred; yet his ill health and the wars with the Danes did not
keep him from trying to educate his people or from earning the title,
"father of English prose." Freeman even says that England owes to
Alfred's prose writing and to the encouragement that he gave to other
writers the "possession of a richer early literature than any other
people of western Europe" and the maintenance of the habit of writing
after the Norman conquest, when English was no longer used in courtly
circles.
[Illustration: THE BEGINNING OF ALFRED'S LAWS. _Illuminated MS.,
British Museum_.]
Although most of his works are translations from the Latin, yet he has
left the stamp of his originality and sterling sense upon them all.
Finding that his people needed textbooks in the native tongue, he
studied Latin so that he might consult all accessible authorities and
translate the most helpful works, making alterations and additions to
suit his plan. For example, he found a Latin work on history and
geography by Orosius, a Spanish Christian of the fifth century; but as
this book contained much material that was unsuited to Alfred's
purposes, he omitted some parts, changed others, and, after
interviewing travelers from the far North, added much original matter.
These additions, which even now are not uninteresting reading, are the
best material in the book. This work is known as Alfred's _Orosius_.
Alfred also translated Pope Gregory's _Pastoral Rule_ in order to show
the clergy how to teach and care for their flocks. Alfred's own words
at the beginning of the volume show how great was the need for the
work. Speaking of the clergy, he says:--
"There were very few on this side Humber who would know how to
render their services in English, or so much as translate an epistle
out of Latin into English; and I ween that not many would be on the
other side Humber. So few of them were there, that I cannot think of
so much as a single one, south of Thames, when I took to the
realm."[31]
Alfred produced a work on moral philosophy, by altering and amending
the _De Consolatione Philosophiae_ of Boethius, a noble Roman who was
brutally thrown into prison and executed about 525 A.D. In simplicity
and moral power, some of Alfred's original matter in this volume was
not surpassed by any English writer for several hundred years. We
frequently find such thoughts as, "If it be not in a man's power to do
good, let him have the good intent." "True high birth is of the mind,
not of the flesh." His _Prayer_ in the same work makes us feel that he
could see the divine touch in human nature:--
"No enmity hast Thou towards anything... Thou, O Lord,
bringest together heavenly souls and earthly bodies, and minglest
them in this world. As they came hither from Thee, even so they also
seek to go hence to Thee."
AElfric, 955?-1025?--The most famous theologian who followed
Alfred's example in writing native English prose, and who took Alfred
for his model, was a priest named AElfric. His chief works are his
_Homilies_, a series of sermons, and the _Lives of the Saints_.
Although much of his writing is a compilation or a translation from
the Latin Fathers, it is often remarkably vigorous in expression and
stimulating to the reader. We find such thoughts as:--
"God hath wrought many miracles, and He performs them every day,
but these miracles have become much less important in the sight of
men because they are very common... Spiritual miracles are greater
than the physical ones."
To modern readers the most interesting of Aelfric's writings is his
_Colloquium_, designed to teach Latin in the monastery at Winchester.
The pupils were required to learn the Latin translation of his
dialogues in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular. Some of these dialogues are
today valuable illustrations of the social and industrial life of the
time. The following is part of the conversation between the Teacher
and the Plowman:--
"_Teacher_. What have you to say, plowman? How do you carry on
your work?
"_Plowman_. O master, I work very hard; I go out at dawn, drive
the oxen to the field, and yoke them to the plow. There is no storm
so severe that I dare to hide at home, for fear of my lord, but when
the oxen are yoked, and the share and coulter have been fastened to
the plow, I must plow a whole acre or more every day.
* * * * *
"_Teacher_. Oh! oh! the labor must be great!
"_Plowman_. It is indeed great drudgery, because I am not free."[32]
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.--This is the first history of any branch
of the Teutonic people in their own tongue. The _Chronicle_ has come
down to us in several different texts, according as it was compiled or
copied at different monasteries. The _Chronicle_ was probably begun in
Alfred's reign. The entries relating to earlier events were copied
from Bede's _Ecclesiastical History_ and from other Latin authorities.
The _Chronicle_ contains chiefly those events which each year
impressed the clerical compilers as the most important in the history
of the nation. This work is a fountainhead to which writers of the
history of those times must turn.
A few extracts (translated) will show its character:--
"A.D. 449. This year ... Hengist and Horsa, invited by Vortigern,
King of Britons, landed in Britain, on the shore which is called
Wappidsfleet; at first in aid of the Britons, but afterwards they
fought against them."
"806. This year the moon was eclipsed on the Kalends of September;
and Eardulf, King of the Northumbrians. was driven from his
kingdom; and Eanbert, Bishop of Hexham, died."
Sometimes the narrative is extremely vivid. Those who know the
difficulty of describing anything impressively in a few words will
realize the excellence of this portraiture of William the Conqueror:--
"1087. If any would know what manner of man King William was,
the glory that he obtained, and of how many lands he was lord; then
will we describe him as we have known him... He was mild to
those good men who loved God, but severe beyond measure to those
withstood his will... So also was he a very stern and a wrathful
man, so that none durst do anything against his will, and he kept
in prison those earls who acted against his pleasure. He removed
bishops from their sees, and abbots from their offices, and he
imprisoned thanes, and at length he spared not his own brother.
Odo... Amongst other things, the good order that William
established is not to be forgotten; it was such that any man, who
was himself aught, might travel over the kingdom with a bosom-full
of gold, unmolested; and no man durst kill another... He made large
forests for the deer, and enacted laws therewith, so that whoever
killed a hart or a hind should be blinded ... and he loved the tall
stags as if he were their father."
SUMMARY
The Anglo-Saxons, a branch of the Teutonic race, made permanent
settlements in England about the middle of the fifth century A.D. Like
modern German, their language is highly inflected. The most
flourishing period of Anglo-Saxon poetry was between 650 and 825 A.D.
It was produced for the most part in the north of England, which was
overrun by the Danes about 800. These marauders destroyed many of the
monasteries and silenced the voices of the singers. The prose was
written chiefly in the south of England after the greatest poetic
masterpieces had been produced. The Norman Conquest of England,
beginning in 1066, brought the period to a close.
Among the poems of this age, we may emphasize: (1) the shorter
_scopic_ pieces, of which the _Far Traveler, The Wanderer, The
Seafarer, The Fortunes of Men_, and _The Battle of Brunanburh_ are
important examples; (2) _Beowulf_, the greatest Anglo-Saxon epic poem,
which describes the deeds of an unselfish hero, shows how the
ancestors of the English lived and died, and reveals the elemental
ideals of the race; (3) the _Caedmonian Cycle_ of scriptural
paraphrases, some of which have Miltonic qualities; and (4) the
_Cynewulf Cycle_, which has the most variety and lyrical excellence.
Both of these _Cycles_ show how the introduction of Christianity
affected poetry.
The subject matter of the poetry is principally war, the sea, and
religion. The martial spirit and love of the sea are typical of the
nation that has raised her flag in every clime. The chief qualities of
the poetry are earnestness, somberness, and strength, rather than
delicacy of touch, exuberance of imagination, or artistic adornment.
The golden period of prose coincides in large measure with Alfred's
reign, 871-901, and he is the greatest prose writer. His translations
of Latin works to serve as textbooks for his people contain excellent
additions by him. AElfric, a tenth century prose writer, has left a
collection of sermons, called _Homilies_, and an interesting
_Colloquium_, which throws strong lights on the social life of the
time. The _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_ is an important record of
contemporaneous events for the historian.
REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
HISTORICAL
In connection with the progress of literature, students should obtain
for themselves a general idea of contemporary historical events from
any of the following named works:--
Gardiner's_ Students' History of England_.
Green's _Short History of the English People_.
Walker's _Essentials in English History_.
Cheney's _A Short History of England_.
Lingard's _History of England_.
Traill's _Social England_, Vol. I.
Ramsay's _The Foundations of England_.
LITERARY
_Cambridge History of English Literature_, Vol. I.
Brooke's _History of Early English Literature to the Accession of King
Alfred_.
Morley's _English Writers_, Vols. I. and II.
Earle's _Anglo-Saxon Literature_.
Ten Brink's Early English Literature, Vol. I.
_The Exeter Book_, edited and translated, by Gollancz (Early English
Text Society).
Gurteen's _The Epic of the Fall of Man: A Comparative Study of
Caedmon, Dante, and Milton_.
Cook's _The Christ of Cynewulf_. (The _Introduction of 97 pages gives
a valuable account of the life and writings of Cynewulf.)
Kennedy's_ Translation of the Poems of Cynewulf_.
Bede's _Ecclesiastical History of England and the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle_, I vol., translated by Giles in Bohn's _Antiquarian
Library_.
Snell's _The Age of Alfred._
Pauli's _Life of Alfred_ (Bohn's Antiquarian Library).
Gem's _An Anglo-Saxon Abbot: AElfric of Eynsham_.
_Mabinogion_ (a collection of Welsh fairy tales and romances,
_Everyman's Library_), translated by Lady Charlotte Guest.
Pancoast and Spaeth's _Early English Poems_ (abbreviated reference)
("P & S.").
Cook and Tinker's _Select Translations from Old English Poetry_ ("C. &
T.").
Cook & Tinker's _Select Translations from Old English Prose_
("C. & T. _Prose_").
SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
The student who is not familiar with the original Anglo-Saxon should
read the translations specified below:--
Scopic Poetry.[33]--_Widsið_ or the _Far Traveler_, translated in
Morley's _English Writers_, Vol. II, 1-11, or in C. & T.,[34] 3-8.
_The Wanderer_, translated in P. & S., 65-68; C. & T., 50-55; Brooke,
364-367.
_The Seafarer_, translated in P. & S., 68-70; C. & T., 44-49; Morley,
II., 21-26; Brooke, 362, 363.
_The Fortunes of Men_, trans. in P. & S., 79-81; Morley, II., 32-37.
_Battle of Brunanburh_, Tennyson's translation.
What were the chief subjects of the songs of the scop? How do they
reveal the life of the time? Is there any common quality running
through them? What qualities of this verse appear in modern poetry?
Beowulf.--This important poem should be read entire in one of the
following translations:
Child's _Beowulf (Riverside Literature Series)_;
Earle's _The Deeds of Beowulf, Done into Modern Prose_ (Clarendon
Press);
Gummere's _The Oldest English Epic_;
Morris and Wyatt's _The Tale of Beowulf_;
Hall's _Beowulf, Translated into Modern Metres_;
Lumsden's _Beowulf, an Old English Poem, Translated into Modern
Rhymes_ (the most readable poetic translation).
Translations of many of the best parts of _Beowulf_ may be found in
P. & S. 5-29; C. & T., 9-24; Morley, I. 278-310; Brooke 26-73.
Where did the exploits celebrated in the poem take place? Where was
Heorot? What was the probably time of the completion of _Beowulf_?
Describe the hero's three exploits. What analogy is there between the
conflict of natural forces in the Norseland and Beowulf's fight with
Grendel? What different attitude toward nature is manifest in modern
poetry? What is the moral lesson of the poem? Show that its chief
characteristics are typical of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Caedmonian Cycle.--Some of the strongest passages may be found in P.
& S., 30-45; C. & T., 104-120; Morley, II. 81-101; Brooke, 290-340.
Read at the same time from Milton's _Paradise Lost_, Book I., lines
44-74, 169-184, 248-263, and _passim_.
What evidence do we find in this cycle of the introduction of
Christianity? Who takes the place of Grendel? What account of Caedmon
does Bede give? What is the subject matter of this cycle?
Cynewulf Cycle.--_The Poems of Cynewulf_, translated by C.W.
Kennedy. Translations of parts of this cycle may be found in Whitman's
_The Christ of Cynewulf_, and _The Exeter Book_, translated by
Gollancz. Good selections are translated in P. & S., 46-55; C. & T.,
79-103; and 132-142: Morley, II., 206-241; Brooke, 371-443. For
selections from the _Phoenix_, see P & S, 54-65; C.& T., 143-163.
What new qualities does this cycle show? What is the subject matter of
its most important poems? What is especially noticeable about the_
Andreas and the Phoenix_?
_General Characteristics of the Verse._--What is its usual form? What
most striking passages (a) in Beowulf; (b) elsewhere, show the Saxon
love of war and of the sea? Instance some similes and make a list of
vivid metaphors. What are the most striking parallelisms found in your
readings? What conspicuous differences are there between Saxon and
Celtic imagery? (See Morley, l, 165-239, or Guest's _Mabinogion_).
What excellencies and defects seem to you most pronounced in
Anglo-Saxon verse?
Prose_--The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_ and Bede's _Ecclesiastical
History_ are both translated in one volume of Bohn's _Antiquarian
Library_. The most interesting part of Bede for the student of
literature is the chapter relating to Caedmon (Chap. XXIV., pp.
217-220).
In the _Chronicle_, read the entries for the years 871, 878, 897, 975,
1087, and 1137.
Alfred's _Orosius_ is translated into modern English in the volume of
Bohn's_ Antiquarian Library_ entitled, _Alfred the Great, his Life and
Anglo-Saxon Works_, by Pauli. Sedgefield's translation of the_
Consolations of Boethius_ distinguishes the original matter by Alfred
from the translation. Selections from Alfred's works are given in C. &
T.(_Prose_), 85-146, and in Earle's _Anglo-Saxon Literature_, 186-206.
For selections from AElfric, see C. & T. (_Prose_), 149-192. Read
especially the _Colloquies_, 177-186.
What was Bede's principal work? Why has Alfred been called the "father
of English prose"? What were his ideals? Mention his chief works and
their object. What is the character of AElfric's work? Why are modern
readers interested in his _Colloquium_?
Why is the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_ important?
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER I:
[Footnote 1: For special references to authors, movements and the
history of the period, see the lists under the heading, _Suggestions
for Further Study_, at the end of each chapter.]
[Footnote 2: School libraries should own books marked *.]
[Footnote 3: The abbreviation in parentheses after titles will be used
in the _Suggested Readings_ in place of the full title.]
[Footnote 4: Tennyson's _In Memoriam_.]
[Footnote 5: Florence Earls Coates's _Dream the Great Dream_.]
[Footnote 6: Shakespeare's _The Tempest_, Act IV., Scene 1.]
[Footnote 7: Morley's translation, _English Writers_, Vol. II., p.
21.]
[Footnote 8: Swinburne's _A Song in Time of Order_.]
[Footnote 9: Morley's _English Writers_, Vol. II., pp. 33, 34.]
[Footnote 10: _Beowulf_, translated by William Morris and A.J. Wyatt.]
[Footnote 11: Translated by J.L. Hall.]
[Footnote 12: Earle's Translation.]
[Footnote 13: Translated by Childs.]
[Footnote 14: Translated by Morris and Wyatt.]
[Footnote 15: Morley's translation.]
[Footnote 16: _Paradise Lost_, Book I., lines 61-69.]
[Footnote 17: _Paradise Lost_, II., 594.]
[Footnote 18: _Ibid_., I., 222-224.]
[Footnotes 19-22: Brooke's translation.]
[Footnote 23: Morley's translation.]
[Footnote 24: Brooke's translation.]
[Footnote 25: Morley's translation.]
[Footnotes 26-27: Brooke's translation.]
[Footnote 28: _Llywarch's Lament for his Son Gwenn_.]
[Footnote 29: Guest's _Mabinogion_.]
[Footnote 30: William Motherwell's _Wearie's Well_.]
[Footnote 31: Earle's translation.]
[Footnote 32: Cook and Tinker's _Select Translations from Old English
Prose.]
[Footnote 33: In his _Education of the Central Nervous System_, Chaps.
VII.-X., the author has endeavored to give some special directions for
securing definite ideas in the study of poetry.]
[Footnote 34: For full titles, see page 50.]
CHAPTER II: FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066, TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400
[Illustration: THE DEATH OF HAROLD AT HASTINGS. _From the Bayeaux
tapestry_.]
The Norman Conquest.--The overthrow of the Saxon rule in England by
William the Conqueror in 1066 was an event of vast importance to
English literature. The Normans (Norsemen or Northmen), as they were
called, a term which shows their northern extraction, were originally
of the same blood as the English race. They settled in France in the
ninth century, married French wives, and adopted the French language.
In 1066 their leader, Duke William, and his army crossed the English
Channel and won the battle of Hastings, in which Harold, the last
Anglo-Saxon king, was killed. William thus became king of England.
Characteristics of the Normans.--The intermixture of Teutonic and
French blood had given to the Normans the best qualities of both
races. The Norman was nimble-witted, highly imaginative, and full of
northern energy. The Saxon possessed dogged perseverance, good common
sense, if he had long enough to think, and but little imagination.
Some one has well said that the union of Norman with Saxon was like
joining the swift spirit of the eagle to the strong body of the ox,
or, again, that the Saxon furnished the dough, and the Norman the
yeast. Had it not been for the blending of these necessary qualities
in one race, English literature could not have become the first in the
world. We see the characteristics of both the Teuton and the Norman in
Shakespeare's greatest plays. A pure Saxon could not have turned from
Hamlet's soliloquy to write:--
"Where the bee sucks, there suck I."[1]
Progress of the Nation, 1066-1400.--The Normans were specially
successful in giving a strong central government to England. The
feudal system, that custom of parceling out land in return for
service, was so extended by William the Conqueror, that from king
through noble to serf there was not a break in the interdependence of
one human being on another. At first the Normans were the ruling
classes and they looked down on the Saxons; but intermarriage and
community of interests united both races into one strong nation before
the close of the period.
There was great improvement in methods of administering justice.
Accused persons no longer had to submit to the ordeal of the red-hot
iron or to trial by combat, relying on heaven to decide their
innocence. Ecclesiastical courts lost their jurisdiction over civil
cases. In the reign of Henry II. (1154-1189), great grandson of
William the Conqueror, judges went on circuits, and the germ of the
jury system was developed.
Parliament grew more influential, and the first half of the fourteenth
century saw it organized into two bodies,--the Lords and the Commons.
Three kings who governed tyrannically or unwisely were curbed or
deposed. King John (1199-1216) was compelled to sign the _Magna
Charta_, which reduced to writing certain foundation rights of his
subjects. Edward II. (1307-1327) and Richard II. (1377-1399) were both
deposed by Parliament. One of the reasons assigned far the deposition
of Richard II. was his claim that "he alone could change and frame the
laws of the kingdom."
The ideals of chivalry and the Crusades left their impress on the age.
One English Monarch, Richard the Lion-Hearted (1189-1199) was the
popular hero of the Third Crusade. In _Ivanhoe_ and _The Talisman_ Sir
Walter Scott presents vivid pictures of knights and crusaders.
We may form some idea of the religious spirit of the Middle Ages from
the Gothic cathedrals, which had the same relative position in the
world's architecture as Shakespeare's work does in literature.
Travelers often declare that there is to-day nothing in England better
worth seeing than these cathedrals, which were erected in the twelfth,
thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries.[2]
The religious, social, and intellectual life of the time was
profoundly affected by the coming of the friars (1220), who included
the earnest followers of St. Francis (1182-1226), that Good Samaritan
of the Middle Ages. The great philosopher and scientist, Roger Bacon
(1214-1294), who was centuries in advance of his time, was a
Franciscan friar. He studied at Oxford University, which had in his
time become one of the great institutions of Europe.
The church fostered schools and learning, while the barons were
fighting. Although William Langland, a fourteenth-century cleric,
pointed out the abuses which had crept into the church, he gave this
testimony in its favor:--
"For if heaven be on this earth or any ease for the soul, it is in
cloister or school. For in cloister no man cometh to chide or fight,
and in school there is lowliness and love and liking to learn."
The rise of the common people was slow. During all this period the
tillers of the soil were legally serfs, forbidden to change their
location. The Black Death (1349) and the Peasants' Revolt (1381),
although seemingly barren of results, helped them in their struggle
toward emancipation. Some bought their freedom with part of their
wages. Others escaped to the towns where new commercial activities
needed more labor. Finally, the common toiler acquired more commanding
influence by overthrowing even the French knights with his long bow.
This period laid the foundation for the almost complete disappearance
of serfdom in the fifteenth century. France waited for the terrible
Revolution of 1789 to free her serfs. England anticipated other great
modern nations in producing a literature of universal appeal because
her common people began to throw off their shackles earlier.
This period opens with a victorious French army in England, followed
by the rule of the conquerors, who made French the language of high
life. It closes with the ascendancy of English government and speech
at home and with the mid-fourteenth century victories of English
armies on French soil, resulting in the rapture of Calais, which
remained for more than two hundred years in the possession of England.
At the close of this period we find Wycliffe, "the morning star of the
Reformation," and Chaucer, the first great singer of the welded
Anglo-Norman race. His wide interest in human beings and his knowledge
of the new Italian literature prefigure the coming to England of the
Revival of Learning in the next age.
It will now be necessary to study the changes in the language, which
were so pronounced between 1066 and Chaucer's death.
THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN ENGLISH
Three Languages used in England--For three hundred years after the
Norman Conquest, three languages were widely used in England. The
Normans introduced French, which was the language of the court and the
aristocracy. William the Conqueror brought over many Norman priests,
who used Latin almost exclusively in their service. The influence of
this book Latin is generally underestimated by those who do not
appreciate the power of the church. The Domesday survey shows that in
1085 the church and her dependents held more than one third of some
counties.
In addition to the Latin and the French (which was itself principally
of Latin origin), there was, thirdly, the Anglo-Saxon, to which the
middle and the lower classes of the English stubbornly adhered. The
Loss of Inflections.--Anglo-Saxon was a language with changing
endings, like modern German. If a Saxon wished to say, "good gifts,"
he had to have the proper case endings for both the adjective and the
noun, and his expression was _g=ode giefa_. For "the good gifts," he
said _ð=a g=odan giefa_, inflecting "the" and at the same time
changing the case ending of "good."
The Norman Conquest helped to lop off these endings, which German has
never entirely lost. We, however, no longer decline articles or
ordinary adjectives. Instead of having our attention taken up with
thinking of the proper endings, we are left free to attend to the
thought rather than to the vehicle of its expression. Although our
pronouns are still declined, the sole inflection of our nouns, with
the exception of a few like _ox, oxen_, or _mouse, mice_, is the
addition of _'s, s,_ or _es_ for the possessive and the plural. Modern
German, on the other hand, still retains these troublesome case
endings. How did English have the good fortune to lose them?
Whenever two peoples, speaking different languages, are closely
associated, there is a tendency to drop the terminations and to use
the stem word in all grammatical relations. If an English-speaking
person, who knows only a little German, travels in Germany, he finds
that he can make himself understood by using only one form of the noun
or adjective. If he calls for "two large glasses of hot milk,"
employing the incorrect expression, _zwei gross Glass heiss Milch_, he
will probably get the milk as quickly as if he had said correctly,
_zwei grosse Gläser heisse Milch_. Neglect of the proper case endings
may provoke a smile, but the tourist prefers that to starvation.
Should the Germans and the English happen to be thrown together in
nearly equal numbers on an island, the Germans would begin to drop the
inflections that the English could not understand, and the German
language would undergo a change.
If there were no books or newspapers to circulate a fixed form of
speech, the alteration in the spoken tongue would be comparatively
rapid.
Such dropping of terminations is precisely what did happen before the
Norman Conquest in those parts of England most overrun by the Danes.
There, the adjectives lost their terminations to indicate gender and
case, and the article "the" ceased to be declined.
Even if the Normans had not come to England, the dropping of the
inflections would not have ceased. Many authorities think that the
grammatical structure of English would, even in the absence of that
event, have evolved into something like its present form. Of course
the Norman Conquest hastened many grammatical changes that would
ultimately have resulted from inherent causes, but it did not exercise
as great an influence as was formerly ascribed to it. Philologists
find it impossible to assign the exact amount of change due to the
Conquest and to other causes. Let us next notice some changes other
than the loss of inflections.
Change in Gender.--Before any one could speak Anglo-Saxon correctly,
he had first to learn the fanciful genders that were attached to
nouns: "trousers" was feminine; "childhood," masculine; "child,"
neuter. During this period the English gradually lost these fanciful
genders which the German still retains. A critic thus illustrates the
use of genders in that language: "A German gentleman writes a
masculine letter of feminine love to a neuter young lady with a
feminine pen and feminine ink on masculine sheets of neuter paper, and
incloses it in a masculine envelope with a feminine address to his
darling, though neuter, Gretchen. He has a masculine head, a feminine
hand, and a neuter heart."
Prefixes, Suffixes, and Self-explaining Compounds.--The English
tongue lost much of its power of using prefixes. A prefix joined to a
well-known word changes its meaning and renders the coining of a new
term unnecessary. The Anglo-Saxons, by the use of prefixes, formed ten
compounds from their verb _fl=owan_, "to flow." Of these, only one
survives in our "overflow." From _sittan_, "to sit," thirteen
compounds were thus formed, but every one has perished. A larger
percentage of suffixes was retained, and we still have many words like
"wholesome-ness," "child-hood," "sing-er."
The power of forming self-explaining compounds was largely lost. The
Saxon compounded the words for "tree," and "worker," and said
_tr=eow-wyrhta_, "tree-wright," but we now make use of the single word
"carpenter." We have replaced the Saxon _b=oc-craeft_, "book-art," by
"literature"; _=aefen-gl=om_, "evening-gloom," by "twilight";
mere-sw=in, "sea-swine," by "porpoise"; _=eag-wraec_, "eye-rack," by
"pain in the eye"; _leornung-cild_, "learning-child," by "pupil." The
title of an old work, _Ayen-bite of In-wit_, "Again-bite of In-wit,"
was translated into "Remorse of Conscience." _Grund-weall_ and
_word-hora_ were displaced by "foundation" and "vocabulary." The
German language still retains this power and calls a glove a
"hand-shoe," a thimble a "finger-hat," and rolls up such clumsy
compound expressions as _Unabhängigkeits-erklärung_.
We might lament this loss more if we did not remember that Shakespeare
found our language ample for his needs, and that a considerable number
of the old compounds still survive, as _home-stead, man-hood,
in-sight, break-fast, house-hold, horse-back, ship-man, sea-shore,
hand-work_, and _day-light_.
Introduction of New Words and Loss of Old Ones.--Since the Normans
were for some time the governing race, while many of the Saxons
occupied comparatively menial positions, numerous French words
indicative of rank, power, science, luxury, and fashion were
introduced. Many titles were derived from a French source. English
thus obtained words like "sovereign," "royalty," "duke," "marquis,"
"mayor," and "clerk." Many terms of government are from the French;
for instance, "parliament," "peers," "commons." The language of law
abounds in French terms, like "damage," "trespass," "circuit,"
"judge," "jury," "verdict," "sentence," "counsel," "prisoner." Many
words used in war, architecture, and medicine also have a French
origin. Examples are "fort," "arch," "mason," "surgery." In fact, we
find words from the French in almost every field. "Uncle" and
"cousin," "rabbit" and "falcon," "trot" and "stable," "money" and
"soldier," "reason" and "virtue," "Bible" and "preach," are instances
in point.
French words often displaced Saxon ones. Thus, the Saxon _Haelend_,
the Healer, gave way to the French _Savior_, _wanhope_ and _wonstead_
were displaced by _despair_ and _residence_. Sometimes the Saxon
stubbornly kept its place beside the French term. The English language
is thus especially rich in synonyms, or rather in slightly
differentiated forms of expression capable of denoting the exact shade
of thought and feeling. The following words are instances:--
SAXON FRENCH
body corpse
folk people
swine pork
calf veal
worth value
green verdant
food nourishment
wrangle contend
fatherly paternal
workman laborer
English was enriched not only by those expressions, gained from the
daily speech of the Normans, but also by words that were added from
literary Latin. Thus, we have the Saxon "ask," the Norman-French
"inquire" and "question," and the Latin "interrogate." "Bold,"
"impudent," "audacious"; "bright," "cheerful," "animated"; "earnings,"
"wages," "remuneration," "short," "brief," "concise," are other
examples of words, largely synonymous, from the Saxon, the
Norman-French, and the Latin, respectively. These facts explain why
modern English has such a wealth of expression, although probably more
than one half of the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary has been lost.
The Superiority of the Composite Tongue.--While we insist on the
truth that Anglo-Saxon gained much of its wonderful directness and
power from standing in close relations to earnest life, it is
necessary to remember that many words of French origin did, by an
apprenticeship at the fireside, in the field, the workshop, and the
laboratory, equally fit themselves for taking their place in the
language. Such words from French-Latin roots as "faith," "pray,"
"vein," "beast," "poor," "nurse," "flower," "taste," "state," and
"fool" remain in our vocabulary because they were used in everyday
life.
Pure Anglo-Saxon was a forcible language, but it lacked the wealth of
expression and the flexibility necessary to respond to the most
delicate touches of the master-musicians who were to come. When
Shakespeare has Lear say of Cordelia:--
"Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low; an excellent thing in woman,"
we find that ten of the thirteen words are Saxon, but the other three
of Romance (French) origin are as necessary as is a small amount of
tin added to copper to make bronze. Two of these three words express
varying shades of quality.
Lounsbury well says: "There result, indeed, from the union of the
foreign and native elements, a wealth of phraseology and a
many-sidedness in English, which give it in these respects a
superiority over any other modern cultivated tongue. German is
strictly a pure Teutonic speech, but no native speaker of it claims
for it any superiority over the English as an instrument of
expression, while many are willing to concede its inferiority."
The Changes Slowly Accomplished.--For over a hundred years after the
Conquest, but few French words found their way into current English
use. This is shown by the fact that the _Brut_, a poem of 32,250
lines, translated from a French original into English about 1205, has
not more than a hundred words of Norman-French origin.
At first the Normans despised the tongue of the conquered Saxons, but,
as time progressed, the two races intermarried, and the children could
hardly escape learning some Saxon words from their mothers or nurses.
On the other hand, many well-to-do Saxons, like parents in later
times, probably had their children taught French because it was
considered aristocratic.
Until 1204 a knowledge of French was an absolute necessity to the
nobles, as they frequently went back and forth between their estates
in Normandy and in England. In 1204 King John lost Normandy, and in
the next reign both English and French kings decreed that no subject
of the one should hold land in the territory of the other. This
narrowing of the attention of English subjects down to England was a
foundation stone in building up the supremacy of the English tongue.
In 1338 began the Hundred Years' War between France and England. In
Edward the Third's reign (1327-1377), it was demonstrated that one
Englishman could whip six Frenchmen; and the language of a hostile and
partly conquered race naturally began to occupy a less high position.
In 1362 Parliament enacted that English should thereafter be used in
law courts, "because the laws, customs, and statutes of this realm, be
not commonly known in the same realm, for that they be pleaded,
shewed, and judged in the French tongue, which is much unknown in the
said realm."
LITERATURE OF THE PERIOD 1066-1400
Metrical Romances.--For nearly three hundred years after the Norman
Conquest the chief literary productions were metrical romances, which
were in the first instance usually written by Frenchmen, but sometimes
by Englishmen (_e.g._ Layamon) under French influence. There were four
main cycles of French romance especially popular in England before the
fifteenth century. These were tales of the remarkable adventures of
King Arthur and his Knights, Charlemagne and his Peers, Alexander the
Great, and the heroes at the siege of Troy. At the battle of Hastings
a French minstrel is said to have sung the _Song of Roland_ from the
Charlemagne cycle.
These long stories in verse usually present the glory of chivalry, the
religious faith, and the romantic loves of a feudal age. In _Beowulf_,
woman plays a very minor part and there is no love story; but in these
romances we often find woman and love in the ascendancy. One of them,
well known today in song, _Tristram and Iseult_ (Wagner's _Tristan und
Isolde_), "a possession of our composite race," is almost entirely a
story of romantic love.
The romances of this age that have most interest for English readers
are those which relate to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round
Table. The foundation suggestions for the most of this cycle are of
British (Welsh) origin. This period would not have existed in vain, if
it had given to the world nothing, but these Arthurian ideals of
generosity, courage, honor, and high endeavour, which are still a
potent influence. In his _Idylls of the King_, Tennyson calls Arthur
and his Knights:--
"A glorious company, the flower of men,
To serve as model for the mighty world,
And be the fair beginning of a time."
The _Quest of the Holy Grail_ belongs to the Arthurian cycle. Percival
(Wagner's Parsifal), the hero of the earlier version and Sir Galahad
of the later, show the same spirit that animated the knights in the
Crusades. Tennyson introduces Sir Galahad as a knight whose strength
is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure, undertaking "the
far-quest after the divine." The American poet Lowell chose Sir
Launfal, a less prominent figure in Arthurian romance, for the hero of
his version of the search for the Grail, and had him find it in every
sympathetic act along the common way of life.
The story of _Gawayne and the Green Knight_, "the jewel of English
medieval literature," tells how Sir Gawayne, Arthur's favorite, fought
with a giant called the Green Knight. The romance might almost be
called a sermon, if it did not reveal in a more interesting way a
great moral truth,--that deception weakens character and renders the
deceiver vulnerable in life's contests. In preparing for the struggle,
Sir Gawayne is guilty of one act of deceit. But for this, he would
have emerged unscathed from the battle. One wound, which leaves a
lasting scar, is the result of an apparently trivial deception. His
purity and honor in all things else save him from death. This story,
which reminds us of Spenser's _Faerie Queene_, presents in a new garb
one of the oft-recurring ideals of the race, "keep troth" (truth).
Chaucer sings in the same key:--
"Hold the hye wey, and let thy gost thee lede,
And trouthe shall delivere, it is no drede."
We should remember that these romances are the most characteristic
literary creations of the Middle Ages, that they embody the new spirit
of chivalry, religious faith, and romantic love in a feudal age, that
they had a story to tell, and that some of them have never lost their
influence on human ideals.
A Latin Chronicler.--One chronicler, Geoffrey of Monmouth,
although he wrote in Latin, must receive some attention because of his
vast influence on English poetry. He probably acquired his last name
from being archdeacon of Monmouth. He was appointed Bishop of St.
Asaph in 1152 and died about 1154. Unlike the majority of the monkish
chroniclers, he possessed a vivid imagination, which he used in his
so-called _History of the Kings of Britain_.
Geoffrey pretended to have found an old manuscript which related the
deeds of all British kings from Brutus, the mythical founder of the
kingdom of Britain, and the great-grandson of Aeneas, to Caesar.
Geoffrey wrote an account of the traditionary British kings down to
Cadwallader in 689 with as much minuteness and gravity as Swift
employed in the _Voyage to Lilliput_. Other chroniclers declared that
Geoffrey lied saucily and shamelessly, but his book became extremely
popular. The monks could not then comprehend that the world's greatest
literary works were to be products of the imagination.
In Geoffrey of Monmouth's _History of the Kings of Britain_ we are
given vivid pictures of King Lear and his daughters, of Cymbeline, of
King Arthur and his Knights, of Guinevere and the rest of that company
whom later poets have immortalized. It is probable that Geoffrey was
not particular whether he obtained his materials from old chroniclers,
Welsh bards, floating tradition, or from his own imagination. His book
left its impress on the historical imagination of the Middle Ages. Had
it not been for Geoffrey's _History_, the dramas of _King Lear_ and
_Cymbeline_ might never have been suggested to Shakespeare.
Layamon's Brut.--About 1155 a Frenchman named Wace translated into
his own language Geoffrey of Monmouth's works. This translation fell
into the hands of Layamon, a priest living in Worcestershire, who
proceeded to render the poem, with additions of his own, into the
Southern English dialect. Wace's _Brut_ has 15,300 lines; Layamon's,
32,250. As the matter which Layamon added is the best in the poem, he
is, in so far, an original author of much imaginative power. He is
certainly the greatest poet between the Conquest and Chaucer's time.
A selection from the _Brut_ will give the student an opportunity of
comparing this transition English with the language in its modern
form:--
"And Ich wulle varan to Avalun: And I will fare to Avalon,
To vairest alre maidene To the fairest of all maidens,
To Argante ðere quene, To Argante the queen,
Alven swiðe sceone; Elf surpassing fair;
And heo scal mine wunden And she shall my wounds
Makien alle isunde, Make all sound,
Al hal me makien All hale me make
Mid halweige drenchen. With healing draughts.
And seoðe Ich cumen wulle And afterwards I will come
To mine kineriche To my kingdom
And wunien mid Brutten And dwell with Britons
Mid muchelere wunne." With much joy.
With this, compare the following lines from Tennyson's _The Passing of
Arthur_:--
"...I am going a long way
* * * * *
To the island-valley of Avilion,
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.
* * * * *
He passes to be King among the dead,
And after healing of his grievous wound
He comes again."
Layamon employed less alliteration than is found in Anglo-Saxon
poetry. He also used an occasional rime, but the accent and rhythm of
his verse are more Saxon than modern. When reading Tennyson's _Idylls
of the King_, we must not forget that Layamon was the first poet to
celebrate in English King Arthur's deeds. The _Brut_ shows little
trace of French influences, not more than a hundred French words being
found in it.
Orm's Ormulum.--A monk named Orm wrote in the Midland dialect a
metrical paraphrase of those parts of the _Gospels_ used in the church
on each service day throughout the year. After the paraphrase comes
his metrical explanation and application of the _Scripture_.
He says:--
"Diss boc iss nemmnedd Orrmulum
Forrði ðatt Ormm itt wrohhte."
This book is named Ormulum
For that Orm it wrote.
There was no fixed spelling at this time. Orm generally doubled the
consonant after a short vowel, and insisted that any one who copied
his work should be careful to do the same. We shall find on counting
the syllables in the two lines quoted from him that the first line has
eight; the second, seven. This scheme is followed with great precision
throughout the poem, which employs neither rime nor regular
alliteration. Orm used even fewer French words than Layamon. The date
of the _Ormulum_ is probably somewhere between 1200 and 1215.
The Ancren Riwle.--About 1225 appeared the most notable prose work
in the native tongue since the time of Alfred, if we except the
_Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_. Three young ladies who had secluded
themselves from the world in Dorsetshire, wished rules for guidance in
their seclusion. An unknown author, to oblige them, wrote the _Ancren
Riwle_ (Rule of Anchoresses). This book not only lays down rules for
their future conduct in all the affairs of life, but also offers much
religious consolation.
The following selection shows some of the curious rules for the
guidance of the anchoresses, and furnishes a specimen of the Southern
dialect of transitional English prose in the early part of the
thirteenth century:--
"ße, mine leoue sustren,
ne schulen habben no best
bute kat one... ße schulen
beon i-dodded four siðen,
iðe ßere, uorto lihten ower
heaued... Of idelnesse awakeneð
muchel flesshes fondunge...
Iren ðet lið stille gedereð
sone rust."
Ye, my beloved sisters,
shall have no beast
but one cat... Ye shall
be cropped four times
in the year for to lighten your
head... Of idleness ariseth
much temptation of the flesh...
Iron that lieth still soon gathereth
rust.
The keynote of the work is the renunciation of self. Few productions
of modern literature contain finer pictures of the divine love and
sympathy. The following simile affords an instance of this quality in
the work:--
"De sixte kunfort is ðet
ure Louerd, hwon he iðolð
ðet we beoð itented, he plaieð mid
us, ase ðe moder mid hire ßunge
deorlinge; vlihð from him, and
hut hire, and let hit sitten one,
and loken ßeorne abuten, and cleopien
Dame! dame! and weopen
one hwule; and ðeonne mid ispredde
ermes leapeð lauhwinde
vorð, and cluppeð and cusseð and
wipeð his eien. Riht so ure
Louerd let us one iwurðen oðer
hwules, and wiðdraweð his grace
and his kunfort, ðet we ne ivindeð
swetnesse in none ðinge ðet we wel
doð, ne savor of heorte; and ðauh,
iðet ilke point ne luveð he us
ure leove veder never ðe lesce,
auh he deð hit for muchel luve
ðet he haveð to us."
The sixth comfort is that
our Lord, when he suffers
that we be tempted, he plays with
us, as the mother with her young
darling; she flees from it, and
hides herself, and lets it sit alone
and look anxiously about and cry
"Dame! dame!" and weep
awhile; and then with outspread
arms leaps laughing
forth and clasps and kisses it and
wipes its eyes. Exactly so our
Lord leaves us alone once in a
while and withdraws his grace
and his comfort, that we find
sweetness in nothing that we do well,
no relish of heart; and notwithstanding,
at the same time, he, our dear
Father, loves us nevertheless,
but he does it for the great love
that he has for us.
Professor Sweet calls the _Ancren Riwle_ "one of the most perfect
models of simple, natural, eloquent prose in our language." For its
introduction of French words, this work occupies a prominent place in
the development of the English language. Among the words of French
origin found in it, we may instance: "dainty," "cruelty," "vestments,"
"comfort," "journey," "mercer."
Lyrical Poetry.--A famous British Museum manuscript, known as
_Harleian MS., No. 2253_. which was transcribed about 1310, contains a
fine anthology of English lyrics, some of which may have been composed
early in the thirteenth century. The best of these are love lyrics,
but they are less remarkable for an expression of the tender passion
than for a genuine appreciation of nature. Some of them are full of
the joy of birds and flowers and warm spring days.
A lover's song, called _Alysoun_, is one of the best of these
lyrics:--
"Bytuene Mershe ant[3] Averil[4]
When spray biginneth to spring,
The lutel[5] foul hath hire wyl
On hyre lud[6] to synge."
A famous spring lyric beginning:--
"Lenten[7] ys come with love to toune,[8]
With blosmen ant with briddes[9] roune."[10]
is a symphony of daisies, roses, "lovesome lilies," thrushes, and
"notes suete of nyhtegales."
The refrain of one love song is invigorating with the breath of the
northern wind:--
"Blou, northerne wynd!
Send thou me my suetyng!
Blou norterne wynd! blou, blou, blou!"
The _Cuckoo Song_, which is perhaps older than any of these, is the
best known of all the early lyrics:--
"Sumer is i-cumen in
Lhude sing cuccu
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springeth the wde nu.
Sing cuccu, cuccu."
Summer is a-coming in,
Loud sing cuckoo,
Groweth seed and bloometh mead,
And springeth the wood now.
Sing cuckoo, cuckoo.
A more somber note is heard in the religious lyrics:--
"Wynter wakeneth al my care,
Nou this leves waxeth bare;
Ofte I sike[11] ant mourne sare[12]
When hit cometh in my thoht
Of this worldes joie, hou hit goth al to noht."
We do not know the names of any of these singers, but they were worthy
forerunners of the later lyrists of love and nature.
Robert Manning of Brunne.--We have now come to fourteenth-century
literature, which begins to wear a more modern aspect. Robert Manning,
generally known as Robert of Brunne, because he was born at Brunne,
now called Bourn, in Lincolnshire, adapted from a Norman-French
original a work entitled _Handlyng Synne_ (_Manual of Sins_). This
book, written in the Midland dialect in 1303, discourses of the Seven
Deadly Sins and the best ways of living a godly life.
A careful inspection of the following selection from the _Handlyng
Synne_ will show that, aside from the spelling, the English is
essentially modern. Most persons will be able to understand all but a
few words. He was the first prominent English writer to use the modern
order of words. The end rime is also modern. A beggar, seeing a beast
laden with bread at the house of a rich man, asks for food. The poem
says of the rich man:--
"He stouped down to seke a stone,
But, as hap was, than fonde he none.
For the stone he toke a lofe,
And at the pore man hyt drofe.
The pore man hente hyt up belyue,
And was thereof ful ferly blythe,
To hys felaws fast he ran
With the lofe, thys pore man."
He stooped down to seek a stone,
But, as chance was, then found he none.
For the stone he took a loaf,
And at the poor man it drove.
The poor man caught it up quickly,
And was thereof full strangely glad,
To his fellows fast he ran
With the loaf this poor man.
Oliphant says: "Strange it is that Dante should have been compiling
his _Inferno_, which settled the course of Italian literature forever,
in the selfsame years that Robert of Brunne was compiling the earliest
pattern of well-formed New English... Almost every one of the Teutonic
changes in idiom, distinguishing the New English from the Old, the
speech of Queen Victoria from the speech of Hengist, is to be found in
Manning's work."
Mandeville's Travels.--Sir John Mandeville, who is popularly
considered the author of a very entertaining work of travels, states
that he was born in St. Albans in 1300, that he left England in 1322,
and traveled in the East for thirty-four years. His _Travels_ relates
what he saw and heard in his wanderings through Ethiopia, Persia,
Tartary, India, and Cathay. What he tells on his own authority, he
vouches for as true, but what he relates as hearsay, he leaves to the
reader's judgment for belief.
[Illustration: WHAT MADEVILLE SAW. _Old print from Edition of
1725._]
No such single traveler as Mandeville ever existed. The work
attributed to him has been proved to be a compilation from the
writings of other travelers. A French critic says wittily: "He first
lost his character as a truthful writer; then out of the three
versions of his book, French, English, and Latin, two were withdrawn
from him, leaving him only the first. Existence has now been taken
from him, and he is left with nothing at all." No matter, however, who
the author was, the book exists. More manuscripts of it survive than
of any other work except the _Scriptures_. It is the most entertaining
volume of English prose that we have before 1360. The sentences are
simple and direct, and they describe things vividly:--
"In Ethiope ben many dyverse folk: and Ethiope is clept[13] Cusis.
In that contree ben folk, that han but o foot: and thei gon so fast,
that it is marvaylle: and the foot is so large, that it schadewethe
alle the body azen[14] the Sonne whanne thei wole[15] lye and reste
hem."[16]
Mandeville also tells of a bird that used to amuse itself by flying
away with an elephant in its talons. In the land of Prester John was a
valley where Mandeville says he saw devils jumping about as thick as
grasshoppers. Stories like these make the work as interesting as
_Gulliver's Travels_.
The so-called Mandeville's _Travels_ was one of the few works that the
unlearned of that age could understand and enjoy. Consequently its
popularity was so great as to bring large number of French words into
familiar use. The native "againbought" is, however, used instead of
the foreign "redeemed."
[Illustration: JOHN WYCLIFFE. _From an old print_.]
John Wycliffe.--Wycliffe (1324-1384) was born at Hipswell, near
Richmond, in the northern part of Yorkshire. He became a doctor of
divinity and a master of one of the colleges at Oxford. Afterward he
was installed vicar of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, where he died.
In history he is principally known as the first great figure in the
English Reformation. He preceded the other reformers by more than a
century. In literature he is best known for the first complete
translation of the _Bible_,--a work that exerted great influence on
English prose. All the translation was not made by him personally, but
all was done under his direction. The translation of most of the _New
Testament_ is thought to be his own special work. He is the most
important prose writer of the fourteenth century. His prose had an
influence as wide as the circulation of the _Bible_. The fact that it
was forced to circulate in manuscript, because printing had not then
been invented, limited his readers; but his translation was,
nevertheless, read by many. To help the cause of the Reformation, he
wrote argumentative religious pamphlets, which are excellent specimens
of energetic fourteenth-century prose.
Of his place in literature, Ten Brink says: "Wycliffe's literary
importance lies in the fact that he extended the domain of English
prose and enhanced its powers of expression. He accustomed it to terse
reasoning, and perfected it as an instrument for expressing rigorous
logical thought and argument; he brought it into the service of great
ideas and questions of the day, and made it the medium of polemics and
satire. And above all, he raised it to the dignity of the national
language of the _Bible_."
The following is a specimen verse of Wycliffe's translation. We may
note that the strong old English word "againrising" had not then been
displaced by the Latin "resurrection."
"Jhesu seith to hir, I am agenrisyng and lyf; he that bileueth in
me, he, if he schal be deed, schall lyue."
Piers Plowman.--_The Vision of William Concerning Piers the
Plowman_, popularly called _Piers Plowman_, from its most important
character, is the name of an allegorical poem, the first draft ("A"
text) of which was probably composed about 1362. Later in the century
two other versions, known as texts "B" and "C" appeared. Authorities
differ in regard to whether these are the work of the same man. _The
Vision_ is the first and the most interesting part of a much longer
work, known as _Liber de Petro Plowman_ (_The Book of Piers the
Plowman_).
The authorship of the poem is not certainly known, but it has long
been ascribed to William Langland, born about 1322 at Cleobury
Mortimer in Shropshire. The author of _Piers Plowman_ seems to have
performed certain functions connected with the church, such as singing
at funerals.
_Piers Plowman_ opens on a pleasant May morning amid rural scenery.
The poet falls asleep by the side of a brook and dreams. In his dream
he has a vision of the world passing before his eyes, like a drama.
The poem tells what he saw. Its opening lines are:--
"In a _s_omer _s_eson * whan _s_oft was the _s_onne
I _sh_ope[17] me in _sh_roudes[18] * as I a _sh_epe[19] were
In _h_abite as an _h_eremite[20] - un_h_oly of workes
_W_ent _w_yde in þis _w_orld - _w_ondres to here
Ac on a _M_ay _m_ornynge - on _M_aluerne hulles[21]
Me by_f_el a _f_erly[22] - of _f_airy me thouß te
I _w_as _w_ery for_w_andred[23] - and _w_ent me to reste
Under a _b_rode _b_ank - _b_i a _b_ornes[24] side,
And as I _l_ay and _l_ened[25] - and _l_oked in þe wateres
I _s_lombred in a _s_lepyng - it _s_weyved[26] so merye."
[Illustration: TREUTHE'S PILGRYME ATTE PLOW. _From a manuscript in
Trinity College, Cambridge._]
The language of _Piers Plowman_ is a mixture of the Southern and
Midland dialects. It should be noticed that the poem employs the old
Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter. There is no end rime. _Piers Plowman_
is the last great poem written in this way.
The actors in this poem are largely allegorical. Abstractions are
personified. Prominent characters are Conscience, Lady Meed or
Bribery, Reason, Truth, Gluttony, Hunger, and the Seven Deadly Sins.
In some respects, the poem is not unlike the _Pilgrim's Progress_, for
the battle in passing from this life to the next is well described in
both; but there are more humor, satire, and descriptions of common
life in Langland. Piers is at first a simple plowman, who offers to
guide men to truth. He is finally identified with the Savior.
Throughout the poem, the writer displays all the old Saxon
earnestness. His hatred of hypocrisy is manifest on every page. His
sadness, because things are not as they ought to be, makes itself
constantly felt. He cannot reconcile the contradiction between the
real and the ideal. In attacking selfishness, hypocrisy, and
corruption; in preaching the value of a life of good deeds; in showing
how men ought to progress toward higher ideals; in teaching that "Love
is the physician of life and nearest our Lord himself,--" _Piers
Plowman_ proved itself a regenerating spiritual force, a
stepping-stone toward the later Reformation.
The author of this poem was also a fourteenth-century social reformer,
protesting against the oppression of the poor, insisting on mutual
service and "the good and loving life." In order to have a
well-rounded conception of the life of the fourteenth century, we must
read _Piers Plowman_. Chaucer was a poet for the upper classes. _Piers
Plowman_ gives valuable pictures of the life of the common people and
shows them working--
"To kepe kyne In þe field, þe corne fro þe bestes,
Diken[27] or deluen[28] or dyngen[29] vppon sheues,[30]
Or helpe make mortar or here mukke a-felde."
We find in the popular poetry of _Piers Plowman_ almost as many words
of French derivation as in the work of the more aristocratic Chaucer.
This fact shows how thoroughly the French element had become
incorporated in the speech of all classes. The style of the author of
_Piers Plowman_ is, however, remarkable for the old Saxon sincerity
and for the realistic directness of the bearer of a worthy message.
John Gower.--Gower, a very learned poet, was born about 1325 and
died in 1408. As he was not sure that English would become the
language of his cultivated countrymen, he tried each of the three
languages used in England. His first important work, the _Speculum
Meditantis_, was written in French; his second, the _Vox Clamantis_,
in Latin; his third, the _Confessio Amantis_, in English.
[Illustration: EARLY PORTRAIT OF GOWER HEARING THE CONFESSION OF A
LOVER (CONFESSIO AMANTIS). _From the Egerton MS., British Museum._]
The _Confessio Amantis_ (_Confession of a Lover_) is principally a
collection of one hundred and twelve short tales. An attempt to unify
them is seen in the design to have the confessor relate, at the
lover's request, those stories which reveal the causes tending to
hinder or to further love. Gower had ability in story-telling, as is
shown by the tales about Medea and the knight Florent; but he lacked
Chaucer's dramatic skill and humor. Gower's influence has waned
because, although he stood at the threshold of the Renaissance, his
gaze was chiefly turned backward toward medievalism. His contemporary,
Chaucer, as we see, was affected by the new spirit.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, 1340?-1400.
[Illustration: GEOFFREY CHAUCER. _From an old drawing in Occleve's
Poems, British Museum._]
Life.--Chaucer was born in London about 1340. His father and
grandfather were vintners, who belonged to the upper class of
merchants. Our first knowledge of Geoffrey Chaucer is obtained from
the household accounts of the Princess Elizabeth, daughter-in-law of
Edward III., in whose family Chaucer was a page. An entry shows that
she bought him a fine suit of clothes, including a pair of red and
black breeches. Such evidence points to the fact that he was early
accustomed to associating with the nobility, and enables us to
understand why he and the author of _Piers Plowman_ regard life from
different points of view.
In 1359 Chaucer accompanied the English army to France and was taken
prisoner. Edward III. thought enough of the youth to pay for his
ransom a sum equivalent to-day to about $1200. After his return he was
made valet of the king's chamber. The duties of that office "consisted
in making the royal bed, holding torches, and carrying messages."
Later, Chaucer became a squire.
In 1370 he was sent to the continent on a diplomatic mission. He seems
to have succeeded so well that during the next ten years he was
repeatedly sent abroad in the royal service. He visited Italy twice
and may thus have met the Italian poet Petrarch. These journeys
inspired Chaucer with a desire to study Italian literature,--a
literature that had just been enriched by the pens of Dante and
Boccaccio.
We must next note that Chaucer's life was not that of a poetic
dreamer, but of a stirring business man. For more than twelve years he
was controller of customs for London. This office necessitated
assessing duties on wools, skins, wines, and candles. Only a part of
this work could be performed by deputy. He was later overseeing clerk
of the king's works. The repeated selection of Chaucer for foreign and
diplomatic business shows that he was considered sagacious as well as
trustworthy. Had he not kept in close touch with life, he could never
have become so great a poet. In this connection we may remark that
England's second greatest writer, Milton, spent his prime in attending
to affairs of state. Chaucer's busy life did not keep him from
attaining third place on the list of England's poets.
There are many passages of autobiographical interest in his poems. He
was a student of books as well as of men, as is shown by these lines
from the _Hous of Fame_:--
"For whan thy labour doon al is,
And halt y-maad thy rekeninges,
In stede of rest and newe thinges,
Thou gost hoom to thy hous anoon,
And, also domb as any stoon,
Thou sittest at another boke,
Til fully daswed[31] is thy loke,
And livest thus as an hermyte."[32]
Chaucer was pensioned by three kings,--Edward III., Richard II., and
Henry IV. Before the reign of Henry IV., Chaucer's pensions were
either not always regularly paid, or they were insufficient for
certain emergencies, as he complained of poverty in his old age. The
pension of Henry IV. in 1399 must have been ample, however; since in
that year Chaucer leased a house in the garden of a chapel at
Westminster for as many of fifty-three years as he should live. He had
occasion to use this house but ten months, for he died in 1400.
He may be said to have founded the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey,
as he was the first of the many great authors to be buried there.
Chaucer's Earlier Poems.--At the age of forty, Chaucer had probably
written not more than one seventh of a total of about 35,000 lines of
verse which he left at his death. Before he reached his poetic prime,
he showed two periods of influence,--French and Italian.
During his first period, he studied French models. He learned much
from his partial translation of the popular French _Romaunt of the
Rose_. The best poem of his French period is _Dethe of Blanche the
Duchesse_, a tribute to the wife of John of Gaunt, the son of Edward
III.
Chaucer's journey to Italy next turned his attention to Italian
models. A study of these was of especial service in helping him to
acquire that skill which enabled him to produce the masterpieces of
his third or English period. This study came at a specially opportune
time and resulted in communicating to him something of the spirit of
the early Renaissance.
The influence of Boccaccio and, sometimes, of Dante is noticeable in
the principal poems of the Italian period,--the _Troilus and Criseyde,
Hous of Fame_, and _Legende of Good Women_. The _Troilus and Criseyde_
is a tale of love that was not true. The _Hous of Fame_, an unfinished
poem, gives a vision of a vast palace of ice on which the names of the
famous are carved to await the melting rays of the sun. The _Legende
of Good Women_ is a series of stories of those who, like Alcestis, are
willing to give up everything for love. In _A Dream of Fair Women_
Tennyson says:--
"'The Legend of Good Women,' long ago
Sung by the morning star of song, who made
His music heard below;
Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still."
In this series of poems Chaucer learned how to rely less and less on
an Italian crutch. He next took his immortal ride to Canterbury on an
English Pegasus.
General Plan of the Canterbury Tales.--People in general have always
been more interested in stories than in any other form of literature.
Chaucer probably did not realize that he had such positive genius for
telling tales in verse that the next five hundred years would fail to
produce his superior in that branch of English literature.
[Illustration: CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL.]
All that Chaucer needed was some framework into which he could fit the
stories that occurred to him, to make them something more than mere
stray tales, which might soon be forgotten. Chaucer's great
contemporary Italian storyteller, Boccaccio, conceived the idea of
representing some of the nobility of Florence as fleeing from the
plague, and telling in their retirement the tales that he used in his
_Decameron_. It is not certain that Chaucer received from the
_Decameron_ his suggestions for the _Canterbury Tales_, although he
was probably in Florence at the same time as Boccaccio.
In 1170 Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered at the
altar. He was considered both a martyr and a saint, and his body was
placed in a splendid mausoleum at the Cathedral. It was said that
miracles were worked at his tomb, that the sick were cured, and that
the worldly affairs of those who knelt at his shrine prospered. It
became the fashion for men of all classes to go on pilgrimages to his
tomb. As robbers infested the highways, the pilgrims usually waited at
some inn until there was a sufficient band to resist attack. In time
the journey came to be looked on as a holiday, which relieved the
monotony of everyday life. About 1385 Chaucer probably went on such a
pilgrimage. To furnish amusement, as the pilgrims cantered along, some
of them may have told stories. The idea occurred to Chaucer to write a
collection of such tales as the various pilgrims might have been
supposed to tell on their journey. The result was the _Canterbury
Tales_.
Characters in the Tales.--Chaucer's plan is superior to Boccaccio's;
for only the nobility figure as story-tellers in the _Decameron_,
while the Canterbury pilgrims represent all ranks of English life,
from the knight to the sailor.
The _Prologue_ to the _Tales_ places these characters before us almost
as distinctly as they would appear in real life. At the Tabard Inn in
Southwark, just across the Thames from London, we see that merry band
of pilgrims on a pleasant April day. We look first upon a manly figure
who strikes us as being every inch a knight. His cassock shows the
marks of his coat of mail.
"At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene.
* * * * *
And of his port as meke as is a mayde.
He never yet no vileinye ne sayde
In al his lyf, un-to no maner wight.
He was a verray parfit gentil knight."
His son, the Squire, next catches our attention. We notice his curly
locks, his garments embroidered with gay flowers, and the graceful way
in which he rides his horse. By his side is his servant, the Yeoman,
"clad in cote and hood of grene," with a sheaf of arrows at his belt.
We may even note his cropped head and his horn suspended from green
belt. We next catch sight of a Nun's gracefully pleated wimple,
shapely nose, small mouth, "eyes greye as glas," well-made cloak,
coral beads, and brooch of gold. She is attended by a second Nun and
three Priests. The Monk is a striking figure:--
"His heed was balled, that shoon as any glas,
And eek his face, as he hadde been anoint.
He was a lord ful fat and in good point."
[Illustration: PILGRIMS LEAVING THE TABARD INN. _From Urry's
Chaucer._]
There follow the Friar with twinkling eyes, "the beste beggere in his
hous," the Merchant with his forked beard, the Clerk (scholar) of
Oxford in his threadbare garments, the Sergeant-at-Law, the Franklyn
(country gentleman), Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, Tapycer
(tapestry maker), Cook, Shipman, Physician, Wife of Bath, Parish
Priest, Plowman, Miller, Manciple (purchaser of provisions), Reeve
(bailiff of a farm), Summoner (official of an ecclesiastical court),
and Pardoner. These characters, exclusive of Baily (the host of Tabard
Inn) and Chaucer himself, are alluded to in the _Prologue_ to the
_Tales_ as--
"Wel nyne and twenty in a companye,
Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde."
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF LINES DESCRIBING THE FRANKLYN[33]. _From
the Cambridge University MS._]
[Illustration: THE FRANKLYN[34].]
[Illustration: THE FRIAR.]
The completeness of the picture of fourteenth century English life in
the _Canterbury Tales_ makes them absolutely necessary reading for the
historian as well as for the student of literature.
Certainly no one who has ever read the _Prologue_ to the _Tales_ will
question Chaucer's right to be considered a great _original_ poet, no
matter how much he may have owed to foreign teachers.
The Tales.--Harry Baily, the keeper of the Tabard Inn, who
accompanied the pilgrims, proposed that each member of the party
should tell four tales,--two going and two returning. The one who told
the best story was to have a supper at the expense of the rest. The
plan thus outlined was not fully executed by Chaucer, for the
collection contains but twenty-four tales, all but two of which are in
verse.
[Illustration: THE KNIGHT.]
[Illustration: THE PRIORESS.]
[Illustration: THE SQUIRE.]
The _Knightes Tale_, which is the first, is also the best. It is a
very interesting story of love and chivalry. Two young Theban
nobleman, Palamon and Arcite, sworn friends, are prisoners of war at
Athens. Looking through the windows of their dungeon, they see walking
in the garden the beautiful sister of the queen. Each one swears that
he will have the princess. Arcite is finally pardoned on condition
that he will leave Athens and never return, on penalty of death; but
his love for Emily lures him back to the forbidden land. Reduced
almost to a skeleton, he disguises himself, goes to Athens, and
becomes a servant in the house of King Theseus. Finally, Palamon
escapes from prison, and by chance encounters Arcite. The two men
promptly fight, but are interrupted by Theseus, who at first condemns
them to death, but later relents and directs them to depart and to
return at the end of a year, each with a hundred brave knights. The
king prescribes that each lover shall then lead his forces in mortal
battle and that the victor shall wed the princess.
[Illustration: THE CLERK OF OXFORD.]
On the morning of the contest, Palamon goes before dawn to the temple
of Venus to beseech her aid in winning Emily, while Arcite at the same
time steals to the temple of Mars to pray for victory in war. Each
deity not only promises but actually grants the suppliants precisely
what they ask; for Arcite, though fatally wounded, is victorious in
the battle, and Palamon in the end weds Emily. Although Boccaccio's
_Teseide_ furnished the general plot for this _Knightes Tale_,
Chaucer's story is, as Skeat says, "to all intents, a truly original
poem."
The other pilgrims tell stories in keeping with their professions and
characters. Perhaps the next best tale is the merry story of
_Chanticleer and the Fox_. This is related by the Nun's Priest. The
Clerk of Oxford tells the pathetic tale of _Patient Griselda_, and the
Nun relates a touching story of a little martyr.
Chief Qualities of Chaucer.--I. Chaucer's descriptions are unusually
clear-cut and vivid. They are the work of a poet who did not shut
himself in his study, but who mingled among his fellow-men and noticed
them acutely. He says of the Friar:--
"His eyes twinkled in his heed aright,
As doon the sterres in the frosty night."
Our eyes and ears distinctly perceive the jolly Monk, as he canters
along:--
"And, whan he rood, men might his brydel here
Ginglen in a whistling wind as clere,
And eek as loude as dooth the chapel-belle."
II. Chaucer's pervasive, sympathetic humor is especially
characteristic. We can see him looking with twinkling eyes at the
Miller, "tolling thrice"; at the Monk, "full fat and in good point,"
hunting with his greyhounds, "swift as fowl in flight," or smiling
before a fat roast swan; at the Squire, keeping the nightingale
company; at the Doctor, prescribing the rules of astrology. The Nun
feels a touch of his humor:--
"Ful wel she song the service divyne,
Entuned in hir nose ful semely."
Of the lawyer, he says:--
"No-wher so bisy a man as he ther nas,
And yet he semed bisier than he was."
Sometimes Chaucer's humor is so delicate as to be lost on those who
are not quick-witted. Lowell instances the case of the Friar, who,
"before setting himself softly down, drives away the cat," and adds
what is true only of those who have acute understanding: "We know,
without need of more words, that he has chosen the snuggest corner."
His humor is often a graceful cloak for his serious philosophy of
existence. The humor in the _Prologue_ does not impair its worth to
the student of fourteenth-century life.
III. Although Chaucer's humor and excellence in lighter vein are such
marked characteristics, we must not forget his serious qualities; for
he has the Saxon seriousness as well as the Norman airiness. As he
looks over the struggling world, he says with a sympathetic heart:--
"Infinite been the sorwes and the teres
Of olde folk, and folk of tendre yeres."[35]
In like vein, we have:--
"This world nis but a thurghfare ful of wo,
And we ben pilgrimes, passinge to and fro;
Deeth is an ende of every worldly sore."[36]
"Her nis non hoom, her nis but wildernesse.
Forthe, pylgrime, forthe! forthe, beste out of thi stal!
Knowe thi contree, look up, thank God of al!"[37]
The finest character in the company is that of the Parish Priest, who
attends to his flock like a good Samaritan:--
"But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve,
He taughte, and first he folwed it him-selve."
IV. The largeness of his view of human nature is remarkable. Some
poets, either intentionally or unintentionally, paint one type of men
accurately and distort all the rest. Chaucer impartially portrays the
highest as well as the lowest, and the honest man as well as the
hypocrite. The pictures of the roguish Friar and the self-denying
Parish Priest, the Oxford Scholar and the Miller, the Physician and
the Shipman, are painted with equal fidelity to life. In the breadth
and kindliness of his view of life, Chaucer is a worthy predecessor of
Shakespeare. Dryden's verdict on Chaucer's poetry is: "Here is God's
plenty."
V. His love of nature is noteworthy for that early age. Such lines as
these manifest something more than a desire for rhetorical effect in
speaking of nature's phenomena:--
"Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe,
That hast this wintres weders over-shake,
And driven awey the longe nightes blake[38]!"[39]
His affection for the daisy has for five hundred years caused many
other people to look with fonder eyes upon that flower.
VI. He stands in the front rank of those who have attempted to tell
stories in melodious verse. Lowell justly says: "One of the world's
three or four great story-tellers, he was also one of the best
versifiers that ever made English trip and sing with a gayety that
seems careless, but where every foot beats time to the tune of the
thought."
[Illustration: MORRIS DANCERS._From a Manuscript of Chaucer's
Time._]
VII. He is the first great English author to feel the influence of the
Renaissance, which did not until long afterward culminate in England.
Gower has his lover hear tales from a confessor in cloistered quiet.
Chaucer takes his Pilgrims out for jolly holidays in the April
sunshine. He shows the spirit of the Renaissance in his joy in varied
life, in his desire for knowledge of all classes of men as well as of
books, in his humor, and in his general reaching out into new fields.
He makes us feel that he lives in a merrier England, where both the
Morris dancer and the Pilgrim may show their joy in life.
What Chaucer did for the English Language.--Before Chaucer's works,
English was, as we have seen, a language of dialects. He wrote in the
Midland dialect, and aided in making that the language of England.
Lounsbury says of Chaucer's influence: "No really national language
could exist until a literature had been created which would be admired
and studied by all who could read, and taken as a model by all who
could write. It was only a man of genius that could lift up one of
these dialects into a preëminence over the rest, or could ever give to
the scattered forces existing in any one of them the unity and vigor
of life. This was the work that Chaucer did." For this reason he
deserves to be called our first modern English poet. At first sight,
his works look far harder to read than they really are, because the
spelling has changed so much since Chaucer's day.
SUMMARY
The period from the Norman Conquest to 1400 is remarkable (1) for
bringing into England French influence and closer contact with the
continent; (2) for the development of (_a_) a more centralized
government, (_b_) the feudal system and chivalry, (_c_) better civil
courts of justice and a more representative government, _Magna Charta_
being one of the steps in this direction; (3) for the influence of
religion, the coming of the friars, the erection of unsurpassed Gothic
cathedrals; (4) for the struggles of the peasants to escape their
bondage, for a striking decline in the relative importance of the
armored knight, and for Wycliffe's movement for a religious
reformation.
This period is also specially important because it gave to England a
new language of greater flexibility and power. The old inflections,
genders, formative prefixes, and capability of making self-explaining
compounds were for the most part lost. To supply the places of lost
words and to express those new ideas which came with the broader
experiences of an emancipated, progressive nation, many new words were
adopted from the French and the Latin. When the time for literature
came, Chaucer found ready for his pen the strongest, sincerest, and
most flexible language that ever expressed a poet's thought.
In tracing the development of the literature of this period, we have
noted (1) the metrical romances; (2) Geoffrey of Monmouth's (Latin)
_History of the Kings of Britain_, and Layamon's _Brut_, with their
stories of Lear, Cymbeline and King Arthur; (3) the _Ormulum_, a
metrical paraphrase of those parts of the _Gospels_ used in church
service; (4) the _Ancren Riwle_, remarkable for its natural eloquent
prose and its noble ethics, as well as for showing the development of
the language; (5) the lyrical poetry, beginning to be redolent of the
odor of the blossom and resonant with the song of the bird; (6) the
_Handlyng Synne_, in which we stand on the threshold of modern
English; (7) Mandeville's _Travels_, with its entertaining stories;
(8) Wycliffe's monumental translation of the _Bible_ and vigorous
religious prose pamphlets; (9) _Piers Plowman_, with its pictures of
homely life, its intense desire for higher ideals and for the
reformation of social and religious life; (10) Gower's _Confessio
Amantis_, a collection of tales about love; and (11) Chaucer's poetry,
which stands in the front rank for the number of vivid pictures of
contemporary life, for humor, love of nature, melody, and capacity for
story-telling.
REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
HISTORICAL
An account of the history of this period may be found in either
Gardiner[40], Green, Lingard, Walker, or Cheney. Volumes II. and III.
of the _Political History of England_, edited by Hunt (Longmans), give
the history in greater detail. For the social side, consult Traill, I.
and II. See also Rogers's _Six Centuries of Work and Wages_. Freeman's
_William the Conqueror_, Green's _Henry II_., and Tout's _Edward I_.
(_Twelve English Statesmen Series_) are short and interesting.
Kingsley's _Hereward the Wake_ deals with the times of William the
Conqueror and Scott's _Ivanhoe_ with those of Richard the
Lion-Hearted. Archer and Kingsford's _The Story of the Crusades_,
Cutt's _Parish Priests and their People in the Middle Ages in
England_, and Jusserand's _English Wayfaring Life in the fourteenth
Century_ are good works.
LITERARY
_Cambridge History of English Literature_, Vols. I. and II.
Bradley's _Making of English_.
Schofield's _English Literature from the Conquest to Chaucer_.
Ker's _Epic and Romance_.
Saintsbury's _The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory_.
Lawrence's _Medieval Story_ (excellent).
Weston's _The Romance Cycle of Charlemagne and his Peers_.
Weston's _King Arthur and his Knights_.
Maynadier's _The Arthur of the English Poets_.
Nutt's _The Legends of the Holy Grail_.
Jusserand's _Piers Plowman_.
Warren's _Langland's Vision of Piers the Plowman, Done into Modern
Prose_.
Savage's _Old English Libraries_.
Schofield's _Chivalry in English Literature_.
Snell's _The Age of Chaucer_.
Root's _The Poetry of Chaucer_.
Tuckwell's _Chaucer_ (96 pp.).
Pollard's _Chaucer_ (142 pp.).
Legouis's _Chaucer_.
Coulton's _Chaucer and his England_.
Lowell's _My Study Windows_ contains one of the best essays ever
written on Chaucer.
Mackail's _The Springs of Helicon_ (Chaucer).
SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Romances.--The student will be interested in reading from Lawrence's
_Medieval Story_, Chapters III., _The Song of Roland_; IV., _The
Arthurian Romances_; V., _The Legend of the Holy Grail_; VI., _The
History of Reynard the Fox_. Butler's _The Song of Roland_ (_Riverside
Literature Series_) is an English prose translation of a popular story
from the Charlemagne cycle. _Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight_ has
been retold in modern English prose by J.L. Weston (London: David
Nutt). A long metrical selection from this romance is given in
Bronson.[41] I., 83-100, in _Oxford Treasury_, I., 60-81, and a prose
selection in _Century_, 1000-1022.
Stories from the Arthurian cycle may he found in Newell's _King Arthur
and the Table Round_. See also Maynadier's _The Arthur of the English
Poets_, and Tennyson's _The Idylls of the King_.
Geoffrey of Monmouth's _History of the Kings of Britain_ is translated
in Giles's _Six Old English Chronicles_ (Bohn Library).
Selections from Layamon's _Brut_ may be found in Bronson, I.; P. & S.;
and Manly, I.
What were the chief subjects of the cycles of Romance? Were they
mostly of English or French origin? What new elements appear, not
found in Beowulf? Which of these cycles has the most interest for
English readers? How does this cycle still influence twentieth-century
ideals? In what respect is the romance of _Gawayne_ like a sermon?
What Shakespearean characters does Geoffrey of Monmouth introduce? How
is Layamon's _Brut_ related to Geoffrey's chronicle? Point out a
likeness between the _Brut_ and the work of a Victorian poet.
Ormulum, Lyrics, and Robert Manning of Brunne.--Selections may be
found in P. & S.; Bronson, I.; Oxford (lyrics, pp. 1-10); Manly, I.;
Morris's _Specimens of Early English_. Among the lyrics, read
specially, "Sumer is i-cumen in," "Alysoun," "Lenten ys come with love
to toune," and "Blow, Northern Wind."
What was the purpose of the _Ormulum_? What is its subject matter?
Does it show much French influence?
What new appreciation of nature do the thirteenth-century lyrics show?
Point out at least twelve definite concrete references to nature in
"Lenten ys come with love to toune." How many such references are
there in the _Cuckoo Song_?
What difference do you note between the form of Robert Manning of
Brunne's _Handling Synne_ and Anglo-Saxon poetry? Can you find an
increasing number of words of French derivation in his work?
Prose.--Manly's _English Prose_, Morris's _Specimens of Early
English_, Parts I. and II., Chambers, I., Craik, I., contain specimens
of the best prose, including Mandeville and Wycliffe. Mandeville's
_Travels_ may be found in modern English in Cassell's _National
Library_ (15¢). Bosworth and Waring's edition of the _Gospels_
contains the Anglo-Saxon text, together with the translations of
Wycliffe and Tyndale. No. 107 of Maynard's _English Classics_ contains
selections from both Wycliffe's _Bible_ and Mandeville's _Travels_.
What is the subject matter of the _Ancren Riwle_? What is the keynote
of the work? Mention some words of French origin found in it. What is
the character of Mandeville's _Travels_? Why was it so popular?
In what does Wycliffe's literary importance consist? Compare some
verses of his translation of the _Bible_ with the 1611 version.
Piers Plowman and Gower.--Selections are given in P. & S.; Bronson,
I.; Ward, I.; Chambers, I.; and Manly, I. Skeat has edited a small
edition of _Piers the Plowman_ ("B" text) and also a larger edition,
entitled _The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, in Three
Parallel Texts_. G.C. Macaulay has a good volume of selections from
Gower's _Confessio Amantis_.
What is the difference between the form of the verse in _Piers
Plowman_ and _Handling Synne_? Who is Piers? Who are some of the other
characters in the poem? What type of life is specially described? In
what sort of work are the laborers engaged? Why may the author of
_Piers Plowman_ be called a reformer?
Why was Gower undecided in what language to write? What is the subject
matter of the _Confessio Amantis_?
Chaucer.--Read the _Prologue_ and if possible also the _Knightes
Tale_ (Liddell's, or Morris-Skeat's, or Van Dyke's, or Mather's
edition). Good selections may be found in Bronson, I.; Ward, I.; P.
and S., and _Oxford Treasury_, I. Skeat's Complete Works, 6 vols., is
the best edition. Skeat's _Oxford Chaucer_ in one volume has the same
text. The _Globe Edition of Chaucer_, edited by Pollard, is also a
satisfactory single volume edition. Root's _The Poetry of Chaucer_,
292 pp., is a good reference work in connection with the actual study
of the poetry.
Give a clear-cut description of the six of Chaucer's pilgrims that
impress you most strongly. How has the _Prologue_ added to our
knowledge of life in the fourteenth century? Give examples of
Chaucer's vivid pictures. What specimens of his humor does the
_Prologue_ contain? Do any of Chaucer's lines in the _Prologue_ show
that the Reformation spirit was in the air, or did Wycliffe and
Langland alone among contemporary authors afford evidence of this
spirit? Compare Chaucer's verse with Langland's in point of subject
matter. What qualities in Chaucer save him from the charge of cynicism
when he alludes to human faults? Does the _Prologue_ attempt to
portray any of the nobler sides of human nature? Is the _Prologue_
mainly or entirely concerned with the personality of the pilgrims? Has
Chaucer any philosophy of life? Are there any references to the
delights of nature? Note any passages that show special powers of
melody and mastery over verse. Does the poem reveal anything of
Chaucer's personality? In your future reading see if you can find
another English story-teller in verse who can be classed with Chaucer.
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER II:
[Footnote 1: _The Tempest_, V., I.]
[Footnote 2: For the location of all the English cathedral towns, see
the _Literary Map_, p. XII.]
[Footnote 3: and.]
[Footnote 4: April.]
[Footnote 5: little.]
[Footnote 6: in her language.]
[Footnote 7: Spring.]
[Footnote 8: in its turn.]
[Footnote 9: birds.]
[Footnote 10: song.]
[Footnote 11: sigh.]
[Footnote 12: sorely.]
[Footnote 13: called.]
[Footnote 14: against.]
[Footnote 15: will.]
[Footnote 16: them.]
[Footnote 17: arrayed.]
[Footnote 18: garments.]
[Footnote 19: shepherd.]
[Footnote 20: hermit.]
[Footnote 21: hills.]
[Footnote 22: wonder.]
[Footnote 23: tired out with wandering.]
[Footnote 24: brook.]
[Footnote 25: reclined.]
[Footnote 26: sounded.]
[Footnote 27: to make dykes or ditches.]
[Footnote 28: to dig.]
[Footnote 29: to thrash (ding).]
[Footnote 30: sheaves.]
[Footnote 31: dazed.]
[Footnote 32: hermit.]
[Footnote 33: _The Prologue_, Lines 331-335.]
[Footnote 34: The cuts of the Pilgrims are from the Fourteenth Century
Ellesmere MS. of _Canterbury Tales_.]
[Footnotes 35-36: _Knightes Tale_.]
[Footnote 37: _Truth: Balade de bon Conseyl_.]
[Footnote 38: black.]
[Footnote 39: _The Parlement of Foules_.]
[Footnote 40: For full titles, see p. 50.]
[Footnote 41: For full titles, see p. 6.]
CHAPTER III: FROM CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400, TO THE ACCESSION OF
ELIZABETH, 1558
The Course of English History.--The century and a half that followed
the death of Chaucer appealed especially to Shakespeare. He wrote or
helped to edit five plays that deal with this period,--_Henry IV.,
Henry V., Henry VI., Richard III._, and _Henry VIII_. While these
plays do not give an absolutely accurate presentation of the history
of the time, they show rare sympathy in catching the spirit of the
age, and they leave many unusually vivid impressions.
Henry IV. (1399-1413), a descendant of John of Gaunt, Duke of
Lancaster, one of the younger sons of Edward III., and therefore not
in the direct line of succession, was the first English king who owed
his crown entirely to Parliament. Henry's reign was disturbed by the
revolt of nobles and by contests with the Welsh. Shakespeare gives a
pathetic picture of the king calling in vain for sleep, "nature's
tired nurse," and exclaiming:--
"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."
Henry V. (1413-1422) is one of Shakespeare's romantic characters. The
young king renewed the French war, which had broken out in 1337 and
which later became known as the Hundred Years' War. By his victory
over the French at Agincourt (1415), he made himself a national hero.
Shakespeare has him say:--
"I thought upon one pair of English legs
Did march three Frenchmen."
In the reign of Henry VI. (1422-1461), Joan of Arc appeared and saved
France.
The setting aside of the direct succession in the case of Henry IV.
was a pretext for the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) to settle the
royal claims of different descendants of Edward III. While this war
did not greatly disturb the common people, it occupied the attention
of those who might have been patrons of literature. Nearly all the
nobles were killed during this prolonged contest; hence when Henry
VII. (1485-1509), the first of the Tudor line of monarchs, came to the
throne, there were no powerful nobles with their retainers to hold the
king in check. He gave a strong centralized government to England.
The period following Chaucer's death opens with religious persecution.
In 1401 the first Englishman was burned at the stake for his religious
faith. From this time the expenses of burning heretics are sometimes
found in the regular accounts of cities and boroughs. Henry VIII.
(1509-1547) broke with the Pope, dissolved the monasteries, proclaimed
himself head of the church, and allowed the laity to read the _Bible_,
but insisted on retaining many of the old beliefs. In Germany, Martin
Luther (1483-1546) was in the same age issuing his famous protests
against religious abuses. Edward VI. (1547-1553) espoused the
Protestant cause. An order was given to introduce into all the
churches an English prayer book, which was not very different from
that in use to-day in the Episcopal churches. Mary (1553-1558) sought
the aid of fagots and the stake to bring the nation back to the old
beliefs.
[Illustration: HENRY VIII. GIVING BIBLES TO CLERGY AND LAITY. _From
frontispiece to Coverdale Bible_.]
While this period did not produce a single great poet or a statesman
of the first rank, it witnessed the destruction of the majority of the
nobility in the Wars of the Roses, the increase of the king's power,
the decline of feudalism, the final overthrow of the knight by the
yeoman with his long bow at Agincourt(1415), the freedom of the serf,
and the growth of manufactures, especially of wool. English trading
vessels began to displace even the ships of Venice.
In spite of the religious persecution with which the period began and
ended, there was a remarkable change in religious belief, the
dissolution of the monasteries and the subordination of church to
state being striking evidences of this change. An event that had
far-reaching consequences on literature and life was the act of Henry
VIII. in ordering a translation of the _Bible_ to be placed in every
parish church in England. The death of Mary may in a measure be said
to indicate the beginning of modern times.
Contrast between the Spirit of the Renaissance and of the Middle
Ages.--One of the most important intellectual movements of the world
is known as the Renaissance or Revival of Learning. This movement
began in Italy about the middle of the fourteenth century and spread
slowly westward. While Chaucer's travels in Italy; and his early
contact with this new influence are reflected in his work, yet the
Renaissance did not reach its zenith in England until the time of
Shakespeare. This new epoch followed a long period, known as the
Middle ages, when learning was mostly confined to the church, when
thousands of the best minds retired to the cloisters, when many
questions, like those of the revolution of the sun around the earth or
the cause of disease, were determined, not by observation and
scientific proof, but by the assertion of those in spiritual
authority. Then, scientific investigators, like Roger Bacon, were
thought to be in league with the devil and were thrown into prison. In
1258 Dante's tutor visited Roger Bacon, and, after seeing his
experiments with the mariner's compass, wrote to an Italian friend:--
"This discovery so useful to all who travel by sea, must remain
concealed until other times, because no mariner dare use it, lest he
fall under imputation of being a magician, nor would sailors put to
sea with one who carried an instrument so evidently constructed by
the devil."
Symonds says: "During the Middle Ages, man had lived enveloped in a
cowl. He had not seen the beauty of the world, or had seen it only to
cross himself and turn aside, to tell his beads and pray." Before the
Renaissance, the tendency was to regard with contempt mere questions
of earthly progress and enjoyment, because they were considered
unimportant in comparison with the eternal future of the soul. It was
not believed that beauty, art, and literature might play a part in
saving souls.
The Schoolmen of the Middle Ages often discussed such subjects as
these: whether the finite can comprehend the infinite at any point,
since the infinite can have no finite points; whether God can make a
wheel revolve and be stationary at the same time; whether all children
in a state of innocence are masculine. Such debates made remarkable
theologians and metaphysicians, developed precision in defining terms,
accuracy in applying the rules of deductive logic, and fluency in
expression. As a result, later scientists were able to reason more
accurately and express themselves with greater facility.
The chief fault of the studies of the Middle Ages consisted in
neglecting the external world of concrete fact. The discussions of the
Schoolmen would never have introduced printing or invented the
mariner's compass or developed any of the sciences that have
revolutionized life.
The coming of the Renaissance opened avenues of learning outside of
the church, interested men in manifold questions relating to this
world, caused a demand for scientific investigation and proof, and
made increasing numbers seek for joy in this life as well as in that
to come.
Causes and Effects of the Renaissance.--Some of the causes of this
new movement were the weariness of human beings with their lack of
progress, their dissatisfaction with the low estimate of the value of
this life, and their yearning for fuller expansion of the soul, for
more knowledge and joy on this side of the grave.
Another cause was the influence of Greek literature newly discovered
in the fifteenth century by the western world. In 1423 an Italian
scholar brought 238 Greek manuscripts to Italy. In 1453 the Turks
captured Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and
the headquarters of Grecian learning. Because of the remoteness of
this capital, English literature had not been greatly influenced by
Greece. When Constantinople fell, many of her scholars went to Italy,
taking with them precious Grecian manuscripts. As Englishmen often
visited Italy, they soon began to study Grecian masterpieces, and to
fall under the spell of Homer and the Athenian dramatists.
The renewed study of Greek and Latin classics stimulated a longing for
the beautiful in art and literature. Fourteenth-century Italian
writers, like Petrarch and Boccaccio, found increasing interest in
their work. Sixteenth-century artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci,
Michael Angelo, and Raphael show their magnificent response to a world
that had already been born again.
Many of the other so-called causes of the Renaissance should strictly
be considered its effects. The application of the modern theory of the
solar system, the desire for exploration, the use of the mariner's
compass, the invention and spread of printing, were more effects of
the new movement than its causes.
Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), inspired by the spirit of the
Renaissance, wrote in Latin a remarkable book called _Utopia_ (1516),
which presents many new social ideals. In the land of Utopia, society
does not make criminals and then punish them for crime. Every one
worships as he pleases. Only a few hours of work a day are necessary,
and all find genuine pleasure in that. In Utopia life is given to be a
joy. No advantage is taken of the weak or the unfortunate.
Twentieth-century dreams of social justice are not more vivid and
absorbing than Sir Thomas More's. It is pleasant to think that the
Roman Catholic church in 1886 added to her list of saints this lovable
man, "martyr to faith and freedom."
When the full influences of the Renaissance reached England,
Shakespeare answered their call, and his own creations surpass the
children of Utopia.
The Invention of Printing.--In 1344, about the time of Chaucer's
birth, a _Bible_ in manuscript cost as much as three oxen. A century
later an amount equal to the wages of a workman for 266 days was paid
for a manuscript _Bible_. At this time a book on astronomy cost as
much as 800 pounds of butter. One page of a manuscript book cost the
equivalent of from a dollar to a dollar and a half to-day. When a
member of the Medici family in Florence desired a library, he sent for
a book contractor, who secured forty-five copyists. By rigorous work
for nearly two years they produced two hundred volumes.
[Illustration: BOOK ILLUSTRATION, EARLY FIFTEENTH CENTURY. _British
Museum_.]
One of the most powerful agencies of the Renaissance was the invention
of printing, which multiplied books indefinitely and made them
comparatively cheap. People were alive with newly awakened curiosity,
and they read books to learn more of the expanding world.
About 1477 William Caxton, who had set up his press at the Almonry,
near Westminster Abbey, printed the first book in England, _The Dictes
and Notable Wish Sayings of the Philosophers_. Among fully a hundred
different volumes that he printed were Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_,
Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, and an English translation of Vergil's
_AEneid_.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF CAXTON'S ADVERTISEMENT OF HIS BOOKS._
Bodleian Library, Oxford._]
Malory's Morte d'Arthur.--The greatest prose work of the fifteenth
century was completed in 1470 by a man who styles himself Sir Thomas
Malory, Knight. We know nothing of the author's life; but he has left
as a monument a great prose epic of the deeds of King Arthur and his
Knights of the Round Table. From the various French legends concerning
King Arthur, Malory selected his materials and fashioned than into the
completest Arthuriad that we possess. While his work cannot be called
original, he displayed rare artistic power in arranging, abridging,
and selecting the various parts from different French works.
Malory's prose is remarkably simple and direct. Even in the impressive
scene where Sir Bedivere throws the dying King Arthur's sword into the
sea, the language tells the story simply and shows no straining after
effect:--
"And then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might,
and there came an arm and an hand above the water, and met it, and
caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished
away the hand with the sword in the water... 'Now put me into
the barge,' said the king; and so he did softly. And there received
him three queens with great mourning, and so they set him down, and
in one of their laps King Arthur laid his head, and then that queen
said, 'Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me?'"
After the dusky barge has borne Arthur away from mortal sight, Malory
writes: "Here in this world he changed his life." A century before,
Chaucer had with equal simplicity voiced the Saxon faith:--
"His spirit chaunged hous."[1]
Sometimes this prose narrative, in its condensation and expression of
feeling, shows something of the poetic spirit. When the damsel on the
white palfrey sees that her knightly lover has been killed, she
cries:--
"O Balin! two bodies
hast thou slain and one
heart, and two hearts in
one body, and two souls
thou hast lost.' And
therewith she took the
sword from her love that
lay dead, and as she took
it, she fell to the ground
in a swoon."
[Illustration: MALORY'S MORTE D'ARTHUR. _From De Worde's Ed.,
1529_.]
Malory's work, rather than Layamon's _Brut_, has been the storehouse
to which later poets have turned. Many nineteenth-century poets are
indebted to Malory. Tennyson's _Idylls of the King_, Matthew Arnold's
_Death of Tristram_, Swinburne's _Tristram of Lyonesse_, and William
Morris's _Defense of Guinevere_ were inspired by the _Morte d'Arthur_.
Few English prose works have had more influence on the poetry of the
Victorian age.
Scottish Poetry.--The best poetry of the fifteenth century was
written in the Northern dialect, which was spoken north of the river
Humber. This language was just as much English as the Midland tongue
in which Chaucer wrote. Not until the sixteenth century was this
dialect called Scotch.
James I. of Scotland (1406-1437) spent nineteen years of his youth
as a prisoner in England. During his captivity in Windsor Castle, he
fell in love with a maiden, seen at her orisons in the garden, and
wrote a poem, called the _King's Quair_, to tell the story of his
love. Although the _King's Quair_ is suggestive of _The Knightes
Tale_, and indeed owes much to Chaucer, it is a poetic record of
genuine and successful love. These four lines from the spring song
show real feeling for nature:--
"Worshippe, ye that lovers be, this May,
For of your bliss the kalends are begun,
And sing with us, 'Away, Winter, away,
Come, Summer, come, the sweet season and sun!'"
Much of this Scotch poetry is remarkable for showing in that early age
a genuine love of nature. Changes are not rung on some typical
landscape, copied from an Italian versifier. The Northern poet had his
eye fixed on the scenery and the sky of Scotland. About the middle of
the century, Robert Henryson, a teacher in Dunfermline, wrote.--
"The northin wind had purifyit the air
And sched the misty cloudis fra the sky."[2]
This may lack the magic of Shelley's rhythm, but the feeling for
nature is as genuine as in the later poet's lines:--
"For after the rain when, with never a stain
The pavilion of heaven is bare."[3]
William Dunbar, the greatest poet of this group, who lived in the
last half of the fifteenth century, was a loving student of the nature
that greeted him in his northland. No Italian poet, as he wandered
beside a brook, would have thought of a simile like this:--
"The stonés clear as stars in frosty night."[4]
Dunbar takes us with him on a fresh spring morning, where--
"Enamelled was the field with all coloúrs,
The pearly droppés shook in silver showers,"[5]
where we can hear the matin song of the birds hopping among the buds,
while--
"Up rose the lark, the heaven's minstrel fine."[6]
Both Dunbar and Gawain Douglas (1474?-1522), the son of a Scotch
nobleman, had keen eyes for all coloring in sky, leaf, and flower. In
one line Dunbar calls our attention to these varied patches of color
in a Scotch garden: "purple, azure, gold, and gulés [red]." In the
verses of Douglas we see the purple streaks of the morning, the
bluish-gray, blood-red, fawn-yellow, golden, and freckled red and
white flowers, and--
"Some watery-hued, as the blue wavy sea."[7]
Outside the pages of Shakespeare, we shall for the next two hundred
years look in vain for so genuine a love of scenery and natural
phenomena as we find in fifteenth-century Scottish poetry. These poets
obtained many of their images of nature at first hand, an achievement
rare in any age.
[Illustration: EARLY TITLE PAGE OF ROBIN HOOD.]
"Songs for Man or Woman, of All Sizes."--When Shakespeare shows us
Autolycus offering such songs at a rustic festival,[8] the great poet
emphasizes the fondness for the ballad which had for a long time been
developing a taste for poetry. While it is difficult to assign exact
dates to the composition of many ballads, we know that they flourished
in the fifteenth century. They were then as much prized as the novel
is now, and like it they had a story to tell. The verse was often
halting, but it succeeded in conveying to the hearer tales of love, of
adventure, and of mystery. These ballads were sometimes tinged with
pathos; but there was an energy in the rude lines that made the heart
beat faster and often stirred listeners to find in a dance an outlet
for their emotions. Even now, with all the poetry of centuries from
which to choose, it is refreshing to turn to a Robin Hood ballad and
look upon the greensward, hear the rustle of the leaves in Nottingham
forest, and follow the adventures of the hero. We read the opening
lines:--
"There are twelve months in all the year,
As I hear many say,
But the merriest month in all the year
Is the merry month of May."
"Now Robin Hood is to Nottingham gone,
With a link a down, and a day,
And there he met a silly old woman
Was weeping on the way."
Of our own accord we finish the ballad to see whether Robin Hood
rescued her sons, who were condemned to death for shooting the fallow
deer. The ballad of the _Nut-Brown Maid_ has some touches that are
almost Shakespearean.
Some of the carols of the fifteenth century give a foretaste of the
Elizabethan song. One carol on the birth of the Christ-child contains
stanzas like these, which show artistic workmanship, imaginative
power, and, above all, rare lyrical beauty:--
"He cam also stylle
to his moderes bowr,
As dew in Aprille
that Fallyt on the flour."
"He cam also stylle
ther his moder lay,
As dew in Aprille
that fallyt on the spray"[9]
We saw that the English tongue during its period of exclusion from the
Norman court gained strength from coming in such close contact with
life. Although the higher types of poetry were for the most part
wanting during the fifteenth century, yet the ballads multiplied and
sang their songs to the ear of life. Critics may say that the rude
stanzas seldom soar far from the ground, but we are again reminded of
the invincible strength of Antaeus so long as he kept close to his
mother earth. English poetry is so great because it has not withdrawn
from life, because it was nurtured in such a cradle. When Shakespeare
wrote his plays, he found an audience to understand and to appreciate
them. Not only those who occupied the boxes, but also those who stood
in the pit, listened intelligently to his dramatic stories. The ballad
had played its part in teaching the humblest home to love poetry.
These rude fireside songs were no mean factors in preparing the nation
to welcome Shakespeare.
William Tyndale, 1490?-1536.--The Reformation was another mighty
influence, working side by side with all the other forces to effect a
lasting change in English history and literature. In the early part of
the sixteenth century, Martin Luther was electrifying Germany with his
demands for church reformation. In order to decide which religious
party was in the right, there arose a desire for more knowledge of the
_Scriptures_. The language had changed much since Wycliffe's
translation of the _Bible_, and, besides, this was accessible only in
manuscript. William Tyndale, a clergyman and an excellent linguist,
who had been educated at both Oxford and Cambridge, conceived the idea
of giving the English people the Bible in their own tongue. As he
found that he could not translate and print the Bible with safety in
England, he went to the continent, where with the help of friends he
made the translation and had it printed. He was forced to move
frequently from place to place, and was finally betrayed in his hiding
place near Brussels. After eighteen months' imprisonment without pen
or books, he was strangled and his body was burned at the stake.
Of his translation, Brooke says: "It was this _Bible_ which, revised
by Coverdale, and edited and reëdited as _Cromwell's Bible_, 1539, and
again as _Cranmer's Bible_, 1540, was set up in every parish church in
England. It got north into Scotland and made the Lowland English more
like the London English. It passed over into the Protestant
settlements in Ireland. After its revival in 1611 it went with the
Puritan Fathers to New England and fixed the standard of English in
America. Many millions of people now speak the English of Tyndale's
_Bible_, and there is no other book which has had, through the
_Authorized Version_, so great an influence on the style of English
literature and on the standard of English prose."
[Illustration: WILLIAM TYNDALE. _From an old print_.]
The following verses from Tyndale's version show its simplicity
directness, and similarity to the present version:--
"Jesus sayde unto her, Thy brother shall ryse agayne.
"Martha sayde unto hym, I knowe wele, he shall ryse agayne in the
resurreccion att the last day.
"Jesus sayde unto her, I am the resurreccion and lyfe; whosoever
beleveth on me, ye, though he were deed, yet shall he lyve."
Italian Influence: Wyatt and Surrey.--During the reign of Henry
VIII. (1509-1547), the influence of Italian poetry made itself
distinctly felt. The roots of Elizabethan poetry were watered by many
fountains, one of the chief of which flowed from Italian soil. To Sir
Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and to the Earl of Surrey (1517-1547) belongs
the credit of introducing from Italian sources new influences, which
helped to remodel English poetry and give it a distinctly modern cast.
These poets were the first to introduce the sonnet, which Shakespeare,
Milton, and Wordsworth employed with such power in after times. Blank
verse was first used in England by the Earl of Surrey, who translated
a portion of Vergil's _AEneid_ into that measure. When Shakespeare
took up his pen, he found that vehicle of poetic expression ready for
his use.
[Illustration: SIR THOMAS WYATT._After Holbein_.]
Wyatt and Surrey adopted Italian subject matter as well as form. They
introduced the poetry of the amorists, that is, verse which tells of
the woes and joys of a lover. We find Shakespeare in his _Sonnets_
turning to this subject, which he made as broad and deep as life. In
1557, the year before Elizabeth's accession, the poems of Wyatt and
Surrey appeared in Tottel's _Miscellany_, one of the earliest printed
collections of modern English poetry.
SUMMARY
The first part of the century and a half following the death of
Chaucer saw war with France and the Wars of the Roses, in which most
of the nobles were killed. The reign of Henry VII. and his successors
in the Tudor line shows the increased influence of the crown, freed
from the restraint of the powerful lords. The period witnessed the
passing of serfdom and the extension of trade and manufactures.
The changes in religious views were far-reaching. Henry VIII.
superseded the Pope as head of the English church, dissolved the
monasteries, and placed an English translation of the _Bible_ in the
churches. Henry's son and successor Edward VI., established the
Protestant form of worship, but his half-sister Mary used persecution
in an endeavor to bring back the old faith.
The influences of the Renaissance, moving westward from Italy, were
tending toward their culmination in the next period. The study of
Greek literature, the discovery of the new world, the decline of
feudalism, the overthrow of the armed knight, the extension of the use
of gunpowder, the invention of printing, the increased love of
learning, the demand for scientific investigation, the decline of
monastic influence, shown in the new interest in this finite world and
life,--all figured as causes or effects of the new influence.
The most important prose works are Sir Thomas Malory's _Morte
d'Arthur_, a masterly retelling of the Arthurian legends; Sir Thomas
More's _Utopia_, a magnificent Renaissance dream of a new social
world; and Tyndale's translation of the _Bible_. The best poetry was
written in Scotland, and this verse anticipates in some measure that
love of nature which is a dominant characteristic of the last part of
the eighteenth century. The age is noted for its ballads, which aided
in developing among high and low a liking for poetry. At the close of
the period, we find Italian influences at work, as may be seen in the
verse of Wyatt and Surrey.
REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
HISTORICAL
An account of the history of this period may be found in either
Gardiner,[10] Green, Lingard, Walker, or Cheney. Vols. IV. and V. of
_The Political History of England_, edited by Hunt (Longmans), gives
the history in greater detail. For the social side, consult Traill's
_Social England_, Vols. II. and III., also Cheney's _Industrial and
Social History of England_, Field's _Introduction to the Study of the
Renaissance_, Einstein's _The Italian Renaissance in England_,
Symonds's _A Short History of the Renaissance_.
LITERARY
_The Cambridge History of English Literature_, Vol. II.
Snell's _The Age of Transition_, 1400-1580.
Morley's _English Literature_, Vols. VI. and VII.
Minto's _Characteristics of English Poets_, pp. 69-130.
Saintsbury's _Short History of English Literature_, pp. 157-218.
_Dictionary of National Biography_, articles on _Malory, Caxton,
Henryson, Gawain Douglas, Dunbar, Tyndale, Wyatt_, and _Surrey_.
Veitch's _The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry_.
Percy's _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_.
Gummere's _Old English Ballads_.
Child's _The English and Scotch Popular Ballads_.
Collins's _Greek Influence on English Poetry_.
Tucker's _The Foreign Debt of English Literature_.
SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Malory.--Craik,[11] _Century_, 19-33; Swiggett's _Selections from
Malory_; Wragg's _Selections from Malory_,--all contain good
selections. The Globe Edition is an inexpensive single volume
containing the complete text. The best edition is a reproduction of
the original in three volumes with introductions by Oscar Sommer and
Andrew Lang (London: David Nutt). Howard Pyle has retold Malory's best
stories in simple form (Scribner).
Compare the death (or passing) of Arthur in Malory with Tennyson's
_The Passing of Arthur._ What special dualities do you notice in the
manner of Malory's telling a story? Is his work original? Why has it
remained so popular? What age specially shows its influence?
More.--The English translation of the _Utopia_ may be found entire
in _Everyman's Library_ (35¢). There are good selections in Craik, I.,
162-167.
What is the etymological meaning of _Utopia_? What is its modern
significance? Did More really give a new word to literature and
speech? The _Utopia_ should be read for an indication of the influence
of the Renaissance and for comparison with twentieth-century ideas of
social improvement.
Tyndale.--Bosworth and Waring's _Gospels_, containing the
Anglo-Saxon, Wycliffe, and Tyndale versions. Specimens of Tyndale's
prose are given in Chambers, I., 130; Craik, I., 185-187.
Why is Tyndale's translation of the _Bible_ important to the student
of literature? What are some special dualities of this translation?
Early Scottish Poetry.--Selections from fifteenth-century Scottish
poetry may be found in Bronson, I, 170-197; Ward, I, _passim_; P. &
S., 246-277; _Oxford_, 16-33.
From the _King's Quair_ and the poems of Henryson, Dunbar, and Gawain
Douglas, select passages that show first-hand intimacy with nature.
Compare these with lines from any poet whose knowledge of nature seems
to you to be acquired from books.
Ballads.--Ward. I., _passim_, contains among others three excellent
ballads,--_Sir Patrick Spens, The Twa Corbies, Robin Hood Rescuing the
Widow's Three Sons_. Bronson, I., 203-254; P. & S., 282-301; _Oxford_,
33-51; and Maynard's _English Classics_, No. 96, _Early English
Ballads_ also have good selections. The best collection is Child's
_The English and Scotch Popular Ballads_, 5 vols.
What are the chief characteristics of the old ballads? Why do they
interest us today? Which of those indicated for reading has proved
most interesting? What influence impossible for other forms of
literature, was exerted by the ballad? What did Autolycus mean
(_Winter's Tale_, IV., 4) when he offered "songs for man or woman, of
all sizes"? Have any ballads been written in recent times?
Wyatt and Surrey.--Read two characteristic love sonnets by Wyatt and
Surrey, P. & S., 313-319; Ward, I., 251, 257; Bronson, II., 1-4. A
specimen of the first English blank verse employed by Surrey in
translating Vergil's, _AEneid_ is given in Bronson, II., 4, 5; in P. &
S., 322, 323; and Chambers, I., 162.
Why are Wyatt and Surrey called amourists? What contributions did they
make to the form of English verse? What foreign influences did they
help to usher in?
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER III:
[Footnote 1: _Knightes Tale_.]
[Footnote 2: _Testament of Cresseid_.]
[Footnote 3: _The Cloud_.]
[Footnotes 4-6: _The Golden Targe_.]
[Footnote 7: _Prologue to AEneid_, Book XII.]
[Footnote 8: _The Winter's Tale_, IV., 4.]
[Footnote 9: Wright's _Songs and Carols of the Fifteenth Century_, p.
30.]
[Footnote 10: For full titles, see p. 50.]
[Footnote 11: For full titles, see p. 6.]
CHAPTER IV: THE AGE OF ELIZABETH, 1558-1603
The Reign of Elizabeth.--Queen Elizabeth, who ranks among the
greatest of the world's rulers, was the daughter of Henry VIII. and
his second wife Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth reigned as queen of England
from 1558 until her death in 1603. The remarkable allowances which she
made for difference of opinion showed that she felt the spirit of the
Renaissance. She loved England, and her most important acts were
guided, not by selfish personal motives, but by a strong desire to
make England a great nation.
She had a law passed restoring the supremacy of the monarch, "as well
in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things as temporal." The prayer
book of Edward VI. was again introduced and the mass was forbidden.
She was broad enough not to inquire too closely into the private
religious opinions of her subjects, so long as they went to the
established church. For each absence they were fined a shilling. Next
to churchgoing and her country, she loved and encouraged plays.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF ELIZABETH'S SIGNATURE TO A LICENSE
FOR THE EARL OF LEICESTER'S COMPANY OF PLAYERS, 1574.]
For more than twenty years she was worried by fear that either France
or Spain would put her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, on the
English throne. With masterly diplomacy, Elizabeth for a long time
managed to retain the active friendship of at least one of these great
powers, in order to restrain the other from interfering. She had kept
Mary a prisoner for nineteen years, fearing to liberate her. At last
an active conspiracy was discovered to assassinate Elizabeth and put
Mary on the throne. Elizabeth accordingly had her cousin beheaded in
1587. Spain thereupon prepared her fleet, the Invincible Armada, to
attack England. When this became known, the outburst of patriotic
feeling was so intense among all classes in England that the queen did
not hesitate to put Lord Howard, a Catholic, in command of the English
fleet. The Armada was utterly defeated, and England was free to enter
on her glorious period of influencing the thought and action of the
world.
In brief, Elizabeth's reign was remarkable for the rise of the middle
classes, for the growth of manufactures, for the appearance of English
ships in almost all parts of the world, for the extension of commerce,
for greater freedom of thought and action, for what the world now
calls Elizabethan literature, and for the ascendancy of a great mental
and moral movement to which we must next call attention.
Culmination of the Renaissance and the Reformation.--We have seen
that the Renaissance began in Italy in the fourteenth century and
influenced the work of Chaucer. In the same century, Wycliffe's
influence helped the cause of the Reformation. Elizabethan England
alone had the good fortune to experience the culmination of these two
movements at one and the same time. At no other period and in no other
country have two forces, like the Renaissance and the Reformation,
combined at the height of their ascendancy to stimulate the human
mind. One result of these two mighty influences was the work of
William Shakespeare, which speaks to the ear of all time.
The Renaissance, having opened the gates of knowledge, inspired the
Elizabethans with the hope of learning every secret of nature and of
surmounting all difficulties. The Reformation gave man new freedom,
imposed on him the gravest individual responsibilities, made him
realize the importance of every act of his own will, and emphasized
afresh the idea of the stewardship of this present life, for which he
would be held accountable. In Elizabethan days, these two forces
coöperated; in the following Puritan age they were at war.
Some Characteristics of Elizabethan Life.--It became an ambition to
have as many different experiences as possible, to search for that
variety craved by youth and by a youthful age. Sir Walter Raleigh was
a courtier, a writer, a warden of the tin mines, a vice admiral, a
captain of the guard, a colonizer, a country gentleman, and a pirate.
Sir Philip Sidney, who died at the age of thirty-two, was an envoy to
a foreign court, a writer of romances, an officer in the army, a poet
and a courtier. Shakespeare left the little town where he was born, to
plunge into the more complex life of London. The poet, Edmund Spenser,
went to turbulent Ireland, where he had enough experiences to suggest
the conflicts in the _Faerie Queene_.
The greater freedom and initiative of the individual and the
remarkable extension of trade with all parts of the world naturally
led to the rise of the middle class. The nobility were no longer the
sole leaders in England's rapid progress. Many of Elizabeth's
councilors were said to have sprung from the masses, but no reign
could boast of wiser ministers. It was then customary for the various
classes to mingle much more freely than they do now. There was absence
of that overspecialization which today keeps people in such sharply
separated groups. This mingling was further aided by the tendency to
try many different pursuits and by the spirit of patriotism in the
air. All classes were interested in repelling the Spanish Armada and
in maintaining England's freedom. It was fortunate for Shakespeare
that the Elizabethan age gave him unusual opportunity to meet and to
become the spokesman of all classes of men. The audience that stood in
the pit or sat in the boxes to witness the performance of his plays,
comprised not only lords and wealthy merchants, but also weavers,
sailors, and country folk.
Initiative and Love of Action.--The Elizabethans were distinguished
for their initiative. This term implies the possession of two
qualities: (1) ingenuity or fertility in ideas, and (2) ability to
pass at once from an idea to its suggested action. Never did action
habitually follow more quickly on the heels of thought. The age loved
to translate everything into action, because the spirit of the
Renaissance demanded the exercise of youthful activity to its fullest
capacity in order that the power which the new knowledge promised
could be acquired and enjoyed before death. As the Elizabethans felt
that real life meant activity in exploring a new and interesting
world, both physical and mental, they demanded that their literature
should present this life of action. Hence, all their greatest poets,
with the exception of Spenser, were dramatists. Even Spenser's _Faerie
Queene_, with its abstractions, is a poem of action, for the virtues
fight with the vices.
ELIZABETHAN PROSE LITERATURE
Variety in the Prose.--The imaginative spirit of the Elizabethans
craved poetry, and all the greatest authors of this age, with the
exception of Francis Bacon, were poets. If, however, an Elizabethan
had been so peculiarly constituted as to wish to stock his library
with contemporary prose only, he could have secured good works in many
different fields. He could, for instance, have obtained (1) an
excellent book on education, the _Scholemaster_ of Roger Ascham
(1515-1568); (2) interesting volumes of travel, such as the
_Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation_, by
Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616); and _The Discovery of Guiana_, by Sir
Walter Raleigh (1552-1618); (3) history, in the important _Chronicles
of England, Ireland, and Scotland_ (1578), by Raphael Holinshed; the
_Chronicle (Annals of England)_ and _Survey of London_, by John Stow
(1525-1604); and the _Brittania_, by William Camden (1551-1623); (4)
biography, in the excellent translation of _Plutarch's Lives_, by Sir
Thomas North (1535-1601?); (5) criticism, in _The Apologie for
Poetrie_, by Sir Philip Sidney; (6) essays on varied subjects by
Francis Bacon; (7) works dealing with religion and faith: (_a_) John
Foxe's (1516-1587) _Book of Martyrs_, which told in simple prose
thrilling stories of martyrs and served as a textbook of the
Reformation; (_b_) Hooker's _Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity_, a
treatise on theology; (8) fiction,[1] in John Lyly's _Euphues_ (1579),
Robert Greene's _Pandosto_ (1588), Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcardia_
(1590), Thomas Lodge's _Rosalynde_ (1590), Nashe's _The Unfortunate
Traveler_ (1594), and Thomas Deloney's _The Gentle Craft_ (1597).[2]
Shakespeare read Holinshed, North, Greene, Sidney, and Lodge and
turned some of their suggestions into poetry, which we very much
prefer to their prose. We are nearly certain that Shakespeare studied
Lyly's _Euphues_, because we can trace the influence of that work in
his style.
It was the misfortune of Elizabethan prose to be almost completely
overshadowed by the poetry. This prose was, however, far more varied
and important than that of any preceding age. The books mentioned on
page 123 constitute only a small part of the prose of this period.
Lyly, Sidney, Hooker.--In 1579, when Shakespeare was fifteen years
old, there appeared the first part of an influential prose work, John
Lyly's (1554?-1606) _Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit_, followed in 1580 by
a second part, _Euphues and his England_. Much of Lyly's subject
matter is borrowed, and his form reflects the artificial style then
popular over Europe.
Euphues, a young Athenian, goes to Naples, where he falls in love and
is jilted. This is all the action in the first part of the so-called
story. The rest is moralizing. In the second part, Euphues comes to
England with a friend, who falls in love twice, and finally marries;
but again there is more moralizing than story. Euphues returns to
Athens and retires to the mountains to muse in solitude.
In its use of a love story, _Euphues_ prefigures the modern novel. In
_Euphues_, however, the love story serves chiefly as a peg on which to
hang discussions on fickleness, youthful follies, friendship, and
divers other subjects.
Lyly aimed to produce artistic prose, which would render his meaning
clear and impressive. To achieve this object, he made such excessive
use of contrast, balanced words and phrases, and far-fetched
comparisons, that his style seems highly artificial and affected. This
quotation is typical:--
"Achilles spear could as well heal as hurt, the scorpion though he
sting, yet he stints the pain, through the herb _Nerius_ poison the
sheep, yet is a remedy to man against poison... There is great
difference between the standing puddle and the running stream, yet
both water: great odds between the adamant and the pomice, yet both
stones, a great distinction to be put between _vitrum_ and the
crystal, yet both glass: great contrariety between Lais and
Lucretia, yet both women."
Although this selection shows unnatural or strained antithesis, there
is also evident a commendable desire to vary the diction and to avoid
the repetition of the same word. To find four different terms for
nearly the same idea "difference," "odds," "distinction," and
"contrariety," involves considerable painstaking. While it is true
that the term "euphuism" has come to be applied to any stilted,
antithetical style that pays more attention to the manner of
expressing a thought than to its worth, we should remember that
English prose style has advanced because some writers, like Lyly,
emphasized the importance of artistic form. Shakespeare occasionally
employs euphuistic contrast in an effective way. The sententious
Polonius says in _Hamlet_:--
"Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice."
[Illustration: PHILIPPE SIDNEY. _After the miniature by Isaac
Oliver, Windsor Castle._]
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) wrote for his sister, the Countess of
Pembroke, a pastoral romance, entitled _Arcadia_ (published in 1590).
Unlike Lyly, Sidney did not aim at precision, emphatic contrast, and
balance. For its effectiveness, the _Arcadia_ relies on poetic
language and conceptions. The characters in the romance live and love
in a Utopian Arcadia, where "the morning did strow Roses and Violets
in the heavenly floor against the coming of the Sun," and where the
shepherd boy pipes "as though he should never be old."
Passages like the following show Sidney's poetic style and as much
exuberant fancy as if they had been written by a Celt:--
"Her breath is more sweet than a gentle southwest wind, which
comes creeping over flowery fields and shadowed waters in the
extreme heat of summer and yet is nothing compared to the
honey-flowing speech that breath doth carry."
The _Arcadia_ furnished Shakespeare's _King Lear_ with the auxiliary
plot of Gloucester and his two sons and inspired Thomas Lodge to write
his novel _Rosalynde_, which in turn suggested Shakespeare's _As You
Like It_.
To Sidney belongs the credit of having written the first meritorious
essay on criticism in the English language, _The Apologie for
Poetrie_. This defends the poetic art, and shows how necessary such
exercise of the imagination is to take us away from the cold, hard
facts of life.
Richard Hooker's (1554?-1600) _Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity_
shows a third aim in Elizabethan prose,--to express carefully reasoned
investigation and conclusion in English that is as thoroughly
elaborated and qualified as the thought. Lyly's striking contrasts and
Sidney's flowery prose do not appeal to Hooker, who uses Latin
inversions and parenthetical qualifications, and adds clause after
clause whenever he thinks it necessary to amplify the thought or to
guard against misunderstanding. Hooker's prose is as carefully wrought
as Lyly's and far more rhythmical. Both were experimenting with
English prose in different fields, serving to teach succeeding writers
what to imitate and to avoid.
Unlike _Euphues_ and the _Arcadia_, _Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity_ is more valuable for its thought than for its form of
expression. This work, which is still studied as an authority, is an
exposition of divine law in its relations to both the world and the
church. Hooker was personally a compound of sweetness and light, and
his philosophy is marked by sweet reasonableness. He was a clergyman
of the Church of England, but he shows a spirit of toleration toward
other churches. He had much of the modern idea of growth in both
government and religion, and he "accepts no system of government
either in church or state as unalterable."
FRANCIS BACON, 1561-1626
[Illustration: FRANCIS BACON. _From the painting by Van Somer,
National Portrait Gallery._]
Life.--A study of Bacon takes us beyond the limits of the reign of
Elizabeth, but not beyond the continued influences of that reign.
Francis Bacon, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great
Seal under Elizabeth, was born in London and grew up under the
influences of the court. In order to understand some of Bacon's
actions in later life, we must remember the influences that helped to
fashion him in his boyhood days. Those with whom he early associated
and who unconsciously molded him were not very scrupulous about the
way in which they secured the favor of the court or the means which
they took to outstrip an adversary. They also encouraged in him a
taste for expensive luxuries. These unfortunate influences were
intensified when, at the age of sixteen, he went with the English
ambassador to Paris, and remained there for two and a half years,
studying statecraft and diplomacy.
When Bacon was nineteen, his father died. The son, being without
money, returned from Paris and appealed to his uncle, Lord Burleigh,
one of Elizabeth's ministers, for some lucrative position at the
court. In a letter to his uncle, Bacon says: "I confess I have as vast
contemplative ends as I have moderate civil ends; for I have taken all
knowledge to be my province." This statement shows the Elizabethan
desire to master the entire world of the New Learning. Instead of
helping his nephew, however, Lord Burleigh seems to have done all in
his power to thwart him. Bacon thereupon studied law and was admitted
to the bar in 1582.
Bacon entered Parliament in 1584 and distinguished himself as a
speaker. Ben Jonson, the dramatist, says of him "There happened in my
time one noble speaker who was full of gravity in his speaking. No man
ever spoke more neatly, more presly, more weightily, or suffered less
emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. His hearers could not
cough or look aside from him without loss. The fear of every man that
heard him was lest he should make an end." This speaking was valuable
training for Bacon in writing the pithy sentences of his _Essays_. A
man who uses the long, involved sentences of Hooker can never become a
speaker to whom people will listen. The habit of directness and
simplicity, which Bacon formed in his speaking, remained with him
through Life.
Among the many charges against Bacon's personal code of ethics, two
stand out conspicuously. The Earl of Essex, who had given Bacon an
estate then worth £1800, was influential in having him appointed to
the staff of counselors to Queen Elizabeth. When Essex was accused of
treason, Bacon kept the queen's friendship by repudiating him and
taking an active part in the prosecution that led to the earl's
execution. After James I. had made Bacon Lord High Chancellor of
England, he was accused of receiving bribes as a judge. He replied
that he had accepted only the customary presents given to judges and
that these made no difference in his decisions. He was tried, found
guilty, fined £40,000, and sentenced to be imprisoned in the Tower
during the king's pleasure. After a few days, however, the king
released him, forgave the fine, and gave him an annual pension of
£1200.
The question whether he wrote Shakespeare's plays needs almost as much
discussion on the moral as on the intellectual side. James Spedding,
after studying Bacon's life and works for thirty years, said: "I see
no reason to suppose that Shakespeare did not write the plays. But if
somebody else did, then I think I am in a position to say that it was
not Lord Bacon."
After his release, Bacon passed the remaining five years of his life
in retirement,--studying and writing. His interest in observing
natural objects and experimenting with them was the cause of his
death. He was riding in a snowstorm when it occurred to him to test
snow as a preservative agent. He stopped at a house, procured a fowl,
and stuffed it with snow. He caught cold during this experiment and,
being improperly cared for, soon died.
The Essays.--The first ten of his _Essays_, his most popular work,
appeared in the year 1597. At the time of his death, he had increased
them to fifty-eight. They deal with a with range of subjects, from
_Studies_ and _Nobility_, On the one hand, to _Marriage and Single
Life_ and _Gardens_ on the other. The great critic Hallam say: "It
would be somewhat derogatory to a man of the slightest claim to polite
letters, were he unacquainted with the _Essays_ of Bacon. It is,
indeed, little worth while to read this or any other book for
reputation's, sake; but very few in our language so well repay the
pains, or afford more nourishment to the thoughts."
[Illustration: TITLE PAGE OF BACON'S ESSAYS, 1597.]
The following sentence from the essay _Of Studies_ will show some of
the characteristics of his way of presenting thought:--
"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing
an exact man: and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need
have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present
wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to
know that he doth not."
We may notice here (1) clearness, (2) conciseness, (3) breadth of
thought and observation.
A shrewd Scotchman says: "It may be said that to men wishing to rise
in the world by politic management of their fellowmen, Bacon's
_Essays_ are the best handbook hitherto published." In justification
of this criticism, we need only quote from the essay _Of
Negotiating_:--
"It is generally better to deal by speech than by letter... Letters
are good, when a man would draw an answer by letter back again, or
when it may serve, for a man's justification, afterwards to produce
his own letter, or where it may he danger to be interrupted or heard
by pieces. To deal in person is good, when a man's face breedeth
regard, as commonly with inferiors, or in tender cases, where a
man's eye upon the countenance of him with whom he speaketh may give
him a direction how far to go, and generally, where a man will
reserve to himself liberty either to disavow or to expound."
Scientific and Miscellaneous Works.--_The Advancement of Learning_
is another of Bacon's great works. The title aptly expresses the
purpose of the took. He insists on the necessity of close observation
of nature and of making experiments with various forms of matter. He
decries the habit of spinning things out of one's inner consciousness,
without patiently studying the outside world to see whether the facts
justify the conclusions. In other words, he insists on induction.
Bacon was not the father of the inductive principle, as is sometimes
wrongly stated; for prehistoric man was compelled to make inductions
before he could advance one step from barbarism. The trouble was that
this method was not rigorously applied. It was currently believed that
our valuable garden toad is venomous and that frogs are bred from
slime. For his knowledge of bees, Lyly consulted classical authors in
preference to watching the insects. Bacon's writings exerted a
powerful influence in the direction of exact inductive method.
Bacon had so little faith in the enduring qualities of the English
language, that he wrote the most of his philosophical works in Latin.
He planned a Latin work in six parts, to cover the whole field of the
philosophy of natural science. The most famous of the parts completed
is the _Novum Organum_, which deals with certain methods for searching
after definite truth, and shows how to avoid some ever present
tendencies toward error.
Bacon wrote an excellent _History of the Reign of Henry VII_., which
is standard to this day. He is also the author of _The New Atlantis_,
which may be termed a Baconian Utopia, or study of an ideal
commonwealth.
General Characteristics.--In Bacon's sentences we may often find
remarkable condensation of thought in few words. A modern essayist has
taken seven pages to express, or rather to obscure, the ideas in these
three lines from Bacon:--
"Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little,
repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period,
but content themselves with a mediocrity of success."[3]
His works abound in illustrations, analogies, and striking imagery;
but unlike the great Elizabethan poets, he appeals more to cold
intellect than to the feelings. We are often pleased with his
intellectual ingenuity, for instance, in likening the Schoolmen to
spiders, spinning such stuff as webs are made of "out of no great
quantity of matter."
He resembles the Elizabethans in preferring magnificent to commonplace
images. It has been often noticed that if he essays to write of
buildings in general, he prefers to describe palaces. His knowledge of
the intellectual side of human nature is especially remarkable, but,
unlike Shakespeare, Bacon never drops his plummet into the emotional
depths of the soul.
THE NON-DRAMATIC POETRY--LYRICAL VERSE
A Medium of Artistic Expression.--No age has surpassed the
Elizabethan in lyrical poems, those "short swallow flights of song,"
as Tennyson defines them. The English Renaissance, unlike the Italian,
did not achieve great success in painting. The Englishman embodied in
poetry his artistic expression of the beautiful. Many lyrics are
merely examples of word painting. The Elizabethan poet often began his
career by trying to show his skill with the ingenious and musical
arrangement of words, where an Italian would have used color and
drawing on an actual canvas.
We have seen that in the reign of Henry VIII. Wyatt and Surrey
introduced into England from Italy the type of lyrical verse known as
the sonnet. This is the most artificial of lyrics, because its rules
prescribe a length of exactly fourteen lines and a definite internal
structure.
The sonnet was especially popular with Elizabethan poets. In the last
ten years of the sixteenth century, more than two thousand sonnets
were written. Even Shakespeare served a poetic apprenticeship by
writing many sonnets as well as semi-lyrical poems, like _Venus and
Adonis_.
We should, however, remember that the sonnet is only one type of the
varied lyric expression of the age. Many Elizabethan song books show
that lyrics were set to music and used on the most varied occasions.
There were songs for weddings, funerals, dances, banquets,--songs for
the tinkers, the barbers, and other workmen. If modern readers chance
to pick up an Elizabethan novel, like Thomas Lodge's _Rosalynde_
(1590), they are surprised to find that prose will not suffice for the
lover, who must "evaporate" into song like this:--
"Love in my bosom like a bee,
Doth suck his sweet.
Now with his wings he plays with me,
Now with his feet."
There are large numbers of Elizabethan lyrics apparently as
spontaneous and unfettered as the song of the lark. The seeming
artlessness of much of this verse should not blind us to the fact that
an unusual number of poets had really studied the art of song.
Love Lyrics.--The subject of the Elizabethan sonnets is usually
love. Sir Philip Sidney wrote many love sonnets, the best of which is
the one beginning:--
"With how sad steps. O Moon, thou climb'st the Skies!"
Edmund Spencer composed fifty-eight sonnets in one year to chronicle
his varied emotions as a lover. We may find among Shakespeare's 154
sonnets some of the greatest love lyrics in the language, such, for
instance, as CXVI., containing the lines:--
"Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds";
or, as XVIII.:--
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease bath all too short a date.
* * * * *
But thy eternal summer shall not fade."
Sonnets came to be used in much the same way as a modern love letter
or valentine. In the latter part of Elizabeth's reign, sonnets were
even called "merchantable ware." Michael Drayton (1563-1631), a
prolific poet, author of the _Ballad of Agincourt_, one of England's
greatest war songs, tells how he was employed by a lover to write a
sonnet which won the lady. Drayton's best sonnet is, _Since there's no
help, come let us kiss and part_.
Outside of the sonnets, we shall find love lyrics in great variety.
One of the most popular of Elizabethan songs is Ben Jonson's:--
"Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine."
The Elizabethans were called a "nest of singing birds" because such
songs as the following are not unusual in the work of their minor
writers:--
"Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft
To give my love good morrow!
Winds from the wind to please her mind,
Notes from the lark I'll borrow."[4]
Pastoral Lyrics.--In Shakespeare's early youth it was the fashion to
write lyrics about the delights of rustic life with sheep and
shepherds. The Italians, freshly interesting in Vergil's _Georgics_
and _Bucolics_, had taught the English how to write pastoral verse.
The entire joyous world had become a Utopian sheep pasture, in which
shepherds piped and fell in love with glorified sheperdesses. A great
poet named one of his productions, _Shepherd's Calendar_ and Sir
Philip Sidney wrote in poetic prose the pastoral romance _Arcadia_.
Christopher Marlowe's _The Passionate Shepherd to his Love_ is a
typical poetic expression of the fancied delight in pastoral life:--
"...we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals."
Miscellaneous Lyrics.--As the Elizabethan age progressed, the
subject matter of the lyrics became broader. Verse showing consummate
mastery of turns expressed the most varied emotions. Some of the
greatest lyrics of the period are the songs interspersed in the plays
of the dramatists, from Lyly to Beaumont and Fletcher. The plays of
Shakespeare, the greatest and most varied of Elizabethan lyrical
poets, especially abound in such songs. Two of the best of these occur
in his _Cymbeline_. One is the song--
"Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,"
and the other is the dirge beginning:--
"Fear no more the heat o' the sun."
Ariel's songs in _The Tempest_ fascinate with the witchery of
untrammeled existence. Two lines of a song from _Twelfth Night_ give
an attractive presentation of the Renaissance philosophy of the
present as opposed to an elusive future:--
"What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter."
[Illustration: JOHN DONNE. _From the painting ascribed to Cornelius
Jansen, South Kensington Museum._]
Two of the later Elizabethan poets, Ben Jonson and John Donne
(1573-1631), specially impress us by their efforts to secure ingenious
effects in verse. Ben Jonson often shows this tendency, as in trying
to give a poetic definition of a kiss as something--
"So sugar'd, so melting, so soft, so delicious,"
and in showing so much ingenuity of expression in the cramping limits
of an epitaph:--
"Underneath this stone doth lie
As much beauty as could die,
Which in life did harbor give
To more virtue than doth live."
The poet most famous for a display of extreme ingenuity in verse is
John Donne, a traveler, courtier, and finally dean of St. Paul's
Cathedral, who possessed, to quote his own phrase, an "hydroptic
immoderate desire of human learning." He paid less attention to
artistic form than the earlier Elizabethans, showed more cynicism,
chose the abstract rather than the concrete, and preferred involved
metaphysical thought to simple sensuous images. He made few references
to nature and few allusions to the characters of classical mythology,
but searched for obscure likenesses between things, and for conceits
or far-fetched comparisons. In his poem, _A Funeral Elegy_, he shows
these qualities in characterizing a fair young lady as:--
"One whose clear body was so pure and thin,
Because it need disguise no thought within;
'Twas but a through-light scarf her mind to enroll,
Or exhalation breathed out from her soul."
The idea in Shakespeare's simpler expression, "the heavenly rhetoric
of thine eye," was expanded by Donne into:--
"Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string."
Donne does not always show so much fine-spun ingenuity, but this was
the quality most imitated by a group of his successors. His claim to
distinction rests on the originality and ingenuity of his verse, and
perhaps still more on his influence over succeeding poets.[5]
EDMUND SPENSER, 1552-1599
[Illustration: EDMUND SPENSER._From a painting in Duplin Castle_.]
Life and Minor Poems.--For one hundred and fifty-two years after
Chaucer's death, in 1400, England had no great poet until Edmund
Spenser was born in London in 1552. Spenser, who became the greatest
non-dramatic poet of the Elizabethan age, was twelve years older than
Shakespeare.
His parents were poor, but fortunately in Elizabethan times, as well
as in our own days, there were generous men who found their chief
pleasure in aiding others. Such a man assisted Spenser in going to
Cambridge. Spenser's benefactor was sufficiently wise not to give the
student enough to dwarf the growth of self-reliance. We know that
Spenser was a sizar at Cambridge, that is, one of those students who,
to quote Macaulay, "had to perform some menial services. They swept
the court; they carried up the dinner to the fellows' table, and
changed the plate and poured out the ale of the rulers of society." We
know further that Spenser was handicapped by ill health during a part
of his course, for we find records of allowances paid "Spenser
_aegrotanti_."
After leaving Cambridge Spenser went to the north of England, probably
in the capacity of tutor. While there, he fell in love with a young
woman whom he calls Rosalind. This event colored his after life.
Although she refused him, she had penetration enough to see in what
his greatness consisted, and her opinion spurred him to develop his
abilities as a poet. He was about twenty-five years old when he fell
in love with Rosalind; and he remained single until he was forty-two,
when he married an Irish maiden named Elizabeth. In honor of that
event, he composed the _Epithalamion_, the noblest marriage song in
any literature. So strong are early impressions that even in its lines
he seems to be thinking of Rosalind and fancying that she is his
bride.
After returning from the north, he spent some time with Sir Philip
Sidney, who helped fashion Spenser's ideals of a chivalrous gentleman.
Sidney's influence is seen in Spenser's greatest work, the _Faerie
Queene_. Sir Walter Raleigh was another friend who left his imprint on
Spenser.
In 1579, Spenser published the _Shepherd's Calendar_. This is a
pastoral poem, consisting of twelve different parts, one part being
assigned to each of the twelve months. Although inferior to the
_Faerie Queene_, the _Shepherd's Calendar_ remains one of the greatest
pastoral poems in the English language.
In 1580 he was appointed secretary to Lord Gray, Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland. In one capacity or another, in the service of the crown,
Spenser passed in Ireland almost the entire remaining eighteen years
of his life. In 1591 he received in the south of Ireland a grant of
three thousand acres, a part of the confiscated estate of an Irish
earl. Sir Walter Raleigh was also given forty-two thousand acres near
Spenser. Ireland was then in a state of continuous turmoil. In such a
country Spenser lived and wrote his _Faerie Queene_. Of course, this
environment powerfully affected the character of that poem. It has
been said that to read a contemporary's account of "Raleigh's
adventures with the Irish chieftains, his challenges and single
combats, his escapes at fords and woods, is like reading bits of the
_Faerie Queene_ in prose."
In 1598 the Irish, infuriated by the invasion of their country and the
seizure of their lands, set fire to Spenser's castle. He and his
family barely escaped with their lives. He crossed to England and died
the next year, according to some accounts, in want. He was buried, at
the expense of Lord Essex, in Westminster Abbey, near Chaucer.
The Faerie Queene.--In 1590 Spenser published the first three books
of the _Faerie Queene_. The original plan was to have the poem contain
twelve books, like Vergil's _AEneid_, but only six were published. If
more were written, they have been lost.
The poem is an allegory with the avowed moral purpose of fashioning "a
gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline." Spenser
says: "I labour to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was King, the
image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall
vertues, as Aristotle hath devised." Twelve Knights personifying
twelve Virtues were to fight with their opposing Vices, and the twelve
books were to tell the story of the conflict. The Knights set out from
the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, in search of their enemies,
and meet with divers adventures and enchantments.
The hero of the tale is Arthur, who has figured so much in English
song and legend. Spenser makes him typical of all the Virtues taken
together. The first book, which is really a complete poem by itself,
and which is generally admitted to be the finest, contains an account
of the adventures of the Red Cross Knight who represents Holiness.
Other books tell of the warfare of the Knights who typify Temperance,
Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy.
The poem begins thus:--
"A gentle Knight was pricking[6] on the plaine,
Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine,
The cruell markes of many' a bloody fielde;
Yet armes till that time did he never wield.
* * * * *
"And on his brest a bloodie Crosse he bore,
The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore.
* * * * *
"Upon a great adventure he was bond.
That greatest Gloriana to him gave,
That greatest glorious Queene of Faerie lond."
The entire poem really typifies the aspirations of the human soul for
something nobler and better than can be gained without effort. In
Spenser's imaginative mind, these aspirations became real persons who
set out to win laurels in a fairyland, lighted with the soft light of
the moon, and presided over by the good genius that loves to uplift
struggling and weary souls.
The allegory certainly becomes confused. A critic well says: "We can
hardly lose our way in it, for there is no way to lose." We are not
called on to understand the intricacies of the allegory, but to read
between the lines, catch the noble moral lesson, and drink to our fill
at the fountain of beauty and melody.
Spenser a Subjective Poet.--The subjective cast of Spenser's mind
next demands attention. We feel that his is an ideal world, one that
does not exist outside of the imagination. In order to understand the
difference between subjective and objective, let us compare Chaucer
with Spenser. No one can really be said to study literature without
constantly bringing in the principle of comparison. We must notice the
likeness and the difference between literary productions, or the faint
impression which they make upon our minds will soon pass away.
Chaucer is objective; that is, he identifies himself with things that
could have a real existence in the outside world. We find ourselves
looking at the shiny bald head of Chaucer's Monk, at the lean horse
and threadbare clothes of the Student of Oxford, at the brown
complexion of the Shipman, at the enormous hat and large figure of the
Wife of Bath, at the red face of the Summoner, at the hair of the
Pardoner "yelow as wex." These are not mere figments of the
imagination. We feel that they are either realities or that they could
have existed.
While the adventures in the Irish wars undoubtedly gave the original
suggestions for many of the contests between good and evil in the
_Faerie Queene_, Spenser intentionally idealized these knightly
struggles to uphold the right and placed them in fairyland. This great
poem is the work of a mind that loved to elaborate purely subjective
images. The pictures were not painted from gazing at the outside
world. We feel that they are mostly creations of the imagination, and
that few of them could exist in a real world. There is no bower in the
bottom of the sea, "built of hollow billowes heaped hye," and no lion
ever follows a lost maiden to protect her. We feel that the principal
part of Shakespeare's world could have existed in reality as well as
in imagination. Spenser was never able to reach this highest type of
art.
The world, however, needs poets to create images of a higher type of
beauty than this life can offer. These images react on our material
lives and cast them in a nobler mold. Spenser's belief that the
subjective has power to fashion the objective is expressed in two of
the finest lines that he ever wrote:--
"For of the soule the bodie forme doth take;
For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make."[7]
Chief Characteristics of Spenser's Poetry.--We can say of Spencer's
verse that it stands in the front rank for (1) melody, (2) love of the
beautiful, and (3) nobility of the ideals presented. His poetry also
(4) shows a preference for the subjective world, (5) exerts a
remarkable influence over other poets, and (6) displays a peculiar
liking for obsolete forms of expression.
Spencer's melody is noteworthy. If we read aloud correctly such lines
as these, we can scarcely fail to be impressed with their harmonious
flow:--
"A teme of Dolphins raunged in aray
Drew the smooth charett of sad Cymoent:
They were all taught by Triton to obay
To the long raynes at her commaundement:
As swifte as swallowes on the waves they went.
* * * * *
"Upon great Neptune's necke they softly swim,
And to her watry chamber swiftly carry him.
Deepe in the bottome of the sea her bowre
Is built of hollow billowes heaped hye."[8]
The following lines will show Spenser's love for beauty, and at the
same time indicate the nobility of some of his ideal characters. He is
describing Lady Una, the fair representative of true religion, who has
lost through enchantment her Guardian Knight, and who is wandering
disconsolate in the forest:--
"...Her angel's face,
As the great eye of heaven, shyned bright,
And made a sunshine in the shady place;
Did never mortall eye behold such heavenly grace.
"It fortuned out of the thickest wood
A ramping Lyon rushed suddeinly,
Hunting full greedy after salvage blood.
Soone as the royall virgin he did spy,
With gaping mouth at her ran greedily,
To have att once devoured her tender corse;
But to the pray when as he drew more ny,
His bloody rage aswaged with remorse,
And with the sight amazd, forgat his furious forse.
"In stead thereof he kist her wearie feet,
And lickt her lilly hands with fawning tong,
As he her wronged innocence did weet.
O, how can beautie maister the most strong,
And simple truth subdue avenging wrong!"[9]
The power of beauty has seldom been more vividly described. As we read
the succeeding stanzas and see the lion following her, like a faithful
dog, to shield her from harm, we feel the power of both beauty and
goodness and realize that with Spenser these terms are
interchangeable, Each one of the preceding selections shows his
preference for the subjective and the ideal to the actual.
Spenser searched for old and obsolete words. He used "eyne" for
"eyes," "fone" for "foes," "shend" for "shame." He did not hesitate to
coin words when he needed them, like "mercify" and "fortunize." He
even wrote "wawes" in place of "waves" because he wished it to rime
with "jaws." In spite of these peculiarities, Spenser is not hard
reading after the first appearance of strangeness has worn away.
A critic rightly says that Spenser repels none but the anti-poetical.
His influence upon other poets has been far-reaching. Milton, Dryden,
Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley show traces of his influence.
Spenser has been called the poet's poet, because the more poetical one
is, the more one will enjoy him.
THE ENGLISH DRAMA
The Early Religious Drama.--It is necessary to remember at the
outset that the purpose of the religious drama was not to amuse, but
to give a vivid presentation of scriptural truth. On the other hand,
the primary aim of the later dramatist has usually been to entertain,
or, in Shakespeare's exact words, "to please." Shakespeare was,
however, fortunate in having an audience that was pleased to be
instructed, as well as entertained.
Before the sixteenth century, England had a religious drama that made
a profound impression on life and thought. The old religious plays
helped to educate the public, the playwrights, and the actors for the
later drama.
Any one may to-day form some idea of the rise of the religious drama,
by attending the service of the Catholic church on Christmas or Easter
Sunday. In many Catholic churches there may still be seen at Christmas
time a representation of the manger at Bethlehem. Sometimes the
figures of the infant Savior, of Joseph and Mary, of the wise men, of
the sheep and cattle, are very lifelike.
The events clustering about the Crucifixion and the Resurrection
furnished the most striking material for the early religious drama.
Our earliest dramatic writers drew their inspiration from the _New
Testament_.
Miracle and Mystery Plays.--A Miracle play is the dramatic
representation of the life of a saint and of the miracles connected
with him. A Mystery play deals with gospel events which are concerned
with any phase of the life of Christ, or with any Biblical event that
remotely foreshadows Christ or indicates the necessity of a Redeemer.
In England there were few, if any, pure Miracle plays, but the term
"Miracle" is applied indiscriminately to both Miracles and Mysteries.
The first Miracle play in England was acted probably not far from
1100. In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries these
plays had become so popular that they were produced in nearly every
part of England. Shakespeare felt their influence. He must have had
frequent opportunities in his boyhood to witness their production.
They were seldom performed in England after 1600, although visitors to
Germany have, every ten years, the opportunity of seeing a modern
production of a Mystery in the _Passion Play_ at Oberammergau.
The Subjects.--Four great cycles of Miracle plays have been
preserved: the York, Chester, and Coventry plays, so called because
they were performed in those places, and the Towneley plays, which
take their name from Towneley Hall in Lancashire, where the manuscript
was kept for some time. It is probable that almost every town of
importance had its own collection of plays.
[Illustration: MIRACLE PLAY AT COVENTRY. _From an old print_]
The York cycle contains forty-eight plays. A cycle or circle of plays
means a list forming a complete circle from Creation until Doomsday.
The York collection begins with Creation and the fall of Lucifer and
the bad angels from Heaven,--a theme which was later to inspire the
pen of one of England's greatest poets. The tragedies of Eden and the
Flood, scenes from the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Moses, the manger
at Bethlehem, the slaughter of the Innocents, the Temptation, the
resurrection of Lazarus, the Last Supper, the Trial, the Crucifixion,
and the Easter triumph are a few of the Miracle plays that were acted
in the city of York.
The Actors and Manner of Presentation.--At first the actors were
priests who presented the plays either in the church or in its
immediate vicinity on sacred ground. After a while the plays became so
popular that the laity presented them. When they were at the height of
their popularity, that is, during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, the actors were selected with great care from the members
of the various trades guilds. Each guild undertook the entire
responsibility for the presentation of some one play, and endeavored
to surpass all the other guilds.
[Illustration: HELL MOUTH._From a Columbia University Model_.]
Considerable humor was displayed in the allotment of various plays.
The tanners presented the fall of Lucifer and the bad angels into the
infernal regions; the ship carpenters, the play of Noah and the
building of the ark; the bakers, the Last Supper; the butchers, the
Crucifixion. In their prime, the Miracle plays were acted on wooden
platforms mounted on wheels. There were two distinct stories in these
movable stages, a lower one in which the actors dressed, and an upper
one in which they played. The entrance to the lower story, known as
Hell Mouth, consisted of a terrible pair of dragonlike jaws, painted
red. From these jaws issued smoke, flame, and horrible outcries. From
the entrance leaped red-coated devils to tempt the Savior, the saints,
and men. Into it the devils would disappear with some wicked soul.
They would torture it and make it roar with pain, as the smoke poured
faster from the red jaws.
In York on Corpus Christi Day, which usually fell in the first week in
June, the actors were ordered to be in their places on these movable
theaters at half past three in the morning. Certain stations had been
selected throughout the city, where each pageant should stop and, in
the proper order, present its own play. In this way the enormous
crowds that visited York to see these performances were more evenly
scattered throughout the city.
The actors did not always remain on the stage. Herod, for example, in
his magnificent robes used to ride on horseback among the people,
boast of his prowess, and overdo everything. Shakespeare, who was
evidently familiar with the character, speaks of out-Heroding Herod.
The Devil also frequently jumped from the stage and availed himself of
his license to play pranks among the audience.
Much of the acting was undoubtedly excellent. In 1476 the council at
York ordained that four of the best players in the city should examine
with regard to fitness all who wished to take part in the plays. So
many were desirous of acting that it was much trouble to get rid of
incompetents. The ordinance ran: "All such as they shall find
sufficient in person and cunning, to the honor of the City and worship
of the said Crafts, for to admit and able; and all other insufficient
persons, either in cunning, voice, or person, to discharge, ammove and
avoid." A critic says that this ordinance is "one of the steps on
which the greatness of the Elizabethan stage was built, and through
which its actors grew up."[10]
Introduction of the Comic Element in the Miracle Plays.--While the
old drama generally confined itself to religious subjects, the comic
element occasionally crept in, made its power felt, and disclosed a
new path for future playwrights. In the _Play of Noah's Flood_, when
the time for the flood has come, Noah's wife refuses to enter the ark
and a domestic quarrel ensues. Finally her children pull and shove her
into the ark. When she is safe on board, Noah bids her welcome. His
enraged wife deals him resounding blows until he calls to her to stop,
because his back is nearly broken.
The _Play of the Shepherds_ includes a genuine comedy, the first
comedy worthy of the name to appear in England. While watching their
flocks on Christmas Eve, the shepherds are joined by Mak, a neighbor
whose reputation for honesty is not good. Before they go to sleep,
they make him lie down within their circle; but he rises when he hears
them begin to snore, steals a sheep, and hastens home. His wife is
alarmed, because in that day the theft of a sheep was punishable by
death. She finally concludes that the best plan will be to wrap the
animal in swaddling clothes and put it in the cradle. If the shepherds
come to search the house, she will pretend that she has a child; and,
if they approach the cradle, she will caution them against touching it
for fear of waking the child and causing him to fill the house with
his cries. She speedily hurries Mak away to resume his slumbers among
the shepherds. When they wake, they miss the sheep, suspect Mak, and
go to search his house. His wife allows them to look around
thoroughly, but she keeps them away from the cradle. They leave,
rather ashamed of their suspicion. As they are going out of the door,
a thought strikes one of them whereby they can make partial amends.
Deciding to give the child sixpence, he returns, lifts up the covering
of the cradle, and discovers the sheep. Mak and his wife both declare
that an elf has changed their child into a sheep. The shepherds
threaten to have the pair hanged. They seize Mak, throw him on a
canvas, and toss him into the air until they are exhausted. They then
lie down to rest and are roused with the song of an angel from
Bethlehem.
To produce this comedy required genuine inventive imagination; for
there is nothing faintly resembling this incident in the sacred
narrative. These early exercises of the imagination in our drama may
resemble the tattering footsteps of a child; but they were necessary
antecedents to the strength, beauty, and divinity of movement in
Elizabethan times.
[Illustration: FOOL'S HEAD. State properties of the Vice and Fool.]
The Morality.--The next step in the development of the drama is
known as the Morality play. This personified abstractions. Characters
like Charity, Hope, Faith, Truth, Covetousness, Falsehood, Abominable
Living, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil,--in short, all the
Virtues and the Vices,--came on the stage in the guise of persons, and
played the drama of life.
Critics do not agree about the precise way in which the Morality is
related to the Miracle play. It is certain that the Miracle play had
already introduced some abstractions.
In one very important respect, the Morality marks an advance, by
giving more scope to the imagination. The Miracle plays had their
general treatment absolutely predetermined by the Scriptural version
of the action or by the legends of the lives of saints, although
diverting incidents could be introduced, as we have seen. In the
Morality, the events could take any turn which the author chose to
give.
[Illustration: AIR-BAG FLAPPER. Stage properties of the Vice and
Fool.]
In spite of this advantage, the Morality is in general a synonym for
what is uninteresting. The characters born of abstractions are too
often bloodless, like their parents. The Morality under a changed name
was current a few years ago in the average Sunday-school book.
Incompetent writers of fiction today often adopt the Morality
principle in making their characters unnaturally good or bad, mere
puppets who do not develop along the line of their own emotional
prompting, but are moved by machinery in the author's hands.
[Illustration: LATH DAGGER. Stage properties of the Vice and Fool.]
A new character, the Vice, was added as an adjunct to the Devil, to
increase the interest of the audience in the Morality play. The Vice
represented the leading spirit of evil in any particular play,
sometimes Fraud, Covetousness, Pride, Iniquity, or Hypocrisy. It was
the business of the Vice to annoy the Virtues and to be constantly
playing pranks. The Vice was the predecessor of the clown and the fool
upon the stage. The Vice also amused the audience by tormenting the
Devil, belaboring him with a sword of lath, sticking thorns into him,
and making him roar with pain. Sometimes the Devil would be kicked
down Hell Mouth by the offended Virtues; but he would soon reappear
with saucily curled tail, and at the end of the play he would delight
the spectators by plunging into Hell Mouth with the Vice on his back.
[Illustration: FOOL OF THE OLD PLAY.]
Court Plays.--In the first part of the sixteenth century, the court
and the nobility especially encouraged the production of plays whose
main object was to entertain. The influence of the court in shaping
the drama became much more powerful than that of the church. Wallace
says of the new materials which his researches have disclosed in the
twentieth century:--
"They throw into the lime-light a brilliant development of this new
drama through the Chapel Royal, a development that took place
primarily under the direction of the great musicians who served as
masters of the children of the Chapel and as court entertainers, the
first true poets-laureate, through the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward
VI., Mary, and Elizabeth."[11]
In 1509 Henry VIII. appointed William Cornish (died 1523) to be Master
of the Children of the Chapel Royal. This court institution with its
choral body of men and boys not only ministered "by song to the
spiritual well-being of the sovereign and his household," but also
gave them "temporal" enjoyment in dances, pageants, and plays. We must
not forget, however, that the Chapel Royal was originally, as its name
implies, a religious body. Cornish was a capable dramatist, as well as
a musician and a poet; and he, unlike the author of _Everyman_, wrote
plays simply to amuse the court and its guests. He has even been
called the founder of the secular English drama.[12]
The court of Henry VIII. became especially fond of the Interlude,
which was a short play, often given in connection with a banquet or
other entertainment. Any dramatic incident, such as the refusal of
Noah's wife to enter the ark, or Mak's thievery in _The Play of the
Shepherds_, might serve as an Interlude. Cornish and John Heywood
(1497?--1580?), a court dramatist of much versatility, incorporated in
the Interlude many of the elements of the five-act drama. _The Four
P's_, the most famous Interlude, shows a contest between a Pardoner,
Palmer, Pedlar, and Poticary, to determine who could tell the greatest
lie. Wallace thinks that the best Interludes, such as _The Four P's_
and _The Pardoner and the Frere_, were written by Cornish, although
they are usually ascribed to Heywood.
Cornish had unusual ability as a deviser of masques and plays. One of
his interludes for children has allegorical characters that remotely
suggest some that appear in the modern _Bluebird_, by Maeterlinck.
Cornish had Wind appear "in blue with drops of silver"; Rain, "in
black with silver honeysuckles"; Winter, "in russet with flakes of
silver snow"; Summer, "in green with gold stars"; and Spring, "in
green with gold primroses." In 1522 Cornish wrote and presented before
Henry VIII. and his guest, the Roman emperor, a political play,
especially planned to indicate the attitude of the English monarch
toward Spain and France. Under court influences, the drama enlarged
its scope and was no longer chiefly the vehicle for religious
instruction.
Early Comedies.--Two early comedies, divided, after the classical
fashion, into acts and scenes, show close approximation to the modern
form of English plays.
_Ralph Royster Doyster_ was written not far from the middle of the
sixteenth century by Nicholas Udall (1505-1556), sometime master of
Eton College and, later, court poet under Queen Mary. This play,
founded on a comedy of Plautus, shows the classical influence which
was so powerful in England at this time. Ralph, the hero, is a
conceited simpleton. He falls in love with a widow who has already
promised her hand to a man infinitely Ralph's superior. Ralph,
however, unable to understand why she should not want him, persists in
his wooing. She makes him the butt of her jokes, and he finds himself
in ridiculous positions. The comedy amuses us in this way until her
lover returns and marries her. The characters of the play, which is
written in rime, are of the English middle class.
_Gammer Gurton's Needle_, the work of William Stevenson, a
little-known pre-Shakespearean writer, was acted at Christ's College,
Cambridge, shortly after the middle of the sixteenth century. This
play borrows hardly anything from the classical stage. Most of the
characters of _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ are from the lowest English
working classes, and its language, unlike that of _Ralph Royster
Doyster_, which has little to offend, is very coarse.
Gorboduc and the Dramatic Unities.--The tragedy of _Gorboduc_, the
first regular English tragedy written in blank verse, was acted in
1561, three years before the birth of Shakespeare. This play is in
part the work of Thomas Sackville (1536-1608), a poet and diplomat,
the author of two powerful somber poems, the _Induction_ and
_Complaint of the Duke of Buckingham_. In spite of their heavy
narrative form, these poems are in places even more dramatic than the
dull tragedy of Gorboduc, which was fashioned after the classical
rules of Seneca and the Greeks. _Gorboduc_ requires little action on
the stage. There is considerable bloodshed in the play; but the
spectators are informed of the carnage by a messenger, as they are not
permitted to witness a bloody contest on the stage.
[Illustration: THOMAS SACKVILLE.]
If Gorboduc had been taken for a model, the English drama could never
have attained Shakespearean greatness. Our drama would then have been
crippled by following the classical rules, which prescribed unity of
place and time in the plot and the action. The ancients held that a
play should not represent actions which would, in actual life, require
much more than twenty-four hours for their performance. If one of the
characters was a boy, he had to be represented as a boy throughout the
play. The next act could not introduce him as one who had grown to
manhood in the interval. The classical rules further required that the
action should be performed in one place, or near it. Anything that
happened at a great distance had to be related by a messenger, and not
acted on the stage.
Had these rules been followed, the English drama could never have
painted the growth and development of character, which is not the work
of a day. The genius of Marlowe and Shakespeare taught them to
disregard these dramatic unities. In _As You Like It_, the action is
now at the court, and now in the far-off Forest of Arden. Shakespeare
knew that the imagination could traverse the distance. At the
beginning of the play Oliver is an unnatural, brutal brother; but
events change him, so that in the fourth act, when he is asked if he
is the man who tried to kill his brother, Oliver replies:--
"'Twas I; but 'tis not I."
THE PRESENTATION OF ELIZABETHAN PLAYS
[Illustration: THEATER IN INN YARD. _From Columbia University
model._]
The Elizabethan Theater.--Before considering the work of the
Elizabethan dramatists, we should know something of the conditions
which they had to meet in order to produce plays for the contemporary
stage. The courtyard of London inns often served as a playhouse before
sufficient regular theaters were built. The stage was in one end of
the yard, and the unused ground space in front served as the pit. Two
or three tiers of galleries or balconies around the yard afforded
additional space for both actors and spectators. These inn yards
furnished many suggestions which were incorporated in the early
theaters.
The first building in England for the public presentation of plays was
known as The Theater. It was built in London in 1576. In 1598
Shakespeare and his associates, failing to secure a lease of the
ground on which this building stood, pulled it down, carried the
materials across the river, and erected the famous Globe Theater on
the Bankside, as the street running along the south side of the Thames
was called. In late years a careful study of the specifications (1599)
for building the Fortune Theater (see Frontispiece) has thrown much
light on the Globe, which is unusually important from its association
with Shakespeare. Although the Fortune was square, while the Globe was
octagonal, the Fortune was in many essentials modeled after the Globe.
A part of the specifications of the Fortune read as follows:--
"...the frame of the saide howse to be sett square and to conteine
fowerscore foote of lawful assize everye waie square, without, and
fiftie five foote of like assize square, everye waie within ... and
the saide frame to conteine three stories in heigth ... [the] stadge
shall conteine in length fortie and three foote of lawfull assize,
and in breadth to extende to the middle of the yarde of the said
howse: the same stadge to be paled in belowe with goode stronge and
sufficyent new oken boardes... And the said stadge to be in all
other proportions contryved and fashioned like unto the stadge
of the wide Playhowse called the Globe."
[Illustration: RECONSTRUCTED GLOBE THEATER, "SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND,"
EARL'S COURT, LONDON, 1912. _From an original drawing._]
The first part of the twentieth century has made a detailed study of
the stage on which the Great Elizabethan plays were acted. G.F.
Reynolds says:--
"Most students agree that the 'typical' Elizabethan stage consisted
of a platform, uncurtained in front, open as well at the sides,
carpeted, it is generally said, with rushes, and surrounded with a
railing, a space behind this platform closed by a sliding curtain,
and a balcony with its own curtains and entrances. There were also a
space below the stage reached by trap doors, a dressing room behind
the stage, machinery by which characters ascended to and descended
from some place above, and in some theaters at least, a 'heavens,'
or roof over part or all of the stage."[13]
Possibly no single stage had every feature mentioned in the above
description, which gives, however, a good general idea of a typical
stage of the time. We must remember that no one has the right to
assert that different Elizabethan stages did not differ in details. We
are not sure that every stage was so planned as to be divided into two
parts by a sliding curtain. The drawing of the Swan Theater shows no
place for such a curtain, although it is possible that the draftsman
forgot to include it. The specifications of the stage of the Fortune
Theater make no mention of a railing.
The Play and the Audience.--It is impossible to criticize
Elizabethan plays properly from the point of view of the
twentieth-century stage. Many modern criticisms are shown to be
without reason when we understand the wishes of the audience and the
manner of presenting the plays. The conditions of the entry or the
reëntry of a player might explain some of those lengthy monologues
that seem so inartistic to modern dramatists. The Elizabethan theaters
and the tastes of their patrons had certain important characteristics
of their own.
I. In the public theaters,[14] the play began in the early afternoon,
usually between two and three o'clock, and lasted for about two hours.
The audience was an alert one, neither jaded by a long day's business
nor rendered impatient by waiting for the adjustment of scenery. The
Elizabethans constituted a vigorous audience, eager to meet the
dramatist and actors more than half way in interpreting what was
presented.
II. In the case of such public theaters as the Globe and the Fortune,
even their roofed parts, which extended around the pit and back of the
stage and which contained the galleries and the boxes, were all
exposed to the open air on the inner side. The pit, which was
immediately in front of the stage, had the sky for a roof and the
ground for a floor. The frequenters of the pit, who often jostled each
other for standing room, were sometimes called the "groundlings."
Occasionally a severe rain would drive them out of the theater to seek
shelter. Those who attended the Elizabethan public theater were in no
danger of being made drowsy or sick by its bad air.
[Illustration: THE BANKSIDE AND ITS THEATERS
1. The Swan Theater. 3. The Hope Theater. 5. Old St. Paul's.
2. The Bear Gardens. 4. The Globe Theater. 6. The Temple.]
III. The audiences did not attend merely for relaxation or amusement.
They often came for information and education, and they were probably
glad to learn about alchemy from one of Ben Jonson's plays. The
audience doubtless welcomed long monologues if they were well
delivered and presented ideas of worth. The theater took the place of
lectures, newspapers, magazines, and, to a certain extent, of books.
We know that in 1608 the Blackfriars Theater acted the part of a
newspaper in presenting a scandal about the French king and that at
another time it gave some humorous information concerning the English
monarch's newly discovered silver mine in Scotland.
IV. The Elizabethans loved good poetry for its imaginative appeal.
Shakespeare was a poet before he was a dramatist. Beautiful poetry
presenting high ideals must have met with vigorous appreciation, or
Shakespeare could not have continued to produce such great work.
V. The Elizabethans also demanded story and incident. Modern critics
have often noticed that the characterization in Shakespeare's fourth
acts, _e.g._, in _Macbeth_, does not equal that in the preceding part
of the play; but the fourth act of _Macbeth_ interested the
Elizabethans because there was progress in the complicated story. To
modern theatergoers this fourth act seems to drag because they have
acquired through novel reading a liking for analysis and dissection.
Shakespeare succeeded in interesting the Elizabethans by embodying in
story and incident his portrayal of character. Because of admiration
for the revelation of character in his greatest plays, modern readers
forget their moving incidents,--for instance, the almost
blood-curdling appearances of a ghost, the actions of a crazed woman,
the killing of an eavesdropper on the stage, two men fighting at an
open grave, the skull and bones of a human being dug from a grave in
full view of the audience, the fighting to the death on the stage,
which is ghastly with corpses at the close. When we add to this the
roar of cannon whenever the king drinks, as well as when there is some
more noteworthy action, and remember that the very last words of
_Hamlet_ are: "Go, bid the soldiers shoot," we shall realize that
there was not much danger of going to sleep even during a performance
of _Hamlet_.
Scenery.--The conditions under which early Elizabethan plays were
sometimes produced are thus described by Sir Philip Sidney:--
"You shall have Asia of the one side, and Africa of the other, and
so many other under-kingdoms, that the player when he comes in, must
ever begin with telling you where he is, or else the tale will not
be conceived. Now shall you have three ladies walk to gather
flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. By and
by we hear news of a shipwreck in the same place, then we are to
blame if we accept it not for a rock."
[Illustration: CONTEMPORARY DRAWING OF INTERIOR OF AN ELIZABETHAN
THEATER[15].]
Those who remember this well-known quotation too often forget that
Sidney wrote before Shakespeare's plays were produced. We do not know
whether Sidney was describing a private or a public stage, but the
private theaters had the greater amount of scenery.
Modern research has shown that the manner of presenting plays did not
remain stationary while the drama was rapidly evolving. Before
Shakespeare died, there were such stage properties as beds, tables,
chairs, dishes, fetters, shop wares, and perhaps also some artificial
trees, mossy banks, and rocks. A theatrical manager in an inventory of
stage properties (1598) mentions "the sittie of Rome," which was
perhaps a cloth so painted as to present a perspective of the city. He
also speaks of a "cloth of the Sone and Mone." The use of such painted
cloths was an important step toward modern scenery. We may, however,
conclude that the scenery of any Elizabethan theater would have seemed
scant to one accustomed to the detailed setting of the modern stage.
The comparatively little scenery in Elizabethan theaters imposed
strenuous imaginative exercise on the spectators. This effort was
fortunate for all concerned--for the dramatist and for the actor, but
especially for the spectator, who became accustomed to give an
imaginative interpretation and setting to a play that would mean
little to a modern theatergoer.
Actors.--Those who have seen some of the recent performances of
plays under Elizabethan conditions, on a stage modeled after that of
Shakespeare's time have been surprised at the increase of the actors'
power. The stage projects far enough into the pit to bring the actors
close to the audience. Their appeal thus becomes far more personal,
direct, and forceful. The spectator more easily identifies himself
with them and almost feels as if he were a part of the play. This has
been the experience of those who have seen the old-time reproduction
of plays as different as _The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The
Merchant of Venice_, and _Much Ado About Nothing_. In the case of _The
Tempest_, a very interesting act was presented when all the scenery
consisted of a board on which was painted "Prospero Isle."
In Shakespeare's times, the plays were probably well acted. While the
fame of Elizabethan actors like Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage has
come down to modern times, the success of plays did not depend on
single stars. Shakespeare is said to have played in minor rôles. The
audience discouraged bad acting. The occupants of the pit would throw
apples or worse missiles at an unsatisfactory player, and sometimes
the disgusted spectators would suddenly leap on the stage and chase an
incompetent actor off the boards.
Prior to the Restoration in 1660, the women's parts were taken by
boys. While this must have hampered the presentation of characters
like Lady Macbeth, it is now known to have been less of a handicap
than was formerly thought. The twentieth century has seen feminine
parts so well played by carefully trained boys that the most astute
women spectators never detected the deception. Boys, especially those
of the Chapel Royal, had for a long time acted masculine, as well as
feminine, parts. As late as the beginning of the seventeenth century,
the choir boys were presenting some of the great Elizabethan plays in
a private theater connected with St. Paul's Cathedral. Rosencrantz in
the second act of _Hamlet_ bears witness to the popularity of these
boy actors, when he calls them "little eyases, that cry on the top of
question and are most tyrannically clapped for it." Ben Jonson's
touching lyrical epitaph on a boy actor, Salathiel Pavy, who had for
"three fill'd zodiacs" been "the stage's jewel," shows how highly the
Elizabethans sometimes regarded boy actors. The regular theaters found
the companies of boys such strong rivals that, in 1609, Shakespeare
and other theatrical managers used modern business methods to suppress
competition and agreed to pay the master of the boys of St. Paul's
enough to cause him to withdraw them permanently from competing with
the other theaters.
PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMATISTS
The "University Wits" and Thomas Kyd.--Five authors, John Lyly,
George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Nashe, all
graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, were sufficiently versatile to be
called "university wits." Amid various other activities, all of them
were impelled by the spirit of the age to write plays. These
intellectual aristocrats hurled the keen shafts of their wit at those
dramatists, who, without a university education, were arrogant enough
to think that they could write plays. Because Shakespeare had never
attended a university, Greene called him "an upstart Crow beautified
with our feathers."
On New Year's, 1584, John Lyly, the author of _Euphues_, presented
in the first Blackfriars Theater[16] his prose comedy, entitled
_Campaspe_. This play relates the love story of Alexander the Great's
fair Theban captive, Campaspe. The twenty-eight characters necessary
to produce this play were obtained from the boys of the Chapel Royal
and St. Paul's Cathedral. Two months later Lyly's _Sapho and Phao_ was
given in the same theater with a cast of seventeen boys. It should be
remembered that these plays, so important in the evolution of the
drama, were acted by boys under royal patronage. _Campaspe_ is little
more than a series of episodes, divided into acts and scenes, but,
unlike _Gorboduc, Campaspe_ has many of the characteristics of an
interesting modern play.
Lyly wrote eight comedies, all but one in prose. In the history of the
drama, he is important for (1) finished style, (2) good dialogue, (3)
considerable invention in the way he secured interest, by using
classical matter in combination with contemporary life, (4) subtle
comedy, and (5) influence on Shakespeare. It is doubtful whether
Shakespeare could have produced such good early comedies, if he had
not received suggestions from Lyly's work in this field.
The chapel boys also presented at Blackfriars in the same year George
Peele's (1558-1597) _The Arraignment of Paris_, a pastoral drama in
riming verse. In Juno's promise to Paris, Peele shows how the
possibilities of the New World affected his imagination:--
"Xanthus shall run liquid gold for thee to wash thy hands;
And if thou like to tend thy flock and not from them to fly,
Their fleeces shall be curlèd gold to please their master's eye."
While _The Arraignment of Paris_ and his two other plays, _David and
Bathsabe_ and _The Old Wives' Tale_, are not good specimens of
dramatic construction, the beauty of some of Peele's verse could
hardly have failed to impress both Marlowe and Shakespeare with the
poetic possibilities of the drama. Peele writes without effort--
"Of moss that sleeps with sound the waters make,"
and has David build--
"...a kingly bower,
Seated in hearing of a hundred streams."
Robert Greene (1560-1592) showed much skill in (1) the construction
of plots, (2) the revelation of simple and genuine human feeling, and
(3) the weaving of an interesting story into a play. His best drama is
the poetic comedy _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_. In this play, he
made the love story the central point of interest.
Thomas Lodge (1558-1625), author of the story _Rosalynde_, which
Shakespeare used to such good advantage, wrote in collaboration with
Greene, _A Looking Glass for London and England_, and an independent
play, _The Wounds of Civil War_. Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), best
known for his picaresque novel, _The Unfortunate Traveler_, wrote a
play, _Summer's Last Will and Testament_, but he and Lodge had little
dramatic ability.
Thomas Kyd (1558-1594), although lacking a university education,
succeeded in writing, about 1586, the most popular early Elizabethan
play, _The Spanish Tragedy_, a blank verse drama, in which blood flows
profusely. Although this play is not free from classical influences,
yet its excellence of construction, effective dramatic situations,
vigor of movement, and romantic spirit helped to prepare the way for
the tragedies of Marlowe and Shakespeare.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, 1564-1593
Life.--The year 1564 saw the birth of the two greatest geniuses in
the English drama, Marlowe and Shakespeare. Marlowe, the son of a
shoemaker, was born at Canterbury, and educated at Cambridge. When he
was graduated, the dramatic profession was the only one that gave full
scope to genius like his. He became both playwriter and actor. All his
extant work was written in about six years. When he was only
twenty-nine he was fatally stabbed in a tavern quarrel. Shakespeare
had at that age not produced his greatest plays. Marlowe unwittingly
wrote his own epitaph in that of Dr. Faustus:--
"Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo's laurel-bough."
[Illustration: MARLOWE'S MEMORIAL STATUE AT CANTERBURY.]
Works.--Marlowe's great tragedies are four in number _Timberline,
Dr. Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward, II._. No careful student of
English literature can afford to be unacquainted with any of them.
Shakespeare's work appears less miraculous when we know that a
predecessor at the age of twenty-four had written plays like
_Timberline_ and _Dr. Faustus_.
_Timberline_ shows the supreme ambition for conquest, for controlling
the world with physical force. It is such a play as might have been
suggested to an Elizabethan by watching Napoleon's career. _Dr.
Faustus_, on the other hand, shows the desire for knowledge that would
give universal power, a desire born of the Renaissance. _The Jew of
Malta_ is the incarnation of the passion for the world's wealth, a
passion that towers above common greed only by the magnificence of its
immensity. In that play we see that Marlowe--
"Without control can pick his riches up,
And in his house heap pearl like pebble stones,
* * * * *
Infinite riches in a little room."
_Edward II._ gives a pathetic picture of one of the weakest of kings.
This shows more evenness and regularity of construction than any of
Marlowe's other plays; but it is the one least characteristic of him.
The others manifest more intensity of imagination, more of the spirit
of the age.
_Dr. Faustus_ shows Marlowe's peculiar genius at its best. The legend
on which the play is based came from Germany, but Marlowe breathed his
own imaginative spirit into the tragedy. Faustus is wearied with the
barren philosophy of the past. He is impatient to secure at once the
benefits of the New Learning, which seems to him to have all the
powers of magic. If he can immediately enjoy the fruits of such
knowledge, he says:--
"Had I as many souls as there be stars,
I'd give them all."
In order to acquire this knowledge and the resulting power for
twenty-four years, he sells his soul to Mephistopheles. Faustus then
proceeds to enjoy all that the new order of things promised. He
commands Homer to come from the realm of shades to sing his entrancing
songs. He summons Helen to appear before him in the morning of her
beauty. The apostrophe to her shows the vividness and exuberance of
his imagination:--
"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
* * * * *
Oh! thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars."
Marlowe left a fragment of a lyrical poem, entitled _Hero and
Leander_, which is one of the finest productions of its kind in the
language. Shakespeare accorded him the unusual honor of quoting from
this poem.
In What Sense is Marlowe a Founder of the English Drama?--His
success with blank verse showed Shakespeare that this was the proper
versification for the drama. Before Marlowe, rime or prose had been
chiefly employed in writing plays. Sackville had used blank verse in
_Gorboduc_, but his verse and Marlowe's are as unlike as the movements
of the ox and the flight of the swallow. The sentences of _Gorboduc_
generally end with the line, and the accents usually fall in the same
place. Marlowe's blank verse shows great variety, and the major pause
frequently does not come at the end of the line.
Marlowe cast the dramatic unities to the wind. The action in _Dr.
Faustus_ occupies twenty-four years, and the scene changes from
country to country. He knew that he was speaking to a people whose
imaginations could accompany him and interpret what he uttered. The
other dramatists followed him in placing imaginative interpretation
above measurements by the foot rule of the intellect. Symonds says of
him: "It was he who irrevocably decided the destinies of the romantic
drama; and the whole subsequent evolution of that species, including
Shakespeare's work, can be regarded as the expansion, rectification,
and artistic ennoblement of the type fixed by Marlowe's epoch-making
tragedies. In very little more than fifty years from the publication
of _Tamburlaine_, our drama had run its course of unparalleled energy
and splendor."
_General Characteristics_.--As we sum up Marlowe's general qualities,
it is well to note that they exhibit in a striking way the
characteristics of the time. In the morning of that youthful age the
superlative was possible. _Tamburlaine_, _The Jew of Malta_, and _Dr.
Faustus_ show in the superlative degree the love of conquest, of
wealth, and of knowledge. Everything that Marlowe wrote is stamped
with a love of beauty and of the impossible.
Tamburlaine speaks like one of the young Elizabethans--
"That in conceit bear empires on our spears,
Affecting thoughts co-equal with the clouds."
Marlowe voices the new sense of worth of enfranchised man:--
"Thinkest thou heaven glorious thing?
I tell thee, 'tis not half so fair as thou,
Or any man that breathes on earth.
* * * * *
'Twas made for man, therefore is man more excellent."[17]
Marlowe's faults are the faults of youth and of his time. Exaggeration
and lack of restraint are shown in almost all his work. In
_Tamburlaine_, written when he was twenty-two, he is often bombastic.
He has hardly any sense of humor. He does not draw fine distinctions
between his characters.
On the other hand, using the words of Tamburlaine, we may say of all
his dramatic contemporaries, excepting Shakespeare--
"If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,"
were gathered into one vial, it could not surpass the odor from
patches of flowers in Marlowe's garden.
These seven lines represent better than pages of description the
aspiring spirit of the new Elizabethan Renaissance.
"Our souls whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Will us to wear ourselves and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all."[18]
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 1564-1616
[Illustration: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. _From the Chandos portrait in
the National Portrait Gallery_.]
Birthplace and Parents.--William Shakespeare, the greatest of the
world's writers, was born in Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire. The name
originally meant one skilled in wielding a spear. The first William
Shakespeare of whom mention is made in the records was hanged for
robbery near Stratford; but it is only fair to state that in those
days hanging was inflicted for stealing even a sheep.
[Illustration: SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHPLACE, STRATFORD-ON-AVON.]
The great dramatist's birthplace lies in the midst of England's
fairest rural scenery. When two Englishmen were asked to name the
finest walk in England, one chose the walk from Stratford to Coventry,
the other, the walk from Coventry to Stratford. A short distance
northeast of Stratford are Warwick with its castle, the home of the
famous king-maker, and Kenilworth Castle, whose historic associations
were romantic enough to stir the imagination of a boy like
Shakespeare.
He was the son of John Shakespeare, an influential merchant, who in
1571 was elected chief alderman of Stratford. The poet's mother was
the daughter of Robert Arden, a well-to-do farmer. We are told that
she was her father's favorite among seven children. Perhaps it was due
to her influence that he had a happy childhood. His references to
plays and sports and his later desire to return to Stratford are
indicative of pleasant boyhood days.
Probably his mother was the original of some of her son's noblest
conceptions of women. His plays have more heroines than heroes. We may
fancy that it was his mother who first pointed out to him--
"...daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes."[19]
We may imagine that from her teaching, as she walked with him over the
Stratford fields, he obtained suggestions which enabled him to hold
captive the ear of the world, when he sang of the pearl in the
cowslip's ear, of the bank where the wild thyme blows, of the
greenwood tree and the merry note of the bird. Many of the references
to nature in his plays are unsurpassed in English verse.
[Illustration: CLASSROOM IN STRATFORD GRAMMAR SCHOOL[20].]
What He Learned at School.--In all probability Shakespeare entered
the Stratford Grammar School at about the age of seven and continued
there until he was nearly fourteen. The typical course in grammar
schools of that period consisted principally of various Latin authors.
One school in 1583 had twenty-five Latin books on its list of studies,
while the only required works in English were the _Catechism, Psalter,
Book of Common Prayer_, and _New Testament_. Children were required to
study Lilly's _Latin Grammar_ instead of their mother tongue. Among
the works that Shakespeare probably read in Latin, AEsop's _Fables_
and Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ may be mentioned.
Although English was not taught, Shakespeare shows wonderful mastery
in the use of his mother tongue. We have the testimony of the
schoolmaster, Holofernes, in _Love's Labor's Lost_ to show that the
study of Latin led to facility in the use of English synonyms:--
"The deer was, as you know, _sanguis_, in blood, ripe as the
pomewater, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of _caelo_, the
sky, the welkin, the heaven; and anon falleth like a crab on the
face of _terra_, the soil, the land, the earth."
Three English equivalents are here given for each of the Latin terms
_caelo_ and _terra_. The same schoolmaster uses seven synonyms in
describing the "fashion" of speech of the ignorant constable,
--"undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained,
or, rather unlettered, or, ratherest, unconfirmed, fashion." When we
remember that it was really Shakespeare who wrote this, we know that
he had been led to study variety of expression. His large vocabulary
could not have been acquired by any one without hard work.
A good translation of the English _Bible_ was accessible to him.
Scriptural phrases and references appear in his plays, and volumes
have been written to show the influence of the _Bible_ on his thought.
Financial Reverses of the Shakespeare Family.--It is probable that
Shakespeare at about the age of fourteen was taken from school to
assist his father in the store. The elder Shakespeare was then
overtaken by financial reverses and compelled to mortgage his wife's
land. His affairs went from bad to worse; he was sued for debt, but
the court could not find any property to satisfy the claim. It is
possible that he was for a short time even imprisoned for debt.
Finally he was deprived of his alderman's gown.
These events must have made a deep impression on the sensitive boy,
and they may have led him to an early determination to try to master
fortune. In after years he showed a business sagacity very rare for a
poet.
Marriage and Departure from Stratford.--The most famous lovers' walk
in England is the footpath from Stratford, leading about one mile
westward through meadows to the hamlet of Shottery. Perhaps William
Shakespeare had this very walk in mind when he wrote the song:--
"Journeys end in lovers' meeting
Every wise man's son doth know."
[Illustration: ANNE HATHAWAY'S COTTAGE, SHOTTERY.]
The end of his walk led to Anne Hathaway's home in Shottery. She was
nearly eight years his senior, but in 1582 at the age of eighteen he
married her.
There is a record that Shakespeare's twin children, Hamnet and Judith,
were baptized in 1585. From this we know that before he was twenty-one
Shakespeare had a wife and family to support.
We have no positive information to tell us what he did for the next
seven years after the birth of his twins. Tradition says that he
joined a group of hunters, killed some of the deer of Sir Thomas Lucy
at Charlecote Park, and fled from Stratford to London in consequence
of threatened prosecution. There is reason to doubt the truth of this
story, and Shakespeare may have sought the metropolis merely because
it offered him more scope to provide for his rapidly increasing
family.
Connects Himself with the London Stage.--The next scene of
Shakespeare's life is laid in London. In 1592 Robert Greene, a London
poet, dramatist, and hack-writer, wrote:--
"There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with
his _Tyger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide_, supposes he is as
well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being
an absolute _Iohannes fac-totum_, is in his owne conceit the only
Shake-scene in a countrie."[21]
The best critics agree that the "upstart Crow" and "Shake-scene" refer
to Shakespeare. The allusion to "Tyger's heart" is from the third part
of _King Henry VI_. and is addressed by the Duke of York to Queen
Margaret of Anjou:--
"O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide!"
Greene's satiric thrust shows that Shakespeare was becoming popular as
a playwright. We can only imagine the steps by which he rose to his
ascendancy as a dramatist. Perhaps he first served the theater in some
menial capacity, then became an actor, and assisted others in revising
or adapting plays before he acquired sufficient skill to write a play
entirely by himself.
In 1593 he published the non-dramatic poem, _Venus and Adonis_, which
he dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. This nobleman is said to have
given Shakespeare, on one occasion, "a thousand pounds to enable him
to make a purchase which he heard he had a mind to." This would show
that Shakespeare had a capacity for attracting people and making
lasting friendships. In 1597 he purchased "New Place," the stateliest
house in Stratford, and we hear no more of his father's financial
troubles.
Twentieth-century Discoveries.--In the first decade of the twentieth
century, Professor C.W. Wallace discovered in the London Record Office
a romantic story in which Shakespeare was an important figure. This
story opens in the year 1598 in the London house of a French Huguenot,
Christopher Mountjoy, wig-maker, with whom Shakespeare lived. Mountjoy
took as apprentice for six years, Stephen Bellott, a young Frenchman.
Beside him worked Mary Mountjoy, the proprietor's only daughter, who
looked with favor upon the young apprentice. At the end of his
apprenticeship Stephen left without proposing marriage to Mary; but on
his return Mrs. Mountjoy asked Shakespeare to make a match between
Stephen and Mary,--a task in which he was successful.
Seven and a half years later Shakespeare was called into court to
testify to all the facts leading to the marriage. After a family
quarrel, Mr. Mountjoy declared that he would never leave Stephen and
Mary a groat, and the son-in-law brought suit for a dowry.
Shakespeare's testimony shows that he remembered Mrs. Mountjoy's
commission and the part that he played in mating the pair, but he
forgot the amount of the dowry and when it was to be paid. The puzzled
court turned the matter over for settlement to the French church in
London, but it is not known what decision was reached.
The documents in the case show that Shakespeare was on familiar terms
with tradesmen, that they thought well of him, that he was willing to
undertake to try to make two people happy, and that he lived in the
Mountjoy house at the corner of Silver and Monkwell streets. During
the period of Stephen's apprenticeship (1598-1604), Shakespeare wrote
some of his greatest plays, such as _Hamlet_ and _Othello_. From its
connection with Shakespeare, this is the most important corner in
London for literary associations.
Wallace also found documents showing that Shakespeare owned at the
time of his death a one-seventh interest in the Blackfriars Theater
and a one-fourteenth interest in the Globe. The hitherto unknown fact
that he continued to hold to the end of his life these important
interests, requiring such skilled supervision, makes more doubtful the
former assumption that he spent the last years of his life entirely at
Stratford.
Last Years and Death.--Shakespeare probably bought New Place in
Stratford as a residence for his family and a retreat for himself out
of the theatrical season, but he doubtless continued to live in London
for the greater part of his time until a few years before his death in
1616. The Mountjoy testimony proves that he was in London in May,
1612.
We are positive, however, that he was living in Stratford at the time
of his death. He may for several years have taken only occasional
trips to London to look after his interests in his theaters. It is not
improbable that his health forced him to retire to Stratford, for it
is difficult to see how any one could have produced nearly two
Shakespearean plays a year for almost twenty years without breaking
down under the strain. He had in addition almost certainly helped to
manage the production of the plays, and tradition says that he was
also an actor. Some of the parts which he is said to have played are
the ghost in _Hamlet_, Adam in _As You Like It_, and Old Knowell in
Ben Jonson's _Every Man in his Humor_.
[Illustration: STRATFORD-ON-AVON, SHOWING CHURCH WHERE SHAKESPEARE IS
BURIED.]
In 1616, at the age of fifty-two, this master-singer of the world,
who, in De Quincey's phrase, was "a little lower than the angels,"
died and was buried in the parish church at Stratford. Shakespeare
knew that in the course of time graves were often opened and the bones
thrown into the charnel house. The world is thankful that he
deliberately planned to have his resting place remain unmolested. His
grave was dug seventeen feet deep and over it was placed the following
inscription, intended to frighten those who might think of moving his
bones:--
[Illustration: INSCRIPTION OVER SHAKESPEARE'S TOMB.]
Publication of his Plays.--It is probable that Shakespeare himself
published only two early poems. Sixteen of his plays appeared in print
during his lifetime; but the chances are that they were taken either
from notes or from stage copies, more or less imperfect and
surreptitiously obtained. The twentieth century has seen one of these
careless reprints of a single play sell for more than three times as
much as it cost to build a leading Elizabethan theater.[22] If
Shakespeare himself had seen to the publication of his plays,
succeeding generations would have been saved much trouble in puzzling
over obscurities due to an imperfect text. We must remember, however,
that publishing a play was thought to injure its success on the stage.
One manager offered a printer a sum now equal to $100 not to publish a
copy of a play that he had secured.
The _First Folio_ edition of Shakespeare's works was published in
1623, seven years after his death, by two of his friends, John Heming
and Henry Condell. In their dedication of the plays they say:--
"We have but collected them and done an office to the dead ...
without ambition either of self profit or fame, only to keep the
memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive, as was our
Shakespeare, by humble offer of his plays."
If Shakespeare had not possessed the art of making friends, we might
to-day be without such plays as _Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The
Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Antony and
Cleopatra, and Macbeth_. These were printed for the first time in the
1623 _Folio_.
Amount and Classification of his Work.--The _First Folio_ edition
contained thirty-five plays, containing 100,120 lines. The Globe
edition, one of the best modern texts of Shakespeare, has thirty-seven
plays. Even if we give him no credit for the unknown dramas which he
assisted in fashioning, and if we further deduct all doubtful plays
from this number, the amount of dramatic work of which he is certainly
the author is only less astonishing than its excellence. His
non-dramatic poetry, comprising _Venus and Adonis, Lucrece_, 154
_Sonnets_, and some other short pieces, amounts to more than half as
many lines as Milton's _Paradise Lost_.
Mere genius without wonderful self-control and a well-ordered use of
time would not have enabled Shakespeare to leave such a legacy to the
world. The pressure for fresh plays to meet exigencies is sufficient
to explain why he did not always do his best work, even if we suppose
that his health was never "out of joint."
The _First Folio_ gives the current contemporary classification of the
plays into "Comedies," "Histories," and "Tragedies." We indicate the
following as some of the best in each class:--
Comedies: _A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night,
The Merchant of Venice, The Winter's Tale_, and _The Tempest_.
Histories: _Richard III., Henry IV., Henry V., Julius Caesar_.
Tragedies: _Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet_.
Four Periods of his Life.--We may make another classification from a
different point of view, according to the period of his development at
the time of writing special plays. In order to study his growth and
changing ideals, it will assist us to divide his work into four
periods.
(1) There was the sanguine period, showing the exuberance of youthful
love and imagination. Among the plays that are typical of these years
are _The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and
Juliet, Richard II._, and _Richard III_. These were probably all
composed before 1595.
(2) The second period, from 1595 to 1601, shows progress in dramatic
art. There is less exaggeration, more real power, and a deeper insight
into human nature. There appears in his philosophy a vein of sadness,
such as we find in the sayings of Jaques in _As You Like It_, and more
appreciation of the growth of character, typified by his treatment of
Orlando and Adam in the same play. Among the plays of this period are
_The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV., Henry V.,_ and _As You Like It_.
(3) We may characterize the third period, from 1601 to 1608, as one in
which he felt that the time was out of joint, that life was a fitful
fever. His father died in 1601, after great disappointments. His best
friends suffered what he calls, in _Hamlet,_ "the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune." In 1601 Elizabeth executed the Earl of Essex for
treason, and on the same charge threw the Earl of Southampton into the
Tower. Even Shakespeare himself may have been suspected. The great
plays of this period are tragedies, among which we may instance
_Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth,_ and _King Lear_.
(4) The plays of his fourth period, 1608-1613, are remarkable for calm
strength and sweetness. The fierceness of _Othello_ and _Macbeth_ is
left behind. In 1608 Shakespeare's mother died. Her death and the
vivid recollection of her kindness and love may have been strong
factors in causing him to look on life with kindlier eyes. The
greatest plays of this period are _Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale_, and
_The Tempest_.
While the dates of the composition of these plays are not exactly
known, the foregoing classification is probably approximately correct.
It should be followed in studying the development and the changing
phases of Shakespeare's mind. (See table, pp. 188 and 189.)
Development as a Dramatist.--It is possible to study some of
Shakespeare's plays with increased interest, if we note the reasons
for assigning them to certain periods of his life. We conclude that
_Love's Labor's Lost_, for instance, is an early play, because of its
form,--excess of rime, small proportion of blank verse, lack of
mastery of poetic expression,--and also because it suffers from the
puns, conceits, and overdrawn wit and imagery of his early work.
Almost one half of the 2789 lines of _Love's Labor's Lost_ rime, while
there are only 579 lines of blank verse. Of the 2064 lines in _The
Tempest_, one of the last of his plays, 1458 are in blank verse. The
plays of his first period show less freedom in the use of verse. He
dislikes to let his meaning run over into the next line without a
pause, and he hesitates to introduce those extra syllables which give
such wonderful variety to his later work. As he grows older, he also
uses more prose. _Romeo and Juliet_ has 405 lines of prose in a total
of 3052 lines, while _Hamlet_, a tragedy of 3931 lines, has 1208 lines
of prose.
His treatment of his characters is even a more significant index to
his growth than the form of his dramas. In the earlier plays, his men
and women are more engaged with external forces than with internal
struggles. In as excellent an early tragedy as _Romeo and Juliet_, the
hero fights more with outside obstacles than with himself. In the
great later tragedies, the internal conflict is more emphasized, as in
the cases of Hamlet and Macbeth. "See thou character" became in an
increasing degree Shakespeare's watchword. He grew to care less for
mere incident, for plots based on mistaken identity, as in _The Comedy
of Errors_; but he became more and more interested in the delineation
of character, in showing the effect of evil on Macbeth and his wife,
of jealousy on Othello, of indecision on Hamlet, as well as in
exploring the ineffectual attempts of many of his characters to escape
the consequences of their acts.
Sources of his Plots.--We should have had fewer plays from
Shakespeare, if he had been compelled to take the time to invent new
plots. The sources of the plots of his plays may usually be found in
some old chronicle, novel, biography, or older play. Holinshed's
_Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland_, published when
Shakespeare was fourteen years old, gives the stories of Lear,
Cymbeline, Macbeth, and of all the English kings who are the heroes of
the historical plays. As Holinshed is very dry reading, if Shakespeare
had followed him closely, for instance, in _King Lear_, the play would
have lost its most impressive parts. There is not in Holinshed even a
suggestion of the Falstaff of _Henry IV_., that veritable "comic
Hamlet," who holds a unique place among the humorous characters of the
world.
North's translation of Plutarch's _Lives_, published when Shakespeare
was fifteen years old, became his textbook of ancient history and
furnished him the raw material for plays like _Julius Caesar_ and
_Antony and Cleopatra_.
TABLE OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS[23]
Play Total Prose Blank Penta- Rimes, Songs Publ- Supp-
of meter Short ished osed
Lines Rimes Lines Date
I.--PLAYS OF FIRST (RIMING) PERIOD
Love's Labor's 2789 1086 579 1028 54 32 1598 1588-9
Lost
Comedy of 1778 240 1150 380 --- --- 1623 1589-91
Errors [24]
Midsummer 2174 441 878 731 138 63 1600 1590-1
Night's Dream
Two Gentlemen 2294 409 1510 116 --- 15 1623 1590-2
of Verona
Romeo and 3052 405 2111 486 --- --- 1597 1591-3
Juliet
Richard II. 2756 --- 2107 537 --- --- 1597 ? 1593
Richard III. 3619 55? 3374 170 --- --- 1597 ? 1594-5
II.--HISTORIES AND COMEDIES OF SECOND PERIOD
King John 2570 --- 2403 150 --- --- 1623 1594-5
Merchant of 2660 673 1896 93 34 9 1600[24]? 1595-6
Venice
1 Henry IV. 3176 1464 1622 84 --- --- 1598 1596-7[25]
2 Henry IV. 3446 1860 1417 74 7 15 1600 1598-9
Henry V. 3380 1531 1678 101 2 8 1600 1599[25]
Merry Wives 3018 2703 227 69 --- 19 1602 1599
Much Ado, &c. 2826 2106 643 40 18 16 1600 1599-1600
As You Like It 2857 1681 925 71 130 97 1623 1599-1600[25]
Twelfth Night 2690 1741 763 120 --- 60 1623 1601[25]
All's Well 2966 1453 1234 280 2 12 1623 1601-2
(Love's Labor's Won, 1590)
III.--TRAGEDIES AND COMEDY OF THIRD PERIOD
Julius Caesar 2478 165 2241 34 --- --- 1623 1601[3]
Hamlet 3931 1208 2490 81 --- 60 1603[24]1602-3[25]
Measure for 2821 1134 1574 73 22 6 1623 ? 1603
Measure
Othello 3316 541 2672 86 --- 25 1622 ? 1604
Macbeth 2108 158 1588 118 129 --- 1623 1605-6[25]
King Lear 3334 903 2238 74 --- 83 1608[24]1605-6[25]
Antony and 3063 255 2761 42 --- 6 1623 1606-7
Cleopatra
Coriolanus 3410 829 2521 42 --- --- 1623 ? 1607-8
IV.--PLAYS OF FOURTH PERIOD
Tempest 2064 458 1458 2 --- 96 1623 1609-10
Cymbeline 3339 638 2585 107 --- 32 1623 1609-10
Winter's Tale 3075 844 1825 --- --- 57 1623 ? 1611
V.--DOUBTFUL PLAYS
Titus 2523 43 2338 144 --- --- 1594 1588-90
Andronicus
1 Henry VI. 2677 --- 2379 314 --- --- 1623 1592-4
2 Henry VI. 3162 448 2562 122 --- --- 1623 1592-4
3 Henry VI. 2904 --- 2749 155 --- --- 1623 1592-4
Contention 1952 381 1571 44 --- --- 1594 1586-8
True Tragedy 2101 --- 2035 66 --- --- 1595 1586-8
VI.--PLAYS IN WHICH SHAKESPEARE WAS NOT SOLE AUTHOR
Taming of the 2649 516 1971 169 15 --- 1623 1596-7
Shrew
Troilus and 3496 1186 2025 196 --- 16 1609 1603
Cressida
Timon of 2373 596 1560 184 18 --- 1623 1607-8
Athens
Pericles 2389 418 1436 225 89 --- 1609[23]1608-9[24]
Henry VIII. 2822 67? 2613 16 --- 12 1623 1610-12[24]
Poems published.--_Venus and Adonis_, 1593; _Lucrece_, 1594;
_Passionate Pilgrim_, 1599; _Phoenix and Turtle_ in Chester's _Loves
Martyr_, 1601; _Sonnets_, 1609, with _A Lover's Complaint_.
Shakespeare recognized the greatness of North's _Plutarch_ and paid it
the compliment of following its thought more closely than that of any
other of his sources.
Shakespeare found suggestions for _As You Like It_ in Thomas Lodge's
contemporary novel _Rosalynde_, but Touchstone and Adam are original
creations.
Our astonishment is often increased to find that the merest hint led
to an imperishable creation, such as the character of Lady Macbeth,
the reference to whom in Holinshed is confined to these twenty-eight
words, "...specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing,
as she that was very ambitious, burning in unquenchable desire to bear
the name of a queen." His plays are almost as different from the old
chronicles or tales as the rose from the soil which nourished it.
[Illustration: SHAKESPEARE--THE D'AVENANT BUST. _Discovered in 1845
on site of Duke's Theater_.]
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
Sympathy.---His most pronounced characteristic is the broadest
sympathy ever shown by an author. He seems to have been able to
sympathize with every kind of human soul in every emergency. He plays
with the simple rustics in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. The portrait
of the serving man Adam, in _As You Like It_, is as kindly and as
discriminating as that of king or nobleman. Though he is the scholar
and philosopher in _Hamlet_, he can afterward roam the country with
the tramp Autolycus in _The Winter's Tale_. Women have marveled at the
ease with which his sympathy crosses the barriers of sex, at his
portraits of Portia, Rosalind, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Miranda,
Cleopatra, and Cordelia. Great actresses have testified to their
amazement at his discovery of feminine secrets which they had thought
no man could ever divine.
[Illustration: HENRY IRVING AS HAMLET.]
Universality.--Shakespeare's sympathy might have been broad enough
to include all the people of his own time and their peculiar
interests, but might have lacked the power to project itself into the
universal heart of humanity. Sometimes a writer voices the ideals and
aspirations of his own day so effectively that he is called the
spokesman of his age, but he makes slight appeal to future
generations. Shakespeare was the spokesman of his own time, but he had
the genius also to speak to all ages. He loved to present the eternal
truths of the human heart and to invest them with such a touch of
nature as to reveal the kinship of the entire world.
His contemporary, the dramatist, Ben Jonson, had the penetration to
say of Shakespeare:--
"He was not of an age but for all time."
He meant that Shakespeare does not exhibit some popular conceit,
folly, or phase of thought, which is merely the fashion of the hour
and for which succeeding generations would care nothing; but that he
voices those truths which appeal to the people of all ages. The grief
of Lear over the dead Cordelia, the ambition of Lady Macbeth, the
loves of Rosalind and Juliet, the questionings of Hamlet, interest us
as much today as they did the Elizabethans. Fashions in literature may
come and go, but Shakespeare's work remains.
[Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS LADY MACBETH. _From the painting by
Sargent_.]
Humor.--Shakespeare had the most comprehensive sense of humor of any
of the world's great writers,--a humor that was closely related to his
sympathy. It has been said that he saved his tragedies from the fatal
disease of absurdity, by inoculating them with his comic virus, and
that his sense of humor kept him from ever becoming shrill. This
faculty enabled him to detect incongruity, to keep from overstressing
a situation, to enter into the personality of others, to recover
quickly from "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," and in one
of his last plays, _The Tempest_, to welcome the "brave young world"
as if he would like to play the game of life again. It was largely
because of his humor that the tragedies and pain of life did not sour
and subdue Shakespeare.
He soon wearies of a vacant laugh. He has only one strictly farcical
play, _The Comedy of Errors_. There are few intellects keen enough to
extract all the humor from Shakespeare. For literal minds the full
comprehension of even a slight display of his humor, such as the
following dialogue affords, is better exercise than the solution of an
algebraic problem. Dogberry, a constable in _Much Ado About Nothing_,
thus instructs the Watch:--
"_Dogberry_. You shall comprehend all vagrom men; you are to bid
any man stand in the prince's name.
"_Watch_. How if a' will not stand?
"_Dogberry_. Why, then, take no note of him, but let him go, and
presently call the rest of the watch together, and thank God you are
rid of a knave."
Of all Shakespeare's qualities, his humor is the hardest to describe
because of its protean forms. Falstaff is his greatest humorous
creation. So resourceful is he that even defeat enables him to rise
like Antaeus after a fall. His humor is almost a philosophy of
existence for those who love to use wit and ingenuity in trying to
evade the laws of sober, orderly living. Perhaps it was for this very
reason that Shakespeare consented to send so early to "Arthur's
bosom"[26] a character who had not a little of the complexity of
Hamlet.
[Illustration: FALSTAFF AND HIS PAGE. _From a drawing by B.
Westmacott_.]
Much of Shakespeare's humor is delicately suffused through his plays.
Many of them either ripple with the laughter of his characters or are
lighted with their smiles. We may pass pleasant hours in the company
of his joyous creations, such as Rosalind in _As You Like It_, or
Portia in _The Merchant of Venice_, or Puck as the spokesman for _A
Midsummer Night's Dream_, who good naturedly exclaims:--
"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
or Viola and her companions in _Twelfth Night_, or Beatrice and
Benedict in _Much Ado About Nothing_, or Ariel in _The Tempest_
playing pranks on the bewildered mariners and singing of the joys of
life which come as a reward for service:--
"Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough."
Shakespeare is also the one English author who is equally successful
in depicting the highest type of both comedy and tragedy. He has the
power to describe even a deathbed scene so as to invest it with both
humor and pathos. Dame Quickly's lines in _Henry V_., on the death of
Falstaff, show this capacity.
The next greatest English writer is lacking in this sense of humor.
John Milton could write the tragedies of a _Paradise Lost_ and a
_Samson Agonistes_, but he could not give us the humor of _A Midsummer
Night's Dream_, _The Comedy of Errors_, or _As You Like It_. We have
seen that the next greatest dramatic genius, Marlowe, has little sense
of humor. Mrs. Browning correctly describes the plays of Shakespeare
as filled--
"With tears and laughters for all time."
Moral Ideals.--To show the moral consequences of acts was the work
which most appealed to him. Banquo voiced the comprehensiveness of
moral law when he said, "In the great hand of God I stand." There is
here great divergence between the views of Shakespeare and of Bacon.
Dowden says:--
"While Bacon's sense of the presence of physical law in the universe
was for his time extraordinarily developed, he seems practically to
have acted upon the theory that the moral laws of the world are not
inexorable, but rather by tactics and dexterity may be cleverly
evaded. Their supremacy was acknowledged by Shakespeare in the
minutest as well as in the greatest concerns of human life."
By employing "tactics" in sending Hamlet on a voyage to England, the
king hoped to avoid the consequences of his crime. Macbeth in vain
tried every stratagem to "trammel up the consequence." Goneril and
Regan drive their white-haired father out into the storm; but even in
_King Lear_, where the forces of evil seem to run riot, let us note
the result:--
"Throughout that stupendous Third Act the good are seen growing
better through suffering, and the bad worse through success. The
warm castle is a room in hell, the storm-swept heath a sanctuary...
The only real thing in the world is the soul with its courage,
patience, devotion. And nothing outward can touch that."[27]
Shakespeare makes no pessimists. He shows how misfortune crowns life
with new moral glory. We rise from the gloom of _King Lear_, feeling
that we would rather be like Cordelia than like either of her sisters
or any other selfish character who apparently triumphs until life's
close. And yet Cordelia lost everything, her portion of her father's
kingdom and her own life. When we realize that Shakespeare found one
hundred and ten lines in _King Lear_ sufficient not only to confer
immortality on Cordelia, but also to make us all eager to pay homage
to her, in spite of the fact that the ordinary standard of the world
has not ceased to declare such a life a failure, we may the better
understand that his greatest power consisted in revealing the moral
victories possible for this rough-hewn human life.
Shakespeare made a mistake about the seacoast of Bohemia and the
location of Milan with reference to the sea, but he was always sure of
the relative position of right and wrong and of the ultimate failure
of evil. In his greatest plays, for instance, in _Macbeth_, he sought
to impress the incalculable danger of meddling with evil, the
impossibility of forecasting the tragedy that might thereby result,
the certainty that retribution would follow, either here or beyond
"this bank and shoal of time."
Mastery of his Mother Tongue.--His wealth of expression is another
striking characteristic. In a poem on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson wrote:--
"Thou had'st small Latin and less Greek."
Shakespeare is, however, the mightiest master of the English tongue.
He uses 15,000 different words, while the second greatest writer in
our language employs only 7000. A great novelist like Thackeray has a
vocabulary of about 5000 words, while many uneducated laborers do not
use over 600 words. The combinations that Shakespeare has made with
these 15,000 words are far more striking than their mere number.
Variety of Style.--The style of Milton, Addison, Dr. Johnson, and
Macaulay has some definite peculiarities, which can easily be
classified. Shakespeare, on the contrary, in holding the mirror up to
nature, has different styles for his sailors, soldiers, courtiers,
kings, and shepherds,--for Juliet, the lover; for Mistress Quickly,
the alewife; for Hamlet, the philosopher; and for Bottom, the weaver.
To employ so many styles requires genius of a peculiar kind. In the
case of most of us, our style would soon betray our individuality.
When Dr. Samuel Johnson tried to write a drama, he made all his little
fishes talk like whales, as Goldsmith wittily remarked.
In the same play Shakespeare's style varies from the dainty lyric
touch of Ariel's song about the cowslip's bell and the blossoming
bough, to a style unsurpassed for grandeur:--
"The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind."
In the same passage his note immediately changes to the soft _vox
humana_ of--
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
His Influence on Thought.--With the exception of the _Scriptures_,
Shakespeare's dramas have surpassed all other works in molding modern
English thought. If a person should master Shakespeare and the
_Bible_, he would find most that is greatest in human thought, outside
of the realm of science.
Even when we do not read him, we cannot escape the influence of others
who have been swayed by him. For generations, certain modes of thought
have crystallized about his phrases. We may instance such expressions
as these: "Brevity is the soul of wit." "What's in a name?" "The wish
was father to the thought." "The time is out of joint." "There's the
rub." "There's a divinity that shapes our ends." "Comparisons are
odorous." It would, perhaps, not be too much to say that the play of
_Hamlet_ has affected the thought of the majority of the
English-speaking race. His grip on Anglo-Saxon thought has been
increasing for more than three hundred years.
Shakespeare's influence on the thought of any individual has only two
circumscribing factors,--the extent of Shakespearean study and the
capacity of interpreting the facts of life. No intelligent person can
study Shakespeare without becoming a deeper and more varied thinker,
without securing a broader comprehension of human existence,--its
struggles, failures, and successes. If we have before viewed humanity
through a glass darkly, Shakespeare will gradually lead us where we
can see face to face the beauty and the grandeur of the mystery of
existence. His most valuable influence often consists in rendering his
students sympathetic and in making them feel a sense of kinship with
life. Shakespeare's readers more quickly realize that human nature
shows the shaping touch of divinity. They have the rare joy of
discovering the world anew and of exclaiming with Miranda:--
"How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!"[28]
When we have really become acquainted with Shakespeare, our lives will
be less prosaic and restricted. After intimate companionship with him,
there will be, in the words of Ariel, hardly any common thing in
life--
"But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."[29]
BEN JONSON, 1573?-1637
[Illustration: BEN JONSON. _From the portrait by Gerard Honthorst,
National Portrait Gallery_.]
Life.--About nine years after the birth of Shakespeare his greatest
successor in the English drama was born in London. Jonson outlived
Shakespeare twenty-one years and helped to usher in the decline of the
drama.
Ben Jonson, the son of a clergyman and the stepson of a master
bricklayer, received a good education at Westminster School. Unlike
Shakespeare, Jonson learned much Latin and Greek. In one respect
Jonson's training was unfortunate for a poet. He was taught to write
prose exercises first and then to turn them into poetry. In this way
he acquired the habit of trying to express unpoetical ideas in verse.
Art could change the prose into metrical riming lines, but art could
not breathe into them the living soul of poetry. In after times Jonson
said that Shakespeare lacked art, but Jonson recognized that the
author of _Hamlet_ had the magic touch of nature. Jonson's pen rarely
felt her all-embracing touch.
If Jonson served an apprenticeship as a bricklayer, as his enemies
afterward said, he did not continue long at such work. He crossed the
Channel and enlisted for a brief time as a soldier in the Netherlands.
He soon returned to London and became a writer for the theater, and
thenceforth lived the life of an author and a student. He loved to
study and translate the classics. In fact, what a novice might think
original in Jonson's plays was often borrowed from the classics. Of
his relations to the classical writers, Dryden says, "You track him
everywhere in their snow." Jonson was known as the most learned poet
of the age, because, if his plays demanded any special knowledge, no
subject was too hard, dry, or remote from common life for him to
attempt to master it. He knew the boundaries of Bohemia, and he took
pleasure in saying to a friend: "Shakespeare in a play brought in a
number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where is
no sea near, by some hundred miles."
Jonson's personal characteristics partly explain why he placed himself
in opposition to the spirit of the age. He was extremely combative. It
was almost a necessity for him to quarrel with some person or with
some opinion. He killed two men in duels, and he would probably have
been hanged, if he had not pleaded benefit of clergy. For the greater
part of his life, he was often occupied with pen and ink quarrels.
When James I. ascended the throne in 1603, Jonson soon became a royal
favorite. He was often employed to write masques, a peculiar species
of drama which called for magnificent scenery and dress, and gave the
nobility the opportunity of acting the part of some distinguished or
supernatural character. Such work brought Jonson into intimate
association with the leading men of the day.
It is pleasant to think that he was a friend of Shakespeare. Jonson's
pithy volume of prose, known as _Discoveries made upon Men and
Matter_, contains his famous criticism on Shakespeare, noteworthy
because it shows how a great contemporary regarded him, "I loved the
man and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any." Few
English writers have received from a great rival author such
convincing testimony in regard to lovable personality.
[Illustration: BEN JONSON'S TOMB IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.]
In 1616, the year in which Shakespeare died, Jonson was made poet
laureate. When he died in 1637, he was buried in an upright position
in Westminster Abbey. A plain stone with the unique inscription, "O
Rare Ben Jonson," marks his grave.
Plays.--Ben Jonson's comedies are his best dramatic work. From all
his plays we may select three that will best repay reading: _Volpone,
The Alchemist_, and _The Silent Woman_. _Volpone_ is the story of an
old, childless, Venetian nobleman whose ruling passion is avarice.
Everything else in the play is made tributary to this passion. The
first three lines in the first act strike the keynote of the entire
play. Volpone says:--
"Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!--
Open the shrine, that I may see my saint.
Hail the world's soul and mine!"
_The Alchemist_ makes a strong presentation of certain forms of
credulity in human nature and of the special tricks which the
alchemists and impostors of that day adopted. One character wants to
buy the secret of the helpful influence of the stars; another parts
with his wealth to learn the alchemist's secret of turning everything
into gold and jewels. The way in which these characters are deceived
is very amusing. A study of this play adds to our knowledge of a
certain phase of the times. In point of artistic construction of plot,
_The Alchemist_ is nowhere excelled in the English drama; but the
intrusion of Jonson's learning often makes the play tedious reading,
as when he introduces the technical terms of the so-called science of
alchemy to show that he has studied it thoroughly. One character
speaks to the alchemist of--
"Your lato, azoch, zernich, chibrit, heautarit,"
and another asks:--
"Can you sublime and dulcify? calcine?
Know you the sapor pontic? sapor stiptic,
Or what is homogene, or heterogene?"
Lines like the following show that Jonson's acute mind had grasped
something of the principle of evolution:--
"...'twere absurd
To think that nature in the earth bred gold
Perfect in the instant: something went before.
There must be remote matter."
_The Silent Woman_ is in lighter vein than either of the plays just
mentioned. The leading character is called Morose, and his special
whim or "humor" is a horror of noise. His home is on a street "so
narrow at both ends that it will receive no coaches nor carts, nor any
of these common noises." He has mattresses on the stairs, and he
dismisses the footman for wearing squeaking shoes. For a long time
Morose does not marry, fearing the noise of a wife's tongue. Finally
he commissions his nephew to find him a silent woman for a wife, and
the author uses to good advantage the opportunity for comic situations
which this turn in the action affords. Dryden preferred _The Silent
Woman_ to any of the other plays.
Besides the plays mentioned in this section, Jonson wrote during his
long life many other comedies and masques as well as some tragedies.
Marks of Decline.--A study of the decline of the drama, as shown in
Jonson's plays, will give us a better appreciation of the genius of
Shakespeare. We may change Jonson's line so that it will state one
reason for his not maintaining Shakespearean excellence:--
"He was not for all time, but of an age."
His first play, _Every Man in his Humor_, paints, not the universal
emotions of men, but some special humor. He thus defines the sense in
which he uses humor:--
"As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a Humor."
Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson gives a distorted or incomplete picture of
life. In _Volpone_ everything is subsidiary to the humor of avarice,
which receives unnatural emphasis. In _The Alchemist_ there is little
to relieve the picture of credibility and hypocrisy, while _The Silent
Woman_ has for its leading character a man whose principal "humor" or
aim in life is to avoid noise.
No drama which fails to paint the nobler side of womanhood can be
called complete. In Jonson's plays we do not find a single woman
worthy to come near the Shakespearean characters, Cordelia, Imogen,
and Desdemona. His limitations are nowhere more marked than in his
inability to portray a noble woman.
Another reason why he fails to present life completely is shown in
these lines, in which he defines his mission:--
"My strict hand
Was made to seize on vice, and with a gripe
Squeeze out the humor of such spongy souls
As lick up every idle vanity."
Since the world needs building up rather than tearing down, a remedy
for an ailment rather than fault-finding, the greatest of men cannot
be mere satirists. Shakespeare displays some fellow feeling for the
object of his satire, but Jonson's satire is cold and devoid of
sympathy.
Jonson deliberately took his stand in opposition to the romantic
spirit of the age. Marlowe and Shakespeare had disregarded the
classical unities and had developed the drama on romantic lines.
Jonson resolved to follow classical traditions and to adhere to unity
of time and place in the construction of his plots. The action in the
play of _The Silent Woman_, for instance, occupies only twelve hours.
General Characteristics.--Jonson's plays show the touch of a
conscientious artist with great intellectual ability. His vast
erudition is constantly apparent. He is the satiric historian of his
time, and he exhibits the follies and the humors of the age under a
powerful lens. He is also the author of dainty lyrics, and forcible
prose criticism.
Among the shortcomings of his plays, we may specially note lack of
feeling and of universality. He fails to comprehend the nature of
woman. He is not a sympathetic observer of manifold life, but presents
only what is perceived through the frosted glass of intellect. His art
is self-conscious. He defiantly opposed the romantic spirit of the age
and weakened the drama by making it bear the burden of the classical
unities.
MINOR DRAMATISTS
Beaumont and Fletcher.--Next to Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ben
Jonson, the two most influential dramatists were Francis Beaumont
(1584-1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625). They are usually mentioned
together because they collaborated in writing plays. Fletcher had the
great advantage of working with Shakespeare in producing _Henry VIII_.
Beaumont died nine years before Fletcher, and it is doubtful whether
he collaborated with Fletcher in more than fifteen of the fifty plays
published under their joint names.
Two of their greatest plays, _Philaster_ and _The Maid's Tragedy_, are
probably their joint production. _The Faithful Shepherdess_ and
_Bonduca_ are among the best of about eighteen plays supposed to have
been written by Fletcher alone. After Beaumont's death, Fletcher
sometimes collaborated with other dramatists.
[Illustration: FRANCIS BEAUMONT.]
Almost all the so-called Beaumont and Fletcher plays are well
constructed. These dramatists also have, in common with the majority
of their associates, the ability to produce occasional passages of
exquisite poetry. A character in _Philaster_ speaks of death in lines
that suggest _Hamlet_:--
"'Tis less than to be born; a lasting sleep,
A quiet resting from all jealousy;
A thing we all pursue; I know besides
It is but giving over of a game
That must be lost."
Beaumont and Fletcher's work is noteworthy for its pictures of
contemporary life and manners, for wealth of incident, rapidity of
movement, and variety of characters.
Not long after the beginning of the seventeenth century there was a
change in the taste of the patrons of the theater. Shakespeare
declined in popularity. The playwrights tried to solve the problem of
interesting audiences that wished only to be entertained. This attempt
led to a change in dramatic methods.
Changed Moral Ideals.--Under Elizabeth's successors the Puritan
spirit increased and the most religious part of the community seldom
attended the theater. The later dramatists pay little attention to the
moral development of character and its self-revelation through action.
They often merely describe character and paint it from the outside. We
have seen that Shakespeare's great plays are almost a demonstration in
moral geometry, but Beaumont and Fletcher are not much concerned over
the moral consequences of an action. The gravest charge against them
is that they "unknit the sequence of moral cause and effect." After
reading such plays, we do not rise with the feeling that there is a
divinity that shapes our ends.
[Illustration: JOHN FLETCHER.]
Coleridge says, "Shakespeare never renders that amiable which religion
and reason alike teach us to detest, or clothes impurity in the garb
of virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher." Much of the work of their
contemporary dramatists is marred by such blemishes. Unpleasant as are
numbers of these plays, they are less insidious than many which have
appeared on the stage in modern times.
Love of Surprises.--The dramatists racked their inventive powers to
introduce surprises to interest the audience. Here was a marked
departure from Shakespeare's later method. He plans _Macbeth_ so as to
have his audience forecast the logical result. Consequences of the
most tremendous import, beside which Beaumont and Fletcher's surprises
seem trivial, follow naturally from Macbeth's actions. In his greatest
plays, Shakespeare, unlike the later dramatists, never relies on
illogical surprises to sustain the interest. The witch queen in one of
the plays of Thomas Middleton (1570-1627) suddenly exclaims:--
"...fetch three ounces of the red-haired girl
I kill'd last midnight."
Shakespeare's witches suggest only enough of the weird and the
horrible to transfix the attention and make the beholder realize the
force of the temptation that assails Macbeth. Charles Lamb truly
observes that Middleton's witches "can harm the body," but
Shakespeare's "have power over the soul."
Middleton could, however, write a passage like the following, which
probably suggested to Milton one of the finest lines in _Lycidas_:--
"Upon those lips, the sweet fresh buds of youth,
The holy dew of prayer lies, like pearl
Dropt from the opening eyelids of the morn
Upon a bashful rose."
Large Number of Playwrights.--Beaumont and Fletcher were only two of
a large number of dramatists who were born in the age of Elizabeth,
and who, with few exceptions, lived into the second quarter of the
seventeenth century. Their work was the result of earlier Elizabethan
impulses, and it is rightly considered a part of the great dramatic
movement of the Elizabethan age. The popularity of the drama continued
to attract many authors who in a different age might have produced
other forms of literature.
George Chapman (1559?-1634), who is best known for his fine
translation of Homer's _Iliad_, turned dramatist in middle life, but
found it difficult to enter into the feelings of characters unlike
himself. His best two plays, _Bussy D'Ambois_ and _The Revenge of
Bussy D'Ambois_, are tragedies founded on French history. Thomas
Middleton, gifted in dramatic technique and dialogue and noted for
his comedy of domestic manners, was the author of _Michaelmas Term_,
_A Trick to Catch the Old One_, _The Changeling_ (in collaboration
with William Rowley, 1585?-1640?). John Marston (1576?-1634) wrote
_Antonio and Mellida_, a blood and thunder tragedy, and collaborated
with Jonson and Chapman to produce _Eastward Hoe_, an excellent comic
picture of contemporary life. _The Shoemaker's Holiday_ of Thomas
Dekker (1570?-1640) is also a good comedy of London life and manners.
Philip Massinger (1584-1640), a later collaborator with Fletcher,
wrote _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_, a play very popular in after
times. Thomas Heywood (1572?-1650), one of the most prolific
dramatists, claimed to have had "either an entire hand or at the least
a main finger," in two hundred and twenty plays. His best work is _A
Woman Killed with Kindness_, a domestic drama that appealed to the
middle classes.
A Tragic Group.--Three dramatists: John Webster (1602-1624),
Cyril Tourneur (1575?-1626), and John Ford (1586-1640?), had a
love for the most somber tragedy. In tragic power, Webster approaches
nearest to Shakespeare. Webster's greatest play, _The Duchess of
Malfi_ (acted in 1616), and _The White Devil_, which ranks second,
show the working of a master hand, but Webster's genius comes to a
focus only in depicting the horrible. He loves such gloomy metaphors
as the following:--
"You speak as if a man
Should know what fowl is _coffined_ in a baked meat
Afore you cut it open."
Tourneur's _The Atheist's Tragedy_ is in Webster's vein, but far
inferior to _The Duchess of Malfi_.
Ford's _The Broken Heart_ is a strong, but unpleasant, tragedy. He is
so fascinated with the horrible that he introduces it even when it is
not the logical outcome of a situation. His best but least
characteristic play is _Perkin Warbeck_, which is worthy of ranking
second only to Shakespeare's historical plays.
End of the Elizabethan Drama.--James Shirley (1596-1666), "the
last of the Elizabethans," endeavored to the best of his ability to
continue the work of the earlier dramatists. _The Traitor_ and _The
Cardinal_ are two of the best of his many productions. He was hard at
work writing new plays in 1642, when the Puritans closed the theaters.
He was thus forced to abandon the profession that he enjoyed and
compelled to teach in order to earn a livelihood.
The drama has never since regained its Elizabethan ascendancy. The
coarse plays of the Restoration (1660) flourished for a while, but the
treatment of the later drama forms but a minor part of the history of
the best English literature. Few plays produced during the next two
hundred years are much read or acted to-day. _She Stoops to Conquer_
(1773), by Oliver Goldsmith, and _The Rivals_ (1775) and _The School
for Scandal_ (1777), by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, are the chief
exceptions before 1890.
SUMMARY
The Elizabethan age was a period of expansion in knowledge, commerce,
religious freedom, and human opportunities. The defeat of the Armada
freed England from fear of Spanish domination and made her mistress of
the sea.
England was vivified by the combined influence of the Renaissance and
the Reformation. Knowledge was expanding in every direction and
promising to crown human effort with universal mastery. The greater
feeling of individuality was partly due to the Reformation, which
emphasized the direct responsibility of each individual for all acts
affecting the welfare of his soul.
Elizabethans were noted for their resourcefulness, their initiative,
their craving for new experiences, and their desire to realize the
utmost out of life. As they cared little for ideas that could not be
translated into action, they were particularly interested in the
drama.
Although the prose covers a wide field, it is far inferior to the
poetry. Lyly's _Euphues_ suffers from overwrought conceits and forced
antitheses, but it influenced writers to pay more attention to the
manner in which thought was expressed. The flowery prose of Sidney's
_Arcadia_ presents a pastoral world of romance. His _Apologie for
Poetrie_ is a meritorious piece of early criticism. While Hooker
indicates advance in solidity of matter and dignity of style, yet a
comparison of his heavy religious prose with the prayer of the king in
_Hamlet_ or with Portia's words about mercy in _The Merchant of
Venice_ will show the vast superiority of the poetry in dealing with
spiritual ideas. Bacon's _Essays_, celebrated for pithy condensation
of striking thoughts, is the only prose work that has stood the test
of time well enough to claim many readers to-day.
Poetry, both lyric and dramatic, is the crowning glory of the
Elizabethan age. The lyric verse is remarkable for its wide range and
for beauty of form and sentiment. The lyrics include love sonnets,
pastorals, and miscellaneous verse. Shakespeare's _Sonnets_ and the
songs in his dramas are the best in this field, but many poets wrote
exquisite artistic lyrics.
Edmund Spenser is the only great poet who was not also a dramatist.
His _Faerie Queene_ fashions an ideal world dominated by a love of
beauty and high endeavor.
The greatest literary successes of the age were won in writing plays
for the stage. In England the drama had for centuries slowly developed
through Miracle plays, Moralities, and Interludes to the plays of
Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. These three are the greatest
Elizabethan dramatists, but they are only the central figures of a
group.
The English drama in the hands of Sackville imitated Seneca and
followed the rules of the classic stage. Marlowe and Shakespeare threw
off the restraints of the classical unities; and the romantic drama,
rejoicing in its freedom, speedily told the story of all life.
The innyards were used for the public presentation of plays before the
erection of theaters in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The
theaters were a great educational force in Shakespeare's time. They
not only furnished amusement, but they also took the place of
periodicals, lectures, and books. The actors, coming into close
contact with their audience and unable to rely on elaborate scenery as
an offset to poor acting, were equal to the task of so presenting
Shakespeare's great plays as to make them popular.
Shakespeare's plays, the greatest ever written, reveal wonderful
sympathy, universality, humor, delineation of character, high moral
ideals, mastery of expression, and strength, beauty, and variety of
poetic form.
Great as is Ben Jonson, he hampered himself by observing the classical
unities and by stressing accidental qualities. He lacks Shakespeare's
universality, broad sympathy, and emotional appeal.
Other minor dramatists, like Beaumont and Fletcher show further
decline, because they constructed their plays more from the outside,
showed less development of character in strict accordance with moral
law, and relied more for effect on sensational scenes. The drama has
never since taken up the wand that dropped from Shakespeare's hands.
REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
HISTORICAL
In addition to the chapters on the time in the histories of Gardiner,
Green, Lingard, Walker, and Traill, see Stephenson's _The Elizabethan
People_, Creighton's _Queen Elizabeth_, Wilson's _Life in
Shakespeare's England_, Stephenson's _Shakespeare's London_, Warner's
_English History in Shakespeare's plays_.
LITERARY
General and Non-Dramatic
_The Cambridge History of English Literature_, Vols. IV., V., and VI.
Courthope's _A History of English Poetry_, Vol. II.
Schelling's _English Literature during the Lifetime of Shakespeare_.
Seecombe and Allen's _The Age of Shakespeare_, 2 vols.
Saintsbury's _A History of Elizabethan Literature_.
_Dictionary of National Biography_ for lives of Lyly, Sidney, Hooker.
Bacon, Spenser, and the minor dramatists.
Walton's _Life of Hooker_.
Church's _Life of Bacon_. (E.M.L.)
Church's _Life of Spenser_. (E.M.L.)
Mackail's _The Springs of Helicon_ (Spenser).
Dowden's _Transcripts and Studies_ (Spenser).
Lowell's _Among My Books_ (Spenser).
Erskine's _The Elizabethan Lyric_.
The Drama[30]
Schelling's _Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642_, 2 vols. Ward's _A History
of English Dramatic Literature_, 3 vols.
Brooke's _The Tudor Drama_.
Chambers's _The Mediaeval Stage_.
Allbright's _The Shakespearean Stage_.
Lawrence's _Elizabethan Playhouse and Other Studies_.
Smith's _York Plays_ (Clarendon Press).
Symonds's _Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama_.
Bates's _The English Religious Drama_.
Manly's _Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama_.
Wallace's _The Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare_.
Ingram's _Christopher Marlowe and his Associates_.
Dowden's _Transcripts and Studies_ (Marlowe).
Symonds's _Ben Jonson_.
Swinburne's _A Study of Ben Jonson_.
Shakespeare
Lee's _A Life of William Shakespeare_.
Furnivall and Munro's _Shakespeare: Life and Work_.
Harris's _The Man Shakespeare and his Tragic Life Story_.
Halliwell-Phillipps's _Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare_.
Raleigh's _Shakespeare_.(E.M.L.)
Baker's _The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist_.
MacCracken, Pierce, and Durham's _An Introduction to Shakespeare_.
Bradley's _Shakespearean Tragedy_ (excellent).
Bradley's _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_.
Dowden's _Shakespeare, His Mind and Art_.
Coleridge's _Lectures on Shakespeare_ (pp. 21-58 of Beers's
_Selections from the Prose writings of Coleridge_).
Lowell's _Shakespeare Once More_, in _Among My Books_.
Wallace's _Shakespeare, the Globe, and Blackfriars_.
_How Shakespeare's Senses were Trained_, Chap. X. in Halleck's
_Education of the Central Nervous System_.
Rolfe's _Shakespeare the Boy_.
Boswell-Stone's _Shakespeare's Holinshed_.
Brooke's _Shakespeare's Plutarch_, 2 vols.
Madden's _The Diary of Master William Silence: A Study of Shakespeare
and of Elizabethan Sport_.
Winter's _Shakespeare on the Stage_.
SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Elizabethan Prose.--Good selections from Ascham, Hakluyt, Raleigh,
Holinshed, Stow, Camden, North, Sidney, Foxe, Hooker, Lyly, Greene,
Lodge, and Nashe are given in Craik, I.[31] Chambers, I. and Manly,
II. also give a number of selections. Deloney's _The Gentle Craft_ may
be found in the Clarendon Press edition of his _Works_. For Bacon, see
Craik, II.
These selections will give the student a broader grasp of the
Elizabethan age. The style and subject matter of Lyly's _Euphues_,
Sidney's _Arcadia_, Hooker's _Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity_,
and Bacon's _Essays_ should be specially noted. Which one of these
authors exerted the strongest influence on his own age? Which one
makes the strongest appeal to modern times? In what respects does the
style of any Elizabethan prose writer show an improvement over that of
Mandeville and Malory?
Lyrics.--For specimens of love sonnets, read Nos. 18, 33, 73, 104,
111, and 116 of Shakespeare's _Sonnets_. Compare them with any of
Sidney's Spenser's sonnets. Other love lyrics which should be read are
Spenser's _Prothalamion_, Lodge's _Love in My Bosom Like a Bee_ and
Ben Jonson's _To Celia_. Among pastoral lyrics, read from Spenser's
_Shepherd's Calendar_ for August, 1579, Perigo and Willie's duet,
beginning:--
"It fell upon a holy eve,"
and Marlowe's _The Passionate Shepherd to His Love_. The best pastoral
lyrics from the modern point of view are Shakespeare's two songs:
"Under the Greenwood Tree" (_As you like it_) and "When Icicles Hang
by the Wall" (_Love's Labor's Lost_). The best miscellaneous lyrics
are the songs in Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_, _The Tempest_, and _As You
Like It_. Drayton's _Ballad of Agincourt_ and _Sonnet 61_ are his best
lyrical verse. Read Ben Jonson's _An Epitaph on Salathiel Pavy_ and,
from his Pindaric Ode, the stanza beginning:--
"It is not growing like a tree."
From John Donne, read either _The Funeral_, _The Canonization_, or
_The Dream_.
Good selections from all varieties of Elizabethan lyrics may be found
in Bronson, II., Ward. I., _Oxford, Century_, Manly, I. Nearly all the
lyrics referred to in this list, including the best songs from the
dramatists, are given in Schelling's _Elizabethan Lyrics_ (327 pp., 75
cents). This work, together with Erskine's _The Elizabethan Lyric_ and
Reed's _English Lyrical Poetry from its Origins to the Present Time_,
will serve for a more exhaustive study of this fascinating subject.
From your reading, select from each class the lyric that pleases you
most, and give reasons for your choice. Which lyric seems the most
spontaneous? the most artistic? the most inspired? the most modern?
the most quaint? the most and the least instinct with feeling?
Edmund Spenser.--The _Faerie Queene_, Book I., Canto I., should be
read. Maynard's _English Classic Series_, No. 27 (12 cents) contains
the first two cantos and the _Prothalamion_. Kitchin's edition of Book
I. (Clarendon Press. 60 cents) is an excellent volume. The Globe
edition furnishes a good complete text of Spenser's work. Ample
selections are given in Bronson, II., Ward, I., and briefer ones in
Manly, I., and _Century_.
THE DRAMA
The Best Volumes of Selections.--The least expensive volume to cover
nearly the entire field with brief selections is Vol. II. of _The
Oxford Treasury of English Literature_, entitled _Growth of the Drama_
(Clarendon Press, 412 pp., 90 cents). Pollard's _English Miracle
Plays, Moralities, and Interludes_ (Clarendon Press, 250 pp., $1.90)
is the best single volume of selections from this branch of the drama.
_Everyman and Other Miracle Plays_ (Everyman's Library, 35 cents) is a
good inexpensive volume. Manly's' _Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean
Drama_ (three volumes, $1.25 each) covers this field more fully.
Morley's _English Plays_ (published as Vol. III. of Cassell's _Library
of English Literature_, at eleven and one half shillings) contains
good selections from nearly all the plays mentioned below, except
those by Shakespeare and Jonson. Williams's _Specimens of the
Elizabethan Drama, from Lyly to Shirley_, 1580-1642 (Clarendon Press,
576 pp., $1.90) is excellent for a comprehensive survey of the field
covered. Lamb's _Specimens of English Poets Who Lived about the Time
of Shakespeare_ (Bohn's Library, 552 pp.) contains a large number of
good selections.
Miracle Plays.--Read the Chester Play of _Noah's Flood_,
Pollard,[32] 8-20, and the Towneley _Play of the Shepherds_, Pollard,
31-43; Manly's _Specimens_, I, 94-119; Morley's _English Plays_,
12-18. These two plays best show the germs of English comedy.
Moralities.--The best _Morality_ is that known as _Everyman_,
Pollard, 76-96; also in _Everyman's Library_. If _Everyman_ is not
accessible, _Hycke-Scorner_ may be substituted, Morley; 12-18; Manly's
_Specimens_, I., 386-420.
Court Plays, Early Comedies, and Gorboduc.--The best _Interlude_ is
_The Four P's_. Adequate selections are given in Morley, 18-20, and in
Symonds's Shakespeare's _Predecessors in the English Drama_, 188-201.
Pollard and Manly give several good selections from other
_Interludes_.
_Ralph Royster Doyster_ may be found in Arber's _Reprints_; in
Morley's _English Plays_, pp. 22-46; in Manly's _Specimens_, II.,
5-92; in _Oxford Treasury_, II., 161-174, and in _Temple Dramatists_
(35 cents).
_Gorboduc_ is given in _Oxford Treasury_, II. pp., 40-54 (selections);
Morley's _English Plays_, pp. 51-64; and, under the title of _Ferrex
and Porrex_, in Dodsley's _Old Plays_.
What were some of the purposes for which _Interludes_ were written?
How did they aid in the development of the drama?
In what different forms are _The Four-P's, Ralph Royster Doyster_, and
_Gorboduc_ written? Why would Shakespeare's plays have been impossible
if the evolution of the drama had stopped with _Gorboduc_?
Pre-Shakespearean Dramatists.--Selections from Lyly, Peele, Green,
Lodge, Nashe, and Kyd may be found in Williams's _Specimens_. Morley
and _Oxford Treasury_ also contain a number of selections. Peele's
_The Arraignment of Paris_ and Kyd's _The Spanish Tragedy_ are in
_Temple Dramatists_. Greene's best plays are in _Mermaid Series_.
What are the merits of Lyly's dialogue and comedy? What might
Shakespeare have learned from Lyly, Peele, Greene, and Kyd? In what
different form did these dramatists write? What progress do they show?
Marlowe.--Read _Dr. Faustus_, in _Masterpieces of the English Drama_
(American Book Company) or in _Everyman's Library_. This play may also
be found in Morley's _English Plays_, pp. 116-128, or in Morley's
_Universal Library_. Selections from various plays of Marlowe may be
found in _Oxford Treasury_, 61-85, 330-356; and in Williams's
_Specimens_, 25-34.
Does _Dr. Faustus_ observe the classical unities? In what way does it
show the spirit of the Elizabethan age? Was the poetic form of the
play the regular vehicle of dramatic expression? In what does the
greatness of the play consist? What are its defects? Why do young
people sometimes think Marlowe the greatest of _all_ the Elizabethan
dramatists?
Shakespeare.--The student should read in sequence one or more of the
plays in each of Shakespeare's four periods of development (pp. 185,
188), such as _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ and _Romeo and Juliet_, for
the first period; _As You Like It_ and _The Merchant of Venice_, for
the second; _Hamlet_ and _King Lear_ or _Macbeth_ or _Julius Caesar_,
for the third; and _The Winter's Tale_ and _The Tempest_, for the
fourth.
Among the many good annotated editions of separate plays are the
Clarke and Wright, Rolfe, Hudson, Arden, Temple, and Tudor editions.
Furness's _Variorum Shakespeare_ is the best for exhaustive study. The
best portable single volume edition is Craig's _Oxford Shakespeare_,
India paper, 1350 pages.
The student cannot do better than follow the advice of Dr. Johnson:
"Let him who is unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who
desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read
every play, from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of
all his commentators... Let him read on through brightness and
obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his
comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when
the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness and
read the commentators."
Shakespeare's three greatest tragedies, _Hamlet, King Lear_, and
_Macbeth_, should be read several times. After becoming familiar with
the story, the student should next determine the general aim of the
play and analyze the personality and philosophy of each of the leading
characters.
After reading some of all classes of Shakespeare's plays, point out
his (_a_) breadth of sympathy, (_b_) humor, (_c_) moral ideals, (_d_)
mastery of English and variety of style, and (_e_) universality. What
idea of his personality can you form from his plays? If you have read
them in sequence, point out some of the characteristics of each of his
four periods. Why is Shakespeare often called a great dramatic artist?
How did his audience and manner of presentation of his plays modify
his treatment of a dramatic theme?
Ben Jonson and Minor Dramatists.--The best plays of Ben Jonson,
Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Massinger, Webster, and
Tourneur may be found in _Masterpieces of the English Drama_ edited by
Schellinq (American Book Company). Selections from all the minor
dramatists mentioned may be found in Williams's _Specimens_. The
teacher will need to exercise care in assigning readings. Most of the
minor dramatists are better suited to advanced students.
Read Jonson's _The Alchemist_ or the selection in Williams's
_Specimens_. A sufficient selection from _Philaster_ may be found in
Vol. II. of _The Oxford Treasury_, in Morley, and in Williams's
_Specimens_.
What points of difference between Shakespeare and Jonson do you
notice? What is his object in _The Alchemist_? Why is its plot called
unusually fine? Wherein does Jonson show a decline in the drama?
Who were Beaumont and Fletcher? What movement in the drama do they
illustrate? What are the characteristics of some other minor
dramatists? What are the chief reasons why the minor dramatists fail
to equal Shakespeare? When and why did this period of the drama close?
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER IV:
[Footnote 1: For additional mention of Elizabethan novelists, see p.
317.]
[Footnote 2: For references to selections from all these prose
writers, see p. 215.]
[Footnote 3: _Of Youth and Age_.]
[Footnote 4: Thomas Heywood's _Matin Song_.]
[Footnote 5: Suggestions for additional study of Elizabethan lyrics
are given on p. 215.]
[Footnote 6: riding.]
[Footnote 7: _An Hymne in Honour of Beautie_.]
[Footnote 8: _Faerie Queene_, Book III., Canto 4.]
[Footnote 9: _Ibid_., Book I., Canto 3.]
[Footnote 10: Smith's _York Plays_.]
[Footnote 11: C.W. Wallace's _The Evolution of the English Drama up to
Shakespeare_.]
[Footnote 12: Wallace, _op. cit_., p.37.]
[Footnote 13: _What We Know of the Elizabethan Stage_.]
[Footnote 14: Performances were often given at night in private
theaters. From the records in a lawsuit over the second Blackfriars
Theater, we learn that there were in 1608 only three private theaters
in London,--Blackfriars, Whitefriars, and a St. Paul's Cathedral
playhouse, in which boys acted.]
[Footnote 15: This drawing of the Swan Theater, London, was probably
made near the end of the sixteenth century by van Buchell, a Dutchman,
from a description by his friend, J. de Witt. The drawing, found at
the University of Utrecht, although perhaps not accurate in details,
is valuable as a rough contemporary record of an impression
communicated to a draftsman by one who had seen an Elizabethan play.]
[Footnote 16: The lease of the building for the first Blackfriars
Theater, on Ludgate Hill, London, was taken in 1576 by Richard
Farrant, master of the boys of Windsor Chapel, and canceled in 1584.
In 1595 James Burbage bought a building for the second Blackfriars
Theater, near the site of the first. This was a private theater,
competing with the Globe, with which Shakespeare was connected. The
chief dramatists for the second Blackfriars were Ben Jonson, George
Chapman, and John Marston. James I. suppressed the second Blackfriars
in 1608 because its actors satirized him and the French king. A few
months later, Shakespeare and his associates assumed the management of
the Blackfriars and gave performances there as well as at the Globe.
These facts explain Wallace's discovery that Shakespeare at the time
of his death owned a one-seventh interest in the second Blackfriars, a
theater that had formerly been a rival to the Globe.]
[Footnote 17: _Dr. Faustus_, Scene 6.]
[Footnote 18: _Tamburlaine_, Act II., Scene 7.]
[Footnote 19: _The Winter's Tale_, Act IV., Scene 4.]
[Footnote 20: Tradition says that Shakespeare occupied the desk in the
farthest corner.]
[Footnote 21: Greene's _Groatsworth of Wit_, Grosart's edition of
Greene's _Works_, Vol. XII., p. 144.]
[Footnote 22: The contract price for building the Fortune Theater was
£440.]
[Footnote 23: Adapted from Furnivall.]
[Footnote 24: Entered one year before at Stationers' Hall.]
[Footnote 25: May be looked on as fairly certain.]
[Footnote 26: _Henry V_., Act II., Scene 3, line 10.]
[Footnote 27: Bradley's _Shakespearean Tragedy_, p. 327.]
[Footnote 28: _The Tempest_, Act V., Scene 1.]
[Footnote 29: _Ibid_., Act I., Scene 2.]
[Footnote 30: For a list of books of selections from the drama, see p.
216.]
[Footnote 31: For full titles, see p. 6.]
[Footnote 32: For full titles of books of dramatic selections, see the
preceding paragraph.]
CHAPTER V: THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660
History of the Period.--James I. (1603-1625), son of Mary Stuart,
Queen of Scots, and the first of the Stuart line to reign in England,
succeeded Elizabeth. His stubbornness and folly not only ended the
intense patriotic feeling of the previous reign, but laid the
foundation for the deadly conflict that resulted. In fifty-four years
after the defeat of the Armada, England was plunged into civil war.
The guiding belief of James I. was that kings governed by divine
right, that they received from the Deity a title of which no one could
lawfully deprive them, no matter how outrageously they ruled, and that
they were not in any way responsible to Parliament or to the people.
In acting on this belief, he first trampled on the religious liberty
of his subjects. He drove from their churches hundreds of clergymen
who would not take oath that they believed that the prayer book of the
Church of England agreed in every way with the _Bible_. He boasted
that he would "harry out of the kingdom" those who would not conform.
During the reign of James I. and that of his son, Charles I.
(1625-1649) a worse ruler on the same lines, thousands of Englishmen
came to New England to enjoy religious liberty. The Pilgrim Fathers
landed at Plymouth in 1620. The exodus was very rapid during the next
twenty years, since those who insisted on worshiping God as they chose
were thrown into prison and sometimes had their ears cut off and their
noses mutilated. In the sixteenth century, the religious struggle was
between Catholics and Protestants, but in this age both of the
contestants were Protestant. The Church of England (Episcopal church)
was persecuting those who would not conform to its beliefs.
Side by side with the religious strife was a struggle for
constitutional government, for legal taxes, for the right of freedom
of speech in Parliament. James I. and Charles I. both collected
illegal taxes. Finally, when Charles became involved in war with
Spain, Parliament forced him in return for a grant of money to sign
the _Petition of Right_ (1628), which was in some respects a new
_Magna Charta_.
Charles did not keep his promises. For eleven years he ruled in a
despotic way without Parliament. In 1642 civil war broke out between
the Puritans, on one side, and the king, nobles, landed gentry, and
adherents of the Church of England, on the other. The Puritans under
the great Oliver Cromwell were victorious, and in 1649 they beheaded
Charles as a "tyrant, traitor and murderer." Cromwell finally became
Protector of the Commonwealth of England. The greatest Puritan writer,
John Milton, not only upheld the Commonwealth with powerful
argumentative prose, but also became the government's most important
secretary. Though his blindness would not allow him to write after
1652, he used to translate aloud, either into Latin or the language of
the foreign country, what Cromwell dictated or suggested. Milton's
under-secretary, Andrew Marvel, wrote down this translation.
[Illustration: CROMWELL DICTATING TO MILTON DISPATCHES TO THE KING OF
FRANCE CONCERNING THE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT.[1] _From the painting by
Ford Madox Brown._]
The Puritans remained in the ascendancy until 1660, when the Stuart
line was restored in the person of Charles II.
The Puritan Ideals.--The Renaissance had at first seemed to promise
everything, the power to reveal the secrets of Nature, to cause her to
gratify man's every wish, and to furnish a perpetual fountain of happy
youth. These expectations had not been fulfilled. There were still
poverty, disease, and a longing for something that earth had not
given. The English, naturally a religious race, reflected much on
this. Those who concluded that life could never yield the pleasure
which man anticipates, who determines by purity of living to win a
perfect land beyond the shores of mortality, who made the New World of
earlier dreams a term synonymous with the New Jerusalem, were called
Puritans.
Their guide to this land was the _Bible_. Our _Authorized Version_
(1611), the one which is in most common use to-day, was made in the
reign of James I. From this time became much easier to get a copy of
the _Scriptures_, and their influence was now more potent than ever to
shape the ideals of the Puritans. In fact, it is impossible to
estimate the influence which this _Authorized Version_ has had on the
ideals and the literature of the English race. Had it not been for
this _Version_, current English speech and literature would be vastly
different. Such words and expressions as "scapegoat," "a labor of
love," "the eleventh hour," "to cast pearls before swine," and "a
howling wilderness" are in constant use because the language of this
translation of the _Bible_ has become incorporated in our daily
speech, as well as in our best literature.
The Puritan was so called because he wished to purify the established
church from what seemed to him great abuses. He accepted the faith of
John Calvin, who died in 1564. Calvinism taught that no earthly power
should intervene between a human soul and God, that life was an
individual moral struggle, the outcome of which would land the soul in
heaven or hell for all eternity, that beauty and art and all the
pleasures of the flesh were dangerous because they tended to wean the
soul from God.
The Puritan was an individualist. The saving of the soul was to him an
individual, not a social, affair. Bunyan's Pilgrim flees alone from
the wrath to come. The twentieth century, on the other hand, believes
that the regeneration of a human being is both a social and an
individual affair,--that the individual, surrounded by the forces of
evil, often has little opportunity unless society comes to his aid.
The individualism of the Puritan accomplished a great task in
preparing the way for democracy, for fuller liberty in church and
state, in both England and America.
Our study of the Puritan ideals embodied in literature takes us beyond
1660, the date of the Restoration, because after that time two great
Puritan writers, John Milton and John Bunyan, did some of their most
famous work, the one in retirement, the other in jail. Such work,
uninfluenced by the change of ideal after the Restoration, is properly
treated in this chapter. While a change may in a given year seem
sufficiently pronounced to become the basis for a new classification,
we should remember the literary influences never begin or end with
complete abruptness.
THE PROSE OF THE PURITAN AGE
Variety of Subject.--Prose showed development in several directions
during this Puritan age:--
I. The use of prose in argument and controversy was largely extended.
Questions of government and of religion were the living issues of the
time. Innumerable pamphlets and many larger books were written to
present different views. We may instance as types of this class almost
all the prose writings of John Milton (1608-1674).
II. English prose dealt with a greater variety of philosophical
subjects. Shakespeare had voiced the deepest philosophy in poetry, but
up to this time such subjects had found scant expression in prose.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is the great philosophical writer of the
age. In his greatest work, _Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power
of a Commonwealth_, he considers questions of metaphysical philosophy
and of government in a way that places him on the roll of famous
English philosophers.
III. History had an increasing fascination for prose writers. Sir
Walter Raleigh's _History of the World_ (1614) and Lord Clarendon's
_History of the Great Rebellion_, begun in 1646, are specially worthy
of mention.
IV. Prose was developing its capacity for expressing delicate shades
of humor. In Chaucer and in Shakespeare, poetry had already excelled
in this respect. Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), an Episcopal clergyman,
displays an almost inexhaustible fund of humor in his _History of the
Worthies of England_. We find scattered through his works passages
like these:--
"A father that whipped his son for swearing, and swore at him while
he whipped him, did more harm by his example than good by his
correction."
[Illustration: THOMAS FULLER.]
Speaking of a pious short person, Fuller says:--
"His soul had but a short diocese to visit, and therefore might the
better attend the effectual informing thereof."
Of the lark, he writes:--
"A harmless bird while living, not trespassing on grain, and
wholesome when dead, then filling the stomach with meat, as formerly
the ear with music."
Before Fuller, humor was rare in English prose writers, and it was not
common until the first quarter of the next century.
V. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), an Oxford graduate and physician,
is best known as the author of three prose works: _Religio Medici
(Religion of a Physician_, 1642), _Vulgar Errors_ (1646), and
_Hydriotaphia_ or _Urn Burial_ (1658). In imagination and poetic
feeling, he has some kinship with the Elizabethans. He says in the
_Religio Medici_:--
"Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate
were not a history but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common
ears like a fable... Men that look upon my outside, perusing only
my condition and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above
Atlas's shoulders... There is surely a piece of divinity in
us--something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto
the sun."
The _Religio Medici_, however, gives, not the Elizabethan, but the
Puritan, definition of the world as "a place not to live in but to die
in."
_Urn Burial_, which is Browne's masterpiece, shows his power as a
prose poet of the "inevitable hour":--
"There is no antidote against the _opium_ of time... The greater
part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found
in the register of God, not in the record of man... But man is a
Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave,
solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal luster, not omitting
ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature."
Browne's prose frequently suffers from the infusion of too many words
derived from the Latin, but his style is rhythmical and stately and
often conveys the same emotion as the notes of a great cathedral organ
at the evening twilight hour.
VI. _The Complete Angler_ of Izaak Walton (1593-1683) is so filled
with sweetness and calm delight in nature and life, that one does not
wonder that the book has passed through about two hundred editions. It
manifests a genuine love of nature, of the brooks, meadows, flowers.
In his pages we catch the odor from the hedges gay with wild flowers
and hear the rain falling softly on the green leaves:--
"But turn out of the way a little, good
scholar, towards yonder high honeysuckle
hedge; there we'll sit and sing, whilst this
shower falls so gently on the teeming earth,
and gives yet a sweeter smell to the lovely
flowers that adorn these verdant meadows."
[Illustration: IZAAK WALTON.]
[Illustration: JEREMY TAYLOR.]
VII. Of the many authors busily writing on theology, Jeremy Taylor
(1613-1667), an Episcopal clergyman, holds the chief place. His
imagination was so wide and his pen so facile that he has been called
a seventeenth-century prose Shakespeare. Taylor's _Holy Living_ and
_Holy Dying_ used to be read in almost every cottage. This passage
shows his powers of imagery as well as the Teutonic inclination to
consider the final goal of youth and beauty:--
"Reckon but from the sprightfulness
of youth, and the fair cheeks and full
eyes of childhood, from the vigorousness
and strong texture of the joints of five-and-twenty,
to the hollowness and dead
paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days' burial,
and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very
strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts
of its hood, and at first it was fair as morning, and full with the
dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece ... and at night, having lost some
of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds
and outworn faces."
JOHN BUNYAN, 1628-1688
[Illustration: JOHN BUNYAN. _From the painting by Sadler, National
Portrait Gallery_.]
Life.--The Bedfordshire village of Elstow saw in 1628 the birth of
John Bunyan who, in his own peculiar field of literature, was to lead
the world. His father, Thomas Bunyan, was a brazier, a mender of pots
and pans, and he reared his son John to the same trade. In his
autobiography, John Bunyan says that his father's house was of "that
rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the
land."
The boy went to school for only a short time and learned but little
from any books except the _Bible_. The father, by marrying a second
time within a year after his wife's death, wounded the feelings of his
sixteen-year-old son sufficiently to cause the latter to enlist as a
soldier in the Civil War. At about the age of twenty, Bunyan married,
though neither he nor his wife had at the time so much as a dish or a
spoon.
Bunyan tells us that in his youth he was very wicked. Probably he
would have been so regarded from the point of view of a strict
Puritan. His worst offenses, however, seem to have been dancing on the
village green, playing hockey on Sundays, ringing bells to rouse the
neighborhood, and swearing. When he repented, his vivid imagination
made him think that he had committed the unpardonable sin. In the
terror that he felt at the prospect of the loss of his soul, he passed
through much of the experience that enabled him to write the
_Pilgrim's Progress_.
Bunyan became a preacher of God's word. Under trees, in barns, on the
village green, wherever people resorted, he told them the story of
salvation. Within six months after the Restoration, he was arrested
for preaching without Episcopal sanction. The officers took him away
from his little blind daughter. The roisterers of the Restoration
thought a brazier was too coarse to have feelings; yet Bunyan dropped
tears on the paper when he wrote of "the many hardships, miseries, and
wants that my poor family were like to meet with, should I be taken
from them, especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer to my heart
than all besides. Oh, the thoughts of the hardship my poor blind one
might undergo, would break my heart to pieces." In spite of his
dependent family and the natural right of the freedom of speech,
Bunyan was thrust into Bedford jail and kept a prisoner for nearly
twelve years. Had it not been for his imprisonment in this "squalid
den," of which he speaks in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, we should
probably be without that famous work, a part of which, at least, was
written in the jail.
In 1672, as a step toward restoring the Catholic religion, Charles II.
suspended all penal statutes against the dissenting clergy; Bunyan was
thereupon released from jail.
[Illustration: BEDFORD BRIDGE, SHOWING GATES AND JAIL. _From an old
print_.]
After his release, he settled down to his life's work of spreading the
Gospel by both pen and tongue. When he visited London to preach, it
was not uncommon for twelve hundred persons to come to hear him at
seven o'clock in the morning of a week day in winter.
The immediate cause of his death was a cold caught by riding in the
rain, on his way to try to reconcile a father and son. In 1688 Bunyan
died as he uttered these words, "Take me, for I come to Thee."
His Work.--Bunyan achieved the distinction of writing the greatest
of all allegories, the _Pilgrim's Progress_. This is the story of
Christian's journey through this life, the story of meeting Mr.
Worldly Wiseman, of the straight gate and the narrow path, of the
Delectable Mountains of Youth, of the valley of Humiliation, of the
encounter with Apollyon, of the wares of Vanity Fair, "kept all the
year long," of my lord Time-server, of Mr. Anything, of imprisonment
in Doubting Castle by Giant Despair, of the flowery land of Beulah,
lying beyond the valley of the Shadow of Death, through which a deep,
cold river runs, and of the city of All Delight on the other side.
This story still has absorbing interest for human beings, for the
child and the old man, the learned and the ignorant.
Bunyan wrote many other works, but none of them equals the _Pilgrim's
Progress_. His _Holy War_ is a powerful allegory, which has been
called a prose _Paradise Lost_. Bunyan also produced a strong piece of
realistic fiction, the _Life and Death of Mr. Badman_. This shows the
descent of a soul along the broad road. The story is the counterpart
of his great masterpiece, and ranks second to it in point of merit.
[Illustration: BUNYAN'S DREAM. _From Fourth Edition Pilgrim's
Progress, 1680_.]
General Characteristics.--Since the _Pilgrim's Progress_ has been
more widely read in England than any other book except the _Bible_, it
is well to investigate the secret of Bunyan's power.
In the first place, his style is simple. In the second place, rare
earnestness is coupled with this simplicity. He had something to say,
which in his inmost soul he felt to be of supreme importance for all
time. Only a great man can tell such truths without a flourish of
language, or without straining after effect. At the most critical part
of the journey of the Pilgrims, when they approach the river of death,
note that Bunyan avoids the tendency to indulge in fine writing, that
he is content to rely on the power of the subject matter, simply
presented, to make us feel the terrible ordeal:--
"Now I further saw that betwixt
them and the gate was a river; but
there was no bridge to go over, and the
river was very deep... The Pilgrims
then, especially Christian, began
to despond in their minds, and looked
this way and that, but no way could
be found by them by which they might
escape the river... They then addressed
themselves to the water, and
entering, Christian began to sink...
And with that, a great darkness and
horror fell upon Christian, so that he
could not see before him..."
"Now, upon the bank of the river, on the other side, they saw the
two shining men again, who there waited for them... Now you
must note that the city stood upon a mighty hill; but the Pilgrims
went up that hill with ease, because they had these two men to lead
them up by the arms; they had likewise left their mortal garments
behind them in the river; for though they went in with them, they
came out without them."
[Illustration:
Let Badman's broken leg put check
To Badman's course of evil,
Lest, next time, Badman breaks his neck,
And so goes to the devil.
WOODCUT FROM THE FIRST EDITION OF MR. BADMAN]
Of all the words in the above selection, eighty per cent are
monosyllables. Few authors could have resisted the tendency to try to
be impressive at such a climax. One has more respect for this world,
on learning that it has set the seal of its approval on such earnest
simplicity and has neglected works that strive with every art to
attract attention.
Bunyan furthermore has a rare combination of imagination and dramatic
power. His abstractions became living persons. They have warmer blood
coursing in their veins than many of the men and women in modern
fiction. Giant Despair is a living giant. We can hear the clanking of
the chains and the groans of the captives in his dungeon. We are not
surprised to learn that Bunyan imagined that he saw and conversed with
these characters. The _Pilgrim's Progress_ is a prose drama. Note the
vivid dramatic presentation of the tendency to evil, which we all have
at some time felt threatening to wreck our nobler selves:--
"Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way,
and said, 'I am void of fear in this matter; prepare thyself to die;
for I swear by my infernal den that thou shall go no further; here
will I spill thy soul.'"
It would be difficult to find English prose more simple, earnest,
strong, imaginative, and dramatic than this. Bunyan's style felt the
shaping influence of the _Bible_ more than of all other works
combined. He knew the _Scriptures_ almost by heart.
THE POETRY OF THE PURITAN AGE
Lyrical Verse.--The second quarter of the seventeenth century
witnessed an outburst of song that owed its inspiration to Elizabethan
lyrical verse.
Soon after 1600 a change in lyric poetry is noticeable. The sonnet
fell into disfavor with the majority of lyrists. The two poets of
greatest influence over this period, Ben Jonson and John Donne,
opposed the sonnet. Ben Jonson complained that it compels all ideas,
irrespective of their worth, to fill a space of exactly fourteen
lines, and that it therefore operates on the same principle as the bed
of Procrustes. The lyrics of this period, with the exception of those
by Milton, were usually less idealistic, ethereal, and inspired than
the corresponding work of the Elizabethans. This age was far more
imitative, but it chose to imitate Jonson and Donne in preference to
Shakespeare. The greatest lyrical poet of this time thus addresses
Jonson as a patron saint:--
"Candles I'll give to thee,
And a new altar;
And thou, Saint Ben, shall be
Writ in my psalter."[2]
Cavalier Poets.--Robert Herrick (1591-1674), Thomas Carew
(1598?-1639?), Sir John Suckling (1609-1642), and Richard Lovelace
(1618--1658) were a contemporary group of lyrists who are often called
Cavalier poets, because they sympathized with the Cavaliers or
adherents of Charles I.
[Illustration: ROBERT HERRICK.]
By far the greatest of this school is Robert Herrick, who stands in
the front rank of the second class of lyrical poets. He was a graduate
of Cambridge University, who by an accident of the time became a
clergyman. The parish, or "living," given him by the king, was in the
southwestern part of Devonshire. By affixing the title _Hesperides_ to
his volume of nearly thirteen hundred poems, Herrick doubtless meant
to imply that they were chiefly composed in the western part of
England. In the very first poem of this collection, he announces the
subject of his songs:--
"I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers;
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers.
I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes;
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes
* * * * *
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The court of Mab, and of the Fairie-king.
I write of hell; I sing and ever shall,
Of heaven, and hope to have it after all."
His lyric range was as broad as these lines indicate. The most of his
poems show the lightness of touch and artistic form revealed in the
following lines from _To the Virgins_:--
"Gather ye rose-buds while ye may:
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles to-day,
To-morrow will be dying."
His facility in melodious poetic expression is evident in this stanza
from _The Litany_, one of the poems in _Noble Numbers_, as the
collection of his religious verse is called:--
"When the passing-bell doth toll
And the furies in a shoal
Come to fright a parting soul,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me."
The lyric, _Disdain Returned_, of the courtier, Thomas Carew, shows
both a customary type of subject and the serious application often
given:--
"He that loves a rosy cheek,
Or a coral lip admires,
Or from starlike eyes doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires,
As old time makes these decay,
So his flames must waste away."
Carew could write with facility on the subjects in vogue at court, but
when he ventures afield in nature poetry, he makes the cuckoo
hibernate! In his poem _The Spring_, he says:--
"...wakes in hollow tree
The drowsy Cuckoo and the Humble-bee."
In these lines from his poem _Constancy_, Sir John Suckling shows
that he is a typical Cavalier love poet:--
"Out upon it, I have loved
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather."
From Richard Lovelace we have these exquisite lines written in
prison:--
"Stone walls do not a prison make
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage."
To characterize the Cavalier school by one phrase, we might call them
lyrical poets in lighter vein. They usually wrote on such subjects as
the color in a maiden's cheek and lips, blossoms, meadows, May days,
bridal cakes, the paleness of a lover, and--
"...wassail bowls to drink,
Spiced to the brink."
but sometimes weightier subjects were chosen, when these lighter
things failed to satisfy.
Religious Verse.--Three lyrical poets, George Herbert (1593-1633),
Henry Vaughan (1622-1695), and Richard Crashaw (1612?-1650?), usually
chose religious subjects. George Herbert, a Cambridge graduate and
rector of Bemerton, near Salisbury, wrote _The Temple_, a book of
religious verse. His best known poem is _Virtue_:--
"Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky:
The dew shall weep the fall to night;
For thou must die."
The sentiment in these lines from his lyric _Providence_ has the
genuine Anglo-Saxon ring:--
"Hard things are glorious; easy things good cheap.
The common all men have; that which is rare,
Men therefore seek to have, and care to keep."
Henry Vaughan, an Oxford graduate and Welsh physician, shows the
influence of George Herbert. Vaughan would have been a great poet if
he could have maintained the elevation of these opening lines from
_The World_:--
"I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright."
Richard Crashaw, a Cambridge graduate and Catholic mystic, concludes
his poem, _The Flaming Heart_, with this touching prayer to Saint
Teresa:--
"By all of Him we have in thee
Leave nothing of myself in me.
Let me so read my life that I
Unto all life of mine may die."
His verse, like that of his contemporaries, is often marred by
fantastic conceits which show the influence of Donne. Although much of
Crashaw's poem, _The Weeper_, is beautiful, he calls the eyes of Mary
Magdalene:--
"Two walking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious oceans."
JOHN MILTON, 1608-1674
[Illustration: JOHN MILTON. _After a drawing by W. Faithorne, at
Bayfordbury_.]
His Youth.--The second greatest English poet was born in London,
eight years before the death of Shakespeare. John Milton's father
followed the business of a scrivener and drew wills and deeds and
invested money for clients. As he prospered at this calling, his
family did not suffer for want of money. He was a man of much culture
and a musical composer of considerable note.
A portrait of the child at the age of ten, the work of the painter to
the court, still exists and shows him to have been "a sweet, serious,
round-headed boy," who gave early promise of future greatness. His
parents, seeing that he acted as if he was guided by high ideals, had
the rare judgment to allow him to follow his own bent. They employed
the best teachers to instruct him at home. At the age of sixteen he
was fully prepared to enter Christ's College. Cambridge, where he took
both the B.A. and M.A. degrees.
[Illustration: JOHN MILTON, AET. 10.]
His Early Manhood and Life at Horton.--In 1632 Milton left Cambridge
and went to live with his father in a country home at Horton, about
twenty miles west of London. Milton had been intended for the church;
but he felt that he could not subscribe to its intolerance, and that
he had another mission to perform. His father accordingly provided
sufficient funds for maintaining him for over five years at Horton in
a life of studious leisure. The poet's greatest biographer, David
Masson, says "Until Milton was thirty-two years of age, if even then,
he did not earn a penny for himself." Such a course would ruin
ninety-nine out of every hundred talented young men; but it was the
making of Milton. He spent those years in careful study and in writing
his immortal early poems.
[Illustration: VISIT OF MILTON TO THE BLIND GALILEO AT THE VILLA
D'ARCETRI NEAR FLORENCE IN 1638. _From the painting by T. Lessi._]
In 1638, when he was in his thirtieth year, he determined to broaden
his views by travel. He went to Italy, which the Englishmen of his day
still regarded as the home of art, culture, and song. After about
fifteen months abroad, hearing that his countrymen were on the verge
of civil war, he returned home to play his part in the mighty tragedy
of the times.
Milton's "Left Hand."--In 1642 the Civil War broke out between the
Royalists and the Puritans. He took sides in the struggle for liberty,
not with his sword, but with his pen. During this time he wrote little
but prose. He regretted that the necessity of the time demanded prose,
in the writing of which, he says, "I have the use, as I may account
it, but of my left hand."
With that "left hand" he wrote much prose. There is one common quality
running through all his prose works, although they treat of the most
varied subjects. Every one of these works strikes a blow for fuller
liberty in some direction,--for more liberty in church, in state, and
in home relations, for the freedom of expressing opinions, and for a
system of education which should break away from the leading strings
of the inferior methods of the past. His greatest prose work is the
_Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing_.
Much of his prose is poetic and adorned with figures of rhetoric. He
frequently follows the Latin order, and inverts his sentences, which
are often unreasonably long. Sometimes his "left hand" astonishes us
by slinking mud at his opponents, and we eagerly await the loosing of
the right hand which was to give us _Paradise Lost_.
His Blindness.--The English government from 1649 to 1660 is known as
the Commonwealth. The two most striking figures of the time were
Oliver Cromwell, who in 1653 was styled the Lord Protector, and John
Milton, who was the Secretary for Foreign Tongues.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF MILTON'S SIGNATURE IN THE ELEVENTH YEAR
OF HIS BLINDNESS._From his application to wed Elizabeth Minshull.
Feb. 11, 1663._]
One of the greatest of European scholars, a professor at Leyden, named
Salmasius, had written a book attacking the Commonwealth and upholding
the late king. The Council requested Milton to write a fitting answer.
As his eyes were already failing him, he was warned to rest them; but
he said that he would willingly sacrifice his eyesight on the altar of
liberty. He accordingly wrote in reply his _Pro Populo Anglicano
Defensio_, a Latin work, which was published in 1651. This effort cost
him his eyesight. In 1652, at the age of forty-three, he was totally
blind. In his _Paradise Lost_, he thus alludes to his affliction:--
"Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But clouds instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off."
Life after the Restoration.--In 1660, when Charles II. was made
king, the leaders of the Commonwealth had to flee for their lives.
Some went to America for safety while others were caught and executed.
The body of Cromwell was taken from its grave in Westminster Abbey,
suspended from the gallows and left to dangle there. Milton was
concealed by a friend until the worst of the storm had blown over.
Then some influential friends interceded for him, and his blindness
probably won him sympathy.
[Illustration: COMUS TITLE PAGE.]
During his old age his literary work was largely dependent on the
kindness of friends, who read to him, and acted as his amanuenses. His
ideas of woman having been formed in the light of the old
dispensation, he had not given his three daughters such an education
as might have led them to take a sympathetic interest in his work.
They accordingly resented his calling on them for help.
During this period of his life, when he was totally blind, he wrote
_Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained_, and _Samson Agonistes_. He died in
1674, and was buried beside his father in the chancel of St. Giles,
Cripplegate, London.
Minor Poems.--In 1629, while Milton was a student at Cambridge, and
only twenty-one years old, he wrote a fine lyrical poem, entitled _On
the Morning of Christ's Nativity_. These 244 lines of verse show that
he did not need to be taught the melody of song any more than a young
nightingale.
Four remarkable poems were written during his years of studious
leisure at Horton,--_L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus,_ and _Lycidas.
L'Allegro_ describes the charms of a merry social life, and _Il
Penseroso_ voices the quiet but deep enjoyment of the scholar in
retirement. These two poems have been universal favourites.
_Comus_ is a species of dramatic composition known as a Masque, and it
is the greatest of its class. It far surpassess any work of a similar
kind by Ben Jonson, that prolific writer of Masques. Some critics,
like Taine and Saintsbury, consider _Comus_ the finest of Milton's
productions. Its 1023 lines can soon be read; and there are few poems
of equal length that will better repay careful reading.
_Comus_ is an immortal apotheosis of virtue. While in Geneva in 1639,
Milton was asked for his autograph and an expression of sentiment. He
chose the closing lines of _Comus_:--
[Illustration: MILTON'S MOTTO FROM COMUS, WITH AUTOGRAPH. _Written
in an album at Geneva_.]
_Lycidas_, one of the world's great elegies, was written on the death
of Milton's classmate, Edward King. Mark Pattison, one of Milton's
biographers, says: "In _Lycidas_ we have reached the high-water mark
of English poesy and of Milton's own production."
He is one of the four greatest English sonnet writers. Shakespeare
alone surpasses him in this field. Milton numbers among his pupils
Wordsworth and Keats, whose sonnets rank next in merit.
Paradise Lost; Its Inception and Dramatic Plan.--Cambridge
University has a list, written by Milton before he was thirty-five, of
about one hundred possible subjects for the great poem which he felt
it was his life's mission to give to the world. He once thought of
selecting Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table; but his final
choice was _Paradise Lost_, which stands first on this special list.
There are in addition four separate drafts of the way in which he
thought this subject should be treated. This proves that the great
work of a man like; Milton was planned while he was young. It is
possible that he may even have written a very small part of the poem
earlier than the time commonly assigned.
All four drafts show that his early intention was to make the poem a
drama, a gigantic Miracle play. The closing of the theaters and the
prejudice felt against them during the days of Puritan ascendancy may
have influenced Milton to forsake the dramatic for the epic form, but
he seems never to have shared the common prejudice against the drama
and the stage. His sonnet on Shakespeare shows in what estimation he
held that dramatist.
Subject Matter and Form.--About 1658, when Milton was a widower,
living alone with his three daughters, he began, in total blindness,
to dictate his _Paradise Lost_, sometimes relying on them but more
often on any kind friend who might assist him. The manuscript
accordingly shows a variety of handwriting. The work was published in
1667, after some trouble with a narrow-minded censor who had doubts
about granting a license.
The subject matter can be best given in Milton's own lines at the
beginning of the poem:--
"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse..."
The poem treats of Satan's revolt in heaven, of his conflict with the
Almighty, and banishment with all the rebellious angels. Their new
home in the land of fire and endless pain is described with such a
gigantic grasp of the imagination, that the conception has colored all
succeeding theology.
The action proceeds with a council of the fallen angels to devise
means for alleviating their condition and annoying the Almighty. They
decide to strike him through his child, and they plot the fall of man.
In short, _Paradise Lost_ is an intensely dramatic story of the loss
of Eden. The greatest actors that ever sprang from a poet's brain
appear before us on the stage, which is at one time the sulphurous pit
of hell, at another the bright plains of heaven, and at another the
Elysium of our first parents.
In form the poem is an epic in twelve books, containing a total of
10,565 lines. It is written in blank verse of wonderful melody and
variety.
Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.--After finishing _Paradise
Lost_, Milton wrote two more poems, which he published in 1671.
_Paradise Regained_ is in great part a paraphrase of the first eleven
verses of the fourth chapters of _St. Matthew_. The poem is in four
books of blank verse and contains 2070 lines. Although it is written
with great art and finish, _Paradise Regained_ shows a falling off in
Milton's genius. There is less ornament and less to arouse human
interest.
_Samson Agonistes_ (Samson the Struggler) is a tragedy containing 1758
lines, based on the sixteenth chapter of _Judges_. This poem, modeled
after the Greek drama, is hampered by a strict observance of the
dramatic unities. It is vastly inferior to the _Paradise Lost. Samson
Agonistes_ contains scarcely any of the glorious imagery of Milton's
earlier poems. It has been called "the most unadorned poem that can be
found."
CHARACTERISTICS OF MILTON'S POETRY
Variety in his Early Work.--A line in _Lycidas_ says:--
"He touched the tender stops of various quills,"
and this may be said of Milton. His early poems show great variety.
There are the dirge notes in _Lycidas_; the sights, sounds, and odors
of the country, in _L'Allegro_; the delights of "the studious
cloister's pale," in _Il Penseroso_; the impelling presence of his
"great Task-Master," in the sonnets.
Although Milton is noted for his seriousness and sublimity, we must
not be blind to the fact that his minor poems show great delicacy of
touch. The epilogue of the Spirit at the end of _Comus_ is an instance
of exquisite airy fancy passing into noble imagination at the close.
In 1638 Sir Henry Wotton wrote to Milton this intelligent criticism of
_Comus_: "I should much commend the tragical part, if the lyrical did
not ravish me with a certain Doric delicacy in your Songs and Odes,
whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in
our language _Ipsa mollities_."
Limitations.--In giving attention to Milton's variety, we should not
forget that when we judge him by Elizabethan standards his limitations
are apparent. As varied as are his excellences, his range is far
narrower than Shakespeare's. He has little sense of humor and less
sympathy with human life than either Shakespeare or Burns. Milton
became acquainted with flowers through the medium of a book before he
noticed them in the fields. Consequently, in speaking of flowers and
birds, he sometimes makes those mistakes to which the bookish man is
more prone than the child who first hears the story of Nature from her
own lips. Unlike Shakespeare and Burns, Milton had the misfortune to
spend his childhood in a large city. Again, while increasing age
seemed to impose no limitations on Shakespeare's genius, his touch
being as delicate in _The Tempest_ as in his first plays, Milton's
style, on the other hand, grew frigid and devoid of imagery toward the
end of his life.
Sublimity.--The most striking characteristic of Milton's poetry is
sublimity, which consists, first, in the subject matter. In the
opening lines of _Paradise Lost_ he speaks of his "adventurous song"--
"That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme."
Milton succeeded in his intention. The English language has not
another poem that approaches _Paradise Lost_ in sustained sublimity.
In the second place, we must note the sublimity of treatment. Milton's
own mind was cast in a sublime mold. This quality of mind is evident
even in his figures of rhetoric. The Milky Way appears to him as the
royal highway to heaven:--
"A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold,
And pavement stars."[3]
When Death and Satan meet, Milton wishes the horror of the scene to
manifest something of the sublime. What other poet could, in fewer
words, have conveyed a stronger impression of the effect of the frown
of those powers?
"So frowned the mighty combatants, that Hell
Grew darker at their frown."[4]
George Saintsbury's verdict is approved by the majority of the
greatest modern critics of Milton: "In loftiness--sublimity of
thought, and majesty of expression, both sustained at almost
superhuman pitch, he has no superior, and no rival except Dante."
Mastery of Verse.--Milton's verse, especially in _Paradise Lost_, is
such a symphony of combined rhythm, poetic expression, and thought; it
is so harmonious, so varied, and yet so apparently simple in its
complexity, that it has never been surpassed in kind.
His mastery of rhythm is not so evident in a single line as in a group
of lines. The first sentence in _Paradise Lost_ contains sixteen
lines, and yet the rhythm, the pauses, and the thought are so combined
as to make oral reading easy and the meaning apparent. The conception
of the music of the spheres in their complex orbits finds some analogy
in the harmony of the combined rhythmical units of his verse.
Denied the use of his eyes as a guide to the form of his later verse,
he must have repeated aloud these groups of lines and changed them
until their cadence satisfied his remarkably musical ear. Lines like
these show the melody of which this verse is capable:--
"Heaven opened wide
Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound
On golden hinges moving."[5]
To begin with, he had, like Shakespeare and Keats an instinctive
feeling for the poetic value of words and phrases. Milton's early
poems abound in such poetic expressions as "the frolic wind," "the
slumbring morn," "linkèd sweetness," "looks commercing with the
skies," "dewy-feathered sleep," "the studious cloister's pale," "a dim
religious light," the "silver lining" of the cloud, "west winds with
musky wing," "the laureate hearse where Lycid lies." His poetic
instinct enabled him to take common prosaic words and, by merely
changing the position of the adjective, transmute them into
imperishable verse. His "darkness visible" and "human face divine" are
instances of this power.
[Illustration: MILTON DICTATING PARADISE LOST TO HIS DAUGHTERS.
_From the painting by Munkacsy_.]
Twentieth century criticism is more fully recognizing the debt of
subsequent poetic literature to Milton. Saintsbury writes:--
"Milton's influence is omnipresent in almost all later English
poetry, and in not a little of later prose English literature. At
first, at second, at third, hand, he has permeated almost all his
successors."[6]
How the Paradise Lost has affected Thought.--Few people realize how
profoundly this poem has influenced men's ideas of the hereafter. The
conception of hell for a long time current was influenced by those
pictures which Milton painted with darkness for his canvas and the
lightning for his brush. Our pictures of Eden and of heaven have also
felt his touch. Theology has often looked through Milton's imagination
at the fall of the rebel angels and of man. Huxley says that the
cosmogony which stubbornly resists the conclusions of science, is due
rather to the account in _Paradise Lost_ than to _Genesis_.
Many of Milton's expressions have become crystallized in modern
thought. Among such we may mention:--
"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,
What matter where, if I be still the same?"[7]
"To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven."[8]
"...Who overcomes
By force hath overcome but half his foe."[9]
The effect of _Paradise Lost_ on English thought is more a resultant
of the entire poem than of detached quotations. _L'Allegro_ and _Il
Penseroso_ have furnished as many current quotations as the whole of
_Paradise Lost_.
The Embodiment of High Ideals.---No poet has embodied in his verse
higher ideals than Milton. When twenty-three, he wrote that he
intended to use his talents--
"As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye."[10]
Milton's poetry is not universally popular. He deliberately selected
his audience. These lines from _Comus_ show to whom he wished to
speak:--
"Yet some there be that by due steps aspire
To lay their just hands on that golden key
That opes the palace of eternity.
To such my errand is."
He kept his promise of writing something which speaks for liberty and
for nobility of soul and which the world would not willingly let die.
His ideals react on us and raise us higher than we were. To him we may
say with Wordsworth:--
"Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea,
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free." [11]
SUMMARY
The Puritan age was one of conflict in religious and political ideals.
James I. and Charles I. trampled on the laws and persecuted the
Puritans so rigorously that many of them fled to New England. Civil
war, in which the Puritans triumphed, was the result.
The Puritans, realizing that neither lands beyond the sea nor the New
Learning could satisfy the aspirations of the soul, turned their
attention to the life beyond. Bunyan's Pilgrim felt that the sole duty
of life was to fight the forces of evil that would hold him captive in
the City of Destruction and to travel in the straight and narrow path
to the New Jerusalem. Life became a ceaseless battle of the right
against the wrong. Hence, much of the literature in both poetry and
prose is polemical. Milton's _Paradise Lost_ is an epic of war between
good and evil. The book that had the most influence in molding the
thought of the time was the King James (1611) version of the _Bible_.
The minor prose deals with a variety of subjects. There are
argumentative, philosophical, historical, biographical, and
theological prose works; but only the fine presentation of nature and
life in _The Complete Angler_ interests the general reader of to-day,
although the grandeur of Milton's _Areopagitica_, the humor of Thomas
Fuller, the stately rhythmical prose of Sir Thomas Browne, and the
imagery and variety of Jeremy Taylor deserve more readers.
Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_ is the masterpiece of Puritan prose,
written in the simple, direct language of the 1611 version of the
_Bible_. The book is a prose epic of the journey of the Puritan
Christian from the City of Destruction to the New Jerusalem.
The Cavalier poets wrote much lyrical verse, mostly in lighter vein,
but the religious poets strike a deeper note. The work of these minor
poets is often a reflection of the Elizabethan lyrics of Donne and
Jonson.
John Milton, who has the creative power of the Elizabethans, is the
only great poet of the period. His greatest poems are _L'Allegro, Il
Penseroso, Lycidas, Comus,_ and _Paradise Lost_. In sublimity of
subject matter and cast of mind, in nobility of ideals, in expression
of the conflict between good and evil, he is the fittest
representative of the Puritan spirit in literature.
REFERENCES FOR FUTURE STUDY
HISTORICAL
Read the chapters on this period in Gardiner,[12] Walker, Cheney,
Lingard, or Green. For the social life, see Traill, IV. The monumental
history of this time has been written in eighteen volumes by Samuel
Rawson Gardiner. His _Oliver Cromwell_, I vol., is excellent, as is
also Frederick Harrison's _Oliver Cromwell_.
LITERARY
The _Cambridge History of English Literature_, Vol. VII.
Courthope's _History of English Poetry_, Vol. III.
Masterman's _The Age of Milton_.
Saintsbury's _A History of Elizabethan Literature_ (comes down to
1660).
Dowden's _Puritan and Anglican Studies in Literature.
Dictionary of National Biography_ (for lives of minor writers).
Froude's _John Bunyan._
Brown's _John Bunyan, his Life, Times, and Works._
Macaulay's Life of Bunyan in _Encylopaedia Britannica_ or in his
_Essays._
Macaulay's _Essay on Southey's Edition of the Pilgrim's Progress._
Masson's _The Life of John Milton, Narrated in Connection with the
Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary history of his Time_ (6
vols.).
Masson's _Poetical Works of John Milton_, 3 vols., contains
excellent introductions and notes, and is the standard edition.
Raleigh's _Milton_.
Pattison's _Milton_. (E.M.L.)
Woodhull's _The Epic of Paradise Lost_.
Macaulay's _Essay on Milton_.
Lowell's _Milton_ (in _Among My Books_).
Addison's criticisms on Milton, beginning in number 267 of _The
Spectator_, are suggestive.
SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Prose.--The student will obtain a fair idea of the prose of this age
by reading Milton's _Areopagitica_, Cassell's _National Library_ (15
cents), or _Temple Classics_ (45 cents); Craik,[13] II., 471-475; the
selections from Thomas Hobbes, Craik, II., 214-221; from Thomas
Fuller, Craik, II., 377-387; from Sir Thomas Browne, Craik, II.,
318-335; from Jeremy Taylor, Craik, II., 529-542; and from Izaak
Walton, Craik, II., 343-349. Manly, II., has selections from all these
writers; the _Oxford Treasury_ and _Century_, from all but Hobbes. The
student who has the time will wish to read _The Complete Angler_
entire (Cassell's _National Library_, 15 cents; or _Temple Classics_,
45 cents).
Compare (_a_) the sentences, (_b_) general style, and (_c_) worth of
the subject matter of these authors; then, to note the development of
English prose, in treatment of subject as well as in form, compare
these works with those of (1) Wycliffe and Mandeville in the
fourteenth century, (2) Malory in the fifteenth, and (3) Tyndale,
Lyly, Sidney, Hooker, and Bacon (_e.g._ essay _Of Study_, 1597), in
the sixteenth.
Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_ should be read entire (_Everyman's
Library_, 35 cents; Cassell's _National Library_, 15 cents; _Temple
Classics_, 45 cents). Selections may be found in Craik, III., 148-166;
Manly, II., 139-143; _Oxford Treasury_, 83-85; _Century_, 225-235.
In what does the secret of Bunyan's popularity consist--in his style,
or in his subject matter, or in both? What is specially noteworthy
about his style? Point out some definite ways in which his style was
affected by another great work. Suppose that Bunyan had held the
social service ideals of the twentieth century, how might his idea of
saving souls have been modified?
Lyrical Poetry.--Specimens of the best work of Herrick, Carew,
Suckling, Lovelace, Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw may be found in
Ward, II.; Bronson, II.; _Oxford Treasury_, III.; Manly, I.; and
_Century_.
What is the typical subject matter of the Cavalier poets? What subject
do Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw choose? Which lyric of each of these
poets pleases you most? What difference do you note between these
lyrics and those of the Elizabethan age? What Elizabethan lyrists had
most influence on these poets? What are some of the special defects of
the lyrists of this age?
John Milton.--_L'Allegro_, _Il Penseroso_, _Comus_, _Lycidas_
(American Book Company's _Eclectic English Classics_, 20 cents), and
_Paradise Lost_, Books I. and II. (same series), should be read. These
poems, including his excellent _Sonnets_, may also be found in
Cassell's _National Library_, _Everyman's Library_, and the _Temple
Classics_. Selections are given in Ward, II., 306-379; Bronson, II.,
334-423; _Oxford Treasury_, III., 34-70: Manly, I., and _Century_,
_passim_.
Which is the greatest of his minor poets? Why? Is the keynote of
_Comus_ in accord with Puritan ideals? Are there qualities in
_Lycidas_ that justify calling it "the high-water mark" of English
lyrical poetry? Which poem has most powerfully affected theological
thought? Which do you think is oftenest read to-day? Why? What are the
most striking characteristics of Milton's poetry? Contrast Milton's
greatness, limitations, and ideals of life, with Shakespeare's.
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER V:
[Footnote 1: See Milton's Sonnet: _On the Late Massacre in Piedmont_.]
[Footnote 2: Robert Herrick's _Prayer to Ben Jonson_.]
[Footnote 3: _Paradise Lost_, Book VII., lines 577-578.]
[Footnote 4: _Ibid_., Book II., lines 719-720.]
[Footnote 5: _Paradise Lost_, Book VII., lines 207-209.]
[Footnote 6: The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. VII.,
p.156.]
[Footnote 7: _Paradise Lost_, Book I., line 254.]
[Footnote 8: _Ibid_, line 262.]
[Footnote 9: _Ibid_, line 649.]
[Footnote 10: Sonnet: _On His Having Arrived at the Age of
Twenty-three_.]
[Footnote 11: _Milton: A Sonnet._]
[Footnote 12: For full titles, see list on p. 50.]
[Footnote 13: For full titles, see p.6.]
CHAPTER VI: FROM THE RESTORATION, 1660, TO THE PUBLICATION OF PAMELA,
1740
History of the Period.--This chapter opens with the Restoration of
Charles II. (1660-1685) in 1660 and ends before the appearance, in
1740, of a new literary creation, Richardson's _Pamela_, the novel of
domestic life and character. This period is often called the age of
Dryden and Pope, the two chief poets of the time. When Oliver Cromwell
died, the restoration of the monarchy was inevitable. The protest
against the Puritanic view of life had become strong. Reaction always
results when excessive restraint in any direction is removed.
During his exile, Charles had lived much in France and had become
accustomed to the dissolute habits of the French court. The court of
Charles II. was the most corrupt ever known in England. The Puritan
virtues were laughed to scorn by the ribald courtiers who attended
Charles II. John Evelyn (1620-1706) and Samuel Pepys (1633-1703)
left diaries, which give interesting pictures of the times. The one by
Pepys is especially vivid.
In 1663 Samuel Butler (1612-1680) published a famous satire,
entitled _Hudibras_. Its object was to ridicule everything that
savored of Puritanism. This satire became extremely popular in court
circles, and was the favorite reading of the king.
[Illustration: SAMUEL BUTLER.]
Charles II. excluded all but Episcopalians from holding office, either
in towns or in Parliament. Only those who sanctioned the Episcopal
prayer book were allowed to preach. In order to keep England's
friendship and to be able to look to her for assistance in time of
war, Louis XIV. of France paid Charles II. £100,000 a year to act as a
French agent. In this capacity, Charles II. began against Holland.
From a position of commanding importance under Cromwell, England had
become a third-rate power, a tail to a French kite.
James II. (1685-1688), who succeeded his brother, Charles II.,
undertook to suspend laws and to govern like a despot. He was driven
out in the bloodless revolution of 1688 by his son-in-law, William
(1689-1702), and his daughter Mary. William of Orange, who thus became
king of England, was a prince of Holland. This revolution led to the
_Bill of Rights_ (1689), the "third pillar of the British
Constitution," the two previous being _Magna Charta_ and the _Petition
of Right_. The foundations were now firmly laid for a strictly
constitutional monarchy in England. From this time the king has been
less important, sometimes only a mere figure-head.
This revolution, coupled with the increasing rivalry of France in
trade and colonial expansion, altered the foreign policy of England.
Holland was the head of the European coalition against France; and
William III. was influential in having England join it. For the larger
part of the eighteenth century there was intermittent war with France.
Under Anne (1702-1714) the Duke of Marlborough won many remarkable
victories against France. The most worthy goal of French antagonism,
expansion of trade, and displacement of the French in America and
India, was not at this time clearly apparent.
Anne's successor was the Hanoverian Elector, George I. (1714-1727), a
descendant of the daughter of James I., who had married a German
prince. At the time of his accession, George I. was fifty-four years
old and could speak no English. He seldom attended the meetings of his
cabinet, since he could not understand the deliberations. This
circumstance led to further decline of royal power, so that his
successor, George II. (1727-1760), said: "Ministers are the king in
this country."
The history of the rest of this period centers around the great prime
minister, Robert Walpole, whose ministry lasted from 1715-1717 and
from 1721-1742. His motto was, "Let sleeping dogs lie"; and he took
good care to offend no one by proposing any reforms, either political
or religious. "Every man has his price" was the succinct statement of
his political philosophy; and he did not hesitate to secure by bribery
the adoption of his measures in Parliament. He succeeded in three
aims: (1) in making the house of Hanover so secure on the throne that
it has not since been displaced, (2) in giving fresh impetus to trade
and industry at home by reducing taxation, and (3) in strengthening
the navy and encouraging colonial commerce.
Change in Foreign Influence.--Of all foreign influences from the
beginning of the Renaissance to the Restoration, the literature of
Italy had been the most important. French influence now gained the
ascendancy.
There were several reasons for this change. (1) France under the great
Louis XIV. was increasing her political importance. (2) She now had
among her writers men who were by force of genius fitted to exert wide
influence. Among such, we may instance Molière (1622-1673), who stands
next to Shakespeare in dramatic power. (3) Charles II. and many
Cavaliers had passed the time of their exile in France. They became
familiar with French literature, and when they returned to England in
1660, their taste had already been influenced by French models.
Change in the Subject Matter of Literature.--The Elizabethan age
impartially held the mirror up to every type of human emotion. The
writers of the Restoration and of the first half of the eighteenth
century, as a class, avoided any subject that demanded a portrayal of
deep and noble feeling. In this age, we catch no glimpse of a Lady
Macbeth in the grasp of remorse or of a Lear bending over a dead
Cordelia.
The popular subjects were those which appealed to cold intellect; and
these were, for the most part, satirical, didactic, and argumentative.
The two greatest poets of the period, John Dryden and his successor,
Alexander Pope, usually chose such subjects. John Locke (1632-1704), a
great prose writer of this age, shows in the very title of his most
famous work, _Of the Conduct of the Understanding_, what he preferred
to discuss. That book opens with the statement, "The last resort a man
has recourse to in the conduct of himself is his understanding." This
declaration, which is not strictly true, embodies a pronounced
tendency of the age, which could not understand that the world of
feeling is no less real than that of the understanding.
One good result of the ascendancy of the intellect was seen in
scientific investigation. The Royal Society was founded in 1662 to
study natural phenomena and to penetrate into the hidden mysteries of
philosophy and life.
The Advance of Prose.--In each preceding age, the masterpieces were
poetry; but before the middle of the eighteenth century we find the
prose far surpassing the poetry. Dryden, almost immediately after the
Restoration, shows noteworthy advance in modern prose style. He avoids
a Latinized inversion, such as the following, with which Milton begins
the second sentence of his _Areopagitica_ (1644):--
"And me perhaps each of these dispositions, as the subject was
whereon I entered, may have at other times variously affected ..."
Here, the object "me" is eighteen words in advance of its predicate.
The sentence might well have ended with the natural pause at
"affected," but Milton adds fifty-one more words. We may easily
understand by comparison why the term "modern" is applied to the prose
of Dryden and of his successors Addison and Steele. To emphasize the
precedence of these writers in the development of modern prose is no
disparagement to Bunyan's style, which is almost as quaint and as
excellent as that of the 1611 version of the _Bible_.
French influence was cumulative in changing the cumbersome style of
Milton's prose to the polished, neatly-turned sentences of Addison.
Matthew Arnold says: "The glory of English literature is in poetry,
and in poetry the strength of the eighteenth century does not lie.
Nevertheless the eighteenth century accomplished for us an immense
literary progress, and its very shortcomings in poetry were an
instrument to that progress, and served it. The example of Germany may
show us what a nation loses from having no prose style... French prose
is marked in the highest degree by the qualities of regularity,
uniformity, precision, balance... The French made their poetry also
conform to the law which was molding their prose... This may have been
bad for French poetry, but it was good for French prose."
The same influence which gave vigor, point, and definiteness to the
prose, necessary for the business of the world, helped to dwarf the
poetry. If both could not have advanced together, we may be thankful
that the first part of the eighteenth century produced a varied prose
of such high excellence.
The Classic School.--The literary lawgivers of this age held that a
rigid adherence to certain narrow rules was the prime condition of
producing a masterpiece. Indeed, the belief was common that a
knowledge of rules was more important than genius.
The men of this school are called _classicists_ because they held that
a study of the best works of the ancients would disclose the necessary
guiding rules. No style that did not closely follow these rules was
considered good. Horace, seen through French spectacles, was the
classical author most copied by this school. His _Epistles_ and
_Satires_ were considered models.
The motto of the classicists was polished regularity. Pope struck the
keynote of the age when he said:--
"True wit is nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd."[1]
These two lines show the form of the "riming couplet," which the
classical poets adopted. There is generally a pause at the end of each
line; and each couplet, when detached from the context, will usually
make complete sense.
Edmund Waller (1606-1687), remembered today for his single
couplet:--
"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made,"
had used this form of verse before 1630; but it was reserved for
Dryden, and especially for Pope, to bring the couplet to a high degree
of perfection. A French critic advised poets to compose the second
line of the couplet first. No better rule could have been devised for
dwarfing poetic power and for making poetry artificial.
Voltaire, a French classicist, said, "I do not like the monstrous
irregularities of Shakespeare." An eighteenth-century classicist
actually endeavored to improve Hamlet's soliloquy by putting it in
riming couplets. These lines from _Macbeth_ show that Shakespeare will
not tolerate such leading strings nor allow the ending of the lines to
interfere with his sense:--
"...Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against
The deep damnation of his taking-off."
A later romantic poet called the riming couplet "rocking-horse meter";
and said that the reading of many couplets reminded him of round trips
on a rocking-horse.
Advances are usually made by overstressing some one point. The
classicists taught the saving grace of style, the need of restraint,
balance, clearness, common sense. We should therefore not despise the
necessary lesson which English literature learned from such
teaching,--a lesson which has never been forgotten.
The Drama.--The theaters were reopened at the time of the
Restoration. It is interesting to read in the vivacious _Diary_ of
Samuel Pepys how he went in 1661 to see Shakespeare's _Romeo and
Juliet_, "a play of itself the worst that I ever heard." The next year
he characterizes _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ as "the most ridiculous
play that I ever saw." He liked the variety in _Macbeth_, and calls
_The Tempest_ "the most innocent play that I ever saw."
The Restoration dramatists, who were dominated by French influence, so
often sneered at morality and the virtues of the home, that they have
paid the penalty of being little read in after times. The theater has
not yet entirely recovered from the deep-seated prejudice which was so
intensified by the coarse plays which flourished for fifty years after
the Restoration.
Although John Dryden is best known among a large number of Restoration
dramatists,[2] he did better work in another field. William Congreve
(1670-1729) made the mast distinctive contribution to the new comedy
of manners. Descended from an old landowning family in Staffordshire,
he was for a while a mate of Jonathan Swift at Trinity College,
Dublin. In 1691 Congreve was entered in the Middle Temple, London, to
begin the study of law, but he soon turned playwright. His four
comedies,--_The Old Bachelor, The Double Dealer, Love for Love, The
Way of the World_,--and one tragedy, _The Mourning Bride_, were all
written in the last decade of the seventeenth century. After 1700 he
wrote no more plays, although he lived nearly thirty years longer. On
his death, in 1729, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Congreve attempts to picture the manners of contemporary society, and
he does not penetrate far below the surface of life. He is not read
for the depth of his thought, but for his humor and for the clear,
pointed style of his prose comedies. George Meredith says:--
"Where Congreve excels all his English rivals is in his literary
force, and a succinctness of style peculiar to him... He is at once
precise and voluble. If you have ever thought upon style, you will
acknowledge it to be a signal accomplishment. In this he is a
classic, and he is worthy of treading a measure with Molière."
Congreve's best comedies are _Love for Love_ and _The Way of the
World_. The majority of critics agree with Meredith in calling Miss
Millimant, who is the heroine of the latter play, "an admirable,
almost a lovable heroine." Meredith illustrates one phase of his own
idea of the comic spirit, by the language which Miss Millimant uses in
accepting her lover: "If I continue to endure you a little longer, I
may by degrees dwindle into a wife." Congreve's peculiar genius is
well shown in his ability to make her manner of speech reveal her
characteristics. His plays are unfortunately disfigured with the
coarseness of the age.
The blemishes in the drama did not exist, however, without an emphatic
contemporary protest. Jeremy Collier (1650-1729), a non-conforming
bishop, in his _Short View of the Immorality of the Stage_ (1698),
complains that the unworthy hero of one of Congreve's plays "is
crowned for the man of merit, has his wishes thrown into his lap, and
makes the happy exit."
Such attacks had their weight and prepared the way far the more moral
sentimental comedies of Richard Steele and succeeding playwrights. The
sacrifice of plot to moral purpose and the deliberate introduction of
scenes designed to force an appeal to sentiment caused the later drama
to deteriorate in a different way. We shall see that the natural
hearty humor of Goldsmith's comedy, _She Stoops to Conquer_(1773),
afforded a welcome relief from such plays.
JOHN DRYDEN, 1631-1700
[Illustration: JOHN DRYDEN. _From the painting by Sir Godfrey
Knellwe, National Portrait Gallery_.]
[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF DRYDEN. _From a print._]
Life.--John Dryden was born in 1631 in the small village of
Aldwinkle, in the northern part of Northamptonshire. Few interesting
facts concerning his life have come down to us. His father was a
baronet; his mother, the daughter of a rector. Young Dryden graduated
from Cambridge in 1654.
During his entire life, Dryden was a professional literary man; and
with his pen he made the principal part of his living. This necessity
often forced him against his own better judgment to cater to the
perverted taste of the Restoration. When he found that plays had more
market value than any other kind of literature, he agreed to furnish
three plays a year for the king's actors, but was unable to produce
that number. For fifteen years in the prime of his life, Dryden did
little but write plays, the majority of which are seldom read to-day.
His only important poem during his dramatic period was _Annus
Mirabilis_ (_The Wonderful Year_, 1666), memorable for the great
London fire and for naval victories over the Dutch.
By writing the greatest political satire in the language at the age of
fifty, he showed the world where his genius lay. During the last
twenty years of his life, he produced but few plays. His greatest
satires, didactic poems, and lyrics belong to this period. In his last
years he wrote a spirited translation of Vergil, and retold in his own
inimitable way various stories from Chaucer and Boccaccio and _Ovid_.
These stories were published in a volume entitled _Fables, Ancient and
Modern_. Dryden died in 1700 and was buried in Westminster Abbey
beside Chaucer.
It is difficult to speak positively of Dryden's character. He wrote a
poem in honor of the memory of Cromwell, and a little later another
poem, _Astraea Redux_, welcoming Charles II. He argued in stirring
verse in favor of the Episcopal religion when that was the faith of
the court; but after the accession of James II., who was a Catholic,
Dryden wrote another poem to prove the Catholic Church the only true
one. He had been appointed poet laureate in 1670, but the Revolution
of 1688, which drove James from the throne, caused Dryden to lose the
laureateship. He would neither take the oath of fealty to the new
government nor change his religion. In spite of adversity and the loss
of an income almost sufficient to support him, he remained a Catholic
for the rest of his life and reared his sons in that faith.
He seems to have been of a forgiving disposition and ready to
acknowledge his own faults. He admitted that his plays were disfigured
with coarseness. He was very kind to young writers and willing to help
them with their work. In his chair at Will's Coffee House, discoursing
to the wits of the Restoration about matters of literary art, he was
one of the most prominent figures of the age.
His Prose.--Although to the majority of people Dryden is known only
as a poet, his influence on prose has been so far-reaching as to
entitle him to be called one of the founders of modern prose style.
The shortening of sentences has been a striking feature in the
development of modern English prose. Edmund Spenser averages about
fifty words to each of his prose sentences; Richard Hooker, about
forty-one. One of the most striking sentences in Milton's
_Areopagitica_ contains ninety-five words, although he crowds over
three hundred words into some of his long sentences. The sentences in
some of Dryden's pages average only twenty-five words in length.
Turning to Macaulay, one of the most finished masters of modern prose,
we find that his sentences average twenty-two words. Dryden helped
also to free English prose from the inversions, involutions, and
parenthetical intricacies of earlier times. His influence on both
prose and poetry were much the same. In verse he adopted the short,
easily understood unit of the classical couplet; and in prose, the
short, direct sentence.
Dryden's prose deals chiefly with literary criticism. Most of his
prose is to be found in the prefaces to his plays and poems. His most
important separate prose composition is his _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_,
a work which should be read by all who wish to know some of the
foundation principles of criticism.
Satiric Poetry.--No English writer has surpassed Dryden in satiric
verse. His greatest satire is _Absalom and Achitophel_, in which,
under the guise of Old Testament characters, he satirizes the leading
spirits of the Protestant opposition to the succession of James, the
brother of Charles II., to the English throne. Dryden thus satirizes
Achitophel, the Earl of Shaftesbury:--
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
Else, why should he, with wealth and honor blest,
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?
Punish a body which he could not please,
Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?
And all to leave what with his toil he won
To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son.
* * * * *
In friendship false, implacable in hate,
Resolved to ruin or to rule the state."
Zimri, the Duke of Buckingham, is immortalized thus:--
"Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts, and nothing long."
_Mac Flecknoe_ is another satire of almost as great merit, directed
against a certain Whig poet by the name of Shadwell. He would have
been seldom mentioned in later times, had it not been for two of
Dryden's lines:--
"The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense."
_All for Love_, one of Dryden's greatest plays, shows the delicate
keenness of his satire in characterizing the cold-blooded Augustus
Caesar, or Octavius, as he is there called. Antony has sent a
challenge to Octavius, who replies that he has more ways than one to
die. Antony rejoins:--
"He has more ways than one;
But he would choose them all before that one.
_Ventidius._ He first would choose an ague or a fever.
_Antony._ No; it must be an ague, not a fever;
He has not warmth enough to die by that."
Dryden could make his satire as direct and blasting as a thunderbolt.
He thus describes his publisher:--
"With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair,
With two left legs, and Judas-colored hair,
And frowsy pores that taint the ambient air."
Argumentative or Didactic Verse.--Dryden is a master in arguing in
poetry. He was not a whit hampered by the restrictions of verse. They
were rather an advantage to him, for in poetry he could make more
telling arguments in briefer compass than in prose. The best two
examples of his power of arguing in verse are _Religio Laici_, written
in 1682, to uphold the Episcopal religion, and _The Hind and the
Panther_, composed in 1687, to vindicate the Catholic church. Verse of
this order is called didactic, because it endeavors to teach or to
explain something. The age of the Restoration delighted in such
exercises of the intellect vastly more than in flights of fancy or
imagination.
Lyrical Verse.--While most of Dryden's best poetry is either satiric
or didactic, he wrote three fine lyrical poems: _Alexander's Feast, A
Song for St. Cecilia's Day_, and _An Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew_. All
are distinguished by remarkable beauty and energy of expression.
_Alexander's Feast_ is the most widely read of Dryden's poems. The
opening lines of the Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew seem almost Miltonic
in their conception, and they show great power in the field of lyrical
poetry. Mistress Killigrew was a young lady of rare accomplishments in
both poetry and painting, who died at the age of twenty-five. Dryden
thus begins her memorial ode:--
"Thou youngest virgin daughter of the skies,
Made in the last promotion of the blest;
Whose palms, new plucked from Paradise,
In spreading branches more sublimely rise,
Rich with immortal green above the rest:
* * * * *
Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine,
Since Heaven's eternal year is thine."
Some of his plays have songs and speeches instinct with lyrical force.
The following famous lines on the worth of existence are taken from
his tragedy of _Aurengzebe:_--
"When I consider'd life, 'tis all a cheat,
Yet, fool'd with hope, men favor the deceit,
Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay:
To-morrow's falser than the former day,
Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
Strange cozenage! none would live past years again;
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain.
And, from the dregs of life, think to receive
What the first sprightly running could not give.
I'm tir'd with waiting for this chemic gold,
Which fools us young and beggars us when old."
General Characteristics.--In point of time, Dryden is the first
great poet of the school of literary artists. His verse does not
tolerate the unpruned irregularities and exaggerations of many former
English poets. His command over language is remarkable. He uses words
almost as he chooses, but he does not invest them with the warm glow
of feeling. He is, however, something more than a great word artist.
Many of his ideas bear the stamp of marked originality.
In the field of satiric and didactic poetry, he is a master. The
intellectual, not the emotional, side of man's nature appeals strongly
to him. He heeds not the song of the bird, the color of the rose, nor
the clouds of evening.
Although more celebrated for his poetry than for his prose, he is the
earliest of the great modern prose stylists, and he displays high
critical ability.
DANIEL DEFOE, 1659?-1731
[Illustration: DANIEL DEFOE. _From a print by Vandergucht_.]
Varied Experiences.--Daniel Defoe was born in London, probably the
year before the Restoration. His father, a butcher in good
circumstances, sent the boy to a school in which English, instead of
Latin, was the medium of instruction. He was taught how to express
himself in the simple, forceful English for which he became famous.
His education was planned to make him a dissenting minister; but he
preferred a life of varied activity. He became a trader, a
manufacturer of tiles, a journalist, and a writer of fiction. By also
serving as a government agent and spy, he incurred the severe
criticism of contemporaries. It is doubtful if even Shakespeare had
more varied experiences or more vicissitudes in life.
For writing what would to-day be considered a harmless piece of irony,
_The Shortest Way with Dissenters_, in which Defoe, who was himself a
dissenter, advocated banishment or hanging, he suffered the
mortification of exposure for three days in the pillory and of
imprisonment in the pestilent Newgate jail. His business of making
tiles was consequently ruined. These experiences, with which his
enemies taunted him, colored his entire life and made him realize that
the support of his wife and six children necessitated care in his
choice and treatment of subjects.
His life was a succession of changing fortunes. He died in poverty in
1731 and was buried in Bunhill Fields, London. His grave was marked by
only a small headstone, but the English boys and girls who had read
_Robinson Crusoe_ in the Victorian age subscribed the money for a
monument with a suitable inscription. It is remarkable that Bunhill
Fields, which contains the graves of so many humble dissenters, should
be the final resting place of both Bunyan and Defoe, the authors of
the first two English prose works most often read to-day.
A Journalist and a Prolific Writer.--Defoe has at last come to be
regarded as the first great English journalist. He had predecessors in
this field, for as early as 1622 the _Coranto_, or journal of
"current" foreign news, appeared. In 1641, on the eve of the civil
war, the _Diurnall_ of domestic news was issued. In 1643, when
Parliament appointed a licenser, who gave copyright protection to the
"catchword" or newspaper title, journalists became a "recognized
body." "Newsbooks" and especially "newsletters" grew in popularity.
Only a few years after the Restoration, there appeared _The London
Gazette_, which has been continued to the present time as the medium
through which the government publishes its official news.
From 1704 to 1713 Defoe issued _The Review_, which appeared triweekly
for the greater part of the time, and gave the news current in England
and in much of Europe. _The Review_, an unusual achievement for the
age, shows Defoe to have been a journalist of great ability. This
paper had one department, called _The Scandal Club_, which furnished
suggestions for _The Tatler_ and _The Spectator_.
It has been computed that Defoe wrote for _The Review_ during the nine
years of its publication 5000 pages of essays, in addition to nearly
the same amount of other matter. He also issued many pamphlets, which
performed somewhat the same service as the modern newspaper with its
editorials. It is probable that he was the most prolific of all
English authors. Few have discussed as wide a range of matter. He
wrote more than two hundred and fifty separate works on subjects as
different as social conditions, the promotion of business, human
conduct, travels in England, and ghosts.
Fiction.--Defoe was nearly sixty when he began to write fiction. In
1719 he published the first part of _Robinson Crusoe_, the story of
the adventures of a sailor wrecked on a solitary island. The Frenchman
Daudet said of this work: "It is as nearly immortal as any book can
ever be." The nineteenth century saw more than one hundred editions of
it published in London alone. It has been repeatedly issued in almost
every language of Europe. The secret of the success of _Robinson
Crusoe_ has puzzled hundreds of writers who have tried to imitate it.
The world-wide popularity of _Robinson Crusoe_ is chiefly due (1) to
the peculiar genius of the author; (2) to his journalistic training,
which enabled him to seize on the essential elements of interest and
to keep these in the foreground; (3) to the skill with which he
presents matter-of-fact details, sufficient to invest the story with
an atmosphere of perfect reality; (4) to his style, which is as simple
and direct as the speech of real life, and which is made vivid by
specific words describing concrete actions,--such as hewing a tree,
sharpening a stake, hanging up grapes to dry, tossing a biscuit to a
wild cat, taking a motherless kid in his arms; and (5) to the skill
with which he sets a problem requiring for its solution energy,
ingenuity, self-reliance, and the development of the moral power
necessary to meet and overcome difficulties.
Young and old follow with intense interest every movement of the
shipwrecked mariner when he first swims to the stranded ship,
constructs a raft, and places on it "bread, rice, three Dutch cheeses,
five pieces of dried goat's flesh, a little remainder of European
corn, and the carpenter's chest." Readers do not accompany him
passively as he lands the raft and returns. They work with him; they
are not only made a part of all Crusoe's experience, but they react on
it imaginatively; they suggest changes; they hold their breath or try
to assist him when he is in danger. Defoe's genius in making the
reader a partner in Robinson Crusoe's adventures has not yet received
sufficient appreciation. The author could never have secured such a
triumph if he had not compelled readers to take an active part in the
story.
It was for a long time thought that Defoe was ignorant, that he
accidentally happened to write _Robinson Crusoe_ because he had been
told of the recent experience of Alexander Selkirk on a solitary
island in the Pacific. It is now known that Defoe was well educated,
versed in several languages, and the most versatile writer of his
time. _Robinson Crusoe_ was no more of an accident than any other
creation of genius.
Defoe's other principal works of fiction are: _Memoirs of a Cavalier_,
the story of a soldier's adventures in the seventeenth century; _The
Life, Adventures, and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton_, a
graphic account of adventures in a journey across Africa; _Moll
Flanders_, a story of a well-known criminal; and _A Journal of the
Plague Year_, a vivid, imaginative presentation, in the most realistic
way, of the horrors of the London plague in 1665. These works are
almost completely overshadowed by _Robinson Crusoe_; but they also
show Defoe's narrative power and his ability to make fiction seem an
absolute reality. In writing _Gulliver's Travels_, Swift received
valuable hints from Defoe. Stevenson's _Treasure Island_ is the most
successful of the almost numberless stories of adventure suggested by
_Robinson Crusoe_.
JONATHAN SWIFT, 1667-1745
[Illustration: JONATHAN SWIFT. _From the painting by C. Jervas,
National Portrait Gallery_.]
Life.--Swift, one of the greatest prose writers of the eighteenth
century, was born of English parents in Dublin in 1667. It is
absolutely necessary to know something of his life in order to pass
proper judgment on his writings. A cursory examination of his life
will show that heredity and environment were responsible for many of
his peculiarities. Swift's father died a few months before the birth
of his son, and the boy saw but little of his mother.
Swift's school and college life were passed at Kilkenny School and
Trinity College, Dublin. For his education he was indebted to an
uncle, who made the boy feel the bitterness of his dependence. In
after times he said that his uncle treated him like a dog. Swift's
early experience seems to have made him misanthropic and hardened to
consequences, for he neglected certain studies, and it was only by
special concession that he was allowed to take his A.B. degree in
1686.
After leaving college, he spent almost ten years as the private
secretary of Sir William Temple, at Moor Park in Surrey, about forty
miles southwest of London. Temple had been asked to furnish some
employment for the young graduate because Lady Temple was related to
Swift's mother. Here Swift was probably treated as a dependent, and he
had to eat at the second table. Finally, this life became so
intolerable that he took holy orders and went to a little parish in
Ireland; but after a stay of eighteen months he returned to Moor Park,
where he remained until Temple's death in 1699. Swift then went to
another little country parish in Ireland. From there he visited London
on a mission in behalf of the Episcopal Church in Ireland. He
quarreled with the Whigs, became a Tory, and assisted that party by
writing many political pamphlets. The Tory ministry soon felt that it
could scarcely do without him. He dined with ministers of state, and
was one of the most important men in London; but he advanced the
interests of his friends much better than his own, for he got little
from the government except the hope of becoming bishop. In 1713 he was
made dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. In 1714, Queen Anne
died, the Tories went out of power, and Swift returned to Ireland, a
disappointed man. He passed the rest of his life there, with the
exception of a few visits to England.
[Illustration: MOOR PARK. _From a drawing._]
When English politicians endeavored to oppress Ireland with unjust
laws, Swift championed the Irish cause. A man who knew him well, says:
"I never saw the poor so carefully and conscientiously attended to as
those of his cathedral." He gave up a large part of his income every
year for the poor. In Dublin he was looked upon as a hero. When a
certain person tried to be revenged on Swift for a satire, a
deputation of Swift's neighbors proposed to thrash the man. Swift sent
them home, but they boycotted the man and lowered his income £1200 a
year.
During the last years of his life, Swift was hopelessly insane. He
died in 1745, leaving his property for an asylum for lunatics and
incurables.
[Illustration: SWIFT AND STELLA. _From the painting by Dicksee._]
The mysteries in Swift's life may be partly accounted for by the fact
that during many years he suffered from an unknown brain disease. This
affection, the galling treatment received in his early years, and the
disappointments of his prime, largely account for his misanthropy, for
his coldness, and for the almost brutal treatment of the women who
loved him.
Swift's attachment to the beautiful Esther Johnson, known in
literature as Stella, led him to write to her that famous series of
letters known as the _Journal to Stella_, in which he gives much of
his personal history during the three sunniest years of his life, from
1710 to 1713, when he was a lion in London. Thackeray says: "I know of
nothing more manly, more tender, more exquisitely touching, than some
of these brief notes, written in what Swift calls his 'little
language' in his _Journal to Stella_."
A Tale of a Tub and the Battle of the Books.--Swift's greatest
satire, the greatest prose satire in English, is known as _A Tale of a
Tub_. The purpose of the work is to uphold the Episcopalians and
satirize opposing religious denominations. For those not interested in
theological arguments, there is much entertaining philosophy, as the
following quotation will show:--
"If we take an examination of what is generally understood by
happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the
senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd
under this short definition,--that it is a perpetual possession of
being well deceived. And first, with relation to the mind or
understanding it is manifest what mighty advantages fiction has over
truth; and the reason is just at our elbow, because imagination can
build nobler scenes and produce more wonderful revolutions than
fortune or nature will be at expense to furnish."
Swift's satiric definition of happiness as the art "of being well
deceived" is a characteristic instance of a combination of his humor
and pessimistic philosophy.
In the same volume with _A Tale of a Tub_, there was published a prose
satire in almost epic form, _An Account of a Battle between the
Ancient and Modern Books in St. James Library_ (1704). Although this
satire apparently aims to demonstrate the superior merits of the great
classical writers, it is mainly an attack on pretentions to knowledge.
Our greatest surprise in this satire comes not only from discovering
the expression, "sweetness and light," made famous by Matthew Arnold
in the Victorian age, but also from finding that a satirist like Swift
assigned such high rank to these qualities. He says that the
"Ancients" thus expressed an essential difference between themselves
and the "Moderns":--
"The difference is that, instead of dirt and poison, we have rather
chosen to fill our lives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind
with the two noblest of things, which are Sweetness and Light."
Gulliver's Travels.--The world is always ready to listen to any one
who has a good story to tell. Neither children nor philosophers have
yet wearied of reading the adventures of Captain Lemuel Gulliver in
Lilliput and Brobdingnag. _Gulliver's Travels_ is Swift's most famous
work.
Gulliver makes four remarkable voyages to strange countries. He first
visits Lilliput, which is inhabited by a race of men about six inches
high. Everything is on a corresponding scale. Gulliver eats a whole
herd of cattle for breakfast and drinks several hogsheads of liquor.
He captures an entire fleet of warships. A rival race of pygmies
endeavors to secure his services so as to obtain the balance of power.
The quarrels between these little people seem ridiculous, and so petty
as to be almost beneath contempt.
Gulliver next visits Brobdingnag, where the inhabitants are sixty feet
tall, and the affairs of ordinary human beings appear petty and
insignificant. The cats are as large as three oxen, and the dogs
attain the size of four elephants. Gulliver eats on a table thirty
feet high, and trembles lest he may fall and break his neck. The baby
seizes Gulliver and tries to swallow his head. Afterward the hero
fights a desperate battle with two rats. A monkey catches him and
carries him to the almost infinite height of the house top. Certainly,
the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag merit Leslie Stephen's
criticism of being "almost the most delightful children's book ever
written."
The third voyage, which takes him to Laputa, satirizes the
philosophers. We are taken through the academy at Lagado and are shown
a typical philosopher:--
"He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams
out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials, hermetically
sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers. He
told me he did not doubt that in eight years more he should be able
to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine at a reasonable
rate."
In this voyage the Struldbrugs are described. They are a race of men
who, after the loss of every faculty and of every tie that binds them
to earth, are doomed to continue living. Dante never painted a
stronger or a ghastlier picture.
On his fourth voyage, he visits the country of the Houyhnhnms and
describes the Yahoos, who are the embodiment of all the detestable
qualities of human beings. The last two voyages are not pleasant
reading, and one might wish that the author of two such inimitable
tales as the adventures in Lilliput and Brobdingnag had stopped with
these.
Children read _Gulliver's Travels_ for the story, but there is much
more than a story in the work. In its pages the historian finds
allusions that throw much light on the history of the age. Among the
Lilliputians, for example, there is one party, known as the
Bigendians, which insists that all eggs shall be broken open at the
big end, while another party, called the Littleendians, contends that
eggs shall be opened only at the little end. These differences typify
the quarrels of the age concerning religion and politics. The
_Travels_ also contains much human philosophy. The lover of satire is
constantly delighted with the keenness of the thrusts.
General Characteristics.--Swift is one of the greatest of English
prose humorists. He is noted also for wit of that satiric kind which
enjoys the discomfiture of the victim. A typical instance is shown in
the way in which, under the assumed name of Isaac Bickerstaff, he
dealt with an astrologer and maker of prophetic almanacs, whose name
was Partridge. Bickerstaff claimed to be an infallible astrologer, and
predicted that Partridge would die March 29, 1708, at 11 P.M. When
that day had passed, Bickerstaff issued a pamphlet giving a
circumstantial account of Partridge's death. Partridge, finding that
his customers began to decrease, protested that he was alive.
Bickerstaff promptly replied that Partridge was dead by his own
infallible rules of astrology, and that the man now claiming to be
Partridge was a vile impostor.
Swift's wit frequently left its imprint on the thought of the time.
The results of this special prank with the astrologer were: first, to
cause the wits of the town to join in the hue and cry that Partridge
was dead; second, to increase the contempt for astrologers; and,
third, in the words of Scott: "The most remarkable consequence of
Swift's frolic was the establishment of the _Tatler_." Richard Steele,
its founder, adopted the popular name of Isaac Bickerstaff.
Taine says of Swift: "He is the inventor of irony, as Shakespeare of
poetry." The most powerful instance of Swift's irony is shown in his
attempt to better the condition of the Irish, whose poverty forced
them to let their children grow up ignorant and destitute, or often
even die of starvation. His _Modest Proposal_ for relieving such
distress is to have the children at the age of one year served as a
new dish on the tables of the great. So apt is irony to be
misunderstood and to fail of its mark, that for a time Swift was
considered merely brutal; but soon he convinced the Irish that he was
their friend, willing to contribute both time and money to aid them.
His ironical remarks on _The Abolishing of Christianity_ were also
misunderstood.
His poems, such as _A Description of a City Shower_, and _Cadenus and
Vanessa_, show the same general characteristics as his prose, but are
inferior to it.
We shall search Swift's work in vain for examples of pathos or
sublimity. We shall find his pages caustic with wit, satire, and
irony, and often disfigured with coarseness. One of the great
pessimists of all time, he is yet tremendously in earnest in whatever
he says, from his _Drapier's Letters_, written to protect Ireland from
the schemes of English politicians, to his _Gulliver's Travels_, where
he describes the court of Lilliput. This earnestness and
circumstantial minuteness throw an air of reality around his most
grotesque creations. He pretended to despise Defoe; yet the influence
of that great writer, who made fiction seem as real as fact, is
plainly apparent in Gulliver's remarkable adventures.
Although sublimity and pathos are outside of his range, his style is
remarkably well adapted to his special subject matter. While reading
his works, one scarcely ever thinks of his style, unless the attention
is specially directed to it. Only a great artist can thus conceal his
art. A style so natural as this has especial merits which will repay
study. Three of its chief characteristics are simplicity, flexibility,
and energetic directness.
JOSEPH ADDISON, 1672-1719
[Illustration: JOSEPH ADDISON. _From the painting by Sir Godfrey
Kneller, National Portrait Gallery._]
[Illustration: THE BIRTHPLACE OF ADDISON.]
Life.--Joseph Addison was born in the paternal rectory at Milston, a
small village in the eastern part of Wiltshire. He was educated at
Oxford. He intended to become a clergyman, but, having attracted
attention by his graceful Latin poetry, was dissuaded by influential
court friends from entering the service of the church. They persuaded
him to fit himself for the diplomatic service, and secured for him a
yearly pension of £300. He then went to France, studied the language
of that country, and traveled extensively, so as to gain a knowledge
of foreign courts. The death of King William in 1702 stopped his
pension, however, and Addison was forced to return to England to seek
employment as a tutor.
The great battle of Blenheim was won by Marlborough in 1704. As
Macaulay says, the ministry was mortified to see such a victory
celebrated by so much bad poetry, and he instances these lines from
one of the poems:
"Think of two thousand gentlemen at least,
And each man mounted on his capering beast;
Into the Danube they were pushed by shoals."
The Chancellor of the Exchequer went to Addison's humble lodgings and
asked him to write a poem in honor of the battle. Addison took the
town by storm with a simile in which the great general was likened to
the calm angel of the whirlwind. When people reflected how calmly
Marlborough had directed the whirlwind of war, they thought that no
comparison could be more felicitous. From that time Addison's fortunes
rose. Since his day no man relying on literary talents alone has risen
so high in state affairs. He was made assistant Secretary of State,
Secretary for Ireland, and finally chief Secretary of State.
Though Addison was a prominent figure in the political world, it is
his literary life that most concerns us. In his prime he wrote for
_The Tatler_ and _The Spectator_, famous newspapers of Queen Anne's
day, many inimitable essays on contemporary life and manners. Most
newspaper work is soon forgotten, but these essays are read by the
most cultivated people of to-day. In his own age his most meritorious
production was thought to be the dull tragedy of _Cato_, a drama
observing the classical unities. Some of his _Hymns_ are much finer.
Lines like these, written of the stars, linger in our memories:--
"Forever singing as they shine,
The hand that made us is divine."
Addison had a singularly pleasing personality. Though he was a Whig,
the Tories admired and applauded him. He was a good illustration of
the truth that if one smiles in the mirror of the world, it will
answer him with a smile. Swift said he believed the English would have
made Addison king, if they had been requested to place him on the
throne. Pope's jealous nature prompted him to quarrel with Addison,
but the quarrel was chiefly on one side. Men like Macaulay and
Thackeray have exerted their powers to do justice to the kindliness
and integrity of Addison.
Addison died at the age of forty-seven, and was buried in Westminster
Abbey.
[Illustration: RICHARD STEELE.]
Collaborates with Steele.--Under the pen name of Isaac Bickerstaff,
Richard Steele (1672-1729), a former schoolmate and friend of Addison,
started in 1709 _The Tatler_, a periodical published three times a
week. This discussed matters of interest in society and politics, and
occasionally published an essay on morals and manners. Steele was a
good-natured, careless individual, with a varied experience as
soldier, playwright, moralist, keeper of the official gazette, and
pensioner. He says that he always "preferred the state of his mind to
that of his fortune"; but his mental state was often fickle, and too
much dependent on bodily luxuries, though he was patriotic enough to
sacrifice his personal fortune for what he considered his country's
interest.
We find Addison a frequent contributor to _The Tatler_ after its
seventeenth number. Steele says: "I fared like a distressed prince who
calls in a powerful neighbor to his aid; I was undone by my auxiliary;
when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without dependence
on him."
_The Tatler_ was discontinued in 1711, and Steele projected the more
famous _Spectator_ two months later. Addison wrote the first number,
but the second issue, which came from Steele's pen, contains sketches
of those characters which have become famous in the _Sir Roger de
Coverley Papers_. Steele's first outline of Sir Roger is a creation of
sweetness and light:--
"His tenants grow rich, his servants look satisfied, all the young
women profess to love him, and the young men are glad of his
company. When he comes into a house he calls the servants by their
names, and talks all the way upstairs to a visit."
The influence of such a character must have been especially wholesome
on the readers of the eighteenth century. Without the suggestive
originality of Steele, we might never have had those essays of
Addison, which we read most to-day; but while Steele should have full
credit for the first bold sketches, the finished portraits in the De
Coverley gallery are due to Addison. Steele says of his associate, "I
claim to myself the merit of having extorted excellent productions
from a person of the greatest abilities, who would not have let them
appear by any other means."
It is well, however, to remember that Steele did much more work than
is popularly supposed. Beginning with March 1, 1711, there were 555
issues of _The Spectator_ published on succeeding week days. To these
were added 80 more numbers at irregular intervals. Of these 635
numbers, Steele wrote 236 and Addison 274.
In many respects each seemed to be the complement of the other.
Steele's writings have not the polish or delicate humor of Addison's,
but they have more strength and pathos. Addison had the greater
genius, and he was also more willing to spend time in polishing his
prose and making it artistic. From the far greater interest now shown
in Addison, the student should be impressed by the necessity of
artistic finish as well as of excellence in subject matter.
Addison's Essays--The greatest of Addison's _Essays_ appeared in
_The Spectator_ and charmed many readers in Queen Anne's age. The
subject matter of these _Essays_ is extremely varied. On one day there
is a pleasant paper on witches; on another, a chat about the new
woman; on another, a discourse on clubs. Addison is properly a moral
satirist, and his pen did much more than the pulpit to civilize the
age and make virtue the fashion. In _The Spectator_, he says: "If I
meet with anything in city, court, or country, that shocks modesty or
good manners, I shall use my utmost endeavors to make an example of
it." He accomplished his purpose, not by heated denunciations of vice,
but by holding it up to kindly ridicule. He remembered the fable of
the different methods employed by the north wind and the sun to make a
man lay aside an ugly cloak.
Addison stated also that one of his objects was to bring "philosophy
out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs
and assemblies, at tea tables and coffeehouses." His papers on Milton
did much to diminish that great poet's unpopularity in an age that
loved form rather than matter, art rather than natural strength.
The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers.--The most famous of Addison's
productions are his papers that appeared in _The Spectator_,
describing a typical country gentleman, Sir Roger de Coverley, and his
friends and servants. Taine says that Addison here invented the novel
without suspecting it. This is an overstatement; but these papers
certainly have the interest of a novel from the moment Sir Roger
appears until his death, and the delineation of character is far in
advance of that shown in the majority of modern novels. We find
ourselves rereading the _De Coverley Papers_ more than once, a
statement that can be made of but few novels.
[Illustration: SIR ROGER IN CHURCH. _From a drawing by B.
Westmacott_.]
General Characteristics.--Addison ranks among the greatest of
English essayists. Some of his essays, like the series on _Paradise
Lost_, deal with literary criticism; but most people to-day read
little from his pen except the _Sir Roger de Coverley Papers_, which
give interesting pictures of eighteenth-century life and manners.
Before we have read many of Addison's essays, we shall discover that
he is a humorist of high rank. His humor is of the kind that makes one
smile, rather than laugh aloud. Our countenance relaxes when we
discover that his rules for an eighteenth-century club prescribe a
fine for absence except in case of sickness or imprisonment. We are
quietly amused at such touches as this in the delineation of Sir
Roger:--
"As Sir Roger is landlord to the whole congregation, he keeps them
in very good order, and will suffer nobody to sleep in it besides
himself; for, if by chance he has been surprised into a short nap at
sermon, upon recovering out of it, he stands up and looks about him,
and, if he sees anybody else nodding, either wakes them himself, or
sends his servants to them."
Addison is remarkable among a satiric group of writers because he
intended his humor to be "remedial,"--not merely to inflict wounds,
but to exert a moral influence, to induce human beings to forsake the
wrong and to become more kindly. We may smile at Sir Roger; but we
have more respect for his kindliness, after reading in _Spectator_ No.
383, how he selected his boatmen to row him on the Thames:--
"We were no sooner come to the Temple Stairs, but we were surrounded
with a crowd of watermen, offering us their respective services.
Sir Roger, after having looked about him very attentively, spied one
with a wooden leg, and immediately gave him orders to get his boat
ready. As we were walking towards it, 'You must know,' says Sir
Roger, 'I never make use of anybody to row me, that has not either
lost a leg or an arm. I would rather bate him a few strokes of his
oar than not employ an honest man that had been wounded in the
Queen's service. If I was a lord or a bishop, and kept a barge, I
would not put a fellow in my livery that had not a wooden leg.'"
Such humor, which finds its chief point in a desire to make the world
kindlier, must have appealed to the eighteenth century, or _The
Spectator_ could not have reached a circulation of ten thousand copies
a day. Addison would not now have his legion of warm admirers if his
humor had been personal, like Pope's, or misanthropical, like Swift's.
Of his style, Dr. Samuel Johnson says, "Whoever wishes to attain an
English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not
ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the study of Addison."
Benjamin Franklin, as we know from his _Autobiography_, followed this
advice with admirable results. Addison's style seems as natural and
easy as the manners of a well-bred person. When we have given some
attention to dissecting his style, we may indeed discover that a prose
model for to-day should have more variety and energy and occasionally
more precision; but such a conclusion does not mean that any writer of
this century would like the task of surpassing the _De Coverley
Papers_.
ALEXANDER POPE, 1688-1744
[Illustration: ALEXANDER POPE. _From the portrait by William
Hoare_.]
Life.--Alexander Pope was born in London in 1688. His father, a
devout Catholic, was a linen merchant, who gave his son little formal
schooling, but allowed him to pick up his education by reading such
authors as pleased his fancy.
He was a very precocious child. At the age of twelve he was writing an
_Ode on Solitude_. He chose his vocation early, for writing poetry was
the business of his life.
In his childhood, his parents removed from London to Binfield, a
village in Berkshire, nine miles from Windsor. When he was nearly
thirty years old, his translation of the _Iliad_ enabled him to buy a
house and grounds at Twickenham on the Thames, about twelve miles
above London. He lived here for the rest of his life, indulging his
taste for landscape gardening and entertaining the greatest men of the
age.
After early middle life, his writings made him pecuniarily
independent, but he suffered much from ill health. In his _Lives of
the English Poets_, Dr. Samuel Johnson says of Pope:--
"By natural deformity, or accidental distortion, his vital functions
were so much disordered that his life was a long disease... When he
rose, he was invested in a bodice made of stiff canvas, being scarce
able to hold himself erect till they were laced, and he then put on
a flannel waistcoat. One side was contracted. His legs were so
slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pair of stockings...
"In all his intercourse with mankind, he had great delight in
artifice, and endeavored to attain all his purposes by indirect and
unsuspected methods. _He hardly drank tea without a stratagem._"
The publication of his correspondence tangled him in a mesh of
deceptions, because his desire to appear in a favorable light led him
to change letters that he had sent to friends. His double-dealing,
intense jealousy, and irritability, due to his physical condition,
caused him to become involved in many quarrels, which gave him the
opportunity to indulge to the utmost his own satiric tendency. In one
of his late satires, _The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_, he charged
Addison with the inclination to--
"Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer."
On the basis of what he wrote, we may divide his life into three
periods. During his first thirty years, he produced various kinds of
verse, like the _Essay on Criticism_ and _The Rape of the Lock_. The
middle period of his life was marked by his translation of Homer's
_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. In his third period, he wrote moral and
didactic poems, like the _Essay on Man_, and satires, like the
_Dunciad_.
[Illustration: POPE'S VILLA AT TWICKENHAM. _From an old print._]
Some Poems of the First Period: Essay on Criticism and The Rape of
the Lock.--Pope's first published poem, _The Pastorals_, which
appeared in 1709, was followed in 1711 by _An Essay on Criticism_,--an
exquisite setting of a number of gems of criticism which had for a
long time been current. Pope's intention in writing this poem may be
seen from what he himself says: "It seems not so much the perfection
of sense to say things that have never been said before, as to express
those best that have been said oftenest."
From this point of view, the poem is remarkable. No other writer,
except Shakespeare, has in an equal number of lines said so many
things which have passed into current quotation. Rare perfection in
the form of statement accounts for this. The poem abounds in such
lines as these:--
"For fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
"To err is human, to forgive divine."
"All seems infected that th' infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye."
"In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold,
Alike fantastic if too new or old:
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."
_The Rape of the Lock_, which is Pope's masterpiece, is almost a
romantic poem, even though it is written in classical couplets. It was
a favorite with Oliver Goldsmith, and James Russell Lowell rightly say
says: "The whole poem more truly deserves the name of a creation than
anything Pope ever wrote." The poem is a mock epic, and it has the
supernatural machinery which was supposed to be absolutely necessary
for an epic. In place of the gods and goddesses of the great epics,
however, the fairy-like sylphs help to guide the action of this poem.
The poem, which is founded on an actual incident, describes a young
lord's theft of a lock of hair from the head of a court beauty. Pope
composed _The Rape of the Lock_ to soothe her indignation and to
effect a reconciliation. The whole of this poem should be read by the
student, as it is a vivid satiric picture of fashionable life in Queen
Anne's reign.
[Illustration: RAPE OF THE LOCK. _From a drawing by B. Westmacott_.]
Translation of Homer.--Pope's chief work during the middle period of
his life was his translation of the _Iliad_ and of the _Odyssey_ of
Homer. From a financial point of view, these translations were the
most successful of his labors. They brought him in nearly £9000, and
made him independent of bookseller or of nobleman.
The remarkable success of these works is strange when we remember that
Pope's knowledge of Greek was very imperfect, and that he was obliged
to consult translations before attempting any passage. The Greek
scholar Bentley, a contemporary of Pope, delivered a just verdict on
the translation: "A pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it
Homer." The historian Gibbon said that the poem had every merit except
faithfulness to the original.
Homer is simple and direct. He abounds in concrete terms. Pope
dislikes a simple term and loves a circumlocution and an abstraction.
We have the concrete "herd of swine" translated into "a bristly care,"
"skins," into "furry spoils." The concrete was considered common and
undignified. Homer says in simple language: "His father wept with
him," but Pope translates this: "The father poured a social flood."
Pope used to translate thirty or forty verses of the _Iliad_ before
rising, and then to spend a considerable time in polishing them. But
half of the translation of the _Odyssey_ is his own work. He employed
assistants to finish the other half; but it is by no means easy to
distinguish his work from theirs.
[Illustration: ALEXANDER POPE. _From contemporary portrait_.]
Some Poems of his Third Period: "Essay on Man," and "Satires."--The
_Essay on Man_ is a philosophical poem with the avowed object of
vindicating the ways of God to man. The entire poem is an
amplification of the idea contained in these lines:--
"All nature is but art unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good.
And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right."
The chief merit of the poem consists in throwing into polished form
many of the views current at the time, so that they may be easily
understood. Before we read very far we come across such old
acquaintances as--
"The proper study of mankind is man."
"An honest man's the noblest work of God."
"Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace."
The _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_ and _The Dunciad_ are Pope's greatest
satires. In _The Dunciad_, an epic of the dunces, he holds up to
ridicule every person and writer who had offended him. These were in
many cases scribblers who had no business with a pen; but in a few
instances they were the best scholars of that day. A great deal of the
poem is now very tiresome reading. Much of it is brutal. Pope was a
powerful agent, as Thackeray says, in rousing that obloquy which has
ever since pursued a struggling author. _The Dunciad_ could be more
confidently consulted about contemporary literary history, if Pope had
avoided such unnecessary misstatements as:--
"Earless on high, stood unabash'd De Foe."
This line is responsible for the current unwarranted belief that the
author of _Robinson Crusoe_ lost his ears in the pillory.
General Characteristics.---Pope has not strong imagination, a keen
feeling for nature, or wide sympathy with man. Leslie Stephen says:
"Pope never crosses the undefinable, but yet ineffaceable line, which
separates true poetry from rhetoric." The debate in regard to whether
Pope's verse is ever genuine poetry may not yet be settled to the
satisfaction of all; but it is well to recognize the undoubted fact
that his couplets still appeal to many readers who love clearness and
precision and who are not inclined to wrestle with the hidden meaning
of greater poetry. One of his poems, _The Rape of the Lock_, has
become almost a universal favorite because of its humor, good-natured
satire, and entertaining pictures of society in Queen Anne's time.
He is the poet who best expresses the classical spirit of the
eighteenth century. He excels in satiric and didactic verse. He
expresses his ideas in perfect form, and embodies them in classical
couplets, sometimes styled "rocking-horse meter"; but he shows no
power of fathoming the emotional depths of the soul.
In the history of literature, he holds an important place, because,
more than any other writer, he calls attention to the importance of
correctness of form and of careful expression. He is the prince of
artificial poets. Though he erred in exalting form above matter, he
taught his age the needed lesson of careful workmanship.
SUMMARY
The Restoration and the first part of the eighteenth century display a
low moral standard in both church and state. This standard had its
effect on literature. The drama shows marked decline. We find no such
sublime outbursts of song as characterize the Elizabethan and Puritan
ages. The writers chose satiric or didactic subjects, and avoided
pathos, deep feeling, and sublimity. French influence was paramount.
The classical school, which loved polished regularity, set the fashion
in literature. An old idea, dressed in exquisite form, was as welcome
as a new one. Anything strange, irregular, romantic, full of feeling,
highly imaginative, or improbable to the intellect, was unpopular.
Even in _Gulliver's Travels_, Swift endeavored to be as realistic as
if he were demonstrating a geometrical proposition.
Dryden and Pope are the two chief poets of the classical school. Both
use the riming couplet and are distinguished for their satiric and
didactic verse. Their poetry shows more intellectual brilliancy than
imaginative power. They display little sympathy with man and small
love for nature.
The age is far more remarkable for its prose than for its poetry.
French influence helped to develop a concise, flexible, energetic
prose style. The deterioration in poetry was partly compensated for by
the rapid advances in prose, which needed the influences working
toward artistic finish. Because of its cleverness, avoidance of long
sentences, and of classical inversions, Dryden's prose is essentially
modern. Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_ is the world's most popular story of
adventure, told in simple and direct, but seemingly artless, prose. Of
all the prose writers since Swift's time, few have equaled him and
still fewer surpassed him in simplicity, flexibility, directness, and
lack of affectation. The essays of Steele and Addison constitute a
landmark. No preceding English prose shows so much grace of style,
delicate humor, and power of awakening and retaining interest as do
the _Sir Roger de Coverley Papers_.
The influence of this age was sufficient to raise permanently the
standard level of artistic literary expression. The unpruned,
shapeless, and extravagant forms of earlier times will no longer be
tolerated.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY
HISTORICAL
An account of the history of this period may be found in either
Gardiner,[3] Green, Walker, or Cheney. Vols. VIII. and IX. of the
_Political History of England_ give the history in greater detail. For
the social side, consult Traill, Vols. IV. and V., and Cheney's
_Industrial and Social History of England._ Lecky's _History of
England in the Eighteenth Century_ is an excellent work.
LITERARY
_The Cambridge History of English Literature,_ Vols. VIII., IX., X.
Courthope's _A History of English Poetry_, Vols. III., IV., and V.
Stephen's _English Literature in the Eighteenth Century_.
Taine's _History of English Literature_, Book III., Chaps. I., II.,
III.
Gosse's _History of Eighteenth Century Literature_ begins with 1660.
Garnett's _The Age of Dryden_.
Phillips's _Popular Manual of English Literature_, Vol. I.
Minto's _Manual of English Prose Literature_.
Saintsbury's _Life of Dryden_. (E.M.L.)
Macaulay's _Essay on Dryden_.
Lowell's _Essay on Dryden_ in _Among My Books_.
Dryden's _Essays on the Drama_, edited by Strunk.
Fowler's _Life of Locke_. (E.M.L.)
Stephen's _History of Thought in the Eighteenth Century_.
Dennis's _The Age of Pope_.
Thackeray's _English Humorists_ (Swift, Addison, Steele, Pope).
Stephen's _Life of Swift_. (E.M.L.)
Craik's _Life of Swift_.
Courthope's _Life of Addison_. (E.M.L.)
Macaulay's _Essay on Addison_.
Stephen's _Life of Pope_. (E.M.L.)
De Quincey's _Essay on Pope_, and _On the Poetry of Pope_.
Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_ (Dryden, Pope, Addison).
Lowell's _My Study Windows_ (Pope).
SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Dryden.--From his lyrical verse, read _Alexander's Feast_ or _A Song
for St. Cecilia's Day_. The opening lines of _Religio Laici_ or of
_The Hind and the Panther_ will serve as a specimen of his
argumentative or didactic verse and _Absalom and Achitophel_ for his
satire. (Cassell's _National Library_, 15 cents.)
Selections are given in Ward,[4] II., 454-483; Bronson, III., 20-58;
Manly, I., 203-209; _Oxford Treasury_, III., 99-110; _Century_,
266-285.
For his critical prose, read _An Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ (Strunk's
edition of _Dryden's Essays on the Drama_). For selections see Craik,
III., 148-154; Manly, II., 146-163; _Century_, 276-285.
What is the chief subject matter of Dryden's verse? Point out typical
qualities in his argumentative and satiric verse. Give definite
instances of his power in argument and satire.
Why is his prose called modern? Point out some of its qualities.
Defoe.--Read or reread _Robinson Crusoe_ and point out where he
specially shows the skill of the journalist in the presentation of his
facts. Can you select passages that show the justice of the criticism?
How would the interest in the story have been affected, had Defoe,
like the author of _Swiss Family Robinson_, caused the shipwreck to
occur on an island where tropical fruits would have rendered
unnecessary Crusoe's labor to secure food?
Swift.--Caik's _English Prose Selections_, Vol. III., pp. 391-424,
contains representative selections from Swift's prose. The best of
these are _The Philosophy of Clothes_, from _A Tale of a Tub_ (Craik,
III., 398); _A Digression concerning Critics_, from the same (Craik,
III., 400); _The Emperor of Lilliput_ (Craik, III., 417) and _The King
of Brobdingnag_ (Craik, III., 419), from _Gulliver's Travels_.
Selections may be found also in Manly, II., 184-198; _Oxford
Treasury_, III., 125-129; _Century_, 299-323.
Is Swift's a good prose style? Does he use ornament? Can you find a
passage where he strives after effect? In what respects do the
subjects which he chooses and his manner of treating them show the
spirit of the age? Why is _Gulliver's Travels_ so popular? What are
the most important lessons which a young writer may learn from Swift?
In what is he specially lacking?
Addison and Steele.--From the _Sir Roger de Coverley Papers_ the
student should not fail to read _Spectator No. 112, A Country Sunday_.
He may then read _Spectator No. 2_, by Steele, which sketches the De
Coverley characters, and compare the style and characteristics of the
two authors. The student who has the time at this point should read
all the _De Coverley Papers_ (_Eclectic English Classics_, American
Book Company).
Good selections from both Addison and Steele may be found in Craik,
III., 469-535; Manly, II., 198-216; _Century_, 324-349.
In what did Addison and Steele excel? What qualities draw so many
readers to the _De Coverley Papers_? Why may they be called a prelude
to the modern novel?
Select passages which will serve to bring into sharp contrast the
style and humor of Swift and of Addison.
Pope.--Read _The Rape of the Lock_ (printed with the _Essay on Man_
in _Eclectic English Classics_, American Book Company, 20 cents).
Selections from this are given in Ward, III., 73-82. The _Essay on
Man_, Book I. (Ward, III., 85-91), will serve as a specimen of his
didactic verse. The _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_ (Ward, III., 103-105)
will illustrate his satire, and the lines from the _Iliad_ in Ward,
III., 82, will show the characteristics of his translation.
_The Rape of the Lock_ and full selections are given in Bronson, III.,
89-144; _Century_, 350-368; Manly, I., 228-253.
How does Pope show the spirit of the classical school? What are his
special merits and defects? Does an examination of his poetry convince
you that Leslie Stephen's criticism is right? Select lines from six
great poets of different periods. Place beside these selections some
of Pope's best lines, and see if you have a clearer idea of the
difference between rhetoric and true poetry.
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER VI:
[Footnote 1: _Essay on Criticism_, lines 297, 298.]
[Footnote 2: For a list of the chief dramatists of the Restoration and
their best work, see p. 626.]
[Footnote 3: For full titles, see p. 50.]
[Footnote 4: For full titles, see p. 6.]
CHAPTER VII: THE SECOND FORTY YEARS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY,
1740-1780
The Colonial Expansion of England.--The most important movements in
English history during the second forty years of the eighteenth
century are connected with colonial expansion. In 1739 friction
between England and Spain over colonial trade forced Robert Walpole,
the prime minister, into a war which was not successfully prosecuted,
and which compelled him to resign in 1742. The humorous statement that
he "abdicated," contains a large element of truth, for he had been a
much more important ruler than the king. The contest with Spain was
merged in the unprofitable war of the Austrian Succession (1740-1778),
in which England participated.
The successors of Walpole were weak and inefficient; but in 1757
William Pitt, the Elder (1708-1778), although merely secretary of
state, obtained the ascendancy in the government. Walpole had tried in
vain to bribe Pitt, who was in politics the counterpart of Wesley in
religious life. Pitt appealed to the patriotism and to the sense of
honor of his countrymen, and his appeal was heard. His enthusiasm and
integrity, coupled with good judgment of men, enabled him to lead
England to become the foremost power of the world.
France had managed her colonial affairs in America and in India so
well that it seemed as if she might in both places displace England.
Pitt, however, selected good leaders and planned a comprehensive
method of warfare against France, both in Europe and in the colonies.
Between 1750 and 1760 Clive was making Great Britain mistress of the
vast empire of India. The French and Indian War (1754-1760) in America
resulted in favor of England. In 1759 Wolfe shattered the power of
France in Canada, which has since remained an English colony. England
was expanding to the eastward and the westward and taking her
literature with her. As Wolfe advanced on Quebec, he was reading
Gray's _Elegy_.
At the beginning of this century England owned one half of the island
of Great Britain and a few colonial settlements. Not until 1707 were
England and Scotland united. In 1763 England had vast dominions in
North America and India. She had become the greatest colonial power in
the world.
The New Religious Influence.--England could not have taken such a
commanding position unless the patriotism and morals of her citizens
had improved since the beginning of the century. The church had become
too lukewarm and respectable to bring in the masses, who saw more to
attract them in taverns and places of public amusement.
When religious influence was at the lowest ebb, two eloquent
preachers, John Wesley and George Whitefield, started a movement which
is still gathering force. Wesley did not ask his audience to listen to
a sermon on the favorite bloodless abstractions of the
eighteenth-century pulpit, such as Charity, Faith, Duty, Holiness,
--abstractions which never moved a human being an inch heavenward. His
sermons were emotional. They dealt largely with the emotion of
love,--God's love for man.
He did not ask his listeners to engage in intellectual disquisitions
about the aspects of infinity: He did not preach free-will metaphysics
or trouble his hearers with a satisfactory philosophical account of
the origin of evil. He spoke about things that reached not only the
understanding but also the feelings of plain men.
About the same time, Whitefield was preaching to the miners near
Bristol. As he eloquently told them the story of salvation he brought
tears to the eyes of these rude men and made many resolve to lead
better lives.
This religious awakening may have been accompanied with too much
appeal to the feelings and unhealthy emotional excitement; but some
vigorous movement was absolutely necessary to quicken the spiritual
life of a decadent age.
The American Revolution.--The second forty years of the eighteenth
century witnessed another movement of great importance to the
world,--the revolt of the American colonies (1775). When George III.
(1760-1820) came to the throne, he determined to be the real ruler of
his kingdom,--to combine in himself the offices of king, prime
minister, and cabinet. He undertook to coerce public opinion at home
and abroad. He repeatedly offended the American colonies by attempts
to tax them and to regulate their trade. They rebelled in 1775 and
signed their Declaration of Independence in 1776. Under the leadership
of George Washington, and with the help of France, they achieved their
independence. The battle of Yorktown (1781), won by Washington and the
French navy, was the last important battle of the American Revolution.
In spite of her great loss, England still retained Canada and her West
India possessions and remained the first colonial power.
CHANGE IN LITERARY STANDARDS: ROMANTICISM
What is Romanticism?--In order to comprehend the dominating spirit
of the next age, it is important to understand the meaning of the
romantic movement. Between 1740 and 1780 certain romantic influences
were at work in opposition to the teaching of the great classical
writer, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who was almost the literary dictator of
the age.
The best short definition of romanticism is that of Victor Hugo, who
calls it "liberalism in literature." This has the merit of covering
all kinds of romantic movements. "Liberalism" here means toleration of
departures from fixed standards, such as the classical couplet and
didactic and satiric subjects. Romanticism is characterized by less
regard for form than for matter, by a return to nature, and by
encouragement of deep emotion. Romanticism says: "Be liberal enough
not to sneer at authors when they discard narrow rules. Welcome a
change and see if variety and feeling will not add more interest to
literature."
In this period and the far more glorious one that followed,
romanticism made its influence felt for the better in four different
ways. An understanding of each of these will make us more intelligent
critics.
In the first place, the romantic spirit is opposed to the prosaic. The
romantic yearns for the light that never was on sea or land and longs
to attain the unfulfilled ambitions of the soul, even when these in
full measure are not possible. Sometimes these ambitions are so
unrelated to the possible that the romantic has in certain usage
become synonymous with the impractical or the absurd; but this is not
its meaning in literature. The romantic may not always be "of
imagination all compact," but it has a tendency in that direction. To
the romanticists a reality of the imagination is as satisfying as a
reality of the prosaic reason; hence, unlike the classicists, the
romanticists can enjoy _The Tempest_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_.
The imagination is the only power that can grasp the unseen. Any
movements that stimulate imaginative activity must give the individual
more points of contact with the part of the world that does not
obtrude itself on the physical senses, and especially with many facts
of existence that cold intellectual activity can never comprehend.
Hence, romanticism leads to greater breadth of view.
In the second place, the romantic is the opposite of the hackneyed.
Hence, too much repetition may take away a necessary quality from what
was once considered romantic. The epithets "ivory" and "raven," when
applied to "brow" and to "tresses," respectively, were at first
romantic; but much repetition has deprived them of this quality. If an
age is to be considered romantic, it must look at things from a point
of view somewhat different from that of the age immediately preceding.
This change may be either in the character of the thought or in the
manner of its presentation, or in both. An example of the formal
element of change which appeared, consists in the substitution of
blank verse and the Spenserian stanza for the classical couplets of
the French school. In the next age, we shall find that the subject
matter is no longer chiefly of the satiric or the didactic type.
In the third place, the highest type of romanticism encourages each
author to express himself in an individual way, to color the world
according to his own moods. This individual element often appears in
the ideals that we fashion and in our characteristic conceptions of
the spiritual significance of the world and its deepest realities. Two
writers of this period by investing nature with a spirit of melancholy
illustrate one of the many ways in which romantic thought seeks
individuality of expression.
In the fourth place, the romantic movement encouraged the portrayal of
broader experiences and especially the expression of deeper feeling.
The mid-eighteenth century novels of Richardson and Fielding were
strong agencies in this direction; and they were followed in the next
age by the even more intense appeal of the great romantic poets to
those thoughts and feelings that lie too deep for tears.
The classic school shunned as vulgar all exhibitions of enthusiasm and
strong emotion, such as the love of Juliet and the jealousy of
Othello; but the romanticists, knowing that the feelings had as much
value and power as the intellect, encouraged their expression.
Sometimes this tendency was carried to an extreme, both in fiction and
in the sentimental drama; but it was necessary for romanticism to call
attention to the fact that great literature cannot neglect the world
of feeling.
Early Romantic Influences.--The reader and imitators of the great
romantic poet, Edmund Spenser, were growing in number. Previous to
1750, there was only one eighteenth-century edition of Spenser's works
published in England. In 1758 three editions of the _Faerie Queene_
appeared and charmed readers with the romantic enchantment of bowers,
streams, dark forests, and adventures of heroic knights.
James Thomson (1700-1748), a Scotch poet, used the characteristic
Spenserian form and subject matter for his romantic poem, _The Castle
of Indolence_ (1748). He placed his castle in "Spenser land":--
"A pleasing land of drowsy-head it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
Forever flushing round a summer sky."
The influence of Shakespeare increased. In 1741 the great actor David
Garrick captivated London by his presentation of Shakespeare's plays.
Milton's poetry, especially his _Il Penseroso_, with its individual
expression of melancholy, its studious spirit, "commercing with the
skies and bringing all Heaven before the eyes," left a strong impress
on the romantic spirit of the age. The subject matter of his _Paradise
Lost_ satisfied the romantic requirement for strangeness and strong
feeling. In the form of his verse, James Thomson shows the influence
of Milton as well as of Spencer. Thomson's greatest achievement is
_The Seasons_ (1730), a romantic poem, written in Miltonic blank
verse. He takes us where--
"The hawthorn whitens; and the juicy groves
Put forth their buds."
He was one of the earliest poets to place Nature in the foreground, to
make her the chief actor. He reverses what had been the usual poetic
attitude and makes his lovers, shepherds, and harvesters serve largely
as a background for the reflection of her moods instead of their own.
The spring shower, the gusts sweeping over fields of corn, the sky
saddened with the gathering storm of snow, are the very fabric of his
verse. Unlike Wordsworth, Thomson had not sufficient genius to invest
Nature with an intelligent, loving, companionable soul; but his
pictures of her were sufficiently novel and attractive to cause such a
classicist and lover of the town as Dr. Samuel Johnson to say:--
"The reader of _The Seasons_ wonders that he never saw before what
Thomson shows him, and that he never yet has felt what Thomson
impresses."
Ossian and "The Castle of Otranto."--Two contemporary works proved a
romantic influence out of all proportion to the worth of their subject
matter.
Between 1760 and 1764 James Macpherson, a Highland schoolmaster,
published a series of poems, which he claimed to have translated from
an old manuscript, the work of Ossian, a Gaelic poet of the third
century. This so-called translation in prose may have been forged
either in whole or in part; but the weirdness, strange imagery,
melancholy, and "other-world talk of ghosts riding on the tempest at
nightfall," had a pronounced effect on romantic literature.
[Illustration: HORACE WALPOLE.]
_The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Romance_ (1765) by Horace Walpole
(1717-1797) tells a story of a Gothic castle where mysterious
labyrinths and trap doors lead to the strangest adventures. The term
"Gothic" had been contemptuously applied to whatever was medieval or
out of date, whether in architecture, literature, or any form of art.
The unusual improbabilities of this Gothic romance were welcomed by
readers weary of commonplace works where nothing ever happens. The
influence of _The Castle of Otranto_ was even felt across the
Atlantic, by Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), the early American
novelist. Some less pronounced traces of such influence are
discernible also in the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel
Hawthorne.
Mrs. Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823) was a successor of Walpole in the
field of Gothic romance. Her stories, _The Romance of the Forest_ and
_The Mysteries of Udolpho_, have their castle and their thrilling,
unnatural episodes. Lack of portrayal of character and excess of
supernatural incident were causing fiction to suffer severe
deterioration.
Percy's Reliques and Translation of Mallet's Northern
Antiquities.--In 1765 Thomas Percy (1729-1811) published _The
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_, an epoch-making work in the
history of the romantic movement. The _Reliques_ is a collection of
old English ballads and songs, many of which have a romantic story to
tell. Scott drew inspiration from them, and Wordsworth acknowledged
his indebtedness to their influence. So important was this collection
that it has been called "the Bible of the Romantic Reformation."
In 1770 appeared Percy's translation of Mallet's _Northern
Antiquities_. For the first time the English world was given an easily
accessible volume which disclosed the Norse mythology in all its
strength and weirdness. As classical mythology had become hackneyed,
poets like Gray rejoiced that there was a new fountain to which they
could turn. Thor and his invincible hammer, the Frost Giants, Bifrost
or the Rainbow Bridge, Odin, the Valkyries, Valhal, the sad story of
Baldur, and the Twilight of the Gods, have appealed strongly to a race
which takes pride in its own mythology, to a race which today loves to
hear Wagner's translation of these myths into the music of _Die
Walküre, Siegfried_, and _Götterdämmerung_.
Thomas Chatterton, 1772-1770.--This Bristol boy was early in his
teens impressed with Percy's _Reliques_ and with the fact that
Macpherson's claim to having discovered _Ossian_ in old manuscripts
had made him famous. Chatterton spent much time in the interesting old
church of St.
Mary Redcliffe, of which his ancestors had been sextons for several
generations. He studied the manuscripts in an old chest and began to
write a series of poems, which he claimed to have discovered among the
parchments left by Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk.
Chatterton was unsuccessful in finding a publisher, and he determined
to go to London, where he thought that, like other authors, he could
live by his pen. In April, 1770, at the age of seventeen, he left
Bristol for London, where he took poison in August of the same year to
escape a slower death by starvation.
His romantic poetry and pathetic end appealed to all the great poets.
Wordsworth spoke of him as "the marvelous boy"; Coleridge called him
"young-eyed Poesy"; Shelley honored him in _Adonais_; and Keats
inscribed _Endymion_ to his memory. Traces of his influence may be
found in Coleridge and Keats.
The greatest charm of Chatterton's verse appears in unusual epithets
and unexpected poetic turns, such, for instance, as may be noted in
these lines from his best "Rowley" poem, _Aella, a Tragycal
Enterlude_:--
"Sweet his tongue as the throstle's note;
Quick in dance as thought can be."
"Hark! the raven flaps his wing
In the briar'd dell below;
Hark! the death-owl loud doth sing,
To the night-mares as they go."
While Chatterton did not leave enough verse of surpassing merit to
rank him as a great poet, his work nevertheless entitles him to be
chosen from among all his boyish peers to receive the laurel wreath
for song.
The Literature of Melancholy.--The choice of subjects in which the
emotion of melancholy was given full sway shows one direction taken by
the romantic movement. Here, the influence of Milton's _Il Penseroso_
can often be traced. The exquisite _Ode to Evening_, by William
Collins (1721-1759), shows the love for nature's solitudes where this
emotion may be nursed. Lines like these:--
"...be mine the hut,
That, from the mountain's side,
Views wilds and swelling floods,
And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires;
And hears their simple bell; and marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil,"
caused Swinburne to say: "Corot on canvas might have signed his _Ode
to Evening_."
[Illustration: THOMAS GRAY.]
The high-water mark of the poetry of melancholy of this period was
reached in Thomas Gray's (1716-1771) _Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard_ (1751). The poet with great art selected those natural
phenomena which cast additional gloom upon the scene. We may notice in
the very first stanza that the images were chosen with this end in
view:--
"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me"
Then we listen to the droning flight of the beetle, to the drowsy
tinklings from a distant fold, to the moping owl in an ivy-mantled
tower. Each natural object, either directly or by contrast, reflects
the mind of man. Nature serves as a background for the display of
emotion.
Gosse says in his _Life of Gray_: "The _Elegy_ has exercised an
influence on all the poetry of Europe, from Denmark to Italy, from
France to Russia. With the exception of certain works of Byron and
Shakespeare, no English poem has been so widely admired and imitated
abroad."
[Illustration: STOKE POGES CHURCHYARD (SCENE OF GRAY'S ELEGY).]
The Conflict between Romanticism and Classicism.--The influences of
this period were not entirely in the direction of romanticism. Samuel
Johnson, the literary dictator of the age, was unsparing in his
condemnation of the movement. The weight of his opinion kept many
romantic tendencies in check. Even authors like Gray were afraid to
adopt the new creed in its entirety. In one stanza of his _Hymn to
Adversity_ we find four capitalized abstractions, after the manner of
the classical school: Folly, Noise, Laughter, Prosperity; and the
following two lay figures, little better than abstractions:--
"The summer Friend, the flattering Foe."
These abstractions have little warmth or human interest. After Gray
had studied the Norse mythology, we find him using such strong
expressions as "iron-sleet of arrowy shower." Collins's ode on _The
Passions_ contains seventeen personified abstractions, from "pale
Melancholy" to "brown Exercise."
The conflict between these two schools continues; and many people
still think that any poetry which shows polished regularity must be
excellent. To prove this statement, we have only to turn to the
magazines and glance at the current poetry, which often consists of
words rather artificially strung together without the soul of feeling
or of thought.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN NOVEL
The Growth of Prose Fiction.--Authentic history does not take us
back to the time when human beings were not solaced by tales. The
_Bible_ contains stories of marked interest. _Beowulf_, the medieval
romances, the _Canterbury Tales_, and the ballads relate stories in
verse.
For a long time the knight and his adventures held the place of honor
in fiction; but the time came when improbable or impossible
achievements began to pall. The knight who meets with all kinds of
adventures and rescues everybody, is admirably burlesqued in _Don
Quixote_ by the Spanish author Cervantes, which appeared at the
beginning of the seventeenth century. This world-famous romance shows
by its ridicule that the taste for the impossible adventures of
chivalry was beginning to pall. The following title to one of the
chapters of _Don Quixote_ is sufficiently suggestive: "Chapter
LVIII.--Which tells how Adventures came crowding on Don Quixote in
Such Numbers that they gave him No Breathing Time."
Much prose fiction was written during the Elizabethan Age. We have
seen that Lyly's _Euphues_ and Sidney's _Arcadia_ contain the germs of
romance. Two of the novelists of the sixteenth century, Robert Greene
(1560?-1592) and Thomas Lodge (1558?-1625), helped to give to
Shakespeare the plots of two of his plays. Greene's novel _Pandosto_
suggested the plot of _The Winter's Tale_, and Lodge's _Rosalind_ was
the immediate source of the plot of _As You Like It_.
Although Greene died in want at the age of thirty-two, he was the most
prolific of the Elizabethan novelists. His most popular stories deal
with the passion of love as well as with adventure. He was also the
pioneer of those realistic novelists who go among the slums to study
life at first hand. Greene made a careful study of the sharpers and
rascals of London and published his observations in a series of
realistic pamphlets.
[Illustration: A BLIND BEGGAR ROBBED OF HIS DRINK. _From a British
Museum MS._]
Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) was the one who introduced into England the
picaresque novel in _The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jacke
Wilton_ (1594). The picaresque novel (Spanish, _picaro_, a rogue) is a
story of adventure in which rascally tricks play a prominent part.
This type of fiction came from Spain and attained great popularity in
England. Jacke Wilton is page to a noble house. Many of his sharp
tricks were doubtless drawn from real life. Nashe is a worthy
predecessor of Defoe in narrating adventures that seem to be founded
on actual life.
In spite of an increasing tendency to picture the life of the time,
Elizabethan prose fiction did not entirely discard the matter and
style of the medieval romances. All types of prose fiction were then
too prone to deal with exceptional characters or unusual events. Even
realists like Greene did not present typical Elizabethan life. The
greatest realist in the prose fiction of the Elizabethan Age was
Thomas Deloney (1543?-1600), who chose his materials from the everyday
life of common people. He had been a traveling artisan, and he knew
how to paint "the life and love of the Elizabethan workshop." He wrote
_The Gentle Craft_, a collection of tales about shoemakers, and _Jack
of Newberry_, a story of a weaver.
The seventeenth century produced _The Pilgrim's Progress_, a powerful
allegorical story of the journey of a soul toward the New Jerusalem.
Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-1689), dramatist and novelist, shows the faults
of the Restoration drama in her short tales, which helped to prepare
the way for the novelists of the next century. Her best story is
_Oroonoko_ (1658), a tale of an African slave, which has been called
"the first humanitarian novel in English," and a predecessor of _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_.
Fiction in the First Part of the Eighteenth Century.--Defoe's
_Robinson Crusoe_ shows a great advance over preceding fiction. In the
hands of Defoe, fiction became as natural as fact. Leslie Stephen
rightly calls his stories "simple history minus the facts." Swift's
_Gulliver's Travels_ (1726) is artfully planned to make its
impossibilities seem like facts. _Robinson Crusoe_ took another
forward step in showing how circumstances and environment react on
character and develop the power to grapple with difficulties and
overcome them. Unlike the majority of modern novels, Defoe's
masterpiece does not contain a love story.
The essay of life and manners at the beginning of the eighteenth
century presents us at once with various pigments necessary for the
palette of the novelist. Students on turning to the second number of
_The Spectator_ will find sketches of six different types of
character, which are worthy to be framed and hung in a permanent
gallery of English fiction. The portrait of Sir Roger de Coverley may
even claim one of the places of honor on the walls.
Distinction between the Romance and the Modern Novel.--The romances
and tales of adventure which had been so long in vogue differ widely
from the modern novel. Many of them pay but little attention to
probability; but those which do not offend in this respect generally
rely on a succession of stirring incidents to secure attention. Novels
showing the analytic skill of Thackeray's _Vanity Fair_, or the
development of character in George Eliot's _Silas Marner_ would have
been little read in competition with stirring tales of adventure, if
such novels had appeared before a taste for them had been developed by
habits of trained observation and thought.
We may broadly differentiate the romance from the modern novel by
saying that the romance deals primarily with incident and adventure
for their own sake, while the novel concerns itself with these only in
so far as they are necessary for a faithful picture of life or for
showing the development of character.
Again, the novel gave a much more prominent position to that important
class of human beings who do the most of the world's work,--a type
that the romance had been inclined to neglect.
[Illustration: SAMUEL RICHARDSON. _From an original drawing_.]
Samuel Richardson, the First Modern English Novelist.--Samuel
Richardson (1689-1761) was born in Derbyshire. When he was only
thirteen years old some of the young women of the neighborhood
unconsciously began to train him for a novelist by employing him to
conduct their love correspondence. This training partly accounts for
the fact that every one of his novels is merely a collection of
letters, written by the chief characters to each other and to their
friends, to narrate the progress of events.
At the age of fifteen Richardson went to London and learned the
printer's trade, which he followed for the rest of his life. When he
was about fifty years old, some publishers asked him to prepare a
letter writer which would be useful to country people and to others
who could not express themselves with a pen. The idea occurred to him
of making these letters tell a connected story. The result was the
first modern novel, _Pamela_, published in four volumes in 1740. This
was followed by _Clarissa Harlowe_, in seven volumes, in 1747-48, and
this by _Sir Charles Grandison_, in seven volumes, in 1753.
The affairs in the lives of the leading characters are so minutely
dissected, the plot is evolved so slowly and in a way so unlike the
astonishing bounds of the old romance, that one is tempted to say that
Richardson's novels progress mere slowly than events in life. One
secret of his success depends on the fact that we feel that he is
deeply interested in all his characters. He is as much interested in
the heroine of his masterpiece, _Clarissa Harlowe_, as if she were his
own daughter. He has the remarkable power of so thoroughly identifying
himself with his characters that, after we are introduced to them, we
can name them when we hear selections read from their letters.
The length and slow development of his novels repel modern readers,
but there was so little genuinely interesting matter in the middle of
the eighteenth century that many were sorry his novels were no longer.
The novelty of productions of this type also added to their interest.
His many faults are largely those of his age. He wearies his readers
with his didactic aims. He is narrow and prosy. He poses as a great
moralist, but he teaches the morality of direct utility.
The drama and the romance had helped to prepare the way for the novel
of everyday domestic life. While this way seemed simple, natural, and
inevitable, Richardson was the first to travel in it. Defoe had
invested fictitious adventure with reality. Richardson transferred the
real human life around him to the pages of fiction. The ascendancy of
French influence was noteworthy for a considerable period after the
Restoration. England could now repay some of her debt. Richardson
exerted powerful influence on the literature of France as well as on
that of other continental nations.
[Illustration: HENRY FIELDING. _From the original sketch by
Hogarth_.]
Henry Fielding, 1707-1754.--The greatest novelist of the eighteenth
century, and one of the greatest that England ever produced, was Henry
Fielding, who was born in Sharpham Park, Somersetshire. After
graduating at the University of Leyden, he became a playwright, a
lawyer, a judge of a police court, and, most important of all, a
novelist, or a historian of society, as he preferred to style himself.
When Richardson's _Pamela_ appeared, Fielding determined to write a
story caricaturing its morality and sentiment, which he considered
hypocritical. Before he had gone very far he discovered where his
abilities lay, and, abandoning his narrow, satiric aims, he wrote
_Joseph Andrews_ (1742), a novel far more interesting than _Pamela_.
_Jonathan Wild the Great_ (1743) tells the story of a rogue who was
finally hanged. In 1749 appeared Fielding's masterpiece, _Tom Jones_,
and in 1751 his last novel, _Amelia_.
Richardson lacks humor, but Fielding is one of the greatest humorists
of the eighteenth century. Fielding is also a master of plot. From all
literature, Coleridge selected, for perfection of plot, _The
Alchemist, Oedipus Tyrannus_, and _Tom Jones_.
Fielding's novels often lack refinement, but they palpitate with life.
His pages present a wonderful variety of characters, chosen from
almost all walks of life. He could draw admirable portraits of women.
Thackeray says of Amelia, the heroine of the novel that bears her
name:--
"To have invented that character, is not only a triumph of art, but
it is a good action. They say it was in his own home that Fielding
knew her and loved her, and from his own wife that he drew the most
charming character in English fiction... I admire the author of
_Amelia_, and thank the kind master who introduced me to that sweet
and delightful companion and friend. _Amelia_, perhaps, is not a
better story than _Tom Jones_, but it has the better ethics; the
prodigal repents at least before forgiveness,--whereas that odious
broad-backed Mr. Jones carries off his beauty with scarce an
interval of remorse for his manifold errors and shortcomings... I
am angry with Jones. Too much of the plum cake and rewards of life
fall to that boisterous, swaggering young scapegrace."[1]
The "prodigal" to whom Thackeray refers is Captain Booth, the husband
of Amelia, and "Mr. Jones" is the hero of _Tom Jones_. Fielding's
wife, under the name of Sophia Western, is also the heroine of _Tom
Jones_. It is probable that in the characters of Captain Booth and Tom
Jones, Fielding drew a partial portrait of himself. He seems, however,
to have changed in middle life, for his biographer, Austin Dobson,
says of him: "He was a loving father and a kind husband; he exerted
his last energies in philanthropy and benevolence; he expended his
last ink in defence of Christianity."
Fielding shows the eighteenth-century love of satire. He hates that
hypocrisy which tries to conceal itself under a mask of morality. In
the evolution of the plots of his novels, he invariably puts such
characters in positions that tear away their mask. He displays almost
savage pleasure in making them ridiculous. Perhaps the lack of
spirituality of the age finds the most ample expression in his pages;
but Chaucer's Parish Priest and Fielding's Parson Adams are typical of
those persisting moral forces that have bequeathed a heritage of power
to England.
[Illustration: LAURENCE STERNE.]
[Illustration: UNCLE TOBY AND CORPORAL TRIM. _From a drawing by B.
Westmacott_.]
[Illustration: TOBIAS SMOLLETT.]
Sterne and Smollett.--With Richardson and Fielding it is customary
to associate two other mid-eighteenth century novelists, Lawrence
Sterne (1713-1768) and Tobias Smollett (1721-1771). Between 1759 and
1767 Sterne wrote his first novel, _The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy, Gentleman_, which presents the delightfully comic and
eccentric members of the Shandy family, among whom Uncle Toby is the
masterpiece. In 1768 Sterne gave to the world that compound of
fiction, essays, and sketches of travel known as _A Sentimental
Journey through France and Italy_. The adjective "sentimental" in the
title should be specially noted, for it defines Sterne's attitude
toward everything in life. He is habitually sentimental in treating
not only those things fitted to awaken deep emotion, but also those
trivial incidents which ordinarily cause scarcely a ripple of feeling.
Although he is sometimes a master of pathos, he frequently gives an
exhibition of weak and forced sentimentalism. He more uniformly excels
in subtle humor, which is his next most conspicuous characteristic.
_Roderick Random_ (1748), _Peregrine Pickle_ (1751), and _The
Expedition of Humphrey Clinker_ (1771) are Smollett's best novels.
They are composed mainly of a succession of stirring or humorous
incidents. In relying for interest more on adventure than on the
drawing of character, he reverts to the picaresque type of story.
The Relation of Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and
Smollett to Subsequent Fiction.--Although the modern reader
frequently complains that these older novelists often seem heavy, slow
in movement, unrefined, and too ready to draw a moral or preach a
sermon, yet these four men hold an important place in the history of
fiction. With varying degrees of excellence, Richardson, Fielding, and
Sterne all have the rare power of portraying character from within, of
interpreting real life. Some novelists resort to the far easier task
of painting merely external characteristics and mannerisms. Smollett
belongs to the latter class. His effective focusing of external
peculiarities and caricaturing of exceptional individuals has had a
far-reaching influence, which may be traced even in the work of so
great a novelist as Charles Dickens. Fielding, on the other hand, had
great influence of Thackeray, who has recorded in _The English
Humorists of the Eighteenth Century_ his admiration for his earlier
fellow-craftsman.
Although subsequent English fiction has invaded many new fields,
although it has entered the domain of history and of sociology, it is
not too much to say that later novelists have advanced on the general
lines marked out by these four mid-eighteenth century pioneers. We may
even affirm with Gosse that "the type of novel invented in England
about 1740-50 continued for sixty or seventy years to be the only
model for Continental fiction; and criticism has traced in every
French novelist, in particular, the stamp of Richardson, if not of
Sterne, and of Fielding."
PHILOSOPHICAL, HISTORICAL, AND POLITICAL PROSE
Philosophy.--Although the majority of eighteenth-century writers
disliked speculative thought and resolutely turned away from it, yet
the age produced some remarkable philosophical works, which are still
discussed, and which have powerfully affected later thought. David
Hume (1711-1776) is the greatest metaphysician of the century. He
took for his starting point the conclusions of a contemporary
philosopher, George Berkeley (1685-1753).
Berkeley had said that ideas are the only real existing entities, that
matter is merely another term for the ideas in the Mind of the
Infinite and has no existence outside of mind. He maintained that if
every quality should be taken away from matter, no matter would
remain; _e.g._, if color, sweetness, sourness, form, and all other
qualities should be taken away from an apple, there would be no apple.
Now, a quality is a mental representation based on a sensation, and
this quality varies as the sensation varies; in other words, the
object is not a stable immutable thing. It is only a thing as I
perceive it. Berkeley's idealistic position was taken to crush
atheistic materialism.
Hume attempted to rear on Berkeley's position an impregnable citadel
of skepticism. He accepted Berkeley's conclusion that we know nothing
of matter, and then attempted to show that inferences based on ideas
might be equally illusory. Hume attacked the validity of the reasoning
process itself. He endeavored to show that there is no such thing as
cause and effect in either the mental or the material world.
Hume's _Treatise of Human Nature_ (1739-1740), in which these views
are stated, is one of the world's epoch-making works in philosophy.
Its conclusion startled the great German metaphysician Kant and roused
him to action. The questions thus raised by Hume have never been
answered to the satisfaction of all philosophers.
Hume's skepticism is the most thoroughgoing that the world has ever
seen; for he attacks the certainty of our knowledge of both mind and
matter. But he dryly remarks that his own doubts disappear when he
leaves his study. He avoids a runaway horse and inquires of a friend
the way to a certain house in Edinburgh, relying as much on the
evidence of his eyes and on the directions of his friend as if these
philosophic doubts had never been raised.
Historical Prose.--In carefully elaborated and highly finished works
of history, the eighteenth century surpasses its predecessors. _The
History of England_ by David Hume, the philosopher, is the first work
of the kind to add to the history of politics and the affairs of state
an account of the people and their manners. This _History_ is
distinguished for its polished ease and clearness. Unfortunately, the
work is written from a partisan point of view. Hume was a Tory, and
took the side of the Stuarts against the Puritans. He sometimes
misrepresented facts if they did not uphold his views. His _History_
is consequently read more to-day as a literary classic than as an
authority.
[Illustration: EDWARD GIBBON. _From the painting by Sir Joshua
Reynolds_.]
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) is the greatest historian of the century.
His monumental work, _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_, in six volumes, begins with the reign of Trajan, A.D. 98, and
closes with the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople in
1453. Gibbon constructed a "Roman road" through nearly fourteen
centuries of history; and he built it so well that another on the same
plan has not yet been found necessary. E.A. Freeman says: "He remains
the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern research has
neither set aside nor threatened to set aside." In preparing his
_History_, Gibbon spent fifteen years. Every chapter was the subject
of long-continued study and careful original research. From the
chaotic materials which he found, he constructed a history remarkable
as well for its scholarly precision as for the vastness of the field
covered.
His sentences follow one another in magnificent procession. One feels
that they are the work of an artist. They are thickly sprinkled with
fine-sounding words derived from the Latin. The 1611 version of the
first four chapters of the _Gospel_ of John averages 96 per cent of
Anglo-Saxon words, and Shakespeare 89 per cent, while Gibbon's average
of 70 per cent is the lowest of any great writer. He has all the
coldness of the classical school, and he shows but little sympathy
with the great human struggles that are described in his pages. He has
been well styled "a skillful anatomical demonstrator of the dead
framework of society." With all its excellences, his work has,
therefore, those faults which are typical of the eighteenth century.
[Illustration: EDMUND BURKE. _From the painting by Sir Joshua
Reynolds, National Portrait Gallery_.]
Political Prose.--Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was a distinguished
statesman and member of the House of Commons in an important era of
English history,--a time when the question of the independence of the
American colonies was paramount, and when the spirit of revolt against
established forms was in the air. He is the greatest political writer
of the eighteenth century.
Burke's best productions are _Speech on American Taxation_ (1774) and
_Speech on Conciliation with America_ (1775). His _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ is also noteworthy. His prose is distinguished
for the following qualities: (1) He is one of the greatest masters of
metaphor and imagery in English prose. Only Carlyle surpasses him in
the use of metaphorical language. (2) Burke's breadth of thought and
wealth of expression enable him to present an idea from many different
points of view, so that if his readers do not comprehend his
exposition from one side, they may from another. He endeavors to
attach what he says to something in the experience of his hearers or
readers; and he remembers that the experience of all is not the same.
(3) It follows that his imagery and figures lay all kinds of knowledge
under contribution. At one time he draws an illustration from
manufacturing; at another, from history; at another, from the butcher
shop. (4) His work displays intense earnestness, love of truth,
strength of logical reasoning, vividness of imagination, and breadth
of view, all of which are necessary qualities in prose that is to mold
the opinions of men.
It is well to note that Burke's careful study of English literature
contributed largely to his success as a writer. His use of Bible
phraseology and his familiarity with poetry led a critic to say that
any one "neglects the most valuable repository of rhetoric in the
English language, who has not well studied the English Bible... The
cadence of Burke's sentences always reminds us that prose writing is
only to be perfected by a thorough study of the poetry of the
language."
OLIVER GOLDSMITH, 1728-1774
[Illustration: OLIVER GOLDSMITH. _From the painting by Sir Joshua
Reynolds, National Portrait Gallery_.]
Life and Minor Works.--Oliver Goldsmith was born of English parents
in the little village of Pallas in the center of Ireland. His father,
a poor clergyman, soon moved a short distance to Lissoy, which
furnished some of the suggestions for _The Deserted Village_.
Goldsmith went as a charity student to Dublin University, where, like
Swift, he graduated at the bottom of his class. Goldsmith tried in
turn to become a clergyman, a teacher, a lawyer, and a doctor, but
failed in all these fields. Then he wandered over the continent of
Europe for a year and accumulated some experiences that he used in
writing _The Traveler_. He returned to London in 1757, and, after an
ineffectual attempt to live by practicing medicine, turned to
literature. In this profession he at first managed to make only a
precarious living, for the most part as a hackwriter, working for
periodicals and filling contracts to compile popular histories of
England, Greece, Rome, and _Animated Nature_. He had so much skill in
knowing what to retain, emphasize, or subordinate, and so much genius
in presenting in an attractive style what he wrote, that his work of
this kind met with a readier sale than his masterpieces. Of the
_History of Animated Nature_, Johnson said: "Goldsmith, sir, will give
us a very fine book on the subject, but if he can tell a horse from a
cow, that I believe may be the extent of his knowledge of natural
history."
His first literary reputation was gained by a series of letters,
supposed to be written by a Chinaman as a record of his impressions of
England. These letters or essays, like so much of the work of Addison
and Steele, appeared first in a periodical; but they were afterwards
collected under the title, _Citizen of the World_ (1761). The
interesting creation of these essays is Beau Tibbs, a poverty-stricken
man, who derives pleasure from boasting of his frequent association
with the nobility.
[Illustration: GOLDSMITH GIVES DR. JOHNSON THE MS. OF THE VICAR OF
WAKEFIELD. _From a drawing by B. Westmacott_.]
It was not until the last ten years of his life that Goldsmith became
famous. He certainly earned enough then to be free from care, had he
but known how to use his money. His improvidence in giving to beggars
and in squandering his earnings on expensive rooms, garments, and
dinners, however, kept him always in debt.
One evening he gave away his blankets to a woman who told him a
pitiful tale. The cold was so bitter during the night that he had to
open the ticking of his bed and crawl inside. Although this happened
when he was a young man, it was typical of his usual response to
appeals for help. When his landlady had him arrested for failing to
pay his rent, he sent for Johnson to come and extricate him. Johnson
asked him if he had nothing that would discharge the debt, and
Goldsmith handed him the manuscript of _The Vicar of Wakefield_.
Johnson reported his action to Boswell, as follows:--
"I looked into it and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon
return; and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds."
[Illustration: CANONBURY TOWER, LONDON, WHERE GOLDSMITH WROTE SOME OF
HIS FAMOUS WORK.]
During his last years, Goldsmith sometimes received as much as £800 in
twelve months; but the more he earned, the deeper he plunged into
debt. When he died, in 1774, at the age of forty-five, he owed £2000.
He was loved because--
"...e'en his failings leaned to virtue's side."
His grave by the Temple Church on Fleet Street, London, is each year
visited by thousands who feel genuine affection for him in spite of
his shortcomings.
Masterpieces.--His best work consists of two poems, _The Traveler_
and _The Deserted Village_; a story, _The Vicar of Wakefield_; and a
play,_She Stoops to Conquer_.
The object of _The Traveler_ (1765), a highly polished moral and
didactic poem, was to show that happiness is independent of climate,
and hence to justify the conclusion:--
"Vain, very vain, my weary search to find
That bliss which only centers in the mind."
_The Deserted Village_ (1770) also has a didactic aim, for which we
care little. Its finest parts, those which impress us most, were
suggested to Goldsmith by his youthful experiences. We naturally
remember the sympathetic portrait of the poet's father, "the village
preacher":--
"A man he was to all the country dear
And passing rich with forty pounds a year.
* * * * *
His house was known to all the vagrant train;
He chid their wanderings but relieved their pain."
The lines relating to the village schoolmaster are almost as well
known as Scripture. Previous to this time, the eighteenth century had
not produced a poem as natural, sincere, and sympathetic in its
descriptions and portraits as _The Deserted Village_.
_The Vicar of Wakefield_ is a delightful romantic novel, which Andrew
Lang classes among books "to be read once a year." Goldsmith's own
criticism of the story in the _Advertisement_ announcing it has not
yet been surpassed:--
"There are an hundred faults in this Thing, and an hundred things
might be said to prove them beauties. But it is needless. A book
may be amusing with numerous errors, or it may he very dull without
a single absurdity. The hero of this piece unites in himself the
three greatest characters upon earth: he is a priest, an husbandman,
and the father of a family. He is drawn as ready to teach and ready
to obey; as simple in affluence, and majestic in adversity."
[Illustration: DR. PRIMROSE AND HIS FAMILY. _From a drawing by G.
Patrick Nelson._]
_The Vicar of Wakefield_ has faults of improbability and of plot
construction; in fact, the plot is so poorly constructed that the
novel would have been almost a failure, had other qualities not
insured success. The story lives because Dr. Primrose and his family
show with such genuineness the abiding lovable traits of human
nature,--kindliness, unselfishness, good humor, hope, charity,--the
very spirit of the _Sermon of the Mount_. Goethe rejoiced that he felt
the influence of this story at the critical moment of his mental
development. Goldsmith has added to the world's stock of kindliness,
and he has taught many to avoid what he calls "the fictitious demands
of happiness."
Goldsmith wrote two plays, both hearty comedies. The less successful,
_The Good-Natured Man_ (acted 1768), brought him in £500. His next
play, _She Stoops to Conquer_, a comedy of manners, is a landmark in
the history of the drama. The taste of the age demanded regular,
vapid, sentimental plays. Here was a comedy that disregarded the
conventions and presented in quick succession a series of hearty
humorous scenes. Even the manager of the theater predicted the failure
of the play; but from the time of its first appearance in 1773, this
comedy of manners has had an unbroken record of triumphs. A century
later it ran one hundred nights in London. Authorities say that it has
never been performed without success, not even by amateurs. Like all
of Goldsmith's best productions, it was based on actual experience. In
his young days a wag directed him to a private house for an inn.
Goldsmith went there and with much flourish gave his orders for
entertainment. The subtitle of the comedy is _The Mistakes of a
Night_; and the play shows the situations which developed when its
hero, Tony Lumpkin, sent two lovers to a pretended inn, which was
really the home of the young ladies to be wooed.
It is interesting to note that his contemporary, Richard Brinsley
Sheridan (1751-1816), produced, shortly after the great success of
_She Stoops to Conquer_, the only other eighteenth-century comedies
that retain their popularity, _The Rivals_ (1775) and _The School for
Scandal_ (1777), which contributed still further to the overthrow of
the sentimental comedy of the age.
General Characteristics.--Goldsmith is a romanticist at heart; but
he felt the strong classical influences of Johnson and of the earlier
school. In his poetry, Goldsmith used classical couplets and sometimes
classical subject matter, but the didactic parts of his poems are the
poorest. His greatest successes, such as the pictures of the village
preacher and the schoolmaster in _The Deserted Village_ and of Dr.
Primrose and his family in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, show the warm
human sympathy of the romantic school.
The qualities for which he is most noted are (1) a sane and saving
altruistic philosophy of life, pervaded with rare humor, and (2) a
style of remarkable ease, grace, and clearness, expressed in copious
and apt language.
_She Stoops to Conquer_ marks a change in the drama of the time,
because, in Dobson's phrase, it bade "good-bye to sham Sentiment."
"...this play it appears
Dealt largely in laughter and nothing in tears."
SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1709-1784
[Illustration: SAMUEL JOHNSON. _From the painting by Sir Joshua
Reynolds_.]
[Illustration: SAMUEL JOHNSON'S BIRTHPLACE. _From an old print_.]
Early Struggles.--Michael Johnson, an intelligent bookseller in
Lichfield, Staffordshire, was in 1709 blessed with a son who was to
occupy a unique position in literature, a position gained not so much
by his writings as by his spoken words and great personality.
Samuel was prepared for Oxford at various schools and in the paternal
bookstore, where he read widely and voraciously, but without much
system. He said that at the age of eighteen, the year before he
entered Oxford, he knew almost as much as at fifty-three. Poverty kept
him from remaining at Oxford long enough to take a degree. He left the
university, and, for more than a quarter of a century, struggled
doggedly against poverty. When he was twenty-five, he married a widow
of forty-eight. With the money which she brought him, he opened a
private school, but failed. He never had more than eight pupils, one
of whom was the actor, David Garrick.
In 1737 Johnson went to London and sought employment as a hack writer.
Sometimes he had no money with which to hire a lodging, and was
compelled to walk the streets all night to keep warm. Johnson reached
London in the very darkest days for struggling authors, who were often
subjected to the greatest hardships. They were the objects of general
contempt, to which Pope's _Dunciad_ had largely contributed.
During this period Johnson did much hack work for the _Gentleman's
Magazine_. He was also the author of two satirical poems, _London_
(1738) and _The Vanity of Human Wishes_ (1749), which won much praise.
Later Years.--By the time he had been for ten years in London, his
abilities were sufficiently well known to the leading booksellers for
them to hire him to compile a _Dictionary of the English Language_ for
£1575. He was seven years at this work, finishing it in 1755. Between
1750 and 1760 he wrote the matter for two periodicals, _The Rambler_
(1750-1752) and _The Idler_ (1758-1760), which contain papers on
manners and morals. He intended to model these papers on the lines of
_The Tatler_ and _The Spectator_, but his essays are for the most part
ponderously dull and uninteresting.
In 1762, for the first time, he was really an independent man, for
then George III. gave him a life pension of £300 a year. Even as late
as 1759, in order to pay his mother's funeral expenses, Johnson had
been obliged to dash off the romance of _Rasselas_ in a week; but from
the time he received his pension, he had leisure "to cross his legs
and have his talk out" in some of the most distinguished gatherings of
the eighteenth century. During the rest of his life he produced little
besides _Lives of the English Poets_, which is his most important
contribution to literature. In 1784 he died, and was buried in
Westminster Abbey among the poets whose lives he had written.
A Man of Character.--Any one who will read Macaulay's _Life of
Johnson_[2] may become acquainted with some of Johnson's most striking
peculiarities; but these do not constitute his claims to greatness. He
had qualities that made him great in spite of his peculiarities. He
knocked down a publisher who insulted him, and he would never take
insolence from a superior; but there is no case on record of his
having been unkind to an inferior. Goldsmith said: "Johnson has
nothing of a bear but the skin." When some one manifested surprise
that Johnson should have assisted a worthless character, Goldsmith
promptly replied: "He has now become miserable, and that insures the
protection of Johnson."
Johnson, coming home late at night, would frequently slip a coin into
the hand of a sleeping street Arab, who, on awakening, was rejoiced to
find provision thus made for his breakfast. He spent the greater part
of his pension on the helpless, several of whom he received into his
own house.
There have been many broader and more scholarly Englishmen, but there
never walked the streets of London a man who battled more courageously
for what he thought was right. The more we know of him, the more
certain are we to agree with this closing sentence from Macaulay's
_Life of Johnson_: "And it is but just to say that our intimate
acquaintance with what he would himself have called the
anfractuosities of his intellect and of his temper serves only to
strengthen our conviction that he was both a great and a good man."
A Great Converser and Literary Lawgiver.--By nature Johnson was
fitted to be a talker. He was happiest when he had intelligent
listeners. Accordingly, he and Sir Joshua Reynolds, the artist,
founded the famous Literary Club in 1764. During Johnson's lifetime
this had for members such men as Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith,
Charles James Fox, James Boswell, Edward Gibbon, and David Garrick.
Macaulay says: "The verdicts pronounced by this conclave on new books
were speedily known over all London, and were sufficient to sell off a
whole edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the
trunk maker and the pastry cook... To predominate over such a society
was not easy; yet even over such a society Johnson predominated."
He was consulted as an oracle on all kinds of subjects, and his
replies were generally the pith of common sense. So famous had Johnson
become for his conversations that George III. met him on purpose to
hear him talk. A committee from forty of the leading London
booksellers waited on Johnson to ask him to write the _Lives of the
English Poets_. There was then in England no other man with so much
influence in the world of literature.
Boswell's Life of Johnson.--In 1763 James Boswell (1740-1795), a
Scotchman, met Johnson and devoted much time to copying the words that
fell from the great Doctor's lips and to noting his individual traits.
We must go to Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, the greatest of all
biographies, to read of Johnson as he lived and talked; in short, to
learn those facts which render him far more famous than his written
works.
[Illustration: JAMES BOSWELL.]
Leslie Stephen saw: "I would still hope that to many readers Boswell
has been what he has certainly been to some, the first writer who gave
them a love of English literature, and the most charming of all
companions long after the bloom of novelty has departed. I subscribe
most cheerfully to Mr. Lewes's statement that he estimates his
acquaintances according to their estimate of Boswell."
A Champion of the Classical School.--Johnson was a powerful adherent
of classicism, and he did much to defer the coming of romanticism. His
poetry is formal, and it shows the classical fondness for satire and
aversion to sentiment. The first two lines of his greatest poem, _The
Vanity of Human Wishes_--
"Let observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru,"
show the classical couplet, which he employs, and they afford an
example of poetry produced by a sonorous combination of words.
"Observation," "view," and "survey" are nearly synonymous terms. Such
conscious effort centered on word building subtracts something from
poetic feeling.
His critical opinions of literature manifest his preference for
classical themes and formal modes of treatment. He says of
Shakespeare: "It is incident to him to be now and then entangled with
an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express ... the equality
of words to things is very often neglected."
Although there is much sensible, stimulating criticism in Johnson's
_Lives of the Poets_, yet he shows positive repugnance to the pastoral
references--the flocks and shepherds, the oaten flute, the woods and
desert caves--of Milton's _Lycidas_. "Its form," says Johnson, "is
that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting."
General Characteristics.--While he is best known in literary history
as the great converser whose full length portrait is drawn by Boswell,
Johnson left the marks of his influence on much of the prose written
within nearly a hundred years after his death. On the whole, this
influence has, for the following reasons, been bad.
[Illustration: CHESHIRE CHEESE INN, FLEET STREET, LONDON.]
First, he loved a ponderous style in which there was an excess of the
Latin element. He liked to have his statements sound well. He once
said in forcible Saxon: "_The Rehearsal_! has not wit enough to keep
it sweet," but a moment later he translated this into: "It has not
sufficient vitality to preserve it from putrefaction." In his
_Dictionary_ he defined "network" as "anything reticulated or
decussated at equal distances with interstices between the
intersections." Some wits of the day said that he used long words to
make his _Dictionary_ necessary.
In the second place, Johnson loved formal balance so much that he used
too many antitheses. Many of his balancing clauses are out of place or
add nothing to the sense. The following shows excess of antithesis:--
"If the flights of Dryden, therefore, are higher, Pope continues
longer on the wing. If of Dryden's fire the blaze is brighter, of
Pope's the heat is more regular and constant. Dryden often surpasses
expectation, and Pope never falls below it. Dryden is read with
frequent astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight."
As a rule, Johnson's prose is too abstract and general, and it awakens
too few images. This is a characteristic failing of his essays in _The
Rambler_ and _The Idler_. Even in _Rasselas_, his great work of
fiction, he speaks of passing through the fields and seeing the
animals around him; but he does not mention definite trees, flowers,
or animals. Shakespeare's wounded stag or "winking Mary-buds" would
have given a touch of life to the whole scene.
Johnson's latest and greatest work, _Lives of the English Poets_, is
comparatively free from most of these faults. The sentences are
energetic and full of meaning. Although we may not agree with some of
the criticism, shall find it stimulating and suggestive. Before
Johnson gave these critical essays to the world, he had been doing
little for years except talking in a straightforward manner. His
constant practice in speaking English reacted on his later written
work. Unfortunately this work has been the least imitated.
SUMMARY
The second part of the eighteenth century was a time of changing
standards in church, state, and literature. The downfall of Walpole,
the religious revivals of Wesley, the victories of Clive in India and
of Wolfe in Canada, show the progress that England was making at home
and abroad. Even her loss of the American colonies left her the
greatest maritime and colonial power.
There began to be a revolt against the narrow classical standards in
literature. A longing gradually manifested itself for more freedom of
imagination, such as we find in _Ossian, The Castle of Otranto_,
Percy's _Reliques_, and translations of the Norse mythology. There was
a departure from the hackneyed forms and subjects of the preceding age
and an introduction of more of the individual and ideal element, such
as can be found in Gray's _Elegy_ and Collins's _Ode to Evening_. Dr.
Johnson, however, threw his powerful influence against this romantic
movement, and curbed somewhat such tendencies in Goldsmith, who,
nevertheless, gave fine romantic touches to _The Deserted Village_ and
to much of his other work. This period was one of preparation for the
glorious romantic outburst at the end of the century.
In prose, the most important achievement of the age was the creation
of the modern novel in works like Richardson's _Pamela_ and _Clarissa
Harlowe_, Fielding's _Tom Jones_, Sterne's _Tristram Shandy_,
Smollett's _Humphrey Clinker_, and Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_.
There were also noted prose works in philosophy and history by Hume
and Gibbon, in politics by Burke, in criticism by Johnson, and in
biography by Boswell. Goldsmith's comedy of manners, _She Stoops to
Conquer_, won a decided victory over the insipid sentimental drama.
REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
HISTORICAL
For contemporary English history, consult Gardiner,[3] Green, Walker,
or Cheney. For the social side, see Traill, V. Lecky's _History of the
Eighteenth Century_ is specially full.
LITERARY
_The Cambridge History of English Literature_.
Courthope's _History of English Poetry_, Vol. V.
Seccombe's _The Age of Johnson_.
Gosse's _History of English Literature in the Eighteenth Century_.
Stephen's _English Literature in the Eighteenth Century_.
Minto's _Manual of English Prose Literature_.
Symons's _The Romantic Movement in English Poetry_.
Beers's _English Romanticism_.
Phelps's _Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement_.
Nutt's _Ossian and Ossianic Literature_.
Jusserand's _The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare_.
Cross's _The Development of the English Novel_.
Minto's _Defoe_ (E.M.L.)
Dobson's _Samuel Richardson_. (E.M.L.)
Dobson's _Henry Fielding_. (E.M.L.)
Godden's _Henry Fielding, a Memoir_.
Stephen's _Hours in a Library_ (Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding).
Thackeray's _English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century_ (Fielding,
Smollett, Sterne, Goldsmith).
Gosse's _Life of Gray_. (E.M.L.)
Huxley's _Life of Hume_. (E.M.L.)
Morrison's _Life of Gibbon_. (E.M.L.)
Woodrow Wilson's _Mere Literature_ (Burke).
Boswell's _Life of Johnson_.
Stephen's _Life of Johnson_. (E.M.L.)
Macaulay's _Essay on Croker's Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson_.
Irving's, Forster's, Dobson's, Black's (E.M.L.), or B. Frankfort
Moore's _Life of Goldsmith_.
SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
The Romantic Movement.--In order to note the difference in feeling,
imagery, and ideals, between the romantic and the classic schools, it
will be advisable for the student to make a special comparison of
Dryden's and Pope's satiric and didactic verse with Spenser's _Faerie
Queene_, Milton's _Il Penseroso_, and with some of the work of the
romantic poets in the next period. What is the difference in the
general atmosphere of these poems? See if the influence of _Il
Penseroso_ is noticeable in Collins's _Ode to Evening_ (Ward[4], III.,
287; Bronson, III., 220; _Oxford_, 531; Manly, I., 273; _Century_,
386) and in Gray's _Elegy_ (Ward, III., 331; Bronson, III., 238;
_Oxford_, 516; Manly, I., 267; _Century_, 398).
What element foreign to Dryden and Pope appears in Thomson's _Seasons_
(Ward, III., 173; Bronson. III., 179; Manly, I., 255; _Century_,
369-372).
What signs of a struggle between the romantic and the classic are
noticeable in Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_ (Ward, III., 373-379;
Bronson, III., 282; Manly, I., 278; _Century_, 463). Pick out the
three finest passages in the poem, and give the reasons for the
choice.
Read pp. 173-176 of _Ossian (Canterbury Poets_ series, 40 cents;
Chambers, II.; Manly, II., 275), and show why it appealed to the
spirit of romanticism.
For a short typical selection from Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, see
Chambers. II. Why is this called romantic fiction?
In Percy's _Reliques_, read the first ballad, that of _Chevy Chase_,
and explain how the age could turn from Pope to read such rude verse.
In place of Mallet's _Northern Antiquities_, twentieth-century readers
will prefer books like Guerber's _Myths of Northern Lands_ and Mabie's
_Norse Stories Retold from the Eddas_.
From Chatterton's _Aella_ read nine stanzas from the song beginning:
"O sing unto my roundelay." His _The Bristowe Tragedy_ may be compared
with Percy's _Reliques_ and with Coleridge's _The Ancient Mariner_.
Selections from Chatterton are given in Bronson, III., Ward, III.,
_Oxford_, Manly, I., and _Century_.
The Novel.--Those who have the time to study the beginnings of the
novel will be interested in reading, _Guy, Earl of Warwick_ (Morley's
_Early Prose Romances_) or _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Retold in
Modern Prose, with Introduction and Notes_, by Jessie L. Weston
(London: David Nutt, two shillings).
Two Elizabethan novels: Lodge's _Rosalynde_ (the original of
Shakespeare's _As You Like It_) and Greene's _Pandosto_ (the original
of _The Winter's Tale_) are published in _The Shakespeare Classics_,
edited by Gollancz (Duffield & Company, New York, $1 each). _Pandosto_
may be found at the end of the Cassell _National Library_ edition of
_The Winter's Tale_ (15 cents). Selections from Lodge's _Rosalynde_
are given in Craik, I., 544-549. These should be compared with the
parallel parts of _As You Like It_. Selections from Nashe's _The
Unfortunate Traveller_ are given in Craik, I., 573-576, and selections
from Sidney's _Arcadia_ in the same volume, pp. 409-419. Deloney's
_The Gentle Craft_ and _Jack of Newberry_ are given in his _Works_,
edited by Mann (Clarendon Press).
For the preliminary sketching of characters that might serve as types
in fiction, read _The Spectator_, No. 2, by Steele. Defoe's _Robinson
Crusoe_ will be read entire by almost every one.
In Craik, IV., read the following selections from these four great
novelists of the middle of the eighteenth century; from Richardson,
pp. 59-66; from Fielding, pp. 118-125; from Sterne, pp. 213-219; and
from Smollett, pp. 261-264 and 269-272. Manly, II., has brief
selections.
Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_ should be read entire by the student
(_Eclectic English Classics_, or _Gateway Series_, American Book
Company). Selections may be found in Craik, IV., 365-370.
Sketch the general lines of development in fiction, from the early
romance to Smollett. What type of fiction did _Don Quixote_ ridicule?
Compare Greene's _Pandosto_ with Shakespeare's _Winter's Tale_, and
Lodge's _Rosalynde_ with _As You Like It_. In what relation do Steele,
Addison, and Defoe stand to the novel? Why is the modern novel said to
begin with Richardson?
Philosophy.--Two selections from Berkeley in Craik, IV., 34-39, give
some of that philosopher's subtle metaphysics. The same volume, pp.
189-195, gives a selection from Hume's _Treatise of Human Nature_. Try
stating in your own words the substance of these selections.
Gibbon.--Read Aurelian's campaign against Zenobia, which constitutes
the last third of Chap. XI. of the first volume of _The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire_. Other selections may be found in Craik,
IV., 460-472; _Century_, 453-462.
What is the special merit of Gibbon's work? What period does he cover?
Compare his style, either in description or in narration, with
Bunyan's.
Burke.--Let the student who has not the time to read all the speech
on _Conciliation with America (Eclectic English Classics_, or _Gateway
Series_, American Book Company, 20 cents) read the selection in Craik,
IV., 379-385, and also the selection referring to the decline of
chivalry, from _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ (Craik, IV.,
402).
Point out in Burke's writings the four characteristics mentioned on p.
331. Compare his style with Bacon's, Swift's, Addison's, and Gibbon's.
Goldsmith.--Read his three masterpieces: _The Deserted Village, The
Vicar of Wakefield (Eclectic English Classics_, or _Gateway Series_,
American Book Company), _She Stoops to Conquer_ (Cassell's _National
Library_; _Everyman's Library_).
Select passages that show (a) altruistic philosophy of life, (b)
humor, (c) special graces of style. What change did _She Stoops to
Conquer_ bring to the stage? What qualities keep the play alive?
Johnson.--Representative selections are given in Craik, IV.,
141-185. Those from _Lives of the English Poets_ (Craik, IV., 175-182;
_Century_, 405-419) will best repay study. Let the student who has the
time read Johnson's _Dryden_ entire. As much as possible of Boswell's
_Life of Johnson_ should be read (Craik, IV., 482-495; Manly, II.,
277-292).
Compare the style of Johnson with that of Gibbon and Burke. For what
reasons does Johnson hold a high position in literature? What special
excellences or defects do you note in his _Lives of the English
Poets_? Why is Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ a great work?
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER VII:
[Footnote 1: _The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century_.]
[Footnote 2: To be found in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, or in
Macaulay's collected _Essays_.]
[Footnote 3: For full titles, see p. 50.]
[Footnote 4: For full titles, see p. 6.]
CHAPTER VIII: THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837
History of the Period.--Much of the English history of this period
was affected directly or indirectly by the French Revolution (1789).
The object of this movement was to free men from oppression by the
aristocracy and to restore to them their natural rights. The new
watchwords were "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality." The professed
principles of the French revolutionists were in many respects similar
to those embodied in the American _Declaration of Independence_.
At first the movement was applauded by the liberal-minded Englishmen;
but the confiscation of property, executions, and ensuing reign of
terror soon made England recoil from this Revolution. When France
executed her king and declared her intention of using force to make
republics out of European powers, England sent the French minister
home, and war immediately resulted. With only a short intermission,
this lasted from 1793 until 1815, the contest caused by the French
Revolution having become merged in the Napoleonic war. The battle of
Waterloo (1815) ended the struggle with the defeat of Napoleon by the
English general, Wellington.
The War of 1812 with the United States was for England only an
incident of the war with France. England had become so powerful on the
sea, as a result of the victories of Nelson, that she not only forbade
vessels of a neutral power to trade with France, but she actually
searched American vessels and sometimes removed their seamen, claiming
that they were British deserters. The Americans won astonishing naval
victories; but the war was concluded without any very definite
decision on the points involved.
The last part of the eighteenth century saw the invention of spinning
and weaving machines, the introduction of steam engines to furnish
power, the wider use of coal, the substitution of the factory system
for the home production of cloth, and the impairment of the home by
the employment of women and children for unrestricted hours in the
factories.
The long reign of George III., interrupted by periods of insanity,
ended in 1820. The next two kings were his sons, George IV.
(1820-1830) and William IV. (1830-1837). During these two reigns the
spirit of reform was in the air. The most important reforms were (1)
the revision of the criminal laws, which had prescribed death for some
two hundred offenses, including stealing as much as five shillings;
(2) the removal of political disabilities from Catholics, so that for
the first time since 1673 they could hold municipal office and sit in
Parliament; (3) the Reform Bill of 1832, which (_a_) extended the
franchise to the well-to-do middle classes but not to those dependent
on day labor, (_b_) gave a fairer apportionment of representatives in
Parliament and abolished the so-called "rotten boroughs," _i.e._ those
districts which with few or no inhabitants had been sending members to
Parliament, while the large manufacturing cities in the north were
without representatives; (4) the final bill in 1833 for the abolition
of slavery; (5) child labor laws, which ordered the textile factories
to cease employing children under nine years of age, prescribed a
legal working day of eight hours for children between nine and
thirteen, and of twelve hours for those between thirteen and eighteen;
(6) the improvement of the poor laws.
The increased interest in human rights and welfare is the most
important characteristic of this entire period, but most especially of
the reigns of George IV. and William IV. Sir Robert Peel, the elder,
although an employer of nearly a thousand children, felt the spirit of
the time enough to call the attention of Parliament to the abuses of
child labor. As we shall see, this new spirit exerted a strong
influence on literature.
Influence of the New Spirit on Poetry.--The French Revolution
stirred the young English poets profoundly. They proclaimed the birth
of a new humanity of boundless promise. The possibilities of life
again seemed almost as great as in Elizabethan days. The usually
sober-minded Wordsworth exclaimed:--
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!"[1]
In the age of Pope, the only type of man considered worthy a place in
the best literature was the aristocrat. The ordinary laborer was an
object too contemptible even for satire. Burns placed a halo around
the head of the honest toiler. In 1786 he could find readers for his
_The Cotter's Saturday Night_; and ten years later he proclaimed
thoughts which would have been laughed to scorn early in the
century:--
"Is there, for honest poverty,
That hangs his head and a' that?
The coward slave, we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a' that!
* * * * *
The rank is but the guinea stamp;
The man's the gowd[2] for a' that."[3]
Wordsworth strikes almost the same chord:--
"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie."[4]
The tenderness and sympathy induced by this new interest in human
beings resulted in the annexation to English literature of an almost
unexplored continent,--the continent of childhood. William Blake and
William Wordsworth set the child in the midst of the poetry of this
romantic age.
More sympathy for animals naturally followed the increased interest in
humanity. The poems of Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, and Coleridge show
this quickened feeling for a starved bird, a wounded hare, a hart
cruelly slain, or an albatross wantonly shot. The social disorder of
the Revolution might make Wordsworth pause, but he continued with
unabated vigor to teach us--
"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."[5]
New humanitarian interests affected all the great poets of this age.
Although Keats was cut off while he was making an Aeolian response to
the beauty of the world, yet even he, in his brief life, heard
something of the new message.
Growth of Appreciation of Nature.--More appreciation of nature
followed the development of broader sympathy, Burns wrote a lyric full
of feeling for a mountain daisy which his plow had turned beneath the
furrow. Wordsworth exclaimed:--
"To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."[6]
For more than a century after Milton, the majority of references to
nature were made in general terms and were borrowed from the stock
illustrations of older poets, like Vergil. We find the conventional
lark, nightingale, and turtledove. Nothing new or definite is said of
them.
Increasing comforts and safety in travel now took more people where
they could see for themselves the beauty of nature. In the new poetry
we consequently find more definiteness. We can hear the whir of the
partridge, the chatter of magpies, the whistle of the quail. Poets
speak of a tree not only in general terms, but they note also the
differences in the shade of the green of the leaves and the
peculiarities of the bark. Previous to this time, poets borrowed from
Theocritus and Vergil piping shepherds reclining in the shade, whom no
Englishman had ever seen. In _Michael_ Wordsworth pictures a genuine
English shepherd.
The love for mountains and wild nature is of recent growth. One writer
in the seventeenth century considered the Alps as so much rubbish
swept together by the broom of nature to clear the plains of Italy. A
seventeenth century traveler thought the Welsh mountains better than
the Alps because the former would pasture goats. Dr. Johnson asked,
"Who can like the Highlands?" The influence of the romantic movement
developed the love for wild scenery, which is so conspicuous in
Wordsworth and Byron.
This age surpasses even the Elizabethan in endowing Nature with a
conscious soul, capable of bringing a message of solace and
companionship. The greatest romantic poet of nature thus expresses his
creed:--
"...Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy."[7]
The Victory of Romanticism.--We have traced in the preceding age the
beginnings of the romantic movement. Its ascendancy over classical
rules was complete in the period between 1780 and the Victorian age.
The romantic victory brought to literature more imagination, greater
individuality, deeper feeling, a less artificial form of expression,
and an added sense for the appreciation of the beauties of nature and
their spiritual significance.
Swinburne says that the new poetic school, "usually registered as
Wordsworthian," was "actually founded at midnight by William Blake
(1757-1827) and fortified at sunrise by William Wordsworth." These
lines from Blake's _To the Evening Star_ (1783) may be given to
support this statement:--
"Thou fair-haired Angel of the Evening,
* * * * *
Smile on our loves; and while thou drawest the
Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew
On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes
In timely sleep. Let thy West Wind sleep on
The lake."
We may note in these lines the absence of the classical couplet, the
fact that the end of the lines necessitates no halt in thought, and a
unique sympathetic touch in the lines referring to the flower and the
wind.
Blake's _Songs of Innocence_ (1789) and _Songs of Experience_ (1793)
show not only the new feeling toward nature, but also a broader
sympathy with children and with all suffering creatures. The chimney
sweeper, the lost child, and even the sick rose are remembered in his
verse. In his poem, _The Schoolboy_, he enters as sympathetically as
Shakespeare into the heart of the boy on his way to school, when he
hears the call of the uncaged birds and the fields.
These two lines express an oft-recurring idea in Blake's mystical
romantic verse:--
"The land of dreams is better far,
Above the light of the morning star."
The volume of _Lyrical Ballads_ (1798), the joint work of Wordsworth
and Coleridge, marks the complete victory of the romantic movement.
The Position of Prose.--The eighteenth century, until near its end,
was, broadly speaking, an age of prose. In excellence and variety the
prose surpassed the poetry; but in this age (1780-1837) their position
was reversed and poetry regained almost an Elizabethan ascendancy.
Much good prose was written, but it ranks decidedly below the
enchanting romantic poetry.
Prose writers were laying the foundations for the new science of
political economy and endeavoring to ascertain how the condition of
the masses could be improved. While investigating this subject,
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), an Episcopal clergyman, announced
his famous proposition, since known as the Malthusian theorem, that
population tends to increase faster than the means of subsistence.
Political economists and philosophers like Adam Smith (1723-1790),
professor in the University of Glasgow, agreed on the "let-alone"
doctrine of government. They held that individuals could succeed best
when least interfered with by government, that a government could not
set aside natural law, but could only impede it and cause harm, as for
instance, in framing laws to tempt capital into forms of industry less
productive than others and away from the employment that it would
naturally seek. Many did not even believe in legislation affecting the
hours of labor or the work of children. This "let-alone" theory was
widely held until the close of the nineteenth century.
In moral philosophy, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), lawyer and
philosopher, laid down the principle that happiness is the prime
object of existence, and that the basis of legislation should be the
greatest happiness to the greatest number, instead of to the
privileged few. He measured the morality of actions by their
efficiency in producing this happiness, and he said that pushpin is as
good as poetry, if it gives as much pleasure. He was followed by
James Mill (1773-1836), who maintained that the morality of actions
is measured by their utility. The fault with many of the prevalent
theories of government and morals lay in their narrow standards of
immediate utility, their failure to measure remote spiritual effects.
[Illustration: ROBERT SOUTHEY.]
The taste of the age encouraged poetry. Scott, although a natural born
writer of prose romance, made his early reputation by such poems as
_Marmion_ and _The Lady of the Lake_. Robert Southey (1774-1843)
usually classed with Wordsworth and Coleridge as one of the three
so-called Lake Poets, wrote much better prose than poetry. His prose
_Life of Nelson_ outranks the poetry in his _Curse of Kehama_. It is
probable that, had he lived in an age of prose ascendancy, he would
have written little poetry, for he distinctly says that the desire of
making money "has already led me to write sometimes in poetry what
would perhaps otherwise have been better written in prose." This
statement shows in a striking way the spirit of those times. If
Coleridge had not written such good poetry, his excellent critical
prose would probably be more read to-day; but he doubtless continues
to have a thousand readers for _The Ancient Mariner_ to one for his
prose.
Among the prose writers of this age, the fiction of Scott and Jane
Austen seems destined to the longest lease of life and the widest
circle of readers. De Quincey's work, especially his artistic
presentation of his thrilling dreams, has many admirers.
[Illustration: CHARLES LAMB. _From a drawing by Maclise_.]
The _Essays of Elia_ of Charles Lamb (1775-1834) still charms many
readers. For over thirty years he was by day a clerk in the India
House and by night a student of the Elizabethan drama and a writer of
periodical essays, suggestive of the work of Addison and Steele.
Lamb's pervasive humor in discussing trivial subjects makes him very
delightful reading. His well-known _Essays of Elia_ first appeared in
the _London Magazine_ between 1820 and 1833. The peculiar flavor of
his style and humor is shown in his _A Dissertation upon Roast-Pig_,
as one of the most popular of these _Essays_ is called. Lamb relates
how a Chinese boy, Bo-bo, having accidentally set his house an fire
and roasted a litter of pigs, happened to acquire a liking for roast
pig when he sucked his fingers to cool them after touching a crackling
pig. It was considered a crime to eat meat that was not raw; but the
jury fortunately had their fingers burned in the same way and tried
Bo-bo's method of cooling them. The boy was promptly acquitted. Lamb
gravely proceeds:--
"The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity
of the decision, and when the court was dismissed, went privily
and bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a
few days his lordship's town house was observed to be on fire. The
thing took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fires in
every direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the
district. The insurance offices one and all shut up shop. People
built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the
very science of architecture would in no long time be lost to the
world. Thus this custom of firing houses continued, till in process
of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made
a discovery that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal,
might be cooked (_burnt_ as they called it) without the necessity of
consuming a whole house to dress it. Then began the rude form of a
gridiron."
[Illustration: BO-BO AND ROAST PIG. _From a drawing by B.
Westmacott_.]
Other enjoyable essays are _Old China_, a lovable picture of his home
life with his sister, _Dream Children_, _New Year's Eve_, and _Poor
Relations_.
The results of Lamb's Elizabethan studies appeared in the excellent
_Tales from Shakespeare_, which he wrote with his sister, and in his
_Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who wrote about the Time of
Shakespeare_.
This age produced much prose criticism. Coleridge remains one of
England's greatest critics, and Lamb and De Quincey are yet two of her
most enjoyable ones. Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) and William
Hazlitt (1778-1830) also deserve mention in the history of English
prose criticism. Both men were unusually combative. Landor was sent
away from Oxford "for criticizing a noisy party with a shot gun,"
which he discharged against the closed shutters of the room where the
roisterers were holding their festivities. He went to Italy, where
most of his literary work was done. He avoided people, and even
boasted that he took more pleasure with his own thoughts than with
those of others. For companionship, he imagined himself conversing
with other people. The titles of his best two works are _Imaginary
Conversations_ (1824-1848) and _Pericles and Aspasia_ (1836), the
latter a series of imaginary letters. His writings are notable for
their style, for an unusual combination of dignity with simplicity and
directness. A statement like the following shows how vigorous and
sweeping his criticisms sometimes are: "A rib of Shakespeare would
have made a Milton; the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever
since." In spite of many splendid passages and of a style that
suggests sculpture in marble, twentieth-century readers often feel
that he is under full sail, either bound for nowhere, or voyaging to
some port where they do not care to land.
Hazlitt is less polished, but more suggestive, and in closer touch
with life than Landor. In seizing the important qualities of an
author's works and summarizing them in brief space, Hazlitt shows the
skill of a trained journalist. His three volumes, _Characters of
Shakespeare's Plays_ (1817), _Lectures on the English Poets_ (1818),
and _Lectures on the English Comic Writers_ (1819) contain criticism
that remains stimulating and suggestive. He loves to arrive somewhere,
to settle his points definitely. His discussion of the frequently
debated question,--whether Pope is a poet, shows this
characteristic:--
"The question,--whether Pope was a poet, has hardly yet been
settled, and is hardly worth settling; for if he was not a great
poet, he must have been a great prose writer, that is, he was a
great writer of some sort."
His two volumes of essays, _The Round Table_ (1817) and _Table Talk_
(1821-1822), caused him to be called a "lesser Dr. Samuel Johnson."
While the combative dispositions of Landor and Hazlitt did not make
them ideal critics of their contemporaries, the taste of the age liked
criticism of the slashing type. The newly established periodicals and
reviews, such as _The Edinburgh Review_ (started in 1802), furnished a
new market for critical essays. Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850), editor
of _The Edinburgh Review_, accused Wordsworth of "silliness" in his
_Lyrical Ballads_; and said vehemently of a later volume of the same
poet's verse: "This will never do." _The Quarterly Review_ in 1818
spoke of the "insanity" of the poetry of Keats. In 1819 _Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine_ gave a fatherly warning to Shelley that Keats as a
poet was "worthy of sheer and instant contempt," advised him to select
better companions than "Johnny Keats," and promised that compliance
with this advice would secure him "abundance of better praise."
Even the more genial Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), the friend of Shelley
and Keats, and the writer of many pleasant essays, called Carlyle's
style "a jargon got up to confound pretension with performance." We
like Hunt best when he is writing in the vein of the _Spectator_ or as
a "miniature Lamb." In such papers as _An Earth upon Heaven_, Hunt
tells us that in heaven "there can be no clergymen if there are no
official duties for them"; that we shall there enjoy the choicest
books, for "Shakespeare and Spenser should write us _new ones_." He
closes this entertaining paper with the novel assurance: "If we
choose, now and then we shall even have inconveniences."
WILLIAM COWPER, 1731-1800
[Illustration: WILLIAM COWPER. _From the portrait by Sir Thomas
Lawrence_.]
Life.--Cowper's life is a tale of almost continual sadness, caused
by his morbid timidity. He was born at Great Berkhampstead,
Hertfordshire, in 1731. At the age of six, he lost his mother and was
placed in a boarding school. Here his sufferings began. The child was
so especially terrified by one rough boy that he could never raise his
eyes to the bully's face, but knew him unmistakably by his shoe
buckles.
There was some happiness for Cowper at his next school, the
Westminster School, and also during the twelve succeeding years, when
he studied law; but the short respite was followed by the gloom of
madness. Owing to his ungovernable fear of a public examination, which
was necessary to secure the position offered by an uncle, Cowper
underwent days and nights of agony, during which he tried in many ways
to end his miserable life. The frightful ordeal unsettled his reason,
and he spent eighteen months in an insane asylum.
Upon his recovery, he was taken into the house of a Rev. Mr. Unwin,
whose wife tended Cowper as a son during the rest of her life. He was
never supremely happy, and he was sometimes again thrown into madness
by the terrible thought of God's wrath; but his life was passed in a
quiet manner in the villages of Weston and Olney, where he was loved
by every one. The simple pursuits of gardening, carpentering, visiting
the sick, caring for his numerous pets, rambling through the lanes,
studying nature, and writing verse, occupied his sane moments when he
was not at prayer.
Works.--Cowper's first works were the _Olney Hymns_. His religious
nature is manifest again in the volume which consists of didactic
poems upon such subjects as _The Progress of Error, Truth, Charity,
Table Talk_, and _Conversation_. These are in the spirit of the formal
classical poets, and contain sententious couplets such as
"An idler is a watch that wants both hands,
As useless if it goes as when it stands."[8]
"Vociferated logic kills me quite;
A noisy man is always in the right."[9]
[Illustration: COWPER'S COTTAGE AT WESTON.]
The bare didacticism of these poems is softened and sweetened by the
gentle, devout nature of the poet, and is enlivened by a vein of pure
humor.
He is one of England's most delightful letter writers because of his
humor, which ripples occasionally over the stream of his
constitutional melancholy. _The Diverting History of John Gilpin_ is
extremely humorous. The poet seems to have forgotten himself in this
ballad and to have given full expression to his sense of the
ludicrous.
[Illustration: JOHN GILPIN'S RIDE. _From a drawing by R.
Caldecott_.]
The work that has made his name famous is _The Task_. He gave it this
title half humorously because his friend, Lady Austen, had bidden him
write a poem in blank verse upon some subject or other, the sofa, for
instance; and he called the first book of the poem _The Sofa_. _The
Task_ is chiefly remarkable because it turns from the artificial and
conventional subjects which had been popular, and describes simple
beauties of nature and the joys of country life. Cowper says:--
"God made the country, and man made the town."
To a public acquainted with the nature poetry of Burns, Wordsworth,
and Tennyson, Cowper's poem does not seem a wonderful production.
Appearing as it did, however, during the ascendancy of Pope's
influence, when aristocratic city life was the only theme for verse,
_The Task_ is a strikingly original work. It marks a change from the
artificial style of eighteenth century poetry and proclaims the dawn
of the natural style of the new school. He who could write of--
"...rills that slip
Through the cleft rock, and chiming as they fall
Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length
In matted grass, that with a livelier green
Betrays the secret of their silent course,"
was a worthy forerunner of Shelley and Keats.
General Characteristics.--Cowper's religious fervor was the
strongest element in both his life and his writings. Perhaps that
which next appealed to his nature was the pathetic. He had
considerable mastery of pathos, as may be seen in the drawing of
"crazed Kate" in _The Task_, in the lines _To Mary_, and in the
touchingly beautiful poem _On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture out
of Norfolk_, beginning with that well-known line:--
"Oh that those lips had language!"
The two most attractive characteristics of his works are refined,
gentle humor and a simple and true manner of picturing rural scenes
and incidents. He says that he described no spot which he had not
seen, and expressed no emotion which he had not felt. In this way, he
restricted the range of his subjects and displayed a somewhat literal
mind; but what he had seen and felt he touched with a light fancy and
with considerable imaginative power.
ROBERT BURNS, 1759-1796
[Illustration: ROBERT BURNS. _From the painting by Nasmyth, National
Portrait Gallery_.]
[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF BURNS.]
Life.--The greatest of Scottish poets was born in a peasant's
clay-built cottage, a mile and a half south of Ayr. His father was a
man whose morality, industry, and zeal for education made him an
admirable parent. For a picture of his father and the home influences
under which the boy was reared, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ should
be read. The poet had little formal schooling, but under paternal
influence he learned how to teach himself.
Until his twenty-eighth year, Robert Burns was an ordinary laborer on
one or another of the Ayrshire tenant farms which his father or
brothers leased. At the age of fifteen, he was worked beyond his
strength in doing a man's full labor. He called his life on the
Ayrshire farms "the unceasing toil of a galley slave." All his life he
fought a hand-to-hand fight with poverty.
In 1786, when he was twenty-seven years old, he resolved to abandon
the struggle and seek a position in the far-off island of Jamaica. In
order to secure money for his passage, he published some poems which
he had thought out while following the plow or resting after the day's
toil. Six hundred copies were printed at three shillings each. All
were sold in a little over a month. A copy of this Kilmarnock edition
has since sold in Edinburgh for £572. His fame from that little volume
has grown as much as its monetary value.
Some Edinburgh critics praised the poems very highly and suggested a
second edition. Burns therefore abandoned the idea of going to Jamaica
and went to Edinburgh to arrange for a new edition. Here he was
entertained by the foremost men, some of whom wished to see how a
plowman would behave in polite society, while others desired to gaze
on what they regarded as a freak of nature.
The new volume appeared in 1787, and contained but few poems which had
not been published the previous year. The following winter he again
went to Edinburgh; but having shocked society by his intemperate
habits, he was almost totally neglected by the leaders of literature
and fashion.
In 1788 Burns married Jean Armour and took her to a farm which he
leased in Dumfriesshire. The first part of this new period was the
happiest in his life. She has been immortalized in his songs:--
"I see her in the dewy flowers,
I see her sweet and fair:
I hear her in the tunefu' birds,
I hear her charm the air:
There's not a bonie flower that springs
By fountain, shaw, or green
There's not a bonie bird that sings,
But minds me o' my Jean."[10]
As this farm proved unprofitable, Burns appealed to influential
persons for some position that would enable him to support his family
and write poetry. This was an age of pensions, but not a farthing of
pension did he ever get. He was made an exciseman or gauger, at a
salary of £50 a year, and he followed that occupation for the few
remaining years of his life.
Robert Burns wrote and did some things unworthy of a great poet; but
when Scotland thinks of him, she quotes the lines which he wrote for
_Tam Samson's Elegy_:--
"Heav'n rest his saul, whare'er he be!
Is th' wish o' mony mae than me:
He had twa faults, or maybe three,
Yet what remead?[11]
Ae social, honest man want we."
Burns's Poetic Creed.--We can understand and enjoy Burns much better
if we know his object in writing poetry and the point of view from
which he regarded life. It would be hard to fancy the intensity of the
shock which the school of Pope would have felt on reading this
statement of the poor plowman's poetic creed:--
"Gie me ae spark o' Nature's fire,
That's a' the learning I desire;
Then tho' I drudge thro' dub an' mire
At pleugh or cart,
My Muse, though hamely in attire,
May touch the heart."[12]
Burns's heart had been touched with the loves and sorrows of life, and
it was his ambition to sing so naturally of these as to touch the
hearts of others.
With such an object in view, he did not disdain to use in his best
productions much of the Scottish dialect, the vernacular of the
plowman and the shepherd. The literary men of Edinburgh, who would
rather have been convicted of a breach of etiquette than of a
Scotticism, tried to induce him to write pure English; but the Scotch
words which he first heard from his mother's lips seemed to possess
more "o' Nature's fire." He ended by touching the heart of Scotland
and making her feel more proud of this dialect, of him, and of
herself.
[Illustration: BURNS AND HIGHLAND MARY. _From the painting by James
Archer_.]
Union of the Elizabethan with the Revolutionary Spirit.--In no
respect does the poetry of Burns more completely part company with the
productions of the classical school than in the expression of feeling.
The emotional fire of Elizabethan times was restored to literature. No
poet except Shakespeare has ever written more nobly impassioned love
songs. Burns's song beginning:--
"Ae fond kiss and then
we sever"
seemed to both Byron and Scott to contain the essence of a thousand
love tales. This unaffected, passionate treatment of love had long
been absent from our literature; but intensity of genuine feeling
reappeared in Burns's _Highland Mary, I Love My Jean, Farewell to
Nancy, To Mary in Heaven, O Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast_, which last
Mendelssohn thought exquisite enough to set to music. The poetry of
Burns throbs with varying emotions. It has been well said that the
essence of the lyric is to describe the passion of the moment. Burns
is a master in this field.
The spirit of revolution against the bondage and cold formalism of the
past made the poor man feel that his place in the world was as
dignified, his happiness as important, as that of the rich. A feeling
of sympathy for the oppressed and the helpless also reached beyond man
to animals. Burns wrote touching lines about a mouse whose nest was,
one cold November day, destroyed by his plow. When the wild eddying
swirl of the snow beat around his cot, his heart went out to the poor
sheep, cattle, and birds.
Burns can, therefore, claim kinship with the Elizabethans because of
his love songs, which in depth of feeling and beauty of natural
utterance show something of Shakespeare's magic. In addition to this,
the poetry of Burns voices the democratic spirit of the Revolution.
Treatment of Nature.--In his verses, the autumn winds blow over
yellow corn; the fogs melt in limpid air; the birches extend their
fragrant arms dressed in woodbine; the lovers are coming through the
rye; the daisy spreads her snowy bosom to the sun; the "westlin" winds
blow fragrant with dewy flowers and musical with the melody of birds;
the brook flows past the lover's Eden, where summer first unfolds her
robes and tarries longest, because of the rarest bewitching
enchantment of the poet's tale told there.
In his poetry those conventional birds,--the lark and the
nightingale,--do not hold the chief place. His verses show that the
source of his knowledge of birds is not to be sought in books. We
catch glimpses of grouse cropping heather buds, of whirring flocks of
partridges, of the sooty coot and the speckled teal, of the fisher
herons, of the green-crested lapwing, of clamoring craiks among fields
of flowering clover, of robins cheering the pensive autumn, of
lintwhites chanting among the buds, of the mavis singing drowsy day to
rest.
It is true that on the poetic stage of Burns, man always stands in the
foreground. Nature is employed in order to give human emotion a proper
background. Burns chose those aspects of nature which harmonized with
his present mood, but the natural objects in his pages are none the
less enjoyable for that reason. Sometimes his songs complain if nature
seems gay when he is sad, but this contrast is employed to throw a
stronger light on his woes.
General Characteristics.--More people often visit the birthplace of
Burns near Ayr than of Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon. What
qualities in Burns account for such popularity? The fact that the
Scotch are an unusually patriotic people and make many pilgrimages to
the land of Burns is only a partial answer to this question. The
complete answer is to be found in a study of Burns's characteristics.
In the first place, with his "spark o' Nature's fire," he has touched
the hearts of more of the rank and file of humanity than even
Shakespeare himself. The songs of Burns minister in the simplest and
most direct way to every one of the common feelings of the human
heart. Shakespeare surpasses all others in painting universal human
nature, but he is not always simple. Sometimes his audience consists
of only the cultured few.
Especially enjoyable is the humor of Burns, which usually displays a
kindly and intuitive sympathy with human weakness. _Tam o' Shanter_,
his greatest poem, keeps the reader smiling or laughing from beginning
to end. When the Scottish Muse proudly placed on his brow the holly
wreath, she happily emphasized two of his conspicuous qualities,--his
love and mirth, when she said:--
"I saw thee eye the gen'ral mirth
With boundless love."[13]
Burns is one of the great masters of lyrical verse. He preferred that
form. He wrote neither epic nor dramatic poetry. He excels in "short
swallow flights of song."
There are not many ways in which a poet can keep larger audiences or
come nearer to them than by writing verses that naturally lend
themselves to daily song. There are few persons, from the peasant to
the lord, who have not sung some of Burns's songs such as _Auld Lang
Syne, Coming through the Rye, John Anderson my Jo_, or _Scots Wha hae
wi' Wallace Bled_. Since the day of his death, the audiences of Robert
Burns have for these reasons continually grown larger.
WALTER SCOTT, 1771-1832
[Illustration: WALTER SCOTT. _From the painting by William
Nicholson._]
Life.--Walter Scott, the son of a solicitor, was born in Edinburgh
in 1771. In childhood he was such an invalid that he was allowed to
follow his own bent without much attempt at formal education. He was
taken to the country, where he acquired a lasting fondness for animals
and wild scenery. With his first few shillings he bought the
collection of early ballads and songs known as Percy's _Reliques of
Ancient English Poetry_. Of this he says, "I do not believe I ever
read a book half so frequently, or with half the enthusiasm." His
grandmother used to delight him with the tales of adventure on the
Scottish border.
Later, Scott went to the Edinburgh High School and to the University.
At the High School he showed wonderful genius for telling stories to
the boys. "I made a brighter figure in the _yards_ than in the
_class_," he says of himself at this time. This early practice of
relating tales and noting what held the attention of his classmates
was excellent training for the future Wizard of the North.
After the apprenticeship to his father, the son was called to the bar
and began the practice of law. He often left his office to travel over
the Scottish counties in search of legendary ballads, songs, and
traditions, a collection of which he published under the title of
_Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_. In 1797 he married Miss Charlotte
Carpenter, who had an income of £500 a year. In 1799, having obtained
the office of sheriff of Selkirkshire at an annual salary of £300,
with very light duties, he found himself able to neglect law for
literature. His early freedom from poverty is in striking contrast to
the condition of his fellow Scotsman, Robert Burns.
During the period between thirty and forty years of age, he wrote his
best poems. Not until he was nearly forty-three did he discover where
his greatest powers lay. He then published _Waverley_, the first of a
series of novels known by that general name. During the remaining
eighteen years of his life he wrote twenty-nine novels, besides many
other works, such as the _Life of Napoleon_ in nine volumes, and an
entertaining work on Scottish history under the title of _Tales of a
Grandfather_.
[Illustration: ABBOTSFORD, HOME OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.]
The crisis that showed Scott's sterling character came in the winter
of 1825-1826, when an Edinburgh publishing firm in which he was
interested failed and left an his shoulders a debt of £117,000. Had he
been a man of less honor, he might have taken advantage of the
bankrupt law, which would have left his future earnings free from past
claims; but he refused to take any step that would remove his
obligation to pay the debt. At the age of fifty four, he abandoned his
happy dream of founding the house of Scott of Abbotsford and sat down
to pay off the debt with his pen. The example of such a life is better
than the finest sermon on honor. He wrote with almost inconceivable
rapidity. His novel _Woodstock_, the product of three months' work,
brought him £8228. In four years he paid £70,000 to his creditors. One
day the tears rolled down his cheeks because he could no longer force
his fingers to grasp the pen. The king offered him a man-of-war in
which to make a voyage to the Mediterranean. Hoping to regain his
health, Scott made the trip, but the rest came too late. He returned
to Abbotsford in a sinking condition, and died in 1832, at the age of
sixty-one.
[Illustration: SCOTT'S GRAVE IN DRYBURGH ABBEY.]
Poetry.--Scott's three greatest poems are _The Lay of the Last
Minstrel_ (1805), _Marmion_ (1808), and _The Lady of the Lake_ (1810).
They belong to the distinct class of story-telling poetry. Like many
of the ballads in Percy's collection, these poems are stories of old
feuds between the Highlander and the Lowlander, and between the border
lords of England and Scotland. These romantic tales of heroic battles,
thrilling incidents, and love adventures, are told in fresh, vigorous
verse, which breathes the free air of wild nature and moves with the
prance of a war horse. Outside of Homer, we can nowhere find a better
description of a battle than in the sixth canto of _Marmion: A Tale of
Flodden Field_:--
"They close, in clouds of smoke and dust,
With sword sway and with lance's thrust;
And such a yell was there,
Of sudden and portentous birth,
As if men fought upon the earth,
And fiends in upper air;
* * * * *
And in the smoke the pennons flew,
As in the storm the white sea mew."
_The Lady of the Lake_, an extremely interesting story of romantic
love and adventure, has been the most popular of Scott's poems. Loch
Katrine and the Trossachs, where the scene of the opening cantos is
laid, have since Scott's day been thronged with tourists.
[Illustration: LOCH KATRINE AND ELLEN'S ISLE.]
The most prominent characteristic of Scott's poetry is its energetic
movement. Many schoolboys know by heart those dramatic lines which
express Marmion's defiance of Douglas, and the ballad of _Lochinvar_,
which is alive with the movements of tireless youth. These poems have
an interesting story to tell, not of the thoughts, but of the deeds,
of the characters. Scott is strangely free from nineteenth century
introspection.
Historical Fiction.--Seeing that Byron could surpass him as a poet,
and finding that his own genius was best adapted to writing prose
tales, Scott turned to the composition of his great romances. In 1814
he published _Waverly_, a story of the attempt of the Jacobite
Pretender to recover the English throne in 1745. Seventeen of Scott's
works of fiction are historical.
When we wish a vivid picture of the time of Richard Coeur de Lion, of
the knight and the castle, of the Saxon swineherd Gurth and of the
Norman master who ate the pork, we may read _Ivanhoe_. If we desire
some reading that will make the Crusaders live again, we find it in
the pages of _The Talisman_. When we wish an entertaining story of the
brilliant days of Elizabeth, we turn to _Kenilworth_. If we are moved
by admiration for the Scotch Covenanters to seek a story of their
times, we have Scott's truest historical tale, _Old Mortality_.
Shortly after this story appeared, Lord Holland was asked his opinion
of it. "Opinion!" he exclaimed; "we did not one of us go to bed last
night--nothing slept but my gout." The man who could thus charm his
readers was called "the Wizard of the North."
[Illustration: WALTER SCOTT. _From a life sketch by Maclise_.]
Scott is the creator of the historical novel, which has advanced on
the general lines marked out by him. Carlyle tersely says: "These
historical novels have taught all men this truth, which looks like a
truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and
others till so taught: that the by-gone ages of the world were
actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers,
controversies, and abstractions of men."
The history in Scott's novels is not always absolutely accurate. To
meet the exigencies of his plot, he sometimes takes liberties with the
events of history, and there are occasional anachronisms in his work.
Readers may rest assured, however, that the most prominent strokes of
his brush will convey a sufficiently accurate idea of certain phases
of history. Although the hair lines in his pictures may be neglected,
most persons can learn more truth from studying his gallery of
historic scenes than from poring over volumes of documents and state
papers. Scott does not look at life from every point of view. The
reader of _Ivanhoe_, for instance, should be cautioned against
thinking that it presents a complete picture of the Middle Ages. It
shows the bright, the noble side of chivalry, but not all the
brutality, ignorance, and misery of the times.
Novels that are not Historical.--Twelve of Scott's novels contain
but few attempts to represent historic events. The greatest of these
novels are _Guy Mannering, The Heart of Midlothian, The Antiquary, and
The Bride of Lammermoor_.
Scott said that his most rapid work was his best. _Guy Mannering_, an
admirable picture of Scottish life and manners, was written in six
weeks. Some of its characters, like Dominie Sampson, the pedagogue,
Meg Merrilies, the gypsy, and Dick Hatteraick, the smuggler, have more
life than many of the people we meet.
A century before, Pope said that most women had no characters at all.
His writings tend to show that this was his real conviction, as it was
that of many others during the time when Shakespeare was little read.
_The Heart of Midlothian_ presents in Jeanie Deans a woman whose
character and feminine qualities have won the admiration of the world.
Scott could not paint women in the higher walks of life. He was so
chivalrous that he was prone to make such women too perfect, but his
humble Scotch lass Jeanie Deans is one of his greatest creations.
[Illustration: SCOTT'S DESK AT ABBOTSFORD.]
When we note the vast number of characters drawn by his pen, we are
astonished to find that he repeats so little. Many novelists write
only one original novel. Their succeeding works are merely repetitions
of the first. The hero may have put on a new suit of clothes and the
heroine may have different colored hair, or each may be given a new
mannerism, but there is nothing really new in character, and very
little in incident. Year after year, however, Scott wrote with
wonderful rapidity, without repeating his characters or his plots.
General Characteristics.--All critics are impressed with the
healthiness of Scott's work, with its freedom from what is morbid or
debasing. His stories display marked energy and movement, and but
little subtle analysis of feelings and motives. He aimed at broad and
striking effects. We do not find much development of character in his
pages. "His characters have the brilliance and the fixity of
portraits."
Scott does not particularly care to delineate the intense passion of
love. Only one of his novels, _The Bride of Lammermoor_, is aflame
with this overmastering emotion. He delights in adventure. He places
his characters in unusual and dangerous situations, and he has
succeeded in making us feel his own interest in the outcome. He has on
a larger scale many of the qualities that we may note in the American
novelist Cooper, whose best stories are tales of adventure in the
forest or on the sea. Like him, Scott shows lack of care in the
construction of sentences. Few of the most cultured people of to-day
could, however, write at Scott's breakneck speed and make as few
slips. Scott has far more humor and variety than Cooper.
Scott's romanticism is seen in his love for supernatural agencies,
which figure in many of his stories. His fondness for adventure, for
mystery, for the rush of battle, for color and sharp contrast, and his
love for the past are also romantic traits. Sometimes, however, he
falls into the classical fault of overdescription and of leaving too
little to the imagination.
In the variety of his creations, he is equaled by no one. He did more
than any other pioneer to aid fiction in dethroning the drama. His
influence can be seen in the historical novels of almost every nation.
JANE AUSTEN, 1775-1817
[Illustration: JANE AUSTEN. _From an original family portrait_.]
Life and Works.--While Sir Walter Scott was laying the foundations
of his large family estates and recounting the story of battles,
chivalry, and brigandage, a quiet little woman, almost unmindful of
the great world, was enlivening her father's parsonage and writing
about the clergy, the old maids, the short-sighted mothers, the
marriageable daughters, and other people that figure in village life.
This cheery, sprightly young woman was Jane Austen, who was born in
Steventon, Hampshire, in 1775.
She spent nearly all her life in Hampshire, which furnished her with
the chief material for her novels. She loved the quiet life of small
country villages and interpreted it with rare sympathy and a keen
sense of humor, as is shown in the following lines from _Pride and
Prejudice_:--
"'Oh, Mr. Bennet, you are wanted immediately; we are all in an
uproar! You must come and make Lizzy marry Mr. Collins, for she
vows she will not have him; and if you do not make haste he will
change his mind and not have her!'
"'Come here, child,' cried her father ... 'I understand that Mr.
Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?' Elizabeth
replied that it was. 'Very well--and this offer of marriage you have
refused?'
"'I have, sir.'
"'Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists
upon your accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?'
"'Yes, or I will never see her again.'
"'An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day
you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will
never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will
never see you again if you do!'"
She began her literary work early, and at the age of sixteen she had
accumulated quite a pile of manuscripts. She wrote as some artists
paint, for the pure joy of the work, and she never allowed her name to
appear on a title page. The majority of her acquaintances did not even
suspect her of the "guilt of authorship."
She disliked "Gothic" romances, such as _The Mysteries of Udolpho_,
and she wrote _Northanger Abbey_ as a burlesque of that type. In this
story the heroine, Catherine Moreland, who has been fed on such
literature, is invited to visit Northanger Abbey in Gloucestershire,
where with an imagination "resolved on alarm," she is prepared to be
agitated by experiences of trapdoors and subterranean passages. On the
first night of her visit, a violent storm, with its mysterious noises,
serves to arouse the most characteristic "Gothic" feelings; but when
the complete awakening comes and the "visions of romance are over,"
Catherine realizes that real life is not fruitful of such horrors as
are depicted in her favorite novels.
_Pride and Prejudice_ is usually considered Jane Austen's best work,
although _Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park_, and
_Persuasion_ have their ardent admirers. In fact, there is an
increasing number of discriminating readers who enjoy almost
everything that she wrote. During the last five years of the
eighteenth century, she produced some of her best novels, although
they were not published until the period between 1811 and 1818.
The scenes of her stories are laid for the most part in small
Hampshire villages, with which she was thoroughly familiar, the
characters being taken from the middle class and the gentry with whom
she was thrown. Simple domestic episodes and ordinary people, living
somewhat monotonous and narrow lives, satisfy her. She exhibits
wonderful skill in fashioning these into slight but entertaining
narratives. In _Pride and Prejudice_, for example, she creates some
refreshing situations by opposing Philip Darcy's pride to Elizabeth
Bennet's prejudice. She manages the long-delayed reconciliation
between these two lovers with a tact that shows true genius and a
knowledge of the human heart.
[Illustration: JANE AUSTEN'S DESK.]
A strong feature of Jane Austen's novels is her subtle, careful manner
of drawing character. She perceives with an intuitive refinement the
delicate shadings of emotion, and describes them with the utmost care
and detail. Her heroines are especially fine, each one having an
interesting individuality, thoroughly natural and womanly. The minor
characters in Miss Austen's works are usually quaint and original. She
sees the oddities and foibles of people with the insight of the true
humorist, and paints them with most dexterous cunning.
William D. Howells, the chief American realist of the nineteenth
century, wrote in 1891 of her and her novels:--
"She was great and they were beautiful because she and they were
honest and dealt with nature nearly a hundred years ago as realism
deals with it to-day. Realism is nothing more and nothing less than
the truthful treatment of material."
She was, indeed, a great realist, and it seems strange that she and
Scott, the great romanticist, should have been contemporaries. Scott
was both broad and big-hearted enough to sum up her chief
characteristics as follows:--
"That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of
feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most
wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do myself,
like any one going; but the exquisite touch which renders
commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the
description and the sentiment is denied to me."
She died in 1817 at the age of forty-one and was buried in Winchester
Cathedral, fourteen miles from her birthplace. The merit of her work
was apparent to only a very few at the time of her death. Later years
have slowly brought a just recognition of the important position that
she holds in the history of the realistic novel of daily life. Of
still greater significance to the majority is the fact that the subtle
charm of her stories continues to win for her an enlarged circle of
readers.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1770-1850
[Illustration: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. _After the portrait by B.R.
Haydon_.]
Early Life and Training.--William Wordsworth was born in
Cockermouth, Cumberland, in 1770. He went to school in his ninth year
at Hawkshead, a village on the banks of Esthwaite Water, in the heart
of the Lake Country. The traveler who takes the pleasant journey on
foot or coach from Windermere to Coniston, passes through Hawkshead,
where he may see Wordsworth's name cut in a desk of the school which
he attended. Of greater interest is the scenery which contributed so
much to his education and aided his development into England's
greatest nature poet.
We learn from his autobiographical poem, _The Prelude_, what
experiences molded him in boyhood. He says that the--
"...common face of Nature spake to me
Rememberable things."
In this poem he relates how he absorbed into his inmost being the
orange sky of evening, the curling mist, the last autumnal crocus, the
"souls of lonely places," and the huge peak, which terrified him at
nightfall by seeming to stride after him and which awoke in him a--
"...dim and undermined sense
Of unknown modes of being."
[Illustration: BOY OF WINANDER. _From mural painting by H.O. Walker,
Congressional Library, Washington, D.C._]
In his famous lines on the "Boy of Winander," Wordsworth tells how--
"...the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake."
At the age of seventeen he entered Cambridge University, from which he
was graduated after a four years' course. He speaks of himself there
as a dreamer passing through a dream. There came to him the strange
feeling that he "was not for that hour nor for that place;" and yet he
says that he was not unmoved by his daily association with the haunts
of his illustrious predecessors, or of--
"Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace,"
and of Milton whose soul seemed to Wordsworth "like a star."
Influence of the French Revolution.--His travels on the continent in
his last vacation and after his graduation brought him in contact with
the French Revolution, of which he felt the inspiring influence. He
was fond of children, and the sight of a poor little French peasant
girl seems to have been one of the main causes leading him to become
an ardent revolutionist. _The Prelude_ tells in concrete fullness how
he walked along the banks of the Loire with his friend, a French
patriot:--
"...And when we chanced
One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl,
Who crept along fitting her languid gait
Unto a heifer's motion, by a cord
Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane
Its sustenance, while the girl with pallid hands
Was busy knitting in a heartless mood
Of solitude, and at the sight my friend
In agitation said, ''Tis against _that_
That we are fighting.'"
Just as Wordsworth was prepared to throw himself personally into the
conflict, his relatives recalled him to England. When the Revolution
passed into a period of anarchy and bloodshed, his dejection was
intense. As he slowly recovered from his disappointment, he became
more and more conservative in politics and less in sympathy with
violent agitation; but he never ceased to utter a hopeful though calm
and tempered note for genuine liberty.
Maturity and Declining Years.--Although Wordsworth was early left an
orphan, he never seemed to lack intelligent care and sympathy. His
sister Dorothy, a rare soul, helped to fashion him into a poet. Their
favorite pastime was walking and observing nature. De Quincey
estimates that Wordsworth, during the course of his life, mast have
walked as many as 175,000 miles. He acted on his belief that--
"All things that love the sun are out of doors,"
and he composed his best poetry during his walks, dictating it after
his return.
He must have had the capacity of impressing himself favorably on his
associates or he might never have had the leisure to write poetry.
When he was twenty-five, a friend left him a legacy of £900 to enable
him to follow his chosen calling of poet. Seven years later, friends
saw that he was appointed distributor of stamps for Westmoreland, at
the annual salary of £400. Years afterward, a friend gave him a
regular allowance to be spent in traveling.
The summer of 1797 saw him and Dorothy begin a golden year at Alfoxden
in Somersetshire, in close association with Coleridge. The result of
this companionship was _Lyrical Ballads_, an epoch-making volume of
romantic verse, containing such gems as Wordsworth's _Lines composed a
Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Lines written in Early Spring, We Are
Seven_, and Coleridge's _The Ancient Mariner_. "All good poetry,"
wrote Wordsworth in the _Preface_ to the second edition of this
volume, "is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." This is
the opposite of the belief of the classical school.
In 1797, after a trip to Germany, he and Dorothy settled at Dove
Cottage, Grasmere, in the Lake Country. She remained a member of the
household after he married his cousin, Mary Hutchinson, in 1802. The
history of English authors shows no more ideal companionship than that
of these three kindred souls. Dove Cottage where he wrote the best of
his poetry, remains almost unchanged. It is one of the most
interesting literary homes in England.
[Illustration: DOVE COTTAGE.]
In 1813 he moved a short distance away, to Rydal Mount, where he lived
the remainder of his life. In 1843 he was chosen poet laureate. He
died in 1850 and was buried in Grasmere Churchyard.
A Poet of Nature.--Wordsworth is one of the world's most loving and
thoughtful lyrical poets of Nature. For him she possessed a soul, a
conscious existence, an ability to feel joy and love. In _Lines
written in Early Spring_, he expresses this belief:--
"And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes."
All things seem to him to feel pure joy in existence:--
"The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare."
It was also his poetic creed that Nature could bring to human hearts a
message of solace and companionship. His poem, _Lines composed a Short
Distance above Tintern Abbey_, is a remarkable exposition of this
faith.
He would have scorned to be considered merely a descriptive poet of
nature. He satirizes those who could do nothing more than correctly
apply the color "yellow" to the primrose:--
"A primrose by a river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him
And it was nothing more."
He interprets the sympathetic soul of Nature, not merely her outward
or her intellectual aspect. He says in _The Prelude_:--
"From Nature and her overflowing soul
I had received so much, that all my thoughts
Were steeped in feeling."
If we compare Wordsworth's line--
"This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,"[14]
with Tennyson's line from _The Princess_--
"A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight,"
we may easily decide which shows more feeling and which, more art.
Many poets have produced beautiful paintings of the external features
of nature. With rare genius, Wordsworth looked beyond the color of the
flower, the outline of the hills, the beauty of the clouds, to the
spirit that breathed through them, and he communed with "Nature's
self, which is the breath of God." He introduced lovers of his poetry
to a new world of nature, a new source of companionship and solace, a
new idea of a Being in cloud and air and "the green leaves among the
groves."
Poetry of Man: Narrative Poems.--Wordsworth is a poet of man as well
as of nature. The love for nature came to him first; but out of it
grew his regard for the people who lived near to nature. His poetry of
man is found more in his longer narrative poems, although in them as
well as in his shorter pieces, he shows the action of nature on man.
In _The Prelude_, the most remarkable autobiographical poem in
English, not only reveals the power in nature to develop man, but he
also tells how the French revolution made him feel the worth of each
individual soul and a sense of the equality of all humanity at the bar
of character and conscience. As his lyrics show the sympathetic soul
of nature, so his narrative poems illustrate the second dominant
characteristic of the age, the strong sense of the worth of the
humblest man.
[Illustration: GRASMERE LAKE.]
_Michael_, one of the very greatest of his productions, displays a
tender and living sympathy with the humble shepherd. The simple
dignity of Michael's character, his frugal and honorable life, his
affection for his son, for his sheep, and for his forefather's old
home, appealed to the heart of the poet. He loved his subject and
wrote the poem with that indescribable simplicity which makes the
tale, the verse, and the tone of thought and feeling form together one
perfect and indissoluble whole. _The Leech-Gatherer_ and the story of
"Margaret" in _The Excursion_ also deal with lowly characters and
exhibit Wordsworth's power of pathos and simple earnestness. He could
not present complex personalities; but these characters, which
belonged to the landscapes of the Lake District and partook of its
calm and its simplicity, he drew with a sure hand.
His longest narrative poem is _The Excursion_ (1814), which is in nine
books. It contains fine passages of verse and some of his sanest and
maturest philosophy; but the work is not the masterpiece that he hoped
to make. It is tedious, prosy, and without action of any kind. The
style, which is for the most part heavy, becomes pure and easy only in
some description of a mountain peak or in the recital of a tale, like
that of "Margaret."
An Interpreter of Child Life.--Perhaps the French Revolution and the
unforgettable incident of the pitiable peasant child were not without
influence in causing him to become a great poetic interpreter of
childhood. No poem has surpassed his _Alice Fell, or Poverty_ in
presenting the psychology of childish grief, or his _We Are Seven_ in
voicing the faith of--
"...A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,"
or the loneliness of "the solitary child" in _Lucy Gray_:--
"The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door."
In the poem, _Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower_, Nature seems to
have chosen Wordsworth as her spokesman to describe the part that she
would play in educating a child. Nature says:--
"This child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.
* * * * *
...She shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."
One of the finest similes in all the poetry of nature may be found in
the stanza which likens the charms of a little girl to those of:--
"A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky."
Finally, in his _Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood_, he glorifies universal childhood, that "eye among
the blind," capable of seeing this common earth--
"Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream."
General Characteristics.--Four of Wordsworth's characteristics go
hand in hand,--sincerity, feeling, depth of thought, and simplicity of
style. The union of these four qualities causes his great poems to
continue to yield pleasure after an indefinite number of readings. In
his garden of poetry, the daffodil blossoms all the year for the
"inward eye," and the "wandering voice of the cuckoo" never ceases to
awaken springtime in the heart.
His own age greeted with so much ridicule the excessive simplicity of
the presentation of ordinary childish grief in _Alice Fell_, that he
excluded it from many editions of his poems. We now recognize the
special charm of his simplicity in expressing those feelings and
thoughts that "do often lie too deep for tears."
Wordsworth was most truly great when he seemed to write as naturally
as he breathed, when he appeared unconscious of the power that he
wielded. When he attempted to command it at will, he failed, as in the
dull, lifeless lines of _The Excursion_. Sometimes even his labored
simplicity is no better than prose; but such simple and natural poems
as _Michael, The Solitary Reaper, To My Sister, Three Years She Grew
in Sun and Shower_, and the majority of the poems showing the new
attitude toward childhood, are priceless treasures of English
literature. Of most of these, we may say with Matthew Arnold, "It
might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but
wrote his poem for him."
[Illustration: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. _From a life sketch in Fraser's
Magazine_.]
Wordsworth lacks humor and his compass is limited; but within that
compass he is surpassed by no poet since Milton. On the other hand, no
great poet ever wrote more that is almost worthless. Matthew Arnold
did much for Wordsworth's renown by collecting his priceless poems and
publishing them apart from the mediocre work. Among the fine
productions, his sonnets occupy a high place. Only Shakespeare and
Milton in our language excel him in this form of verse.
Wordsworth is greatest as a poet of nature. To him nature seemed to
possess a conscious soul, which expressed itself in the primrose, the
rippling lake, or the cuckoo's song, with as much intelligence as
human lips ever displayed in whispering a secret to the ear of love.
This interpretation of nature gives him a unique position among
English poets. Neither Shakespeare nor Milton had any such general
conception of nature.
[Illustration: RYDAL MOUNT NEAR AMBLESIDE, THE HOME OF WORDSWORTH'S
OLD AGE.]
The bereaved, the downcast, and those in need of companionship turn
naturally to Wordsworth. He said that it was his aim "to console the
afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight." His critics often say that he
does not recognize the indifference, even the cruelty of nature; but
that he chooses, instead, to present the world as a manifestation of
love and care for all creatures. When he was shown where a cruel
huntsman and his dogs had chased a poor hart to its death, Wordsworth
wrote:--
"This beast not unobserved by nature fell;
His death was mourned by sympathy divine.
"The Being that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves."[15]
Whatever view we take of the indifference of nature or of the
suffering in existence, it is necessary for us, in order to live
hopeful and kindly lives, to feel with Wordsworth that the great
powers of the universe are not devoid of sympathy, and that they
encourage in us the development of "a spirit of love" for all earth's
creatures. It was Wordsworth's deepest conviction that any one alive
to the presence of nature's conscious spiritual force, that "rolls
through all things"--
"Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain."
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1722-1834
[Illustration: SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. _From a pencil sketch by
C.R. Leslie_.]
Life.--The troubled career of Coleridge is in striking contrast to
the peaceful life of Wordsworth. Coleridge, the thirteenth child of a
clergyman, was born in 1772 at Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire. Early in
his life, the future poet became a confirmed dreamer, refusing to
participate in the play common to boys of his age. Before he was five
years old, he had read the _Arabian Nights_. Only a few years later,
the boy's appetite for books became so voracious that he devoured an
average of two volumes a day.
One evening, when he was about nine years old, he had a violent
quarrel with his brother and ran away, sleeping out of doors all
night. A cold October rain fell; but he was not found until morning,
when he was carried home more dead than alive. "I was certainly
injured;" he says of this adventure, "for I was weakly and subject to
ague for many years after." Facts like these help to explain why
physical pain finally led him to use opium.
After his father's death, young Coleridge became, at the age of ten, a
pupil in Christ's Hospital, London, where he remained eight years.
During the first half of his stay here, his health was still further
injured by continuing as he was in earlier childhood, "a playless
daydreamer," and by a habit of almost constant reading. He says that
the food "was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends to
supply them." He writes:--
"Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a continual
low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of
present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read,
read, read--fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a
mountain of plumcake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating
it into the shapes of tables and chairs--hunger and fancy!"
A few months after leaving Christ's Hospital, Coleridge went to
Cambridge, but he did not remain to graduate. From this time he seldom
completed anything that he undertook. It was characteristic of him,
stimulated by the spirit of the French Revolution, to dream of
founding with Southey a Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna.
In this ideal village across the sea, the dreamers were to work only
two hours a day and were to have all goods in common. The demand for
poetry was at this time sufficiently great for a bookseller to offer
Coleridge, although he was as yet comparatively unknown, thirty
guineas for a volume of poems and a guinea and a half for each hundred
lines after finishing that volume. With such wealth in view, Coleridge
married a Miss Fricker of Bristol, because no single people could join
the new ideal commonwealth. Southey married her sister; but the young
enthusiasts were forced to abandon their project because they did not
have sufficient money to procure passage across the ocean.
The tendency to dream, however, never forsook Coleridge. One of his
favorite poems begins with this line:--
"My eyes make pictures when they are shut."[16]
He recognized his disinclination to remain long at work on prearranged
lines, when he said, "I think that my soul must have preëxisted in the
body of a chamois chaser."
In 1797-1798 Coleridge lived with his young wife at Nether-Stowey in
Somerset. Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to a house in the
neighborhood in order to be near Coleridge. The two young men and
Dorothy Wordsworth seemed to be exactly fitted to stimulate one
another. Together they roamed over the Quantock Hills, gazed upon the
sea, and planned _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_, which is one of
the few things that Coleridge ever finished. In little more than a
year he wrote nearly all the the poetry that has made him famous.
Had he, like Keats, died when he was twenty-five, the world would
probably be wondering what heights of poetic fame Coleridge might have
reached; but he became addicted to the use of opium and passed a
wretched existence of thirty-six years longer, partly in the Lake
District, but chiefly in a suburb of London, without adding to his
poetic fame. During his later years he did hack work for papers, gave
occasional lectures, wrote critical and philosophical prose, and
became a talker almost as noted as Dr. Johnson. It is only just to
Coleridge to recognize the fact that even if he had never written a
line of poetry, his prose would entitle him to be ranked among
England's greatest critics.
[Illustration: COLERIDGE'S COTTAGE AT NETHER-STOWEY.]
Coleridge's wide reading, continued from boyhood, made his
contemporaries feel that he had the best intellectual equipment of any
man in England since Francis Bacon's time. Once Coleridge, having
forgotten the subject of his lecture, was startled by the announcement
that he would speak on a difficult topic, entirely different from the
one he had in mind; but he was equal to the emergency and delivered an
unusually good address.
Young men used to flock to him in his old age to draw on his copious
stores of knowledge and especially to hear him talk about German
philosophy. Carlyle visited him for this purpose and speaks of the
"glorious, balmy, sunny islets, islets of the blest and the
intelligible," which occasionally emerged from the mist of German
metaphysics. He spent the last eighteen years of his life in Highgate
with his kind friend, Dr. Gillman, who succeeded in regulating and
decreasing the amount of opium which Coleridge took. He died there in
1834 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Westminster Abbey does not
have the honor of the grave of a single one of the great poets of this
romantic age.
Poetry.--_The Ancient Mariner_ (1798) is Coleridge's poetical
masterpiece. It is also one of the world's masterpieces. The
supernatural sphere into which it introduces the reader is a
remarkable creation, with its curse, its polar spirit, the phantom
ship, the seraph band, and the magic breeze. The mechanism of the poem
is a triumph of romantic genius. The meter, the rhythm, and the music
have well-nigh magical effect. Almost every stanza shows not only
exquisite harmony, but also the easy mastery of genius in dealing with
those weird scenes which romanticists love.
The moral interest of the poem is not inferior to its other charms.
The Mariner killed the innocent Albatross, and we listen to the same
kind of lesson as Wordsworth teaches in his _Hart-Leap Well_:--
"The spirit who bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shat him with his bow.'"
The noble conclusion of the poem has for more than a hundred years
continued to influence human conduct:--
"He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."
His next greatest poem is the unfinished _Christabel_ (1816). A lovely
maiden falls under the enchantments of a mysterious Lady Geraldine;
but the fragment closes while this malevolent influence continues. We
miss the interest of a finished story, which draws so many readers to
_The Ancient Mariner_, although _Christabel_ is thickly sown with
gems. Lines like these are filled with the airiness of nature:--
"There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky."
In all literature there has been no finer passage written on the
wounds caused by broken friendship than the lines in _Christabel_
relating to the estrangement of Roland and Sir Leoline. After reading
this poem and _Kubla Khan_, an unfinished dream fragment of fifty-four
lines, we feel that the closing lines of _Kubla Khan_ are peculiarly
applicable to Coleridge:--
"For he on honey dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise."
Swinburne says of _Christabel_ and _Kubla Khan_: "When it has been
said that such melodies were never heard, such dreams never dreamed,
such speech never spoken, the chief things remain unsaid, unspeakable.
There is a charm upon these poems which can only be felt in silent
submission and wonder."
General Characteristics of his Poetry.--Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge
is not the poet of the earth and the common things of life. He is the
poet of air, of the regions beyond the earth, and of dreams. By no
poet has the supernatural been invested with more charm.
He has rare feeling for the beautiful, whether in the world of morals;
of nature, or of the harmonies of sound. The motherless Christabel in
her time of danger dreams a beautiful truth of this divinely governed
world:--
"But this she knows, in joys and woes,
That saints will aid if men will call:
For the blue sky bends over all."
His references to nature are less remarkable for description or
photographic details than for suggestiveness and diffused charm, such
as we find in these lines:--
"...the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune."
Wordsworth wrote few poems simpler than _The Ancient Mariner_. A
stanza like this seems almost as simple as breathing:--
"The moving moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide;
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside."
Prose.--Coleridge's prose, which is almost all critical or
philosophical, left its influence on the thought of the nineteenth
century. When he was a young man, he went to Germany and studied
philosophy with a continued vigor unusual for him. He became an
idealist and used the idealistic teachings of the German
metaphysicians to combat the utilitarian and sense-bound philosophy of
Bentham, Malthus, and Mill. We pass by Coleridge's _Aids to
Reflection_ (1825), the weightiest of his metaphysical productions, to
consider those works which possess a more vital interest for the
student of literature.
[Illustration: COLERIDGE AS A YOUNG MAN. _From a sketch made in
Germany_.]
His _Lectures on Shakespeare_, delivered in 1811, contained
epoch-making Shakespearean criticism. We are told that every
drawing-room in London discussed them. His greatest work on criticism
is entitled _Biographia Literaria_ (2 Vols., 1817). There are parts of
it which no careful student of the development of modern criticism can
afford to leave unread. The central point of this work is the
exposition of his theory of the romantic school of poetry. He thus
gives his own aim and that of Wordsworth in the composition of the
volume of poems, known as _Lyrical Ballads_:--
"...it was agreed that my endeavors should be directed to persons
and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to
transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of
truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that
willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes
poetic faith.
Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his
object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to
excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the
mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to
the loveliness and wonders of the world before us."[17]
Coleridge does not hold Wordsworth's belief that the language of
common speech and of poetry should be identical. He shows that
Wordsworth does better than follow his own theories. Yet, when he
considers both the excellencies and the defects of Wordsworth's verse,
Coleridge's verdict of praise is substantially that of the twentieth
century. This is an unusual triumph for a contemporary critic, sitting
in judgment on an author of an entirely new school and rendering a
decision in opposition to that of the majority, who, he says, "have
made it a business to attack and ridicule Mr. Wordsworth... His _fame_
belongs to another age and can neither be accelerated nor
retarded."[18]
GEORGE NOEL GORDON, LORD BYRON, 1788-1824
[Illustration: GEORGE NOEL GORDON, LORD BYRON. _From a portrait by
Kramer_.]
Life.--Byron was born in London in 1788. His father was a reckless,
dissipated spendthrift, who deserted his wife and child. Mrs. Byron
convulsively clasped her son to her one moment and threw the scissors
and tongs at him the next, calling him "the lame brat," in reference
to his club foot. Such treatment drew neither respect nor obedience
from Byron, who inherited the proud, defiant spirit of his race. His
accession to the peerage in 1798 did not tend to tame his haughty
nature, and he grew up passionately imperious and combative.
Being ambitious, he made excellent progress in his studies at Harrow,
but when he entered Cambridge he devoted much of his time to shooting,
swimming, and other sports, for which he was always famous. In 1809 he
started on a two years' trip through Spain, Greece, and the far East.
Upon his return, he published two cantos of _Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage_, which describe his journey.
This poem made him immediately popular. London society neglected its
old favorite, Scott, and eagerly sought out the handsome young peer
who had burst suddenly upon it. Poem after poem was produced by this
lion of society, and each one was received with enthusiasm and
delight. Probably no other English poet knew such instant widespread
fame as Byron.
Suddenly and unexpectedly this adulation turned to hatred. In 1815
Byron married Miss Milbanke, an heiress, but she left him a year
later. Although no reason for the separation was given, the public
fastened all the blame upon Byron. The feeling against him grew so
strong that he was warned by his friends to prepare for open violence,
and finally, in 1816, he left England forever.
His remaining eight years were spent mostly in Italy. Here, his great
beauty, his exile, his poetry, and his passionate love of liberty made
him a prominent figure throughout Europe. Notwithstanding this fame,
life was a disappointment to Byron. Baffled but rebellious, he openly
defied the conventions of his country; and seemed to enjoy the shock
it gave to his countrymen.
[Illustration: BYRON AT SEVENTEEN. _From a painting_.]
The closing year of his life shone brightest of all. His main
activities had hitherto been directed to the selfish pursuit of his
own pleasure; and he had failed to obtain happiness. But in 1823 Byron
went to Greece to aid the Greeks, who were battling with Turkey for
their independence. Into this struggle for freedom, he poured his
whole energies, displaying "a wonderful aptitude for managing the
complicated intrigues and plans and selfishnesses which lay in the
way." His efforts cost him his life. He contracted fever, and, after
restlessly battling with the disease, said quietly, one April morning
in 1824, "Now I shall go to sleep." His relatives asked in vain for
permission to inter him in Westminster Abbey. He was buried in the
family vault at Hucknall, Notthinghamshire, not far from Newstead
Abbey.
[Illustration: NEWSTEAD ABBEY, BYRON'S HOME.]
Early Works.--The poems that Byron wrote during his brilliant
sojourn in London, amid the whirl of social gayeties, are _The Giaour,
The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Parisina, Lara_, and _The Siege of
Corinth_. These narrative poems are romantic tales of oriental passion
and coloring, which show the influence of Scott. They are told with a
dash and a fine-sounding rhetoric well fitted to attract immediate
attention; but they lack the qualities of sincere feeling, lofty
thought, and subtle beauty, which give lasting fame.
His next publication, _The Prisoner of Chillon_ (1816), is a much
worthier poem. The pathetic story is feelingly told in language that
often displays remarkable energy and mastery of expression and
versification. His picture of the oppressive vacancy which the
Prisoner felt is a well-executed piece of very difficult word
painting:--
"There were no stars, no earth, no time,
No check, no change, no good, no crime--
But silence, and a stirless breath
Which neither was of life nor death;
A sea of stagnant idleness,
Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless!"
[Illustration: CASTLE OF CHILLON.]
Dramas.--Byron wrote a number of dramas, the best of which are
_Manfred_ (1817) and _Cain_ (1821). His spirit of defiance and his
insatiable thirst for power are the subjects of these dramas. Manfred
is a man of guilt who is at war with humanity, and who seeks refuge on
the mountain tops and by the wild cataract. He is fearless and untamed
in all his misery, and even in the hour of death does not quail before
the spirits of darkness, but defies them with the cry:--
"Back to thy hell!
Thou hast no power upon me, _that_ I feel!
Thou never shall possess me, _that_ I know;
What I have done is done; I bear within
A torture which could nothing gain from thine;
* * * * *
Back, ye baffled fiends!
The hand of death is on me--but not yours!"
Cain, while suffering remorse for the slaying of Abel, is borne by
Lucifer through the boundless fields of the universe. Cain yet dares
to question the wisdom of the Almighty in bringing evil, sin, and
remorse into the world. A critic has remarked that "Milton wrote his
great poem to justify the ways of God to man; Byron's object seems to
be to justify the ways of man to God."
The very soul of stormy revolt breathes through both _Manfred_ and
_Cain_, but _Cain_ has more interest as a pure drama. It contains some
sweet passages and presents one lovely woman,--Adah. But Byron could
not interpret character wholly at variance with his own. He possessed
but little constructive skill, and he never overcame the difficulties
of blank verse. A drama that does not show wide sympathy with varied
types of humanity and the constructive capacity to present the
complexities of life is lacking in essential elements of greatness.
Childe Harold, The Vision of Judgment, and Don Juan.--His best works
are the later poems, which require only a slight framework or plot,
such as _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, The Vision of Judgement,_ and
_Don Juan_.
The third and fourth cantos of _Childe Harold_, published in 1816 and
1818, respectively, are far superior to the first two. These later
cantos continue the travels of Harold, and contain some of Byron's
most splendid descriptions of nature, cities, and works of art. Rome,
Venice, the Rhine, the Alps, and the sea inspired the finest lines. He
wrote of Venice as she--
"...Sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!
* * * * *
She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance."
He calls Rome--
"The Niobe of nations! there she stands.
Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe;
An empty urn within her wither'd hands,
Whose holy dust was scattered long ago."
The following description, from Canto III, of a wild stormy night in
the mountains is very characteristic of his nature poetry and of his
own individuality:--
"And this is in the night:--Most Glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight--
A portion of the tempest and of thee!
How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,
And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!
And now again 'tis black,--and now, the glee
of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth
As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth"
When George III. died, Southey wrote a poem filled with absurd
flattery of that monarch. Byron had such intense hatred for the
hypocrisy of society that he wrote his _Vision of Judgment_ (1822) to
parody Southey's poem and to make the author the object of satire.
Pungent wit, vituperation, and irony were here handled by Byron in a
brilliant manner, which had not been equaled since the days of Dryden
and Pope. The parodies of most poems are quickly forgotten, but we
have here the strange case of Byron's parody keeping alive Southey's
original.
_Don Juan_ (1819-1824), a long poem in sixteen cantos, is Byron's
greatest work. It is partly autobiographic. The sinister, gloomy Don
Juan is an ideal picture of the author, who was sore and bitter over
his thwarted hopes of liberty and happiness. Therefore, instead of
strengthening humanity with hope for the future, this poem tears hope
from the horizon, and suggests the possible anarchy and destruction
toward which the world's hypocrisy, cant, tyranny, and universal
stupidity are tending.
The poem is unfinished. Byron followed Don Juan through all the phases
of life known to himself. The hero has exciting adventures and
passionate loves, he is favored at courts, he is driven to the lowest
depths of society, he experiences a godlike happiness and a demoniacal
despair.
_Don Juan_ is a scathing satire upon society. All its fondest
idols,--love, faith, and hope,--are dragged in the mire. There is
something almost grand in the way that this Titanic scoffer draws
pictures of love only to mock at them, sings patriotic songs only to
add--
"Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung
The modern Greek in tolerable verse,"
and mentions Homer, Milton, and Shakespeare only to show how
accidental and worthless is fame.
Amid the splendid confusion of pathos, irony, passion, mockery, keen
wit, and brilliant epigram, which display Byron's versatile and
spontaneous genius at its height, there are some beautiful and
powerful passages. There is an ideal picture of the love of Don Juan
and Haidee:--
"Each was the other's mirror, and but read
Joy sparkling in their dark eyes like a gem."
"...they could not be
Meant to grow old, but die in happy spring,
Before one charm or hope had taken wing."
As she lightly slept--
"...her face so fair
Stirr'd with her dream, as rose-leaves with the air;
Or as the stirring of a deep clear stream
Within an Alpine hollow, when the wind
Walks o'er it."
General Characteristics.--The poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge
shows the revolutionary reaction against classicism in literature and
tyranny in government; but their verse raises no cry of revolt against
the proprieties and moral restrictions of the time. Byron was so
saturated with the revolutionary spirit that he rebelled against these
also; and for this reason England would not allow him to be buried in
Westminster Abbey.
As Byron frequently wrote in the white heat of passionate revolt, his
verse shows the effects of lack of restraint. Unfortunately he did not
afterwards take the trouble to improve his subject matter, or the mold
in which it was cast. Swinburne says, "His verse stumbles and jingles,
stammers and halts, where is most need for a swift and even pace of
musical sound."
[Illustration: BYRON'S HOME AT PISA.]
The great power of Byron's poetry consists in its wealth of
expression, its vigor, its rush and volume of sound, its variety, and
its passion. Lines like the following show the vigorous flow of the
verse, the love for lonely scenery, and a wealth of figurative
expression:--
"Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains,
They crowned him long ago
On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds
With a diadem of snow."[19]
Scattered through his works we find rare gems, such as the following--
"...when
Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage bell."[20]
We may also frequently note the working of an acute intellect, as, for
instance, in the lines in which he calls his own gloomy type of mind--
"...the telescope of truth,
Which strips the distance of its phantasies,
And brings life near in utter nakedness,
Making the cold reality too real!"[21]
The answers to two questions which are frequently asked, will throw
more light on Byron's characteristics:--
I. Why has his poetic fame in England decreased so much from the
estimate of his contemporaries, by whom he seemed worthy of a place
beside Goethe? The answer is to be sought in the fact that Byron
reflected so powerfully the mood of that special time. That
reactionary period in history has passed and with it much of Byron's
influence and fame. He was, unlike Shakespeare, specially fitted to
minister to a certain age. Again, much of Byron's verse is rhetorical,
and that kind of poetry does not wear well. On the other hand, we
might reread Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, Milton's _Lycidas_, and
Wordsworth's _Intimations of Immortality_ every month for a lifetime,
and discover some new beauty and truth at every reading.
II. Why does the continent of Europe class Byron among the very
greatest English poets, next even to Shakespeare? It is because Europe
was yearning for more liberty, and Byron's words and blows for freedom
aroused her at an opportune moment. Historians of continental
literature find his powerful impress on the thought of that time.
Georg Brandes, a noted European critic, says:--
"In the intellectual life of Russia and Poland, of Spain and Italy,
of France and Germany, the seeds which he had sown, fructified...
The Slavonic nations ...seized on his poetry with avidity... The
Spanish and Italian exile poets took his war cry... Heine's best
poetry is a continuation of Byron's work. French Romanticism and
German Liberalism are both direct descendants of Byron's
Naturalism."
Swinburne gives as another reason for Byron's European popularity the
fact that he actually gains by translation into a foreign tongue. His
faulty meters and careless expressions are improved, while his
vigorous way of stating things and his rolling rhetoric are easily
comprehended. On the other hand, the delicate shades of thought in
Shakespeare's _Hamlet_ cannot be translated into some European tongues
without distinct loss.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 1792-1822
[Illustration: PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. _From the portrait by Amelia
Curran, National Portrait Gallery_.]
Life.--Another fiery spirit of the Revolution was Shelley, born in
1792, in a home of wealth, at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex. He
was one of the most ardent, independent, and reckless English poets
inspired by the French Revolution. He was a man who could face infamy
and defy the conventionalities of the world, and, at the same moment,
extend a helpful hand of sympathy to a friend or sit for sixty hours
beside the sick bed of his dying child. Tender, pitying, fearless,
full of a desire to reform the world, and of hatred for any form of
tyranny, Shelley failed to adjust himself to the customs and laws of
his actual surroundings. He was calumniated and despised by the public
at large, and almost idolized by his intimate friends.
At Eton he denounced the tyranny of the larger boys. At Oxford he
decried the tyranny of the church over freedom of thought, and was
promptly expelled for his pamphlet, _The Necessity of Atheism_. This
act so increased his hatred for despotic authority that he almost
immediately married Harriet Westbrook, a beautiful school girl of
sixteen, to relieve her from the tyranny of her father who wanted her
to return to school. Shelley was then only nineteen and very
changeable. He would make such a sudden departure from a place where
he had vowed "to live forever," that specially invited guests
sometimes came to find him gone. He soon fell in love with Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin, the brilliant woman who later wrote the weird
romance _Frankenstein_, and he married her after Harriet Shelley had
drowned herself. These acts alienated his family and forced him to
forfeit his right to Field Place.
[Illustration: SHELLEY'S BIRTHPLACE, FIELD PLACE.]
His repeatedly avowed ideas upon religion, government, and marriage
brought him into conflict with public opinion. Unpopular at home, he
left England in 1818, never to return. Like Byron, he was practically
an exile.
The remaining four years of Shelley's life were passed in comparative
tranquillity in the "Paradise of exiles," as he called Italy. He lived
chiefly at Pisa, the last eighteen months of his life. Byron rented
the famous Lanfranchi Palace in Pisa and became Shelley's neighbor,
often entertaining him and a group of English friends, among whom were
Edward Trelawny, the Boswell of Shelley's last days, and Leigh Hunt,
biographer and essayist.
On July 7, 1822, Shelley said: "If I die to-morrow, I have lived to be
older than my father. I am ninety years of age." The young poet was
right in claiming that it is not length of years that measures life.
He had lived longer than most people who reach ninety. The next day he
started in company with two others to sail across the Bay of Spezzia
to his summer home. Friends watching from the shore saw a sudden
tempest strike his boat. When the cloud passed, the craft could not be
seen. Not many months before, he had written the last stanza of
_Adonais_:--
"...my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."
Shelley's body was washed ashore, July 18, and it was burned near the
spot, in accordance with Italian law; but the ashes and the unconsumed
heart were interred in the beautiful Protestant cemetery at Rome, not
far from where Keats was buried the previous year.
Few poets have been loved more than Shelley. Twentieth century
visitors to his grave often find it covered with fresh flowers. The
direction which he wrote for finding the tomb of Keats is more
applicable to Shelly's own resting place:--
"Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access,
Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread."[22]
Works.--_Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude_ (1816) is a magnificent
expression of Shelley's own restless, tameless spirit, wandering among
the grand solitudes of nature in search of the ineffably lovely dream
maiden, who was his ideal of beauty. He travels through primeval
forests, stands upon dizzy abysses, plies through roaring whirlpools,
all of which are symbolic of the soul's wayfaring, until at last,--
"When on the threshold
of the green recess,"
his dying glance rests upon the setting moon and the sufferer finds
eternal peace. The general tone of this poem is painfully despairing,
but this is relieved by the grandeur of the natural scenes and by many
imaginative flights.
[Illustration: GRAVE OF SHELLEY, PROTESTANT CEMETERY, ROME.]
The year 1819 saw the publication of a work unique among Shelley's
productions, _The Cenci_. This is a drama based upon the tragic story
of Beatrice Cenci. The poem deals with human beings, human passions,
real acts, and the natural world, whereas Shelley usually preferred to
treat of metaphysical theories, personified abstractions, and the
world of fancy. This strong drama was the most popular of his works
during his lifetime.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF STANZA FROM "TO A SKYLARK".]
He returned to the ideal sphere again in one of his great poems, the
lyrical drama _Prometheus Unbound_ (1820). This poem is the apotheosis
of the French Revolution. Prometheus, the friend of mankind, lies
tortured and chained to the mountain side. As the hour redemption
approaches, his beloved Asia, the symbol of nature, arouses the soul
of Revolution, represented by Demogorgon. He rises, hurls down the
enemies of progress and freedom, releases Prometheus, and spreads
liberty and happiness through all the world. Then the Moon, the Earth,
and the Voices of the Air break forth into a magnificent chant of
praise. The most delicate fancies, the most gorgeous imagery, and the
most fiery, exultant emotions are combined in this poem with something
of the stateliness of its Greek prototype. The swelling cadences of
the blank verse and the tripping rhythm of the lyrics are the product
of a nature rich in rare and wonderful melodies.
_The Witch of Atlas_ (1820), _Epipsychidion_ (1821), _Adonais_ (1821),
and the exquisite lyrics, _The Cloud, To a Skylark_ and _Ode to the
West Wind_ are the most beautiful of the remaining works. The first
two mentioned are the most elusive of Shelley's poems. With scarcely
an echo in his soul of the shadows and discords of earth, the poet
paints, in these works, lands--
"...'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea,
Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity;"
where all is--
"Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise."[23]
_Adonais_ is a lament for the early death of Keats, and it stands
second in the language among elegiac poems, ranking next to Milton's
_Lycidas_. Shelley referred to _Adonais as "perhaps the least
imperfect of my compositions." His biographer, Edward Dowden, calls it
"the costliest monument ever erected to the memory of an English
singer," who
"...bought, with price of purest breath,
A grave among the eternal."
Mrs. Shelley put some of her most sacred mementos of the poet between
the leaves of _Adonais_, which spoke to her of his own immortality and
omnipresence:--
"Naught we know dies. Shall that alone which knows
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath
By sightless lightning?
* * * * *
He is a portion of the loveliness,
Which once he made more lovely."
Although some of Shelley's shorter poems are more popular, nothing
that he ever wrote surpasses _Adonais_ in completeness, poetic
thought, and perfection of artistic finish.
Treatment of Nature.--Shelley was not interested in things
themselves, but in their elusive, animating spirit. In the lyric poem,
_To Night_, he does not address himself to mere darkness, but to the
active, dream-weaving "Spirit of Night." The very spirit of the
autumnal wind seems to him to breathe on the leaves and turn them--
"Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes."[24]
In his spiritual conception of nature, he was profoundly affected by
Wordsworth; but he goes farther than the older poet in giving
expression to the strictly individual forms of nature. Wordsworth
pictures nature as a reflection of his own thoughts and feelings. In
_The Prelude_ he says:--
"To unorganic natures were transferred
My own enjoyments."
Shelley, on the other hand, is most satisfying and original when his
individual spirit forms in night, cloud, skylark, and wind are made to
sing, not as a reflection of his own mood, but as these spirit forces
might themselves be supposed to sing, if they could express their song
in human language without the aid of a poet. In the lyric, _The
Cloud_, it is the animating spirit of the Cloud itself that sings the
song:--
"I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
* * * * *
I sift the snow on the mountains below
And their great pines groan aghast."
He thus begins the song, _To a Skylark_--
"Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,"
and he likens the lark to "an unbodied joy."
He peoples the garden in his lyric, _The Sensitive Plant_, with
flowers that are definite, individual manifestations of "the Spirit of
Love felt everywhere," the same power on which Shelley
enthusiastically relied for the speedy transformation of the world.
"A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew."
The "tulip tall," "the Naiad-like lily," "the jessamine faint," "the
sweet tuberose," were all "ministering angels" to the "companionless
Sensitive Plant," and each tried to be a source of joy to all the
rest. No one who had not caught the new spirit of humanity could have
imagined that garden.
In the exquisite _Ode to the West Wind_, he calls to that "breath of
Autumn's being" to express its own mighty harmonies through him:--
"O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
* * * * *
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness."
We may fancy that the spirit forms of nature which appear in cloud and
night, in song of bird and western wind, are content to have found in
Shelley a lyre that responded to their touch in such entrancing notes.
General Characteristics.--Shelley's is the purest, the most hopeful,
and the noblest voice of the Revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge lost
their faith and became Tories, and Byron was a selfish, lawless
creature; but Shelley had the martyr spirit of sacrifice, and he
trusted to the end in the wild hopes of the revolutionary enthusiasts.
His _Queen Mab, Revolt of Islam, Ode to Liberty, Ode to Naples_, and,
above all, his _Prometheus Unbound_, are some of the works inspired by
a trust in the ideal democracy which was to be based on universal love
and the brotherhood of man. This faith gives a bounding elasticity and
buoyancy to Shelley's thought, but also tinges it with that disgust
for the old, that defiance of restraint, and that boyish disregard for
experience which mark a time of revolt.
The other subject that Shelley treats most frequently in his verse is
ideal beauty. He yearned all his life for some form beautiful enough
to satisfy the aspirations of his soul. _Alastor, Epipsychidion, The
Witch of Atlas_, and _Prometheus Unbound_, all breathe this insatiate
craving for that "Spirit of Beauty," that "awful Loveliness."
Many of his efforts to describe in verse this democracy and this ideal
beauty are impalpable and obscure. It is difficult to clothe such
shadowy abstractions in clear, simple form. He is occasionally vague
because his thoughts seem to have emerged only partially from the
cloud lands that gave them birth. At other times, his vagueness
resembles Plato's because it is inherent in the subject matter. Like
Byron, Shelley is sometimes careless in the construction and revision
of his verse. We shall, however, search in vain for these faults in
Shelley's greatest lyrics. He is one of the supreme lyrical geniuses
in the language. Of all the lyric poets of England, he is the greatest
master of an ethereal, evanescent, phantomlike beauty.
JOHN KEATS, 1795-1821
[Illustration: JOHN KEATS. _From the painting by Hilton, National
Portrait Gallery_.]
Life.--John Keats, the son of a keeper of a large livery stable, a
man "fine in common sense and native respectability," was born in
Moorfields, London, in 1795. He attended school at Enfield, where he
was a prize scholar. He took special pleasure in studying Grecian
mythology, the influence of which is so apparent in his poetry. While
at school, he also voluntarily wrote a translation of much of Vergil's
_AEneid_. It would seem as if he had also been attracted to
Shakespeare; for Keats is credited with expressing to a young playmate
the opinion that no one, if alone in the house, would dare read
_Macbeth_ at two in the morning.
When Keats was left an orphan in his fifteenth year, he was taken from
school and apprenticed to a surgeon at Edmonton, near London.
When seventeen, he walked some distance to borrow a copy of Spenser's
_Faerie Queene_. A friend says: "Keats ramped through the scenes of
the romance like a young horse turned into a spring meadow." His study
of Grecian mythology and Elizabethan poetry exerted a stronger
influence over him than his medical instructor. One day when Keats
should have been listening to a surgical lecture, "there came," he
says, "a sunbeam into the room and with it a whole troop of creatures
floating in the ray: and I was off with them to Oberon and fairy
land."
He made a moderately good surgeon; but finding that his heart was
constantly with "Oberon and the fairy land" of poesy, he gave up his
profession in 1817 and began to study hard, preparatory to a literary
career.
His short life was a brave struggle against disease, poverty, and
unfriendly criticism; but he accomplished more than any other English
author in the first twenty-five years of life. Success under such
conditions would have been impossible unless he had had "flint and
iron in him." He wrote:--
"I must think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a man. They make
his Prime Objects a Refuge as well as a Passion."
Late in 1818, after he had published his first volume of verse, he met
Fanny Brawne, a girl of eighteen, and soon fell desperately in love
with her. The next six months were the happiest and the most
productive period of his life. His health was then such that he could
take long walks with her. In the first spring after he had met her, he
wrote in less than three hours his wonderful _Ode to a Nightingale_,
while he was sitting in the garden of his home at Wentworth Place,
Hampstead, near London, listening to the song of the bird. Most of his
famous poems were written in the year after meeting her.
In February, 1820, his health began to decline so rapidly that he knew
that his days were numbered. His mother and one of his brothers had
died of consumption, and he had been for some time threatened with the
disease. He offered to release Miss Brawne from her engagement, but
she would not listen to the suggestion. She and her mother tried to
nurse him back to health. Few events in the history of English authors
are tinged with a deeper pathos than his engagement to Miss Brawne.
Some of the letters that he wrote to her or about her are almost
tragic. After he had taken his last leave of her he wrote, "I can bear
to die--I cannot bear to leave her."
[Illustration: WENTWORTH PLACE, KEATS'S HOME IN HAMPSTEAD.]
Acting on insistent medical advice, Keats sailed for Italy in
September, 1820, accompanied by a stanch friend, the artist Joseph
Severn. On this voyage, Keats wrote a sonnet which proved to be his
swan song:--
"Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores."
While he lay on his sick bed in Rome, he said: "I feel the flowers
growing over me." In February, 1821, he died, at the age of
twenty-five years and four months. On the modest stone which marks his
grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, there was placed at his
request: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." His most
appropriate epitaph is Shelley's _Adonais_.
[Illustration: GRAVE OF KEATS, ROME.]
Poems.--In 1817 he published his first poems in a thin volume, which
did not attract much attention, although it contained two excellent
sonnets: _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_ and _On the
Grasshopper and Cricket_, which begins with the famous line:--
"The poetry of earth is never dead."
We may also find in this volume such lines of promise as:--
"Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown
The reading of an ever changing tale."
A year later, his long poem, _Endymion_, appeared. The inner purpose
of this poetic romance is to show the search of the soul for absolute
Beauty. The first five lines are a beautiful exposition of his poetic
creed. _Endymion_, however, suffers from immaturity, shown in boyish
sentimentality, in a confusion of details, and in an overabundance of
ornament. This poem met with a torrent of abuse. One critic even
questioned whether Keats was the real name of the author, adding, "we
almost doubt whether any man in his senses would put his real name to
such a rhapsody." Keats showed himself a better critic than the
reviewers. It is unusual for a poet to recognize almost at once the
blemishes in his own work. He acknowledged that a certain critic--
"...is perfectly right in regard to the 'slipshod' _Endymion_...
it is as good as I had the power to make it by myself. I have
written independently, _without judgement_, I may write
independently and _with judgement_ hereafter."
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF ORIGINAL MS. OF ENDYMION.]
The quickness of his development is one of the most amazing facts in
literary history. He was twenty-three when _Endymion_ was published,
but in the next eighteen months he had almost finished his life's
work. In that brief time, he perfected his art and wrote poems that
rank among the greatest of their kind, and that have influenced the
work of many succeeding poets, such as Tennyson, Lowell, and
Swinburne.
[Illustration: ENDYMION. _From mural painting by H.O. Walker,
Congressional Library, Washington, D.C._]
Nearly all his greatest poems were written in 1819 and published in
his 1820 volume. _The Eve of St. Agnes_ (January, 1819) and the _Ode
to a Nightingale_ (May, 1819) are perhaps his two most popular poems;
but his other masterpieces are sufficiently great to make choice among
them largely a matter of individual preference.
_The Eve of St. Agnes_ is an almost flawless narrative poem, romantic
in its conception and artistic in its execution. Porphyro, a young
lover, gains entrance to a hostile castle on the eve of St. Agnes to
see if he cannot win his heroine, Madeline, on that enchanted evening.
The interest in the story, the mastery of poetic language, the wealth
and variety of the imagery, the atmosphere of medieval days, combine
to make this poem unusually attractive. The following lines appeal to
the senses of sight, odor, sound, and temperature,[25] as well as to
romantic human feeling and love of the beautiful:--
"...like a throbbing star
Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose;
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odor with the violet,--
Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows
Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window panes; St. Agnes' moon hath set."
The fact that Keats could write the _Ode to a Nightingale_ in three
hours is proof of genius. This poem pleases lovers of music, of
artistic expression, of nature, of romance, and of human pathos. Such
lines as these show that the strength and beauty of his verse are not
entirely dependent on images of sense:--
"Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath."
The _Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Ode on
Melancholy, Lamia_, and _Isabella_,--all show the unusual charm of
Keats. He manifests the greatest strength in his unfinished fragment
_Hyperion_, "the Götterdämmerung of the early Grecian gods." The
opening lines reveal the artistic perfection of form and the
effectiveness of the sensory images with which he frames the scene:--
"Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud."
General Characteristics.--Keats is the poetic apostle of the
beautiful. He specially emphasizes the beautiful in the world of the
senses; but his definition of beauty grew to include more than mere
physical sensations from attractive objects. In his _Ode to a Grecian
Urn_, he says that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," and he calls to
the Grecian pipes to play--
"Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone."
Those poets who thought that they could equal Keats by piling up a
medley of sense images have been doomed to disappointment. The
transforming power of his imagination is more remarkable than the
wealth of his sensations.
His mastery in choosing, adapting, and sometimes even creating, apt
poetic words or phrases, is one of his special charms. Matthew Arnold
says: "No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in
expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats." Some of his
descriptive adjectives and phrases, such as the "deep-damasked wings"
of the tiger-moth, have been called "miniature poems." In the eighty
lines of the _Ode to a Nightingale_, we may note the "_full-throated
ease_" of the nightingale's song, the vintage cooled in the
"_deep-delved_ earth," the "_beaded bubbles winking_ at the brim" of
the beaker "_full of the warm South_," "the coming musk-rose, full of
_dewy wine_," the sad Ruth "amid the _alien_ corn," and the "_faery
lands forlorn_."
A contemporary critic accused Keats of "spawning" new words, of
converting verbs into nouns, of forming new verbs, and of making
strange use of adjectives and adverbs. Some contemporaries might
object to his "_torchèd_ mines," "_flawblown_ sleet," "_liegeless_
air," or even to the "_calm-throated_" thrush of the immortals. Modern
lovers of poetry, however, think that he displayed additional proof of
genius by enriching the vocabulary of poetry more than any other
writer since Milton.
Keats was not, like Byron and Shelley, a reformer. He drew his first
inspiration from Grecian mythology and the romantic world of Spenser,
not from the French Revolution or the social unrest of his own day. It
is, however, a mistake to say that he was untouched by the new human
impulses. There is modern feeling in the following lines which
introduce us to the two cruel brothers in _Isabella_:--
"...for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torchèd mines and noisy factories.
* * * * *
For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark;
For them his ears gushed blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
Lay full of darts."
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Matthew Arnold wrote of
Keats: "He is with Shakespeare." Andrew Bradley, a twentieth century
professor of poetry in the University of Oxford, says: "Keats was of
Shakespeare's tribe." These eminent critics do not mean that Keats had
the breadth, the humor, the moral appeal of Shakespeare, but they do
find in Keats much of the youthful Shakespeare's lyrical power,
mastery of expression, and intense love of the beautiful in life. When
Keats said: "If a sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its
existence and pick about the gravel," he showed another Shakespearean
quality in his power to enter into the life of other creatures. At
first he wrote of the beautiful things that appealed to his senses or
his fancies, but when he came to ask himself the question:--
"And can I ever bid these joys farewell?"
he answered:--
"Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts."[26]
In _Isabella_, the _Ode to a Nightingale, Lamia_, and _Hyperion_, he
was beginning to paint these "agonies" and "the strife"; but death
swiftly ended further progress on this road. Before he passed away,
however, he left some things that have an Elizabethan appeal. Among
such, we may mention his welcome to "easeful death," his artistic
setting of a puzzling truth:--
"...Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips,
Bidding adieu,"
his line to which the young world still responds:--
"Forever wilt thou love and she be fair,"
and especially the musical call of his own young life, "yearning like
a God in pain."
THOMAS DE QUINCEY, 1785-1859
[Illustration: THOMAS DE QUINCEY. _From the painting by Sir J.W.
Gordon, National Portrait Gallery_.]
Life.-Thomas de Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785. Being a
precocious child, he became a remarkable student at the age of eight.
When he was only eleven, his Latin verses were the envy of the older
boys at the Bath school, which he was then attending. At the age of
fifteen, he was so thoroughly versed in Greek that his professor said
of him to a friend: "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better
than you or I could address an English one." De Quincey was sent in
this year to the Manchester grammar school; but his mind was in
advance of the instruction offered there, and he unceremoniously left
the school on his seventeenth birthday.
For a time he tramped through Wales, living on an allowance of a
guinea a week. Hungering for books, he suddenly posted to London. As
he feared that his family would force him to return to school, he did
not let them know his whereabouts. He therefore received no money from
them, and was forced to wander hungry, sick, and destitute, through
the streets of the metropolis, with its outcasts and waifs. He
describes this part of his life in a very entertaining manner in his
_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_.
When his family found him, a year later, they prevailed on him to go
to Oxford; and, for the next four years, he lived the life of a
recluse at college.
In 1808 he took the cottage at Grasmere that Wordsworth had quitted,
and enjoyed the society of the three Lake poets. Here De Quincey
married and lived his happiest years.
The latter part of his life was clouded by his indulgence in opium,
which he had first taken while at college to relieve acute neuralgia.
At one time he was in the habit of taking an almost incredible amount
of laudanum. Owing to a business failure, his money was lost. It then
became necessary for him to throw off the influence of the narcotic
sufficiently to earn a livelihood, In 1821 he began to write. From
that time until his death, in 1859, his life was devoted mainly to
literature.
[Illustration: ROOM IN DOVE COTTAGE OCCUPIED BY WORDSWORTH,
COLERIDGE, AND DE QUINCEY.]
Works.--Nearly all De Quincey's writings were contributed to
magazines. His first and greatest contribution was _The Confessions of
an English Opium-Eater_, published in the _London Magazine_. These
_Confessions_ are most remarkable for the brilliant and elaborate
style in which the author's early life and his opium dreams are
related. His splendid, yet melancholy, dreams are the most famous in
the language.
De Quincey's wide reading, especially of history, supplied the
material for many of them. In these dreams he saw the court ladies of
the "unhappy times of Charles I.," witnessed Marius pass by with his
Roman legions, "ran into pagodas" in China, where he "was fixed, for
centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms," and "was buried for a
thousand years, in stone coffins, in narrow chambers at the heart of
eternal pyramids" in Egypt.
His dreams were affected also by the throngs of people whom he had
watched in London. He was haunted by "the tyranny of the human face."
He says:--
"Faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands,
by myriads, by generations, by centuries: my agitation was infinite,
my mind tossed, and surged with the ocean."
Sound also played a large part in the dreams. Music, heart-breaking
lamentations, and pitiful echoes recurred frequently in the most
magnificent of these nightly pageants. One of the most distressing
features of the dreams was their vastness. The dreamer lived for
centuries in one night, and space "swelled, and was amplified to an
extent of unutterable infinity."
To present with such force and reality these grotesque and weird
fancies, these vague horrors, and these deep oppressions required a
powerful imaginative grasp of the intangible, and a masterly command
of language.
In no other work does De Quincey reach the eminence attained in the
_Confessions_, although his scholarly acquirements enabled him to
treat philosophical, critical, and historical subjects with wonderful
grace and ease. His biographer, Masson, says, "De Quincey's sixteen
volumes of magazine articles are full of brain from beginning to end."
The wide range of his erudition is shown by the fact that he could
write such fine literary criticisms as _On Wordsworth's Poetry_ and
_On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth_, such clear, strong, and
vivid descriptions of historical events and characters as _The
Caesars, Joan of Arc_, and _The Revolt of the Tartars_, and such acute
essays on unfamiliar topics as _The Toilette of a Hebrew Lady, The
Casuistry of Roman Meals_, and _The Spanish Military Nun_.
He had a contemplative, analytic mind which enjoyed knotty
metaphysical problems and questions far removed from daily life, such
as the first principles of political economy, and of German
philosophy. While he was a clear thinker in such fields, he added
little that was new to English thought.
The works which rank next to _The Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater_ are all largely autobiographical, and reveal charming
glimpses of this dreamy, learned sage. Those works are _Suspiria de
Profundis (Sighs from the Depths), The English Mail Coach_, and
_Autobiographic Sketches_. None of them contains any striking or
unusual experience of the author. Their power rests upon their
marvelous style. _Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow_ in _Suspiria de
Profundis_ and the _Dream Fugue_ in the _Mail Coach_ are among the
most musical, the most poetic, and the most imaginative of the
author's productions.
General Characteristics.--De Quincey's essays show versatility,
scholarly exactness, and great imaginative power. His fame, however,
rests in a large degree upon his style. One of its most prominent
characteristics is, precision. There are but few English essayists who
can compare with him in scrupulous precision of expression. He
qualifies and elaborates a simple statement until its exact meaning
becomes plainly manifest. His vocabulary is extraordinary. In any of
the multifarious subjects treated by him, the right word seems always
at hand.
Two characteristics, which are very striking in all his works, are
harmony and stateliness. His language is so full of rich harmonies
that it challenges comparison with poetry. His long, periodic
sentences move with a quiet dignity, adapted to the treatment of lofty
themes.
De Quincey's work possesses also a light, ironic humor, which is
happiest in parody. The essay upon _Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts_ is the best example of his humor. This selection is one of
the most whimsical:--
"For, if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he come,
to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to
drinking and Sabbath breaking, and from that to incivility and
procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know
where you are to stop."
De Quincey's gravest fault is digression. He frequently leaves his
main theme and follows some line of thought that has been suggested to
his well-stored mind. These digressions are often very long, and
sometimes one leads to another, until several subjects receive
treatment in a single paper. De Quincey, however, always returns to
the subject in hand and defines very sharply the point of digression
and of return. Another of his faults is an indulgence in involved
sentences, which weaken the vigor and simplicity of the style.
Despite these faults, De Quincey is a great master of language. He
deserves study for the three most striking characteristics of his
style,--precision, stateliness, and harmony.
SUMMARY
The tide of reaction, which had for same time been gathering force,
swept triumphantly over England in this age of Romanticism.
Men rebelled against the aristocracy, the narrow conventions of
society, the authority of the church and of the government, against
the supremacy of cold classicism in literature, against confining
intellectual activity to tangible commonplace things, and against the
repression of imagination and of the soul's aspirations. The two
principal forces behind these changes were the Romantic movement,
which culminated in changed literary ideals, and the spirit of the
French Revolution, which emphasized the close kinship of all ranks of
humanity.
The time was preeminently poetic. The Elizabethan age alone excels it
in the glory of its poetry. The principal subjects of verse in the age
of Romanticism were nature and man. Nature became the embodiment of an
intelligent, sympathetic, spiritual force. Cowper, Burns, Scott,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats constitute a group of
poets who gave to English literature a new poetry of nature. The
majority of these were also poets of man, of a more ideal humanity.
The common man became an object of regard. Burns sings of the Scotch
peasant. Wordsworth pictures the life of shepherds and dalesmen.
Byron's lines ring with a cry of liberty for all, and Shelley
immortalizes the dreams of a universal brotherhood of man. Keats, the
poet of the beautiful, passed away before he heard clearly the message
of "the still sad music of humanity."
While the prose does not take such high rank as the poetry, there are
some writers who will not soon be forgotten. Scott will be remembered
as the great master of the historical novel, Jane Austen as the
skillful realistic interpreter of everyday life, De Quincey for the
brilliancy of his style and the vigor of his imagination in presenting
his opium dreams, and Lamb for his exquisite humor. In philosophical
prose, Mill, Bentham, and Malthus made important contributions to
moral, social, and political philosophy, while Coleridge opposed their
utilitarian and materialistic tendencies, and codified the principles
of criticism from a romantic point of view.
REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
HISTORICAL
Gardiner[27], Green, Walker, or Cheney. For the social side, see
Traill, V., VI., and Cheney's _Industrial and Social History of
England_.
LITERARY
_The Cambridge History of English Literature_, Vols. XI., XII.
Courthope's _A History of English Poetry_, Vol. VI.
Elton's _A Survey of English Literature from 1780-1830_, 2 vols.
Herford's _The Age of Wordsworth_.
Brandes's _Naturalism in England_ (Vol. IV. of _Main Currents in
Nineteenth Century Literature_.)
_The Revolution in English Poetry and Fiction_ (Chap. XXII. of Vol. X.
of _Cambridge Modern History_.)
Hancock's _The French Revolution and the English Poets_.
Scudder's _Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets_.
Symons's _The Romantic Movement in English Poetry_.
Reynolds's _The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry between Pope and
Wordsworth_.
Mackie's _Nature Knowledge in Modern Poetry_.
Brookes's _Studies in Poetry_ (Blake, Scott, Shelley, Keats).
Symons's _William Blake_.
Payne's _The Greater English Poets of the Nineteenth Century_ (Keats,
Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth).
Stephen's _Hours in a Library_, 3 vols. (Scott, De Quincey, Cowper,
Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge).
Dowden's _Studies in Literature_, 1879-1877.
Bradley's _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_ (Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats).
Lowell's _Among my Books, Second Series_ (Wordsworth, Keats).
Ainger's _Life of Lamb_. (E.M.L.)
Lucas's _Life of Charles Lamb_.
Goldwin Smith's _Life of Cowper_. (E.M.L.)
Wright's _Life of Cowper_.
Shairp's _Robert Burns_. (E.M.L.)
Carlyle's _Essay on Burns_.
Lockhart's _Life of Scott_., Hutton's _Life of Scott_. (E.M.L.)
Yonge's _Life of Scott_. (G.W.)
Goldwin Smith's _Life of Jane Austen_. (G.W.)
Helm's _Jane Austen and her Country House Comedy_.
Mitton's _Jane Austen and her Times_.
Adams's _The Story of Jane Austen's Life_.
Knight's _Life of Wordsworth_, 3 vols., Myers's _Life of Wordsworth_
(E.M.L.), Raleigh's _Wordsworth_.
Robertson's _Wordsworth and the English Lake Country_.
Traill's _Life of Coleridge_ (E.M.L.), Caine's _Life of Coleridge_
(G.W.), Garnett's _Coleridge_.
Sneath's _Wordsworth, Poet of Nature and Poet of Man_.
Mayne's _The New Life of Byron_, 2 vols, Nichol's _Life of Byron_
(E.M.L.), Noel's _Life of Byron_. (G.W.)
Trelawney's _Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron_.
Dowden's _Life of Shelley_, 2 vols., Symonds's _Life of Shelley_
(E.M.L.), Sharp's _Life of Shelley_ (G.W.). Francis Thompson's
_Shelley_.
Clutton-Brock's _Shelley: The Man and the Poet_.
Hogg's _Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley_(contemporary).
Angeli's _Shelley and his Friends in Italy_.
Colvin's _Life of Keats_ (E.M.L.), Rossetti's _Life of Keats_ (G.W.),
Hancock's _John Keats_.
Miller's _Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley, and Keats_.
Arnold's _Essays in Criticism, Second Series_ (Keats).
H. Buxton Forman's _Complete Works of John Keats_ (includes the
_Letters_, the best edition).
Masson's _Life of De Quincey_. (E.M.L.)
Minto's _Manual of English Prose Literature_ (De Quincey).
SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Blake.--Some of his best poems are given in Ward, IV., 601-608;
Bronson, III., 385-403; Manly, I., 301-304; _Oxford_, 558-566;
_Century_, 485-489, and in the volume in _The Canterbury Poets_.
Point out in Blake's verse (_a_) the new feeling for nature, (_b_)
evidences of wide sympathies, (_c_) mystical tendencies, and (_d_)
compare his verses relating to children and nature with Wordsworth's
poems on the same subjects.
Cowper.--Read the opening stanzas of Cowper's _Conversation_ and
note the strong influence of Pope in the cleverly turned but
artificial couplets. Compare this poem with the one _On the Receipt of
my Mother's Picture_ or with _The Task_, Book IV., lines 1-41 and
267-332, Cassell's _National Library, Canterbury Poets_, or _Temple
Classics_ and point out the marked differences in subject matter and
style. What forward movement in literature is indicated by the change
in Cowper's manner? _John Gilpin_ should be read for its fresh,
beguiling humor.
For selections, see Bronson,[28] III., 310-329; Ward, III., 422-485;
_Century_, 470-479; Manly, I., 285-294.
Burns.--Read _The Cotter's Saturday Night, For a' That and a' That,
To a Mouse, Highland Mary, To Mary in Heaven, Farewell to Nancy, I
Love My Jean, A Red, Red Rose_. The teacher should read to the class
parts of _Tam o' Shanter_.
The _Globe_ edition contains the complete poems of Burns with
Glossary. Inexpensive editions may be found in Cassell's _National
Library, Everyman's Library_, and _Canterbury Poets_. For selections,
see Bronson, III., 338-385; Ward. III., 512-571; _Century_, 490-502;
Manly, I., 309-326; _Oxford_, 492-506.
In what ways do the first three poems mentioned above show Burns's
sympathy with democracy? Quote some of Burns's fine descriptions of
nature and describe the manner in which he treats nature. How does he
rank as a writer of love songs? What qualities in his poems have
touched so many hearts? Compare his poetry with that of Dryden, Pope,
and Shakespeare.
Scott.--Read _The Lady of the Lake_, Canto III., stanzas iii.-xxv.,
or _Marmion_, Canto VI., stanzas xiii.-xxvii. (American Book Company's
_Eclectic English Classics_, Cassell's _National Library_, or
_Everyman's Library_.) Read in Craik, V., "The Gypsy's Curse" (_Guy
Mannering_), pp. 14-17, "The Death of Madge Wildfire" (_Heart of
Middlothian_), pp. 30-35, and "The Grand Master of the Templars"
(_Ivanhoe_), pp. 37-42. The student should put on his list for reading
at his leisure: _Guy Mannering, Old Mortality, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth,
and The Talisman_.
In what kind of poetry does Scott excel? Quote some of his spirited
heroes, and point out their chief excellences. How does his poetry
differ from that of Burns? In the history of fiction, does Scott rank
as an imitator or a creator? As a writer of fiction, in what do his
strength and his weakness consist? Has he those qualities that will
cause him to be popular a century hence? What can be said of his
style?
Jane Austen.--In Craik, V., or Manly. II, read the selections from
_Pride and Prejudice_. The student at his leisure should read all this
novel.
What world does she describe in her fiction? What are her chief
qualities? How does she differ from Scott? Why is she called
a "realist"?
Wordsworth.--Read _I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, The Solitary
Reaper, To the Cuckoo, Lines Written in Early Spring, Three Years She
Grew in Sun and Shower, To my Sister, She Dwelt among the Untrodden
Ways, She Was a Phantom of Delight, Alice Fell, Lucy Gray, We Are
Seven, Intimations of Immortality from Recollection of Early
Childhood, Ode to Duty, Hart-Leap Well, Lines Composed a Few Miles
above Tintern Abbey, Michael_ and the sonnets: "It is a beauteous
evening, calm and free," "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this
hour," and "The world is too much with us, late and soon." Some
students will also wish to read _The Prelude_ (_Temple Classics_ or
A.J. George's edition), which describes the growth of Wordsworth's
mind.
All the above poems (excepting _The Prelude_) may be found in the
volume _Poems of Wordsworth, chosen and edited by Matthew Arnold_
(_Golden Treasury Series_, 331 pp., $1). Nearly all may also be found
in Page's _British Poets of the Nineteenth Century_ (923 pp., $2). For
selections, see Bronson, IV., 1-54; Ward, IV., 1-88; _Oxford_ 594-618;
_Century_, 503-541; Manly, I., 329-345.
Refer to Wordsworth's "General Characteristics" (pp. 393-396) and
select the poems that most emphatically show his special qualities.
Which of the above poems seems easiest to write? In which is his
genius most apparent? Which best presents his view of nature? Which
best stand the test of an indefinite number of readings? In what do
his poems of childhood excel?
Coleridge.--Read _The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Hymn
before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, Youth and Age_; Bronson, I.,
54-93; Ward, IV., 102-154; Page, 66-103; Century, 553-565; Manly, I.,
353-364; _Oxford_, 628-656.
How do _The Ancient Mariner_ and _Christabel_ manifest the spirit of
Romanticism? What are the chief reasons for the popularity of _The
Ancient Mariner_? Would you call this poem didactic? Select stanzas
specially remarkable for melody, for beauty, for telling much in few
words, for images of nature, for conveying an ethical lesson. What
feeling almost unknown in early poetry is common in Coleridge's _The
Ancient Mariner_, Wordsworth's _Hart-Leap Well_, Burns's _To a Mouse,
On Seeing a Wounded Hare Limp by Me, A Winter Night_, and Cowper's _On
a Goldfinch Starved to Death in his Cage_?
The advanced student should read some of Coleridge's prose criticism
in his _Biographia Literaria_ (_Everyman's Library_). The parts best
worth reading have been selected in George's _Coleridge's Principles
of Criticism_ (226 pp., 60 cents) and in Beers's _Selections for the
Prose Writings of Coleridge_ (including criticisms of Wordsworth and
Shakespeare, 146 pp., 50 cents).
Note how fully Coleridge unfolds in these essays the principles of
romantic criticism, which have not been superseded.
Byron.--Read _The Prisoner of Chillon_ (_Selections from Byron,
Eclectic English Classics_), _Childe Harold_, Canto III., stanzas
xxi-xxv. and cxiii., Canto IV., stanzas lxxviii., and lxxix. "Oh,
Snatch'd away in Beauty's Bloom," "There's not a joy the world can
give like that it takes away," and from _Don Juan_, Canto III., the
song inserted between stanzas lxxxvi. and lxxxvii. All these poems
will be found in the two volumes of Byron's works in the _Canterbury
Poets'_ series.
Selections are given in Bronson, IV., 125-174; Ward, IV., 244-303;
Page, 170-272; Oxford, 688-694; _Century_, 586-613; Manly, I.,
378-393.
From the stanzas indicated in _Childe Harold_, select, first, the
passages which best illustrate the spirit of revolt, and, second, the
passages of most poetic beauty. What natural phenomena appeal most to
Byron? What qualities make _The Prisoner of Chillon_ a favorite? Why
is his poetry often called rhetorical?
Shelley.--Read _Adonais, To a Skylark, Ode to the West Wind, To
Night, The Cloud, The Sensitive Plant_, and selections from _Alastor_
and _Prometheus Unbound_. Shelley's _Poetical Works_, edited by Edward
Dowden (_Globe Poets_), contains all of Shelley's extant poetry. Less
expensive editions are in _Canterbury Poets, Temple Classics_, and
_Everyman's Library_. Selections are given in Bronson, IV., 182-227;
Ward, IV., 348-416; Page, 275-369; _Oxford_, 697-717; _Century_,
614-638; Manly, I., 394-411.
Under what different aspects do _Adonais_ and _Lycidas_ view the life
after death? Has Shelley modified Wordsworth's view of the spiritual
force in nature? Does Shelley use either the cloud or the skylark for
the direct purpose of expressing his own feelings? Why is he sometimes
called a metaphysical poet? What is the most striking quality of
Shelley's poetic gift?
Keats.--Read _The Eve of St. Agnes_, _Ode to a Nightingale_, _Ode on
a Grecian Urn_, _To Autumn_, _Hyperion_ (first 134 lines), _La Belle
Dame sans Merci_, _Isabella_, and the sonnets: _On First Looking into
Chapman's Homer_, _On the Grasshopper and Cricket_, _When I have Fears
that I May Cease to Be_, _Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou
Art_. The best edition of the works of Keats is that by Buxton Forman.
The _Canterbury Poets_ and _Everyman's Library_ have less expensive
editions. All the poems indicated above may be found in Page's
_British Poets of the Nineteenth Century_. For selections, see
Bronson, IV., 230-265; Ward, IV., 427-464; _Oxford_, 721-744;
_Century_, 639-655; Manly, I., 413-425.
By direct reference to the above poems, justify calling Keats "the
apostle of the beautiful," in both thought and language. Give examples
of his felicitous use of words and phrases. Show by illustrations his
mastery in the use of the concrete. To what special senses do his
images appeal? Was he at all affected by the new human movement? Why
does Arnold say, "Keats is with Shakespeare"? In what respects is he
like the Elizabethans?
De Quincey.--Read _Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow_ (Craik, V.,
264-270). The first chapters of _The Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater_ (_Everyman's Library_; _Temple Classics_; _Century_,
683-690; Manly, II., 357-366) are entertaining and will repay reading.
Does his prose show any influence of a romantic and poetic age?
Compare his style with that of Addison, Gibbon, and Burke. In what
respects does De Quincey succeed, and in what does he fail, as a model
for a young writer?
Lamb.--From the _Essays of Elia_ (Cassell's _National Library_;
_Everyman's Library_, _Temple Classics_) read any two of these essays:
_A Dissertation upon Roast Pig, Old China, Dream Children, New Year's
Eve, Poor Relations_. For selections, see Craik, V., 116-126;
_Century_, 575-578; Manly, II., 337-345.
In what does Lamb's chief charm consist? Point out resemblances and
differences between his _Essays_ and Addison's.
Landor, Hazlitt, and Hunt.--Good selections are given in Craik, V.;
Chambers, III.; Manly, II. Inexpensive editions of Landor's _Imaginary
Conversations_ and _Pericles and Aspasia_ may be found in the _Camelot
Series_. Hazlitt's _Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, Lectures on the
English Poets, Lectures on the English Comic Writers_, and _Table
Talk_ are published in _Everyman's Library_. The _Camelot Series_ and
the _Temple Classics_ also contain some of Hazlitt's works. A
selection from Leigh Hunt's _Essays_ is published in the _Camelot
Series_.
What are the main characteristics of Landor's style? Select a passage
which justifies the criticism: "He writes in marble." Give some
striking thoughts from his _Imaginary Conversations_. Compare his
style and subject matter with Hazlitt's. Show that Hazlitt has the
power of presenting in an impressive way the chief characteristics of
authors. Select some pleasing passages from Leigh Hunt's _Essays_.
Compare him with Addison and Lamb.
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER VIII:
[Footnote 1: _Prelude_, Book XI.]
[Footnote 2: gold.]
[Footnote 3: _For a' That and a' That_.]
[Footnote 4: _Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle_.]
[Footnote 5: _Hart-Leap Well_.]
[Footnote 6: _Intimations of Immortality_.]
[Footnote 7: Wordsworth's _Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern
Abbey_.]
[Footnote 8: _Retirement_.]
[Footnote 9: _Conversation_.]
[Footnote 10: _I Love My Jean_.]
[Footnote 11: remedy.]
[Footnote 12: _Epistle to John Lapraik_.]
[Footnote 13: _The Vision_.]
[Footnote 14: _Sonnet_: "The world is too much with us."]
[Footnote 15: _Hart Leap Well_.]
[Footnote 16: _A Day-Dream_.]
[Footnote 17: _Biographia Literaria_, Chapter XIV.]
[Footnote 18: _Ibid_., Chapter XXII.]
[Footnote 19: _Manfred_, Act I.]
[Footnote 20: _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_, Canto III.]
[Footnote 21: _The Dream_.]
[Footnote 22: _Adonais_, Stanza xlix]
[Footnote 23: _Epipsychidion_.]
[Footnote 24: _Ode to the West Wind_.]
[Footnote 25: For a discussion of the different sensory images of the
poets, see the author's _Education of the Central Nervous System_,
pages 109-208.]
[Footnote 26: _Sleep and Poetry_.]
[Footnote 27: For full titles, see p. 50.]
[Footnote 28: For full titles, see p. 6.]
CHAPTER IX: THE VICTORIAN AGE, 1837-1900
History of the Period.--In the two periods of English history most
remarkable for their accomplishment, the Elizabethan and the
Victorian, the throne was occupied by women. Queen Victoria, the
granddaughter of George III., ruled from 1837 to the beginning of
1901. Her long reign of sixty-three years may be said to close with
the end of the nineteenth century.
For nearly fifty years after the battle of Waterloo (1815), England
had no war of magnitude. In 1854 she joined France in a war against
Russia to keep her from taking Constantinople. Tennyson's well-known
poem, _The Charge of the Light Brigade_, commemorates an incident in
this bloody contest, which was successful in preventing Russia from
dismembering Turkey.
When the Turks massacred the Christians in Bulgaria in 1876, Russia
fought and conquered Turkey. England again intervened, this time after
the war, in the Berlin Congress (1878). In return for her diplomatic
services and for a guaranty to maintain the integrity of certain
Turkish territory, England received from Turkey the island of Cyprus.
As a result of this Congress, the principalities of Roumania, Servia,
and Bulgaria were formed, but the Turk was allowed to remain in
Europe. A later English prime minister, Lord Salisbury (1830-1903),
referring to England's espousal of the Turkish cause, said that she
had "backed the wrong horse." The bloody war of 1912-1913 between
Turkey and the allied armies of Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro, and
Greece was the result of this mistake.
An important part of England's history during this period centers
around the expansion, protection, and development of her colonies in
Asia, Australia, Africa, and America. England was then constantly
agitated by the fear that Russia might grow strong enough to seize
India or some other English colonial possessions.
A serious rebellion in India (1857) led England to take from the East
India Company the government of that colony. "Empress of India" was
later (1876) added to the titles of Queen Victoria. Had India not been
an English colony, literature might not have had Kipling's fascinating
_Jungle Books_ and Hindu stories. England's protectorate over Egypt
(1882) was assumed in order to strengthen her control over the newly
completed Suez Canal (1869), which was needed for her communication
with India and her Australian colonies.
The Boer war in South Africa (1899-1902)required the largest number of
troops that England ever mustered into service in any of her wars. The
final outcome of this desperate struggle was the further extension of
her South African possessions.
In the nineteenth century, England's most notable political
achievement was "her successful rule over colonies, ranging from
India, with its 280,000,000 subjects, to Fanning Island with its
population of thirty." Her tactful guidance was for the must part
directed toward enabling them to develop and to govern themselves. She
had learned a valuable lesson from the American revolution.
Ireland, however, failed to secure her share of the benefits that
usually resulted from English rule. She was neither regarded as a
colony, like Australia, nor as an integral part of England. For the
greater part of the century her condition was deplorable. The great
prime minister, William E. Gladstone (1809-1898), tried to secure
needed home rule for her, but did not succeed. Toward the end of the
century, more liberal laws regarding the tenure of the land and more
self-government afforded some relief from unjust conditions.
During the Victorian age the government of England became more
democratic. Two reform bills (1867 and 1884) gave almost unrestricted
suffrage to men. The extension of the franchise and the granting of
local self-government to her counties (1888) made England one of the
most democratic of all nations. Her monarch has less power than the
president of the United States.
The Victorian age saw the rise of trades unions and the passing of
many laws to improve the condition of the working classes. As the
tariff protecting the home grower of wheat had raised the price of
bread and caused much suffering to the poor, England not only repealed
this duty (1846) but also became practically a free-trade country. The
age won laurels in providing more educational facilities for all, in
abridging class privileges, and in showing increasing recognition of
human rights, without a bloody revolution such as took place in
France. A rough indication of the amount of social and moral progress
is the decrease in the number of convicts in England, from about
50,000 at the accession of Victoria to less than 6000 at her death.
An Age of Science and Invention.--In the extent and the variety of
inventions, in their rapid improvement and utilization for human
needs, and in general scientific progress, the sixty-three years of
the Victorian age surpassed all the rest of historic time.
When Victoria ascended the throne, the stage coach was the common
means of traveling; only two short pieces of railroad had been
constructed; the electric telegraph had not been developed; few
steamships had crossed the Atlantic. The modern use of the telephone
would then have seemed as improbable as the wildest Arabian Nights'
tale. Before her reign ended, the railroad, the telegraph, the
steamship, and the telephone had wrought an almost magical change in
travel and in communication.
The Victorian age introduced anaesthetics and antiseptic surgery,
developed photography, the sciences of chemistry and physics, of
biology and zoölogy, of botany and geology. The enthusiastic
scientific worker appeared in every field, endeavoring to understand
the laws of nature and to apply them in the service of man. Science
also turned its attention to human progress and welfare. The new
science of sociology had earnest students.
[Illustration: CHARLES DARWIN.]
The Influence of Science on Literature.--The Victorian age was the
first to set forth clearly the evolution hypothesis, which teaches the
orderly development from simple to complex forms. While the idea of
evolution had suggested itself to many naturalists, Charles Darwin
(1809-1882) was the first to gain a wide hearing for the theory. After
years of careful study of nature, he published in 1859 _The Origin of
Species by Natural Selection_, an epoch-making work, which had a
far-reaching effect on the thought of the age.
The influence of his doctrine of evolution is especially apparent in
Tennyson's poetry, in George Eliot's fiction, in religious thought,
and in the change in viewing social problems. In his _Synthetic
Philosophy_, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), philosopher and
metaphysician, applied the doctrine of evolution not only to plants
and animals but also to society, morality, and religion.
Two eminent scientists, John Tyndall (1820-1893) and Thomas Huxley
(1825-1895), did much to popularize science and to cause the age to
seek a broader education. Tyndall's _Fragments of Science_ (1871)
contains a fine lecture on the _Scientific Use of the Imagination_, in
which he becomes almost poetic in his imaginative conception of
evolution:--
"Not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular
or animal life, not alone the nobler
forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite
and wonderful mechanism of the human
body, but the human mind itself,--emotion,
intellect, will, and all their phenomena,--were
once latent in a fiery cloud... All our philosophy, all our poetry,
all our science, and all our art,--Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and
Raphael,--are potential in the fires of the sun."
[Illustration: JOHN TYNDALL.]
Unlike Keats in his _Lamia_, Tyndall is firm in his belief that
science will not clip the wings of imagination. In the same lecture he
says:--
"How are we to lay hold of the physical basis of light, since, like
that of life itself, it lies entirely without the domain of the
senses? We are gifted with the power of imagination and by this
power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the
senses... Bounded and conditioned by coöperant reason, imagination
becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer.
Newton's passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was at the
outset a leap of the imagination."
Huxley was even a more brilliant interpreter of science to popular
audiences. His so-called _Lay Sermons_ (1870) are invigorating
presentations of scientific and educational subjects. He awakened many
to a sense of the importance of "knowing the laws of the physical
world" and "the relations of cause and effect therein." Nowhere is he
more impressive than where he forces us to admit that we must all play
the chess game of life against an opponent that never makes an error
and never fails to count our mistakes against us.
[Illustration: THOMAS HUXLEY. _From the painting by Collier,
National Portrait Gallery_.]
"The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the
universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.
The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his
play is always fair, just, and patient. But we also know, to our
cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest
allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest
stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which
the strong man shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is
checkmated--without haste, but without remorse.
* * * * *
"Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty
game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect
in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things
and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the
affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move
in harmony with those laws."[1]
We find the influence of science manifest in much of the general
literature of the age, as well as in the special writings of the
scientists. Science introduced to literature a new interest in
humanity and impressed on writers what is known as the "growth idea."
Preceding literature, with the conspicuous exception of Shakespeare's
work, had for the most part presented individuals whose character was
already fixed. This age loved to show the growth of souls. George
Eliot's novels are frequently Darwinian demonstrations of the various
steps in the moral growth or the perversion of the individual. In
_Rabbi Ben Ezra_, Browning thus expresses this new idea of the working
of the Divine Power:--
"He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance."
The Trend of Prose; Minor Prose Writers.--The prose of this age is
remarkable for amount and variety. In addition to the work of the
scientists, there are the essays and histories of Macaulay and
Carlyle, the essays and varied prose of Newman, the art and social
philosophy of Ruskin, the critical essays of Matthew Arnold and
Swinburne.
One essayist, Walter Pater (1839-1894), an Oxford graduate and
teacher, who kept himself aloof from contemporary thought, produced
almost a new type of serious prose, distinguished for color,
ornamentation, melody, and poetic thought. Even such prosaic objects
as wood and brick were to his retrospective gaze "half mere
soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows where." His object was to
charm his reader, to haunt him with vague suggestions rather than to
make a logical appeal to him, or to add to his world of vivid fact,
after the manner of Macaulay. A quotation from Pater's most brilliant
essay, _Leonardo Da Vinci_, in the volume, _The Renaissance: Studies
in Art and Poetry_[2] (1873) will show some of the characteristics of
his prose. This description of Da Vinci's masterpiece, the portrait of
Mona Lisa, has added to the world-wide fame of that picture--
"Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,'
and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from
within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange
thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a
moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women
of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into
which the soul with its maladies has passed!... She is older than
the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead
many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a
diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and
trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda,
was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of
Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and
flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the
changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands."
The period from 1780 to 1837 had only two great writers of
fiction,--Scott and Jane Austen; but the Victorian age saw the novel
gain the ascendancy that the drama enjoyed in Elizabethan times.
In addition to the chief novelists,--Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot,
Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and Kipling,--there were
many other writers who produced one or more excellent works of
fiction. In this class are the Brontë sisters, especially Charlotte
Brontë (1816-1855) and Emily Brontë (1818-1848), the daughters of a
clergyman, who lived in Haworth, Yorkshire. They had genius, but they
were hampered by poverty, lack of sympathy, and peculiar environment.
Charlotte Brontë's _Jane Eyre_ (1847) is a thrilling story, which
centers around the experiences of one of the great nineteenth-century
heroines of fiction. This virile novel, an unusual compound of
sensational romance and of intense realism, lives because the highly
gifted author made it pulsate with her own life. Unlike _Jane Eyre_,
Emily Brontë's powerful novel, _Wuthering Heights_ (1847) is not
pleasant reading. This romantic novel is really her imaginative
interpretation of the Yorkshire life that she knew. If she had
humanized _Wuthering Heights_, it could have been classed among the
greatest novels of the Victorian age. She might have learned this art,
had she not died at the age of thirty. "Stronger than a man, simpler
than a child, her nature stood alone," wrote Charlotte Brontë of her
sister Emily.
Among the other authors who deserve mention for one or more works of
fiction are: Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), a versatile writer whose
best-known work is _The Last Days of Pompeii_; Elizabeth Gaskell
(1810-1865), whose _Cranford_ (1853) is an inimitable picture of
mid-nineteenth century life in a small Cheshire village; Anthony
Trollope (1815-1882), whose _Barchester Towers_ is a realistic study
of life in a cathedral town; Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), who stirs
the blood in _Westward Ho!_ (1855), a tale of Elizabethan seamen;
Charles Reade (1814-1884), author of _The Cloister and the Hearth_
(1861), a careful and fascinating study of fifteenth-century life;
R.D. Blackmore (1825-1900), whose _Lorna Doone_ (1869) is a
thrilling North Devonshire story of life and love in the latter part
of the seventeenth century; J.M. Barrie (1860- ), whose _The Little
Minister_ (1891) is a richly human, sympathetic, and humorous story,
the scene of which is laid in Kirriemuir, a town about sixty miles
north of Edinburgh. His _Sentimental Tommy_ (1896), although not so
widely popular, is an unusually original, semi-autobiographical story
of imaginative boyhood. This entire chapter could be filled with
merely the titles of Victorian novels, many of which possess some
distinctive merit.
The changed character of the reading public furnished one reason for
the unprecedented growth of fiction. The spread of education through
public schools, newspapers, cheap magazines, and books caused a
widespread habit of reading, which before this time was not common
among the large numbers of the uneducated and the poor. The masses,
however, did not care for uninteresting or abstruse works. The
majority of books drawn from the circulating libraries were novels.
The scientific spirit of the age impelled the greatest novelists to
try to paint actual life as it impressed them. Dickens chose the lower
classes in London; Thackeray, the clubs and fashionable world; George
Eliot, the country life near her birthplace in Warwickshire; Hardy,
the people of his Wessex; Meredith, the cosmopolitan life of
egotistical man; Kipling, the life of India both in jungle and camp,
as well as the life of the great outer world. These writers of fiction
all sought a realistic background, although some of them did not
hesitate to use romantic touches to heighten the general effect.
Stevenson was the chief writer of romances.
The Trend of Poetry: Minor Poets.--The Victorian age was dominated
by two great poets,--Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. Browning
showed the influence of science in his tendency to analyze human
motives and actions. In one line of _Fra Lippo Lippi_, he voices the
new poetic attitude toward the world:--
"To find its meaning is my meat and drink."
Browning advanced into new fields, while Tennyson was more content to
make a beautiful poetic translation of much of the thought of the age.
In his youth he wrote:--
"Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time."
From merely reading Tennyson's verse, one could gauge quite accurately
the trend of Victorian scientific thought.
The poetry of both Browning and Tennyson is so resonant with faith
that they have been called great religious teachers. Rudyard Kipling,
the poet of imperialistic England, of her "far-flung battle line,"
attributes her "dominion over palm and pine" to faith in the "Lord God
of Hosts."
In the minor poets, there is often a different strain. Arnold is beset
with doubt, and hears no "clear call," such as Tennyson voices in
_Crossing the Bar_. Swinburne, seeing the pessimistic side of the
shield of evolution, exclaims:--
"Thou hast fed one rose with dust of many men."
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), Oxford tutor, traveler, and
educational examiner, was a poet who struggled with the doubt of the
age. He loved--
"To finger idly some old Gordian knot,
Unskilled to sunder, and too weak to cleave,
And with much toil attain to half-believe."
His verse would be forgotten if it expressed only such an uncertain
note; but his greatest poem thus records his belief in the value of
life's struggle and gives a hint of final victory:--
"Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labor and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
"If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It maybe, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field."
Although he paid too little attention to the form of his verse, some
of his poems have the vitality of an earnest, thoughtful sincerity.
Two poets, W. E. Henley (1849-1903) and Robert Bridges (1844- ),
although they do not possess Robert Browning's genius, yet have much
of his capacity to inspire others with joy in "the mere living."
Henley, a cripple and a great sufferer, was a poet, critic, and London
editor. His message is "the joy of life ":--
"...the blackbird sings but a box-wood flute,
But I lose him best of all
For his song is all of the joy of life."
His verse, which is elemental, full of enthusiasm and beauty, often
reminds us of the work of the thirteenth-century lyrists.
Robert Bridges, an Oxford graduate, physician, critic, and poet, also
had for his creed: "Life and joy are one." His universe, like
Shelley's, is an incarnation of the spirit of love:--
"Love can tell, and love alone,
Whence the million stars were strewn,
Why each atom knows its own,
How, in spite of woe and death,
Gay is life, and sweet is breath."
He wishes for no happier day than the present one. Bridges has been
called a classical poet because he often selects Greek and Roman
subjects for his verse, and because he writes with a formality,
purity, and precision of style. He is, however, most delightful in
such volumes as _Shorter Poems_ and _New Poems_.[3] wherein he
describes in a simple, artless manner English rural scenes and
fireside joys. In 1913 he was appointed poet laureate, to succeed
Alfred Austin.
John Davidson (1857-1909), a Scotch poet, who came to London and
wrestled with poverty, produced much uneven work. In his best verse,
there is often a pleasing combination of poetic beauty and vigorous
movement. Lines like these from his _Ballad of a Nun_ have been much
admired:--
"On many a mountain's happy head
Dawn lightly laid her rosy hand.
The adventurous son took heaven by storm,
Clouds scattered largesses of rain."
Davidson later became an offensively shrill preacher of materialism
and lost his early charm. Some of the best of his poetry may be found
in _Fleet Street Ecologues_.
Francis Thompson (1860-1907), a Catholic poet, who has been called a
nineteenth-century Crashaw, passed much of his short life of suffering
in London, where he was once reduced to selling matches on a street
corner. His greatest poem, _The Hound of Heaven_ (1893), is an
impassioned lyrical rendering of the passage in the _Psalms_
beginning: "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I
flee from thy presence?" While fleeing down "the long savannahs of the
blue," the poet hears a Voice say:--
"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."
William Watson (1858- ), a London poet, looked to Milton,
Wordsworth, and Arnold as his masters. Some of Watson's best verse,
such as _Wordsworth's Grave_, is written in praise of dead poets. His
early volume _Epigrams_ (1884), containing one hundred poems of four
lines each, shows his power of conveying poetic thought in brief
space. One of these poems is called _Shelley and Harriet Westbrook_:--
"A star looked down from heaven and loved a flower,
Grown in earth's garden--loved it for an hour:
Let eyes that trace his orbit in the spheres
Refuse not, to a ruin'd rosebud, tears."[4]
Many expected to see Watson appointed poet-laureate to succeed
Tennyson. Possibly mental trouble, which had temporarily affected him,
influenced the choice; for Alfred Austin (1835-1913) received the
laureateship in 1896. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Watson disliked those
whom he called a "phrase-tormenting fantastic chorus of poets." His
best verse shows depth of poetic thought, directness of expression,
and a strong sense of moral values.
The Victorian age has provided poetry to suit almost all tastes. In
striking contrast with those who wrestled with the eternal verities
are such poets and essayists as Austin Dobson (1840- ), long a clerk
of the London Board of Trade, and Arthur Symons (1865- ), a poet and
discriminating prose critic. Austin Dobson, who is fond of
eighteenth-century subjects, is at his best in graceful society verse.
His poems show the touch of a highly skilled metrical artist who has
been a careful student of French poetry. His ease of expression,
freshness, and humor charm readers of his verse without making serious
demands on their attention. His best poems are found in _Vignettes in
Rhyme_ (1873), _At the Sign of the Lyre_ (1885), and _Collected Poems_
(1913).
In choice of subject matter, Arthur Symons sometimes suggests the
Cavalier poets. He has often squandered his powers in acting on his
theory that it is one of the provinces of verse to record any
momentary mood, irrespective of its value. His deftness of touch and
acute poetic sensibility are evident in such short poems as _Rain on
the Down, Credo, A Roundel of Rest_ and _The Last Memory_.[5]
[Illustration: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. _From the drawing by himself,
National Portrait Gallery_.]
The Pre-Raphaelite Movement.--In 1848 three artists, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti (1828-1882), William Holman-Hunt (1827-1910), and John
Everett Millais (1829-1896), formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Others soon joined the movement which was primarily artistic, not
literary. Painting had become imitative. The uppermost question in the
artist's mind was, "How would Raphael or some other authority have
painted this picture?" The new school determined to paint things from
a direct study of nature, without a thought of the way in which any
one else would have painted them. They decided to assume the same
independence as the Pre-Raphaelite artists, who expressed their
individuality in their own way. Keats was the favorite author of the
new school. The artists painted subjects suggested by his poems, and
Rossetti thought him "the one true heir of Shakespeare."
When the Pre-Raphaelite paintings were violently attacked, Ruskin
examined them and decided that they conformed to the principles which
he had already laid down in the first two volumes of _Modern Painters_
(1843, 1846), so he wrote _Pre-Raphaelitism_ (1851) as the champion of
the new school. It has been humorously said that some of the painters
of this school, before beginning a new picture, took an oath "to paint
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."
The new movement in poetry followed this revolt in art. Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, the head of the literary Pre-Raphaelites, though born in
London, was of Italian parentage in which there was a strain of
English blood. His poem, _The Blessed Damozel_ (first published in
1850), has had the greatest influence of any Pre-Raphaelite literary
production. This poem was suggested by _The Raven_ (1845), the work of
the American, Edgar Allan Poe. Rossetti said:--
"I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the
grief of the lover an earth, and I determined to reverse the
conditions, and give utterance to the yearnings of the loved one in
heaven."
His Blessed Damozel, wearing a white rose, "Mary's gift," leaning out
from the gold bar of heaven, watching with sad eyes, "deeper than the
depth of waters stilled at even," for the coming of her lover, has
left a lasting impression on many readers. Simplicity, beauty, and
pathos are the chief characteristics of this poem, which, like
Bryant's _Thanatopsis_, was written by a youth of eighteen.
Painting was the chief work of Rossetti's life, but he wrote many
other poems. Some of the most characteristic of these are the two
semi-ballads, _Sister Helen_ and _The King's Tragedy, Rose Mary,
Love's Nocturn_, and _Sonnets_.
One of the earliest of these Sonnets, _Mary's Girlhood_, describes the
child as:--
"An angel-watered lily, that near God
Grows and is quiet."
His sister, Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), the author of much
religious verse, shows the unaffected naturalness of the new movement.
This stanza from her _Amor Mundi_ (_Love of the World_) is
characteristic:--
"So they two went together in glowing August weather,
The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right;
And dear she was to doat on, her swift feet seemed to float on
The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight."
William Morris (1834-1896), Oxford graduate, decorator,
manufacturer, printer, and poet, was born near London. He was
fascinated by _The Blessed Damozel_, and his first and most poetical
volume, _The Defence of Guinevere and Other Poems_ (1858), shows
Rossetti's influence. The simplicity insisted on by the new school is
evident in such lines as these from _Two Red Roses across the Moon_:--
"There was a lady lived in a hall,
Large in the eyes and slim and tall;
And ever she sung from noon to noon,
Two red roses across the moon."
Morris later wrote a long series of narrative poems, called _The
Earthly Paradise_ (1868-1870) and an epic, _Sigurd the Volsung_
(1876). He turned from Pre-Raphaelitism to become an earnest social
reformer.
In literature, the Pre-Raphaelite movement disdained the old
conventions and started a miniature romantic revival, which emphasized
individuality, direct expression, and the use of simple words. Its
influence soon became merged in that of the earlier and far greater
romantic school.
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, 1800-1859
[Illustration: THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. _From the painting by Sir
F. Grant, National Portrait Gallery_.]
Life.--A prominent figure in the social and political life of
England during the first part of the century was Thomas Babington
Macaulay, a man of brilliant intellectual powers, strict integrity of
character, and enormous capacity for work. He loved England and
gloried in her liberties and her commercial prosperity. He served her
for many years in the House of Commons, and he bent his whole energy
and splendid forensic talent in favor of the Reform Bill of 1832,
which secured greater political liberty for England.
He was not a theorizer, but a practical man of affairs.
Notwithstanding the fact that his political opinions were ready made
for him by the Whig party, his career in the House was never
"inconsistent with rectitude of intention and independence of spirit."
He voted conscientiously for measures, although he personally
sacrificed hundreds of pounds by so doing.
He was a remarkable talker. A single speech of his has been known to
change an entire vote in Parliament. Unlike Coleridge, he did not
indulge in monologue, but showed to finest advantage in debate. His
power of memory was wonderful. He often startled an opponent by
quoting from a given chapter and page of a book. He repeated long
passages from _Paradise Lost_; and it is said he could have restored
it complete, had it all been lost.
His disposition was sweet and his life altogether fortunate. His
biographer says of him: "Descended from Scotch Presbyterians
--ministers many of them--on his father's side, and from
a Quaker family on his mother's, he probably united as many guaranties
of 'good birth,' in the moral sense of the word, as could be found in
these islands at the beginning of the century."
He was born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, in 1800. He was
prepared for college at good private schools, and sent to Cambridge
when he was eighteen. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in
1825; but, in the following year, he determined to adopt literature as
a profession, owing to the welcome given to his _Essay on Milton_. As
he had written epics, histories, and metrical romances prior to the
age of ten, his choice of a profession was neither hasty nor
unexpected.
He continued from this time to write for the _Edinburgh Review_, but
literature was not the only field of his activity. He had a seat in
Parliament, and he held several positions under the Government. He was
never unemployed. Many of his _Essays_ were written before breakfast;
while the other members of the household were asleep.
He was a voracious reader. If he walked in the country or in London,
he always carried a book to read. He spent some years in the
government's service in India. On the long voyage over, he read
incessantly, and on the return trip he studied the German language.
He was beyond the age of forty when he found the leisure to begin his
_History of England_. He worked uninterruptedly, but broke down early,
dying at the age of fifty-nine.
With his large, fine physique, his sturdy common sense, his interest
in practical matters, and his satisfaction in the physical
improvements of the people, Macaulay was a fine specimen of the
English gentleman.
Essays and Poetry.--Like De Quincey, Macaulay was a frequent
contributor to periodicals. He wrote graphic essays on men of action
and historical periods. The essays most worthy of mention in this
class are _Sir William Temple, Lord Clive, Warren Hastings_, and
_William Pitt, Earl of Chatham_. Some of his essays on English writers
and literary subjects are still classic. Among these are _Milton,
Dryden, Addison, Southey's Edition of Pilgrim's Progress, Croker's
Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson_, and the biographical essays on
_Bunyan, Goldsmith_, and _Johnson_, contributed to the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_. Although they may lack deep spiritual insight into the
fundamental principles of life and literary criticism, these essays
are still deservedly read by most students of English history and
literature.
Gosse says: "The most restive of juvenile minds, if induced to enter
one of Macaulay's essays, is almost certain to reappear at the other
end of it gratified, and, to an appreciable extent, cultivated." These
_Essays_ have developed a taste for general reading in many who could
not have been induced to begin with anything dry or hard. Many who
have read Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ during the past fifty years say
that Macaulay first turned their attention to that fascinating work.
In the following quotation from an essay on that great biography, we
may note his love for interesting concrete statements, presented in a
vigorous and clear style:--
"Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fullness of his fame and in the
enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any
other man in history. Everything about him, his chat, his wig, his
figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling
walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked
his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish
sauce and veal pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea,
his trick of touching the posts as he walked ... all are as familiar
to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from
childhood."
Macaulay wrote some stirring ballad poetry, known as _Lays of Ancient
Rome_, which gives a good picture of the proud Roman Republic in its
valorous days. These ballads have something of Scott's healthy, manly
ring. They contain rhetorical and martial stanzas, which are the
delight of many boys; but they lack the spirituality and beauty that
are necessary for great poetry.
History of England.--Macaulay had for some time wondered why some
one should not do for real history what Scott had done for imaginary
history. Macaulay accordingly proposed to himself the task of writing
a history that should be more accurate than Hume's and possess
something of the interest of Scott's historical romances. In 1848
appeared the first two volumes of _The History of England from the
Accession of James II_. Macaulay had the satisfaction of seeing his
work, in sales and popular appreciation, surpass the novels. He
intended to trace the development of English liberty from James II. to
the death of George III.; but his minute method of treatment allowed
him to unfold only sixteen years (from 1685 to 1701) of that period,
so important in the constitutional and religious history of England.
Macaulay's pages are not a graveyard for the dry bones of history. The
human beings that figure in his chapters have been restored to life by
his touch. We see Charles II. "before the dew was off in St. James's
Park striding among the trees, playing with his spaniels, and flinging
corn to his ducks." We gaze for a moment with the English courtiers at
William III.:--
"They observed that the king spoke in a somewhat imperious tone,
even to the wife to whom he owed so much, and whom he sincerely
loved and esteemed. They were amused and shocked to see him,
when the Princess Anne dined with him, and when the first green peas
of the year were put on the table, devour the whole dish without
offering a spoonful to her Royal Highness, and they pronounced that
this great soldier and politician was no better than a low Dutch
bear."[6]
Parts of the _History_ are masterpieces of the narrator's art. A
trained novelist, unhampered by historical facts, could scarcely have
surpassed the last part of Macaulay's eighth chapter in relating the
trial of the seven Bishops. Our blood tingles to the tips of our
fingers as we read in the fifth chapter the story of Monmouth's
rebellion and of the Bloody Assizes of Judge Jeffreys.
Macaulay shirked no labor in preparing himself to write the _History_.
He read thousands of pages of authorities and he personally visited
the great battlefields in order to give accurate descriptions.
Notwithstanding such preparation, the value of his _History_ is
impaired, not only because he sometimes displays partisanship, but
also because he fails to appreciate the significance of underlying
social movements. He does not adopt the modern idea that history is a
record of social growth, moral as well as physical. While a graphic
picture of the exterior aspects of society is presented, we are given
no profound insight into the interior movements of a great
constitutional epoch. We may say of both Gibbon and Macaulay that they
are too often mere surveyors, rather than geologists, of the historic
field.[7] The popularity of the _History_ is not injured by this
method.
Macaulay's grasp of fact never weakens, his love of manly courage
never relaxes, his joy in bygone time never fails, his zeal for the
free institutions of England never falters, and his style is never
dull.
General Characteristics.--The chief quality of Macaulay's style is
its clearness. Contemporaries said that the printers' readers never
had to read his sentences a second time to understand them. This
clearness is attained, first, by the structure of his sentences. He
avoids entangling clauses, obscure references in his pronouns, and
long sentences whenever they are in danger of becoming involved and
causing the reader to lose his way. In the second place, if the idea
is a difficult one or not likely to be apprehended at its full worth,
Macaulay repeats his meaning from a different point of view and throws
additional light on the subject by varied illustrations.
In the third place, his works abound in concrete ideas, which are more
readily grasped than abstract ones. He is not content to write: "The
smallest actual good is better than the most magnificent promise of
impossibilities:" but he gives the concrete equivalent: "An acre in
Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia."
It is possible for style to be both clear and lifeless, but his style
is as energetic as it is clear. In narration he takes high rank. His
erudition, displayed in the vast stores of fact that his memory
retained for effective service in every direction, is worthy of
special mention.
While his excellences may serve as a model, he has faults that
admirers would do well to avoid. His fondness for contrast often leads
him to make one picture too bright and the other too dark. His love of
antithesis has the merit of arousing attention in his readers and of
crystallizing some thoughts into enduring epigrammatic form; but he is
often led to sacrifice exact truth in order to obtain fine contrasts,
as in the following:--
"The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the
bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."
Macaulay is more the apostle of the material than of the spiritual. He
lacked sympathy with theories and aspirations that could not
accomplish immediate practical results. While his vigorous,
easily-read pages exert a healthy fascination, they are not illumined
with the spiritual glow that sheds luster on the pages of the great
Victorian moral teachers, like Carlyle and Ruskin. He has, however,
had more influence on the prose style of the last half of the
nineteenth century than any other writer. Many continue to find in him
their most effective teacher of a clear, energetic form of expression.
JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN, 1801-1890
[Illustration: JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN. _From the painting by
Emmeline Deane_.]
Life.--Newman, who was born in London the year after Macaulay,
represents a different aspect of English thought. Macaulay was
thrilled in contemplating the great material growth and energy of the
nation. Newman's interest was centered in the development of the
spiritual life.
This son of a practical London banker was writing verses at nine, a
mock drama at twelve, and at fourteen, "he broke out into periodicals,
_The Spy_ and _Anti-Spy_, intended to answer one another." Of his
tendency toward mysticism in youth, he wrote:--
"I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true; my imagination ran on
unknown influences, on magical powers and influences. I thought life
might be a dream, or I an angel, and all this world a deception, my
fellow angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and
deceiving me with the semblance of a material world."
In his youth he imitated the style of Addison, Johnson, and Gibbon.
Few boys of his generation had as much practice in writing English
prose. At the age of fifteen years and ten months he entered Trinity
College, Oxford, from which he was graduated at nineteen. Two years
later he won an Oxford fellowship, and in 1824 he became a clergyman
of the Church of England.
The rest of his life belongs mainly to theological history. He became
one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement (1833-1841) toward stricter
High-Church principles, as opposed to liberalism, and in 1845 he
joined the Catholic Church. He was rector of the new Catholic
University at Dublin from 1854 to 1858. In 1879 he was made a
cardinal. Most of his later life was spent at Edgbaston (near
Birmingham) at the Oratory of St. Philip Neri.
Works and General Characteristics.--Newman was a voluminous writer.
An edition of his works in thirty-six volumes was issued during his
lifetime. Most of these properly belong to the history of theological
thought. His _Apologia pro Vita Sua_, which he wrote in reply to an
attack by Charles Kingsley, an Episcopal clergyman, is really, as its
sub-title indicates, _A History of His Religious Opinions_. This
intimate, sympathetic account of his religious experiences won him
many friends. He wrote two novels: _Loss and Gain_ (1848), which gives
an excellent picture of Oxford society during the last days of the
Oxford Movement, and _Callista_ (1852), a vivid story of an early
Christian martyr in Africa. His best-known hymn, _Lead kindly Light_,
remains a favorite with all Christian denominations. _The Dream of
Gerontius_ (1865) is a poem that has been called "the happiest effort
to represent the unseen world that has been made since the time of
Dante."
Those who are not interested in Newman's Episcopal or Catholic sermons
or in his great theological treatises will find some of his best prose
in the work known as _The Idea of a University_. This volume,
containing 521 pages, is composed of discussions, lectures, and
essays, prepared while he was rector of the University at Dublin.
Newman's prose is worthy of close study for the following reasons:--
(1) His style is a clear, transparent medium for the presentation of
thought. He molded his sentences with the care of an artist. He
said:--
"I have been obliged to take great pains with everything I have ever
written, and I often write chapters over and over again, besides
innumerable corrections and interlinear additions."
His definition of style is "a thinking out into language," not an
ornamental "addition from without." He employs his characteristic
irony in ridiculing those who think that "_one_ man could do the
thought and _another_ the style":--
"We read in Persian travels of the way in which young gentlemen
go to work in the East, when they would engage in correspondence
with those who inspire them with hope or fear. They cannot write one
sentence themselves; so they betake themselves to the professional
letter writer... The man of thought comes to the man of words; and
the man of words duly instructed in the thought, dips the pen of
desire into the ink of devotedness, and proceeds to spread it over
the page of desolation. Then the nightingale of affection is heard
to warble to the rose of loveliness, while the breeze of anxiety
plays around the brow of expectation. This is what the Easterns are
said to consider fine writing;
and it seems pretty much the idea of the school of critics to whom I
have been referring."[8]
It was a pleasure to him to "think out" expressions like the
following:--
"Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt."
"Calculation never made a hero."
"Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have
changed often."
(2) Like Macaulay, Newman excelled in the use of the concrete. In his
_Historical Sketches_, he imagines the agent of a London company sent
to inspect Attica:--
"He would report that the climate was mild; the hills were
limestone; there was plenty of good marble; more pasture land than
at first survey might have been expected, sufficient certainly for
sheep and goats; fisheries productive; silver mines once, but long
since worked out; figs fair; oil first rate; olives in profusion...
He would not tell how that same delicate and brilliant atmosphere
freshened up the pale olive till the olive forgot its monotony, and
its cheek glowed like the arbutus or the beech of the Umbrian
hills."
A general statement about superseding "the operation of the laws of
the universe in a multitude of ways" does not satisfy him. He
specifies in those ways when he records his belief that saints have
"raised the dead to life, crossed the sea without vessels, multiplied
grain and bread, cured incurable diseases."
(3) He modestly called himself a rhetorician, but he possessed also
the qualities of an acute thinker. He displayed unusual sagacity in
detecting the value of different arguments in persuasion. He could
arrange in proper proportion the most complex tangle of facts, so as
to make one clear impression. Such power made him one of the great
Victorian masters of argumentative prose.
THOMAS CARLYLE, 1795-1881
[Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE. _From the painting by James McNeil
Whistler, Glasgow Art Galleries_.]
Life.--Thomas Carlyle, who became one of the great tonic forces of
the nineteenth century, was also most interested in spiritual growth.
He specially emphasized the gospel of work as the only agency that
could develop the atmosphere necessary for such growth, and, though
deeply religious, he cared little for any special faith or creed.
The son of a Scotch stone mason, Thomas Carlyle was born in 1795 at
Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. At the age of fourteen, the boy was ready
for the University of Edinburgh, and he walked the eighty miles
between it and his home. After he was graduated, he felt that he could
not enter the ministry, as his parents wished. He therefore taught
while he was considering what vocation to follow.
In 1821 he met Jane Welsh, a brilliant and beautiful girl, descended
on her father's side from John Knox and on her mother's from William
Wallace. With the spirit of Wallace, she climbed in her girlhood up to
places that a boy would have considered perilous. When she was
forbidden to take up such a masculine study as Latin, she promptly
learned to decline a Latin noun. Carlyle had much trouble in winning
her; but she finally consented to be his wife, and they were married
in 1826. In 1828 they went to live for six lonely years on her farm at
Craigenputtock, sixteen miles north of Dumfries, where it was so quiet
that Mrs. Carlyle said she could hear the sheep nibbling the grass a
quarter of a mile away. Ralph Waldo Emerson visited them here and
formed a lifelong friendship with Carlyle. It was here that Carlyle
fought the intense spiritual battle of his early life, here that he
wrote his first great work, _Sartor Resartus_, which his wife
pronounced "a work of genius, dear."
[Illustration: CRAIGENPUTTOCK.]
It would be difficult to overestimate the beneficent influence which
Mrs. Carlyle exerted over her husband in those trying days of poverty
and spiritual stress. When her private correspondence was inadvisedly
published after his death, she unwittingly became her husband's
Boswell. For many years after the appearance of her letters, his
personality and treatment of her were more discussed than his
writings. Her references to marital unhappiness were for awhile given
undue prominence; but with the passing of time there came a
recognition of the fact that she was almost as brilliant a writer as
her husband, that, like him, she was frequently ill, and that in
expressing things in a striking way, she sometimes exercised his
prerogative of exaggeration. "Carlyle has to take a journey always
after writing a book," she declared, "and then gets so weary with
knocking about that he has to write another book to recover from it."
She once said that living with him was as bad as keeping a lunatic
asylum.
[Illustration: MRS. CARLYLE.]
Unfortunately, his early privations had caused him to have chronic
indigestion. He thought that the worst punishment he could suggest for
Satan would be to compel him to "try to digest for all eternity with
my stomach." This disorder rendered Carlyle peculiarly irascible and
explosive. His wife's quick temper sometimes took fire at his
querulousness; but her many actions, which spoke much louder than her
words, showed how deeply she loved him and how proud she was of his
genius. After their removal to London, she would quietly buy the
neighbors' crowing roosters, which kept him awake, and she prepared
food that would best suit his disordered digestion. She complained of
his seeming lack of appreciation. "You don't want to be praised for
doing your duty," he said. "I did, though," she wrote.
Carlyle's lack of restraint was most evident in little things. A
German who came from Weimar to see him was unfortunately admitted
during a period of stress in writing. A minute later the German was
seen rapidly descending the stairs and leaving the house. Carlyle
immediately hurried to the room where his wife was receiving a
visitor, and tragically asked what he had done to cause the Almighty
to send a German all the way from Weimar to wrench off the handles of
his cupboard doors. Carlyle did not then appear to realize that the
frightened German had mistaken the locked cupboard doors for the exit
from the room. On the other hand, when the great political economist,
John Stuart Mill, was responsible for the loss of the borrowed
manuscript of the first volume of _The French Revolution_, Carlyle
said to his wife: "Well, Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we
must endeavor to hide from him how very serious the business is to
us." To rewrite this volume cost Carlyle a year's exhausting labor.
In 1834 Carlyle went to London, where he lived for the rest of his
life in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. The publication of _The French
Revolution_ in 1837 made him famous. Other works of his soon appeared,
to add to his fame. His essays, collected and published in 1839 under
the title, _Critical and Miscellaneous Essays_, contained his
sympathetic _Essay on Burns_, which no subsequent writer has
surpassed. _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations_ (1845)
permanently raised England's estimation of that warrior statesman.
Carlyle's writings, his lectures on such subjects as _Heroes and Hero
Worship_ (1841), and his oracular criticism on government and life
made him as conspicuous a figure as Dr. Samuel Johnson had been in the
previous century. Carlyle's last great work, _History of Friedrich
II_., was fortunately finished in 1865, the year before his great
misfortune.
In the latter part of 1865 the students of the University of Edinburgh
elected Carlyle Lord Rector of that institution because they
considered him the man most worthy to receive such high honor. In the
spring of 1866, he went to Edinburgh to deliver his inaugural address.
Before he returned, he received a telegram stating that his wife had
died of heart failure while she was taking a drive in London. The blow
was a crushing one. The epitaph that he placed on her monument shows
his final realization of her worth and of his irreparable loss. He
said truly that the light of his life had gone out.
During his remaining years, he produced little of value except his
_Reminiscences_, a considerable part of which had been written long
before. Honors, however, came to him until the last. The Prussian
Order of Merit was conferred on him in 1874. The English government
offered him the Grand Cross of Bath and a pension, both of which he
declined. On his eightieth birthday, more than a hundred of the most
distinguished men of the English-speaking race joined in giving him a
gold medallion portrait. When he died in 1881, an offer of interment
in Westminster Abbey was declined and he was laid beside his parents
in the graveyard at Ecclefechan.
Sartor Resartus.--Like Coleridge, Carlyle was a student of German
philosophy and literature. His earliest work was _The Life of
Friedrich Schiller_ (1823-1825), which won for him the appreciation
and friendship of the German poet, Goethe.
Carlyle's first great original work, the one in which he best delivers
his message to humanity, is _Sartor Resartus_ (_The Tailor Patched_).
This first appeared serially in _Fraser's Magazine_ in 1833-1834. He
feigned that he was merely editing a treatise on _The Philosophy of
Clothes_, the work of a German professor, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. This
professor is really Carlyle himself; but the disguise gave him an
excuse for writing in a strange style and for beginning many of his
nouns with capitals, after the German fashion.
When _Sartor Resartus_ first appeared, Mrs. Carlyle remarked that it
was "completely understood and appreciated only by women and mad
people." This work did not for some years receive sufficient attention
in England to justify publication in book form. The case was different
in America, where the first edition with a preface by Emerson was
published in 1836, two years before the appearance of the English
edition. In the year of Carlyle's death, a cheap London edition of
30,000 copies was sold in a few weeks.
Carlyle calls _Sartor Resartus_ a "Philosophy of Clothes." He uses the
term "Clothes" symbolically to signify the outward expression of the
spiritual. He calls Nature "the Living Garment of God." He teaches us
to regard these vestments only as semblances and to look beyond them
to the inner spirit, which is the reality. The century's material
progress, which was such a cause of pride to Macaulay, was to Carlyle
only a semblance, not a sign of real spiritual growth. He says of the
utilitarian philosophy, which he hated intensely:--
"It spreads like a sort of Dog-madness; till the whole World-kennel
will be rabid."
The majority of readers cared nothing for the symbolism of _Sartor
Resartus_; but they responded to its effective presentation of the
gospel of work and faced the duties of life with increased energy.
Carlyle seemed to stand before them saying:--
"_Do the Duty which lies nearest thee_, which thou knowest to be a
Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer... The
Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal was never yet occupied by
man. Yes here, in this poor miserable, hampered, despicable Actual,
wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work
it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the
Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition
is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of ..."
The French Revolution.--In 1837 when Carlyle finished the third
volume of his historic masterpiece, _The French Revolution_, he handed
the manuscript to his wife for her criticism, saying: "This I could
tell the world: 'You have not had for a hundred years any book that
comes more direct and flamingly from the heart of a living man.'" His
Scotch blood boiled over the injustice to the French peasants. His
temperature begins to rise when he refers to the old law authorizing a
French hunter, if a nobleman, "to kill not more than two serfs."
Carlyle brings before us a vast stage where the actors in the French
Revolution appear: in the background, "five full-grown millions of
gaunt figures with their hungry faces"; in the foreground, one young
mother of seven children, "looking sixty years of age, although she is
not yet twenty-eight," and trying to respond to the call for seven
different kinds of taxes; and, also in the foreground, "a perfumed
Seigneur," taking part of the children's dinner. The scene changes;
the great individual actors in the Revolution enter: the tocsin
clangs; the stage is reddened with human blood and wreathed in flames.
We feel that we are actually witnessing that great historic tragedy.
Carlyle had something of Shakespeare's dramatic imagination, which
pierced to the heart of men and movements. More detailed and scholarly
histories of this time have been written; but no other historian has
equaled Carlyle in presenting the French Revolution as a human tragedy
that seems to be acted before our very eyes.
He did not attempt to write a complete history of the time. He used
the dramatist's legitimate privilege of selection. From a mass of
material that would have bewildered a writer of less ability, he chose
to present on the center of the stage the most significant actors and
picturesque incidents.
Carlyle's "Real Kings."--Carlyle believed that "universal history,
the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom
the history of the great men who have worked here." In accordance with
this belief, he studied, not the slow growth of the people, but the
lives of the world's great geniuses.
In his course of lectures entitled _Heroes and Hero Worship_ (1841),
he considers _The Hero as Prophet, The Hero as Poet, The Hero as
Priest_, and _The Hero as King_, and shows how history has been molded
by men like Mohammed, Shakespeare, Luther, and Napoleon. It is such
men as these whom Carlyle calls "kings," beside whom "emperors,"
"popes," and "potentates" are as nothing. He believed that there was
always living some man worthy to be the "real king" over men, and such
a kingship was Carlyle's ideal of government.
Oliver Cromwell was one of these "real kings." In the work entitled
_Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations_, Carlyle was the
first to present the character of the Protector in its full strength
and greatness and to demonstrate once for all that he was a hero whose
memory all Englishmen should honor.
The _Life of John Sterling_ (1851) is a fair, true, and touching
biography of Carlyle's most intimate friend, the man who had
introduced him to Jane Welsh. After reading this book, George Eliot
said she wished that more men of genius would write biographies.
Carlyle's next attempt at biography grew into the massive _History of
Friedrich II_. (1858-1865), which includes a survey of European
history in that dreary century which preceded the French Revolution.
"Friedrich is by no means one of the perfect demigods." He is "to the
last a questionable hero." However, "in his way he is a Reality," one
feels "that he always means what he speaks; grounds his actions, too,
on what he recognizes for the truth; and, in short, has nothing of the
Hypocrite or Phantasm." Despite his tyranny and his bloody career, he,
therefore, is another of Carlyle's "real kings." While this work is a
history of modern Europe, Friedrich is always the central figure. He
gives to these six volumes a human note, a glowing interest of
personal adventure, and a oneness that are remarkable in so vast a
work.
General Characteristics.--Carlyle's writings must be classed among
the great social and democratic influences of the nineteenth century,
in spite of the fact that he did not believe in pure democracy. It was
his favorite theory that a great man, like Oliver Cromwell, could
govern better than the unintelligent multitude. However much he
rebelled against democracy in government, his sympathies were with the
toiling masses. His work entitled _Past and Present_ (1843) suggests
the organization of labor and introduces such modern expressions as "a
fair day's wages for a fair day's work." In _Sartor Resartus_, he
specially honors "the toilworn Craftsman, that with earthmade
implement laboriously conquers the Earth and makes her Man's."
Carlyle had a large fund of incisive wit and humor, which often appear
in picturesque setting, as when he said to a physician: "A man might
as well pour his sorrows into the long hairy ear of a jackass." As the
satiric censor of his time, Carlyle found frequent occasion for
caustic wit. He lashed the age for its love of the "swine's trough,"
of "Pig-science, Pig-enthusiasm and devotion." Although his intentions
were good, his satire was not always just or discriminating, and he
was in consequence bitterly criticized. The following Dutch parable is
in some respects specially applicable to Carlyle:--
"There was a man once,--a satirist. In the natural course of time
his friends slew him and he died. And the people came and stood
about his corpse. 'He treated the whole round world as his
football,' they said indignantly, 'and he kicked it.' The dead man
opened one eye. 'But always toward the goal,' he said."
This goal toward which Carlyle struggled to drive humanity was the
goal of moral achievement. Young people on both sides of the Atlantic
responded vigorously to his appeals. The scientist John Tyndall said
to his students:--
"The reading of the works of two men has placed me here to-day.
These men are the English Carlyle and the American Emerson.
I must ever remember with gratitude that through three long, cold
German winters, Carlyle placed me in my tub, even when ice was on
its surface, at five o'clock every morning ... determined, whether
victor or vanquished, not to shrink from difficulty... They told me
what I ought to do in a way that caused me to do it, and all my
consequent intellectual action is to be traced to this purely moral
force... They called out. 'Act!' I hearkened to the summons."
Huxley aptly defined Carlyle as a "great tonic,--a source of
intellectual invigoration and moral stimulus."
Carlyle is not only a "great Awakener" but also a great literary
artist. His style is vivid, forceful, and often poetic. He loves to
present his ideas with such picturesqueness that the corresponding
images develop clearly in the reader's mind. Impressive epithets and
phrases abound. His metaphors are frequent and forceful. Mirabeau's
face is pictured as "rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled." In describing
Daniel Webster, Carlyle speaks of "the tanned complexion, that
amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of
brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown, the
mastiff-mouth, accurately closed." He formed many new compound words
after the German fashion, such as "mischief-joy"; and when he pleased,
he coined new words, like "dandiacal" and "croakery."
His frequent exclamations and inversions make his style seem choppy,
like a wave-tossed sea; but his sentences are so full of vigor that
they almost call aloud from the printed page. His style was not an
imitation of the German, but a characteristic form of expression,
natural to him and to his father.
The gift of verse was denied him, but he is one of the great prose
poets of the nineteenth century. Much of _Sartor Resartus_ is highly
poetic and parts of _The French Revolution_ resemble a dramatic poem.
JOHN RUSKlN, 1819-1900
[Illustration: JOHN RUSKIN. _From a photograph_]
Life.--The most famous disciple of Carlyle is John Ruskin, the only
child of wealthy parents, who was born in London in 1819. When he was
four years old the family moved to Herne Hill, a suburb south of
London, where his intense love of nature developed as he looked over
open fields, "animate with cow and buttercup," "over softly wreathing
distances of domestic wood," to the distant hills. His entertaining
autobiography, _Praeterita_ (1885-1889), relates how he was reared:--
"I had never heard my father's or mother's voice once raised in any
question with each other ... I had never heard a servant scolded ...
I obeyed word or lifted finger, of father or mother, simply as a
ship her helm ...nothing was ever promised me that was not given;
nothing ever threatened me that was not inflicted, and nothing ever
told me that was not true... Peace, obedience, faith; these three
for chief good; next to these, the habit of fixed attention with
both eyes and mind."
He grew up a solitary child without playmates. This solitude was
relieved when his parents took him on occasional trips through
England, Switzerland, and Italy. In _Praeterita_ he tells in an
inimitable way how the most portentious interruption to his solitude
came in 1836, when his father's Spanish partner came with his four
beautiful daughters to visit Herne Hill. These were the first girls in
his own station to whom he had spoken. "Virtually convent-bred more
closely than the maids themselves," says Ruskin, "I was thrown, bound
hand and foot, in my unaccomplished simplicity, into the fiery
furnace." In four days he had fallen so desperately in love with the
oldest, Clotilde Adèle Domecq, a "graceful blonde" of fifteen, that he
was more than four years in recovering his equilibrium. She laughed at
his protestations of love; but she repeatedly visited his parents, and
he did not give up hope until 1840, when she married a French baron.
His biographer says that the resulting "emotional strain doubtless was
contributory to his breakdown at Oxford" and to his enforced absence
for a recuperative trip on the continent.
His feminine attachments usually showed some definite results in his
writing. Miss Domecq's influence during the long period of his
devotion inspired him to produce much verse, which received such high
praise that his father desired him to become a poet. Although some of
Ruskin's verse was good, he finally had the penetration to see that it
ranked decidedly below the greatest, and he later laid down the
dictum: "with second-rate poetry _in quality_ no one ought to be
allowed to trouble mankind." In 1886, he had the humor to allude as
follows to Miss Domecq and her influence on his rimes, "...her sisters
called her Clotilde, after the queen-saint, and I, Adèle, because it
rimed to shell, spell, and knell."
Before he was graduated from Oxford in 1842, he wrote the beautiful
altruistic story, _The King of the Golden River_ (1841) for Euphemia
Gray, the young girl unhappily chosen by his mother to become his
wife. He married her in 1848, but was divorced from her in 1854. In
1855 she was married to the Pre-Raphaelite artist, John Millais.
Another attachment led to his writing some of the finest parts of his
most popular work, _Sesame and Lilies_ (1864). "I wrote Lilies," he
says, "to please one girl." He is here referring to Rose La Touche, a
bright, ardent, religious enthusiast, to whom he began to teach
drawing when she was ten years old. His affection for her grew so
strong that he finally asked her to become his wife. He was then a man
of forty while she was scarcely grown. Her religious scruples kept her
from definitely accepting him, because his belief was not sufficiently
orthodox. The attachment, however, continued until her early death.
She was in some respects a remarkable character, and he seems to have
had her in mind when he wrote in _Sesame and Lilies_ the "pearly"
passage about Shakespeare's heroines.
Although Ruskin's wealth relieved him from earning a living, he was
rarely idle. He studied, sketched, arranged collections of minerals,
prepared Turner's pictures for the National Gallery, became professor
of art at Oxford University, and wrote and lectured on art and social
subjects. His later activities, before his health gave way, were in
many respects similar to those of a twentieth-century social-service
worker. The realization of the misery that overwhelmed so much of
human life caused him to turn from art to consider remedies for the
evils that developed as the competitive industries of the nation
expanded. He endeavored to improve the condition of the working
classes in such ways as building sanitary tenements, establishing a
tea shop, and forming an altruistic association, known as St. George's
Guild. Nearly all his inheritance of £180,000 was expended in such
activities. The royalties coming from the sale of his books supported
him in old age.
Ruskin suffered from periods of mental depression during his last
years, which were spent at Brantwood on Coniston Water in the Lake
District. He died in 1900 at the age of eighty-one and was buried in
the cemetery at Coniston.
Art Works.--Ruskin published the first volume of _Modern Painters_
in 1843, the year after he was graduated from Oxford, and the fifth
and last volume, seventeen years later, in 1860. Many of his views
changed during this period; but he honestly declared them and left to
his readers the task of reconciling the divergent ideas in _Modern
Painters_. The purpose of this book was, in his own words, "to declare
the perfectness and eternal beauty of the work of God; and test all
works of man by concurrence with, or subjection to that."
_Modern Painters_ contains painstaking descriptions of God's handiwork
in cloud formation, mountain structure, tree architecture, and water
forms. In transferring these aspects of nature to canvas, Ruskin shows
the superiority of modern to ancient painting. He emphasizes the moral
basis of true beauty, and the necessity of right living as a
foundation for the highest type of art. Perhaps _Modern Painters_
achieved its greatest success in freeing men from the bondage of a
conventional criticism that was stifling art, in sending them direct
to nature as a guide, and in developing a love for her varied
manifestations of beauty.
Two of Ruskin's works on architecture, _The Seven Lamps of
Architecture_ (1849) and _The Stones of Venice_ (1851-1853), had a
decided effect on British taste in building. The three volumes of the
_The Stones of Venice_ give a history of the Venetians and of their
Gothic architecture. He aims to show that the beauty of such buildings
as St. Mark's Cathedral and the Doges' Palace is due to the virtue and
patriotism of the people, the nobility of the designers, and the joy
of the individual workmen, whose chisels made the very stones of
Venice tell beautiful stories.
The most important of his many other writings on art is the volume
entitled _Lectures on Art, Delivered before the University of Oxford,
1870_. In his famous _Inaugural_ of this series, he thus states what
he considers the central truth of his teaching: "The art of any
country is the exponent of its social and political virtues."
Social Works.--By turning from the criticism of art to consider the
cause of humanity, Ruskin shows the influence of the ethical and
social forces of the age. In middle life he was overwhelmed with the
amount of human misery and he determined to do his best to relieve it.
He wrote:--
"I simply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do
anything else that I like, and the very light of the morning sky,
when there is any--which is seldom, nowadays, near London--has
become hateful to me, because of the misery that I know of, and see
signs of, where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret
too bitterly."[9]
After 1860 his main efforts with both pen and purse were devoted to
improving the condition of his fellow men. His attempts to provide a
remedy led him to write _Unto this Last_ (1860), his first and most
complete work on political economy, _Munera Pulveris_ (1863), _Time
and Tide by Weare and Tyne_ (1868), _Fors Clavigera_ (1871-1884),
which is a long series of letters to workingmen, and a number of other
works, that also present his views on social questions.
He abhorred the old political economy, which he defined as "the
professed and organized pursuit of money." Instead of considering
merely the question of the production and distribution of articles,
his interest lay in the causes necessary to produce healthy, happy
workmen. It seemed to him that the manufacture "of souls" ought to be
"exceedingly lucrative." This statement and his maxim, "There is no
wealth but life," were called "unscientific." In his fine book of
essays, entitled _Sesame and Lilies_ (1864), he actually had printed
in red those pathetic pages describing how an old cobbler and his son
worked night and day to try to keep a little home of one room, until
the father died from exhaustion and the son had a film come over his
eyes.
John Ruskin, social reformer, has an important place in the social
movement of the nineteenth century. Many of his theories, which were
considered revolutionary, have since become the commonplace
expressions of twentieth-century social economists.
General Characteristics.--Ruskin was a champion of the
Pre-Raphaelite school of art. He used his powerful influence to free
art from its conventional fetters and to send people direct to nature
for careful loving study of her beautiful forms. His chief strength
lies in his moral enthusiasm and his love of the beautiful in nature.
Like his master, Carlyle, Ruskin is a great ethical teacher; but he
aimed at more definite results in the reformation of art and of social
life. He moralized art and humanized political economy.
Some of his art criticisms and social theories are fanciful, narrow,
and sometimes even absurd. He did not seem to recognize with
sufficient clearness the fact that immoral individuals might produce
great works of art; but no one can successfully assail his main
contention that there must be a connection between great art and the
moral condition of a people. His rejection of railroads and steam
machinery as necessary factors in modern civilization caused many to
pay little attention to any of his social theories. Much of the gospel
that he preached has, however, been accepted by the twentieth century.
He was in advance of his time when he said in 1870 that the object of
his art professorship would be accomplished if "the English nation
could be made to understand that the beauty which is indeed to be a
joy forever must be a joy for all."
At the age of fifty-eight, he thus summed up the principal work of his
life:--
"_Modern Painters_ taught the claim of all lower nature on the
hearts of men; of the rock, and wave, and herb, as a part of their
necessary spirit life... _The Stories of Venice_ taught the laws of
constructive Art, and the dependence of all human work or edifice,
for its beauty, on the happy life of the workman. _Under this Last_
taught the laws of that life itself and its dependence on the Sun of
Justice; the _Inaugural Oxford Lectures_, the necessity that it
should be led, and the gracious laws of beauty and labor recognized,
by the upper, no less than the lower classes of England; and,
lastly, _Fors Clavigera_ has declared the relation of these to each
other, and the only possible conditions of peace and honor, for low
and high, rich and poor..."
Ruskin has written remarkable descriptive prose. A severe English
critic, George Saintsbury, says of Ruskin's works "...they will he
found to contain the very finest prose (without exception and beyond
comparison) which has been written in English during the last half of
the nineteenth century... _The Stones of Venice_ ... is _the_ book of
descriptive prose in English, and all others toil after it in vain."
Ruskin could be severely plain in expression, but much of his earlier
prose is ornate and almost poetic. The following description of the
Rhone deserves to be ranked with the painter's art:--
"There were pieces of wave that danced all day as if Perdita were
looking on to learn; there were little streams that skipped like
lambs and leaped like chamois; there were pools that shook the
sunshine all through them, and were rippled in layers of overlaid
ripples, like crystal sand; here were currents that twisted the
light into golden braids, and inlaid the threads with turquoise
enamel; there were strips of stream that had certainly above the
lake been mill streams, and were busily looking for mills to turn
again."[10]
CHARLES DICKENS, 1812-1870
[Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS. _From a photograph taken in America,
1868_.]
Life.--The first of the great Victorian novelists to make his mark
was Charles Dickens. This great portrayer of child life had a sad
painful childhood. He was born in 1812 at Landport, a district of the
city of Portsmouth, Hampshire, where his father was a clerk in the
Navy Pay Office. John Dickens, the prototype of Mr. Micawber, was a
kind, well-intentioned man, who knew far better how to harangue his
large household of children than how to supply it with the necessities
of life. He moved from place to place, sinking deeper into poverty and
landing finally in a debtors' prison.
The dreams of a fine education and a brilliant career, which the
future novelist had fondly cherished in his precocious little brain,
had to be abandoned. At the age of eleven the delicate child was
called upon to do his part toward maintaining the family. He was
engaged, at six-pence a week, to paste labels on blacking bottles. He
was poorly clothed, ill fed, forced to live in the cheapest place to
be found, and to associate with the roughest kind of companions. This
experience was so bitter and galling to the sensitive boy that years
after, when he was a successful, happy man, he could not look back
upon it without tears in his eyes. Owing to a rupture between his
employer and the elder Mr. Dickens, Charles was removed from this
place and sent to school. At fifteen, however, he had to seek work
again. This time he was employed in an attorney's office at Gray's
Inn.
It was impossible, of course, for this ambitious boy to realize that
he was receiving an education in the dirty streets, the warehouses,
the tenements, and the prisons. Yet, for his peculiar bent of mind,
these furnished far richer stores of learning than either school or
college could have given. He had marvelous powers of observation. He
noted everything, from the saucy street waif to the sorrowful prison
child, from the poor little drudge to the brutal schoolmaster, and he
transplanted them from life to fiction, in such characters as Sam
Weller, Little Dorrit, the Marchioness, Mr. Squeers, and a hundred
others.
While in the attorney's office, Dickens began to study shorthand, in
order to become a reporter. This was the beginning of his success. His
reports were accurate and racy, even when they happened to be written
in the pouring rain, in a shaking stagecoach, or by the light of a
lantern. They were also promptly handed in at the office, despite the
fact that the stages sometimes broke down and left their passengers to
plod on foot through the miry roads leading into London. These reports
and newspaper articles soon attracted attention; and Dickens received
an offer for a series of humorous sketches, which grew into the famous
_Pickwick Papers_, and earned £20,000 for the astonished publishers.
He was able to make his own terms for his future novels. Fame came to
him almost at a bound. He was loved and toasted in England and America
before he had reached the age of thirty. When, late in life, he made
lecture tours through his own country, or through Scotland or America,
they were like triumphal marches.
In his prime Dickens was an energetic, high-spirited, fun-loving man.
He made a charming host, and was never happier than when engineering
theatrical entertainments at his delightful home, Gads Hill. He was
esteemed by all the literary men of London, and idolized by his
children and friends. As his strong personality was communicated to
his audiences and his readers, his death in 1870 was felt as a
personal loss throughout the English-speaking world.
[Illustration: DICKENS'S HOME, GADS HILL.]
Works.--_Pickwick Papers_ (1836-1837), Dickens's first long story,
is one of his best. Mr. Pickwick, with his genial nature, his simple
philosophy, and his droll adventures, and Sam Weller, with his ready
wit, his acute observations, and his almost limitless resources, are
amusing from start to finish. The book is brimful of its author's high
spirits. It has no closely knit plot, but merely a succession of
comical incidents, and vivid caricatures of Mr. Pickwick and his
friends. Yet the fun is so good-natured and infectious, and the
looseness of design is so frankly declared that the book possesses a
certain unity arising from its general atmosphere of frolic and
jollity.
_Oliver Twist_ (1837-1838) is a powerful story, differing widely from
_Pickwick Papers_. While the earlier work is delightful chiefly for
its humor, _Oliver Twist_ is strong in its pictures of passion and
crime. Bill Sykes the murderer, Fagin the Jew, who teaches the boys
deftness of hand in stealing, and poor Nancy, are drawn with such
power that they seem to be still actually living in some of London's
dark alleys. Little Oliver, born in the poor-house, clothed by
charity, taught by the evil genius of the streets, starved in body and
soul, is one of the many pathetic portraits of children drawn with a
sure and loving hand by Dickens. There are some improbable features
about the plot and some overwrought sentimental scenes in this story.
Dickens reveled in the romantic and found it in robbers' dens, in bare
poverty, in red-handed crime. The touching pathos and thrilling
adventures of _Oliver Twist_ make a strong appeal to the reader's
emotions.
With the prodigality of a fertile genius, Dickens presented his
expectant and enthusiastic public with a new novel on an average of
once a year for fourteen years; and, even after that, his productivity
did not fall off materially. The best and most representative of these
works are _Nicholas Nickleby_ (1838-1839), _Barnaby Rudge_ (1841),
_Martin Chuzzlewit_ (1843-1844), _Dombey and Son_ (1846-1848), _David
Copperfield_ (1849-1850), _Bleak House_ (1852-1853), _Hard Times_
(1854), _A Tale of Two Cities_ (1859), and _Our Mutual Friend_ (1864).
Of these, _David Copperfield_ is at once Dickens's favorite work and
the one which the world acclaims as his masterpiece. The novel is in
part an autobiography. Some incidents are taken directly from
Dickens's early experiences and into many more of David's childish
sorrows, boyish dreams, and manly purposes, Dickens has breathed the
breath of his own life. David Copperfield is thus a vitally
interesting and living character. The book contains many of Dickens's
most human men and women. Petted Little Em'ly with her pathetic
tragedy is handled with deep sympathy and true artistic delicacy.
Peggotty and Mrs. Steerforth are admirably drawn and contrasted. Mrs.
Gummidge's thoughtful care of Peggotty exhibits Dickens's fine
perception of the self-sacrificing spirit among the very poor. Uriah
Heep remains the type of the humble sycophant, and Mr. Micawber, the
representative of the man of big words and pompous manners. These
various characters and separate life histories are bound in same way
to the central story of David. General Characteristics.--England has
produced no more popular novelist than Charles Dickens. His novels
offer sound and healthy entertainment, hearty laughter, a wide range
of emotions, and a wonderful array of personalities. He presents the
universal physical experiences of life that are understood by all men,
and irradiates this life with emotion and romance. He keeps his
readers in an active state of feeling. They laugh at the broad humor
in Sam Weller's jokes; they chuckle over the sly exposure of Mr.
Pecksniff in _Martin Chuzzlewit_; they weep in _Dombey and Son_ over
poor Paul crammed with grown-up learning when he wanted to be just a
child; they rejoice over David Copperfield's escape from his
stepfather into the loving arms of whimsical, clever Aunt Betsey
Trotwood; they shiver with horror in _Our Mutual Friend_ during the
search for floating corpses on the dark river; and they feel more
kindly toward the whole world after reading _A Christmas Carol_ and
taking Tiny Tim into their hearts.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF MS. OF A CHRISTMAS CAROL.]
Dickens excels in the portrayal of humanity born and reared in poverty
and disease. He grasps the hand of these unfortunates in a brother's
clasp. He says in effect "I present to you my friends, the beggar, the
thief, the outcast. They are men worth knowing." He does not probe
philosophically into complex causes of poverty and crime. His social
creed was well formulated by Dowden in these words: "Banish from earth
some few monsters of selfishness, malignity, and hypocrisy, set to
rights a few obvious imperfections in the machinery of society,
inspire all men with a cheery benevolence, and everything will go well
with this excellent world of ours."
Every student of the science of society, however, owes a debt to
Dickens. He did what no science or knowledge or logic can do alone. He
reached the heart, awoke the conscience, and pierced the obtuseness of
the public. He aroused its protests because his genius painted prisons
and hovels and dens of vice so vividly that his readers actually
suffered from the scenes thus presented and wanted such horrors
abolished.
Dickens's infectious humor is a remarkable and an unfailing quality of
his works. It pervades entire chapters, colors complete incidents, and
displays the temper of the optimist through the darkest pictures of
human suffering.
A hypocrite is an abomination to Dickens. Speaking of Mr. Pecksniff in
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, Dickens says: "Some people likened him to a
direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never
goes there." His humor can be fully appreciated only by reading long
passages, such as the scene of Mr. Pickwick's trial, the descriptions
of Mr. Micawber and of Miss Betsey Trotwood, or the chapter on
Podsnappery in _Our Mutual Friend_. Dickens's humor has an exuberant
richness, which converts men and women into entertaining figures of
comedy.
Closely allied to his fund of humor is his capacity for pathos,
especially manifest in his treatment of childhood. Dickens has a large
gallery of children's portraits, fondly and sympathetically executed.
David Copperfield, enduring Mr. Murdstone's cruel neglect, Florence
Dombey pining for her father's love, the Marchioness starving upon
cold potatoes, Tom and Louise Gradgrind, stuffed with facts and
allowed no innocent amusement, and the waifs of Tom's-All-Alone dying
from abject poverty and disease, are only a few of the sad-eyed
children peering from the pages of Dickens and yearning for love and
understanding. He wrings the heart; but, happily, his books have
improved the conditions of children, not only in public asylums,
factories, and courts, but also in schools and homes.
Dickens's chief faults arise from an excess of sensibility and humor.
His soft heart and romantic spirit lead him to exaggerate. In such
passages as the death of Little Nell in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ and
the interviews between Dora and David in _David Copperfield_, Dickens
becomes mawkish and sentimental. While his power of portraiture is
amazing, he often overleaps the line of character drawing and makes
side-splitting caricatures of his men and women. They are remembered
too often by a limp or a mannerism of speech, or by some other little
peculiarity, instead of by their human weaknesses and accomplishments.
Dickens is not a master in the artistic construction of his plots. The
majority of his readers do not, however, notice this failing because
he keeps them in such a delightful state of interest and suspense by
the sprightliness with which he tells a story.
He was a very rapid writer, and his English is consequently often
careless in structure and in grammar. As he was not a man of books, he
never acquired that half-unconscious knowledge of fine phrasing which
comes to the careful student of literature. No novelist has, however,
told more graphically such appealing stories of helpless childhood and
of the poor and the outcast.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, 1811-1863
[Illustration: WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. _From the painting by
Samuel Laurence, National Portrait Gallery_.]
Life_.--Though nearly a year older than Dickens, Thackeray made his
way to popularity much more slowly. These two men, who became friends
and generous rivals, were very different in character and disposition.
Instead of possessing the self-confidence, energy, and industry that
brought Dickens fame in his youth, Thackeray had to contend with a
somewhat shy and vacillating temperament, with extreme modesty, and
with a constitutional aversion to work.
Born in Calcutta in 1811, he was sent to England to be educated. He
passed through Charter House and went one year to Cambridge. He was
remembered by his school friends for his skill in caricature
sketching. He hoped to make painting a profession and went to Paris to
study; but he never attained correctness in drawing, and when he
offered to illustrate the works of Dickens, the offer was declined.
Thackeray certainly added to the charm of his own writings by his
droll and delightful illustrations.
When Thackeray came of age in 1832, he inherited a small fortune,
which he soon lost in an Indian bank and in newspaper investments. He
was then forced to overcome his idle, procrastinating habits. He
became a literary hack, and contributed humorous articles to such
magazines as _Fraser_ and _Punch_. While his pen was causing mirth and
laughter in England, his heart was torn by suffering. His wife, whom
he had married in 1837, became insane. He nursed her patiently with
the vain hope that she could recover; but he finally abandoned hope
and put her in the care of a conscientious attendant. His home was
consequently lonely, and the club was his only recourse. Here, his
broad shoulders and kindly face were always greeted with pleasure;
for his affable manners and his sparkling humor, which concealed an
aching heart, made him a charming companion.
[Illustration: CARICATURE OF THACKERAY BY HIMSELF.]
It is pleasant to know that the later years of his life were happier.
They were cheered by the presence of his daughters, and were free from
financial worries. He had the satisfaction of knowing that, through
the sales of his book; and the returns from his lectures, he had
recovered his lost fortune.
Novels.--_Vanity Fair_ (1847-1848) is Thackeray's masterpiece. For
the lifelikeness of its characters, it is one of the most remarkable
creations in fiction. Thackeray called this work "A Novel without a
Hero." He might have added "and without a heroine"; for neither clever
Becky Sharp nor beautiful Amelia Sedley satisfies the requirements for
a heroine. No perfect characters appear in the book, but it is
enlivened with an abundance of genuine human nature. Few people go
through life without meeting a George Osborne, a Mrs. Bute Crawley, or
a Mrs. Sedley. Even a penurious, ridiculous, old Sir Pitt Crawley is
sometimes seen. The greatest stroke of genius in the book, however, is
the masterly portrayal of the artful, scheming Becky Sharp, who
alternately commands respect for her shrewdness and repels by her
moral depravity.
In _Vanity Fair_ certain classes of society are satirized. Their
intrigues, frivolities, and caprices are mercilessly dealt with.
Thackeray probes almost every weakness, vanity, or ambition that leads
humanity to strive for a place in society, to long for a bow from a
lord, and to stint in private in order to shine in public. He uncovers
the great social farce of life, which is acted with such solemn
gravity by the snobs, the hypocrites, and the other superficial
_dramatis personae_. Amid these satirized frivolities there appear
occasional touches of true pathos and deep human tragedy, which are
strangely effective in their unsympathetic surroundings.
[Illustration: THACKERAY'S HOME WHERE VANITY FAIR WAS WRITTEN.]
Thackeray gives in _Henry Esmond_ (1852) an enduring picture of high
life in the eighteenth century. This work is one of the great
historical novels in our language. The time of queen Anne is
reconstructed with remarkable skill. The social etiquette, the ideals
of honor, the life and spirit of that bygone day, reappear with a
powerful vividness. Thackeray even went so far as to disguise his own
natural, graceful style, and to imitate eighteenth-century prose.
_Henry Esmond_ is a dangerous rival of _Vanity Fair_. The earlier work
has a freshness of humor and a spontaneity of manner that are not so
apparent in _Henry Esmond_. On the other hand, _Esmond_ has a superior
plot and possesses a true hero.
In _The Newcomes_ (1854-1855), Thackeray exhibits again his incisive
power of delineating character. This book would continue to live if
for nothing except the simple-hearted, courtly Colonel Newcome. Few
scenes in English fiction are more affecting than those connected with
his death. The accompanying lines will show what a simple pathos
Thackeray could command:--
"At the usual evening hour the chapel bell begin to toll, and
Thomas Newcome's hands outside the bed feebly beat time--and just
as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face,
and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said, '_Adsum_'--and
fell back. It was the word we used at school when names were called;
and, lo! he whose heart was as that of a little child had answered
to his name, and stood in the presence of the Master!"
_The History of Pendennis_ (1849) and _The Virginians_ (1857-1859) are
both popular novels and take rank inferior only to the author's three
greatest works. _The Virginians_ is a sequel to _Esmond_, and carries
the Castlewood family through adventures in the New World.
Essays.--Thackeray will live in English literature as an essayist as
well as a novelist. _The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century_
(1853) and _The Four Georges_ (1860) are among the most delightful
essays of the age. The author of _Henry Esmond_ knew Swift, Addison,
Fielding, and Smollett, almost as one knows the mental peculiarities
of an intimate friend. In _The English Humorists of the Eighteenth
Century_, Thackeray writes of their conversations, foibles, and strong
points of character, in a most easy and entertaining way. There is a
constant charm about his manner, which, without effort or display of
learning, brings the authors vividly before the reader. In addition to
this presentation of character, the essays contain appreciative
literary criticism. The essence of the humor in these
eighteenth-century writers is distilled in its purest, most delicate
flavor, by this nineteenth-century member of their brotherhood.
_The Four Georges_ deals with England's crowned heads in a satiric
vein, which caused much comment among Thackeray's contemporaries. The
satire is, however, mild and subdued, never venomous. For example, he
says in the essay on George III.:--
"King George's household was a model of an English gentleman's
household. It was early; it was kindly; it was charitable; it was
frugal; it was orderly; it must have been stupid to a degree which I
shudder now to contemplate. No wonder all the princes ran away from
the lap of that dreary domestic virtue. It always rose, rode, dined,
at stated intervals. Day after day was the same. At the same hour at
night the King kissed his daughters' jolly cheeks; the Princesses
kissed their mother's hand; and Madame Thielke brought the royal
nightcap."
General Characteristics.--Dickens and Thackeray have left graphic
pictures of a large portion of contemporary London life. Dickens
presents interesting pictures of the vagabonds, the outcasts, and the
merchants, and Thackeray portrays the suave, polite leisure class and
its dependents.
Thackeray is an uncompromising realist and a satirist. He insisted
upon picturing life as he believed that it existed in London society;
and, to his satiric eye, that life was composed chiefly of the small
vanities, the little passions, and the petty quarrels of commonplace
people, whose main objects were money and title. He could conceive
noble men and women, as is proved by Esmond, Lady Castlewood, and
Colonel Newcome; but such characters are as rare in Thackeray as he
believed they were in real life. The following passage upon mankind's
fickleness is a good specimen of his satiric vein in dealing with
human weakness:--
"There are no better satires than letters. Take a bundle of your
dear friend's letters of ten years back--your dear friend whom you
hate now. Look at a pile of your sister's! How you clung to each
other until you quarreled about the twenty-pound legacy!... Vows,
love promises, confidence, gratitude,--how queerly they read after a
while!...The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that faded
utterly in a couple of days, and left the paper clean and blank, so
that you might write on it to somebody else."
The phases of life that he describes have had no more subtle
interpreter. He does not label his characters with external marks, but
enters into communion with their souls. His analytic method of laying
bare their motives and actions is strictly modern. His great master,
Fielding, would have been baffled by such a complex personality as
Becky Sharp. Amid the throng of Thackeray's men and women, there are
but few who are not genuine flesh and blood.
The art of describing the pathetic is unfailing in Thackeray. He never
jars upon the most sensitive feelings nor wearies them by too long a
treatment. With a few simple but powerful expressions he succeeds in
arousing intense emotions of pity or sorrow. He has been wrongly
called a cynic; for no man can be a cynic who shows Thackeray's
tenderness in the treatment of pathos.
Thackeray is master of a graceful, simple prose style. In its ease and
purity, it most resembles that of Swift, Addison, or Goldsmith.
Thackeray writes as a cultured, ideal, old gentleman may be imagined
to talk to the young people, while he sits in his comfortable armchair
in a corner by the fireplace. The charm of freshness, quaintness, and
colloquial familiarity is seldom absent from the delightfully natural
pages of Thackeray.
GEORGE ELIOT, 1819-1880
[Illustration: GEORGE ELIOT. _From a drawing by Sir E.W. Burton,
National Portrait Gallery._]
Life.--Mary Ann Evans, known to her family as Marian and to her
readers as George Eliot, was born in 1819, at South Farm, in Arbury,
Warwickshire, about twenty-two miles north of Stratford-on-Avon. A few
months later, the family moved to a spacious ivy-covered farmhouse at
Griff, some two miles east, where the future novelist lived until she
was twenty-two.
She was a thoughtful, precocious child. She lived largely within
herself, passed much time in reverie, and pondered upon deep problems.
She easily outstripped her schoolmates in all mental accomplishments,
and, from the first, gave evidence of a clear, strong intellect.
The death of her mother and the marriage of a sister left the entire
care of the house and dairy to Marian before she was seventeen years
old. Her labors were quite heavy for the neat six years. At the end of
that time, she and her father moved to Foleshill, near Coventry, where
she had ample leisure to pursue her studies and music. At Foleshill,
she came under the influence of free-thinking friends and became an
agnostic, which she remained through the rest of her life. This home
was again broken up in 1849 by the death of her father. Through the
advice of friends she sought comfort in travel on the continent.
Upon her return, she settled in London as assistant editor of the
_Westminster Review_. By this time she had become familiar with five
languages, had translated abstruse metaphysical books from the German
into English, and had so thoroughly equipped her naturally strong
intellect that she was sought after in London by such men as Herbert
Spencer and George Henry Lewes. A deep attachment sprang up between
Mr. Lewes and Miss Evans, and they formed an alliance that lasted
until his death.
George Eliot's early literary labors were mainly critical and
scientific, being governed by the circle in which she moved. When she
came under the influence of Mr. Lewes, she was induced to attempt
creative work. Her novels, published under the pen name of George
Eliot, quickly became popular. Despite this success, it is doubtful
whether she would have possessed sufficient self-reliance to continue
her work without Mr. Lewes's encouragement and protecting love, which
shielded her from contact with publishers and from a knowledge of
harsh criticisms.
Their companionship was so congenial that her friends were astonished
when she formed another attachment after his death in 1878, and
married Mr. Cross. Her husband said that her affectionate nature
required some deep love to which to cling. She had never been very
robust, and, during her later years, she was extremely frail. She died
in 1880.
[Illustration: GEORGE ELIOT'S BIRTHPLACE.]
Works.--George Eliot was fast approaching forty when she found the
branch of literature in which she was to achieve fame. Her first
volume of stories, _Scenes of Clerical Life_ (1858), showed decisively
that she was master of fiction writing. Three novels followed rapidly,
_Adam Bede_ (1859), _The Mill on the Floss_ (1860), and _Silas Marner_
(1861). Her mind was stored with memories of the Midland counties,
where her young life was spent; and these four books present with a
powerful realism this rich rural district and its quaint inhabitants,
who seem flushed with the warmth of real life.
_Adam Bede_ is the freshest, healthiest, and most delightful of her
books. This story leaves upon the memory a charming picture of peace
and contentment, with its clearly drawn and interesting characters,
its ideal dairy, the fertile stretches of meadow lands, the squire's
birthday party, the harvest supper, and the sweet Methodist woman
preaching on the green.
_The Mill on the Floss_ also gives a fine picture of village life.
This novel is one of George Eliot's most earnest productions. She
exhibits one side of her own intense, brooding girlhood, in the
passionate heroine, Maggie Tulliver. There is in this tragic story a
wonderfully subtle revelation of a young nature, which is morbid,
ambitious, quick of intellect, and strong of will, and which has no
hand firm enough to serve as guide at the critical period of her life.
_Silas Marner_, artistically considered, is George Eliot's
masterpiece. In addition to the ruddy glow of life in the characters,
there is an idyllic beauty about the pastoral setting, and a poetic,
half mystic charm about the weaver's manner of connecting his gold
with his bright-haired Eppie. The slight plot is well planned and
rounded, and the narrative is remarkable for ease and simplicity.
_Romola_ (1863) is a much bolder flight. It is an attempt to present
Florence of the fifteenth century, to contrast Savonarola's ardent
Christianity with the Greek aestheticism of the Medicis, and to show
the influence of the time upon two widely different characters, Romola
and Tito Melema. This novel is the greatest intellectual achievement
of its author; but it has neither the warmth of life, nor the vigor of
her English stories. Though no pains is spared to delineate Romola,
Tito, and the inspiring monk, Savonarola, yet they do not possess the
genuineness and reality that are felt in her Warwickshire characters.
_Middlemarch_ (1871-1872) and _Daniel Deronda_ (1876) marked the
decline of George Eliot's powers. Although she still possessed the
ability to handle dialogue, to analyze subtle complex characters, and
to attain a philosophical grasp of the problems of existence, yet her
weakening powers were shown in the length of tedious passages, in an
undue prominence of ethical purpose, in the more studied and, on the
whole, duller characters, and in the prolixity of style.
George Eliot's poetry does not bear comparison with her prose. _The
Spanish Gypsy_ (1868) is her most ambitious poem, and it contains some
fine dramatic passages. Her most beautiful poem is the hymn
beginning:--
"Oh, may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence!"
There is a strain of noble thought and lofty feeling in her poems, and
she rises easily to the necessary passion and fervor of verse; but her
expression is hampered by the metrical form.
General Characteristics.--George Eliot is more strictly modern in
spirit than either of the other two great contemporary novelists. This
spirit is exhibited chiefly in her ethical purpose, her scientific
sympathies, and her minute dissection of character.
Her writings manifest her desire to benefit human beings by convincing
them that nature's laws are inexorable, and that an infraction of the
moral law will be punished as surely as disobedience to physical laws.
She strives to arouse people to a knowledge of hereditary influences,
and to show how every deed brings its own results, and works, directly
or indirectly, toward the salvation or ruin of the doer. She throws
her whole strength into an attempt to prove that joy is to be found
only in strict attendance upon duty and in self-renunciation. In order
to carry home these serious lessons of life, she deals with powerful
human tragedies, which impart a somberness of tone to all her novels.
In her early works she treats these problems with artistic beauty; but
in her later books she often forgets the artist in the moralist, and
uses a character to preach a sermon.
The analytical tendency is pronounced in George Eliot's works, which
exhibit an exhaustive study of the feelings, the thoughts, the dreams,
and purposes of the characters. They become known more through
description than through action.
A striking characteristic of her men and women is their power to grow.
They do not appear ready-made and finished at the beginning of a
story, but, like real human beings amid the struggles of life, they
change for the better or the worse. Tito Melema in _Romola_ is an
example of her skill in evolving character. At the outset, he is a
beautiful Greek boy with a keen zest for pleasure. His selfishness,
however, which betrays itself first in ingratitude to his benefactor,
leads step by step to his complete moral degradation. The consequences
of his deeds entangle him finally in such a network of lies that he is
forced to betray "every trust that was reposed in him, that he might
keep himself safe."
George Eliot occasionally brightens the seriousness of her works with
humor. Her stories are not permeated with joyousness, like those of
Dickens, nor do they ripple with quiet amusement, like the novels of
Thackeray; but she puts witty and aphoristic sayings into the
conversations of the characters. The scene at the "Rainbow" inn is
bristling with mother wit. Mr. Macey observes:--
"'There's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of
himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be
two 'pinions about a cracked bell if the bell could hear
itself.'"[11]
Great precision and scholarlike correctness mark the style of George
Eliot. Her vocabulary, though large, is too full of abstract and
scientific terms to permit of great flexibility and idiomatic purity
of English. She is master of powerful figures of speech, original,
epigrammatic turns of expression, and, sometimes, of a stirring
eloquence.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, 1850-1894
[Illustration: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _From a photograph_.]
Life.--By preferring romantic incident to the portrayal of
character, Stevenson differed from his great Victorian predecessors in
the field of fiction. He was born in 1850 in the romantic city of
Edinburgh, which he has described so well in his _Picturesque Notes on
Edinburgh_. Being an invalid from early childhood, he was not sent
regularly to school; yet he was ready at the age of seventeen to enter
Edinburgh University. He says of himself that in college he neglected
all the studies that did not appeal to him, to read with avidity
English poetry and fiction, Scottish legend and history. During his
summer vacations he worked at lighthouse engineering. The out-of-door
life was just what he liked; but the office work was irksome to him.
When finally he made his dislike known, his father, although bitterly
disappointed at his son's aversion to the calling followed by two
generations of Stevensons, nevertheless consented to a change; and
they compromised on the law. In 1875 Stevenson succeeded in gaining
admission to the bar; but he soon realized that he would never feel at
home in this profession. Moreover, he had always wanted to be a
writer. He says:--
"All through my boyhood and youth...
I was always busy on my own private end,
which was to learn to write. I kept always
two books in my pocket, one to read, one
to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy
fitting what I saw with appropriate words.
...Thus I lived with words. And what I
thus wrote was for no ulterior use; it was
written consciously for practice."
[Illustration: STEVENSON AS A BOY.]
The next year, therefore, he decided to devote himself entirely to
literature.
He was by heredity predisposed to weak lungs. For the greater part of
his life he moved from place to place, searching for some location
that would improve his health and allow him to write. He lived for a
while in Switzerland, in the south of France, in the south of England,
in the Adirondack Mountains, and in California. In 1880 he married in
California, Mrs. Fanny Osbourne, of whom he wrote:--
"Steel-true and blade-straight,
The great artificer made my mate."
By a former marriage she had a son, who, at the age of thirteen,
inspired Stevenson to write that exciting romance of adventure,
_Treasure Island_, published in book form in 1883. This and the
remarkable story, _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_
(1886), made him so famous that when he visited New York in 1887, a
newspaper there offered him $10,000 for a weekly article during the
year.
He preferred to accept an offer of $3500 for twelve monthly articles
for a magazine.
The most romantic part of his life began in 1888, when he chartered a
yacht in San Francisco for a cruise among the South Sea Islands. He
had the enthusiasm of a boy for this trip, which was planned to
benefit his health. Almost as many adventures befell him as Robinson
Crusoe. At one time Stevenson became so ill that he was left with his
wife on one of the Society Islands while the yacht sailed away for
repairs. Before the boat returned, both his food and money were
exhausted, and he and Mrs. Stevenson were forced to live on the bounty
of the natives, who adopted him into one of their tribes and gave him
the name of Tusitala.
He wandered for three and a half years among the islands of the
Southern Pacific, visiting Australia twice. On one trip he called at
thirty-three small coral islands, and wrote, "Hackney cabs have more
variety than atolls."
He finally selected for his residence the island of Samoa, where he
spent the last three and a half years of his life. He died suddenly in
his forty-fifth year, and was buried on the summit of a Samoan
mountain near his home.
In 1893 he wrote to George Meredith:--
"In fourteen years I have not had a day's real health; I have
wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work
unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written
in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for
weakness..."
Many have found in Stevenson's life an inspiration to overcome
obstacles, to cease complaining, and to bear a message of good cheer.
These lines from his volume of poems called _Underwoods_ (1887), are
especially characteristic:--
"If I have faltered more or less
In my great task of happiness;
If I have moved among my race
And shown no glorious morning face;
If beams from happy human eyes
Have moved me not; if morning skies,
Books, and my food, and summer rain
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:--
Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take
And stab my spirit broad awake."
Works.--Stevenson wrote entertaining travels, such as _An Inland
Voyage_ (1878), the record of a canoe journey from Antwerp to
Pontoise, _Travels with a Donkey through the Cévennes_ (1879), and _In
the South Seas_ (published in book form in 1896). Early in life he
wrote many essays, the best of which are included in the volumes,
_Virginibus Puerisque_ (_To Girls and Boys_, 1881) and _Familiar
Studies of Men and Books_ (1882). Valuable papers presenting his views
of the technique of writing may be found in the volumes called
_Memories and Portraits_ (1887) and _Essays in the Art of Writing_
(collected after his death). There is a happy blending of style,
humor, and thought in many of these essays. Perhaps the most unusual
and original of all is _Child's Play_ (_Virginibus Puerisque_). This
is a psychological study, which reveals one of his strongest
characteristics, the power of vividly recalling the events and
feelings of childhood.
"When my cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a
device to enliven the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, and
explained it to be a country continually buried under snow. I took
mine with milk, and explained it to be a country suffering gradual
inundation. You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an
island still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with
snow; ...and how, in fine, the food was of altogether secondary
importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we
seasoned it with these dreams."
The simplicity and apparent artlessness of his _A Child's Garden of
Verse_ (1885) have caused many critics to neglect these poems; but the
verdict of young children is almost unanimous against such neglect.
These songs
"Lead onward into fairy land,
Where all the children dine at five,
And all the playthings come alive."
It is quite possible that the verses in this little volume may in the
coming years appeal to more human beings than all the remainder of
Stevenson's work. He and his American contemporary, Eugene Field
(1850-1895), had the peculiar genius to delight children with a type
of verse in which only a very few poets have excelled.
Boys and young men love Stevenson best for his short stories and
romances. After a careful study of Poe and Hawthorne, the American
short story masters, Stevenson made the English impressionistic short
story a more artistic creation. Some of the best of his short stories
are _Will o' the Mill_ (1878), _The Sire de Malétroit's Door_ (1878),
and _Markheim_ (1885). His best-known single production, _The Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, is really a short story that
presents a remarkable psychological study of dual personality.
The short stories served as an apprenticeship for the longer romances,
of which _Treasure Island_ is the best constructed and the most
interesting. Among a number of other romances, the four which deal
with eighteenth-century Scottish history are the best: _Kidnapped_
(1886), _The Master of Ballantrae_ (1889), _David Balfour_
(_Catriona_, 1893), and the unfinished _Weir of Hermiston_, published
two years after his death.
[Illustration: EDINBURGH MEMORIAL OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _By
Augustus St. Candeus._]
General Characteristics.--Unlike the majority of the Victorian
writers of fiction, Stevenson preferred the field of romance and
adventure. It is natural to compare him with Scott, who showed a far
wider range, both in subject matter and in the portrayal of human
beings. Stevenson, however, surpassed Scott in swift delineation of
incident, in pictorial vividness, and in literary form. Scott dashed
off some of his long romances in six weeks; while Stevenson said that
his printer's copy was sometimes the result of ten times that amount
of writing. The year before he died, he spent three weeks in writing
twenty-four pages.
Stevenson's romances are remarkable for artistic style, clearness of
visual image, and boyish love of adventure. He made little attempt to
portray more than the masculine half of the human race. His simple
verses possess rare power to charm children. The most evident quality
of all his prose is its artistic finish.
GEORGE MEREDITH, 1828-1909
[Illustration: GEORGE MEREDITH. _From the painting by G.F. Watts,
National Portrait Gallery_.]
Life.--George Meredith was the only child of a Welsh father and an
Irish mother. He was born in 1828 over his grandfather's tailor shop
in Portsmouth, Hampshire. The father proved incompetent in handling
the excellent tailoring business to which he fell heir; and he soon
abandoned his son. The mother died when the boy was five years old,
and he was then cared for by relatives. When he was fourteen, he was
sent to school in Germany for two years; but he did not consider his
schooling of much benefit to him and he was forced to educate himself
for his life's work.
On his return to England, he was articled to a London solicitor; but
by the age of twenty-one, Meredith had abandoned the law and had begun
the literary life which was to receive his undivided attention for
nearly sixty years. The struggle was at first extremely hard. Some
days, indeed, he is said to have lived on a single bowl of porridge.
While following his work as a novelist, he tried writing for
periodicals, served as a newspaper correspondent, and later became a
literary adviser for a large London publishing firm. In this capacity,
he proved a sympathetic friend to many a struggling young author.
Thomas Hardy says that he received from Meredith's praise sufficient
encouragement to persevere in the field of literature.
Meredith's marriage in 1849 was unhappy and resulted in a separation.
Three years after his wife's death, which occurred in 1861, he married
a congenial helpmate and went to live in Flint Cottage, near Burford
Bridge, Surrey, where most of his remaining years were spent.
Not until late in life were the returns from his writings sufficient
to relieve him from unceasing daily toil at his desk. He was widely
hailed as a literary master and recognized as a force in fiction
before he attained financial independence. After the death of
Tennyson, Meredith was elected president of the Society of British
Authors. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, his reply to the
_Who's Who_ query about his recreations was, "a great reader,
especially of French literature; has in his time been a great walker."
During his last sixteen years of life, he suffered from partial
paralysis and was compelled to abandon these long walks, which had
been a source both of recreation and of health.
He died in 1909 at the age of eighty-one and was laid beside his wife
in the Dorking cemetery. The following words from his novel,
_Vittoria_, are on his tombstone: "Life is but a little holding, lent
to do a mighty labor."
Poetry.--During his long career, Meredith wrote much verse, which
was collected in 1912 in a volume of 578 pages.
The quality of his poetry is very uneven. In such exquisite poems as
_Love in the Valley_, _The Lark Ascending_, and _Melanthus_, the fancy
and melody are artistically intertwined. Many have admired the
felicity of the description and the romance of the sentiment in this
stanza from _Love in the Valley_:--
"Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,
Swift as the swallow along the river's light
Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets,
Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.
Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops,
Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun,
She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer,
Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!"
Some of his songs are pure music, and an occasional descriptive
passage in his verse shows the deftness of touch of a skilled lyrical
poet. Such poems as _Jump-to-Glory Jane_, _Juggling Jerry_, _The
Beggar's Soliloquy_, and _The Old_ _Chartist_, are character sketches
of humble folk and show genuine pathos and humor. In his poetry,
Meredith is, however, more often the moralist and philosopher than the
singer and simple narrator. He treats of love, life, and death as
metaphysical problems. He ponders over the duties of mankind and the
greatest sources of human strength and courage. He roams through a
region that seems timeless and spaceless. He "neighbors the
invisible." The obscurities in many of these poems are due to the
abstract nature of the subject matter, to excessive condensation of
thought, to frequent omission of connecting words, and to an abundance
of figurative language.
Novels.--Meredith's novels comprise the largest and most noteworthy
part of his writings. His most important works of fiction are _The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ (1859), _The Egoist_ (1879), and _Diana of
the Crossways_ (1885). _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ is the story of
a beautiful first love. The courtship of Richard and Lucy, amid scenes
that inspire poetic descriptions, is in itself a true prose lyric.
Their parting interview is one of the most powerfully handled chapters
to be found in English novels. It is heart-rending in its emotional
intensity and almost faultless in expression. _The Ordeal of Richard
Feverel_, like most of Meredith's works, contains more than a love
story. Many chapters of high-class comedy and epigrammatical wit serve
to explode a fallacious educational theory.
_The Egoist_ has for its special aim the portrayal and exposure of
masculine egotism. This was a favorite subject with Meredith and it
recurs frequently in his novels. The plot of _The Egoist_ is slight.
The interest is centered on the awakening of Clara Middleton and
Laetitia Dale to the superlative selfishness of Sir Willoughby's
egotism.
Scintillating repartee, covert side-thrusts, shrewd observations,
subtle innuendoes, are all used to assist in the revelation of this
egotism. One fair April morning, after his return to England from a
three years' absence, Sir Willoughby met Laetitia Dale, an early
sweetheart whom he no longer loved.
"He sprang out of the carriage and seized her hand. 'Laetitia
Dale!' he said. He panted. 'Your name is sweet English music!
And you are well?' The anxious question permitted him to read deep
in her eyes. He found the man he sought there, squeezed him
passionately, and let her go."
The delicate irony of this passage is a mild example of the rich vein
of humor running through this work. _The Egoist_ is the most
Meredithian of the author's novels, and it displays most exuberantly
his comic spirit, intent upon photographing mankind's follies. This
book has been called "a comedy in narrative."
Diana, the heroine of _Diana of the Crossways, is the queen of
Meredith's heroines. She is intellectual, warm-hearted, and
courageous. She thinks and talks brilliantly; but when she acts, she
is often carried away by the momentary impulse. She therefore keeps
the reader alternately scolding and forgiving her. Her betrayal of a
state secret, which cannot be condoned, remains the one flaw in the
plot. With this exception, the story is absorbing. The men and women
belong to the world of culture. Among them are some of Meredith's most
interesting characters, notably Redworth, the noblest man in any of
the novels. The scene of the story is in London's highest political
circle and the discussions sparkle with cleverness.
_Evan Harrington_ (1861), the story of a young tailor, is one of the
lightest and brightest of Meredith's novels. It presents in the
author's most inimitable manner a comic picture of the struggle for
social position. In two of the characters, Great Mel and Mrs. Mel, are
found the pen portraits of Meredith's grandparents. _Rhoda Fleming_
(1865) is in its style the simplest of his novels. The humble tragedy
is related in the plain speech of the people, without the Gaelic wit
usually characteristic of Meredith.
The first half of _The Adventures of Harry Richmond_ has been called
by some critics Meredith's best piece of writing, but the last half
shows less power.
Meredith grew more introspective in his later years, as is shown in
such long, analytical novels as, _One of Our Conquerors_ (1891), _Lord
Ormont and His Aminta_ (1894), and _The Amazing Marriage_ (1895).
General Characteristics.-Meredith's novels afford him various
opportunities for an exposition of his views on education, divorce,
personal liberty, conventional narrow-mindedness, egotism,
sentimentalism, and obedience to law. His own personality creeps into
the stories when he has some favorite sermon to preach; and he
sometimes taxes the reader's patience by unduly delaying the narrative
or even directing its course in order to accentuate the moral issue.
The chief excellences of his novels lie in the strong and subtle
character portrayal, in the brilliant conversations, in the power with
which intense scenes are presented, and in the well-nigh omnipresent
humor.
Meredith's humor frequently arises from his keen intellectual
perception of the paradoxes in life. One of his egotistical lovers,
talking to the object of his undying affections, "could pledge himself
to eternity, but shrank from being bound to eleven o'clock on the
morrow morning." Meredith does not fly into a passion, like Carlyle,
because society is sentimental and shallow and loves to pose. He
proceeds in the coolest manner to draw with unusual distinctness the
shallow dilettante, the sentimentalist, the egotist, and the
hypocrite. By placing these characters in the midst of men and women
actuated by simple and genuine motives, he develops situations that
seem especially humorous to readers who are alert to detect
incongruity. This veiled humor, which has been aptly styled "the
laughter of the mind," gives to Meredith's works their most
distinctive flavor.
His prose style is epigrammatic, rich in figures, subtle, sometimes
tortuous and even obscure. He abhors the trite and obvious, and, in
escaping them to indulge in witty riddles, fanciful expressions, and
difficult allusions, he imperils his clearness. In the presence of
genuine emotion, he is always as simple in style as he is serious in
attitude; but there are times when he seems to revel in the
extravagant and grotesque.
Meredith is the novelist of men and women in the world of learning, of
letters, and of politics; he is the satirist of social shams; and he
is the sparkling epigrammatist; but he is also the optimist with the
sane and vigorous message for his generation, and the realist who
keeps a genuine rainbow of idealism in his sky.
THOMAS HARDY, 1840-
[Illustration: THOMAS HARDY. _From the painting by Winifred
Thompson_.]
Life.--The subtle, comic aspects of cosmopolitan life, which were
such a fascination to Meredith, did not appeal to that somber realist,
Thomas Hardy, whose genius enabled him to paint impressive pictures of
the retired elemental life of Wessex. Hardy was born in 1840 in the
little village of Bockhampton, Dorsetshire, a few miles out of
Dorchester. He received his early education at the local schools,
attended evening classes at King's College, London, and studied Gothic
architecture under Sir Arthur Blomfield. The boy was articled at the
early age of sixteen to an ecclesiastical architect and, like the hero
in his novel, _A Pair of Blue Eyes_, made drawings and measurements of
old churches in rural England and planned their remodeling. He won
medals and prizes in this profession before he turned from it to
authorship. His first published work, _How I Built Myself a House_,
was an outgrowth of some early experiences as an architect.
Hardy married Miss Emma Lavinia Gifford in 1874 and went to live at
Sturminster Newton. Later he spent some time in London; but he
returned finally to his birthplace, the land of his novels, and built
himself a home at Max Gate, Dorchester, in 1885. His life has been a
retired one. He always shunned publicity, but he was happy to receive
in 1910 the freedom of his native town, an honor bestowed upon him as
a mark of love and pride.
Works.--Thomas Hardy is one of the greatest realists in modern
England, and also one of the most uncompromising pessimists. His
characters are developed with consummate skill, but usually their
progression is toward failure or death. These men and women are
largely rustics who subsist by means of humble toil, such as tending
sheep or cutting furze. The orbit of their lives is narrow. The people
are simple, primitive, superstitious. They are only half articulate in
the expression of their emotions. In _Far From the Madding Crowd_, for
example, Gabriel Oak wished to have Bathsheba know "his impressions;
but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odor in a net as of
attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feelings in the coarse
meshes of language. So he remained silent." On the other hand, the
speech is sometimes racy, witty, and flavored by the daily occupation
of the speaker.
The scenes usually selected for Hardy's stories are from his own
county and those immediately adjacent, to which section of country he
has given the name of Wessex. He knows it so intimately and paints it
so vividly that its moors, barrows, and villages are as much a part of
the stories as the people dwelling there. In fact, Egdon Heath has
been called the principal character in the novel, _The Return of the
Native_ (1878). The upland with its shepherd's hut, the sheep-shearing
barn, the harvest storm, the hollow of ferns, and the churchyard with
its dripping water spout are part of the wonderful landscape in _Far
From the Madding Crowd_ (1874) This is the finest artistic product of
Hardy's genius. It contains strongly-drawn characters, dramatic
incidents, a most interesting story, and some homely native humor. The
heroine, Bathsheba, is one of the brainiest and most independent of
all Hardy's women. She has grave faults; but the tragic experiences
through which she passes soften her and finally mold her into a
lovable woman. Steady, resourceful, dumb Gabriel Oak and clever,
fencing Sergeant Troy are delightful foils to each other, and are
every inch human.
[Illustration: MAX GATE. The Home of Hardy near Dorchester (the
Casterbridge of the Novels).]
_The Mayor of Casterbridge_ (1886) and _The Woodlanders_ (1886-1887)
deserve mention with _Far from the Madding Crowd_ and The _Return of
the Native_ as comprising the best four novels of the so-called Wessex
stories.
Hardy's later works exhibit an increasing absorption in ethical and
religious problems. _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ (1892) is one of
Hardy's most powerful novels. It has for its heroine a strong, sweet,
appealing woman, whose loving character and tragic fate are presented
with fearless vigor and deep sympathetic insight. The personal
intensity of the author, which is felt to pervade this book, is
present again in _Jude the Obscure_ (1895), that record of an aspiring
soul, struggling against hopeless odds, heavy incumbrances, and sordid
realities.
General Characteristics.--Hardy's novels leave a sense of gloom upon
the reader. He explains his view of modern life "as a thing to be put
up with, replacing the zest for existence which was so intense in
early civilization." His pessimistic philosophy strikes at the core of
life and human endeavor. Sorrow appears in his work, not as a
punishment for crime, but as an unavoidable result of human life and
its inevitable mistakes. Events, sometimes comic but generally tragic,
play upon the weaknesses of his characters and bring about
entanglements, misunderstandings, and suffering far in excess of the
deserts of these well-intentioned people. No escape is suggested.
Resignation to misfits, mistakes, and misfortune is what remains.
Hardy is one of the great Victorian story-tellers. His personality is
never obtruded on his readers. His humor is not grafted on his scenes,
but is a natural outgrowth of his rustic gatherings and conversations.
He relates a straightforward tale, and makes his characters act and
speak for themselves. He selects the human nature, the rural scene,
and the moral issue upon which his whole being can be centered. The
result is a certainty of design, a somberness of atmosphere, and an
intensity of feeling, such as are found in elegiac poetry. Natural
laws, physical nature, and human life are engaged in an uneven
struggle, and the result is usually unsatisfactory for human life. The
novels are pitilessly sad, but they are nevertheless products of a
genuine artist in temperament and technique. His novels show almost as
much unity of plot and mood as many of the greatest short stories.
MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1822-1888
[Illustration: MATTHEW ARNOLD. _From the painting of G.F. Watts,
National Portrait Gallery_.]
Life.--Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, A.C.
Swinburne, and the much younger Rudyard Kipling are the most noted
among a large number of Victorian poets. All of these, with the
exception of the two greatest, Browning and Tennyson, also wrote
prose.
Matthew Arnold was born in 1822, at Laleham, Middlesex. His father,
Dr. Thomas Arnold, was the eminent head master of Rugby School, and
the author of _History of Rome, Lectures on Modern History_, and
_Sermons_. Under the guidance of such a father, Matthew Arnold enjoyed
unusual educational advantages. In 1837 he entered Rugby, and from
there went to Baliol College, Oxford. He was so ambitious and studious
that he won two prizes at Oxford, was graduated with honors, and, a
year later, was elected fellow of Oriel College. Arnold's name, like
Thomas Gray's, is associated with university life.
From 1847 to 1851, Arnold was private secretary to Lord Lansdowne. In
1851 he married the daughter of Justice Wightman. After relinquishing
his secretaryship, Arnold accepted a position that took him again into
educational fields. He was made lay inspector of schools, a position
which he held to within two years of his death. This office called for
much study in methods of education, and he visited the continent three
times to investigate the systems in use there. In addition, he held
the chair of poetry at Oxford for ten years, between 1857 and 1867.
One of the most scholarly courses of lectures that he delivered there
was _On Translating Homer_. From this time until his death, in 1888,
he was a distinguished figure in English educational and literary
circles.
Poetical Works.--Matthew Arnold's poetry belongs to the middle of
the century, that season of doubt, perplexity, and unrest, when the
strife between the church and science was bitterest and each
threatened to overthrow the other. In his home, Arnold was taught a
devout faith in revealed religion, and at college he was thrown upon a
world of inquiring doubt. Both influences were strong. His feelings
yearned after the early faith, and his intellect sternly demanded
scientific proof and explanation. He was, therefore, torn by a
conflict between his emotions and reason, and he was thus eminently
fitted to be the poetic exponent of what he calls--
"...this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts."[12]
Arnold felt that there were too much hurry and excitement in the age.
In the midst of opposing factions, theories, and beliefs, he cries out
for rest and peace. We rush from shadow to shadow--
"And never once possess our soul
Before we die."[13]
Again, in the _Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Obermann"_, he
voices the unrest of the age--
"What shelter to grow ripe is ours?
What leisure to grow wise?
Like children bathing on the shore,
Buried a wave beneath,
The second wave succeeds, before
We have had time to breathe."
But Arnold is not the seer to tell us how to enter the vale of rest,
how to answer the voice of doubt. He passes through life a lonely
figure--
"Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born." [14]
The only creed that he offers humanity is one born of the scientific
temper, a creed of stoical endurance and unswerving allegiance to the
voice of duty. Many readers miss in Arnold the solace that they find
in Wordsworth and the tonic faith that is omnipresent in Browning.
Arnold himself was not wholly satisfied with his creed; but his cool
reason refused him the solace of an unquestioning faith. Arnold has
been called "the poet of the Universities," because of the reflective
scholarly thought in his verse. It breathes the atmosphere of books
and of the study. Such poetry cannot appeal to the masses. It is for
the thinker.
The style of verse that lends itself best to Arnold's genius is the
elegiac lyric. _The Scholar Gypsy_ and its companion piece _Thyrsis,
Memorial Verses, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,_ and _Stanzas in
Memory of the Author of "Obermann"_ are some of his best elegies.
_Sohrab and Rustam_ and _Balder Dead_ are Arnold's finest narrative
poems. They are stately, dignified recitals of the deeds of heroes and
gods. The series of poems entitled _Switzerland_ and _Dover Beach_ are
among Arnold's most beautiful lyrics. A fine description of the surf
is contained in the last-named poem:--
"Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in."
Neither the movement of the narrative nor the lightness of the lyric
is wholly congenial to Arnold's introspective melancholy muse.
Prose Works.--Although Arnold's first works were in poetry, he won
recognition as a prose writer before he was widely known as a poet.
His works in prose comprise such subjects as literary criticism,
education, theology, and social ethics. As a critic of literature, he
surpasses all his great contemporaries. Neither Macaulay nor Carlyle
possessed the critical acumen, the taste, ana the cultivated judgment
of literary works, in such fullness as Matthew Arnold.
His greatest contributions to critical literature are the various
magazine articles that were collected in the two volumes entitled
_Essays in Criticism_ (1865-1888). In these essays Arnold displays
great breadth of culture and fairness of mind. He rises superior to
the narrow provincialism and racial prejudices that he deprecates in
other criticisms of literature. He gives the same sympathetic
consideration to the German Heine and the Frenchman Joubert as to
Wordsworth. Arnold further insists that Frenchmen should study English
literature for its serious ethical spirit, and that Englishmen would
be benefited by a study of the lightness, precision, and polished form
of French literature.
Arnold's object in all his criticism is to discover the best in both
prose and poetry, and his method of attaining this object is another
illustration of his scholarship and mental reach. He says in his
_Introduction to Ward's English Poets_:--
"Indeed, there can be no more useful help for discovering what
poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can
therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines
and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a
touchstone to other poetry."
When Arnold seeks to determine an author's true place in literature,
his keen critical eye seems to see at a glance all the world's great
writers, and to compare them with the man under discussion. In order
to ascertain Wordsworth's literary stature, for example, Arnold
measures the height of Wordsworth by that of Homer, of Dante, of
Shakespeare, and of Milton.
Another essential quality of the critical mind that Arnold possessed
is "sweet reasonableness." His judgments of men are marked by a
moderation of tune. His strong predilections are sometimes shown, but
they are more often restrained by a clear, honest intellect. Arnold's
calm, measured criticisms are not marred by such stout partisanship as
Macaulay shows for the Whigs, by the hero worship that Carlyle
expresses, or by the exaggerated praise and blame that Ruskin
sometimes bestows. On the other hand, Arnold loses what these men
gain; for while his intellect is less biased than theirs, it is also
less colored and less warmed by the glow of feeling.
The analytical quality of Arnold's mind shows the spirit of the age.
His subjects are minutely classified and defined. Facts seem to divide
naturally into brigades, regiments, and battalions of marching order.
His literary criticisms note subtleties of style, delicate shadings in
expression, and many technical excellences and errors that Carlyle
would have passed over unheeded. In addition to the _Essays in
Criticism,_ the other works of Arnold that possess his fine critical
dualities in highest degree are _On Translating Homer_ (1861) and _The
Study of Celtic Literature_ (1867).
General Characteristics.--The impression that Arnold has left upon
literature is mainly that of a keen, brilliant intellect. In his
poetry there is more emotion than in his prose; but even in his poetry
there is no passion or fire. The sadness, the loneliness, the unrest
of life, and the irreconcilable conflict between faith and doubt are
most often the subjects of his verse. His range is narrow, but within
it he attains a pure, noble beauty. His introspective, analytical
poetry is distinguished by a "majesty of grief," depth of thought,
calm, classic repose, and a dignified simplicity.
In prose, Arnold attains highest rank as a critic of literature. His
culture, the breadth of his literary sympathies, his scientific
analyses, and his lucid literary style make his critical works the
greatest of his age. He has a light, rather fanciful, humor, which
gives snap and spice to his style. He is also a master of irony, which
is galling to an opponent. He himself never loses his suavity or good
breeding. Arnold's prose style is as far removed from Carlyle's as the
calm simplicity of the Greeks is from the powerful passion of the
Vikings. The ornament and poetic richness of Ruskin's style are also
missing in Arnold's. His style has a classic purity and refinement. He
has a terseness, a crystalline clearness, and a precision that have
been excelled in the works of few even of the greatest masters of
English prose.
ROBERT BROWNING, 1812-1889
[Illustration: ROBERT BROWNING. _From the painting by G. F. Watts,
National Portrait Gallery._]
Life.--The long and peaceful lives of Browning and Tennyson, the two
most eminent poets of the Victorian age, are in marked contrast to the
short and troubled careers of Byron, Shelley, and Keats.
Robert Browning's life was uneventful but happy. He inherited a
magnificent physique and constitution from his father, who never knew
a day's illness. With such health, Robert Browning felt a keen relish
for physical existence and a robust joyousness in all kinds of
activity. Late in life he wrote, in the poem _At the Mermaid_:--
"Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did, and does, smack sweet.
* * * * *
I find earth not gray but rosy,
Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.
Do I stand and stare? All's blue."
Again, in _Saul_, he burst forth with the lines:--
"How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy?"
These lines, vibrant with life and joy, could not have been written by
a man of failing vitality or physical weakness.
Robert Browning was born in 1812 at Camberwell, whose slopes overlook
the smoky chimneys of London. In this beautiful suburb he spent his
early years in the companionship of a brother and a sister. A highly
gifted father and a musical mother assisted intelligently in the
development of their children. Browning's education was conducted
mainly under his father's eye. The boy attended neither a large school
nor a college. After he had passed from the hands of tutors, he spent
some time in travel, and was wont to call Italy his university.
Although his training was received in an irregular way, his
scholarship cannot be doubted by the student of his poetry.
He early determined to devote his life to poetry, and his father
wisely refrained from interfering with his son's ambitions.
[Illustration: ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. From the painting by
Field Talfourd, National Portrait Gallery._]
Romantic Marriage with Elizabeth Barrett Barrett,--Her Poetry.--In
1845, after Browning had published some ten volumes of verse, among
which were _Paracelsus_ (1835), _Pippa Passes_ (1841), and _Dramatic
Lyrics_ (1842), he met Miss Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (1806-1861),
whose poetic reputation was then greater than his own. The publication
in 1898 of _The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
Barrett_ disclosed an unusual romance. When he first met her, she was
an invalid in her father's London house, passing a large part of her
time on the couch, scarcely able to see all the members of her own
family at the same time. His magnetic influence helped her to make
more frequent journeys from the sofa to an armchair, then to walk
across the room, and soon to take drives.
Her father, who might have sat for the original of Meredith's
"Egoist," had decided that his daughter should be an invalid and
remain with him for life. When Browning proposed to Miss Barrett that
he should ask her father for her hand, she replied that such a step
would only make matters worse. "He would rather see me dead at his
feet than yield the point," she said. In 1846 Miss Barrett,
accompanied by her faithful maid, drove to a church and was married to
Browning. The bride returned home; but Browning did not see her for a
week because he would not indulge in the deception of asking for "Miss
Barrett." Seven days after the marriage, they quietly left for Italy,
where Mrs. Browning passed nearly all her remaining years. She
repeatedly wrote to her father, telling him of her transformed health
and happy marriage, but he never answered her.
Before Miss Barrett met Browning, the woes of the factory children had
moved her to write _The Cry of the Children_. After Edgar Allan Poe
had read its closing lines:--
"...the child's sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath,"
he said that she had depicted "a horror, sublime in its simplicity, of
which Dante himself might have been proud."
Her best work, _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, written after Browning
had won her affection, is a series of love lyrics, strong, tender,
unaffected, true, from the depth of a woman's heart. Sympathetic
readers, who know the story of her early life and love, are every year
realizing that there is nothing else in English literature that could
exactly fill their place. Browning called them "the finest sonnets
written in any language since Shakespeare's." Those who like the
simple music of the heart strings will find it in lines like these:--
"I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight,
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints--I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death."
After fifteen years of happy married life, she died in 1861, and was
buried in Florence. When thinking of her, Browning wrote his poem
_Prospice_ (1861) welcoming death as--
"...a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest."
His Later Years.--Soon after his wife's death, he began his long
poem of over twenty thousand lines, _The Ring and the Book_. He
continued to write verse to the year of his death.
In 1881 the Browning Society was founded for the study and discussion
of his works,--a most unusual honor for a poet during his lifetime.
The leading universities gave him honorary degrees, he was elected
life-governor of London University, and was tendered the rectorship of
the Universities of Glasgow and St. Andrew's and the presidency of the
Wordsworth Society.
During the latter part of his life, he divided most of his time
between London and Italy. When he died, in 1889, he was living with
his son, Robert Barrett Browning, in the Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice.
Over his grave in Westminster Abbey was chanted Mrs. Browning's
touching lyric:--
"He giveth his belovèd, sleep."
Dramatic Monologues.--Browning was a poet of great productivity.
From the publication of _Pauline_ in 1833 to _Asolando_ in 1889, there
were only short pauses between the appearances of his works. Unlike
Tennyson, Browning could not stop to revise and recast; but he
constantly sought expression, in narratives, dramas, lyrics, and
monologues, for new thoughts and feelings.
The study of the human soul held an unfailing charm for Browning. He
analyzes with marked keenness and subtlety the experiences of the
soul, its sickening failures, and its eager strivings amid complex,
puzzling conditions. In nearly all his poems, whether narrative,
lyric, or dramatic, the chief interest centers about some "incidents
in the development of a soul."
The poetic form that he found best adapted to "the development of a
soul" was the dramatic monologue, of which he is one of the greatest
masters. Requiring but one speaker, this form narrows the interest
either to the speaker or to the one described by him. Most of his best
monologues are to be found in the volumes known as _Dramatic Lyrics_
(1842), _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1845), _Men and Women_ (1855),
_Dramatis Personae_ (1864).
_My Last Duchess, Andrea del Sarto, Saul, Abt Vogler_, and _The Last
Ride Together_ are a few of his strong representative monologues. The
speaker in _My Last Duchess_ is the widowed duke, who is describing
the portrait of his lost wife. In his blind conceit, he is utterly
unconscious that he is exhibiting clearly his own coldly selfish
nature and his wife's sweet, sunny disposition. The chief power of the
poem lies in the astonishing ease with which he is made to reveal his
own character.
The interest in _Andrea del Sarto_ is in the mental conflict of this
"faultless painter." He wishes, on the one hand, to please his wife
with popular pictures, and yet he yearns for higher ideals of his art.
He says:--
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?"
As he sits in the twilight, holding his wife's hand, and talking in a
half-musing way, it is readily seen that his love for this beautiful
but soulless woman has caused many of his failures and sorrows in the
past, and will continue to arouse conflicts of soul in the future.
_Abt Vogler_, one of Browning's noblest and most melodious poems,
voices the exquisite raptures of a musician's soul:--
"But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know."
The beautiful song of David in the poem entitled _Saul_ shows a
wonderful sympathy with the old Hebrew prophecies. _Cleon_ expresses
the views of an early Greek upon the teachings of Christ and St. Paul.
_The Soliloquy of a Spanish Cloister_ describes the development of a
coarse, jealous nature in monastic life. _The Last Ride Together_ is
one of Browning's many passionate poems on the ennobling power of
love. That remarkable, grotesque poem, _Caliban upon Setebos_,
transcends human fields altogether, and displays the brutelike
theology of a fiend.
In these monologues, Browning interprets characters of varying faiths,
nationalities, stations, and historic periods. He shows a wide range
of knowledge and sympathy. One type, however, which he rarely
presents, is the simple, commonplace man or woman. Browning excels in
the portrayal of unusual, intricate, and difficult characters that
have complicated problems to face, weaknesses to overcome, or lofty
ambitions to attain.
The Ring and the Book.--When Browning was asked what he would advise
a student of his poetry to read first, he replied: "_The Ring and the
Book_, of course." He worked on this masterly study of human souls for
many years in the decade in which his wife died. This poem (1868),
which has been facetiously called "a Roman murder story," was
suggested to him by a "square old yellow book," which he purchased for
a few cents at Florence in 1860. This manuscript, dated 1698, gives an
account of the trial of Guido Franceschini for the murder of his wife.
Out of this "mere ring metal," Browning fashioned his "Ring," a poem
twice the length of _Paradise Lost_.
The subject of the story is an innocent girl, Pompilia, who, under the
protection of a noble priest, flees from her brutal husband and seeks
the home of her foster parents. Her husband wrathfully pursues her and
kills both her and her parents. While this is but the barest outline,
yet the story in its complete form is very simple. As is usual with
Browning, the chief stress is laid upon the character portrayal.
He adopted the bold and unique plan of having different classes of
people in Rome and the various actors in the tragedy tell the story
from their own point of view and thus reveal their own bias and
characteristics. Each relation makes the story seem largely new.
Browning shows that all this testimony is necessary to establish a
complete circle of evidence in regard to the central truth of the
tragedy. The poem thus becomes a remarkable analytic study of the
psychology of human minds.
The four important characters,--Guido, the husband; Caponsacchi, the
priest; Pompilia, the girl-wife; and the Pope,--stand out in strong
relief. The greatest development of character is seen in Guido, who
starts with a defiant spirit of certain victory, but gradually becomes
more subdued and abject, when he finds that he is to be killed, and
finally shrieks in agony for the help of his victim, Pompilia. In
Caponsacchi there is the inward questioning of the right and the
wrong. He is a strongly-drawn character, full of passion and noble
desires. Pompilia, who has an intuitive knowledge of the right, is one
of Browning's sweetest and purest women. From descriptions of Mrs.
Browning, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne gave, we may conclude that she
furnished the suggestion for many of Pompilia's characteristics. The
Pope, with his calm, wise judgment and his lofty philosophy, is
probably the greatest product of Browning's intellect.
The books containing the monologues of these characters take first
place among Browning's writings and occupy a high position in the
century's work. They have a striking originality, intensity, vigor,
and imaginative richness. The remaining books are incomparably
inferior, and are marked at times by mere acuteness of reason and
thoroughness of legal knowledge.
A Dramatic Poet.--Although Browning's genius is strongly dramatic,
his best work is not found in the field of the drama. _Strafford_
(1837), _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ (1843), and _Colombe's Birthday_
(1844) have been staged successfully, but they cannot be called great
acting plays. The action is slight, the characters are complex, the
soliloquies are lengthy, and the climaxes are too often wholly
dependent upon emotional intensity rather than upon great or exciting
deeds. The strongest interest of these dramas lies in their
psychological subtlety, which is more enjoyable in the study than in
the theater.
Browning's dramatic power is well exhibited in poems like _In a
Balcony_ or _Pippa Passes_, in which powerful individual scenes are
presented without all the accompanying details of a complete drama.
The great force of such scenes lies in his manner of treating moments
of severe trial. He selects such a moment, focuses his whole attention
upon it, and makes the deed committed stand forth as an explanation of
all the past emotions and as a prophecy of all future acts. _In a
Balcony_ shows the lives of three characters converging toward a
crisis. The hero of this drama thus expresses his theory of life's
struggles in the development of the soul:--
"...I count life just stuff
To try the soul's strength on, educe the man."
_Pippa Passes_ is one of Browning's most artistic presentations of
such dramatic scenes. The little silk weaver, Pippa, rises on the
morning of her one holiday in the year, with the intention of enjoying
in fancy the pleasures "of the Happiest Four in our Asolo," not
knowing, in her innocence, of their misery and guilt. She wanders from
house to house, singing her pure, significant refrains, and, in each
case, her songs arrest the attention of the hearer at a critical
moment. She thus becomes unconsciously a means of salvation. The first
scene is the most intense. She approaches the home of the lovers,
Sebald and Ottima, after the murder of Ottima's husband. As Sebald
begins to reflect on the murder, there comes this song of Pippa's,
like the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, to loose the floodgates of
remorse:--
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF MS. FROM PIPPA PASSES.]
His Optimistic Philosophy.--It has been seen that the Victorian age,
as presented by Matthew Arnold, was a period of doubt and negation.
Browning, however, was not overcome by this wave of doubt. Although he
recognized fully the difficulties of religious faith in an age just
awakening to scientific inquiry, yet he retained a strong, fearless
trust in God and in immortality.
Browning's reason demanded this belief. In this earthly life he saw
the evil overcome the good, and beheld injustice, defeat, and despair
follow the noblest efforts. If there exists no compensation for these
things, he says that life is a cheat, the moral nature a lie, and God
a fiend. In _Asolando_, Browning thus presents his attitude toward
life:--
"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake."
There is no hesitancy in this philosophy of Browning's. With it, he
does not fear to face all the problems and mysteries of existence. No
other poet strikes such a resonant, hopeful note as he. His _Rabbi Ben
Ezra_ is more a song of triumphant faith than anything written since
the Puritan days:--
"Our times are in His hand
Who saith, 'A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!'
* * * * *
"Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:
What entered into thee,
_That_ was, is, and shall be:
Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure."
General Characteristics.--Browning is a poet of striking originality
and impelling force. His writings are the spontaneous outpourings of a
rich, full nature, whose main fabric is intellect, but intellect
illumined with the glittering light of spiritual hopefulness and
flushed with the glow of deep human passion.
The subject of his greatest poetry is the human soul. While he
possesses a large portion of dramatic suggestiveness, he nevertheless
does not excel in setting off character against character in movement
and speech, but rather in a minute, penetrating analysis, by which he
insinuates himself into the thoughts and sensations of his characters,
and views life through their eyes.
He is a pronounced realist. His verse deals not only with the
beautiful and the romantic, but also with the prosaic and the ugly, if
they furnish true pictures for the panorama of real life. The
unconventionality and realism of his poetic art will be made manifest
by merely reading through the titles of his numerous works.
Browning did not write to amuse and entertain, but to stimulate
thought and to "sting" the conscience to activity. The meaning of his
verse is, therefore, the matter of paramount importance, far
overshadowing the form of expression. In the haste and carelessness
with which he wrote many of his difficult abstruse poems, he laid
himself open to the charge of obscurity.
His style has a strikingly individual stamp, which is marked far more
by strength than by beauty. The bare and rugged style of his verse is
often made profoundly impressive by its strenuous earnestness, its
burning intensity, which seems to necessitate the broken lines and
halting, interrupted rhythm. The following utterance of Caponsacchi,
as he stands before his judges, will show the intensity and ruggedness
of Browning's blank verse:--
"Sirs, how should I lie quiet in my grave
Unless you suffer me wring, drop by drop,
My brain dry, make a riddance of the drench
Of minutes with a memory in each?"
His lines are often harsh and dissonant. Even in the noble poem _Rabbi
Ben Ezra_, this jolting line appears:--
"Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"
and in _Sordello_, Browning writes:--
"The Troubadour who sung
Hundreds of songs, forgot, its trick his tongue,
Its craft his brain."
No careful artist tolerates such ugly, rasping inversions.
In spite of these inharmonious tendencies in Browning, his poetry at
times shows a lyric lightness, such as is heard in these lines:--
"Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England--now!"[15]
His verse often swells and falls with a wavelike rhythm as in _Saul_
or in these lines in _Abt Vogler_:--
"There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arc; in the heaven, a perfect round."
While, therefore, Browning's poetry is sometimes harsh, faulty, and
obscure, at times his melodies can be rhythmically simple and
beautiful. He is one of the subtlest analysts of the human mind, the
most original and impassioned poet of his age, and one of the most
hopeful, inspiring, and uplifting teachers of modern times.
ALFRED TENNYSON, 1809-1892
[Illustration: ALFRED TENNYSON. _From a photograph by Mayall._]
Life.--Alfred Tennyson, one of the twelve children of the rector of
Somersby, Lincolnshire, was born in that hamlet in 1809, a year
memorable, both in England and America for the birth of such men as
Charles Darwin, William E. Gladstone, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar
Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln.
Visitors to the Somersby rectory, in which Tennyson was born, note
that it fits the description of the home in his fine lyric, _The
Palace of Art_:--
"...an English home,--gray twilight pour'd
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep--all things in order stored,
A haunt of ancient peace."
His mother, one of the beauties of Lincolnshire, had twenty-five
offers of marriage. Of her Tennyson said in _The Princess:_--
"Happy he
With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and tho' he trip and fall,
He shall not blind his soul with clay."
It is probable that Tennyson holds the record among English poets of
his class for the quantity of youthful verse produced. At the age of
eight, he was writing blank verse in praise of flowers; at twelve, he
began an epic which extended to six thousand lines.
In 1828 he entered Cambridge University; but in 1831 his father's
sickness and death made it impossible for him to return to take his
degree. Before leaving Cambridge, Tennyson had found a firm friend in
a young college mate of great promise, Arthur Henry Hallam, who became
engaged to the poet's sister, Emily Tennyson. Hallam's sudden death in
1832 was a profound shock to Tennyson and had far-reaching effects on
his poetic development. For a long time he lived in comparative
retirement, endeavoring to perfect himself in the poetic art.
His golden year was 1850, the year of the publication of _In
Memoriam_, of his selection as poet laureate, to succeed Wordsworth,
and of his marriage to Emily Sellwood. He had been in love with her
for fourteen years, but insufficient income had hitherto prevented
marriage.
[Illustration: FARRINGFORD.]
In 1855 Oxford honored him by bestowing on him the degree of D.C.L.
The students gave him an ovation and they properly honored his
greatest poem, _In Memoriam_ by mentioning it first in their loud
calls; but they also paid their respects to his _May Queen_, asking in
chorus: "Did they wake and call you early, call you early, Alfred
dear?"
The rest of his life was outwardly uneventful. He became the most
popular poet of his age. Schools and colleges had pupils translate his
poems into Latin and Greek verse. Of _Enoch Arden_ (1864), at that
time his most popular narrative poem, sixty thousand copies were sold
almost as as soon as it was printed. He made sufficient money to be
able to maintain two beautiful residences, a winter home at
Farringford on the Isle of Wight, and a summer residence at Aldworth
in Sussex. In 1884 he was raised to the peerage, with the title of
Baron of Aldworth and Farringford. He died in 1892, at the age of
eighty-three, and was buried beside Robert Browning in Westminster
Abbey.
Early Verse.--Tennyson published a small volume of poems in 1830,
the year before he left college, and another volume in 1832. Although
these contained some good poems, he was too often content to toy with
verse that had exquisite melody and but little meaning. The "Airy,
fairy Lilian" and "Sweet, pale Margaret" type of verse had charmed him
overmuch. The volumes of 1830 and 1832 were severely criticized.
_Blackwood's Magazine_ called same of the lyrics "drivel," and Carlyle
characterized the aesthetic verse as "lollipops." This adverse
criticism and the shock from Hallam's death caused him to remain
silent for nearly ten years. His son and biographer says that his
father during this period "profited by friendly and unfriendly
criticism, and in silence, obscurity, and solitude, perfected his
art."
In his thirty-third year (1842), Tennyson broke his long silence by
publishing two volumes of verse, containing such favorites as _The
Poet, The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art, The Lotos Eaters, A
Dream of Fair Women, Morte d'Arthur, Oenone, The Miller's Daughter,
The Gardener's Daughter, Dora, Ulysses, Locksley Hall, The Two
Voices_, and _Sir Galahad_.
Unsparing revision of numbers of these poems that had been published
before, entitles them to be classed as new work. Some critics think
that Tennyson never surpassed these 1842 volumes. His verse shows the
influence of Keats, of whom Tennyson said: "There is something of the
innermost soul of poetry in almost everything that he wrote."
One of Tennyson's most distinctive qualities, his art in painting
beautiful word-pictures, is seen at its best in stanzas from _The
Palace of Art_. His mastery over melody and the technique of verse is
evident in such lyrics as _Sir Galahad,_ and _The Lotos Eaters_. When
the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, read from _Ulysses_ the passage
beginning:--
"I am a part of all that I have met,"
he gave Tennyson a much-needed annual pension of £200.
These volumes show that he was coming into touch with the thought of
the age. _Locksley Hall_ communicates the thrill which he felt from
the new possibilities of science:--
"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.
* * * * *
I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time."
Hallam's death had also developed in him the human note, resonant in
the lyric, _Break, break, break:_--
"But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still."
The Princess, In Memoriam, and Maud.--Tennyson had produced only
short poems in his 1842 volumes, but his next three efforts, _The
Princess_ (1847), _In Memoriam_ (1850), and _Maud_ (1855), are of
considerable length.
_The Princess: A Medley_, as Tennyson rightly called it, contains 3223
lines of blank verse. This poem, which is really a discussion of the
woman question, relates in a half humorous way the story of a princess
who broke off her engagement to a prince, founded a college for women,
and determined to elevate her life to making them equal to men. The
poem abounds in beautiful imagery and exquisite melody; but the
solution of the question by the marriage of the princess has not
completely satisfied modern thought. The finest parts of the poem are
its artistic songs.
_In Memoriam_, an elegy in memory of Arthur Henry Hallam, was begun at
Somersby in 1833, the year of Hallam's death, and added to at
intervals for nearly sixteen years. When Tennyson first began the
short lyrics to express his grief, he did not intend to publish them;
but in 1850 he gave them to the world as one long poem of 725
four-line stanzas.
_In Memoriam_ was directly responsible for Tennyson's appointment as
poet-laureate. Queen Victoria declared that she received more comfort
from it than from any other book except the _Bible_. The first stanza
of the poem (quoted on page 9) has proved as much of a moral stimulus
as any single utterance of Carlyle or of Browning.
This work is one of the three great elegies of a literature that
stands first in elegiac poetry. Milton's _Lycidas_ has more of a
massive commanding power, and Shelley's _Adonais_ rises at times to
poetic heights that Tennyson did not reach; but neither _Lycidas_ nor
_Adonais_ equals _In Memoriam_ in tracing every shadow of bereavement,
from the first feeling of despair until the mourner can realize that--
"...the song of woe
Is after all an earthly song,"
and can express his unassailable faith in--
"One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves."
With this hopeful assurance closes Tennyson's most noble and beautiful
poem.
_Maud_, a lyrical melodrama, paints the changing emotions of a lover
who passes from morbid gloom to ecstasy. Then, in a moment of anger,
he murders Maud's brother. Despair, insanity, and recovery follow, but
he sees Maud's face no more. While the poem as a whole is not a
masterpiece, it contains some of Tennyson's finest lyrics. The eleven
stanzas of the lover's song to Maud, the--
"Queen Rose of the rosebud garden of girls,"
are such an exquisite blending of woodbine spice and musk of rose, of
star and daffodil sky, of music of flute and song of bird, of the soul
of the rose with the passion of the lover, of meadows and
violets,--that we easily understand why Tennyson loved to read these
lines.
The Idylls of the King.--In 1859 Tennyson published _Lancelot and
Elaine_, one of a series of twelve _Idylls_, the last of which
appeared in 1855. Together these form an epic on the subject of King
Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Tennyson relied mainly on
Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_ for the characters and the stories.
These _Idylls_ show the struggle to maintain noble ideals. Arthur
relates how he collected--
"In that fair order of my Table Round,
A glorious company, the flower of men,
To serve as model for the mighty world,
And be the fair beginning of a time."
He made his knights swear to uphold the ideals of his court--
"To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To honor his own word as if his God's,
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And warship her by years of noble deeds
Until they won her."
The twelve _Idylls_ have as a background those different seasons of
the year that accord with the special mood of the story. In _Gareth
and Lynette_, the most interesting of the _Idylls_, the young hero
leaves his home in spring, when the earth is joyous with birds and
flowers. In the last and most nobly poetic of the series, _The Passing
of Arthur_, the time is winter, when the knights seem to be clothed
with their own frosty breath.
Sin creeps into King Arthur's realm and disrupts the order of the
"Table Round." He receives his mortal wound, and passes to rule in a
kindlier realm that welcomed him as "a king returning from the wars."
Although the _Idylls of the King_ are uneven in quality and sometimes
marred by overprofusion of ornament and by deficiency of dramatic
skill, their limpid style, many fine passages of poetry, appealing
stories, and high ideals have exerted a wider influence than any other
of Tennyson's poems.
Later Poetry.--Tennyson continued to write poetry until almost the
time of his death; but with the exception of his short swan song,
_Crossing the Bar_, he did not surpass his earlier efforts. His
_Locksley Hall Sixty Year After_ (1886) voices the disappointments of
the Victorian age and presents vigorous social philosophy. Some of his
later verse, like _The Northern Farmer_ and _The Children's Hospital_,
are in closer touch with life than many of his earlier poems.
He wrote also several historical dramas, the best of which is _Becket_
(1884); but his genius was essentially lyrical, not dramatic.
_Crossing the Bar_, written in his eighty-first year, is not only the
finest product of his later years, but also one of the very best of
Victorian lyrics.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF MS. OF CROSSING THE BAR.]
General Characteristics.--Tennyson is a poetic interpreter of the
thought of the Victorian age. Huxley called him "the first poet since
Lucretius who understood the drift of science." In these four lines
from _The Princess_, Tennyson gives the evolutionary history of the
world, from nebula to man:--
"This world was once a fluid haze of light.
Till toward the center set the starry tides,
And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast
The planets: then the monster, then the man."
Tennyson's poetry of nature is based on almost scientific observation
of natural phenomena. Unlike Wordsworth, Tennyson does not regard
nature as a manifestation of the divine spirit of love. He sees her
more from the new scientific point of view, as "red in tooth and claw
with rapine." The hero of _Maud_ says:--
"For nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal;
The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear'd by the
shrike.
And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and
prey."
The constant warfare implied in the evolutionary theory of the
survival of the fittest did not keep Tennyson from also presenting
nature in her gentler aspects. In _Maud_, the lover sings--
"...whenever a March-wind sighs,
He sets the jewel-print of your feet
In violets blue as your eyes,"
and he tells how "the soul of the rose" passed into his blood, and how
the sympathetic passion-flower dropped "a splendid tear." As beautiful
as is much of Tennyson's nature poetry, he has not Wordsworth's power
to invest it with "the light of setting suns," or to cause it to
awaken "thoughts that do lie too deep for tears."
The conflict between science and religion, the doubts and the sense of
world-pain are mirrored in Tennyson's verse. _The Two Voices_
begins:--
"A still small voice spoke unto me,
Thou art so full of misery
Were it not better not to be?"
His poetry is, however, a great tonic to religious faith. The closing
lines of _In Memoriam_ and _Crossing the Bar_ show how triumphantly he
met all the doubts and the skepticism of the age.
Like Milton, Tennyson received much of his inspiration from books,
especially from the classical writers; but this characteristic was
more than counterbalanced by his acute observation and responsiveness
to the thought of the age. _Locksley Hall Sixty Years After_ shows
that he was keenly alive to the social movements of the time.
Tennyson said that the scenes in his poems were so vividly conceived
that he could have drawn them if he had been an artist. A twentieth
century critic[16] says that Tennyson is almost the inventor of such
pictorial lyrics as _A Dream of Fair Women_ and _The Palace of Art_.
The artistic finish of Tennyson's verse is one of its great charms. He
said to a friend: "It matters little what we say; it is how we say
it--though the fools don't knew it." His poetry has, however, often
been criticized for lack of depth. The variety in his subject matter,
mode of expression, and rhythm renders his verse far more enjoyable
than that of the formal age of Pope.
Tennyson's extraordinary popularity in his own time was largely due to
the fact that he voiced so clearly and attractively the thought of the
age. As another epoch ushers in different interests, they will
naturally be uppermost in the mind of the new generation. We no longer
feel the intense interest of the Victorians in the supposed conflict
between science and religion. Their theory of evolution has been
modified and has lost the force of novelty. Theories of government and
social ideals have also undergone a gradual change. For these reasons
much of Tennyson's verse has ceased to have its former wide appeal.
Tennyson has, however, left sufficient work of abiding value, both for
its exquisite form and for its thought, to entitle him to be ranked as
a great poet. We cannot imagine a time when _Crossing the Bar_, _The
Passing of Arthur_, and the central thought of _In Memoriam_--
"'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all,"
will no longer interest readers. To Tennyson belong--
"Jewels five words long
That on the stretch'd forefinger of all Time
Sparkle forever."
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1837-1909
[Illustration: ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1837-1909. _From the
painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti_.]
Life.--Swinburne was born in London in 1837. His father was an
admiral in the English navy, and his mother, the daughter of an earl.
The boy passed his summers in Northumberland and his winters in the
Isle of Wight. He thus acquired that fondness for the sea, so
noticeable in his poetry. His early experiences are traceable in lines
like these:--
"Our bosom-belted billowy-blossoming hills,
Whose hearts break out in laughter like the sea."
He went to Oxford for three years, but left without taking his degree.
The story is current that he knew more Greek than his teachers but
that he failed in an examination on the _Scriptures_. He sought to
complete his education by wide reading and by travel, especially in
France and Italy.
When he was twenty-five, he went to live for a short time at 16 Cheyne
Walk, Chelsea, in the western part of London, in the same house with
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Meredith. Swinburne admired
Rossetti's poetry and was much impressed with the Pre-Raphaelite
virtues of simplicity and directness.
Swinburne never married. His deafness caused him to pass much of his
long life in comparative retirement. His last thirty years were spent
with his friend, the critic and poet, Theodore Watts-Dunton, at Putney
on the Thames, a few miles southwest of London. Swinburne died in 1909
and was buried at Bonchurch in the Isle of Wight.
Works.--In 1864 England was enchanted with the melody of the
choruses in his _Atalanta in Calydon_, a dramatic poem in the old
Greek form. Lines like the following from the chorus, _The Youth of
the Year_, show the quality for which his verse is most famous:--
"When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain."
The first series of his _Poems and Ballads_ (1866) contains _The
Garden of Proserpine_, one of his best known poems. Proserpine
"forgets the earth her mother" and goes to her "bloomless" garden:--
"And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
And flowers are put to scorn."
Many volumes came in rapid succession from his pen. In 1904 his poems
were collected in six octavo volumes containing 2357 pages. This
collection includes the long narrative poems, _Tristram of Lyonesse_
and _The Tale of Balen_, a faithful retelling of famous medieval
stories. He, however, had more ability as a writer of lyrics than of
narrative verse.
His poetic dramas fill five additional volumes. _Chastelard_ (1865),
one of the three dramas relating to Mary Queen of Scots, is the best
of his plays. He had, however, neither the power to draw character nor
the repression of speech necessary for a great dramatist. The best
parts of his plays are really lyrical verse.
Many critics think that Swinburne's reputation would be as great as it
now is, if he had ceased to write verse in 1866, at the age of
twenty-nine, after producing _Atalanta in Calydon_ and the first
series of his _Poems and Ballads_. Although his interests widened and
his poetic range increased, much of his work during his last forty
years is a repetition of earlier successes. His _Songs before
Sunrise_, however (1871), and the next two volumes of _Poems and
Ballads_ (1878 and 1889) contain some poems that rank among his best.
Later in life he wrote a large amount of prose criticism, much of
which deals with the Elizabethan dramatists. His _A Study of
Shakespeare_ (1880) and his shorter _Shakespeare_ (1905) are
especially suggestive. In spite of the fact that the reader must make
constant allowance for his habit of using superlatives, he was an able
critic.
General Characteristics.--Swinburne's poetry suffers from his
tendency to drown his ideas in a sea of words.
Sometimes we gain no more definite ideas from reading many lines of
his verse than from hearing music without words. Much of his poetry
was suggested by wide reading, not by close personal contact with
life. His verse sometimes offends from disregarding moral proprieties
and from so expressing his atheism as to wound the feelings of
religious people. His idea of a Supreme Power was colored by the old
Grecian belief in Fate. In exact opposition to Wordsworth, Swinburne's
youthful poems show that he regarded Nature as the incarnation of a
Power malevolent to man. He lacked the optimism of Browning and the
faith of Tennyson. The mantle of Byron and Shelley fell on Swinburne
as the poet of revolt against what seemed to be religious or political
tyranny.
After Tennyson's death, in 1892, Swinburne was the greatest living
English poet; but, even if his verse had not offended Queen Victoria
for the foregoing reasons, she would not have appointed him
poet-laureate after the misery of the Russians had moved him in 1890
to write, referring to the Czar:--
"Night hath naught but one red star--Tyrannicide.
"God or man, be swift; hope sickens with delay:
Smite and send him howling down his father's way."
Swinburne's crowning glory is his unquestioned mastery, unsurpassed by
any poet since Milton, of the technique of varied melodious verse.
This quality is evident, no matter whether he is describing the
laughter of a child:--
"Sweeter far than all things heard,
Hand of harper, tone of bird,
Sound of woods at sundawn stirr'd,
Welling water's winsome ward,
Wind in warm wan weather,"
or expressing his fierce hatred for any condition or place where--
"...a curse was or a chain
A throne for torment or a crown for bane
Rose, moulded out of poor men's molten pain,"
or singing the song of a lover--
"If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather,
Blown fields or flowerful closes,
Green pleasure or grey grief;
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf;"
or voicing his early creed--
"That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea,"
or chanting in far nobler strains the Anglo-Saxon belief in the
molding power of an infinite presence--
"I am in thee to save thee,
As my soul in thee saith,
Give thou as I gave thee,
Thy life-blood and breath,
Green leaves of thy labor, white flowers of thy thought, and red
fruit of thy death."
RUDYARD KIPLING, 1865-
[Illustration: RUDYARD KIPLING. _From the painting by John
Collier_.]
Life.--Rudyard Kipling, the youngest of the great Victorians, was
born in Bombay, India, in 1865. His parents were people of culture and
artistic training, the father, John Lockwood Kipling, being a
recognized authority on Indian art. Like most English children born in
India, Kipling, when very small, was sent to England to escape the
fatal Indian heat. Afterwards in the story _Baa, Baa, Black Sheep_,
Kipling told the tragic experience of two Anglo-Indian children when
separated from their parents. If it is true that this story is largely
autobiographical, the separation must have been a trying ordeal in
Kipling's childhood. Later he spent several years at Westward Ho,
Devonshire, in a school conducted mainly for the sons of Indian
officials. _Stalky and Co._, a broadly humorous book of schoolboy
life, gives the Kipling of this period, in the character of the
"egregious Beetle."
When only seventeen, he returned to India and immediately began
journalistic work. For seven years, first at Lahore and later at
Allahabad, he was busy with the usual hackwork of a small newspaper.
During these impressionable years, from seventeen to twenty-four, he
gained his intimate knowledge of the strangely-colored, many-sided
Indian life. His first stories and poems, often written in hot haste,
to fill the urgent need of more copy, appeared as waifs and strays in
the papers for which he wrote. A collection of verse, _Departmental
Ditties_, published at Lahore in 1886, was well received; and it was
quickly followed by several volumes of short stories. His ability thus
gained early recognition in India.
At the age of twenty-four, he left India for London. Here his books
found a publisher almost at once, and he was hailed as a new literary
genius. His work became so popular that he was able to devote his
whole time to writing. It is doubtful whether any writer since Dickens
has received such quick and enthusiastic recognition from all classes
of the English-speaking race. Even the street-car conductors were
heard quoting him.
In 1892 he married Miss Caroline Balestier, an American, and
afterwards lived for four years at Brattleboro, Vermont. Later he
settled in Sussex, England, whence he has made long journeys to South
Africa, Canada, and Egypt, amassing more knowledge of the English
"around the Seven Seas."
Probably the most remarkable feature of Kipling's career is the early
age at which his genius developed. Before he left India he had
published one book of verse and seven prose collections. By the time
he was thirty, he had written _The Jungle Books_, most of his best
short stories, and some of his finest verse.
Prose.--As a master of the modern short story, Kipling stands
unsurpassed. His journalistic work helped him to acquire a direct,
concentrated style of narrative, to find interest in an astonishing
variety of subjects, and to seize on the right details for vivid
presentation. He was fortunate in discovering in India a new literary
field, in which his genius appears at its best. Some of his early
tales of Indian life are marred by crudeness and by lack of feeling;
but these faults decreased as he matured.
Kipling's stories depend for their interest on incident, not on
analysis. He embodies romantic adventure and action in masterpieces as
different as the terrible tragedy of _The Man Who would be King_
(1888), the tender love story of _Without Benefit of Clergy_ (1890),
and the mystic dream-land of _The Brushwood Boy_ (1895). He specially
enjoyed portraying the English soldier. Perhaps his best-known
characters are the privates Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, whom we
meet in such tales of mingled comedy and tragedy as _With the Main
Guard_ (1888), _On Greenhow Hill_ (1891), _The Incarnation of Krishna
Mulvaney_ (1891), _The Courting of Dinah Shadd_ (1981).
When Kipling traveled to new lands, he wrote stories of America,
Africa, and the deep sea; but his later tales show an unfortunate
increase in the use of technical terms and a lessening of his former
dash and spontaneity. There are, however, readers who prefer such a
delicate, subtle, story as _They_ (1905), to his earlier masterpieces
of strenuous action.
In _The Jungle Book_ (1894) and _The Second Jungle Book_ (1895),
Kipling has accomplished the greatest of feats,--an original creation.
From the moment the little brown baby, Mowgli, crawls into Mother
Wolf's cave away from Shere Khan, the tiger, until the time for him to
graduate from the jungle, we follow him under the spell of a
fascination different from any that we have known before. The animals
of the jungle have real personalities, from the chattering Bandar-log
to the lumbering kindly Baloo. With all their intense individuality,
they remain animals, each one true to his kind, hating or loving men,
thinking mainly through their instincts, and surpassing human
schoolmasters in teaching Mowgli the great laws of the jungle,--that
obedience is "the head and the hoof of the Law," that nothing was ever
yet lost by silence, that, in the jungle, life and food depend on
keeping one's temper, that no one shall kill for the pleasure of
killing.
[Illustration: MOWGLI AND HIS BROTHERS. _By permission of Century
Company._]
Above all stands the character of Mowgli, the wolf-adopted man-cub,
human and yet brother to the animals. With a touch of genius, Kipling
revealed the kinship between Mowgli and the denizens of the jungle.
Kipling's eyes could see both the harsh realism of animal existence
and the genuine idealism of Mother Wolf and the Pack and the
Jungle-law.
_Just So Stories_ (1902), written primarily for children, but
entertaining to all, is a collection of romantic stories, mostly of
animals, illustrated by Kipling himself. One of the best of these
tales is _The Cat that Walked by Himself_, which has distinct ethical
value in showing how the cat through service won his place by the
fireside.
Though Kipling has written four novels, only two, _The Light that
Failed_ (1891) and _Kim_ (1901), can compare with his best short
stories. _The Light that Failed_, the tragedy of an artist who becomes
blind, proves that Kipling was able to handle a long plot sufficiently
well to sustain interest. _Kim_ is an attempt to present as a more
completed whole that India of which the stories give only glimpses. On
the slenderest thread of plot is strung a bewildering array of scenes,
characters, and incidents. His intimate knowledge of India and his
photographic power of description are here used with remarkable
picturesque effect.
[Illustration: THE CAT THAT WALKED. _Copyright, 1902, by Rudyard
Kipling._]
Verse.--Kipling's poetry has many of the same qualities as his
prose,--originality, force, love of action. In _Barrack Room Ballads_
(1892), the soldier is again celebrated in vigorous songs with
swinging choruses. _Mandalay, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, Danny Deever_, show what
spirited verse can be fashioned from a common ballad meter and a bold
use of dialect.
"So 'ere's _to_ you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan;
You're a pore benighted 'eathen, but a first class fightin' man;
An' 'ere's _to_ you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your 'ayrick 'ead of 'air--
You big black boundin' beggar--for you broke a British square!"
Much of his verse is political. His opinion of questions at issue is
sometimes given with much heat, but always with sincerity and true
patriotism. The best known of his patriotic songs, and perhaps his
noblest poetic effort, _The Recessional_ (1897), was inspired by the
fiftieth anniversary of Victoria's reign. _The Truce of the Bear_
(1898) is a warning against Russia. _The Native-Born_ is a toast to
the colonies in every clime.
Kipling's verse breaks with many of the accepted standards of English
verse. He does not aim at such pure beauty of form as we find in
Tennyson. He can handle skillfully many kinds of meter, as is shown in
_The Song of the English_, _The Ballad of East and West_, _The Song of
the Banjo_, and many sea lyrics. Yet he uses mostly the common
measures, attaining with these a free swing, a fitting of sound to
sense, that are irresistible to the many--
"Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose,
Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan--
I can rip your very heart-strings out with those."[17]
Some of his later work shows increasing seriousness of tone. _The
Recessional_ and the _Hymn before Action_ are elevated in thought and
expression. The bigness of _L'Envoi_ shows poetic power capable of
higher flights:--
"And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall
blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame;
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They
Are!"[18]
General Characteristics.--Kipling has carried to their highest
development the principles of the Bret Harte School of short story
writers. His style possesses those qualities necessary for telling a
short tale,--directness, force, suggestiveness. Rarely has any writer
so mastered the technique, the craftsmanship of this particular
literary form. He has the gift of force and dramatic power, rather
than of beauty and delicacy.
He excels in suggestive vivid description, and he draws wonderful
pictures of all out-of-doors, especially of the sea; but nature
remains merely the background for the human figures. Much of his
vividness lies in the use of specific words. If he should employ the
phraseology of his jungle laws to frame the first commandment for
writers, it would be: "_Seven times never_ be vague." Few authors have
at the very beginning of their career more implicitly heeded such a
commandment, obedience to which is evident in the following
description from _The Courting of Dinah Shadd_:--
"Over our heads burned the wonderful Indian stars, which are not
all pricked in on one plane, but preserving an orderly perspective,
draw the eye through the velvet darkness of the void up to the
barred doors of heaven itself. The earth was a grey shadow more
unreal than the sky. We could hear her breathing lightly in the
pauses between the howling of the jackals, the movement of the wind
in the tamarisks, and the fitful mutter of musketry-fire leagues
away to the left. A native woman from some unseen hut began to sing,
the mail train thundered past on its way to Delhi, and a roosting
crow cawed drowsily."
Abundant and vivid use of metaphors serves to render his concreteness
more varied and impressive. We find these in such expressions as "the
velvet darkness," "the kiss of the rain," "the tree-road." His
celestial artists splash at a ten-league canvas "with brushes of
comet's hair." Five words from Mulvaney explain why he does not wish
to leave his tent: "'Tis rainin' intrenchin' tools outside."
Kipling's spirit is essentially masculine. He prefers to write of men,
work, and battle, rather than of women and love. Since his interest is
mainly in action, he shows small ability in character drawing. His
people are clear-cut and alive, but we do not see them grow and
develop as do George Eliot's characters.
Above all, he stands as the interpreter of the ideals and the
interests of the Anglo-Saxons of his time. Those tendencies of the
age, which seem to others so dangerously materialistic, are the very
causes of his zest in life. In an age of machinery, he writes of the
romance of steam, the soul of an engine, the flight of an airship.
His is a work-a-day world; but in work well done, in obedience to the
established law, and in courage, he sees the proving of manhood, the
test of the true gentleman--
"Who had done his work and held his peace and had no fear to die."
Underlying all his thought is a deep belief in the "God of our
fathers," a God just to punish or reward, whom the English have
reverenced through all their history. Linked with this faith is an
intense feeling of patriotism toward that larger England of his
imperialistic vision.
These qualities justly brought Kipling the 1907 Nobel prize for
idealism in literature. He is truly the idealist of a practical age,
teaching the romance, the joy, the vision in the common facts and
virtues of present-day life.
SUMMARY
The history and literature of the Victorian age show the influence of
science. Darwin's conception of evolution affected all fields of
thought. The tendency toward analysis and dissection is a result of
scientific influence.
In describing the prose of the Victorian age, we have considered the
work of thirteen writers; namely, Macaulay, the brilliant essayist and
historian of the material advancement of England; Newman, essayist and
theologian, who is noted for clear style, acute thought, and
argumentative power; Carlyle, who awoke in his generation a desire for
greater achievement, and who championed the spiritual interpretation
of life in philosophy and history; Ruskin, the apostle of the
beautiful and of more ideal relations in social life; the essayist
Pater, whose prose is tinged with poetic color and mystic thought;
Arnold, the great analytical critic; Dickens, educational and social
reformer, whose novels deal chiefly with the lower classes; Thackeray,
whose fiction is not surpassed in keen, satiric analysis of the upper
classes of society; George Eliot, whose realistic stories of
middle-class life show the influence of science in her conception of
character as an orderly ethical growth; Stevenson, an artist in style,
writer of romances, essays, and poems for children; Meredith, subtle
novelist, distinguished for his comic spirit and portrayal of male
egotism; Hardy, realistic novelist of the lowly life of Wessex;
Kipling, whose _Jungle Books_ are an original creation, and whose
short stories surpass those of all other contemporaries.
In poetry, the age is best represented by five men; namely, Arnold,
who voices the feeling of doubt and unrest; Browning, who, by his
optimistic philosophy, leads to impregnable heights of faith, who
analyzes emotions and notes the development of souls as they struggle
against opposition from within and without, until they reach moments
of supreme victory or defeat; Tennyson, whose careful art mirrors in
beautiful verse much of the thought of the age, the influence of
science, the unrest, the desire to know the problems of the future, as
well as to steal occasional glances at beauty for its own sake;
Swinburne, the greatest artist since Milton in the technique of verse;
and Kipling, the poet of imperialistic England, whose ballads sing of
her soldiers and sailors, and whose lyrics proclaim the Anglo-Saxon
faith and joy in working.
REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
HISTORICAL
Walker's _Essentials in English History_, Cheney's _A Short History of
England_, McCarthy's _History of Our Own Times_, Cheney's _Industrial
and Social History of England_, Traill's _Social England_, VI.
LITERARY
_The Cambridge History of English Literature_.
Walker's _The Literature of the Victorian Era_.
Magnus's _English Literature in the Nineteenth Century_.
Saintsbury's _A History of English Literature in the Nineteenth
Century_.
Kennedy's _English Literature_, 1880-1905.
Walker's _Greater Victorian Poets_.
Brownell's _Victorian Prose Masters_.
Payne's _The Greater English Poets of the Nineteenth Century_.
Brooke's _Four Victorian Poets_ (Rossetti, Arnold, Morris).
Perry's _A Study of Prose Fiction_.
Benson's _Rossetti_. (E.M.L.)
Noyes's _William Morris_. (E.M.L.)
Trevelyan's _Life and Letters of Macaulay_. Morrison's _Macaulay_.
(E.M.L.)
Minto's _English Prose Literature_ (Macaulay and Carlyle).
Barry's _Newman_.
Ward's _The Life of John Henry, Cardinal Newman_, 2 vols.
Newman's _Letters and Correspondence, with a Brief Autobiography_.
Carlyle's _Reminiscences_.
Froude's _Thomas Carlyle_, 2 vols. Nichol's _Carlyle_. (E.M.L.)
Garnett's _Thomas Carlyle_. (G.W.)
Froude's _Jane Welsh Carlyle_, 2 vols.
T. and A. Carlyle's _New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle_.
Cook's _The Life of John Ruskin_, 2 vols.
Ruskin's _Praeterita, Scenes and Thoughts of My Past Life_.
Benson's _Ruskin: A Study in Personality_.
Earland's _Ruskin and his Circle_.
Harrison's _John Ruskin_. (E.M.L.)
Birrell's _Life of Charlotte Brontë_.
Foster's _Life of Dickens_ (abridged and revised by Gissing).
Kitton's _Dickens, his Life, Writings, and Personality_.
Gissing's _Charles Dickens: A Critical Study_.
Chesterton's _Charles Dickens_. Hughes's _Dickens as an Educator_.
Philip's _A Dickens Dictionary_.
Melville's _William Makepeace Thackeray_, 2 vols.
Trollope's _Thackeray_. (E.M.L.)
Merivale and Marzials's _Life of Thackeray_. (G.W.)
Mudge and Sears's _A Thackeray Dictionary_.
Cross's _George Eliot's Life as Related in her Letters and Journals_.
Browning's _Life of George Eliot_. (G.W.) Stephens's _George Eliot_.
(E.M.L.)
Cook's _George Eliot: A Critical Study of her Life, Writings, and
Philosophy_.
Olcott's _George Eliot: Scenes and People in Her Novels_.
Hamilton's _Robert Louis Stevenson_.
Balfour's _The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson_, 2 vols.
_The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson_, edited by Sidney Colvin.
Raleigh's _Robert Louis Stevenson_. Hamerton's _Stevensoniana_.
Japp's _Robert Louis Stevenson_.
Hamerton's _George Meredith: His Life and Art in Anecdote and
Criticism_.
_Letters of George Meredith_, 2 vols.
Sturge Henderson's _George Meredith_.
Bailey's _The Novels of George Meredith: A Study_.
Trevelyan's _The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith_.
Beach's _The Comic Spirit in George Meredith_.
Lionel Johnson's _The Art of Thomas Hardy_.
Macdonell's _Thomas Hardy_.
Abercrombie's _Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study_.
Saxelby's _Thomas Hardy Dictionary_.
Phelps's _Essays on Modern Novelists_ (Hardy, Kipling, Stevenson).
Benson's _Walter Pater_. (E.M.L.)
Paul's _Matthew Arnold_. (E.M.L.)
Saintsbury's _Matthew Arnold_.
_Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett_.
Griffin and Minchin's _The Life of Robert Browning_.
Chesterton's _Robert Browning_. (E.M.L.)
Sharp's _Life of Browning_. (G.W.)
Symons's _An Introduction to the Study of Browning_.
Foster's _The Message of Robert Browning_.
Orr's _A Handbook to the works of Robert Browning_.
_Alfred, Lord Tennyson, A Memoir_, by his son.
Benson's _Alfred Tennyson_ (the best brief work).
Lyall's _Tennyson_. (E.M.L.)
Brooke's _Tennyson: His Art and Relation to Modern Life_.
Van Dyke's _The Poetry of Tennyson_.
Gordon's _The Social Ideals of Alfred Tennyson_.
Lackyer's _Tennyson as a Student and Poet of Nature_.
Luce's _Handbook to the Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson_.
Woodberry's _Swinburne_.
Thomas's _Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Critical Study_.
Knowles's _Kipling Primer_.
Le Galliene's _Rudyard Kipling, A Criticism_.
Clemens's _A Ken of Kipling_.
Young's _Dictionary of the Characters and Scenes in the Stories and
Poems of Rudyard Kipling_.
Canby's _The Short Story in English_ (Kipling).
Cooper's _Some English Story Tellers_ (Kipling).
Leeb-Lundberg's _Word Formation in Kipling_ (excellent).
SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
The Pre-Raphaelites.--Read Rossetti's _The Blessed Damozel_, _Sister
Helen_, _The King's Tragedy_, _Love's Nocturne_, and _Mary's
Girlhood_. All of these are given in Page's _British Poets of the
Nineteenth Century_. Selections may be found in Bronson,[19] IV.,
_Century_, _Oxford Book of Victorian verse_, and Manly, I. Selections
from Christina Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelite verse are given in all except
Page.
From William Morris, read _Two Red Roses Across the Moon_, _The_
_Defence of Guenevere_ (Page's _British Poets_), and the selections
from _The Earthly Paradise_ in either Page, _Century_, Bronson, IV.,
or Manly, I.
What part did Ruskin play in this new movement? Point out the
simplest, the most affecting, and the most pleasing stanza in _The
Blessed Damozel_. What Pre-Raphaelite qualities in this poem have made
it such a favorite? What are the chief characteristics of Rossetti's
other verse? Note specially Miss Rossetti's religious verse.
What Pre-Raphaelite qualities do Morris's _Two Red Roses across the
Moon_ (1858) and _The Defence of Guenevere_ (1858) show? Compare this
early verse with the selections from _The Earthly Paradise_
(1868-1870).
Macaulay.--Read either the _Essay on Milton_ or the _Essay on
Addison_ (_Eclectic English Classics_ or _Gateway Series_) or the
selections in Craik, V., Manly, II., _Century_, or Dickinson and Roe's
_Nineteenth Century Prose_.
Read _History of England_, Chap. IX., or the selections in Craik V.,
or _Century_, or Manly, II.
What are some of the qualities that cause Macaulay's writings to
outstrip in popularity other works of a similar nature? What qualities
in his style may be commended to young writers? What are his special
defects? Contrast his narrative style in Chap. IX. of the _History_
with Carlyle's in _The French Revolution_, Vol. I., Book V., Chap. VI.
Newman.--The best volume of selections is edited by Lewis E. Gates
(228 pages, 75 cents). Dickinson and Roe's _Nineteenth Century English
Prose_ contains Newman's essay on _Literature_. Selections are given
in Craik V., _Century_, and Manly, II.
Compare his style with Macaulay's and note the resemblance and the
difference. Why did Newman call himself a rhetorician? What qualities
does he add to those of a rhetorician? Select passages that show his
special clearness, concreteness, also his rhetorical and argumentative
power.
Carlyle.--Read the _Essay on Robert Burns_ (_Eclectic English
Classics_ or _Gateway Series_); _Sartor Resartus_, Book III., Chap.
VI. (_Everyman's Library_); _The French Revolution_, Vol. I., Book V.,
Chap. VI. (_Everyman's Library_). Selections may be found in Craik,
V., _Century_, Manly, II., and Evans's Carlyle (_Masters of
Literature_).
What marked difference in manner of treatment is shown in Macaulay's
_Milton_ or _Addison_ and Carlyle's _Burns_? What was Carlyle's
message in _Sartor Resartus_? What did Huxley and Tyndale say of his
influence? What are the most noteworthy qualities of _The French
Revolution_? What are the chief characteristics of Carlyle's style?
Ruskin.--In Vol. I., Part II., of _Modern Painters_, read the first
part of Chap. I. of Sec. III., Chap. I. of Sec. IV., and Chap. I. of
Sec. V., and note Ruskin's surprising accuracy of knowledge in dealing
with aspects of the natural world. _The Stones of Venice_, Vol. III.,
Chap. IV., states Ruskin's theory of art and its close relation to
morality. Excellent selections from the various works of Ruskin will
be found in _An Introduction to the Writings of John Ruskin_, by Vida
D. Scudder. Selections are also given in _Century_, Manly, II.,
_Riverside Literature Series_, and Bronson's _English Essays (Modern
Painters and Fors Clavigera). Sesame and lilies, The King of the
Golden River_, and _The Stones of Venice_ are published in _Everyman's
Library_.
What was the message of _Modern Painters_? of _The Stones of Venice_?
of _Fors Clavigera_? Why is Ruskin called a disciple of Carlyle?
Select a passage from Ruskin's descriptive prose and indicate its
chief qualities.
Brontë, Bulwer Lytton, Gaskell, Trollope, Kingsley, Reade, Blackmore,
and Barrie.--_Jane Eyre_ (Charlotte Brontë), _Wuthering Heights_
(Emily Brontë), _Last Days of Pompeii_ (Lytton), _Cranford_ (Gaskell),
_Barchester Towers_ (Trollope), _Westward Ho!_ (Kingsley), _The
Cloister and the Hearth_ (Reade), and _Lorna Doone_ (Blackmore) are
all published in _Everyman's Library_. Barrie's _The Little Minister_
is included in Burt's _Home Library_. The works of the Brontë sisters
will be much more appreciated if Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte
Brontë (Everyman's Library)_ is read first. The novels by the Brontë
sisters, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, and Barrie record their impressions
of contemporary life. The other novels are historical. Lytton gives a
vivid account of the last days of Pompeii. Kingsley thrills with his
story of the sailors of Elizabeth's time. Reade, who studied libraries
to insure the accuracy of _The Cloister and the Hearth_, portrays
vividly the oncoming of the Renaissance in he fifteenth century.
Blackmore's great story, which records some incidents of the Monmouth
rebellion (1685), is written more to interest than to throw light on
history.
Dickens.--The first works of Dickens to be read are _Pickwick
Papers, A Christmas Carol, and David Copperfield_. These are all
published in _Everyman's Library_. Craik, V., gives "Mr. Pickwick on
the Ice," "Christmas at the Cratchit's," and two scenes from _David
Copperfield_.
Select passages that show (a) humor, (b) pathos, (c) sympathy with
children, (d) optimism. Describe some one of the characters. Can you
instance a case here a mannerism is made to take the place of other
characterization? Is Dickens a master of plot? of style?
Thackeray.--Read _Henry Esmond (Eclectic English Classics)_ and _The
English Humorists of the Fifteenth Century_ (Macmillan's _Pocket
Classics_). Craik, V., and Manly, II. give selections.
Contrast the manner of treatment in Thackeray's historical novel,
_Henry Esmond_, and in Scott's historical romance, _Ivanhoe_.
Thackeray says: "The best humor is that which contains most
humanity--that which is flavored throughout with tenderness and
kindness." Would this serve as a definition of Thackeray's own style
of humor? State definitely how he differs from Dickens in portraying
character. Compare Thackeray's _English Humorists_ with Macaulay's
_Milton_ and Carlyle's _Burns_. Which essay leaves the most definite
ideas? Which is the most interesting? Which has the most atmosphere?
How should you characterize Thackeray's style?
George Eliot.--Read _Silas Marner_ (_Eclectic English Classics_ or
_Gateway Series_), or selections in Craik, V., or Manly, II. In what
does the chief strength of _Silas Marner_ consist,--in the plot, the
characters, or the description? Does the ethical purpose of this novel
grow naturally out of the story? Is the inner life or only the outward
appearance of the characters revealed? Wherein do they show growth?
Stevenson.--Read _Treasure Island_ (_Eclectic English Classics_ or
_Gateway Series_), _Inland Voyage_, and _Travels with a Donkey_
(_Gateway Series_). From the essays read _Child's Play, Aes Triplex_
(both in _Virginibus Puerisque_). Some of the essays and best short
stories (including _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_) are given in Canby and
Pierce's _Selections from Robert Louis Stevenson_. From the volume of
poems called _Underwoods_, read _The Celestial Surgeon and Requiem. A
Child's Garden of Verse_ may be read entire in an hour.
_Compare Treasure Island_ with _Robinson Crusoe_. What are the chief
characteristics of _An Inland Voyage_ and _Travels with a Donkey_? Why
is he called a romantic writer? As an essayist, compare him with
Thackeray. What are the special qualities of his style?
George Meredith.--_The Egoist_ is Meredith's most representative
novel. _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ and _Diana of the Crossways_
are also masterpieces. From the _Poems_ read _Love in the Valley, The
Lark Ascending, Melanthus, Jump-to-Glory Jane_.
What is the central purpose of The Egoist? Select specially
Meredithian passages which show his general characteristics. Can you
find any other author whose humor resembles Meredith's? Would he
naturally be more popular with men or with women?
Hardy.--Hardy's most enjoyable novel is _Far from the Madding Crowd.
The Return of the Native_ is one of his strongest works.
What are some of the most striking differences between him and
Meredith? Which one is naturally the better story-teller? Where are
the scenes of most of Hardy's novels laid? What is his theory of life?
Arnold.--Read _Dover Beach, Memorial Verses, Stanzas in Memory of
the Author of "Obermann" and Sohrab and Rustum_ (Page's _British Poets
of the Nineteenth Century_, Bronson, IV., Manly, I.).
Is Arnold the poet of fancy or of reflection? How does his poetry show
one phase of nineteenth-century thought?
Arnold's _Essays, Literary and Critical_ are published in _Everyman's
Library_. The best volume of selections from the prose writings of
Arnold is the one edited by Lewis E. Gates (348 pages, 75 cents). Good
selections are given in Craik, V., Manly, I. (_Sweetness and light_),
_Century_ (_The Study of Poetry_). Arnold's _Introduction_ to Ward,
I., is well worth reading.
What quality specially marks Arnold's criticism? Compare him as a
critic with Coleridge, Macaulay, Carlyle, and Thackeray. What are the
advantages and disadvantages of a style like Arnold's?
Pater.--Read the essay, _Leonardo da Vinci_ (Dickinson and Roe's
_Nineteenth Century Prose_, pp. 338-368), from Pater's "golden book,"
_The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Literature_. E.E. Hale's
_Selections from Walter Pater_ (268 pages, 75 cents) gives
representative selections. Manly, II., and _Century_ give the essay on
_Style_.
What are the chief characteristics of Pater's style? Compare it with
Macaulay's, Newman's, Ruskin's, and Matthew Arnold's. Has Pater a
message? Does he show the spirit of the time?
The Brownings.--From Elizabeth Barrett Browning, read _Cowper's
Grave, the Cry of the Children_, and from her _Sonnets from the
Portuguese_, Nos. I., III., VI., X., XVIII., XX., XXVI., XXVIII.,
XLI., XLIII.
Mrs. Browning's verse comes from the heart and should be felt rather
than criticized. Fresh interest may, however, by given to a study of
her _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, by comparing them with any other
series of love sonnets, excepting Shakespeare's.
Robert Browning's shorter poems are best for the beginner, who should
read _Rabbi Ben Ezra, Abt Vogler, Home Thoughts from Abroad, Prospice,
Saul, The Pied Piper of Hamelin._ Baker's _Browning's Shorter Poems
(Macmillan's Pocket Classics)_ contains a very good collection of his
shorter poems. Representative selections from Browning's poems are
given in Page's _British Poets of the Nineteenth Century, Oxford Book
of Victorian Verse_, Bronson, IV., Manly, I., and _Century_.
Browning's masterpiece, _The Ring and the Book (Oxford Edition_,
Oxford University Press) would be apt to repel beginners. This should
be studied only after a previous acquaintance with his shorter poems.
Define Browning's creed as found in _Rabbi Ben Ezra_. Is he an ethical
teacher? Is there any similarity between his teaching and Carlyle's?
What most interests Browning,--word-painting, narration, action,
psychological analysis, or technique of verse? See whether a
comparison of his _Prospice_ with Tennyson's _Crossing the Bar_ does
not help you to understand Browning's peculiar cast of mind. What
qualities in Browning entitle him to be ranked as a great poet?
Tennyson.--From his 1842 volume, read the poems mentioned on page
556. From _The Princess_, read the lyrical songs; from _In Memoriam_,
the parts numbered XLI., LIV., LVII., and CXXXI.; from _Maud_, the
eleven stanzas beginning: "Come into the garden, Maud"; from _The
Idylls of the King_, read _Gareth and Lynette, Lancelot and Elaine,
The Passing of Arthur_ (Van Dyke's edition in _Gateway Series_); from
his later poems, _The Higher Pantheism, Locksley Hall Sixty Years
After_, and _Crossing the Bar_.
The best single volume edition of Tennyson's works is published in
Macmillan's _Globe Poets_. Selections are given in Page's _British
Poets of the Nineteenth Century_, Bronson, IV., _Oxford Book of
Victorian Verse_, Manly, I., and _Century_.
In _The Palace of Art_, study carefully the stanzas from XIV. to
XXIII., which are illustrative of Tennyson's characteristic style of
description. Compare _Locksley Hall_ with _Locksley Hall Sixty Years
After_, and note the difference in thought and metrical form. Does the
later poem show a gain over the earlier? Compare Tennyson's nature
poetry with that of Keats and Wordsworth. To what is chiefly due the
pleasure in reading Tennyson's poetry: to the imagery, form, thought?
What idea of his faith do you gain from _In Memoriam_ and _The Passing
of Arthur_? In what is Tennyson the poetic exponent of the age? Is it
probable that Tennyson's popularity will increase or wane? Select some
of his verse that you think will be as popular a hundred years hence
as now.
Swinburne.--Read _A Song in Time of Order, The Youth of the Year
(Atlanta in Calydon), A Match, The Garden of Proserpine, Hertha, By
the North Sea, The Hymn of Man, The Roundel, A Child's Laughter_.
The most of the above are given in Page's _British Poets of the
Nineteenth Century_, Bronson, IV., Manly, I., _Century, Oxford Book of
Victorian Verse_.
Compare both the metrical skill and poetic ideas of Swinburne and
Tennyson. Can you find any poet who surpasses Swinburne in the
technique of verse? What are his chief excellencies and faults?
Kipling.--Read _The Jungle Books_. The following are among the best
of his short stories: _The Man Who Would be King, The Brushwood Boy,
The Courting of Dinah Shadd, Drums of the Fore and Aft, Without
Benefit of Clergy, On Greenhow Hill_.
From his poems read _Mandalay, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, Danny Deever, The 'Eathen,
Ballad of East and West, Recessional, The White Man's Burden_; also
_Song of the Banjo_, and _L'Envoi_ from _Seven Seas_, published by
Doubleday, Page and Company.
Why is _The Jungle Book_ called an original creation? What are the
most distinctive dualities of Kipling's short stories? Point out in
what respects they show the methods of the journalist. How does
Kipling sustain the interest? What limitations do you notice? What is
specially remarkable about his style? What are the principal
characteristics of his verse? What subjects appeal to him? Why is his
verse so popular?
Minor Poets.--Read the selections from Clough, Henley, Bridges,
Davidson, Thompson, Watson, Dobson and Symons in either _The Oxford
Book of Victorian Verse_ or Stevenson's _The Home Book of Verse. The
Poetical Works of Robert Bridges_ is inexpensively published by the
Oxford University Press. Dobson's verse has been gathered into the
single volume _Collected Poems_ (1913).
What are the chief characteristics of each of the above authors? Do
these minor versifiers fill a want not fully supplied by the great
poets?
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER IX:
[Footnote 1: _A Liberal Education and Where to Find It_ (_Lay
Sermons_).]
[Footnote 2: For suggested readings in Pater, see p. 584.]
[Footnote 3: Pp. 225-364 of the Oxford University Press edition of his
_Poetical Works_.]
[Footnote 4: Printed by permission of The Macmillan Company.]
[Footnote 5: Given in Stevenson's _Home Book of Verse_ and _The Oxford
Book of Victorian Verse_.]
[Footnote 6: _History of England_, Vol. III, Chap. XI.]
[Footnote 7: Morison's _Life of Macaulay_, p. 139.]
[Footnote 8: _The Idea of a University_ (_Literature: A Lecture_).]
[Footnote 9: _For Claviers_, Letter I.]
[Footnote 10: _Praeterita_, Vol. II., Chap. V.]
[Footnote 11: _Silas Marner_, Chap. VI.]
[Footnote 12: _The Scholar Gypsy_.]
[Footnote 13: _A Southern Light_.]
[Footnote 14: _The Grande Chartreuse_.]
[Footnote 15: _Home Thoughts from Abroad_.]
[Footnote 16: A.C. Benson's _Alfred Tennyson_, p. 157.]
[Footnote 17 & 18: Printed by permission of Rudyard Kipling and
Doubleday, Page and Company.]
[Footnote 19: For full titles, see p. 6.]
CHAPTER X: TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE
Interest in the Present.--One result of the growing scientific
spirit has been an increasing interest in contemporary problems and
literature. At the beginning of the Victorian age, the chief part of
the literature studied in college was nearly two thousand years old.
When English courses were finally added, they frequently ended with
Milton. To-day, however, many colleges have courses in strictly
contemporary literature. The scientific attitude toward life has
caused a recognition of the fact that he who disregards current
literature remains ignorant of a part of the life and thought of
to-day and that he resembles the mathematician who neglects one factor
in the solution of a problem.
It is true that the future may take a different view of all
contemporary things, including literature; but this possibility does
not justify neglect of the present. We should also remember that
different stages in the growth of nations and individuals constantly
necessitate changes in estimating the relative importance of the
thought of former centuries.
The Trend of Contemporary Literature.--The diversity of taste in the
wide circle of twentieth-century readers has encouraged authors of
both the realistic and the romantic schools. The main tendency of
scientific influence and of the new interest in racial welfare is
toward realism. In his stories of the "Five Towns," Arnold Bennett
shows how the dull industrial life affects the character of the
individual. Much of the fiction of H.G. Wells presents matter of
scientific or sociological interest. Poets like John Masefield and
Wilfrid Gibson sing with an almost prosaic sincerity of the life of
workmen and of the squalid city streets. The drama is frequently a
study of the conditions affecting contemporary life.
Twentieth-century writers are not, however, neglecting the other great
function of literature,--to charm life with romantic visions and to
bring to it deliverance from care. The poetry of Noyes takes us back
to the days of Drake and to the Mermaid Inn, where we listen to
Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson. The Irish poets and dramatists
disclose a world of the "Ever-Young," where there is:--
"A laughter in the diamond air, a music in the trembling grass."
The influence of the great German skeptic, Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900), appears in some of Shaw's dramas, as well as in the
novels of Wells; but the poets of this age seem to have more faith
than Swinburne or Matthew Arnold or some of the minor versifiers of
the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Two prominent essayists, Arthur Christopher Benson (1862- ) and
Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874- ) are sincere optimists. Such volumes
of Benson's essays as _From a College Window_ (1906), _Beside Still
Waters_ (1907), and _Thy Rod and Thy Staff_ (1912) have strengthened
faith and proved a tonic to many. Chesterton is a suggestive and
stimulating essayist in spite of the fact that he often bombards his
readers with too much paradox. Early in life he was an agnostic and a
follower of Herbert Spencer, but he later became a champion of
Christian faith. Sometimes Chesterton seems to be merely clever, but
he is usually too thought-provoking to be read passively. His _Robert
Browning_ (1903), _Varied Types_ (1903), _Heretics_ (1905), _George
Bernard Shaw_ (1909), and _The Victorian Age in Literature_ (1913)
keep most readers actively thinking.
THE NOVEL
Joseph Conrad.--This son of distinguished Polish exiles from Russia,
Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski, as he was originally named, was born in
the Ukraine, in 1857. Until his nineteenth year he was unfamiliar with
the English language. Instead of following the literary or military
traditions of his family, he joined the English merchant marine.
Sailing the seas of the world, touching at strange tropical ports and
uncharted islands, elbowing all the races of the globe, hearing all
the languages spoken by man,--such were Conrad's activities between
his twentieth and thirty-seventh years.
[Illustration: JOSEPH CONRAD.]
At thirty-seven, needing a little rest, he settled in England and
began to write. Short stories, novels, and an interesting
autobiographical volume, _A Personal Record_ (1912), represent
Conrad's production. Among his ablest books are _Tales of Unrest_
(1898), a volume of sea stories, and _Lord Jim_ (1900), a novel full
of the fascination of strange seas and shores, but still more
remarkable for its searching analysis of a man's recovery of
self-respect after a long period of remorse for failure to meet a
momentary crisis. _Youth, A Narrative, and Two Other Tales_ (1902),
contains one of Conrad's strongest stories, _The End of the Tether_.
This is a tender story of an old sea captain, who for the sake of a
cherished daughter holds his post against terrific odds, including
blindness and disgrace. _Typhoon_ (1903) is an almost unrivaled
account of a ship's fight against mad hurricanes and raging seas.
One of Conrad's prime distinctions is his power to visualize scenes.
The terror, beauty, caprice, and mercilessness of the sea; the silence
and strangeness of the impenetrable tropical forest; atmospheres tense
with storm or brilliant with sunshine,--these he records with strong
effect. But though he has gained his fame largely as a chronicler of
remote seas and shores, his handling of the human element is but
little less impressive.
Conrad's method is unusual. Though his sentences are sufficiently
direct and terse, his general order of narration is not
straightforward. He often seems to progress slowly at the start, but
after the characters have been made familiar, the story proceeds to
its powerful and logical conclusion.
Arnold Bennett.--Bennett was born in Hanley, North Staffordshire, in
1867. He studied law, but abandoned it to become for seven years an
editor of _Woman_, a London periodical. In 1900 he resigned this
position to devote himself entirely to literature. He went to France
to live, and began to write novels under the influence of the French
and Russian realistic novelists.
[Illustration: ARNOLD BENNETT.]
Bennett is the author of many works of uneven merit. Some of these
were written merely to strike the popular taste and to sell. His
serious, careful work is seen at its best in his stories of the _Five
Towns_, so called from the small towns of his native Staffordshire.
One of the best of these novels, _The Old Wives' Tale_ (1908), is a
painstaking record of the different temperaments and experiences of
two sisters, from their happy childhood to a pathetic, disillusioned
old age. The intimate, homely revelations and the literal fidelity to
life in _The Old Wives' Tale_ give it a high rank among
twentieth-century English novels.
_Clayhanger_ (1910) is another strong story of life in the "Five
Towns" pottery district of Staffordshire. Although the hero, Edwin
Clayhanger, is not a strong personality, Bennett's art makes us keenly
interested in Edwin's simple, impressionable nature, in his eagerness
for life, and in his experiences as a young dreamer, lover, son, and
brother. _Hilda Lessways_ (1911), a companion volume to _Clayhanger_,
but a story of less power, continues the history of the same
characters. Bennett reveals in these novels one of his prime
gifts,--the skill to paint domestic pictures vividly and to invest
them with a distinct local atmosphere. His art has won a signal
triumph in arousing interest in simple scenes and average characters.
He can present the romance of the commonplace,--of gray, dull
monotonous, almost negative existence.
He has enlivened the contemporary stage with a few brisk comedies.
_Milestones_ was written in collaboration with Edward Knoblauch, an
American author. Its characters, representing three generations,
illustrate humorously the truth that what is to-day's innovation
becomes to-morrow's August convention. _The Honeymoon_ (1911) is a
farce of misunderstandings adroitly handled.
Although Bennett has shown great versatility, yet his individual,
strong, and vital work is found in the one field where he brings us
face to face with the circumscribed, but appealing life of the "Five
Towns" district of his youth.
John Galsworthy.--John Galsworthy was born in Coombe, Surrey, in
1867. He was graduated from Oxford with an honor degree in law in 1889
and was called to the bar in 1890. He traveled for a large part of two
years, visiting, among other places, Russia, Canada, Australia, South
Africa, and the Fiji Islands. On one of these trips he met Joseph
Conrad, then a sailor, and they became warm friends. Galsworthy was
twenty-eight when he began to write.
[Illustration: JOHN GALSWORTHY.]
Four of his novels deal with the upper classes of English society.
_The Man of Property_ (1906) treats of the wealthy class, _The Country
House_ (1907) presents the conservative country squire, _Fraternity_
(1909) portrays the intellectual class, and _The Patrician_ (1911)
pictures the aristocrat. Galsworthy is the relentless analyist of
well-to-do, conventional English society. As Frederic Taber Cooper
well says, "British stolidity, British conservatism, the unvarying
fixity of the social system, the sacrifice of individual needs and
cravings to caste and precedent and public opinion,--these are the
themes which Mr. Galsworthy never wearies of satirizing with a mordant
irony."
Since his object is to present problems of life, many of his
characters are but types. On the other hand, Soames Forsyte in _The
Man of Property_, Lord Miltoun, Mrs. Noel, and Lady Casterley in _The
Patrician_, are among the most brilliant and real characters in modern
fiction. Galsworthy's style is clear, his plot construction is
excellent, and his humor in caricaturing social types has many of the
qualities of Dickens's.
Herbert George Wells.--Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1866. He
expected to be a shopkeeper and was apprenticed in his fourteenth year
to a chemist; but this did not satisfy his ambition. Later, however,
he won scholarships that enabled him to take a degree in science.
While preparing himself to graduate from the University of London, he
worked in Huxley's laboratory. The experiments there inspired him to
write stories based on scientific facts and hypotheses, such as _The
Time Machine_ (1895) and _In the Days of the Comet_ (1906). Wells is
also vitally interested in problems of sociology. The _Discovery of
the Future_ (1902) and _The Future in America_ (1906) present
possibilities of scientifically planning man's further development.
_Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul_ (1905) and _Marriage_ (1912) are
his best works, considered as actual novels of character. _Kipps_ is a
bitter but strong portrayal of the pretense and hypocrisy of society
and of its inertia in responding to human needs, and _Marriage_ is a
subtle, psychological analysis of a conjugal misunderstanding and an
attempted readjustment. Wells's study of man as a biological
development and his preference of actual facts to sentimental
conclusions are in accord with the trend of modern social science.
[Illustration: HERBERT GEORGE WELLS.]
The work of Wells covers a wide range of subjects. He has written
scientific romances, blood-curdling tales, strange phantasies,
prophetic Utopias, and sociological novels. He shows an increasing
tendency to depict the human struggle with environment, heredity, and
the manifold forces that affect the earning of a livelihood. His
characters are more often remembered as specimens exhibiting some
phase of life than as attractive or repellent personalities.
Increasing power of portraying character, however, is evident in his
later work. He has a daring imagination, a sense of humor, satiric
power, and a capacity for expressing himself in vivid and picturesque
English.
Eden Phillpotts was born in India in 1862. His novels, however, are
as definitely associated with Devonshire as Hardy's are with Wessex,
and Bennett's with North Staffordshire. Phillpotts is noted for his
power to paint "landscapes with figures." The "figures" are the
farmers, villagers, and shepherds of that part of Devon, known as
Dartmoor; and the landscapes are the granite crags, the moors; and
farmlands of "good red earth." _Widecombe Fair_ (1913) is the
twentieth volume that he has published as a result of twenty years'
work among these children of Devon. Sometimes the roughness and
untutored emotions of the Dartmoor characters repel the readers; but
these characters form strong, picturesque groups of human beings, and
their dialect adds a pleasant flavor to the novels. Phillpotts's
frequent use of coincidences weakens the effect and mars the
naturalness of the plot, since their recurrence comes to be
anticipated. _Children of the Mist_ (1898) and _Demeter's Daughter_
(1911) are among his ablest novels.
Maurice Hewlett was born in Kent in 1861, of an old Somerset family.
He began writing in his boyhood, giving proof even then of his skill
in catching the manner of other writers. His style to-day reëchoes his
reading of many authors in Latin, French, Italian, and English.
_The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay_ (1900) shows Hewlett's
romantic fancy and love for historical characters and pageants. While
this novel is full of life, color, and movement, it displays his
proneness to allow the romantic vein to run to the fantastic in both
episode and style. _The Stooping Lady_ (1907) deals with the love of a
lady of high degree for a humble youth whom her devotion ennobles.
Hewlett's style is finished and richly poetical, but often too ornate
and too encrusted with archaic terms and other artificial forms.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, born in Cornwall in 1863, is a fiction
writer, critic, poet, and anthologist. Having much of Stevenson's love
for romantic adventure, he was chosen to finish _St. Ives_, left
incomplete by Stevenson. _The Splendid Spur_ (1889), a spirited tale
of romance and war in the perturbed time of Charles I., is one of his
best stories of adventure.
Among his books on simple Cornish life may be mentioned _The
Delectable Duchy_ (1893). It is a collection of short stories and
sketches. Quiller-Couch sees life without a touch of morbid somberness
and he commands a vivacious, highly-trained style.
William Frend De Morgan was born in London, in 1839. He published
his first novel, _Joseph Vance_ (1906), at the age of sixty-seven.
This plain, straightforward story of a little boy befriended by a
generous-hearted London doctor won for De Morgan wide and hearty
applause. While some contemporary writers fashion their style and
select their material on the models of French or Russian realists, De
Morgan goes to the great English masters, Thackeray and Dickens. Like
them, De Morgan writes copiously and leisurely.
_Alice-for-Short_ (1907) and _Somehow Good_ (1908) are strong novels,
but _Joseph Vance_, with its carelessly constructed plot and power to
awaken tears and smiles, remains De Morgan's best piece of fiction.
William John Locke was born in the Barbados in 1863. He gained much
of his reputation from his tenth book, _The Beloved Vagabond_ (1906).
The book takes its charm from the whimsical and quixotic temperament
of the hero. He is typical of Locke's other leading characters, who,
like Hamlet's friend, Horatio, take "fortune's buffets and rewards
with equal thanks." Like other novels by the same author, this story
is pervaded by a distinctly Bohemian atmosphere, wherein the ordinary
conventions of society are disregarded.
Locke's humor, his deft characterization, his toleration of human
failings, largely compensate for his lack of significant plots. He is
sometimes whimsical to the point of eccentricity, and his high spirits
often verge on extravagance; but at his best he has the power of
refreshing the reader with gentle irony, genial laughter, and love for
human kind.
Israel Zangwill, the Jewish writer, was born in London in 1864. He
first won fame by interpreting the Jewish temperament as he saw it
manifested in London's dingy, pitiful Ghetto quarter. "This Ghetto
London of ours," he says, "is a region where, amid uncleanness and
squalor, the rose of romance blows yet a little longer in the raw air
of English reality, a world of dreams as fantastic and poetic as the
mirage of the Orient where they were woven."
In his volume, _The Children of the Ghetto_ (1892), Zangwill admirably
chronicles the lives of these people and the sharp contrasts between
their quaint traditions and a great modern commercial city's customs.
POETRY
The Celtic Renaissance.--Some of the best recent English verse has
been written by poets of Irish birth or sympathies. Because of the
distinctive quality of both the poetry and prose of these Celtic
writers, the term "Celtic Renaissance" has been applied to their work,
which glows with spiritual emotion and discloses a world of dreams,
fairies, and romantic aspiration. As Richard Wagner received from the
Scandinavian folk-lore the inspiration for his great music, as
Tennyson found the incentive for _The Idylls of the Kings_ in Malory's
_Morte d'Arthur_, so the modern Celtic poets turned back to the
primitive legends of their country for tales of Cuchulain who fought
the sea, Caolte who besieged the castle of the gods, Oisin, who
wandered three hundred years in the land of the immortals, and Deirdre
who stands in the same relation to Celtic literature as Helen to Greek
and Brunnhilde to German literature. Some of the fascination that the
past and its fairy kingdom exerted over these poets may be found in
this stanza from Russell's _The Gates of Dreamland_:--
"Oh, the gates of the mountain have opened once again
And the sound of song and dancing falls upon the ears of men,
And the Land of Youth lies gleaming, flushed with rainbow light and
mirth.
And the old enchantment lingers in the honey-heart of earth."[1]
William Butler Yeats.--One of the most talented and active workers
in this Celtic Renaissance is William Butler Yeats, born in 1865 in
Dublin, Ireland. He came from an artistic family, his father, brother,
and sisters being either artists or identified with the arts and
crafts movement. Yeats himself studied art in Dublin, but poetry was
more attractive to him than painting.
He was greatly influenced by spending his youthful days with his
grandparents in County Sligo, where he heard the old Irish legends
told by the peasants, who still believed them. He translated these
stories from Irish into English and wrote poems and essays relating to
them. After reaching the age of thirty-four, he became engaged in
writing dramas and in assisting to establish the Irish National
Theater in Dublin. In thus reviving Ireland's heroic history, Yeats
has served his country and his art.
[Illustration: WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.]
_The Wanderings of Oisin_ (1889) is his best narrative poem. Oisin,
one of the ancient Celtic heroes, returns, after three hundred years
of adventure, to find Ireland Christianized. St. Patrick hears him
relate that he had been carried by his immortal wife, Niamh, to the
land of the Ever-Young,--
"Where broken faith has never been known,
And the blushes of first love never have flown,"[2]
that he had battled for a hundred years with an undying foe, and that
his strength had not waned during his stay on those immortal shores,
although he had felt the effect of age when his foot again touched his
native land. The days of "gods and fighting" men are brought back in
this romantic poem. The battles, however, are not such gory conflicts
as Scott and Kipling can paint. Yeats's contemplative genius presents
bloodless battles, symbolic of life's continued fight, and accentuates
the eternal hope and peace in the land of immortal youth.
Among his shorter narrative poems, which show some of the power of
_The Wanderings of Oisin_, are _The Death of Cuchulain_, _The Old Age
of Queen Maeve_, and _Baile and Aillinn_. Baille and Aillinn are the
Irish Romeo and Juliet, each of whom hears from the baleful Aengus the
false report that the other is dead. Each lover unhesitatingly seeks
death in order to meet the other at once beyond these mortal shores.
Yeats has also told simple stories in simple verse, as may be seen in
_The Ballad of Father Gilligan_ or _The Fiddler of Dooney_.
The most striking characteristic of Yeats's work is the pensive
yearning for a spiritual love, for an unchecked joy, and an unchanging
peace beyond what mortal life can give. These qualities are strikingly
illustrated by such poems as _Into the Twilight_, _The Everlasting
Voices_, _The Hosting of the Sidhe_ (Fairies), _The Stolen Child_. The
very spirit of Celtic poetry is seen in these lines from _The Lake
Isle of Innisfree_:--
"And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings."[3]
Yeats's verse has been called "dream-drenched poems." The term is
admirably descriptive of his romantic, lyrical verse.
George W. Russell.--Among the most prominent of these Celtic
imaginative writers is George W. Russell (1867- ), "the Irish
Emerson," popularly known as "A.E." He is a poet, a painter, a mystic,
and a dramatist. With Lady Gregory and Yeats, he has been one of the
most active workers for the Irish National Theater. He is an efficient
member of those coöperative societies which are trying to improve
Ireland's industrial and agricultural conditions.
Russell's poetry is highly spiritual. Sometimes it is so mystical that
like Prospero's messenger, Ariel, it vanishes into thin air. His
shadowy pictures of nature and his lyrical beauty and tenderness are
evident in two little volumes of his verse, _Homeward Songs by the
Way_ (1894) and _The Divine Vision_ (1904). This Stanza from _Beauty_,
in _The Divine Vision_, shows his spiritual longing for quiet, peace,
and beauty, in which to worship his Creator:--
"Oh, twilight, fill in pearl dew, each healing drop may bring
Some image of the song the Quiet seems to sing.
My spirit would have beauty to offer at the shrine,
And turn dull earth to gold and water into wine,
And burn in fiery dreams each thought till thence refined
It may have power to mirror the mighty Master's mind."[4]
Fiona Macleod.--All the work of William Sharp that he published
under the pseudonym of "Fiona Macleod" belongs to this Celtic
Renaissance. Born in 1856 at Paisley, Scotland, he settled in London
in 1878, and became widely known as William Sharp, the critic. When he
turned to his boyhood's home, the West Highlands of Scotland, for
inspiration, he wrote, under the pen-name of Fiona Macleod, poetic
prose stories and many poems about these Scotch Celts. He kept the
secret of his identity so well that not until his death in 1905 was it
known that Fiona Macleod, the mystic, was William Sharp, the critic.
_Mountain Lovers_ (1895), a romantic novel of primitive people who
live with nature in her loneliness, mystery, and terror, and who
possess an instinctive, speechless, and poetic knowledge of her moods,
is one of the earliest and most interesting of his long novels. He
excels in the short story. Some of his finest work in this field is in
_The Sin Eater_ (1895), which contains uncanny tales of quaint,
strongly-marked highland characters with their weird traditions.
_From the Hills of Dream_ (1901) and _The Hour of Beauty_ (1907) are
two small volumes of short poems full of the witchery of dreams, of
death, of youth, and of lonely scenes. These poems come from a land
far off from our common world. Delicacy of fancy, a freedom from any
touch of impurity, a beauty as of "dew-sweet moon-flowers glimmering
white through the mirk of a dust laden with sea-mist," are the
qualities of Fiona Macleod's best verse.
John Masefield.--Instead of looking to the land of dreams and the
misty past, like the Celtic writers, Masefield and Gibson, two younger
English poets, have found in the everyday life of the present time the
themes for their verse. Masefield was born in 1875 in Shropshire. He
was a seafarer in his youth, and later, a traveler by land and sea.
These varied experiences contributed color and vividness to his
narrative verse.
[Illustration: JOHN MASEFIELD.]
He has written several long narrative poems on unromantic subjects.
_Dauber_ (1912) contains some of his best lines and its story is the
most poetic. This poem follows the fortunes of a poor youth who,
wishing to be a painter of ships, went to sea to study his mode at
first hand. Masefield describes, with much power, the young artist's
ambition, his rough handling by the uncouth sailors, and his perilous
experiences while rounding Cape Horn. _Dauber_ exhibits the poet's
power of vividly picturing human figures and landscapes. This poem,
like most of Masefield's long narrative poems, is a story of human
failure,--a dull prosaic failure, such as prose fiction presents in
its pessimistic moods.
A strong and cheerful note is struck in some of Masefield's short
lyrics, notably in _Laugh and be Merry_, _Roadways_, _The Seekers_,
and _Being Her Friend_. In _Laugh and be Merry_, the song is almost
triumphant:--
"Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man.
* * * * *
Laugh and battle, and work, and drink of the wine outpoured
In the dear green earth, the sign of the joy of the Lord."[5]
Masefield's fancy does not busy itself with dreams and impossible
visions. He paints life in its grayness and sordidness and dull
mediocrity. Sometimes his verse is merely plain rimed prose, but again
it becomes vigorous, picturesque, and vivid in description, as in the
following lines from _Dauber_:--
"...then the snow
Whirled all about, dense, multitudinous cold,
Mixed with the wind's one devilish thrust and shriek
Which whiffled out men's tears, deafened, took hold,
Flattening the flying drift against the cheek."[6]
Wilfred W. Gibson.--Gibson, who was born in Hexham in 1878, sings of
the struggling oppressed work-a-day people:--
"Crouched in the dripping dark
With steaming shoulders stark
The man who hews the coal to feed the fires."[7]
His poem, _The Machine_, awakens sympathy for the printer of Christmas
story books and reveals Gibson as the twentieth-century Thomas Hood of
_The Song of the Shirt_. One of the most richly human of his poems is
_The Crane_, the story of the seamstress mother and her lame boy. His
realistic volume of verse bearing the significant title, _Daily Bread_
(1910), contains a number of narrative poems, which endeavor to set to
music the "one measure" to which all life moves,--the earning of daily
bread.
Gibson owes much of his popularity to his spirit of democracy and to
the story form of his verse. Like Masefield, he sacrifices beauty to
dull realism. Gibson manifests less range, less dramatic feeling, than
Masefield, but avoids Masefield's uncouthness and repellent dramatic
episodes.
These two poets illustrate a tendency to introduce a new realistic
poetry. Wordsworth wrote of Michael and the Westmoreland peasantry,
but Masefield and Gibson have taken as subjects of verse the toilers
of factory, foundry, and forecastle. Closeness to life and simplicity
of narration characterize these authors. They approximate the subject
matter and technique of realistic fiction.
Alfred Noyes.--Alfred Noyes was born in 1880 in Wolverhampton
Staffordshire. He wrote verse while an Oxford undergraduate and he has
since become one of the leading poets of the twentieth century. He has
traveled in England and in America, reading his poems and lecturing on
literary subjects.
[Illustration: ALFRED NOYES.]
_The Flower of Old Japan_ (1903) is a fairy tale of children who dream
of the pictures on blue china plates and Japanese fans. The poem is
symbolic. The children are ourselves; and Japan is but the "kingdom of
those dreams which ...are the sole reality worth living and dying
for."
The poet says of this kingdom:--
"Deep in every heart it lies
With its untranscended skies;
For what heaven should bend above
Hearts that own the heaven of love?"[8]
_The Forest of Wild Thyme_ (1905) affords another
"Hour to hunt the fairy gleam
That flutters through this childish dream."[9]
There is also a deeper meaning to be read into this poem. The mystery
of life, small as well as great, is found simply told in these
lines:--
"What does it take to make a rose,
Mother-mine?
The God that died to make it knows
It takes the world's eternal wars,
It takes the moon and all the stars,
It takes the might of heaven and hell
And the everlasting Love as well,
Little child."[10]
Noyes has published several volumes of lyrical verse. Some of it
possesses the lightness of these elfish tales. _The Barrel Organ_,
_The Song of Re-Birth_, and _Forty Singing Seamen_ are among his
finest lyrics. They display much rhythmic beauty and variety. He
strikes a deeply sorrowful and passionate note in _The Haunted Palace_
and _De Profundis_. A line like this in _The Haunted Palace_--
"...I saw the tears
Bleed through her eyes with the slow pain of years,"[11]
indicates the strong emotional metaphor that occasionally deepens the
passion of his verse.
England's sea power, immortalized in song from Beowulf to Swinburne,
often inspires Noyes. His finest long poem is _Drake: An English Epic_
(1908), which relates the adventures of this Elizabethan sea-captain
and his victory over the Armada. The spirit of a daring romantic age
of discovery is shown in these lines that tell how Drake and his men--
"...went out
To danger as to a sweetheart far away,
Who even now was drawing the western clouds
Like a cymar of silk and snow-white furs
Close to her, till her body's beauty seemed
Clad in a mist of kisses."[12]
Another volume of poems, _Tales of the Mermaid Tavern_ (1913), brings
us into the company of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spencer, Jonson, Raleigh,
and others of the great Elizabethan group that made the Mermaid Tavern
their chosen resort. Greene's farewell to Shakespeare,--
"You took my clay and made it live,"[13]
shows that Noyes has caught something of the spirit that animated
Elizabethan England.
Noyes is one of the most spontaneous and fluent writers of modern
English poetry. Whether he is mystical, dramatic, playful, or marching
along the course of a long narrative poem, he handles his verse with
ease and facility. His language, his rhythm, and his thought are most
happily blended in his graceful singing lyrics. The work of Noyes is
inspired by the desire to show that all things and all souls are--
"One with the dream that triumphs beyond the light of the spheres,
We come from the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of
Years."[14]
THE MODERN DRAMA
The revival of the drama is a characteristic feature of the latter
part of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The
plays of the Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), affected England
profoundly in the last decade of the nineteenth century and proved an
impetus to a new dramatic movement, seen in the work of men like Shaw.
The great literary school of dramatists passed away soon after the
death of Shakespeare. While it is true that the writing of plays has
been practically continuous since the time of the Restoration, yet for
more than two hundred years after that event, the history of the drama
has had little memorable work to record. There were two brief
interesting comic periods: (1) the period of Congreve at the close of
the seventeenth century, and (2) of Goldsmith and Sheridan nearly a
hundred years later. The literary plays of the Victorians,--Browning,
Tennyson, and Swinburne,--were lacking in dramatic essentials.
The modern drama has accomplished certain definite results. Pinero's
work is typical of vast improvement in technique. Shaw is noted for
his power of "investing modern conversation with vivacity and point."
J.M. Synge has won distinction for presenting the great elemental
forces that underlie the actions of primitive human beings. The
playwrights are making the drama perform some of the functions that
have been filled by the novel. The modern drama is also wrestling with
the problem of combining literary form, poetic spirit, and good
dramatic action. Some of the modern plays deal with unpleasant
subjects, and some of the least worthy are immoral in their
tendencies. Such plays will be forgotten, for the Anglo-Saxon race has
never yet immortalized an unwholesome drama. Fortunately, however, the
influence of a large proportion of the plays is pure and wholesome. In
this class may be included the dramas of the Irish school and of
Barrie, the majority by Galsworthy, and a number by Phillips and Shaw.
Jones and Pinero.--The work of Henry Arthur Jones and Sir Arthur
Wing Pinero marks the advance of the English drama from artificiality
and narrowness of scope toward a wider, closer relation to life. Henry
Arthur Jones, both a playwright and a critic, was born in
Grandborough, Buckinghamshire, in 1851. Contemporary English life is
the subject of his numerous plays. _The Manoeuvers of Jane_ (1898) and
_Mrs. Dane's Defence (1900), are among his best works.
[Illustration: HENRY ARTHUR JONES.]
Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, born in 1855 in London, began his career as an
actor.
[Illustration: ARTHUR WING PINERO.]
His real ambition, however, was to write for the stage. More than
forty works, including farces, comedies of sentiment, and serious
dramas of English life, attest his zeal as a dramatist. Among his most
successful farces are _The Magistrate_ (1885), _The School Mistress_
(1886), and _The Amazons_ (1893). Clever invention of absurd
situations and success in starting infectious laughter are the prime
qualities of these plays.
_The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ (1893) is by most critics considered
Pinero's masterpiece. The failure of a character to regain
respectability once forfeited supplies the nucleus for the dramatic
situations. Excellent in craftsmanship as it is disagreeable in theme,
this play contains no superfluous word to retard the action or mar the
technical economy. Adolphus William Ward says: "With _The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray_ the English acted drama ceased to be a merely insular
product, and took rank in the literature of Europe. Here was a play
which, whatever its faults, was ...an epoch-marking play."
One great service of Pinero and Jones to the twentieth-century drama
has been excellent craftsmanship. Their technical skill may be
specifically noted in the naturalness of the dialogues, in the
movement of the characters about the stage, in the performance of some
acts apparently trivial but really significant, and in the
substitution of devices to take the place of the old soliloquies and
"asides." Of the two, Pinero is the better craftsman, since Jones, in
his endeavor to paint a moral, sometimes weakens his dramatic effect.
George Bernard Shaw.--Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1856. He
was willful and took "refuge in idleness" at school. His education
consisted mainly in studying music with his talented mother, in
haunting picture galleries, and in wide reading. At the age of twenty,
he went to London and began his literary career. He was at various
times a journalist, a critic of art, music, and the drama, a lecturer,
a novelist, and a playwright. Shaw describes himself as a man "up to
the chin in the life of his times." He is a vegetarian, an
anti-vivisectionist, an advocate for woman's suffrage, and a
socialist.
[Illustration: GEORGE BERNARD SHAW.]
_Arms and the Man, Candida, You Never Can Tell_, and _The Man of
Destiny_, published (1898) in the second volume of _Plays, Pleasant
and Unpleasant_; and _The Devil's Disciple_, published (1900) in
_Three Plays for Puritans_, are among his best dramas. With their
stage directions and descriptions, they are as delightful to read as
novels. Of these plays, _Candida_ is first in character drawing and
human interest. The dramatic action is wholly within the mental states
of the three chief actors, but the situations are made intense through
a succession of unique, absorbing, entertaining, and well-developed
conversations.
Shaw is more destructive than constructive in his philosophy as
expressed in his plays; and he criticizes so many of the institutions
held sacred by society that people have refused to accept him
seriously, even when he has written expository prefaces to his dramas.
In _Arms and the Man_, he satirizes the romantic admiration for the
soldier's calling; in _The Doctor's Dilemma_ (1906), he attacks the
professional man; in _Widowers' Houses_ (1898), he assails the rich
property holder with his high rents on poor people's houses: and in
_Man and Superman_ (1903), he dissects love and home until the
sentiment is entirely taken out of them.
Shaw's chief object is to place before his audience facts, reasons,
and logical conclusions. He will not tolerate romantic emotions or
sentimentalism, which he ridicules with a reckless audacity, a literal
incisiveness, and a satiric wit that none of his contemporaries can
excel. His chief claim to his present important position among
playwrights is based on his originality and fearlessness of thought,
the unfailing sprightliness of his conversation, the infectious spirit
of raillery in his comedies, and his mastery of the requirements of
the modern stage.
J.M. Barrie.--With the successful stage production of _The Little
Minister_ (1897), Barrie passed from novelist to playwright. The
qualities of humor, fancy, and quaint characterization, which were
such a charm in his novels, reappear in his plays.
[Illustration: JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE.]
_The Admirable Crichton_, produced in 1903, is one of Barrie's most
successful comedies. He displays skill and humor in handling the
absurd situation of a peer's family wrecked on a desert island, where
the butler, as the most resourceful member of the party, takes
command. In _Peter Pan_ (1904), the dramatization of the novel, _The
Little White Bird_, care-free, prankish Peter Pan visits three
children in their sleep and teaches them to fly away with him. He
carries them to the little people of the fairy world, to the pirate
ship, to other scenes dear to children's hearts, and finally to his
home in the tree tops. The play is a mixture of fancy, symbolism, and
realism. These are woven into a bright phantasy by an imagination that
is near to childhood and has not lost its morning's brightness.
_What Every Woman Knows_ (produced in 1908) shows Barrie's dramatic
art at its height. He knows how to introduce variety and to give his
characters an opportunity to reveal themselves. Every word, every
movement of the heroine, Maggie Shand, adds to the unfolding of a
fascinating personality. A period of intensely dramatic action may be
followed by a comparative pause, such as occurs when the audience sees
Maggie's husband slowly realize her cleverness and helpfulness,
--qualities that had been long apparent to every one else.
Barrie shows the ability to present dramatically situations that are
emotionally appealing or delightfully humorous. His plays exhibit
admirably the deep feelings, the momentary moods, the resourcefulness,
or the peculiar whimsicalities of men and women.
John Galsworthy.--As a means of presenting social problems,
Galsworthy utilizes the drama even more than the novel. Faulty prison
systems, discords between labor and capital, discrepancies between law
and justice, are some of the themes he chooses to dramatize. _The
Silver Box_ (1906) ironically interprets Justice as blind rather than
impartial. The poor man is often punished while the more fortunate man
goes free. _Strife_ (1909), in some respects the most powerful of his
plays, illustrates the clash between capital and labor. In _The Eldest
Son_ (1912), the conflict is between two social orders. _Justice_
(1910), which secured reforms in the English prison system, shows how
a young man is affected by an inflexible but legal punishment; and how
such a method fails to assist him humanely to a better manhood, but
drives him to lower and lower depths.
In _Joy_ (1907), a delightful play, Galsworthy momentarily
relinquishes social problems for a drama of more personal emotion. In
the mystical, poetical composition, _The Little Dream_ (1911), he
presents an allegory of the maiden in the Alps, dreaming first of the
simple mountain life and then of the life in cities. With its
spiritual note and delicate fancy, _The Little Dream_ turns a golden
key on the ideal world beyond the strife and gloom dramatized in the
sociological plays.
Galsworthy has good stagecraft. His characterization is distinct and
consistent. His plays are simple in construction and direct in
movement. He strictly avoids rhetorical and theatrical effects, but
his dramatic economies often sacrifice all charm and aesthetic appeal.
His gray world leaves no hope save the desperate one that conditions
so grim may shame and spur society to reform.
Stephen Phillips.--This dramatist and poet was born at Somerton,
near Oxford, in 1864. The boy was sent to Shakespeare's birthplace,
Stratford-on-Avon, to attend school. He entered Cambridge, but at the
end of his first term he left the university to join a company of
Shakespearean players. His six years with them initiated him into the
technique of stagecraft, which he later applied in the writing of his
poetic dramas.
[Illustration: STEPHEN PHILLIPS.]
Before producing the plays for which he is known, he wrote some
narrative and lyric verse. _Marpessa_ (1890), a blank verse poem, is a
beautiful treatment of the old Greek myth, in which Apollo, the god,
and Idas, the mortal, woo Marpessa. Marlowe might have written the
lines in which Apollo promises to take her to a home above the world,
where movement is ecstasy and repose is thrilling. In some of his
non-dramatic poems, _Christ in Hades_ (1896), _Cities of Hell_ (1907),
and _The New Inferno_ (1896), Phillips shows how the subject of life
and punishment after death attracts him.
With the appearance of his _Paolo and Francesca_ in 1899, the poetic
drama seemed phoenix-like to arise from its ashes. Tennyson and
Browning had failed to write successful plays. In fact, since the
death of Dryden, poetry and drama had seemed to be afraid to approach
each other. Phillips effected at least a temporary union. His several
plays have distinctly dramatic qualities and many passages of poetic
beauty. From both a dramatic and a poetic point of view, _Paolo and
Francesca_ is Phillips's best play. Its dramatic values lie chiefly in
its power to create and sustain a sense of something definitely
progressing toward a certain point. The poetic elements of the play
consist in the beauty of atmosphere and the charm of the lines.
Giovanni Malatesta, the ugly tyrant of Rimini, being at war when his
marriage draws near, sends his young brother Paolo to escort Francesca
to Rimini. On the journey Paolo and Francesca fall in love with each
other. When Giovanni discovers this, his jealous hand slays them. To
such a tragic climax, Phillips drives steadily onward from the first
scene, thus focusing the interest on a concrete dramatic situation.
_Herod_ (1900) is a drama of ambition versus love. Herod, the great
historic king of the Jews, though passionately in love with his wife
Mariamne, sacrifices her brother Aristobulus to his suspicions,
fearing that this young prince, the last of the Maccabees, may
supplant him on the throne. This sacrifice, prompted by evil
counselors, results in a train of tragic episodes, including
Mariamne's death and Herod's madness. The lines in which Herod speaks
of thinking in gold and dreaming in silver call to mind the hyperbole
and music of Marlowe's mighty line.
_Ulysses_ (1902), more of a panorama than a play, is founded on the
Homeric story. Its scenes are laid in Olympus, in Hades, on Calypso's
isle, and finally in Ithaca. Calypso tries to retain Ulysses upon her
isle, beautiful--
"With sward of parsley and of violet
And poplars shimmering in a silvery dream."[15]
He struggles against her enchantment, returns home, finds his wife
surrounded by her suitors, joins in their bow-drawing contest, and, in
a most exciting and dramatic scene, surpasses all rivals and claims
his faithful, beautiful Penelope.
The plays of Phillips not infrequently lack that clinching power that
stretches the interest taut. Many scenes are admirably spectacular,
suggestive of richly decorated tapestries, which hang separately in
spacious rooms; but the plays need more forceful dramatic action,
moving through changes to a climax. Phillips's diction, though
sometimes rhetorical, is also often ornately beautiful and highly
poetical. We feel that even in his plays, he is greater as a poet than
as a dramatist.
CELTIC DRAMATISTS
Strong national feeling, interest in the folklore and peasant life of
Ireland, and ambition to establish a national theater, have led to a
distinct and original Irish drama. In 1899, with a fund of two hundred
and fifty dollars, Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats, G.W. Russell,
and other playwrights and patrons succeeded in establishing in Dublin
the Irish Literary Theater now known as the Irish National Theater.
The object of this theater is twofold. In the first place, it aims to
produce "literary" plays, not the vapid, panoramic kind that merely
pass away the time. In the second place, the Irish plays present
fabled and historical Irish heroes and the humble Irish peasant.
Patriotism inspired many writers to assist in this national movement.
Some gathered stories from the lips of living Irish-speaking peasants;
others collected and translated into English the old legends of
heroes. Dr. Douglas Hyde's translations of _The Five Songs of
Connacht_ (1894) and _The Religious Songs of Connacht_ (1906) are
valuable works and have greatly influenced the Irish writers.
Lady Augusta Gregory.--Lady Gregory, born in 1852, in Roxborough,
County Galway, has made some of the best of these translations in her
works, _Cuchulain of Muirthemma_, and _Gods and Fighting Men_. "These
two books have come to many as a first revelation of the treasures
buried in Gaelic literature, and they are destined to do much for the
floating of old Irish story upon the world. They aim to do for the
great cycles of Irish romance what Malory did for the Arthurian
stories."[16]
[Illustration: LADY GREGORY.]
Lady Gregory wrote also for the Irish Theater plays that have been
acted successfully not only in Ireland but in England and in America.
Among her best serious plays are _The Gaol Gate_ (1906), a present-day
play, the hero of which dies to save a neighbor, _The Rising of the
Moon_ (1907), and _Grania_ (1912). _McDonough's Wife_ (1913) is an
excellent brief piece with an almost heroic note at the close. The
great vagabond piper, McDonough, master of wonderful music, returns
from wandering, to find his wife dead, and, because of his
thriftlessness, about to be denied honorable burial. McDonough steps
to the door, pipes his marvelous tunes, and immediately the village
flocks to do homage to his wife.
Lady Gregory's farces have primarily made her fame. _Spreading the
News_ (1904), _Hyacinth Halvey_ (1906), _The Image_ (1910), and _The
Bogie Men_ (1913) are representative of her vigorous and
well-constructed farces. They are varied in subject, the incidents are
well developed, the characters are genuine Irish peasants and
villagers, and the humor is infectious. It is interesting to note that
Lady Gregory has continued to write farces because of the demand for
them in the Irish National Theater, in order to offset the large
number of tragedies by other authors.
William Butler Yeats.--In addition to delightful poetic fancy, Yeats
possesses considerable dramatic ability and stagecraft. In _The
Countess Cathleen_ (rewritten in 1912), the poor peasants are driven
by a famine to the verge of starvation. Many die; but some are fed by
the Countess Cathleen, while others sell their souls for the price of
food to demons disguised as merchants. When these demons steal
Countess Cathleen's stores in order to stop her charities, with
instant Irish quickness and generosity, she sells her soul for a great
price to the demons, in order to save her people here and hereafter.
Such a tremendous sacrifice, however, is not permitted. Because of the
purity of her motive, armed angels save her soul in the last
impressive act. Supernatural powers, both pagan and Christian,
participate in the play. Spirits haunt the woods, enter the peasants'
cottages, and cast spells on the inhabitants. The play is Irish in
story, in symbolism, and in the fancifulness of the conception.
_The Land of Heart's Desire_ is another drama that has sprung from the
soil and folklore of Ireland. This play was one of the first Celtic
dramas to be produced, and in its present revised form (1912) it is
one of the most engaging of the Irish plays. Partly in prose and
partly in verse, it is the story of a young bride who tires of her
monotonous life and calls upon the fairies to release her. The old
parents tell her that duty comes before love of the fairies.
The good priest begs her not to forsake her faithful young husband;
but the fairy wins, and, leaving a dead bride in the cottage, bears
away the living bride to a land where--
"The fairies dance in a place apart,
Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring,
Tossing their milk-white arms in the air;
For they have heard the wind laugh and murmur and sing
Of a land where even the old are fair,
And even the wise are merry of tongue."[17]
Patriotic love for Ireland is the very breath of _Cathleen ni
Hoolihan_ (1902), a one-act prose play in which Cathleen symbolizes
Ireland. _The Shadowy Waters_ (1900) and _Deirdre_ (1907) are more
poetic than dramatic. The first of these with the mysterious harper,
the far-sailing into unknown seas, the parting with everything but the
loved one, shows Yeats in his deeply mystical mood. In _Deirdre_ is
dramatized part of a popular legend of the great queen by that name,
who was too beautiful for happiness. She has seven long years of joy
and then accepts her fate in the calm, triumphant way of the old
heroic times.
Yeats's plays reflect the childlike superstitions and lively
imagination of his country. He loves the fairies, the dreams of
eternal youth, the symbolizing of things of the spirit by lovely
things of earth. His plays are poetical, fanciful, and romantic.
John Millington Synge.--One of the most notable of the Irish
writers, J.M. Synge, was born near Dublin in 1871 and died in that
city in 1909. His brief span of life has yielded only scanty
biographical data. He came of an old Wicklow family; he was graduated
from Trinity College, Dublin; afterwards he wandered through much of
Europe, finally settling in France.
[Illustration: JOHN SYNGE.]
In 1899, William Butler Yeats discovered him in Paris, a "man all
folded up in brooding intellect," writing essays on French
authors,--on Molière, for example, from whom he learned the trick of
characterization; on Racine, who taught him concentration; on
Rabelais, who infected him with love of deep laughter. Yeats,
suspecting that Synge could be an original writer as well as an
interpreter of others, persuaded him to go back to Ireland, to the
Aran Islands, off Galway. Synge discovered there a lost kingdom of the
imagination, a place where spontaneous feeling and primitive
imagination had not been repressed by the outside world's customs and
discipline, and where the constant voice of the ocean, the touch of
the mysterious, all-embracing mist, and the gleam of the star through
a rift in the clouds banished all sense of difference between the
natural and the supernatural.
When Synge died in his thirty-eighth year, he had written only six
short plays, all between 1903 and 1909. Two of these, _In the Shadow
of the Glen_ and _Riders to the Sea_, contain only one act. _The
Tinker's Wedding_ has two acts, and the rest are three-act plays.
_In the Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea_, and _The Well of the
Saints_, produced respectively in 1903, 1904, and 1905, show that
Synge came at once into full possession of his dramatic power. Even in
his earliest written play, _The Well of The Saints_, we find a style
stripped of superfluous verbiage and vibrant with emotion. _In the
Shadow of the Glen_, his first staged play, consumes only a half hour.
The scene is laid in a cabin far off in a lonely glen, and the four
actors,--a woman oppressed by loneliness, an unfeeling husband who
feigns death, and two visitors,--make a singularly well-knit
impressive drama.
_Riders to the Sea_ has been pronounced the greatest drama of the
modern Celtic school. Some critics consider this the most significant
tragedy produced in English since Shakespeare. Simple and impressive
as a Greek tragedy, it has for its central figure an old mother whose
husband and five sons have been lost at sea. The simple but poignant
feeling of the drama focuses on the death of Maurya's sixth and last
son, Bartley. This tragic episode, simply presented, touches the
depths of human sympathy. In old Maurya, Synge created an impressive
figure of what Macbeth calls "rooted sorrow."
_The Playboy of the Western World_, produced first in 1907, is a
three-act play. It is as fantastically humorous as the _Riders to the
Sea_ is tragical. Dread of his father ties this peasant to his stupid
toil. A fearful deed frees the youth and throws him into the company
of the lovely maiden, Pegeen, and admiring friends. The latent poetry
and wild joy of living awake in him, and, under the spur of praise, he
performs great feats. He who had never before dared to face girls,
makes such love to Pegeen that poesy itself seems to be talking. The
Playboy is one of the wildest conceptions of character in modern
drama. His very extravagance compels interest. Pegeen is a fitting
sweetheart for him. Her father is a stalwart figure, possessing a
shrewd philosophy and rare strength of speech, as "fully flavored as
nut or apple." Some critics object to such a boisterous play, but they
should remember that it is intended to be an extravagant peasant
fantasia.
_Deirdre of the Sorrows_, another three-act play, produced first in
1910, tells the story of the beautiful princess Deirdre, of her
isolated young life, and her seven years of perfect union with her
lover Naisi. When her lover is slain, this true and tender queen of
the North loosens the knot of life to accompany him.
Synge belongs in the first rank of modern dramatists. The forty Irish
characters that he has created reveal the basal elements of universal
human nature. His purpose is like Shakespeare's,--to reveal throbbing
life, not to talk in his own person, nor to discuss problems. Synge
has dramatized the primal hope, fear, sorrow, and loneliness of life.
Although his plays are written in prose and have the distinctive
flavor of his lowly characters, yet a recent critic justly says that
Synge "for the first time sets English dramatic prose to a rhythm as
noble as the rhythms of blank verse."
SUMMARY
The twentieth century shows two main lines of development,--the
realistic and the romantic. The two leading essayists of the period,
A.C. Benson and G.K. Chesterton, are both idealists and champions of
religious faith.
Among the novelists, Conrad tells impressive stories of distant seas
and shores; Bennett's strongest fiction gives realistic pictures of
life in English industrial towns; Galsworthy's novels present the
problems that affect the upper class of Englishmen; Wells writes
scientific romances and sociological novels.
Some of the best poetry, full of the fascination of a dreamy far-off
world, has been written by the Celtic poets, Yeats, Russell, and Fiona
Macleod. Masefield and Gibson have produced much realistic verse about
the life of the common toiler. Noyes has written _Drake_, a romantic
epic, and a large amount of graceful lyrical verse, in some of which
there is much poetic beauty.
The most distinctive work of recent times has been in the field of the
drama. Pinero has improved its technique; Shaw has given it remarkable
conversational brilliancy; Barrie has brought to it fancy and humor
and sweetness; Galsworthy has used it to present social problems;
Phillips has tried to restore to it the Elizabethan poetic spirit. The
Celtic dramatists form a separate school. Lady Gregory, Yeats, and
Synge have all written plays based on Irish life, folklore, or
mythology. The plays of Synge, the greatest member of the group,
reveal the universal primitive emotions of human beings.
CONCLUSION
Three distinctive moral influences in English literature specially
impress us,--the call to strenuous manhood:--
"...this thing is God,
To be man with thy might,"
the increasing sympathy with all earth's children:--
"Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call,
Ye to each other make,"
and the persistent expression of Anglo-Saxon faith. As we pause in our
study, we may hear in the twentieth-century song of Alfred Noyes, the
echo of the music from the loom of the Infinite Weaver:--
"Under the breath of laughter, deep in the tide of tears,
I hear the loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years."[18]
REFERENCE FOR FURTHER STUDY
Kennedy's _English Literature_, 1880-1895 (Shaw, Wells, Fiona Macleod,
Yeats).
Kelman's _Mr. Chesterton's Point of View_ (in _Among Famous Books_).
Cooper's _Some English Story Tellers_.
Conrad's _A Personal Record_.
Phelps's _Essays on Modern Novelists_ (De Morgan).
Yeats's _Celtic Twilight_.
Figgis's _Studies and Appreciations_ (_Mr. W.B. Yeats's Poetry_. _The
Art of J.M. Synge_.)
More's _Drift of Romanticism_ (Fiona Macleod).
Borsa's _The English Stage of To-day_.
Jones's (Henry Arthur) _The Foundation of a National Drama: A
Collection of Essays, Lectures, and Speeches, Delivered and Written in
the Years 1896-1912_.
Hamilton's _The Theory of the Theater_.
Hunt's _The Play of To-day_.
Hale's _Dramatists of To-day_.
Henderson's _George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Works_, 2 vols.
Chesterton's _George Bernard Shaw_.
Weygandt's _Irish Plays and Playwrights_ (excellent).
Krans's _William Butler Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival_.
Howe's _J.M. Synge: A Critical Study_.
Yeats's _J.M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time_ (in _The Cutting of
an Agate_, 1912).
Bickley's _J.M. Synge and the Irish Dramatic Movement_.
Elton's _Living Irish Literature_ (in _Modern Studies_).
SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Essays.--From A.C. Benson, read one of these collections of essays:
_The Altar Fire, Beside Still Waters, Thy Rod and Thy Staff_, and one
or more of these biographies: _Tennyson, John Ruskin, Rossetti_
(E.M.L.), _Walter Pater_ (E.M.L.); from Chesterton, one of these
collections of essays: _Varied Types, Heretics, Orthodoxy_, and one or
more of these biographies: _George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens,
Robert Browning_ (E.M.L.). For other twentieth-century essays, see the
preceding bibliography and the paragraph following this.
The Novel.--From Conrad, read _Youth, Typhoon, Lord Jim_; from
Bennett, _The Old Wives' Tale, Clayhanger_; from Galsworthy, _The Man
of Property, The Patrician_; from Wells, _The Time Machine,
Kipps, The Future in America_ (essay); from Phillpotts, _Children of
the Mist, Demeter's Daughter_; from Hewlett, _Life and Death of
Richard Yea and Nay, The Stooping Lady_; from Quiller-Couch, _The
Splendid Spur, The Delectable Duchy_; from De Morgan, _Joseph Vance,
Somehow Good_; from Locke, _The Beloved Vagabond, The Adventures of
Aristide Pujol_; from Zangwill, _The Children of the Ghetto, The
Melting Pot_ (play).
Poetry.--From _The Poetical Works of William B. Yeats_ (Macmillan),
read _The Wanderings of Oisin, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Hosting
of the Sidhe, The Voice of the Waters_; from Fiona Macleod's _Poems
and Dramas_ (Duffield), _The Vision, The Lonely Hunter, The Rose of
Flame_; from Masefield, the part of _Dauber_ describing the rounding
of Cape Horn, beginning p. 119, in _The Story of a Round-House_
(Macmillan); from Gibson's _Fires_ (Macmillan), _The Crane, The
Machine_; from Noyes's _Poems_ (Macmillan, 1906), _The Song of
Re-Birth, The Barrel Organ, Forty Singing Seamen, The Highwayman_;
Book II from his _Drake: An English Epic_ (Stokes).
The Drama.--From Jones, read _The Manoeuvers of Jane, Mrs. Dane's
Defence_ (Samuel French); from Pinero, _The Amazons, The School
Mistress_, or _Sweet Lavender_ (W.H. Baker); from Shaw's _Plays
Pleasant and Unpleasant_ (Brentano), _Candida, You Never Can Tell,
Arms and the Man_ from Barrie, _Peter Pan, What Every Woman Knows_;
from Galsworthy, _Strife, Joy, The Little Dream_; from Phillips,
_Marpessa_ (poem), _Ulysses_ (Macmillan), _Herod_; from Lady
Gregory's, _Seven Short Plays_ (Putnam), _The Gaol Gate, Spreading the
News_; from her _New Comedies_ (Putnam, 1913), _McDonough's Wife, The
Bogie Men_; from Yeats's _Poetical Works_, Vol. II. (Macmillan), _The
Land of Heart's Desire, Countess Cathleen_; from Synge, _Riders to the
Sea, The Playboy of the Western World, Deirdre of the Sorrows_ (John
W. Luce).
Questions and Suggestions.--Stevenson's _The Home Book of Verse_ and
_The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse_ contain selections from a number
of the poets. McCarthy's _Irish Literature_, 10 vols., gives
selections from work written prior to 1904. The majority of the
indicated readings can be found only in the original works of the
authors.
Give an outline of the most important thoughts from one essay and one
biography, by both Benson and Chesterton.
What distinctive subject matter do you find in each of the novelists?
How do same reflect the spirit of the age?
What are the chief characteristics of each of the poets? What does the
phrase "Celtic Renaissance" signify?
In brief, what had the drama accomplished from the time of the closing
of the theaters in 1642 to 1890? What distinctive contributions to the
modern drama have Pinero, Shaw, and Barrie made? Describe the work of
Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Synge. In what does Synge's special power
consist?
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER X:
[Footnotes 1-11: Printed by permission of The Macmillan Company.]
[Footnotes 12-13: Printed by permission of Frederick A. Stokes
Company.]
[Footnotes 14-15: Printed by permission of the Macmillan Company.]
[Footnote 16: Krans's _William Butler Yeats and the Irish Literary
Revival_.]
[Footnotes 17-18: Printed by permission of The Macmillan Company.]
SUPPLEMENTARY LIST OF AUTHORS AND THEIR CHIEF WORKS:
1400-1558:
John Lydgate (1370?-1451?): _Falls of Princes_. Thomas Occleve
(1370?-1450?): _Mother of God_; _Governail of Princes_. Sir John
Fortescue (1394?-1476?): _Difference between an Absolute and Limited
Monarchy_. _The Paston Letters_ (1422-1509). Stephen Hawes (d. 1523?):
_Pastime of Pleasure_. John Skelton (1460?-1529): _Bowge of Court_;
_Philip Sparrow_. Alex. Barclay (1475?-1552): _Ship of Fools_. Sir
Thomas More (1478-1535): _Utopia_; _History of Edward V. and Richard
III_. Hugh Latimer (1485?-1555): _Sermon on the Ploughers_. Sir David
Lindsay (1490-1555): _Satire of the Three Estates_.
1558-1603:
John Knox(1505-1572): _Admonition_; _History of the Reformation of
Religion within the Realm of Scotland_; _Sermons_. George Puttenham
(d. 1590?): _Art of English Poesie_. Edward Dyer (1550?-1607): _My
Mind to Me a Kingdom Is_. Samuel Daniel (1562-1619): _The Complaint of
Rosamund_; _A Defence of Rhyme_ (prose). Fulke Greville (Lord Brooke,
1554-1628): _Caelica_. Stephen Gosson (1555-1624): _The School of
Abuse_. George Gascoigne (1525?-1577):_The Steele Glas_. William
Warner (1558?-1609): _Albion's England_.
1603-1660:
Prose Writers.--Robert Burton (1577-1640): _The Anatomy of
Melancholy_. John Selden (1584-1654): _Table Talk_. Richard Baxter
(1615-1691): _The Saints' Everlasting Rest_.
Poets and Dramatists.--Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650?): _The Purple
Island_. William Drummond (1585-1649): _Sonnets_; _The Cypresse Grove_
(prose). Giles Fletcher (1588?-1623): _Christ's Victory and Triumph_.
George Wither (1588-1667): _Juvenilia_. William Browne (1591-1643?)
_Britannia's Pastorals_. Sir William D'Avenant (1606-1668):
_Gondibert_. Edmund Waller (1606-1687): _Poems; Song_--"Go, lovely
Rose." Richard Crashaw (1613?--1649): _Steps to the Temple; The
Delights of the Muses_. Sir John Denham (1615-1669): _Cooper's Hill_.
Abraham Cowley (1618-1667): _Anacreontiques_. Andrew Marvell
(1621-1678): _The Garden_.
1660-1740:
Dramatists of the Restoration.--Sir William D'Avenant (1606-1668):
_Love and Honor_. George Etherege (1635?-1691?): _The Man of Mode_.
William Wycherley (1640-1715): _The Plain Dealer_. Thomas Shadwell
(1642?-1692): _Epson Wells_. Thomas Otway (1652-1685): _Venice
Preserved_. John Vanbrugh (1666?-1726): _The Confederacy_. Colley
Cibber (1671-1757): _The Careless Husband_. George Farquhar
(1678-1707): _The Beaux' Stratagem_.
Prose Writers.--Sir William Temple (1628-1699): _Essays_. Isaac
Barrow (1630-1677): _Sermons_. Robert South (1634-1716): _Sermons_.
Richard Bentley (1662-1742): _Epistles of Phalaris_. Gilbert Burnet
(1643-1715): _Sermons_. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735): _The History of
John Bull_. Lord Bolingbroke (1678-1751): _Letter to Sir William
Windham_. Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753): _Alciphron or the Minute
Philosopher_. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762): _Letters_. Bishop
Butler (1692-1752): _Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion_.
William Warburton (1698-1779): _The Divine Legation of Moses_.
Poets.--Matthew Prior (1664-1721): _Shorter Poems_. Isaac Watts
(1673-1748): _Psalms and Hymns_. Thomas Parnell (1679-1718): _A
Night-Piece on Death; The Hermit_. John Gay (1685-1732): _Fables; The
Beggar's Opera_. Allan Ramsay (1686-1758): _The Gentle Shepherd_. John
Dyer (1700?-1758): _Grongar Hill_.
1740-1780:
Prose Writers.--Gilbert White (1720-1793): _Natural History of
Selborne._ William Robertson (1721-1793): _History of the Reign of
Charles V._ Adam Smith (1723-1790): _Wealth of Nations._ Sir Joshua
Reynolds (1723-1792): _Discourses on Painting._ Thomas Warton
(1728-1790): _History of English Poetry._ Sir Philip Francis
(1740-1818): _Letters of Junius._ Fanny Burney (1752-1840): _Evelina._
Poets.--Edward Young (1681-1765): _Night Thoughts._ Charles Wesley
(1708-1788): _Hymns._ Mark Akenside (1721-1803): _The Minstrel._
Robert Fergusson (1750-1774): _Braid Claith; Ode to the Gowdspink._
1780-1837:
Philosophers.--William Paley (1743-1805): _Natural Theology._ Jeremy
Bentham (1748-1832): _Principles of Morals and Legislation._ William
Godwin (1756-1836): _Inquiry concerning Political Justice._ Thomas
Robert Malthus (1766-1834): _Essay on the Principle of Population._
David Ricardo (1772-1823): _Principles of Political Economy._ James
Mill (1773-1836): _Analysis of the Human Mind._
Historians.--John Lingard (1771-1851): _History of England._ Henry
Hallam (1777-1859): _Constitutional History of England._ Sir William
Napier (1785-1860): _History of the Peninsular War._
Essayists.--William Cobbett (1762-1835): _Rural Rides in England._
Sydney Smith (1771-1845): _Letters of Peter Plymley._ Francis Jeffrey
(1773-1850): _Essays._ John Wilson (1785-1854): _Noctes Ambrosianae._
John Gibson Lockhard (1794-1854): _Life of Sir Walter Scott._
Novelists and Dramatists.--William Beckford (1759-1844): _Vathek._
Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849): _Castle Rackrent._ Jane Porter
(1776-1850): _Scottish Chiefs._ John Galt (1779-1839): _The Annals of
the Parish._ James Sheridan Knowles (1784-1862): _The Hunchback; The
Love Chase._ Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866): _Nightmare Abbey_. Mary
Russell Mitford (1787-1855): _Our Village_.
Poets.--George Crabbe (1754-1832): _The Borough_. Joanna Baillie
(1762-1851): _Poems_. James Hogg (1770-1835): _Queen's Wake_. Thomas
Campbell (1777-1844): _The Pleasures of Hope_. Thomas Moore
(1779-1852): _Irish Melodies; Lalla Rookh_. Ebenezer Elliott
(1781-1849): _Corn Law Rhymes_. Bryan W. Procter (1787-1874): _English
Songs_. John Keble (1792-1866) _The Christian Year_. Felicia Hemans
(1793-1835): _Songs of the Affections_. Thomas Hood (1799-1845): _The
Song of the Shirt; The Bridge of Sighs_. Winthrop Praed (1802-1839):
_The Season; The Letter of Advice_. Thomas Beddoes (1803-1849):
_Lyrics from Death's Jest Book and from The Bride's Tragedy_.
1837-1900:
Philosophers and Scientists.--Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856)
_Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic_. Michael Faraday (1791-1867):
_Experimental Researches_. Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875): _Principles
of Geology; Antiquity of Man_. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): _System
of Logic; Utilitarianism_. George Henry Lewes (1817-1878): _A
Biographical History of Philosophy; Problems of Life and Mind_. Sir
Henry Maine (1822-1888): _Ancient Law; Village Communities_.
Historians.--Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868): _History of Latin
Christianity down to the Death of Pope Nicholas V_. George Grote
(1794-1871): _History of Greece. James Anthony Froude (1818-1894):
_History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the
Spanish Armada_. Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862): _History of
Civilization_. Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-1892): _The History of
the Norman Conquest_. William Stubbs (1825-1901): _The Constitutional
History of England in its Origin and Development_. Samuel Rawson
Gardiner (1829-1902): _History of England from the Accession of James
I. to the Outbreak of Civil War, 1603-1642; History of the Great Civil
War, 1642-1649; History of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate,
1649-1660. Justin M'Carthy (1830-1912): _A History of Our Own Times_.
John Richard Green (1837-1883): _A Short History of the English
People_. William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903): _History of
England in the Eighteenth Century_. James Bryce (1838- ): _The Holy
Roman Empire; The American Commonwealth_. Rt. Rev. Abbot Gasquet,
D.D., O.S.B. (1846- ): _Henry VIII and the English Monasteries; The
Greater Abbeys of England_. Wilfrid Ward (1856- ): _Aubrey de Vere;
Life and Times of Cardinal Newman_.
Essayists and Critics.--George Barrow (1803-1881): _The Bible in
Spain; Lavengro_. Walter Bagehot (1826-1877): _Literary Studies; The
English Constitution_. Leslie Stephen (1832-1904): _Hours in a
Library; History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_. John
Morley (1838- ): _Studies in Literature; Edmund Burke; Life of
Gladstone_. John Addington Symonds (1840-1893): _The History of the
Renaissance in Italy_. Austin Dobson (1840- ): _Eighteenth Century
Vignettes; Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Oliver Goldsmith;_ also
_Collected Poems_. Edward Dowden (1843-1913): _Shakespeare, His Mind
and Art; Life of Shelley; Studies in Literature, 1789-1877_. Andrew
Lang (1844-1912): _Letters to Dead Authors; Essays in Little; The
Iliad in English Prose_ (assisted by Leaf and Myers); also _Ballads
and Lyrics of old France_. Augustine Birrell (1850- ): _Obiter Dicta;
Men, Women, and Books; In the Name of the Bodleian_ A. C. Bradley
(1851- ): _Shakespearean Tragedy; Oxford Lectures on Poetry_ Alice
Meynell (1855- ): _The Rhythm of Life; The Spirit of Place;_ also
_Collected Poems_. William Archer (1856- ): _Poets of the Younger
Generation; Masks or Faces: A Study in the Psychology of Acting_. John
W. Mackail (1859- ): _The Springs of Helicon; Life of William Norris_.
Novelists.--Wilkie Collins (1824-1899): _The Moonstone_. Dinah Maria
Craik (1826-1877): _John Halifax, Gentleman_. Charles L. Dodgson
(Lewis Carroll 1832-1898): _Alice in Wonderland; Through the Looking
Glass_. Joseph H. Shorthouse (1834-1903): _John Inglesant_. Walter
Besant (1836-1901): _All Sorts and Conditions of Men_. William Black
(1841-1898): _A Daughter of Heth_. Canon W. Barry, D.D. (1849- ): _The
Two Standards_. Mrs. Humphry Ward (1851- ): _Marcella_. Canon P.A.
Sheehan, D.D. (1852- ): _My New Curate; The Queen's Fillet_. Hall
Caine (1853- ): _The Manxman_. Rider Haggard (1856- ): _King Solomon's
Mines_. George Gissing (1857-1903): _New Grub Street; The Private
Papers of Henry Ryecroft_. John Ascough (Rt. Rev. Mgr.
Bicherstaffe-Drew, 1858- ): _Marotz_. Kenneth Grahame (1859- ): _The
Golden Age; Dream Days_. A. Conan Doyle (1859- ): _The White Company;
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_. R.H. Benson (1871- ): _By What
Authority; The Queen's Tragedy_. Mrs. Wilfrid Ward: _Great
Possessions_.
Poets.--Richard H. Barham (1788-1845): _Ingoldsby Legends_. James C.
Mangan (1803-1849): _Selected Poems_. Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883):
_Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_ (translation). Aubrey de Vere (1814-1902):
_Irish Odes_. Coventry Patmore (1823-1896): _The Angel in the House;
Amelia_. Sidney Dobell (1824-1874): _The Roman; Balder_. Adelaide Anne
Procter (1825-1864): _Legends and Lyrics_. Jean Ingelow (1830-1897):
_Poems_. Edwin Arnold (1832-1904): _The Light of Asia_. Lewis Morris
(1833-1907): _Epic of Hades_. James Thompson (1834-1882): _The City of
Dreadful Night_. J.B.L. Warren (Lord de Tabley, 1835-1895): _Poems:
Dramatic and Lyrical_. Alfred Austin (1835-1913, appointed
poet-laureate in 1896): _English Lyrics_, edited by William Watson.
Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832- ): _The Coming of Love_. Philip Bourke
Marston (1850-1887): _Song-Tide and Other Poems; Wind Voices_. Oscar
Wilde (1854-1900): _Ave Imperatrix; The Ballad of Reading Gaol; De
Profundis_ (prose).
1900-
Essayists.--Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1857- ): _The Enchanted Woods
and Other Essays; The Sentimental Traveler_. Lawrence Pearsall Jacks
(1860- ): _Mad Shepherds, and Other Human Studies_. Arthur Symons
(1865- ): _William Blake; The Romantic Movement in English Poetry_.
Edward Verrall Lucas (1868- ): _Life of Charles Lamb; Old Lamps for
New_; also the stories _Over Bemerton's_ and _Mr. Ingleside_. Hilaire
Belloc (1870- ): _On Everything_.
Novelists.--Justin Huntley M'Carthy (1860- ): _The Proud Prince; If
I Were King_. W.W. Jacobs (1863- ): _Many Cargoes; Ship's Company_.
Anthony Hope Hawkins (Anthony Hope, 1863- ): _The Prisoner of Zenda;
Rupert of Hentzau_. Marie Corelli (1864- ): _Thelma; Ardath_. Robert
S. Hichens (1864- ): _The Garden of Allah_. G.W. Birmingham (rev. J.O.
Hannay, 1865- ): _Spanish Gold_. Seumas Macmanus (1870- ): _The
Chimney Corner; Donegal Fairy Stories_. J.C. Snaith (1876- ):
_Araminta; Broke of Covenden_. May Sinclair: _The Divine Fire_.
Poets.--A.E. Housman (1859- ): _A Shropshire Lad_. Katherine Tynan
Hinkson (1861- ): _Collected Poems; New Poems_ (1911). Arthur
Christopher Benson (1862- ): _Collected Poems; Paul The Minstrel_.
Henry Newbolt (1862- ): _Admirals All_. Herbert Trench (1865- ):
_Deirdre Wedded and Nineteen Other Poems; Collected Poems_. Ethna
Carberry (1866-1902): _The Passing of the Gael_. Richard Le Gallienne
(1866- ): _Robert Louis Stevenson and Other Poems; Attitudes and
Avowals_ (essays); _The End of the Rainbow_ (stories). Lionel Johnson
(1867-1902): _Poems_. Lawrence Binyon (1869- ): _London Visions;
Atilla_ (poetic drama). Nora Hopper Chesson (1871-1906): _Under
Quicken Boughs_. Dora Sigerson Shorter (1873- ): _Collected Poems_.
John Drinkwater (1882- ): _Poems of Love and Death; King Cophetua_.
Richard Middleton. (1882-1911): _Poems and Songs_. Lascelles
Abercrombie: _Interludes_. James Stephens: _Hill of Vision; Crock of
Gold_ (prose fiction). T. Sturge Moore: _Aphrodite against Artemis;
Poems_.
Celtic Dramatists.--George Moore (1853- ): _The Bending of the
Bough_. Edward Martyn (1859- ): _The Heather Field_. William Boyle:
_The Building Fund_. Padric Colum: _Thomas Muskerry; the Fiddler's
House_. Lennox Robinson: _Patriots_. Rutherford Mayne: _The Turn of
the Road_. H. Granville Barker (English dramatist, 1877- ): _The
Voysey Inheritance_.
INDEX
Abercrombie, Lascelles
_Absalom and Achitophel_
_Abt Vogler_
Actors, in early plays
in Elizabethan theater
_Adam Bede_
Addison, Joseph, collaborates with Steele
incidental reference to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_Admirable Crichton, The_
_Adonais_
_Advancement of Learning_
_Adventures of Harry Richmond_
AElfric
_Aids to Reflection_
Akenside, Mark
_Alastor_
_Alchemist, The_
_Alexander's Feast_
Alfred, King
_Alice-for-Short_
_All for Love_
_Alysoun_
_Amazing Marriage, The_
_Amazone, The_
_Amelia_
_American Taxation, Speech on_
Amorists
_Ancient Mariner_
_Ancren Riwle_
_Andrea del Sarto_
_Andreas_
Anglo-Norman period and Chaucer's Age
characteristics of Normans
history
language
metrical romances
poets
prose writers
references on
suggested readings and question
summary
_Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_
Anglo-Saxon language
Anglo-Saxon period
history
home, migrations and religion of Anglo-Saxons
language
mission of English literature
poetry
prose
references on
subject matter and aim
suggested readings and questions
summary
Anglo-Saxons, earliest literature of
_Annus Mirabilis_
_Antiquary, The_
_Apologia, Newman's_
_Apologie for Poetrie_
Arbuthnot, John
_Arcadia_
Archer, William
_Areopagitica_
Arnold, Edwin
Arnold, Matthew
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
poetical works
prose works
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
Arnold, Thomas
Arthur, King
Ascham, Roger
_Astraea Redux_
_As You Like It_
_Atalanta in Calydon_
Atterbury, Francis
_Aurengzebe_
Austen, Jane, incidental references to
life and works of
references on
suggested readings in
Austin, Alfred
_Autobiography_, Franklin's
Ayseough, John
Bacon, Francis, incidental references to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
Bacon, Roger
Bagehot, Walter
Baillie, Joanna
_Balder Dead_
Bale, John
_Ballad of Agincourt_
Ballads, English
in fifteenth century
_Barchester Towers_
Barclay, Alexander
Barham, Richard H.
Barker, H. Granville
_Barnaby Rudge_
_Barrack Room Ballads_
Barrie, incidental references to
suggested readings in
Barrow, Isaac
_Battle of Brunänburh_
_Battle of the Books_
Baxter, Richard
Beattie, James
Beaumont, Frances
_Becket_
Becket, Thomas à
Beckford, William
Beddoes, Thomas
Bede, _Ecclesiastical History_
references on
suggested readings in
works of
Behn, Mrs. Aphra
Belloc, Hilaire
Bennett, Arnold
suggested readings in
Benson, Arthur Christopher
suggested readings in
Benson, R.H.
Bentham, Jeremy
Bentley, Richard
_Beowulf_
suggested readings in
Berkeley, George
Besant, Walter
_Bible_, King James version
Tyndale's translation of
Wycliffe's translation of
Bickerstaff, Isaac
Bickerstaffe-Drew, Rt. Rev. Mgr.
Binyon, Lawrence
_Biographia Literaria_
Birmingham, G.W. (Hanney, Rev. J.O.)
Birrell, Augustine
Black, William
Blackmore, Richard D.
suggested readings in
_Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_
Blake, William
references on
suggested readings in
Blank verse
in eighteenth century
introduction into England
Shakespeare's and Marlowe's use of
_Bleak House_
_Blessed Damozel, The_
_Blot in the 'Scutcheon_
Bolingbroke, Lord
_Bonduca_
_Book of Martyrs_
Borrow, George
Boswell, James
Boy actors
Boyle, William
Bradley, Andrew
Brandes, Georg, quoted
Bret Harte
_Bride of Lammermoor_
Bridges, Robert
suggested readings in
Brontë, Charlotte
references for
suggested readings in
Brontë, Emily
Brooke, Stopford, quoted
Brown, Charles Brockden
Browne, Sir Thomas
Browne, William
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, life of
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
Browning, Robert
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
optimistic philosophy of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_Brut_
Layamon's
Wace's
Bryce, James
Buckle, Henry Thomas
Bulwer Lytton
suggested readings in
Bunyan
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
references for
suggested readings in
works of
Burke, Edmund
references for
suggested readings in
Burnet, Gilbert
Burney, Fanny
Burns, Robert
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
love songs of
poetic creed of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
Burton, Robert
Butler, Bishop
Butler, Samuel
Byron, Lord
compared with Shakespeare
dramas of
general characteristics
incidental references to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
Caedmon
compared with Milton
Caedmonian Cycle
_Cain_
Caine, hall
_Caliban upon Setebos_
Camden, William
Campbell, Thomas
_Canterbury Tales_
Carberry, Ethna
Carew, Thomas
suggested readings in
Carlyle, Thomas
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
quoted
references on
Sartor Resartus
suggested readings in
works of
Carols of fifteenth century
Carroll, Lewis
_Castle of Indolence_
_Castle of Otranto_
Cathedrals, Gothic
_Cato_
Cavalier poets
Caxton, William
Celtic dramatists
Celtic imagery
Celtic Renaissance
_Cenci_, _The_
Cèrvantes
Chapel Royal
Chapman, George
_Charge of the Light Brigade_
Chatterton, Thomas
suggested readings in
Chaucer, Geoffrey
_Canterbury Tales_
compared with Spenser
earlier poems of
incidental references to
influence on English language
life of
qualitites of
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
Chaucer's age. _See_ Anglo-Norman period
Chesson, Nora Hopper
Chester plays
Chesterton, Gilbert K.
references on
suggested readings in
_Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_
_Child's Garden of Verse, A_
_Christ_, Cynewulf's
_Christabel_
_Christmas Carol, A_
_Chronicle, The_, Stow's
_Chronicles of England, Ireland and Scotland_
Cibber, Colley
_Citizen of the World_
Clarendon, Lord
_Clarissa Harlowe_
Classical couplet
Classic school
Clive, Robert
_Cloister and the Hearth_
_Cloud, The_
Clough, Arthur Hugh
suggested readings in
Cobbett, William
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
association with Wordsworth
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
poetry of
prose of
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
Collier, Jeremy
Collins, Wilkie
suggested readings in
Collins, William
_Colloquium_
_Colombe's Birthday_
Colum, Padric
Comedies, early
_Comedy of Errors, The_
_Complete Angler_
_Comus_
_Conciliation with America_, Burke's speech on
_Conduct of the Understanding_
_Confessio Amantis_
_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_
Congreve, William
Conrad, Joseph
references on
suggested readings in
Cooper, Frederic Taber, quoted
Corelli, Marie
Cornish, William
_Cotter's Saturday Night_
Couplet, classical
"riming"
Court plays
Coventry plays
Cowley, Abraham
Cowper, William
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
Crabbe, George
Craik, Dinah Maria
_Cranford_
Cranmer's Bible
Crashaw, Richard
Critical writings
Addison's
Age of Romanticism
Arnold's
Carlyle's
Coleridge's
De Quincey's
Dryden's
Johnson's
Pope's
Swinburne's
Criticism, first essay on
Cromwell's Bible
Cross, John W.
_Crossing the Bar_
_Cry of the Children_
_Curse of Kehama_
_Cymbeline_
Cynewulf
Cynewulf Cycle
suggested readings in
_Daniel Deronda_
Daniel, Samuel
Darwin, Charles
D'Avenant, Sir William
David and Bathsabe
_David Balfour_
_David Copperfield_
Davidson, John
suggested readings in
_Deathe of Blanche the Duchesse_
_Decameron_, framework of similar to _Canterbury Tales_
De-foe, Daniel
a journalist
incidental references to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
Dekker, Thomas
Deloney, Thomas
suggested readings in
De Morgan, William Frend
references on
suggested readings in
Denham, Sir John
_Departmental Ditties_
De Quincey, Thomas
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_Deserted Village, The_
De Vere, Aubrey
_Diana of the Crossways_
Diary, Evelyn's
Pepys's
Dickens, Charles
contrasted with Thackeray
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_Dictionary of the English Language_, Johnson's
Didactic verse
_Discovery of Guiana, The_
_Disdain Returned_
_Diurnall_
_Divine Vision, The_
Dobell, Sidney
Dobson, Austin
quoted
suggested readings in
Dodgson, Charles L. (Lewis Carroll)
_Dombey and Son_
_Don Juan_
Donne, John
opposes sonnet
suggested readings in
_Don Quixote_
_Double Dealer, The_
Douglas, Gawain
_Dover Beach_
Dowden, Edward
quoted
Doyle, A. Conan
Dr. Faustus
_Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_
_Drake: An English Epic_
Drama, English
and the unities
actors in early
Beaumont and Fletcher in
comedies, early
court plays
decline of
during Restoration
early religious
end of Elizabethan
interlude
Irish
Marlowe, founder of English
miracle and mystery plays
modern
morality plays
suggested readings in
_See also_ Elizabethan Age, Jonson, Marlowe, Shakespeare, etc.
_Dramatic Lyrics_, Browning's
_Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_, Browning's
Dramatic unities
_Dramatis Personae_
_Drapier's Letters_
Drayton, Michael
suggested readings in
_Dream Children_
_Dream of Fair Women, A_
_Dream of Gerontius_
Drinkwater, John
Drummond, William
Dryden, John
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
prose of
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
Spenser's influence on
works of
_Duchess of Malfi, The_
Dunbar, William
_Dunciad_
Dyer, Edward
Dyer, John
_Earthly Paradise_
Edgeworth, Maria
_Edinburgh Review_
_Edward II_
_Egoist, The_
Eighteenth century, early literature. _See_ Restoration period, etc.
Eighteenth century, later literature
history
literary characteristics
novelists
poets
prose writers
references on
romanticism
suggested readings and questions
summary
_Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard_
_Elene_
Eliot, George
general characteristics
incidental references to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
Elizabeth, Queen
Elizabethan age
history
Jonson
life of
Marlowe
minor dramatists
miracle and mystery plays
morality plays
poetry (non-dramatic)
presentation of Elizabethan plays
prose writers
references on
Shakespeare
suggested readings in
summary
Elliott, Ebenezer
_Emma_
_Endymion_
England, origin of name of
_English humorists of the Eighteenth Century_
English language, Chaucer's influence on
emergence of modern
English literature
mission of
subject matter and aim of
_Epigrams_, Watson's
_Epipsychidion_
_Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_
_Epithalamion_
_Essay of Dramatic Poesy_
_Essay on Criticism_
_Essay on Man_
Essays
Addison's
Arnold's
Bacon's
Benson's
Carlyle's
Chesterton's
De Quincey's
Goldsmith's
Johnson's
Lamb's
Macaulay's
Newman's
Pater's
Pope's
Stevenson's
Swinburne's
Thackeray's
_Essays in Criticism_
_Essays of Elia_
Etherege, George
Ethical purposes, in literature. _See_ Moral ideals
_Euphues_
Euphuism
_Evan Harrington_
_Eve of St. Agnes_
Evelyn, John
_Every Man in His Humor_
_Excursion_
_Exeter Book_
_Expedition of Humphrey Clinker_
_Fables, Ancient and modern_
_Faerie Queene_
_Faithful Shepherdess_
_Familiar Studies of Men and Books_
_Far From the Madding Crowd_
_Far Traveler, The_
Faraday, Michael
Farquhar, George
_Faustus, Dr._
Fergusson, Robert
Field, Eugene
Fielding, Henry
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_Fight at Finnsburg_
Fiona Macleod. _See_ Sharp, William
Fitzgerald, Edward
_Fleet Street Eclogues_
Fletcher, Giles
Fletcher, John
Fletcher, Phineas
_Flower of Old Japan_
Ford
_Forest of Wild Thyme_
_Fors Clavigera_
Fortescue, Sir John
_Fortunes of Men_
_Four Georges_
_Four P's_
Fox, Charles James
Foxe, John
_Fragments of Science_
Francis, Sir Philip
_Frankenstein_
Franklin, Benjamin
Freeman, Edward Augustus
quoted
French element in English
French Revolution, influence on literature
_French Revolution_ (Carlyle's)
Fronde, James Anthony
Fuller, Thomas
_Funeral Elegy_
Galsworthy, John
suggested readings in
Galt, John
_Gammer Gurton's Needle_
_Gaol Gate_
Gardiner, Samuel Rawson
_Gardiner's Daughter, The_
Garrick, David
Gascoigne, George
Gaskell, Elizabeth C.
suggested readings in
Gasquet, Rt. Rev. Abbot
_Gates of Dreamland_
_Gawayne and the Green Knight_
Gay, John
General reference list for English literature
_Gentle Craft_
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Gibbon, Edward
quoted
suggested readings in
Gibson, Wilfrid
suggested readings in
Gissing, George
Gladstone, William E.
Gleeman
songs of
Globe Theater
Godwin, William
Goldsmith, Oliver
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_Good-Natured Man, The_
_Gorboduc_
Gosse. Edmund, quoted
Gosson, Stephen
Gower, John
suggested readings in
Grahame, Kenneth
Gray, Thomas
references for
suggested readings in
Green, John Richard
Greene, Robert
Gregory, Lady Augusta
suggested readings in
Gregory, Pope
Greville, Fulke (Lord Brooke)
Grote, George
_Gulliver's Travels_
_Guy Mannering_
Haggard, Rider
Hakluyt, Richard
Hallam, Arthur Henry
Hamilton, Sir William
_Hamlet_
_Handlyng Synne_
_Hard Times_
Hardy, Thomas
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
Harleian, M.S.
Hawes, Stephen
Hawkins, Anthony Hope (Anthony Hope)
Hazlitt, William
suggested readings in
_Heart of Midlothian_
Heine, Heinrich
Hemans, Felicia
Henley, W.E.
suggested readings in
_Henry Esmond_
_Henry IV_
_Henry V_
_Henry VIII_
Henryson, Robert
Herbert, George
_Hero and Leander_
_Herod_
_Heroes and hero Worship_
Herrick, Robert
suggested readings in
_Hesperides_
Hewlett, Maurice
suggested readings in
Heywood, John
Heywood, Thomas
Hichens, Robert S.
_Hilda Lessways_
_Hind and the Panther_
Hinkson, Catherine Tynan
Historical prose
_Historical Sketches_, Newman's
History, English, Age of Romanticism
Anglo-Norman period
Anglo-Saxon period
Eighteenth century
Elizabethan age
Puritan age
Renaissance
Restoration period
Victorian age
_History of England_, Hume's
Macaulay's
_History of Friedrich II_
_History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The_
_History of the Great Rebellion_
_History of the Kings of Britain_
_History of the Reign of Henry VII_
_History of the World_
_History of the Worthies of England_ (Fuller's)
Hobbes, Thomas
Hogg, James
Holinshed, Raphael
Holman-Hunt, William
_Holy Dying_
_Holy Living_
_Holy War_
Homer, Chapman's
Homer, Pope's translation of
_Homeward Songs by the Way_
_Homilies_
Hood, Thomas
Hooker, Richard
references on
suggested readings in
Hope, Anthony (Hawkins)
Horace, influence of
_Hous of Fame_
Housman, A.E.
Howells, William D., quoted
_Hudibras_
Hugo, Victor, quoted
Hume, David
references on
suggested readings in
Humor
Addison's
Arnold's
Barrie's
Burns's
Carlyle's
Chaucer's
Cowper's
De Quincey's
Dickens's
Fielding's
Fuller's
Goldsmith's
Locke's
Meredith's
Pope's
Sterne's
Swift's
Thackeray's
Hundred Years' War
Hunt, Leigh
suggested readings in
Huxley, Thomas
quoted
Hyde, Dr. Douglas
_Hydriotaphia_
_Hymns_, Addison's
_Hyperion_
Ibsen, Henrik, influence of
_Idea of a University_
Ideals. _See_ Moral ideals.
_Idler_
_Idylls of the King_
_Il Penseroso_
Iliad, Pope's translation of
_Imaginary Conversations_
_In a Balcony_
_In Memoriam_
_In the South Seas_
_Induction_ (Sackville's)
Ingelow, Jean
_Inland Voyage_
Interlude
Invention, age of
Irish drama
Irish National Theater
_Isabella_
_Ivanhoe_
_Jack of Newberry_
Jacks, Lawrence Pearsall
Jacobs, W.W.
James I of Scotland
_Jane Eyre_
Jeffrey, Francis
_Jew of Malta_
_John Gilpin_
Johnson, Lionel
Johnson Samuel
Boswell's life of
converser and literary lawgiver
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_Jonathan Wild the Great_
Jones, Henry Arthur
suggested readings in
Jonson, Ben
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
opposes sonnet
plays of
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
_Joseph Andrews_
_Joseph Vance_
_Journal of the Plague Year_
_Journal to Stella_
_Jude the Obscure_
_Judith_
_Juliana_
_Julius Caesar_
_Jungle Books_
Jury system, development of
_Just So Stories_
Kant
Keats, John
general characteristics
incidental references to
life of
poems of
references on
suggested readings in
Keble, John
Kenilworth
_Kidnapped_
_Kim_
_King Lear_
_King of the Golden River, The_
_King's Quair, The_
Kingsley, Charles
suggested readings in
Kipling, Rudyard
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
Nobel prize awarded to
prose of
references on
suggested readings in
verse of
_Knighte's Tale, Chaucer's_
Knoblauch, Edward
Knowles, James Sheridan
Knox, John
_Kubla Khan_
Kyd, Thomas
_Lady of the Lake_
Lake Poets
_L'Allegro_
Lamb, Charles
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
_Lamia_
Landor, Walter Savage
suggested readings in
Lang, Andrew
Längland, William
references on
suggested readings in
Language, new English
Languages, after Norman Conquest
_Last Days of Pompeii_
Latimer, Hugh
Layamon
suggested readings in
_Lay of the Last Minstrel_
_Lay Sermons_, Huxley's
_Lays of Ancient Rome_
Lecky, William Edward Hartpole
_Lectures on Art_
_Lectures on Shakespeare_
Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget)
Le Gallienne, Richard
_Legende of Good Women_
_Leviathan_
Lewes, George Henry
_Life and Death of Mr. Badman_
_Life of Johnson_
Boswell's
Macaulay's
_Life of Nelson_
_Light that Failed, The_
Lindsay, Sir David
Lingard, John
Literary Club
Literary England
literary itinerary
references on
Literature
change in subject-matter after Restoration
childhood introduced into
definitions of
influence of spirit of reform on
Pre-Raphaelite movement
Reformation influences
_Little Minister_
_Little White Bird_
_Lives of the English Poets_
_Lives of the Saints_
Locke, John
references on
Locke, William John
suggested readings in
Lockhart, John Gibson
_Locksley Hall_
_Locksley Hall Sixty Years After_
Lodge, Thomas
suggested readings in
_London_
_Lord Ormont and His Aminta_
_Lorna Doone_
Lounsbury, T.R., quoted
Love lyrics
Lovelace, Richard
_Love's Labor's Lost_
Lowell, James Russell, quoted
Lucas, Edward Verrall
_Lucrece_
Luther, Martin
_Lycidas_
Lydgate, john
Lyell, Sir Charles
Lyly, John
references on
suggested readings in
_Lyrical Ballads_, Coleridge's
Wordsworth's
Lyrical verse in Elizabethan age
Lytton, Edward Bulwer
Macaulay, Thomas Babington
general characteristics of
_History of England_
incidental references to
life of
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_Macbeth_
M'Carthy, Justin Huntley
_Mac Flecknoe_
Mackail, John w.
Macleod, Fiona. _See_ Sharp, William
Macmanus, Seumas
Macpherson, James
Magna Charta
_Maid's Tragedy_
Maine, Sir Henry
Malory, Sir Thomas
Malthus, Thomas Robert
Malthusian theorem
Mandeville, Sir John
_Manfred_
Mangan, James C.
_Mansfield Park_
Marlowe, Christopher
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_Marmion_
Marston, John
Marston, Philip Bourke
_Martin Chuzzlewit_
Martyn, Edward
Marvell, Andrew
Masefield, John
suggested readings in
Masque
Massinger, Philip
Masson, David, quoted
_Master of Ballantrae_
_Maud_
_Mayor of Casterbridge_
Melancholy, literature of
_Memoirs of a Cavalier_
_Memories and Portraits_
_Men and Women_
_Merchant of Venice_
Meredith, George
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
works of
Metrical romances
Meynell, Alice
_Michael_
_Michaelmas Term_
Middle Ages
_Middlemarch_
Middleton, Richard
Middleton, Thomas
_Midsummer Night's Dream_
Mill, James
Mill, John Stuart
_Mill on the Floss_
Millais, John Everett
Milman, Henry Hart
Milton, John
characteristics of poetry
compared with Shakespeare
incidental references to
influence of _Paradise Lost_
life of
Macaulay's essay on
_Paradise Lost_
quoted
references on
Spenser's influence on
suggested readings in
works of
_Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_
Miracle plays
suggested readings in
Mitford, Mary Russell
_Modern Painters_
_Modest Proposal_
Molière
_Moll Flanders_
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley
Moore, George
Moore, Thomas
Moore, T. Sturge
Moral ideals, Addison's
Browning's
Carlyle's
Dickens's
George Eliot's
in Beowulf
Meredith's
Milton's
of Alfred the Great
of Puritan age
Richardson's
Ruskin's
Shakespeare's
Swinburne's
under minor dramatists
Moralitites, suggested readings for
Morality play
More, Sir Thomas
suggested readings in
Morley, Henry, quoted
Morley, John
Morris, Lewis
Morris, William
references on
suggested readings in
_Morte d'Arthur_
_Mourning Bride_
_Much Ado About Nothing_
_Mysteries of Udolpho_
Mystery plays
Napier, Sir William
Nashe, Thomas
suggested readings in
Nature
as depicted in Scottish poetry
Burns's, treatment of
Byron's, poetry of
Chaucer's love of
Coleridge's treatment of
Cowper's poems of
Dunbar a student of
Gray's poetry of
growth of appreciation of
Keats's treatment of
poetry of
Ruskin's love of
Scott's treatment of
Shakespeare's treatment of
Shelley's treatment of
Tennyson's poetry of
Thomason's poetry of
Walton's love of
Wordsworth's poetry of
_Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation_
_Necessity of Atheism_
_New Atlantis_
_New Year's Eve_
Newbolt, Henry
_Newcomes, The_
Newman, Cardinal John Henry
general characteristics of
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
"News books"
"News letters"
Newspapers
_Nicholas Nickleby_
Nietzsche, Friedrich
_Nightingale, To a_
_Noble Numbers_
Norman conquest
North, Sir Thomas
_Northanger Abbey_
Novel, development of
development of modern
in eighteenth century
in sixteenth century
in twentieth century
in Victorian age
(_See_ also Scott, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, etc.)
picaresque
suggested readings for
_Novum Organum_
Noyes, Alfred
suggested readings in
_Nut-Brown maid, The_
Oberämmergau _Passion Play_
Occleve, Thomas
_Ode on a Grecian Urn_
_Ode on the Passions_
_Ode to Evening_
_Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew_
_Ode to the West Wind_
_Odyssey_, Pope's translation of
_Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity_
_Old Bachelor, The_
_Old China_
_Old Curiosity Shop, The_
_Old Mortality_
_Oliver Twist_
_Olney Hymns_
_On the Morning of Christ's Nativity_
_On Translating Homer_
_Ordeal of Richard Feverel_
_Origin of Species_
Orm's _Ormulum_
_Oroonoke_
_Orosius_ (Alfred's)
_Ossian_
_Othello_
Otway, Thomas
_Our Mutual Friend_
_Palace of Art_
Paley, William
_Pamela_
_Pandosto_
_Paracelsus_
_Paradise Lost_
_Paradise Regained_
_Paraphrase_, Caedmon's
Parnell, Thomas
Passion Play at Oberämmergau
_Past and Present_
Pastoral lyrics
Pater, Walter
references on
suggested readings in
Patmore, Coventry
Peacock, Thomas Love
Peele, George
_Pendennis_
Pepys, Samuel
Percy, Thomas
_Peregrine Pickle_
_Pericles and Aspasia_
_Perkin Warbeck_
_Persuasion_
_Peter Pan_
_Philaster_
Phillips, Stephen
suggested readings in
Phillpotts, Eden
suggested readings in
Philosophical prose
Coleridge's
of age of Romantiscism
of eighteenth century
Philosophical prose, of Puritan age
Phoenix
Picaresque novel
_Pickwick Papers_
_Piers Plowman_
references on
suggested readings for
_Pilgrim's Progress_
Pinero, Sir Arthur Wing
suggested readings in
_Pippä Passes_
_Play of Noah's Flood_
_Play of the Shepherds_
_Playboy of the Western World_
_Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_
Plutarch's _Lives_
Poe, Edgar Allan, quoted
_Poet, The_
Pope, Alexander
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
translation of Homer
works of
Pope Gregory
Porter, Jane
Praed, Winthrop
_Praeterita_
_Prelude, The_
Pre-Raphaelite movement
suggested readings in
_Pre-Raphaelitism_
_Pride and Prejudice_
_Princess, The_
Printing, invention of
Prior, Matthew
Procter, Adelaide Anne
Procter, Bryan W.
_Prometheus Unbound_
Puritan age
history
poets
prose writers
references on
suggested readings and questions
summary
_Puttenham, George_
_Quarterly Review_
Quiller-Couch (Cooch), Sir Arthur
suggested readings in
_Rabbi Ben Ezra_
Radcliffe, Mrs. Anne
Raleigh, Sir Walter
_Ralph Royster Doyster_
_Rambler, The_
Ramsay, Allan
_Rape of the Lock_
_Rasselas_
Reade, Charles
suggested readings in
Readings, suggestions for
_Recessional_
References, historical and literary
References for literary England
_Reflections on the Revolution in France_
Reformation
_Religio Laici_
_Religio Medici_
Religion, effect of on literature
Religious drama
_Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_
_Reminiscences_, Carlyle's
Renaissance
causes and effects of the Renaissance
culmination of
history
in Elizabeth's reign
influence on Chaucer
invention of printing
poets
prose writers
references on
suggested readings and questions
summary
_Renaissance; Studies in Art and Poetry_
Restoration period and early eighteenth-century literature
dramatists
history
poets
prose writers
references on
suggested readings and questions
summary
_Return of the Native_
_Review_
_Revolt of Islam_
Reynolds, G.F., quoted
Reynolds, Sir Joshua
_Rhoda Fleming_
Ricardo, David
_Richard II_
_Richard III_
Richardson, Samuel
references on
suggested readings in
_Ring and the Book_
_Rivals_
Robert of Brunne
Robertson, William
_Robin Hood_
_Robinson Crusoe_
Robinson, Lennox
_Roderick Random_
Romance, distinguished from modern novel
_Romance of the Forest_
Romantiscism
age of
appreciation of nature
history
literary characteristics
poets
prose writers
Romanticism, references on
suggested readings and questions
summary
_Romaunt of the Rose_
_Romeo and Juliet_
_Romola_
_Rosalynde_
Rossetti, Christina
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
references on
_Round Table_
Rowley, Thomas
Rowley, William
Ruskin, John
art works of
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
Russell, George W.
suggested readings in
Sackville, Thomas
Saintsbury, George, quoted
_Samson Agonistes_
_Sartor Resartus_
Satire, Addison's
Carlyle's
Dryden's
Fielding's
Meredith's
Pope's
Swift's
Thackeray's
_Saul_
Saxon. _See_ Anglo-Saxon.
Scenery, in early theater
_Scenes of Clerical Life_
_Scholar-Gypsy_
_Scholemaster, The_
_School for Scandal_
_School Mistress, The_
Schoolmen
Science, age of
influence on literature
Scop
songs of
Scott, Sir Walter
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_Seafarer, The_
_Seasons, The_
_Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The_
Selden, John
_Sense and Sensibility_
_Sentimental Journey through France and Italy_
_Sentimental Tommy_
_Sesame and Lilies_
_Seven Lamps of Architecture_
Shadwell, Thomas
Shakespeare, William
amount and classification of work
connection with London stage
development as dramatist
general characteristics of
incidental references to
influence of Bible on
life of
publication of plays
quoted
references on
sonnets
sources of plots
suggested readings in
table of plays
variety of style
Sharp, William (Fiona Macleod)
references on
suggested readings in
Shaw, George Bernard
references on
suggested readings in
_She Stoops to Conquer_
Sheehan, Canon, P.A.
Shelley, Mrs.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
lyrical genius
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_Shepherd's Calendar_
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley
Shirley, James
_Shoemaker's Holiday_
_Short View of the Immorality of the Stage_
Shorter, Dora Sigerson
Shorthouse, Joseph H.
Sidney, Sir Philip
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_Sigurd, the Volsung_
_Silas Marner_
_Silent Woman, The_
Sinclair, May
_Sir Charles Grandison_
_Sir Roger de Coverley Papers_
Skeltin, John
_Skylark, To a_
Smith, Adam
Smith, Sydney
Smollett, Tobias
references on
Smollett, suggested readings in
Snaith, J.C.
Social movement of nineteenth century
_Sohrab and Rustum_
_Somehow Good_
_Song of Roland_
_Songs before Sunrise_
_Songs of Experience_
_Songs of Innocence_
Sonnets
in Elizabethan Age
introduction of
Jonson and Donne oppose
Keats's
Milton's
Shakespeare's
Sidney's
Spenser's
Wordsworth's
_Sonnets from the Portuguese_
_Sordello_
Southey, Robert
_Spanish Gypsy, The_
_Spanish Tragedy, The_
_Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_
_Spectator, The_
Spodding, James, quoted
_Speech on American Taxation_ (Burke's)
_Speech on Conciliation with America_ (Burke's)
Spencer, Herbert
Spenser, Edmund, chief characteristics of poetry of
_Faerie Queene_
incidental references to
life of
references on
sonnets of
subjective poet
suggested readings in
St. Francis
Stage, in early English theater
_Stalky and Co._
Steele, Richard
suggested readings in
Stephen, Leslie
quoted
Stephens, James
Sterne, Laurence
references on
suggested reading in
Stevenson, Robert Louis
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
Stevenson, William
_Stones of Venice, The_
Story, short
Stow, John
_Strafford_
_Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_
Stubbs, William
_Study of Celtic Literature_
Suckling, Sir John
suggested readings in
Suggested readings
Summaries
_Summer's Last Will and Testament_
Surrey, Earl of
sonnets of
suggested readings in
_Survey of London_
Sweet, Professor, quoted
Swift, Jonathon
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
references on
suggested readings in
works of
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_Switzerland_
Symonds, John Addington
quoted
Symons, Arthur
suggested readings in
Synge, John Millington
references on
_Synthetic Philosophy_
_Table Talk_
Taine, H.A., quoted
_Tale of a Tub_
_Tale of Two Cities_
_Tales from Shakespeare_
_Tales of a Grandfather_
_Tales of a Mermaid Tavern_
_Talisman_
_Tam o'Shanter_
_Tamburlaine_
_Task, The_
_Tatler_
Taylor, Jeremy
_Tempest, The_
Ten Brink, quoted
Tennyson, Alfred
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_Tess of the D'Urberville's_
Thackeray, William Makepeace
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
works of
Theater, Elizabethan
Thompson, Frances
suggested readings in
Thompson, James
Thomson, James
suggested readings in
Thoreau, quoted
_Thyrnie_
_Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne_
_Tom Jones_
Tottel's _Miscellany_
Tourneur, Cyril
_Traitor, The_
_Traveller, The_
_Travels_, Mandeville's
_Travels with a Donkey_
_Treasure Island_
_Treatise of Human Nature_
Trelawny, Edward
Trench, Herbert
_Trick to Catch the Old One_
_Tristram and Iseule_
_Tristram of Lioness_
_Tristram Shandy_
_Troilus and Criseyde_
Trollope, Anthony
suggested readings in.
_Twelfth Night_
Twentieth-century literature
dramatists
essayists
novelists
poets
references on
suggested readings and questions
summary
trend of contemporary literature
_Two Voices, The_
Tyndale, William
suggested readings in
Tyndall, John
quoted
Udall, Nicholas
_Ulysses_
_Underwoods_
_Unfortunate Traveler_
Unities, dramatic
"University wits"
_Unto this Last_
_Urn Burial_
_Utopia_
Vanbrugh, John
_Vanity Fair_
_Vanity of Human Wishes_
Vaughan, Henry
_Venus and Adonis_
_Vercelli Book_
_Vicar of Wakefield_
Vice, in old plays
Victorian age
essayists
history of
novelists
poets
references on
scientific writers
short stories
suggested readings and questions
summary
_Vignettes in Rhyme_
_Virginians_
_Vision of Judgement_
_Volpone_
Voltaire
_Vox Clamantis_
_Vulgar Errors_
Wace
Wagner, Richard
Wallace, Professor C.W.
quoted
Waller, Edmund
Walpole, Horace
suggested readings in
Walpole, Herbert
Walton, Izaak
_Wanderer, The_
Warburton, William
Ward, Mrs. Humphry
Ward, Mrs. Wilfrid
Ward, Wilfrid
Warner, William
Warren, J.B.L. (Lord de Tabley)
War of the Roses
Warton, Thomas
Watson, William
suggested readings in
Watts, Isaac
Waits-Dunton, Theodore
_Waverly_
_Way of the World_
Webster, John
_War of Hermiston_
Wells, Herbert George
references on
suggested readings in
Wesley, Charles
Wesley, John
_Westward Ho_
_What Every Woman Knows_
_White Devil, The_
White, Gilbert
Whitefield, George
_Widecombe Fair_
_Widsið_
Wilde, Oscar
Wilson, John
_Winter's Tale_
_Witch of Atlas_
Wither, George
_Woman Killed with Kindness, A_
_Woodlanders, The_
_Woodstock_
Wordsworth, William
general characteristics of
incidental references to
life of
poet of child life
poet of man
poet of nature
quoted
references on
suggested readings in
works of
_World, The_
Wotton, Sir Henry, quoted
_Wounds of Civil War_
Wright
_Wuthering Heights_
Wyatt, Sir Thomas
suggested readings in
Wycherley, William
Wycliffe, John
Yeats, William Butler
references on
suggested reading in
York plays
Young, Edward
_Youth of the Year_
Zangwill, Israel
suggested readings in
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