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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/11327-0.txt b/11327-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..467dcdd --- /dev/null +++ b/11327-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6521 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11327 *** + +HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE + +ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN + +BY G. H. MAIR, M.A. SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF CHRIST CHURCH + +First Printed, October, 1911 Revised & Printed February, 1914 + + + +PREFACE + + +The intention of this book is to lay stress on ideas and tendencies that +have to be understood and appreciated, rather than on facts that have to +be learned by heart. Many authors are not mentioned and others receive +scanty treatment, because of the necessities of this method of approach. +The book aims at dealing with the matter of authors more than with their +lives; consequently it contains few dates. All that the reader need +require to help him have been included in a short chronological table at +the end. + +To have attempted a severely ordered and analytic treatment of the +subject would have been, for the author at least, impossible within the +limits imposed, and, in any case, would have been foreign to the purpose +indicated by the editors of the Home University Library. The book +pretends no more than to be a general introduction to a very great +subject, and it will have fulfilled all that is intended for it if it +stimulates those who read it to set about reading for themselves the +books of which it treats. + +Its debts are many, its chief creditors two teachers, Professor +Grierson at Aberdeen University and Sir Walter Raleigh at Oxford, to the +stimulation of whose books and teaching my pleasure in English +literature and any understanding I have of it are due. To them and to +the other writers (chief of them Professor Herford) whose ideas I have +wittingly or unwittingly incorporated in it, as well as to the kindness +and patience of Professor Gilbert Murray, I wish here to express my +indebtedness. + +G.H.M. +MANCHESTER, +_August_, 1911. + + + + +CONTENTS + + +CHAPTER + + PREFACE + +I THE RENAISSANCE + +II ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE + +III THE DRAMA + +IV THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY + +V THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE + +VI DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME + +VII THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL + +VIII THE VICTORIAN AGE + +IX THE NOVEL + +X THE PRESENT AGE + + BIBLIOGRAPHY + + CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE + + INDEX + + + + +ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN + + + + +CHAPTER I + + +THE RENAISSANCE + +(1) + +There are times in every man's experience when some sudden widening of +the boundaries of his knowledge, some vision of hitherto untried and +unrealized possibilities, has come and seemed to bring with it new life +and the inspiration of fresh and splendid endeavour. It may be some +great book read for the first time not as a book, but as a revelation; +it may be the first realization of the extent and moment of what +physical science has to teach us; it may be, like Carlyle's "Everlasting +Yea," an ethical illumination, or spiritual like Augustine's or John +Wesley's. But whatever it is, it brings with it new eyes, new powers of +comprehension, and seems to reveal a treasury of latent and unsuspected +talents in the mind and heart. The history of mankind has its parallels +to these moments of illumination in the life of the individual. There +are times when the boundaries of human experience, always narrow, and +fluctuating but little between age and age, suddenly widen themselves, +and the spirit of man leaps forward to possess and explore its new +domain. These are the great ages of the world. They could be counted, +perhaps, on one hand. The age of Pericles in Athens; the less defined +age, when Europe passed, spiritually and artistically, from what we call +the Dark, to what we call the Middle Ages; the Renaissance; the period +of the French Revolution. Two of them, so far as English literature is +concerned, fall within the compass of this book, and it is with one of +them--the Renaissance--that it begins. + +It is as difficult to find a comprehensive formula for what the +Renaissance meant as to tie it down to a date. The year 1453 A.D., when +the Eastern Empire--the last relic of the continuous spirit of +Rome--fell before the Turks, used to be given as the date, and perhaps +the word "Renaissance" itself--"a new birth"--is as much as can be +accomplished shortly by way of definition. Michelet's resonant +"discovery by mankind of himself and of the world" rather expresses what +a man of the Renaissance himself must have thought it, than what we in +this age can declare it to be. But both endeavours to date and to define +are alike impossible. One cannot fix a term to day or night, and the +theory of the Renaissance as a kind of tropical dawn--a sudden passage +to light from darkness--is not to be considered. The Renaissance was, +and was the result of, a numerous and various series of events which +followed and accompanied one another from the fourteenth to the +beginning of the sixteenth centuries. First and most immediate in its +influence on art and literature and thought, was the rediscovery of the +ancient literatures. In the Middle Ages knowledge of Greek and Latin +literatures had withdrawn itself into monasteries, and there narrowed +till of secular Latin writing scarcely any knowledge remained save of +Vergil (because of his supposed Messianic prophecy) and Statius, and of +Greek, except Aristotle, none at all. What had been lost in the Western +Empire, however, subsisted in the East, and the continual advance of the +Turk on the territories of the Emperors of Constantinople drove westward +to the shelter of Italy and the Church, and to the patronage of the +Medicis, a crowd of scholars who brought with them their manuscripts of +Homer and the dramatists, of Thucydides and Herodotus, and most +momentous perhaps for the age to come, of Plato and Demosthenes and of +the New Testament in its original Greek. The quick and vivid intellect +of Italy, which had been torpid in the decadence of mediaevalism and its +mysticism and piety, seized with avidity the revelation of the classical +world which the scholars and their manuscripts brought. Human life, +which the mediaeval Church had taught them to regard but as a threshold +and stepping-stone to eternity, acquired suddenly a new momentousness +and value; the promises of the Church paled like its lamps at sunrise; +and a new paganism, which had Plato for its high priest, and Demosthenes +and Pericles for its archetypes and examples, ran like wild-fire through +Italy. The Greek spirit seized on art, and produced Raphael, Leonardo, +and Michel Angelo; on literature and philosophy and gave us Pico della +Mirandula, on life and gave us the Medicis and Castiglione and +Machiavelli. Then--the invention not of Italy but of Germany--came the +art of printing, and made this revival of Greek literature quickly +portable into other lands. + +Even more momentous was the new knowledge the age brought of the +physical world. The brilliant conjectures of Copernicus paved the way +for Galileo, and the warped and narrow cosmology which conceived the +earth as the centre of the universe, suffered a blow that in shaking it +shook also religion. And while the conjectures of the men of science +were adding regions undreamt of to the physical universe, the +discoverers were enlarging the territories of the earth itself. The +Portuguese, with the aid of sailors trained in the great Mediterranean +ports of Genoa and Venice, pushed the track of exploration down the +western coast of Africa; the Cape was circumnavigated by Vasco da Gama, +and India reached for the first time by Western men by way of the sea. +Columbus reached Trinidad and discovered the "New" World; his successors +pushed past him and touched the Continent. Spanish colonies grew up +along the coasts of North and Central America and in Peru, and the +Portuguese reached Brazil. Cabot and the English voyagers reached +Newfoundland and Labrador; the French made their way up the St. +Lawrence. The discovery of the gold mines brought new and unimagined +possibilities of wealth to the Old World, while the imagination of +Europe, bounded since the beginning of recorded time by the Western +ocean, and with the Mediterranean as its centre, shot out to the romance +and mystery of untried seas. + +It is difficult for us in these later days to conceive the profound and +stirring influence of such an alteration on thought and literature. To +the men at the end of the fifteenth century scarcely a year but brought +another bit of received and recognized thinking to the scrap-heap; +scarcely a year but some new discovery found itself surpassed and in its +turn discarded, or lessened in significance by something still more new. +Columbus sailed westward to find a new sea route, and as he imagined, a +more expeditious one to "the Indies"; the name West Indies still +survives to show the theory on which the early discoverers worked. The +rapidity with which knowledge widened can be gathered by a comparison of +the maps of the day. In the earlier of them the mythical Brazil, a relic +perhaps of the lost Atlantis, lay a regularly and mystically blue island +off the west coast of Ireland; then the Azores were discovered and the +name fastened on to one of the islands of that archipelago. Then Amerigo +reached South America and the name became finally fixed to the country +that we know. There is nothing nowadays that can give us a parallel to +the stirring and exaltation of the imagination which intoxicated the men +of the Renaissance, and gave a new birth to thought and art. The great +scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century came to men more +prepared for the shock of new surprises, and they carried evidence less +tangible and indisputable to the senses. Perhaps if the strivings of +science should succeed in proving as evident and comprehensible the +existences which spiritualist and psychical research is striving to +establish, we should know the thrill that the great twin discoverers, +Copernicus and Columbus, brought to Europe. + + +(2) + +This rough sketch of the Renaissance has been set down because it is +only by realizing the period in its largest and broadest sense that we +can understand the beginnings of our own modern literature. The +Renaissance reached England late. By the time that the impulse was at +its height with Spenser and Shakespeare, it had died out in Italy, and +in France to which in its turn Italy had passed the torch, it was +already a waning fire. When it came to England it came in a special form +shaped by political and social conditions, and by the accidents of +temperament and inclination in the men who began the movement. But the +essence of the inspiration remained the same as it had been on the +Continent, and the twin threads of its two main impulses, the impulse +from the study of the classics, and the impulse given to men's minds by +the voyages of discovery, runs through all the texture of our +Renaissance literature. + +Literature as it developed in the reign of Elizabeth ran counter to the +hopes and desires of the men who began the movement; the common usage +which extends the term Elizabethan backwards outside the limits of the +reign itself, has nothing but its carelessness to recommend it. The men +of the early renaissance in the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, belonged +to a graver school than their successors. They were no splendid +courtiers, nor daring and hardy adventurers, still less swashbucklers, +exquisites, or literary dandies. Their names--Sir John Cheke, Roger +Ascham, Nicholas Udall, Thomas Wilson, Walter Haddon, belong rather to +the universities and to the coteries of learning, than to the court. To +the nobility, from whose essays and _belles lettres_ Elizabethan poetry +was to develop, they stood in the relation of tutors rather than of +companions, suspecting the extravagances of their pupils rather than +sympathising with their ideals. They were a band of serious and +dignified scholars, men preoccupied with morality and good-citizenship, +and holding those as worth more than the lighter interests of learning +and style. It is perhaps characteristic of the English temper that the +revival of the classical tongues, which in Italy made for paganism, and +the pursuit of pleasure in life and art, in England brought with it in +the first place a new seriousness and gravity of life, and in religion +the Reformation. But in a way the scholars fought against tendencies in +their age, which were both too fast and too strong for them. At a time +when young men were writing poetry modelled on the delicate and +extravagant verse of Italy, were reading Italian novels, and affecting +Italian fashions in speech and dress, they were fighting for sound +education, for good classical scholarship, for the purity of native +English, and behind all these for the native strength and worth of the +English character, which they felt to be endangered by orgies of +reckless assimilation from abroad. The revival of the classics at Oxford +and Cambridge could not produce an Erasmus or a Scaliger; we have no +fine critical scholarship of this age to put beside that of Holland or +France. Sir John Cheke and his followers felt they had a public and +national duty to perform, and their knowledge of the classics only +served them for examples of high living and morality, on which +education, in its sense of the formation of character, could be based. + +The literary influence of the revival of letters in England, apart from +its moral influence, took two contradictory and opposing forms. In the +curricula of schools, logic, which in the Middle Ages had been the +groundwork of thought and letters, gave place to rhetoric. The reading +of the ancients awakened new delight in the melody and beauty of +language: men became intoxicated with words. The practice of rhetoric +was universal and it quickly coloured all literature. It was the habit +of the rhetoricians to choose some subject for declamation and round it +to encourage their pupils to set embellishments and decorations, which +commonly proceeded rather from a delight in language for language's +sake, than from any effect in enforcing an argument. Their models for +these exercises can be traced in their influence on later writers. One +of the most popular of them, Erasmus's "Discourse Persuading a Young Man +to Marriage," which was translated in an English text-book of rhetoric, +reminds one of the first part of Shakespeare's sonnets. The literary +affectation called euphuism was directly based on the precepts of the +handbooks on rhetoric; its author, John Lyly, only elaborated and made +more precise tricks of phrase and writing, which had been used as +exercises in the schools of his youth. The prose of his school, with its +fantastic delight in exuberance of figure and sound, owed its +inspiration, in its form ultimately to Cicero, and in the decorations +with which it was embellished, to the elder Pliny and later writers of +his kind. The long declamatory speeches and the sententiousness of the +early drama were directly modelled on Seneca, through whom was faintly +reflected the tragedy of Greece, unknown directly or almost unknown to +English readers. Latinism, like every new craze, became a passion, and +ran through the less intelligent kinds of writing in a wild excess. Not +much of the literature of this time remains in common knowledge, and for +examples of these affectations one must turn over the black letter pages +of forgotten books. There high-sounding and familiar words are handled +and bandied about with delight, and you can see in volume after volume +these minor and forgotten authors gloating over the new found treasure +which placed them in their time in the van of literary success. That +they are obsolete now, and indeed were obsolete before they were dead, +is a warning to authors who intend similar extravagances. Strangeness +and exoticism are not lasting wares. By the time of "Love's Labour Lost" +they had become nothing more than matter for laughter, and it is only +through their reflection and distortion in Shakespeare's pages that we +know them now. + +Had not a restraining influence, anxiously and even acrimoniously urged, +broken in on their endeavours the English language to-day might have +been almost as completely latinized as Spanish or Italian. That the +essential Saxon purity of our tongue has been preserved is to the credit +not of sensible unlettered people eschewing new fashions they could not +comprehend, but to the scholars themselves. The chief service that Cheke +and Ascham and their fellows rendered to English literature was their +crusade against the exaggerated latinity that they had themselves helped +to make possible, the crusade against what they called "inkhorn terms." +"I am of this opinion," said Cheke in a prefatory letter to a book +translated by a friend of his, "that our own tongue should be written +clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with the borrowing of other +tongues, wherein if we take not heed by time, ever borrowing and never +paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt." Writings in +the Saxon vernacular like the sermons of Latimer, who was careful to use +nothing not familiar to the common people, did much to help the scholars +to save our prose from the extravagances which they dreaded. Their +attack was directed no less against the revival of really obsolete +words. It is a paradox worth noting for its strangeness that the first +revival of mediaevalism in modern English literature was in the +Renaissance itself. Talking in studious archaism seems to have been a +fashionable practice in society and court circles. "The fine courtier," +says Thomas Wilson in his _Art of Rhetoric_, "will talk nothing but +Chaucer." The scholars of the English Renaissance fought not only +against the ignorant adoption of their importations, but against the +renewal of forgotten habits of speech. + +Their efforts failed, and their ideals had to wait for their acceptance +till the age of Dryden, when Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, all of +them authors who consistently violated the standards of Cheke, had done +their work. The fine courtier who would talk nothing but Chaucer was in +Elizabeth's reign the saving of English verse. The beauty and richness +of Spenser is based directly on words he got from _Troilus and Cressida_ +and the _Canterbury Tales_. Some of the most sonorous and beautiful +lines in Shakespeare break every canon laid down by the humanists. + +"Th' extravagant and erring spirit hies + To his confine" + +is a line, three of the chief words of which are Latin importations that +come unfamiliarly, bearing their original interpretation with them. +Milton is packed with similar things: he will talk of a crowded meeting +as "frequent" and use constructions which are unintelligible to anyone +who does not possess a knowledge--and a good knowledge--of Latin syntax. +Yet the effect is a good poetic effect. In attacking latinisms in the +language borrowed from older poets Cheke and his companions were +attacking the two chief sources of Elizabethan poetic vocabulary. All +the sonorousness, beauty and dignity of the poetry and the drama which +followed them would have been lost had they succeeded in their object, +and their verse would have been constrained into the warped and ugly +forms of Sternhold and Hopkins, and those with them who composed the +first and worst metrical version of the Psalms. When their idea +reappeared for its fulfilment phantasy and imagery had temporarily worn +themselves out, and the richer language made simplicity possible and +adequate for poetry. + +There are other directions in which the classical revival influenced +writing that need not detain us here. The attempt to transplant +classical metres into English verse which was the concern of a little +group of authors who called themselves the Areopagus came to no more +success than a similar and contemporary attempt did in France. An +earlier and more lasting result of the influence of the classics on new +ways of thinking is the _Utopia_ of Sir Thomas More, based on Plato's +_Republic_, and followed by similar attempts on the part of other +authors, of which the most notable are Harrington's _Oceana_ and Bacon's +_New Atlantis_. In one way or another the rediscovery of Plato proved +the most valuable part of the Renaissance's gift from Greece. The +doctrines of the Symposium coloured in Italy the writings of Castiglione +and Mirandula. In England they gave us Spenser's "Hymn to Intellectual +Beauty," and they affected, each in his own way, Sir Philip Sidney, and +others of the circle of court writers of his time. More's book was +written in Latin, though there is an English translation almost +contemporary. He combines in himself the two strains that we found +working in the Renaissance, for besides its origin in Plato, _Utopia_ +owes not a little to the influence of the voyages of discovery. In 1507 +there was published a little book called an _Introduction to +Cosmography_, which gave an account of the four voyages of Amerigo. In +the story of the fourth voyage it is narrated that twenty-four men were +left in a fort near Cape Bahia. More used this detail as a +starting-point, and one of the men whom Amerigo left tells the story of +this "Nowhere," a republic partly resembling England but most of all the +ideal world of Plato. Partly resembling England, because no man can +escape from the influences of his own time, whatever road he takes, +whether the road of imagination or any other. His imagination can only +build out of the materials afforded him by his own experience: he can +alter, he can rearrange, but he cannot in the strictest sense of the +word create, and every city of dreams is only the scheme of things as +they are remoulded nearer to the desire of a man's heart. In a way More +has less invention than some of his subtler followers, but his book is +interesting because it is the first example of a kind of writing which +has been attractive to many men since his time, and particularly to +writers of our own day. + +There remains one circumstance in the revival of the classics which had +a marked and continuous influence on the literary age that followed. To +get the classics English scholars had as we have seen to go to Italy. +Cheke went there and so did Wilson, and the path of travel across France +and through Lombardy to Florence and Rome was worn hard by the feet of +their followers for over a hundred years after. On the heels of the men +of learning went the men of fashion, eager to learn and copy the new +manners of a society whose moral teacher was Machiavelli, and whose +patterns of splendour were the courts of Florence and Ferrara, and to +learn the trick of verse that in the hands of Petrarch and his followers +had fashioned the sonnet and other new lyric forms. This could not be +without its influence on the manners of the nation, and the scholars who +had been the first to show the way were the first to deplore the +pell-mell assimilation of Italian manners and vices, which was the +unintended result of the inroad on insularity which had already begun. +They saw the danger ahead, and they laboured to meet it as it came. +Ascham in his _Schoolmaster_ railed against the translation of Italian +books, and the corrupt manners of living and false ideas which they +seemed to him to breed. The Italianate Englishman became the chief part +of the stock-in-trade of the satirists and moralists of the day. Stubbs, +a Puritan chronicler, whose book _The Anatomy of Abuses_ is a valuable +aid to the study of Tudor social history, and Harrison, whose +description of England prefaces Holinshed's Chronicles, both deal in +detail with the Italian menace, and condemn in good set terms the +costliness in dress and the looseness in morals which they laid to its +charge. Indeed, the effect on England was profound, and it lasted for +more than two generations. The romantic traveller, Coryat, writing well +within the seventeenth century in praise of the luxuries of Italy (among +which he numbers forks for table use), is as enthusiastic as the authors +who began the imitation of Italian metres in Tottel's _Miscellany_, and +Donne and Hall in their satires written under James wield the rod of +censure as sternly as had Ascham a good half century before. No doubt +there was something in the danger they dreaded, but the evil was not +unmixed with good, for insularity will always be an enemy of good +literature. The Elizabethans learned much more than their plots from +Italian models, and the worst effects dreaded by the patriots never +reached our shores. Italian vice stopped short of real life; poisoning +and hired ruffianism flourished only on the stage. + + +(3) + +The influence of the spirit of discovery and adventure, though it is +less quickly marked, more pervasive, and less easy to define, is perhaps +more universal than that of the classics or of the Italian fashions +which came in their train. It runs right through the literature of +Elizabeth's age and after it, affecting, each in their special way, all +the dramatists, authors who were also adventurers like Raleigh, scholars +like Milton, and philosophers like Hobbes and Locke. It reappears in the +Romantic revival with Coleridge, whose "Ancient Mariner" owes much to +reminiscences of his favourite reading--_Purchas, his Pilgrimes_, and +other old books of voyages. The matter of this too-little noticed strain +in English literature would suffice to fill a whole book; only a few of +the main lines of its influence can be noted here. + +For the English Renaissance--for Elizabeth's England, action and +imagination went hand in hand; the dramatists and poets held up the +mirror to the voyagers. In a sense, the cult of the sea is the oldest +note in English literature. There is not a poem in Anglo-Saxon but +breathes the saltness and the bitterness of the sea-air. To the old +English the sea was something inexpressibly melancholy and desolate, +mist-shrouded, and lonely, terrible in its grey and shivering spaces; +and their tone about it is always elegiac and plaintive, as a place of +dreary spiritless wandering and unmarked graves. When the English +settled they lost the sense of the sea; they became a little parochial +people, tilling fields and tending cattle, wool-gathering and +wool-bartering, their shipping confined to cross-Channel merchandise, +and coastwise sailing from port to port. Chaucer's shipman, almost the +sole representative of the sea in mediaeval English literature, plied a +coastwise trade. But with the Cabots and their followers, Frobisher and +Gilbert and Drake and Hawkins, all this was changed; once more the ocean +became the highway of our national progress and adventure, and by virtue +of our shipping we became competitors for the dominion of the earth. The +rising tide of national enthusiasm and exaltation that this occasioned +flooded popular literature. The voyagers themselves wrote down the +stories of their adventures; and collections of these--Hakluyt's and +Purchas's--were among the most popular books of the age. To them, +indeed, we must look for the first beginnings of our modern English +prose, and some of its noblest passages. The writers, as often as not, +were otherwise utterly unknown--ship's pursers, super-cargoes, and the +like--men without much literary craft or training, whose style is great +because of the greatness of their subject, because they had no literary +artifices to stand between them and the plain and direct telling of a +stirring tale. But the ferment worked outside the actual doings of the +voyagers themselves, and it can be traced beyond definite allusions to +them. Allusions, indeed, are surprisingly few; Drake is scarcely as much +as mentioned among the greater writers of the age. None the less there +is not one of them that is not deeply touched by his spirit and that of +the movement which he led. New lands had been discovered, new +territories opened up, wonders exposed which were perhaps only the first +fruits of greater wonders to come. Spenser makes the voyagers his +warrant for his excursion into fairyland. Some, he says, have condemned +his fairy world as an idle fiction, + +"But let that man with better sense advise; + That of the world least part to us is red; + And daily how through hardy enterprise + Many great regions are discovered, + Which to late age were never mentioned. + Who ever heard of the 'Indian Peru'? + Or who in venturous vessel measured + The Amazon, huge river, now found true? + Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view? + +"Yet all these were, when no man did them know, + Yet have from wiser ages hidden been; + And later times things more unknown shall show." + +It is in the drama that this spirit of adventure caught from the +voyagers gets its full play. "Without the voyagers," says Professor +Walter Raleigh,[1] "Marlowe is inconceivable." His imagination in every +one of his plays is preoccupied with the lust of adventure, and the +wealth and power adventure brings. Tamburlaine, Eastern conqueror though +he is, is at heart an Englishman of the school of Hawkins and Drake. +Indeed the comparison must have occurred to his own age, for a historian +of the day, the antiquary Stow, declares Drake to have been "as famous +in Europe and America as Tamburlaine was in Asia and Africa." The +high-sounding names and quests which seem to us to give the play an air +of unreality and romance were to the Elizabethans real and actual; +things as strange and foreign were to be heard any day amongst the +motley crowd in the Bankside outside the theatre door. Tamburlaine's +last speech, when he calls for a map and points the way to unrealised +conquests, is the very epitome of the age of discovery. + +"Lo, here my sons, are all the golden mines, + Inestimable wares and precious stones, + More worth than Asia and all the world beside; + And from the Antarctic Pole eastward behold + As much more land, which never was descried. + Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright + As all the lamps that beautify the sky." + + +[Footnote 1: To whose terminal essay in "Hakluyt's Voyages" (Maclehose) +I am indebted for much of the matter in this section.] + +It is the same in his other plays. Dr. Faustus assigns to his +serviceable spirits tasks that might have been studied from the books of +Hakluyt + +"I'll have them fly to India for gold, + Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, + And search all corners of the new round world + For pleasant fruits and princely delicates." + +When there is no actual expression of the spirit of adventure, the air +of the sea which it carried with it still blows. Shakespeare, save for +his scenes in _The Tempest_ and in _Pericles_, which seize in all its +dramatic poignancy the terror of storm and shipwreck, has nothing +dealing directly with the sea or with travel; but it comes out, none the +less, in figure and metaphor, and plays like the _Merchant of Venice_ +and _Othello_ testify to his accessibility to its spirit. Milton, a +scholar whose mind was occupied by other and more ultimate matters, is +full of allusions to it. Satan's journey through Chaos in _Paradise +Lost_ is the occasion for a whole series of metaphors drawn from +seafaring. In _Samson Agonistes_ Dalila comes in, + + "Like a stately ship ... +With all her bravery on and tackle trim +Sails frilled and streamers waving +Courted by all the winds that hold them play." + +and Samson speaks of himself as one who, + + "Like a foolish pilot have shipwracked +My vessel trusted to me from above +Gloriously rigged." + +The influence of the voyages of discovery persisted long after the first +bloom of the Renaissance had flowered and withered. On the reports +brought home by the voyagers were founded in part those conceptions of +the condition of the "natural" man which form such a large part of the +philosophic discussions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, +Hobbes's description of the life of nature as "nasty, solitary, brutish, +and short," Locke's theories of civil government, and eighteenth century +speculators like Monboddo all took as the basis of their theory the +observations of the men of travel. Abroad this connection of travellers +and philosophers was no less intimate. Both Montesquieu and Rousseau +owed much to the tales of the Iroquois, the North American Indian allies +of France. Locke himself is the best example of the closeness of this +alliance. He was a diligent student of the texts of the voyagers, and +himself edited out of Hakluyt and Purchas the best collection of them +current in his day. The purely literary influence of the age of +discovery persisted down to _Robinson Crusoe_; in that book by a +refinement of satire a return to travel itself (it must be remembered +Defoe posed not as a novelist but as an actual traveller) is used to +make play with the deductions founded on it. Crusoe's conversation with +the man Friday will be found to be a satire of Locke's famous +controversy with the Bishop of Worcester. With _Robinson Crusoe_ the +influence of the age of discovery finally perishes. An inspiration +hardens into the mere subject matter of books of adventure. We need not +follow it further. + + + + +CHAPTER II + + +ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE + +(1) + +To understand Elizabethan literature it is necessary to remember that +the social status it enjoyed was far different from that of literature +in our own day. The splendours of the Medicis in Italy had set up an +ideal of courtliness, in which letters formed an integral and +indispensable part. For the Renaissance, the man of letters was only one +aspect of the gentleman, and the true gentleman, as books so early and +late respectively as Castiglione's _Courtier_ and Peacham's _Complete +Gentleman_ show, numbered poetry as a necessary part of his +accomplishments. In England special circumstances intensified this +tendency of the time. The queen was unmarried: she was the first single +woman to wear the English crown, and her vanity made her value the +devotion of the men about her as something more intimate than mere +loyalty or patriotism. She loved personal homage, particularly the +homage of half-amatory eulogy in prose and verse. It followed that the +ambition of every courtier was to be an author, and of every author to +be a courtier; in fact, outside the drama, which was almost the only +popular writing at the time, every author was in a greater or less +degree attached to the court. If they were not enjoying its favours they +were pleading for them, mingling high and fantastic compliment with +bitter reproaches and a tale of misery. And consequently both the poetry +and the prose of the time are restricted in their scope and temper to +the artificial and romantic, to high-flown eloquence, to the celebration +of love and devotion, or to the inculcation of those courtly virtues and +accomplishments which composed the perfect pattern of a gentleman. Not +that there was not both poetry and prose written outside this charmed +circle. The pamphleteers and chroniclers, Dekker and Nash, Holinshed and +Harrison and Stow, were setting down their histories and descriptions, +and penning those detailed and realistic indictments of the follies and +extravagances of fashion, which together with the comedies have enabled +us to picture accurately the England and especially the London of +Elizabeth's reign. There was fine poetry written by Marlowe and Chapman +as well as by Sidney and Spenser, but the court was still the main +centre of literary endeavour, and the main incitement to literary fame +and success. + +But whether an author was a courtier or a Londoner living by his wits, +writing was never the main business of his life: all the writers of the +time were in one way or another men of action and affairs. As late as +Milton it is probably true to say that writing was in the case even of +the greatest an avocation, something indulged in at leisure outside a +man's main business. All the Elizabethan authors had crowded and various +careers. Of Sir Philip Sidney his earliest biographer says, "The truth +is his end was not writing, even while he wrote, but both his wit and +understanding bent upon his heart to make himself and others not in +words or opinion but in life and action good and great." Ben Jonson was +in turn a soldier, a poet, a bricklayer, an actor, and ultimately the +first poet laureate. Lodge, after leaving Oxford, passed through the +various professions of soldiering, medicine, playwriting, and fiction, +and he wrote his novel _Rosalind_, on which Shakespeare based _As You +Like It_ while he was sailing on a piratical venture on the Spanish +Main. This connection between life and action affected as we have seen +the tone and quality of Elizabethan writing. "All the distinguished +writers of the period," says Thoreau, "possess a greater vigour and +naturalness than the more modern ... you have constantly the warrant of +life and experience in what you read. The little that is said is eked +out by implication of the much that was done." In another passage the +same writer explains the strength and fineness of the writings of Sir +Walter Raleigh by this very test of action, "The word which is best said +came nearest to not being spoken at all, for it is cousin to a deed +which the speaker could have better done. Nay almost it must have taken +the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, +so that the truest writer will be some captive knight after all." This +bond between literature and action explains more than the writings of +the voyagers or the pamphlets of men who lived in London by what they +could make of their fellows. Literature has always a two-fold relation +to life as it is lived. It is both a mirror and an escape: in our own +day the stirring romances of Stevenson, the full-blooded and vigorous +life which beats through the pages of Mr. Kipling, the conscious +brutalism of such writers as Mr. Conrad and Mr. Hewlett, the plays of +J.M. Synge, occupied with the vigorous and coarse-grained life of +tinkers and peasants, are all in their separate ways a reaction against +an age in which the overwhelming majority of men and women have +sedentary pursuits. Just in the same way the Elizabethan who passed his +commonly short and crowded life in an atmosphere of throat-cutting and +powder and shot, and in a time when affairs of state were more momentous +for the future of the nation than they have ever been since, needed his +escape from the things which pressed in upon him every day. So grew the +vogue and popularity of pastoral poetry and of pastoral romance. + + + +(2) + +It is with two courtiers that modern English poetry begins. The lives of +Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey both ended early and unhappily, +and it was not until ten years after the death of the second of them +that their poems appeared in print. The book that contained them, +Tottel's _Miscellany of Songs and Sonnets_, is one of the landmarks of +English literature. It begins lyrical love poetry in our language. It +begins, too, the imitation and adaptation of foreign and chiefly Italian +metrical forms, many of which have since become characteristic forms of +English verse: so characteristic, that we scarcely think of them as +other than native in origin. To Wyatt belongs the honour of introducing +the sonnet, and to Surrey the more momentous credit of writing, for the +first time in English, blank verse. Wyatt fills the most important place +in the _Miscellany_, and his work, experimental in tone and quality, +formed the example which Surrey and minor writers in the same volume and +all the later poets of the age copied. He tries his hand at +everything--songs, madrigals, elegies, complaints, and sonnets--and he +takes his models from both ancient Rome and modern Italy. Indeed there +is scarcely anything in the volume for which with some trouble and +research one might not find an original in Petrarch, or in the poets of +Italy who followed him. But imitation, universal though it is in his +work, does not altogether crowd out originality of feeling and poetic +temper. At times, he sounds a personal note, his joy on leaving Spain +for England, his feelings in the Tower, his life at the Court amongst +his books, and as a country gentleman enjoying hunting and other outdoor +sports. + +"This maketh me at home to hunt and hawk, + And in foul weather at my book to sit, + In frost and snow, then with my bow to stalk, + No man does mark whereas I ride or go: + In lusty leas at liberty I walk." + +It is easy to see that poetry as a melodious and enriched expression of +a man's own feelings is in its infancy here. The new poets had to find +their own language, to enrich with borrowings from other tongues the +stock of words suitable for poetry which the dropping of inflection had +left to English. Wyatt was at the beginning of the process, and apart +from a gracious and courtly temper, his work has, it must be confessed, +hardly more than an antiquarian interest. Surrey, it is possible to say +on reading his work, went one step further. He allows himself oftener +the luxury of a reference to personal feelings, and his poetry contains +from place to place a fairly full record of the vicissitudes of his +life. A prisoner at Windsor, he recalls his childhood there + +"The large green courts where we were wont to hove, + The palme-play, where, despoiled for the game. + With dazzled eyes oft we by gleams of love + Have missed the ball, and got sight of our dame." + +Like Wyatt's, his verses are poor stuff, but a sympathetic ear can catch +in them something of the accent that distinguishes the verse of Sidney +and Spenser. He is greater than Wyatt, not so much for greater skill as +for more boldness in experiment. Wyatt in his sonnets had used the +Petrarchan or Italian form, the form used later in England by Milton and +in the nineteenth century by Rossetti. He built up each poem, that is, +in two parts, the octave, a two-rhymed section of eight lines at the +beginning, followed by the sestet, a six line close with three rhymes. +The form fits itself very well to the double mood which commonly +inspires a poet using the sonnet form; the second section as it were +both echoing and answering the first, following doubt with hope, or +sadness with resignation, or resolving a problem set itself by the +heart. Surrey tried another manner, the manner which by its use in +Shakespeare's sonnets has come to be regarded as the English form of +this kind of lyric. His sonnets are virtually three-stanza poems with a +couplet for close, and he allows himself as many rhymes as he chooses. +The structure is obviously easier, and it gives a better chance to an +inferior workman, but in the hands of a master its harmonies are no less +delicate, and its capacity to represent changing modes of thought no +less complete than those of the true form of Petrarch. Blank verse, +which was Surrey's other gift to English poetry, was in a way a +compromise between the two sources from which the English Renaissance +drew its inspiration. Latin and Greek verse is quantitative and +rhymeless; Italian verse, built up on the metres of the troubadours and +the degeneration of Latin which gave the world the Romance languages, +used many elaborate forms of rhyme. Blank verse took from Latin its +rhymelessness, but it retained accent instead of quantity as the basis +of its line. The line Surrey used is the five-foot or ten-syllable line +of what is called "heroic verse"--the line used by Chaucer in his +Prologue and most of his tales. Like Milton he deplored rhyme as the +invention of a barbarous age, and no doubt he would have rejoiced to go +further and banish accent as well as rhymed endings. That, however, was +not to be, though in the best blank verse of later time accent and +quantity both have their share in the effect. The instrument he forged +passed into the hands of the dramatists: Marlowe perfected its rhythm, +Shakespeare broke its monotony and varied its cadences by altering the +spacing of the accents, and occasionally by adding an extra unaccented +syllable. It came back from the drama to poetry with Milton. His +blindness and the necessity under which it laid him of keeping in his +head long stretches of verse at one time, because he could not look back +to see what he had written, probably helped his naturally quick and +delicate sense of cadence to vary the pauses, so that a variety of +accent and interval might replace the valuable aid to memory which he +put aside in putting aside rhyme. Perhaps it is to two accidents, the +accident by which blank verse as the medium of the actor had to be +retained easily in the memory, and the accident of Milton's blindness, +that must be laid the credit of more than a little of the richness of +rhythm of this, the chief and greatest instrument of English verse. + +The imitation of Italian and French forms which Wyatt and Surrey began, +was continued by a host of younger amateurs of poetry. Laborious +research has indeed found a Continental original for almost every great +poem of the time, and for very many forgotten ones as well. It is easy +for the student engaged in this kind of literary exploration to +exaggerate the importance of what he finds, and of late years criticism, +written mainly by these explorers, has tended to assume that since it +can be found that Sidney, and Daniel, and Watson, and all the other +writers of mythological poetry and sonnet sequences took their ideas and +their phrases from foreign poetry, their work is therefore to be classed +merely as imitative literary exercise, that it is frigid, that it +contains or conveys no real feeling, and that except in the secondary +and derived sense, it is not really lyrical at all. Petrarch, they will +tell you, may have felt deeply and sincerely about Laura, but when +Sidney uses Petrarch's imagery and even translates his words in order to +express his feelings for Stella, he is only a plagiarist and not a +lover, and the passion for Lady Rich which is supposed to have inspired +his sonnets, nothing more than a not too seriously intended trick to add +the excitement of a transcript of real emotion to what was really an +academic exercise. If that were indeed so, then Elizabethan poetry is a +very much lesser and meaner thing than later ages have thought it. But +is it so? Let us look into the matter a little more closely. The unit of +all ordinary kinds of writing is the word, and one is not commonly +quarrelled with for using words that have belonged to other people. But +the unit of the lyric, like the unit of spoken conversation, is not the +word but the phrase. Now in daily human intercourse the use, which is +universal and habitual, of set forms and phrases of talk is not commonly +supposed to detract from, or destroy sincerity. In the crises indeed of +emotion it must be most people's experience that the natural speech that +rises unbidden and easiest to the lips is something quite familiar and +commonplace, some form which the accumulated experience of many +generations of separate people has found best for such circumstances or +such an occasion. The lyric is just in the position of conversation, at +such a heightened and emotional moment. It is the speech of deep +feeling, that must be articulate or choke, and it falls naturally and +inevitably into some form which accumulated passionate moments have +created and fixed. The course of emotional experiences differs very +little from age to age, and from individual to individual, and so the +same phrases may be used quite sincerely and naturally as the direct +expression of feeling at its highest point by men apart in country, +circumstances, or time. This is not to say that there is no such thing +as originality; a poet is a poet first and most of all because he +discovers truths that have been known for ages, as things that are fresh +and new and vital for himself. He must speak of them in language that +has been used by other men just because they are known truths, but he +will use that language in a new way, and with a new significance, and +it is just in proportion to the freshness, and the air of personal +conviction and sincerity which he imparts to it, that he is great. + +The point at issue bears very directly on the work of Sir Philip Sidney. +In the course of the history of English letters certain authors +disengage themselves who have more than a merely literary position: they +are symbolic of the whole age in which they live, its life and action, +its thoughts and ideals, as well as its mere modes of writing. There are +not many of them and they could be easily numbered; Addison, perhaps, +certainly Dr. Johnson, certainly Byron, and in the later age probably +Tennyson. But the greatest of them all is Sir Philip Sidney: his +symbolical relation to the time in which he lived was realized by his +contemporaries, and it has been a commonplace of history and criticism +ever since. Elizabeth called him one of the jewels of her crown, and at +the age of twenty-three, so fast did genius ripen in that summer time of +the Renaissance, William the Silent could speak of him as "one of the +ripest statesmen of the age." He travelled widely in Europe, knew many +languages, and dreamed of adventure in America and on the high seas. In +a court of brilliant figures, his was the most dazzling, and his death +at Zutphen only served to intensify the halo of romance which had +gathered round his name. His literary exercises were various: in prose +he wrote the _Arcadia_ and the _Apology for Poetry_, the one the +beginning of a new kind of imaginative writing, and the other the first +of the series of those rare and precious commentaries on their own art +which some of our English poets have left us. To the _Arcadia_ we shall +have to return later in this chapter. It is his other great work, the +sequence of sonnets entitled _Astrophel and Stella_, which concerns us +here. They celebrate the history of his love for Penelope Devereux, +sister of the Earl of Essex, a love brought to disaster by the +intervention of Queen Elizabeth with whom he had quarrelled. As poetry +they mark an epoch. They are the first direct expression of an intimate +and personal experience in English literature, struck off in the white +heat of passion, and though they are coloured at times with that +over-fantastic imagery which is at once a characteristic fault and +excellence of the writing of the time, they never lose the one merit +above all others of lyric poetry, the merit of sincerity. The note is +struck with certainty and power in the first sonnet of the series:-- + +"Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, + That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,-- + Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,-- + Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,-- + I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, + Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain; + Oft turning others' leaves to see if thence would flow + Some fresh and fruitful flower upon my sunburned brain. + But words came halting forth ... + Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, + 'Fool,' said my muse to me, 'look in thy heart and write.'" + +And though he turned others' leaves it was quite literally looking in +his heart that he wrote. He analyses the sequence of his feelings with a +vividness and minuteness which assure us of their truth. All that he +tells is the fruit of experience, dearly bought: + +"Desire! desire! I have too dearly bought + With price of mangled mind thy worthless ware. + Too long, too long! asleep thou hast me brought, + Who shouldst my mind to higher things prepare." + +and earlier in the sequence-- + +"I now have learned love right and learned even so + As those that being poisoned poison know." + +In the last two sonnets, with crowning truth and pathos he renounces +earthly love which reaches but to dust, and which because it fades +brings but fading pleasure: + +"Then farewell, world! Thy uttermost I see. + Eternal love, maintain thy life in me." + +The sonnets were published after Sidney's death, and it is certain that +like Shakespeare's they were never intended for publication at all. The +point is important because it helps to vindicate Sidney's sincerity, but +were any vindication needed another more certain might be found. The +_Arcadia_ is strewn with love songs and sonnets, the exercises solely of +the literary imagination. Let any one who wishes to gauge the sincerity +of the impulse of the Stella sequence compare any of the poems in it +with those in the romance. + +With Sir Philip Sidney literature was an avocation, constantly indulged +in, but outside the main business of his life; with Edmund Spenser +public life and affairs were subservient to an overmastering poetic +impulse. He did his best to carve out a career for himself like other +young men of his time, followed the fortunes of the Earl of Leicester, +sought desperately and unavailingly the favour of the Queen, and +ultimately accepted a place in her service in Ireland, which meant +banishment as virtually as a place in India would to-day. Henceforward +his visits to London and the Court were few; sometimes a lover of travel +would visit him in his house in Ireland as Raleigh did, but for the most +he was left alone. It was in this atmosphere of loneliness and +separation, hostile tribes pinning him in on every side, murder lurking +in the woods and marshes round him, that he composed his greatest work. +In it at last he died, on the heels of a sudden rising in which his +house was burnt and his lands over-run by the wild Irish whom the +tyranny of the English planters had driven to vengeance. Spenser was not +without interest in his public duties; his _View of the State of +Ireland_ shows that. But it shows, too, that he brought to them +singularly little sympathy or imagination. Throughout his tone is that +of the worst kind of English officialdom; rigid subjection and in the +last resort massacre are the remedies he would apply to Irish +discontent. He would be a fine text--which might be enforced by modern +examples--for a discourse on the evil effects of immersion in the +government of a subject race upon men of letters. No man of action can +be so consistently and cynically an advocate of brutalism as your man of +letters, Spenser, of course, had his excuses; the problem of Ireland +was new and it was something remote and difficult; in all but the mere +distance for travel, Dublin was as far from London as Bombay is to-day. +But to him and his like we must lay down partly the fact that to-day we +have still an Irish problem. + +But though fate and the necessity of a livelihood drove him to Ireland +and the life of a colonist, poetry was his main business. He had been +the centre of a brilliant set at Cambridge, one of those coteries whose +fame, if they are brilliant and vivacious enough and have enough +self-confidence, penetrates to the outer world before they leave the +University. The thing happens in our own day, as the case of Oscar Wilde +is witness; it happened in the case of Spenser; and when he and his +friends Gabriel Harvey and Edward Kirke came "down" it was to immediate +fame amongst amateurs of the arts. They corresponded with each other +about literary matters, and Harvey published his part of the +correspondence; they played like Du Bellay in France, with the idea of +writing English verse in the quantitative measures of classical poetry; +Spenser had a love affair in Yorkshire and wrote poetry about it, +letting just enough be known to stimulate the imagination of the public. +They tried their hands at everything, imitated everything, and in all +were brilliant, sparkling, and decorative; they got a kind of entrance +to the circle of the Court. Then Spenser published his _Shepherd's +Calendar_, a series of pastoral eclogues for every month of the year, +after a manner taken from French and Italian pastoral writers, but +coming ultimately from Vergil, and Edward Kirke furnished it with an +elaborate prose commentary. Spenser took the same liberties with the +pastoral form as did Vergil himself; that is to say he used it as a +vehicle for satire and allegory, made it carry political and social +allusions, and planted in it references to his friends. By its +publication Spenser became the first poet of the day. It was followed by +some of his finest and most beautiful things--by the Platonic hymns, by +the _Amoretti_, a series of sonnets inspired by his love for his wife; +by the _Epithalamium_, on the occasion of his marriage to her; by +_Mother Hubbard's Tale_, a satire written when despair at the coldness +of the Queen and the enmity of Burleigh was beginning to take hold on +the poet and endowed with a plainness and vigour foreign to most of his +other work--and then by _The Fairy Queen_. + +The poets of the Renaissance were not afraid of big things; every one of +them had in his mind as the goal of poetic endeavour the idea of the +heroic poem, aimed at doing for his own country what Vergil had intended +to do for Rome in the _Aeneid_, to celebrate it--its origin, its +prowess, its greatness, and the causes of it, in epic verse. Milton, +three-quarters of a century later, turned over in his mind the plan of +an English epic on the wars of Arthur, and when he left it was only to +forsake the singing of English origins for the more ultimate theme of +the origins of mankind. Spenser designed to celebrate the character, the +qualities and the training of the English gentleman. And because poetry, +unlike philosophy, cannot deal with abstractions but must be vivid and +concrete, he was forced to embody his virtues and foes to virtue and to +use the way of allegory. His outward plan, with its knights and dragons +and desperate adventures, he procured from Ariosto. As for the use of +allegory, it was one of the discoveries of the Middle Ages which the +Renaissance condescended to retain. Spenser elaborated it beyond the +wildest dreams of those students of Holy Writ who had first conceived +it. His stories were to be interesting in themselves as tales of +adventure, but within them they were to conceal an intricate treatment +of the conflict of truth and falsehood in morals and religion. A +character might typify at once Protestantism and England and Elizabeth +and chastity and half the cardinal virtues, and it would have all the +while the objective interest attaching to it as part of a story of +adventure. All this must have made the poem difficult enough. Spenser's +manner of writing it made it worse still. One is familiar with the type +of novel which only explains itself when the last chapter is +reached--Stevenson's _Wrecker_ is an example. _The Fairy Queen_ was +designed on somewhat the same plan. The last section was to relate and +explain the unrelated and unexplained books which made up the poem, and +at the court to which the separate knights of the separate books--the +Red Cross Knight and the rest--were to bring the fruit of their +adventures, everything was to be made clear. Spenser did not live to +finish his work; _The Fairy Queen_, like the _Aeneid_, is an uncompleted +poem, and it is only from a prefatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh +issued with the second published section that we know what the poem was +intended to be. Had Spenser not published this explanation, it is +impossible that anybody, even the acutest minded German professor, could +have guessed. + +The poem, as we have seen, was composed in Ireland, in the solitude of a +colonists' plantation, and the author was shut off from his fellows +while he wrote. The influence of his surroundings is visible in the +writing. The elaboration of the theme would have been impossible or at +least very unlikely if its author had not been thrown in on himself +during its composition. Its intricacy and involution is the product of +an over-concentration born of empty surroundings. It lacks vigour and +rapidity; it winds itself into itself. The influence of Ireland, too, is +visible in its landscapes, in its description of bogs and desolation, of +dark forests in which lurk savages ready to spring out on those who are +rash enough to wander within their confines. All the scenery in it which +is not imaginary is Irish and not English scenery. + +Its reception in England and at the Court was enthusiastic. Men and +women read it eagerly and longed for the next section as our +grandfathers longed for the next section of _Pickwick_. They really +liked it, really loved the intricacy and luxuriousness of it, the heavy +exotic language, the thickly painted descriptions, the languorous melody +of the verse. Mainly, perhaps, that was so because they were all either +in wish or in deed poets themselves. Spenser has always been "the +poets' poet." Milton loved him; so did Dryden, who said that Milton +confessed to him that Spenser was "his original," a statement which has +been pronounced incredible, but is, in truth, perfectly comprehensible, +and most likely true. Pope admired him; Keats learned from him the best +part of his music. You can trace echoes of him in Mr. Yeats. What is it +that gives him this hold on his peers? Well, in the first place his +defects do not detract from his purely poetic qualities. The story is +impossibly told, but that will only worry those who are looking for a +story. The allegory is hopelessly difficult; but as Hazlitt said "the +allegory will not bite you"; you can let it alone. The crudeness and +bigotry of Spenser's dealings with Catholicism, which are ridiculous +when he pictures the monster Error vomiting books and pamphlets, and +disgusting when he draws Mary Queen of Scots, do not hinder the pleasure +of those who read him for his language and his art. He is great for +other reasons than these. First because of the extraordinary smoothness +and melody of his verse and the richness of his language--a golden +diction that he drew from every source--new words, old words, obsolete +words--such a mixture that the purist Ben Jonson remarked acidly that he +wrote no language at all. Secondly because of the profusion of his +imagery, and the extraordinarily keen sense for beauty and sweetness +that went to its making. In an age of golden language and gallant +imagery his was the most golden and the most gallant. And the language +of poetry in England is richer and more varied than that in any other +country in Europe to-day, because of what he did. + + +(3) + +Elizabethan prose brings us face to face with a difficulty which has to +be met by every student of literature. Does the word "literature" cover +every kind of writing? Ought we to include in it writing that aims +merely at instruction or is merely journey-work, as well as writing that +has an artistic intention, or writing that, whether its author knew it +or no, is artistic in its result? Of course such a question causes us no +sort of difficulty when it concerns itself only with what is being +published to-day. We know very well that some things are literature and +some merely journalism; that of novels, for instance, some deliberately +intend to be works of art and others only to meet a passing desire for +amusement or mental occupation. We know that most books serve or attempt +to serve only a useful and not a literary purpose. But in reading the +books of three centuries ago, unconsciously one's point of view shifts. +Antiquity gilds journey-work; remoteness and quaintness of phrasing lend +a kind of distinction to what are simply pamphlets or text-books that +have been preserved by accident from the ephemeralness which was the +common lot of hundreds of their fellows. One comes to regard as +literature things that had no kind of literary value for their first +audiences; to apply the same seriousness of judgment and the same tests +to the pamphlets of Nash and Dekker as to the prose of Sidney and +Bacon. One loses, in fact, that power to distinguish the important from +the trivial which is one of the functions of a sound literary taste. +Now, a study of the minor writing of the past is, of course, well worth +a reader's pains. Pamphlets, chronicle histories, text-books and the +like have an historical importance; they give us glimpses of the manners +and habits and modes of thought of the day. They tell us more about the +outward show of life than do the greater books. If you are interested in +social history, they are the very thing. But the student of literature +ought to beware of them, nor ought he to touch them till he is familiar +with the big and lasting things. A man does not possess English +literature if he knows what Dekker tells of the seven deadly sins of +London and does not know the _Fairy Queen_. Though the wide and curious +interest of the Romantic critics of the nineteenth century found and +illumined the byways of Elizabethan writing, the safest method of +approach is the method of their predecessors--to keep hold on common +sense, to look at literature, not historically as through the wrong end +of a telescope, but closely and without a sense of intervening time, to +know the best--the "classic"--and study it before the minor things. + +In Elizabeth's reign, prose became for the first time, with cheapened +printing, the common vehicle of amusement and information, and the books +that remain to us cover many departments of writing. There are the +historians who set down for us for the first time what they knew of the +earlier history of England. There are the writers, like Harrison and +Stubbs, who described the England of their own day, and there are many +authors, mainly anonymous, who wrote down the accounts of the voyages of +the discoverers in the Western Seas. There are the novelists who +translated stories mainly from Italian sources. But of authors as +conscious of a literary intention as the poets were, there are only two, +Sidney and Lyly, and of authors who, though their first aim was hardly +an artistic one, achieved an artistic result, only Hooker and the +translators of the Bible. The Authorized Version of the Bible belongs +strictly not to the reign of Elizabeth but to that of James, and we +shall have to look at it when we come to discuss the seventeenth +century. Hooker, in his book on Ecclesiastical Polity (an endeavour to +set forth the grounds of orthodox Anglicanism) employed a generous, +flowing, melodious style which has influenced many writers since and is +familiar to us to-day in the copy of it used by Ruskin in his earlier +works. Lyly and Sidney are worth looking at more closely. + +The age was intoxicated with language. It went mad of a mere delight in +words. Its writers were using a new tongue, for English was enriched +beyond all recognition with borrowings from the ancient authors; and +like all artists who become possessed of a new medium, they used it to +excess. The early Elizabethans' use of the new prose was very like the +use that educated Indians make of English to-day. It is not that these +write it incorrectly, but only that they write too richly. And just as +fuller use and knowledge teaches them spareness and economy and gives +their writing simplicity and vigour, so seventeenth century practice +taught Englishmen to write a more direct and undecorated style and gave +us the smooth, simple, and vigorous writing of Dryden--the first really +modern English prose. But the Elizabethans loved gaudier methods; they +liked highly decorative modes of expression, in prose no less than in +verse. The first author to give them these things was John Lyly, whose +book _Euphues_ was for the five or six years following its publication a +fashionable craze that infected all society and gave its name to a +peculiar and highly artificial style of writing that coloured the work +of hosts of obscure and forgotten followers. Lyly wrote other things; +his comedies may have taught Shakespeare the trick of _Love's Labour +Lost_; he attempted a sequel of his most famous work with better success +than commonly attends sequels, but for us and for his own generation he +is the author of one book. Everybody read it, everybody copied it. The +maxims and sentences of advice for gentlemen which it contained were +quoted and admired in the Court, where the author, though he never +attained the lucrative position he hoped for, did what flattery could do +to make a name for himself. The name "Euphuism" became a current +description of an artificial way of using words that overflowed out of +writing into speech and was in the mouths, while the vogue lasted, of +everybody who was anybody in the circle that fluttered round the Queen. + +The style of _Euphues_ was parodied by Shakespeare and many attempts +have been made to imitate it since. Most of them are inaccurate--Sir +Walter Scott's wild attempt the most inaccurate of all. They fail +because their authors have imagined that "Euphuism" is simply a highly +artificial and "flowery" way of talking. As a matter of fact it is made +up of a very exact and very definite series of parts. The writing is +done on a plan which has three main characteristics as follows. First, +the structure of the sentence is based on antithesis and alliteration; +that is to say, it falls into equal parts similar in sound but with a +different sense; for example, Euphues is described as a young gallant +"of more wit than wealth, yet of more wealth than wisdom." All the +characters in the book, which is roughly in the form of a novel, speak +in this way, sometimes in sentences long drawn out which are +oppressively monotonous and tedious, and sometimes shortly with a +certain approach to epigram. The second characteristic of the style is +the reference of every stated fact to some classical authority, that is +to say, the author cannot mention friendship without quoting David and +Jonathan, nor can lovers in his book accuse each other of faithlessness +without quoting the instance of Cressida or Aeneas. This appeal to +classical authority and wealth of classical allusion is used to decorate +pages which deal with matters of every-day experience. Seneca, for +instance, is quoted as reporting "that too much bending breaketh the +bow," a fact which might reasonably have been supposed to be known to +the author himself. This particular form of writing perhaps influenced +those who copied Lyly more than anything else in his book. It is a +fashion of the more artificial kind of Elizabethan writing in all +schools to employ a wealth of classical allusion. Even the simple +narratives in _Hakluyt's Voyages_ are not free from it, and one may +hardly hope to read an account of a voyage to the Indies without +stumbling on a preliminary reference to the opinions of Aristotle and +Plato. Lastly, _Euphues_ is characterised by an extraordinary wealth of +allusion to natural history, mostly of a fabulous kind. "I have read +that the bull being tied to the fig tree loseth his tail; that the whole +herd of deer stand at gaze if they smell a sweet apple; that the dolphin +after the sound of music is brought to the shore," and so on. His book +is full of these things, and the style weakens and loses its force +because of them. + +Of course there is much more in his book than this outward decoration. +He wrote with the avowed purpose of instructing courtiers and gentlemen +how to live. _Euphues_ is full of grave reflections and weighty morals, +and is indeed a collection of essays on education, on friendship, on +religion and philosophy, and on the favourite occupation and curriculum +of Elizabethan youth--foreign travel. The fashions and customs of his +countrymen which he condemns in the course of his teaching are the same +as those inveighed against by Stubbs and other contemporaries. He +disliked manners and fashions copied from Italy; particularly he +disliked the extravagant fashions of women. One woman only escapes his +censure, and she, of course, is the Queen, whom Euphues and his +companion in the book come to England to see. In the main the teaching +of Euphues inculcates a humane and liberal, if not very profound creed, +and the book shares with _The Fairy Queen_ the honour of the earlier +Puritanism--the Puritanism that besides the New Testament had the +_Republic_. + +But Euphues, though he was in his time the popular idol, was not long in +finding a successful rival. Seven years before his death Sir Philip +Sidney, in a period of retirement from the Court wrote "_The Countess of +Pembroke's Arcadia_"; it was published ten years after it had been +composed. The _Arcadia_ is the first English example of the prose +pastoral romance, as the _Shepherd's Calendar_ is of our pastoral verse. +Imitative essays in its style kept appearing for two hundred years after +it, till Wordsworth and other poets who knew the country drove its +unrealities out of literature. The aim of it and of the school to which +it belonged abroad was to find a setting for a story which should leave +the author perfectly free to plant in it any improbability he liked, and +to do what he liked with the relations of his characters. In the shade +of beech trees, the coils of elaborated and intricate love-making wind +and unravel themselves through an endless afternoon. In that art nothing +is too far-fetched, nothing too sentimental, no sorrow too unreal. The +pastoral romance was used, too, to cover other things besides a +sentimental and decorative treatment of love. Authors wrapped up as +shepherds their political friends and enemies, and the pastoral eclogues +in verse which Spenser and others composed are full of personal and +political allusion. Sidney's story carries no politics and he depends +for its interest solely on the wealth of differing episodes and the +stories and arguments of love which it contains. The story would furnish +plot enough for twenty ordinary novels, but probably those who read it +when it was published were attracted by other things than the march of +its incidents. Certainly no one could read it for the plot now. Its +attraction is mainly one of style. It goes, you feel, one degree beyond +_Euphues_ in the direction of freedom and poetry. And just because of +this greater freedom, its characteristics are much less easy to fix than +those of _Euphues_. Perhaps its chief quality is best described as that +of exhaustiveness. Sidney will take a word and toss it to and fro in a +page till its meaning is sucked dry and more than sucked dry. On page +after page the same trick is employed, often in some new and charming +way, but with the inevitable effect of wearying the reader, who tries to +do the unwisest of all things with a book of this kind--to read on. This +trick of bandying words is, of course, common in Shakespeare. Other +marks of Sidney's style belong similarly to poetry rather than to prose. +Chief of them is what Ruskin christened the "pathetic fallacy"--the +assumption (not common in his day) which connects the appearance of +nature with the moods of the artist who looks at it, or demands such a +connection. In its day the _Arcadia_ was hailed as a reformation by men +nauseated by the rhythmical patterns of Lyly. A modern reader finds +himself confronting it in something of the spirit that he would confront +the prose romances, say, of William Morris, finding it charming as a +poet's essay in prose but no more: not to be ranked with the highest. + + + + +CHAPTER III + + +THE DRAMA + +(1) + +Biologists tell us that the hybrid--the product of a variety of +ancestral stocks--is more fertile than an organism with a direct and +unmixed ancestry; perhaps the analogy is not too fanciful as the +starting-point of a study of Elizabethan drama, which owed its strength +and vitality, more than to anything else, to the variety of the +discordant and contradictory elements of which it was made up. The drama +was the form into which were moulded the thoughts and desires of the +best spirits of the time. It was the flower of the age. To appreciate +its many-sided significances and achievements it is necessary to +disentangle carefully its roots, in religion, in the revival of the +classics, in popular entertainments, in imports from abroad, in the air +of enterprise and adventure which belonged to the time. + +As in Greece, drama in England was in its beginning a religious thing. +Its oldest continuous tradition was from the mediaeval Church. Early in +the Middle Ages the clergy and their parishioners began the habit, at +Christmas, Easter and other holy days, of playing some part of the story +of Christ's life suitable to the festival of the day. These plays were +liturgical, and originally, no doubt, overshadowed by a choral element. +But gradually the inherent human capacity for mimicry and drama took the +upper hand; from ceremonies they developed into performances; they +passed from the stage in the church porch to the stage in the street. A +waggon, the natural human platform for mimicry or oratory, became in +England as it was in Greece, the cradle of the drama. This momentous +change in the history of the miracle play, which made it in all but its +occasion and its subject a secular thing, took place about the end of +the twelfth century. The rise of the town guilds gave the plays a new +character; the friendly rivalry of leagued craftsmen elaborated their +production; and at length elaborate cycles were founded which were +performed at Whitsuntide, beginning at sunrise and lasting all through +the day right on to dusk. Each town had its own cycle, and of these the +cycles of York, Wakefield, Chester and Coventry still remain. So too, +does an eye-witness's account of a Chester performance where the plays +took place yearly on three days, beginning with Whit Monday. "The +manner of these plays were, every company had his pageant or part, a +high scaffold with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels. In +the lower they apparelled themselves and in the higher room they played, +being all open on the top that all beholders might hear and see them. +They began first at the abbey gates, and when the first pageant was +played, it was wheeled to the high cross before the mayor and so to +every street. So every street had a pageant playing upon it at one time, +till all the pageants for the day appointed were played." The +"companies" were the town guilds and the several "pageants" different +scenes in Old or New Testament story. As far as was possible each +company took for its pageant some Bible story fitting to its trade; in +York the goldsmiths played the three Kings of the East bringing precious +gifts, the fishmongers the flood, and the shipwrights the building of +Noah's ark. The tone of these plays was not reverent; reverence after +all implies near at hand its opposite in unbelief. But they were +realistic and they contained within them the seeds of later drama in the +aptitude with which they grafted into the sacred story pastoral and city +manners taken straight from life. The shepherds who watched by night at +Bethlehem were real English shepherds furnished with boisterous and +realistic comic relief. Noah was a real shipwright. + +"It shall be clinched each ilk and deal. + With nails that are both noble and new + Thus shall I fix it to the keel, + Take here a rivet and there a screw, + With there bow there now, work I well, + This work, I warrant, both good and true." + +Cain and Abel were English farmers just as truly as Bottom and his +fellows were English craftsmen. But then Julius Caesar has a doublet and +in Dutch pictures the apostles wear broad-brimmed hats. Squeamishness +about historical accuracy is of a later date, and when it came we gained +in correctness less than we lost in art. + +The miracle plays, then, are the oldest antecedent of Elizabethan drama, +but it must not be supposed they were over and done with before the +great age began. The description of the Chester performances, part of +which has been quoted, was written in 1594. Shakespeare must, one would +think, have seen the Coventry cycle; at any rate he was familiar, as +every one of the time must have been, with the performances; +"Out-heroding Herod" bears witness to that. One must conceive the +development of the Elizabethan age as something so rapid in its +accessibility to new impressions and new manners and learning and modes +of thought that for years the old and new subsisted side by side. Think +of modern Japan, a welter of old faiths and crafts and ideals and +inrushing Western civilization all mixed up and side by side in the +strangest contrasts and you will understand what it was. The miracle +plays stayed on beside Marlowe and Shakespeare till Puritanism frowned +upon them. But when the end came it came quickly. The last recorded +performance took place in London when King James entertained Gondomar, +the Spanish ambassador. And perhaps we should regard that as a "command" +performance, reviving as command performances commonly do, something +dead for a generation--in this case, purely out of compliment to the +faith and inclination of a distinguished guest. + +Next in order of development after the miracle or mystery plays, though +contemporary in their popularity, came what we called "moralities" or +"moral interludes"--pieces designed to enforce a religious or ethical +lesson and perhaps to get back into drama something of the edification +which realism had ousted from the miracles. They dealt in allegorical +and figurative personages, expounded wise saws and moral lessons, and +squared rather with the careful self-concern of the newly established +Protestantism than with the frank and joyous jest in life which was more +characteristic of the time. _Everyman_, the oftenest revived and best +known of them, if not the best, is very typical of the class. They had +their influences, less profound than that of the miracles, on the full +drama. It is said the "Vice"--unregeneracy commonly degenerated into +comic relief--is the ancestor of the fool in Shakespeare, but more +likely both are successive creations of a dynasty of actors who +practised the unchanging and immemorial art of the clown. The general +structure of _Everyman_ and some of its fellows, heightened and made +more dramatic, gave us Marlowe's _Faustus_. There perhaps the influence +ends. + +The rise of a professional class of actors brought one step nearer the +full growth of drama. Companies of strolling players formed themselves +and passed from town to town, seeking like the industrious amateurs of +the guilds, civic patronage, and performing in town-halls, market-place +booths, or inn yards, whichever served them best. The structure of the +Elizabethan inn yard (you may see some survivals still, and there are +the pictures in _Pickwick_) was very favourable for their purpose. The +galleries round it made seats like our boxes and circle for the more +privileged spectators; in the centre on the floor of the yard stood the +crowd or sat, if they had stools with them. The stage was a platform set +on this floor space with its back against one side of the yard, where +perhaps one of the inn-rooms served as a dressing room. So suitable was +this "fit-up" as actors call it, that when theatres came to be built in +London they were built on the inn-yard pattern. All the playhouses of +the Bankside from the "Curtain" to the "Globe" were square or circular +places with galleries rising above one another three parts round, a +floor space of beaten earth open to the sky in the middle, and jutting +out on to it a platform stage with a tiring room capped by a gallery +behind it. + +The entertainment given by these companies of players (who usually got +the patronage and took the title of some lord) was various. They played +moralities and interludes, they played formless chronicle history plays +like the _Troublesome Reign of King John_, on which Shakespeare worked +for his _King John_; but above and before all they were each a company +of specialists, every one of whom had his own talent and performance for +which he was admired. The Elizabethan stage was the ancestor of our +music-hall, and to the modern music-hall rather than to the theatre it +bears its affinity. If you wish to realize the aspect of the Globe or +the Blackfriars it is to a lower class music-hall you must go. The +quality of the audience is a point of agreement. The Globe was +frequented by young "bloods" and by the more disreputable portions of +the community, racing men (or their equivalents of that day) "coney +catchers" and the like; commonly the only women present were women of +the town. The similarity extends from the auditorium to the stage. The +Elizabethan playgoer delighted in virtuosity; in exhibitions of strength +or skill from his actors; the broad sword combat in _Macbeth_, and the +wrestling in _As You Like It_, were real trials of skill. The bear in +the _Winter's Tale_ was no doubt a real bear got from a bear pit, near +by in the Bankside. The comic actors especially were the very +grandfathers of our music-hall stars; Tarleton and Kemp and Cowley, the +chief of them, were as much popular favourites and esteemed as separate +from the plays they played in as is Harry Lauder. Their songs and tunes +were printed and sold in hundreds as broadsheets, just as pirated +music-hall songs are sold to-day. This is to be noted because it +explains a great deal in the subsequent evolution of the drama. It +explains the delight in having everything represented actually on the +stage, all murders, battles, duels. It explains the magnificent largesse +given by Shakespeare to the professional fool. Work had to be found for +him, and Shakespeare, whose difficulties were stepping-stones to his +triumphs, gave him Touchstone and Feste, the Porter in _Macbeth_ and the +Fool in _Lear_. Others met the problem in an attitude of frank despair. +Not all great tragic writers can easily or gracefully wield the pen of +comedy, and Marlowe in _Dr. Faustus_ took the course of leaving the low +comedy which the audience loved and a high salaried actor demanded, to +an inferior collaborator. + +Alongside this drama of street platforms and inn-yards and public +theatres, there grew another which, blending with it, produced the +Elizabethan drama which we know. The public theatres were not the only +places at which plays were produced. At the University, at the Inns of +Court (which then more than now, were besides centres of study rather +exclusive and expensive clubs), and at the Court they were an important +part of almost every festival. At these places were produced academic +compositions, either allegorical like the masques, copies of which we +find in Shakespeare and by Ben Jonson, or comedies modelled on Plautus +or Terence, or tragedies modelled on Seneca. The last were incomparably +the most important. The Elizabethan age, which always thought of +literature as a guide or handmaid to life, was naturally attracted to a +poet who dealt in maxims and "sentences"; his rhetoric appealed to men +for whom words and great passages of verse were an intoxication that +only a few to-day can understand or sympathize with; his +bloodthirstiness and gloom to an age so full-blooded as not to shrink +from horrors. Tragedies early began to be written on the strictly +Senecan model, and generally, like Seneca's, with some ulterior +intention. Sackville's _Gorboduc_, the first tragedy in English, +produced at a great festival at the Inner Temple, aimed at inducing +Elizabeth to marry and save the miseries of a disputed succession. To be +put to such a use argues the importance and dignity of this classical +tragedy of the learned societies and the court. None of the pieces +composed in this style were written for the popular theatre, and indeed +they could not have been a success on it. The Elizabethan audience, as +we have seen, loved action, and in these Senecan tragedies the action +took place "off." But they had a strong and abiding influence on the +popular stage; they gave it its ghosts, its supernatural warnings, its +conception of nemesis and revenge, they gave it its love of +introspection and the long passages in which introspection, description +or reflection, either in soliloquy or dialogue, holds up the action; +contradictorily enough they gave it something at least of its melodrama. +Perhaps they helped to enforce the lesson of the miracle plays that a +dramatist's proper business was elaboration rather than invention. None +of the Elizabethan dramatists except Ben Jonson habitually constructed +their own plots. Their method was to take something ready at their hands +and overlay it with realism or poetry or romance. The stories of their +plays, like that of Hamlet's Mousetrap, were "extant and writ in choice +Italian," and very often their methods of preparation were very like +his. + +Something of the way in which the spirit of adventure of the time +affected and finished the drama we have already seen. It is time now to +turn to the dramatists themselves. + + +(2) + +Of Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, and Peele, the "University Wits" who fused the +academic and the popular drama, and by giving the latter a sense of +literature and learning to mould it to finer issues, gave us +Shakespeare, only Marlowe can be treated here. Greene and Peele, the +former by his comedies, the latter by his historical plays, and Kyd by +his tragedies, have their places in the text-books, but they belong to a +secondary order of dramatic talent. Marlowe ranks amongst the greatest. +It is not merely that historically he is the head and fount of the whole +movement, that he changed blank verse, which had been a lumbering +instrument before him, into something rich and ringing and rapid and +made it the vehicle for the greatest English poetry after him. +Historical relations apart, he is great in himself. More than any other +English writer of any age, except Byron, he symbolizes the youth of his +time; its hot-bloodedness, its lust after knowledge and power and life +inspires all his pages. The teaching of Machiavelli, misunderstood for +their own purposes by would-be imitators, furnished the reign of +Elizabeth with the only political ideals it possessed. The simple +brutalism of the creed, with means justified by ends and the unbridled +self-regarding pursuit of power, attracted men for whom the Spanish +monarchy and the struggle to overthrow it were the main factors and +politics. Marlowe took it and turned it to his own uses. There is in his +writings a lust of power, "a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness," a +glow of the imagination unhallowed by anything but its own energy which +is in the spirit of the time. In _Tamburlaine_ it is the power of +conquest, stirred by and reflecting, as we have seen, the great deeds of +his day. In _Dr. Faustus_ it is the pride of will and eagerness of +curiosity. Faustus is devoured by a tormenting desire to enlarge his +knowledge to the utmost bounds of nature and art and to extend his power +with his knowledge. His is the spirit of Renaissance scholarship +heightened to a passionate excess. The play gleams with the pride of +learning and a knowledge which learning brings, and with the nemesis +that comes after it. "Oh! gentlemen! hear me with patience and tremble +not at my speeches. Though my heart pant and quiver to remember that I +have been a student here these thirty years; oh! I would I had never +seen Wittemburg, never read book!" And after the agonizing struggle in +which Faustus's soul is torn from him to hell, learning comes in at the +quiet close. + +"Yet, for he was a scholar once admired, +For wondrous knowledge in our German Schools; +We'll give his mangled limbs due burial; +And all the students, clothed in mourning black +Shall wait upon his heavy funeral." + +Some one character is a centre of over-mastering pride and ambition in +every play. In the _Jew of Malta_ it is the hero Barabbas. In _Edward +II_. it is Piers Gaveston. In _Edward II_. indeed, two elements are +mixed--the element of Machiavelli and Tamburlaine in Gaveston, and the +purely tragic element which evolves from within itself the style in +which it shall be treated, in the King. "The reluctant pangs of +abdicating Royalty," wrote Charles Lamb in a famous passage, "furnished +hints which Shakespeare scarcely improved in his _Richard II_; and the +death scene of Marlowe's King moves pity and terror beyond any scene, +ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted." Perhaps the play gives +the hint of what Marlowe might have become had not the dagger of a groom +in a tavern cut short at thirty his burning career. + +Even in that time of romance and daring speculation he went further than +his fellows. He was said to have been tainted with atheism, to have +denied God and the Trinity; had he lived he might have had trouble with +the Star Chamber. The free-voyaging intellect of the age found this one +way of outlet, but if literary evidences are to be trusted sixteenth and +seventeenth century atheism was a very crude business. The _Atheist's +Tragedy_ of Tourneur (a dramatist who need not otherwise detain us) +gives some measure of its intelligence and depth. Says the villain to +the heroine, + + "No? Then invoke +Your great supposed Protector. I will do't." + +to which she: + +"Supposed Protector! Are you an atheist, then + I know my fears and prayers are spent in vain." + +Marlowe's very faults and extravagances, and they are many, are only the +obverse of his greatness. Magnitude and splendour of language when the +thought is too shrunken to fill it out, becomes mere inflation. He was a +butt of the parodists of the day. And Shakespeare, though he honoured +him "on this side idolatry," did his share of ridicule. Ancient Pistol +is fed and stuffed with relic and rags of Marlowesque affectation-- + +"Holla! ye pampered jades of Asia, + Can ye not draw but twenty miles a day." + +is a quotation taken straight from _Tamburlaine_. + + +(3) + +A study of Shakespeare, who refuses to be crushed within the limits of a +general essay is no part of the plan of this book. We must take up the +story of the drama with the reign of James and with the contemporaries +of his later period, though of course, a treatment which is conditioned +by the order of development is not strictly chronological, and some of +the plays we shall have to refer to belong to the close of the sixteenth +century. We are apt to forget that alongside Shakespeare and at his +heels other dramatists were supplying material for the theatre. The +influence of Marlowe and particularly of Kyd, whose _Spanish Tragedy_ +with its crude mechanism of ghosts and madness and revenge caught the +popular taste, worked itself out in a score of journeymen dramatists, +mere hack writers, who turned their hand to plays as the hacks of to-day +turn their hand to novels, and with no more literary merit than that +caught as an echo from better men than themselves. One of the worst of +these--he is also one of the most typical--was John Marston, a purveyor +of tragic gloom and sardonic satire, and an impostor in both, whose +tragedy _Antonio and Mellida_ was published in the same year as +Shakespeare's _Hamlet_. Both plays owed their style and plot to the same +tradition--the tradition created by Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_--in which +ghostly promptings to revenge, terrible crime, and a feigned madman +waiting his opportunity are the elements of tragedy. Nothing could be +more fruitful in an understanding of the relations of Shakespeare to his +age than a comparison of the two. The style of _Antonio and Mellida_ is +the style of _The Murder of Gonzago_. There is no subtlety nor +introspection, the pale cast of thought falls with no shadow over its +scenes. And it is typical of a score of plays of the kind we have and +beyond doubt of hundreds that have perished. Shakespeare stands alone. + +Beside this journey-work tragedy of revenge and murder which had its +root through Kyd and Marlowe in Seneca and in Italian romance, there was +a journey-work comedy of low life made up of loosely constructed strings +of incidents, buffoonery and romance, that had its roots in a joyous and +fantastic study of the common people. These plays are happy and +high-spirited and, compared with the ordinary run of the tragedies, of +better workmanship. They deal in the familiar situations of low +comedy--the clown, the thrifty citizen and his frivolous wife, the +gallant, the bawd, the good apprentice and the bad portrayed vigorously +and tersely and with a careless kindly gaiety that still charms in the +reading. The best writers in this kind were Middleton and Dekker--and +the best play to read as a sample of it _Eastward Ho!_ in which Marston +put off his affectation of sardonical melancholy and joined with Jonson +and Dekker to produce what is the masterpiece of the non-Shakespearean +comedy of the time. + +For all our habit of grouping their works together it is a far cry in +spirit and temperament from the dramatists whose heyday was under +Elizabeth and those who reached their prime under her successor. Quickly +though insensibly the temper of the nation suffered eclipse. The high +hopes and the ardency of the reign of Elizabeth saddened into a profound +pessimism and gloom in that of James. This apparition of unsought +melancholy has been widely noted and generally assumed to be +inexplicable. In broad outline its causes are clear enough, "To travel +hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." The Elizabethans were, if +ever any were, hopeful travellers. The winds blew them to the four +quarters of the world; they navigated all seas; they sacked rich cities. +They beat off the great Armada, and harried the very coasts of Spain. +They pushed discovery to the ends of the world and amassed great wealth. +Under James all these things were over. Peace was made with Spain: +national pride was wounded by the solicitous anxiety of the King for a +Spanish marriage for the heir to the throne. Sir Walter Raleigh, a +romantic adventurer lingering beyond his time, was beheaded out of hand +by the ungenerous timidity of the monarch to whom had been transferred +devotion and loyalty he was unfitted to receive. The Court which had +been a centre of flashing and gleaming brilliance degenerated into a +knot of sycophants humouring the pragmatic and self-important folly of a +king in whom had implanted themselves all the vices of the Scots and +none of their virtues. Nothing seemed left remarkable beneath the +visiting moon. The bright day was done and they were for the dark. The +uprising of Puritanism and the shadow of impending religious strife +darkened the temper of the time. + +The change affected all literature and particularly the drama, which +because it appeals to what all men have in common, commonly reflects +soonest a change in the outlook or spirits of a people. The onslaughts +of the dramatists on the Puritans, always implacable enemies of the +theatre, became more virulent and envenomed. What a difference between +the sunny satire of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and the dark animosity of _The +Atheists' Tragedy_ with its Languebeau Snuffe ready to carry out any +villainy proposed to him! "I speak sir," says a lady in the same play to +a courtier who played with her in an attempt to carry on a quick witted, +"conceited" love passage in the vein of _Much Ado_, "I speak, sir, as +the fashion now: is, in earnest." The quick-witted, light-hearted age +was gone. It is natural that tragedy reflected this melancholy in its +deepest form. Gloom deepened and had no light to relieve it, men supped +full of horrors--there was no slackening of the tension, no concession +to overwrought nerves, no resting-place for the overwrought soul. It is +in the dramatist John Webster that this new spirit has its most powerful +exponent. + +The influence of Machiavelli, which had given Marlowe tragic figures +that were bright and splendid and burning, smouldered in Webster into a +duskier and intenser heat. His fame rests on two tragedies, _The White +Devil_ and _The Duchess of Malf_. Both are stories of lust and crime, +full of hate and hideous vengeances, and through each runs a vein of +bitter and ironical comment on men and women. In them chance plays the +part of fate. "Blind accident and blundering mishap--'such a mistake,' +says one of the criminals, 'as I have often seen in a play' are the +steersmen of their fortunes and the doomsmen of their deeds." His +characters are gloomy; meditative and philosophic murderers, cynical +informers, sad and loving women, and they are all themselves in every +phrase that they utter. But they are studied in earnestness and +sincerity. Unquestionably he is the greatest of Shakespeare's successors +in the romantic drama, perhaps his only direct imitator. He has single +lines worthy to set beside those in _Othello_ or _King Lear_. His dirge +in the _Duchess of Malfi_, Charles Lamb thought worthy to be set beside +the ditty in _The Tempest_, which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned +father. "As that is of the water, watery, so this is of the earth, +earthy." He has earned his place among the greatest of our dramatists by +his two plays, the theme of which matched his sombre genius and the +sombreness of the season in which it flowered. + +But the drama could not survive long the altered times, and the +voluminous plays of Beaumont and Fletcher mark the beginning of the end. +They are the decadence of Elizabethan drama. Decadence is a term often +used loosely and therefore hard to define, but we may say broadly that +an art is decadent when any particular one of the elements which go to +its making occurs in excess and disturbs the balance of forces which +keeps the work a coherent and intact whole. Poetry is decadent when the +sound is allowed to outrun the sense or when the suggestions, say, of +colour, which it contains are allowed to crowd out its deeper +implications. Thus we can call such a poem as this one well-known of +O'Shaughnessy's + +"We are the music-makers, + We are the dreamers of dreams," + +decadent because it conveys nothing but the mere delight in an obvious +rhythm of words, or such a poem as Morris's "Two red roses across the +moon;" because a meaningless refrain, merely pleasing in its word +texture, breaks in at intervals on the reader. The drama of Beaumont and +Fletcher is decadent in two ways. In the first place those variations +and licences with which Shakespeare in his later plays diversified the +blank verse handed on to him by Marlowe, they use without any restraint +or measure. "Weak" endings and "double" endings, _i.e._ lines which end +either on a conjunction or proposition or some other unstressed word, or +lines in which there is a syllable too many--abound in their plays. They +destroyed blank verse as a musical and resonant poetic instrument by +letting this element of variety outrun the sparing and skilful use which +alone could justify it. But they were decadent in other and deeper ways +than that. Sentiment in their plays usurps the place of character. +Eloquent and moving speeches and fine figures are no longer subservient +to the presentation of character in action, but are set down for their +own sake, "What strange self-trumpeters and tongue-bullies all the brave +soldiers of Beaumont and Fletcher are," said Coleridge. When they die +they die to the music of their own virtue. When dreadful deeds are done +they are described not with that authentic and lurid vividness which +throws light on the working of the human heart in Shakespeare or Webster +but in tedious rhetoric. Resignation, not fortitude, is the authors' +forte and they play upon it amazingly. The sterner tones of their +predecessors melt into the long drawn broken accent of pathos and woe. +This delight not in action or in emotion arising from action but in +passivity of suffering is only one aspect of a certain mental flaccidity +in grain. Shakespeare may be free and even coarse. Beaumont and Fletcher +cultivate indecency. They made their subject not their master but their +plaything, or an occasion for the convenient exercise of their own +powers of figure and rhetoric. + +Of their followers, Massinger, Ford and Shirley, no more need be said +than they carried one step further the faults of their masters. Emotion +and tragic passion give way to wire-drawn sentiment. Tragedy takes on +the air of a masquerade. With them romantic drama died a natural death +and the Puritans' closing of the theatre only gave it a _coup de grace_. +In England it has had no second birth. + + +(4) + +Outside the direct romantic succession there worked another author whose +lack of sympathy with it, as well as his close connection with the age +which followed, justifies his separate treatment. Ben Jonson shows a +marked contrast to Shakespeare in his character, his accomplishments, +and his attitude to letters, while his career was more varied than +Shakespeare's own. The first "classic" in English writing, he was a +"romantic" in action. In his adventurous youth he was by turns scholar, +soldier, bricklayer, actor. He trailed a pike with Leicester in the Low +Countries; on his return to England fought a duel and killed his man, +only escaping hanging by benefit of clergy; at the end of his life he +was Poet Laureate. Such a career is sufficiently diversified, and it +forms a striking contrast to the plainness and severity of his work. But +it must not lead us to forget or under-estimate his learning and +knowledge. Not Gray nor Tennyson, nor Swinburne--perhaps not even +Milton--was a better scholar. He is one of the earliest of English +writers to hold and express different theories about literature. He +consciously appointed himself a teacher; was a missionary of literature +with a definite creed. + +But though in a general way his dramatic principles are opposed to the +romantic tendencies of his age, he is by no means blindly classical. He +never consented to be bound by the "Unities"--that conception of +dramatic construction evolved out of Aristotle and Horace and elaborated +in the Renaissance till, in its strictest form, it laid down that the +whole scene of a play should be in one place, its whole action deal with +one single series of events, and the time it represented as elapsing be +no greater than the time it took in playing. He was always pre-eminently +an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather than a poet's +temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, and only limited +because in ruling out these things he ruled out much else that was +essential to the spirit of the time. As a craftsman he was +uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes of the public and never +veiled his scorn of those--Shakespeare among them--whom he conceived to +do so; but he knew and valued his own work, as his famous last word to +an audience who might be unsympathetic stands to witness, + +"By God 'tis good, and if you like it you may." + +Compare the temper it reveals with the titles of the two contemporary +comedies of his gentler and greater brother, the one _As You Like It_, +the other _What You Will_. Of the two attitudes towards the public, and +they might stand as typical of two kinds of artists, neither perhaps can +claim complete sincerity. A truculent and noisy disclaimer of their +favours is not a bad tone to assume towards an audience; in the end it +is apt to succeed as well as the sub-ironical compliance which is its +opposite. + +Jonson's theory of comedy and the consciousness with which he set it +against the practice of his contemporaries and particularly of +Shakespeare receive explicit statement in the prologue to _Every Man Out +of His Humour_--one of his earlier plays. "I travail with another +objection, Signor, which I fear will be enforced against the author ere +I can be delivered of it," says Mitis. "What's that, sir?" replies +Cordatus. Mitis:--"That the argument of his comedy might have been of +some other nature, as of a duke to be in love with a countess, and that +countess to be in love with the duke's son, and the son to love the +lady's waiting maid; some such cross-wooing, better than to be thus near +and familiarly allied to the times." Cordatus: "You say well, but I +would fain hear one of these autumn-judgments define _Quin sit +comoedia_? If he cannot, let him concern himself with Cicero's +definition, till he have strength to propose to himself a better, who +would have a comedy to be _invitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, +imago veritatis_; a thing throughout pleasant and ridiculous and +accommodated to the correction of manners." That was what he meant his +comedy to be, and so he conceived the popular comedy of the day, +_Twelfth Night_ and _Much Ado_. Shakespeare might play with dukes and +countesses, serving-women and pages, clowns and disguises; he would come +down more near and ally himself familiarly with the times. So comedy was +to be medicinal, to purge contemporary London of its follies and its +sins; and it was to be constructed with regularity and elaboration, +respectful to the Unities if not ruled by them, and built up of +characters each the embodiment of some "humour" or eccentricity, and +each when his eccentricity is displaying itself at its fullest, +outwitted and exposed. This conception of "humours," based on a +physiology which was already obsolescent, takes heavily from the realism +of Jonson's methods, nor does his use of a careful vocabulary of +contemporary colloquialism and slang save him from a certain dryness and +tediousness to modern readers. The truth is he was less a satirist of +contemporary manners than a satirist in the abstract who followed the +models of classical writers in this style, and he found the vices and +follies of his own day hardly adequate to the intricacy and +elaborateness of the plots which he constructed for their exposure. At +the first glance his people are contemporary types, at the second they +betray themselves for what they are really--cock-shies set up by the new +comedy of Greece that every "classical" satirist in Rome or France or +England has had his shot at since. One wonders whether Ben Jonson, for +all his satirical intention, had as much observation--as much of an eye +for contemporary types--as Shakespeare's rustics and roysterers prove +him to have had. It follows that all but one or two of his plays, when +they are put on the stage to-day are apt to come to one with a sense of +remoteness and other-worldliness which we hardly feel with Shakespeare +or Molière. His muse moves along the high-road of comedy which is the +Roman road, and she carries in her train types that have done service to +many since the ancients fashioned them years ago. Jealous husbands, +foolish pragmatic fathers, a dissolute son, a boastful soldier, a +cunning slave--they all are merely counters by which the game of comedy +used to be played. In England, since Shakespeare took his hold on the +stage, that road has been stopped for us, that game has ceased to amuse. + +Ben Jonson, then, in a certain degree failed in his intention. Had he +kept closer to contemporary life, instead of merely grafting on to it +types he had learned from books, he might have made himself an English +Molière--without Molière's breadth and clarity--but with a corresponding +vigour and strength which would have kept his work sweet. And he might +have founded a school of comedy that would have got its roots deeper +into our national life than the trivial and licentious Restoration +comedy ever succeeded in doing. As it is, his importance is mostly +historical. One must credit him with being the first of the English +classics--of the age which gave us Dryden and Swift and Pope. Perhaps +that is enough in his praise. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + + +THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY + +(1) + +With the seventeenth century the great school of imaginative writers +that made glorious the last years of Elizabeth's reign, had passed away. +Spenser was dead before 1600, Sir Philip Sidney a dozen years earlier, +and though Shakespeare and Drayton and many other men whom we class +roughly as Elizabethan lived on to work under James, their temper and +their ideals belong to the earlier day. The seventeenth century, not in +England only but in Europe, brought a new way of thinking with it, and +gave a new direction to human interest and to human affairs. It is not +perhaps easy to define nor is it visible in the greater writers of the +time. Milton, for instance, and Sir Thomas Browne are both of them too +big, and in their genius too far separated from their fellows to give us +much clue to altered conditions. It is commonly in the work of lesser +and forgotten writers that the spirit of an age has its fullest +expression. Genius is a law to itself; it moves in another dimension; it +is out of time. To define this seventeenth century spirit, then, one +must look at the literature of the age as a whole. What is there that +one finds in it which marks a change in temperament and outlook from the +Renaissance, and the time which immediately followed it? + +Putting it very broadly one may say that literature in the seventeenth +century becomes for the first time essentially modern in spirit. We +began our survey of modern English literature at the Renaissance because +the discovery of the New World, and the widening of human experience and +knowledge, which that and the revival of classical learning implied, +mark a definite break from a way of thought which had been continuous +since the break up of the Roman Empire. The men of the Renaissance felt +themselves to be modern. They started afresh, owing nothing to their +immediate forbears, and when they talked, say, of Chaucer, they did so +in very much the same accent as we do to-day. He was mediaeval and +obsolete; the interest which he possessed was a purely literary +interest; his readers did not meet him easily on the same plane of +thought, or forget the lapse of time which separated him from them. And +in another way too, the Renaissance began modern writing. Inflections +had been dropped. The revival of the classics had enriched our +vocabulary, and the English language, after a gradual impoverishment +which followed the obsolescence one after another of the local dialects, +attained a fairly fixed form. There is more difference between the +language of the English writings of Sir Thomas More and that of the +prose of Chaucer than there is between that of More and of Ruskin. But +it is not till the seventeenth century that the modern spirit, in the +fullest sense of the word, comes into being. Defined it means a spirit +of observation, of preoccupation with detail, of stress laid on matter +of fact, of analysis of feelings and mental processes, of free argument +upon institutions and government. In relation to knowledge, it is the +spirit of science, and the study of science, which is the essential +intellectual fact in modern history, dates from just this time, from +Bacon and Newton and Descartes. In relation to literature, it is the +spirit of criticism, and criticism in England is the creation of the +seventeenth century. The positive temper, the attitude of realism, is +everywhere in the ascendant. The sixteenth century made voyages of +discovery; the seventeenth sat down to take stock of the riches it had +gathered. For the first time in English literature writing becomes a +vehicle for storing and conveying facts. + +It would be easy to give instances: one must suffice here. Biography, +which is one of the most characteristic kinds of English writing, was +unknown to the moderns as late as the sixteenth century. Partly the +awakened interest in the careers of the ancient statesmen and soldiers +which the study of Plutarch had excited, and partly the general interest +in, and craving for, facts set men writing down the lives of their +fellows. The earliest English biographies date from this time. In the +beginning they were concerned, like Plutarch, with men of action, and +when Sir Fulke Greville wrote a brief account of his friend Sir Philip +Sidney it was the courtier and the soldier, and not the author, that he +designed to celebrate. But soon men of letters came within their scope, +and though the interest in the lives of authors came too late to give us +the contemporary life of Shakespeare we so much long for, it was early +enough to make possible those masterpieces of condensed biography in +which Isaak Walton celebrates Herbert and Donne. Fuller and Aubrey, to +name only two authors, spent lives of laborious industry in hunting down +and chronicling the smallest facts about the worthies of their day and +the time immediately before them. Autobiography followed where biography +led. Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, as well +as less reputable persons, followed the new mode. By the time of the +Restoration Pepys and Evelyn were keeping their diaries, and Fox his +journal. Just as in poetry the lyric, that is the expression of personal +feeling, became more widely practised, more subtle and more sincere, in +prose the letter, the journal, and the autobiography formed themselves +to meet the new and growing demand for analysis of the feelings and the +intimate thoughts and sensations of real men and women. A minor form of +literature which had a brief but popular vogue ministered less directly +to the same need. The "Character," a brief descriptive essay on a +contemporary type--a tobacco seller, an old college butler or the +like--was popular because in its own way it matched the newly awakened +taste for realism and fact. The drama which in the hands of Ben Jonson +had attacked folly and wickedness proper to no place or time, descended +to the drawing-rooms of the day, and Congreve occupied himself with the +portrayal of the social frauds and foolishnesses perpetrated by actual +living men and women of fashion in contemporary London. Satire ceased +to be a mere expression of a vague discontent, and became a weapon +against opposing men and policies. The new generation of readers were +nothing if not critical. They were for testing directly institutions +whether they were literary, social, or political. They wanted facts, and +they wanted to take a side. + +In the distinct and separate realm of poetry a revolution no less +remarkable took place. Spenser had been both a poet and a Puritan: he +had designed to show by his great poem the training and fashioning of a +Puritan English gentleman. But the alliance between poetry and +Puritanism which he typified failed to survive his death. The +essentially pagan spirit of the Renaissance which caused him no doubts +nor difficulties proved too strong for his readers and his followers, +and the emancipated artistic enthusiasm in which it worked alienated +from secular poetry men with deep and strong religious convictions. +Religion and morality and poetry, which in Sidney and Spenser had gone +hand in hand, separated from each other. Poems like _Venus and Adonis_ +or like Shakespeare's sonnets could hardly be squared with the sterner +temper which persecution began to breed. Even within orthodox +Anglicanism poetry and religion began to be deemed no fit company for +each other. When George Herbert left off courtier and took orders he +burnt his earlier love poetry, and only the persuasion of his friends +prevented Donne from following the same course. Pure poetry became more +and more an exotic. All Milton's belongs to his earlier youth; his +middle age was occupied with controversy and propaganda in prose; when +he returned to poetry in blindness and old age it was "to justify the +ways of God to man"--to use poetry, that is, for a spiritual and moral +rather than an artistic end. + +Though the age was curious and inquiring, though poetry and prose tended +more and more to be enlisted in the service of non-artistic enthusiasms +and to be made the vehicle of deeper emotions and interests than perhaps +a northern people could ever find in art, pure and simple, it was not +like the time that followed it, a "prosaic" age. Enthusiasm burned +fierce and clear, displaying itself in the passionate polemic of Milton, +in the fanaticism of Bunyan and Fox, hardly more than in the gentle, +steadfast search for knowledge in Burton, and the wide and vigilant +curiousness of Bacon. Its eager experimentalism tried the impossible; +wrote poems and then gave them a weight of meaning they could not carry, +as when Fletcher in _The Purple Island_ designed to allegorize all that +the physiology of his day knew of the human body, or Donne sought to +convey abstruse scientific fact in a lyric. It gave men a passion for +pure learning, set Jonson to turn himself from a bricklayer into the +best equipped scholar of his day, and Fuller and Camden grubbing among +English records and gathering for the first time materials of scientific +value for English history. Enthusiasm gave us poetry that was at once +full of learning and of imagination, poetry that was harsh and brutal +in its roughness and at the same time impassioned. And it set up a +school of prose that combined colloquial readiness and fluency, +pregnancy and high sentiment with a cumbrous pedantry of learning which +was the fruit of its own excess. + +The form in which enthusiasm manifested itself most fiercely was as we +have seen not favourable to literature. Puritanism drove itself like a +wedge into the art of the time, broadening as it went. Had there been no +more in it than the moral earnestness and religiousness of Sidney and +Spenser, Cavalier would not have differed from Roundhead, and there +might have been no civil war; each party was endowed deeply with the +religious sense and Charles I. was a sincerely pious man. But while +Spenser and Sidney held that life as a preparation for eternity must be +ordered and strenuous and devout but that care for the hereafter was not +incompatible with a frank and full enjoyment of life as it is lived, +Puritanism as it developed in the middle classes became a sterner and +darker creed. The doctrine of original sin, face to face with the fact +that art, like other pleasures, was naturally and readily entered into +and enjoyed, forced them to the plain conclusion that art was an evil +thing. As early as Shakespeare's youth they had been strong enough to +keep the theatres outside London walls; at the time of the Civil War +they closed them altogether, and the feud which had lasted for over a +generation between them and the dramatists ended in the destruction of +the literary drama. In the brief years of their ascendancy they produced +no literature, for Milton is much too large to be tied down to their +negative creed, and, indeed, in many of his qualities, his love of music +and his sensuousness for instance, he is antagonistic to the temper of +his day. With the Restoration their earnest and strenuous spirit fled to +America. It is noteworthy that it had no literary manifestation there +till two centuries after the time of its passage. Hawthorne's novels are +the fruit--the one ripe fruit in art--of the Puritan imagination. + + +(2) + +If the reader adopts the seventeenth century habit himself and takes +stock of what the Elizabethans accomplished in poetry, he will recognize +speedily that their work reached various stages of completeness. They +perfected the poetic drama and its instrument, blank verse; they +perfected, though not in the severer Italian form, the sonnet; they +wrote with extraordinary delicacy and finish short lyrics in which a +simple and freer manner drawn from the classics took the place of the +mediaeval intricacies of the ballad and the rondeau. And in the forms +which they failed to bring to perfection they did beautiful and noble +work. The splendour of _The Fairy Queen_ is in separate passages; as a +whole it is over tortuous and slow; its affectations, its sensuousness, +the mere difficulty of reading it, makes us feel it a collection of +great passages, strung it is true on a large conception, rather than a +great work. The Elizabethans, that is, had not discovered the secret of +the long poem; the abstract idea of the "heroic" epic which was in all +their minds had to wait for embodiment till _Paradise Lost_. In a way +their treatment of the pastoral or eclogue form was imperfect too. They +used it well but not so well as their models, Vergil and Theocritus; +they had not quite mastered the convention on which it is built. + +The seventeenth century, taking stock in some such fashion of its +artistic possessions, found some things it were vain to try to do. It +could add nothing to the accomplishment of the English sonnet, so it +hardly tried; with the exception of a few sonnets in the Italian form of +Milton, the century can show us nothing in this mode of verse. The +literary drama was brought to perfection in the early years of it by the +surviving Elizabethans; later decades could add nothing to it but +licence, and as we saw, the licences they added hastened its +destruction. But in other forms the poets of the new time experimented +eagerly, and in the stress of experiment, poetry which under Elizabeth +had been integral and coherent split into different schools. As the +period of the Renaissance was also that of the Reformation it was only +natural a determined effort should sooner or later be made to use poetry +for religious purposes. The earliest English hymn writing, our first +devotional verse in the vernacular, belongs to this time, and a Catholic +and religious school of lyricism grew and flourished beside the pagan +neo-classical writers. From the tumult of experiment three schools +disengage themselves, the school of Spenser, the school of Jonson, and +the school of Donne. + +At the outset of the century Spenser's influence was triumphant and +predominant; his was the main stream with which the other poetic +influences of the time merely mingled. His popularity is referable to +qualities other than those which belonged peculiarly to his talent as a +poet. Puritans loved his religious ardour, and in those Puritan +households where the stricter conception of the diabolical nature of all +poetry had not penetrated, his works were read--standing on a shelf, may +be, between the new translation of the Bible and Sylvester's translation +of the French poet Du Bartas' work on the creation, that had a large +popularity at that time as family reading. Probably the Puritans were as +blind to the sensuousness of Spenser's language and imagery as they were +(and are) to the same qualities in the Bible itself. _The Fairy Queen_ +would easily achieve innocuousness amongst those who can find nothing +but an allegory of the Church in the "Song of Songs." His followers made +their allegory a great deal plainer than he had done his. In his poem +called _The Purple Island_, Phineas Fletcher, a Puritan imitator of +Spenser in Cambridge, essayed to set forth the struggle of the soul at +grip with evil, a battle in which the body--the "Purple Island"--is the +field. To a modern reader it is a desolating and at times a mildly +amusing book, in which everything from the liver to the seven deadly +sins is personified; in which after four books of allegorized +contemporary anatomy and physiology, the will (Voletta) engages in a +struggle with Satan and conquers by the help of Christ and King James! +The allegory is clever--too clever--and the author can paint a pleasant +picture, but on the whole he was happier in his pastoral work. His +brother Giles made a better attempt at the Spenserian manner. His long +poem, _Christ's Victory and Death_, shows for all its carefully +Protestant tone high qualities of mysticism; across it Spenser and +Milton join hands. + +It was, however, in pastoral poetry that Spenser's influence found its +pleasantest outlet. One might hesitate to advise a reader to embark on +either of the Fletchers. There is no reason why any modern should not +read and enjoy Browne or Wither, in whose softly flowing verse the +sweetness and contentment of the countryside, that "merry England" which +was the background of all sectarian and intellectual strife and labour, +finds as in a placid stream a calm reflection and picture of itself. The +seventeenth century gave birth to many things that only came to maturity +in the nineteenth; if you care for that kind of literary study which +searches out origins and digs for hints and models of accented styles, +you will find in Browne that which influenced more than any other single +thing the early work of Keats. Browne has another claim to immortality; +if it be true as is now thought that he was the author of the epitaph on +the Countess of Pembroke: + +"Underneath this sable hearse + Lies the subject of all verse, + Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother. + Death, ere thou hast slain another + Fair and learned and good as she, + Time shall throw a dart at thee." + +then he achieved the miracle of a quintessential statement of the spirit +of the English Renaissance. For the breath of it stirs in these slow +quiet moving lines, and its few and simple words implicate the soul of a +period. + +By the end of the first quarter of the century the influence of Spenser +and the school which worked under it had died out. Its place was taken +by the twin schools of Jonson and Donne. Jonson's poetic method is +something like his dramatic; he formed himself as exactly as possible on +classical models. Horace had written satires and elegies, and epistles +and complimentary verses, and Jonson quite consciously and deliberately +followed where Horace led. He wrote elegies on the great, letters and +courtly compliments and love-lyrics to his friends, satires with an air +of general censure. But though he was classical, his style was never +latinized. In all of them he strove to pour into an ancient form +language that was as intense and vigorous and as purely English as the +earliest trumpeters of the Renaissance in England could have wished. The +result is not entirely successful. He seldom fails to reproduce classic +dignity and good sense; on the other hand he seldom succeeds in +achieving classic grace and ease. Occasionally, as in his best known +lyric, he is perfect and achieves an air of spontaneity little short of +marvellous, when we know that his images and even his words in the song +are all plagiarized from other men. His expression is always clear and +vigorous and his sense good and noble. The native earnestness and +sincerity of the man shines through as it does in his dramas and his +prose. In an age of fantastic and meaningless eulogy--eulogy so amazing +in its unexpectedness and abstruseness that the wonder is not so much +that it should have been written as that it could have been thought +of--Jonson maintains his personal dignity and his good sense. You feel +his compliments are such as the best should be, not necessarily +understood and properly valued by the public, but of a discriminating +sort that by their very comprehending sincerity would be most warmly +appreciated by the people to whom they were addressed. His verses to +Shakespeare and his prose commentaries on him too, are models of what +self-respecting admiration should be, generous in its praise of +excellence, candid in its statement of defects. They are the kind of +compliments that Shakespeare himself, if he had grace enough, must have +loved to receive. + +Very different from his direct and dignified manner is the closely +packed style of Donne, who, Milton apart, is the greatest English writer +of the century, though his obscurity has kept him out of general +reading. No poetry in English, not even Browning, is more difficult to +understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning proceed from such +similar causes that they are worth examining together. In both, as in +the obscure passages in Shakespeare's later plays, obscurity arises not +because the poet says too little but because he attempts to say too +much. He huddles a new thought on the one before it, before the first +has had time to express itself; he sees things or analyses emotions so +swiftly and subtly himself that he forgets the slower comprehensions of +his readers; he is for analysing things far deeper than the ordinary +mind commonly can. His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and +likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things from a +dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each separate vision +in a heap out on to the page; his restless intellect finds new and +subtler shades of emotion and thought invisible to other pairs of eyes, +and cannot, because speech is modelled on the average of our +intelligences, find words to express them; he is always trembling on the +brink of the inarticulate. All this applies to both Donne and Browning, +and the comparison could be pushed further still. Both draw the +knowledge which is the main cause of their obscurity from the same +source, the bypaths of mediaevalism. Browning's _Sordello_ is obscure +because he knows too much about mediaeval Italian history; Donne's +_Anniversary_ because he is too deeply read in mediaeval scholasticism +and speculation. Both make themselves more difficult to the reader who +is familiar with the poetry of their contemporaries by the disconcerting +freshness of their point of view. Seventeenth century love poetry was +idyllic and idealist; Donne's is passionate and realistic to the point +of cynicism. To read him after reading Browne or Jonson is to have the +same shock as reading Browning after Tennyson. Both poets are salutary +in the strong and biting antidote they bring to sentimentalism in +thought and melodious facility in writing. They are the corrective of +lazy thinking and lazy composition. + +Elizabethan love poetry was written on a convention which though it was +used with manliness and entire sincerity by Sidney did not escape the +fate of its kind. Dante's love for Beatrice, Petrarch's for Laura, the +gallant and passionate adoration of Sidney for his Stella became the +models for a dismal succession of imaginary woes. They were all figments +of the mind, perhaps hardly that; they all use the same terms and write +in fixed strains, epicurean and sensuous like Ronsard, ideal and +intellectualized like Dante, sentimental and adoring like Petrarch. Into +this enclosed garden of sentiment and illusion Donne burst passionately +and rudely, pulling up the gay-coloured tangled weeds that choked +thoughts, planting, as one of his followers said, the seeds of fresh +invention. Where his forerunners had been idealist, epicurean, or +adoring, he was brutal, cynical and immitigably realist. He could begin +a poem, "For God's sake hold your tongue and let me live"; he could be +as resolutely free from illusion as Shakespeare when he addressed his +Dark Lady-- + +"Hope not for mind in women; at their best, + Sweetness and wit they're but mummy possest." + +And where the sonneteers pretended to a sincerity which was none of +theirs, he was, like Browning, unaffectedly a dramatic lyrist. "I did +best," he said, "when I had least truth for my subject." + +His love poetry was written in his turbulent and brilliant youth, and +the poetic talent which made it turned in his later years to express +itself in hymns and religious poetry. But there is no essential +distinction between the two halves of his work. It is all of a piece. +The same swift and subtle spirit which analyses experiences of passion, +analyses, in his later poetry, those of religion. His devotional poems, +though they probe and question, are none the less never sermons, but +rather confessions or prayers. His intense individuality, eager always, +as his best critic has said, "to find a North-West passage of his +own,"[2] pressed its curious and sceptical questioning into every corner +of love and life and religion, explored unsuspected depths, exploited +new discovered paradoxes, and turned its discoveries always into poetry +of the closely-packed artificial style which was all its own. Simplicity +indeed would have been for him an affectation; his elaborateness is not +like that of his followers, constructed painfully in a vicious desire to +compass the unexpected, but the natural overflow of an amazingly fertile +and ingenious mind. The curiosity, the desire for truth, the search +after minute and detailed knowledge of his age is all in his verse. He +bears the spirit of his time not less markedly than Bacon does, or +Newton, or Descartes. + +[Footnote 2: Prof. Grierson in _Cambridge History of English +Literature_.] + +The work of the followers of Donne and Jonson leads straight to the new +school, Jonson's by giving that school a model on which to work, Donne's +by producing an era of extravagance and absurdity which made a literary +revolution imperative. The school of Donne--the "fantastics" as they +have been called (Dr. Johnson called them the metaphysical poets), +produced in Herbert and Vaughan, our two noblest writers of religious +verse, the flower of a mode of writing which ended in the somewhat +exotic religiousness of Crashaw. In the hands of Cowley the use of +far-sought and intricate imagery became a trick, and the fantastic +school, the soul of sincerity gone out of it, died when he died. To the +followers of Jonson we owe that delightful and simple lyric poetry which +fills our anthologies, their courtly lyricism receiving a new impulse in +the intenser loyalty of troubled times. The most finished of them is +perhaps Carew; the best, because of the freshness and varity of his +subject-matter and his easy grace, Herrick. At the end of them came +Waller and gave to the five-accented rhymed verse (the heroic couplet) +that trick of regularity and balance which gave us the classical school. + + +(3) + +The prose literature of the seventeenth century is extraordinarily rich +and varied, and a study of it would cover a wide field of human +knowledge. The new and unsuspected harmonies discovered by the +Elizabethans were applied indeed to all the tasks of which prose is +capable, from telling stories to setting down the results of speculation +which was revolutionizing science and philosophy. For the first time +the vernacular and not Latin became the language of scientific research, +and though Bacon in his _Novum Organum_ adhered to the older mode its +disappearance was rapid. English was proving itself too flexible an +instrument for conveying ideas to be longer neglected. It was applied +too to preaching of a more formal and grandiose kind than the plain and +homely Latimer ever dreamed of. The preachers, though their +golden-mouthed oratory, which blended in its combination of vigour and +cadence the euphuistic and colloquial styles of the Elizabethans, is in +itself a glory of English literature, belong by their matter too +exclusively to the province of Church history to be dealt with here. The +men of science and philosophy, Newton, Hobbes, and Locke, are in a like +way outside our province. For the purpose of the literary student the +achievement of the seventeenth century can be judged in four separate +men or books--in the Bible, in Francis Bacon, and in Burton and Browne. + +In a way the Bible, like the preachers, lies outside the domain of +literary study in the narrow sense; but its sheer literary magnitude, +the abiding significance of it in our subsequent history, social, +political, and artistic as well as religious, compel us to turn aside to +examine the causes that have produced such great results. The Authorized +Version is not, of course, a purely seventeenth century work. Though the +scholars[3] who wrote and compiled it had before them all the previous +vernacular texts and chose the best readings where they found them or +devised new ones in accordance with the original, the basis is +undoubtedly the Tudor version of Tindall. It has, none the less, the +qualities of the time of its publication. It could hardly have been done +earlier; had it been so, it would not have been done half so well. In it +English has lost both its roughness and its affectation and retained its +strength; the Bible is the supreme example of early English prose style. +The reason is not far to seek. Of all recipes for good or noble writing +that which enjoins the writer to be careful about the matter and never +mind the manner, is the most sure. The translators had the handling of +matter of the gravest dignity and momentousness, and their sense of +reverence kept them right in their treatment of it. They cared +passionately for the truth; they were virtually anonymous and not +ambitious of originality or literary fame; they had no desire to stand +between the book and its readers. It followed that they cultivated that +naked plainness and spareness which makes their work supreme. The +Authorized Version is the last and greatest of those English +translations which were the fruit of Renaissance scholarship and +pioneering. It is the first and greatest piece of English prose. + +[Footnote 3: There is a graphic little pen-picture of their method in +Selden's "Table Talk."] + +Its influence is one of those things on which it is profitless to +comment or enlarge simply because they are an understood part of every +man's experience. In its own time it helped to weld England, for where +before one Bible was read at home and another in churches, all now read +the new version. Its supremacy was instantaneous and unchallenged, and +it quickly coloured speech and literature; it could produce a Bunyan in +the century of its birth. To it belongs the native dignity and eloquence +of peasant speech. It runs like a golden thread through all our writing +subsequent to its coming; men so diverse as Huxley and Carlyle have paid +their tribute to its power; Ruskin counted it the one essential part of +its education. It will be a bad day for the mere quality of our language +when it ceases to be read. + +At the time the translators were sitting, Francis Bacon was at the +height of his fame. By profession a lawyer--time-serving and +over-compliant to wealth and influence--he gives singularly little +evidence of it in the style of his books. Lawyers, from the necessity +they are under of exerting persuasion, of planting an unfamiliar +argument in the minds of hearers of whose favour they are doubtful, but +whose sympathy they must gain, are usually of purpose diffuse. They +cultivate the gift, possessed by Edmund Burke above all other English +authors, of putting the same thing freshly and in different forms a +great many times in succession. They value copiousness and fertility of +illustration. Nothing could be more unlike this normal legal manner than +the style of Bacon. "No man," says Ben Jonson, speaking in one of those +vivid little notes of his, of his oratorical method, "no man ever +coughed or turned aside from him without loss." He is a master of the +aphoristic style. He compresses his wisdom into the quintessential form +of an epigram; so complete and concentrated is his form of statement, so +shortly is everything put, that the mere transition from one thought to +another gives his prose a curious air of disjointedness as if he flitted +arbitrarily from one thing to another, and jotted down anything that +came into his head. His writing has clarity and lucidity, it abounds in +terseness of expression and in exact and discriminating phraseology, and +in the minor arts of composition--in the use of quotations for +instance--it can be extraordinarily felicitous. But it lacks +spaciousness and ease and rhythm; it makes too inexorable a demand on +the attention, and the harassed reader soon finds himself longing for +those breathing spaces which consideration or perhaps looseness of +thought has implanted in the prose of other writers. + +His _Essays_, the work by which he is best known, were in their origin +merely jottings gradually cohered and enlarged into the series we know. +In them he had the advantage of a subject which he had studied closely +through life. He counted himself a master in the art of managing men, +and "Human Nature and how to manage it" would be a good title for his +book. Men are studied in the spirit of Machiavelli, whose philosophy of +government appealed so powerfully to the Elizabethan mind. Taken +together the essays which deal with public matters are in effect a kind +of manual for statesmen and princes, instructing them how to acquire +power and how to keep it, deliberating how far they may go safely in +the direction of self-interest, and to what degree the principle of +self-interest must be subordinated to the wider interests of the people +who are ruled. Democracy, which in England was to make its splendid +beginnings in the seventeenth century, finds little to foretell it in +the works of Bacon. Though he never advocates cruelty or oppression and +is wise enough to see that no statesman can entirely set aside moral +considerations, his ethical tone is hardly elevating; the moral +obliquity of his public life is to a certain extent explained, in all +but its grosser elements, in his published writings. The essays, of +course, contain much more than this; the spirit of curious and restless +enquiry which animated Bacon finds expression in those on "Health," or +"Gardens" and "Plantations" and others of the kind; and a deeper vein of +earnestness runs through some of them--those for instance on +"Friendship," or "Truth" and on "Death." + +The _Essays_ sum up in a condensed form the intellectual interests which +find larger treatment in his other works. His _Henry VII._, the first +piece of scientific history in the English language (indeed in the +modern world) is concerned with a king whose practice was the outcome of +a political theory identical with Bacon's own. The _Advancement of +Learning_ is a brilliant popular exposition of the cause of scientific +enquiry and of the inductive or investigatory method of research. The +_New Atlantis_ is the picture of an ideal community whose common purpose +is scientific investigation. Bacon's name is not upon the roll of those +who have enlarged by brilliant conjectures or discoveries the store of +human knowledge; his own investigations so far as they are recorded are +all of a trivial nature. The truth about him is that he was a +brilliantly clever populariser of the cause of science, a kind of +seventeenth century Huxley, concerned rather to lay down large general +principles for the guidance of the work of others, than to be a serious +worker himself. The superstition of later times, acting on and +refracting his amazing intellectual gifts, has raised him to a godlike +eminence which is by right none of his; it has even credited him with +the authorship of Shakespeare, and in its wilder moments with the +composition of all that is of supreme worth in Elizabethan literature. +It is not necessary to take these delusions seriously. The ignorance of +mediaevalism was in the habit of crediting Vergil with the construction +of the Roman aqueducts and temples whose ruins are scattered over +Europe. The modern Baconians reach much the same intellectual level. + +A similar enthusiasm for knowledge and at any rate a pretence to science +belong to the author of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Robert Burton. His +one book is surely the most amazing in English prose. Its professed +object was simple and comprehensive; it was to analyze human melancholy, +to describe its effects, and prescribe for its removal. But as his task +grew, melancholy came to mean to Burton all the ills that flesh is heir +to. He tracked it in obscure and unsuspected forms; drew illustrations +from a range of authors so much wider than the compass of the reading +of even the most learned since, that he is generally credited with the +invention of a large part of his quotations. Ancients and moderns, poets +and prose writers, schoolmen and dramatists are all drawn upon for the +copious store of his examples; they are always cited with an air of +quietly humorous shrewdness in the comments and enclosed in a prose that +is straightforward, simple and vigorous, and can on occasion command +both rhythm and beauty of phrase. It is a mistake to regard Burton from +the point of view (due largely to Charles Lamb) of tolerant or loving +delight in quaintness for quaintness' sake. His book is anything but +scientific in form, but it is far from being the work of a recluse or a +fool. Behind his lack of system, he takes a broad and psychologically an +essentially just view of human ills, and modern medicine has gone far in +its admiration of what is at bottom a most comprehensive and subtle +treatise in diagnosis. + +A writer of a very different quality is Sir Thomas Browne. Of all the +men of his time, he is the only one of whom one can say for certain that +he held the manner of saying a thing more important than the thing said. +He is our first deliberate and conscious stylist, the forerunner of +Charles Lamb, of Stevenson (whose _Virginibus Puerisque_ is modelled on +his method of treatment) and of the stylistic school of our own day. His +eloquence is too studied to rise to the greatest heights, and his +speculation, though curious and discursive, never really results in deep +thinking. He is content to embroider his pattern out of the stray +fancies of an imaginative nature. His best known work, the _Religio +Medici_, is a random confession of belief and thoughts, full of the +inconsequent speculations of a man with some knowledge of science but +not deeply or earnestly interested about it, content rather to follow +the wayward imaginations of a mind naturally gifted with a certain +poetic quality, than to engage in serious intellectual exercise. Such +work could never maintain its hold on taste if it were not carefully +finished and constructed with elaborate care. Browne, if he was not a +great writer, was a literary artist of a high quality. He exploits a +quaint and lovable egoism with extraordinary skill; and though his +delicately figured and latinized sentences commonly sound platitudinous +and trivial when they are translated into rough Saxon prose, as they +stand they are rich and melodious enough. + + +(4) + +In a century of surpassing richness in prose and poetry, one author +stands by himself. John Milton refuses to be classed with any of the +schools. Though Dryden tells us Milton confessed to him that Spenser was +his "original," he has no connection--other than a general similarity of +purpose, moral and religious--with Spenser's followers. To the +fantastics he paid in his youth the doubtful compliment of one or two +half-contemptuous imitations and never touched them again. He had no +turn for the love lyrics or the courtliness of the school of Jonson. In +everything he did he was himself and his own master; he devised his own +subjects and wrote his own style. He stands alone and must be judged +alone. + +No author, however, can ever escape from the influences of his time, +and, just as much as his lesser contemporaries, Milton has his place in +literary history and derives from the great original impulse which set +in motion all the enterprises of the century. He is the last and +greatest figure in the English Renaissance. The new passion for art and +letters which in its earnest fumbling beginnings gave us the prose of +Cheke and Ascham and the poetry of Surrey and Sackville, comes to a full +and splendid and perfect end in his work. In it the Renaissance and the +Reformation, imperfectly fused by Sidney and Spenser, blend in their +just proportions. The transplantation into English of classical forms +which had been the aim of Sidney and the endeavour of Jonson he finally +accomplished; in his work the dream of all the poets of the +Renaissance--the heroic poem--finds its fulfilment. There was no poet of +the time but wanted to do for his country what Vergil had planned to do +for Rome, to sing its origins, and to celebrate its morality and its +citizenship in the epic form. Spenser had tried it in _The Fairy Queen_ +and failed splendidly. Where he failed, Milton succeeded, though his +poem is not on the origins of England but on the ultimate subject of the +origins of mankind. We know from his notebooks that he turned over in +his mind a national subject and that the Arthurian legend for a while +appealed to him. But to Milton's earnest temper nothing that was not +true was a fit subject for poetry. It was inevitable he should lay it +aside. The Arthurian story he knew to be a myth and a myth was a lie; +the story of the Fall, on the other hand, he accepted in common with his +time for literal fact. It is to be noted as characteristic of his +confident and assured egotism that he accepted no less sincerely and +literally the imaginative structure which he himself reared on it. +However that may be, the solid fact about him is that in this +"adventurous song" with its pursuit of + +"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," + +he succeeded in his attempt, that alone among the moderns he contrived +to write an epic which stands on the same eminence as the ancient +writings of the kind, and that he found time in a life, which hardly +extended to old age as we know it, to write, besides noble lyrics and a +series of fiercely argumentative prose treatises, two other masterpieces +in the grand style, a tragedy modelled on the Greeks and a second epic +on the "compact" style of the book of Job. No English poet can compare +with him in majesty or completeness. + +An adequate study of his achievement is impossible within the limits of +the few pages that are all a book like this can spare to a single +author. Readers who desire it will find it in the work of his two best +critics, Mark Pattison and Sir Walter Raleigh.[4] All that can be done +here is to call attention to some of his most striking qualities. +Foremost, of course, is the temper of the man. From the beginning he +was sure of himself and sure of his mission; he had his purpose plain +and clear. There is no mental development, hardly, visible in his work, +only training, undertaken anxiously and prayerfully and with a clearly +conceived end. He designed to write a masterpiece and he would not start +till he was ready. The first twenty years of his life were spent in +assiduous reading; for twenty more he was immersed in the dust and toil +of political conflict, using his pen and his extraordinary equipment of +learning and eloquence to defend the cause of liberty, civil and +religious, and to attack its enemies; not till he was past middle age +had he reached the leisure and the preparedness necessary to accomplish +his self-imposed work. But all the time, as we know, he had it in his +mind. In _Lycidas_, written in his Cambridge days, he apologizes to his +readers for plucking the fruit of his poetry before it is ripe. In +passage after passage in his prose works he begs for his reader's +patience for a little while longer till his preparation be complete. +When the time came at last for beginning he was in no doubt; in his very +opening lines he intends, he says, to soar no "middle flight." This +self-assured unrelenting certainty of his, carried into his prose essays +in argument, produces sometimes strange results. One is peculiarly +interesting to us now in view of current controversy. He was unhappily +married, and because he was unhappy the law of divorce must be changed. +A modern--George Eliot for instance--would have pleaded the artistic +temperament and been content to remain outside the law. Milton always +argued from himself to mankind at large. + +[Footnote 4: "Milton," E.M.L., and "Milton" (Edward Arnold).] + +In everything he did, he put forth all his strength. Each of his poems, +long or short, is by itself a perfect whole, wrought complete. The +reader always must feel that the planning of each is the work of +conscious, deliberate, and selecting art. Milton never digresses; he +never violates harmony of sound or sense; his poems have all their +regular movement from quiet beginning through a rising and breaking wave +of passion and splendour to quiet close. His art is nowhere better seen +than in his endings. + +Is it _Lycidas_? After the thunder of approaching vengeance on the +hireling shepherds of the Church, comes sunset and quiet: + +"And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills, + And now was dropt into the western bay; + At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: + To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." + +Is it _Paradise Lost_? After the agonies of expulsion and the flaming +sword-- + +"Some natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon; + The world was all before them where to choose + Their place of rest, and Providence their guide; + They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, + Through Eden took their solitary way." + +Is it finally _Samson Agonistes_? + +"His servants he with new acquist, + Of true experience from this great event, + With peace and consolation hath dismist, + And calm of mind all passion spent." + +"Calm of mind, all passion spent," it is the essence of Milton's art. + +He worked in large ideas and painted splendid canvases; it was +necessary for him to invent a style which should be capable of sustained +and lofty dignity, which should be ornate enough to maintain the +interest of the reader and charm him and at the same time not so ornate +as to give an air of meretricious decoration to what was largely and +simply conceived. Particularly it was necessary for him to avoid those +incursions of vulgar associations which words carelessly used will bring +in their train. He succeeded brilliantly in this difficult task. The +unit of the Miltonic style is not the phrase but the word, each word +fastidiously chosen, commonly with some air of an original and lost +meaning about it, and all set in a verse in which he contrived by an +artful variation of pause and stress to give the variety which other +writers had from rhyme. In this as in his structure he accomplished what +the Renaissance had only dreamed. Though he had imitators (the poetic +diction of the age following is modelled on him) he had no followers. No +one has been big enough to find his secret since. + + + + +CHAPTER V + + +THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE + +The student of literature, when he passes in his reading from the age of +Shakespeare and Milton to that of Dryden and Pope, will be conscious of +certain sharply defined differences between the temper and styles of +the writers of the two periods. If besides being a student of literature +he is also (for this is a different thing) a student of literary +criticism he will find that these differences have led to the affixing +of certain labels--that the school to which writers of the former period +belong is called "Romantic" and that of the latter "Classic," this +"Classic" school being again overthrown towards the end of the +eighteenth century by a set of writers who unlike the Elizabethans gave +the name "Romantic" to themselves. What is he to understand by these two +labels; what are the characteristics of "Classicism" and how far is it +opposite to and conflicting with "Romanticism"? The question is +difficult because the names are used vaguely and they do not adequately +cover everything that is commonly put under them. It would be difficult, +for instance, to find anything in Ben Jonson which proclaims him as +belonging to a different school from Dryden, and perhaps the same could +be said in the second and self-styled period of Romanticism of the work +of Crabbe. But in the main the differences are real and easily visible, +even though they hardly convince us that the names chosen are the +happiest that could be found by way of description. + +This period of Dryden and Pope on which we are now entering sometimes +styled itself the Augustan Age of English poetry. It grounded its claim +to classicism on a fancied resemblance to the Roman poets of the golden +age of Latin poetry, the reign of the Emperor Augustus. Its authors saw +themselves each as a second Vergil, a second Ovid, most of all a second +Horace, and they believed that their relation to the big world, their +assured position in society, heightened the resemblances. They +endeavoured to form their poetry on the lines laid down in the critical +writing of the original Augustan age as elaborated and interpreted in +Renaissance criticism. It was tacitly assumed--some of them openly +asserted it--that the kinds, modes of treatment and all the minor +details of literature, figures of speech, use of epithets and the rest, +had been settled by the ancients once and for all. What the Greeks began +the critics and authors of the time of Augustus had settled in its +completed form, and the scholars of the Renaissance had only interpreted +their findings for modern use. There was the tragedy, which had certain +proper parts and a certain fixed order of treatment laid down for it; +there was the heroic poem, which had a story or "fable," which must be +treated in a certain fixed manner, and so on. The authors of the +"Classic" period so christened themselves because they observed these +rules. And they fancied that they had the temper of the Augustan +time--the temper displayed in the works of Horace more than in those of +any one else--its urbanity, its love of good sense and moderation, its +instinctive distrust of emotion, and its invincible good breeding. If +you had asked them to state as simply and broadly as possible their +purpose they would have said it was to follow nature, and if you had +enquired what they meant by nature it would turn out that they thought +of it mainly as the opposite of art and the negation of what was +fantastic, tortured, or far sought in thinking or writing. The later +"Romantic" Revival, when it called itself a return to nature, was only +claiming the intention which the classical school itself had proclaimed +as its main endeavour. The explanation of that paradox we shall see +presently; in the meantime it is worth looking at some of the +characteristics of classicism as they appear in the work of the +"Classic" authors. + +In the first place the "Classic" writers aimed at simplicity of style, +at a normal standard of writing. They were intolerant of individual +eccentricities; they endeavoured, and with success, to infuse into +English letters something of the academic spirit that was already +controlling their fellow-craftsmen in France. For this end amongst +others they and the men of science founded the Royal Society, an +academic committee which has been restricted since to the physical and +natural sciences and been supplemented by similar bodies representing +literature and learning only in our own day. Clearness, plainness, +conversational ease and directness were the aims the society set before +its members where their writing was concerned. "The Royal Society," +wrote the Bishop of Rochester, its first historian, "have exacted from +all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive +expressions, clear sense, a native easiness, bringing all things as near +the mathematical plainness as they can; and preferring the language of +artisans, countrymen, and merchants before that of wits and scholars." +Artisans, countrymen, and merchants--the ideal had been already accepted +in France, Malesherbes striving to use no word that was not in the +vocabulary of the day labourers of Paris, Molière making his washerwoman +first critic of his comedies. It meant for England the disuse of the +turgidities and involutions which had marked the prose of the preachers +and moralists of the times of James and Charles I.; scholars and men of +letters were arising who would have taken John Bunyan, the unlettered +tinker of Bedford, for their model rather than the learned physician Sir +Thomas Browne. + +But genius like Bunyan's apart, there is nothing in the world more +difficult than to write with the easy and forthright simplicity of talk, +as any one may see who tries for himself--or even compares the +letter-writing with the conversation of his friends. So that this desire +of simplicity, of clarity, of lucidity led at once to a more deliberate +art. Dryden and Swift and Addison were assiduous in their labour with +the file; they excel all their predecessors in polish as much as the +writers of the first Augustan age excelled theirs in the same quality. +Not that it was all the result of deliberate art; in a way it was in the +air, and quite unlearned people--journalists and pamphleteers and the +like who wrote unconsciously and hurriedly to buy their supper--partook +of it as well as leisured people and conscious artists. Defoe is as +plain and easy and polished as Swift, yet it is certain his amazing +activity and productiveness never permitted him to look back over a +sentence he had written. Something had happened, that is, to the English +language. The assimilation of latinisms and the revival of obsolete +terms of speech had ceased; it had become finally a more or less fixed +form, shedding so much of its imports as it had failed to make part of +itself and acquiring a grammatical and syntactical fixity which it had +not possessed in Elizabethan times. When Shakespeare wrote + +"What cares these roarers for the name of king," + +he was using, as students of his language never tire of pointing out to +us, a perfectly correct local grammatical form. Fifty years after that +line was written, at the Restoration, local forms had dropped out of +written English. We had acquired a normal standard of language, and +either genius or labour was polishing it for literary uses. + +What they did for prose these "Classic" writers did even more +exactly--and less happily--for verse. Fashions often become exaggerated +before their disappearance, and the decadence of Elizabethan romanticism +had produced poetry the wildness and extravagance of whose images was +well-nigh unbounded. The passion for intricate and far-sought metaphor +which had possessed Donne was accompanied in his work and even more in +that of his followers with a passion for what was elusive and recondite +in thought and emotion and with an increasing habit of rudeness and +wilful difficultness in language and versification. Against these +ultimate licences of a great artistic period, the classical writers +invoked the qualities of smoothness and lucidity, in the same way, so +they fancied, as Vergil might have invoked them against Lucretius. In +the treatment of thought and feeling they wanted clearness, they wanted +ideas which the mass of men would readily apprehend and assent to, and +they wanted not hints or half-spoken suggestions but complete statement. +In the place of the logical subtleties which Donne and his school had +sought in the scholastic writers of the Middle Ages, they brought back +the typically Renaissance study of rhetoric; the characteristic of all +the poetry of the period is that it has a rhetorical quality. It is +never intimate and never profound, but it has point and wit, and it +appeals with confidence to the balanced judgment which men who distrust +emotion and have no patience with subtleties intellectual, emotional, or +merely verbal, have in common. Alongside of this lucidity, this air of +complete statement in substance they strove for and achieved smoothness +in form. To the poet Waller, the immediate predecessor of Dryden, the +classical writers themselves ascribed the honour of the innovation. In +fact Waller was only carrying out the ideals counselled and followed by +Ben Jonson. It was in the school of Waller and Dryden and not in that of +the minor writers who called themselves his followers that he came to +his own. + +What then are the main differences between classicism of the best +period--the classicism whose characteristics we have been +describing--and the Romanticism which came before and after? In the +first place we must put the quality we have described as that of +complete statement. Classical poetry is, so to speak, "all there." Its +meaning is all of it on the surface; it conveys nothing but what it +says, and what it says, it says completely. It is always vigorous and +direct, often pointed and aphoristic, never merely suggestive, never +given to half statement, and never obscure. You feel that as an +instrument of expression it is sharp and polished and shining; it is +always bright and defined in detail. The Great Romantics go to work in +other ways. Their poetry is a thing of half lights and half spoken +suggestions, of hints that imagination will piece together, of words +that are charged with an added meaning of sound over sense, a thing that +stirs the vague and impalpable restlessness of memory or terror or +desire that lies down beneath in the minds of men. It rouses what a +philosopher has called the "Transcendental feeling," the solemn sense of +the immediate presence of "that which was and is and ever shall be," to +induce which is the property of the highest poetry. You will find +nothing in classical poetry so poignant or highly wrought as Webster's + +"Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young," + +and the answer, + +"I think not so: her infelicity + Seemed to have years too many," + +or so subtle in its suggestion, sense echoing back to primeval terrors +and despairs, as this from _Macbeth_: + +"Stones have been known to move and trees to speak; + Augurs and understood relations have + By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks brought forth + The secret'st man of blood." + +or so intoxicating to the imagination and the senses as an ode of Keats +or a sonnet by Rossetti. But you will find eloquent and pointed +statements of thoughts and feelings that are common to most of us--the +expression of ordinary human nature-- + +"What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest," + +"Wit and fine writing" consisting, as Addison put it in a review of +Pope's first published poem, not so much "in advancing things that are +new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable turn." + +Though in this largest sense the "classic" writers eschewed the +vagueness of romanticism, in another and more restricted way they +cultivated it. They were not realists as all good romanticists have to +be. They had no love for oddities or idiosyncrasies or exceptions. They +loved uniformity, they had no use for truth in detail. They liked the +broad generalised, descriptive style of Milton, for instance, better +than the closely packed style of Shakespeare, which gets its effects +from a series of minute observations huddled one after the other and +giving the reader, so to speak, the materials for his own impression, +rather than rendering, as does Milton, the expression itself. + +Every literary discovery hardens ultimately into a convention; it has +its day and then its work is done, and it has to be destroyed so that +the ascending spirit of humanity can find a better means of +self-expression. Out of the writing which aimed at simplicity and truth +to nature grew "Poetic Diction," a special treasury of words and phrases +deemed suitable for poetry, providing poets with a common stock of +imagery, removing from them the necessity of seeing life and nature each +one for himself. The poetry which Dryden and Pope wrought out of their +mental vigour, their followers wrote to pattern. Poetry became reduced, +as it never was before and has never been since, to a formula. The +Elizabethan sonneteers, as we saw, used a vocabulary and phraseology in +common with their fellows in Italy and France, and none the less +produced fine poetry. But they used it to express things they really +felt. The truth is it is not the fact of a poetic diction which matters +so much as its quality--whether it squares with sincerity, whether it is +capable of expressing powerfully and directly one's deepest feelings. +The history of literature can show poetic dictions--special vocabularies +and forms for poetry--that have these qualities; the diction, for +instance, of the Greek choruses, or of the Scottish poets who followed +Chaucer, or of the troubadours. That of the classic writers of an +Augustan age was not of such a kind. Words clothe thought; poetic +diction had the artifice of the crinoline; it would stand by itself. The +Romantics in their return to nature had necessarily to abolish it. + +But when all is said in criticism the poetry of the earlier half of the +eighteenth century excels all other English poetry in two respects. Two +qualities belong to it by virtue of the metre in which it is most of it +written--rapidity and antithesis. Its antithesis made it an incomparable +vehicle for satire, its rapidity for narrative. Outside its limits we +have hardly any even passable satirical verse; within them there are +half-a-dozen works of the highest excellence in this kind. And if we +except Chaucer, there is no one else in the whole range of English +poetry who have the narrative gift so completely as the classic poets. +Bentleys will always exist who will assure us with civility that Pope's +_Homer_, though "very pretty," bears little relation to the Greek, and +that Dryden's _Vergil_, though vigorous and virile, is a poor +representation of its original. The truth remains that for a reader who +knows no ancient languages either of those translations will probably +give a better idea of their originals than any other rendering in +English that we possess. The foundation of their method has been +vindicated in the best modern translations from the Greek. + + +(2) + +The term "eighteenth century" in the vocabulary of the literary +historian is commonly as vaguely used as the term Elizabethan. It +borrows as much as forty years from the seventeenth and gives away ten +to the nineteenth. The whole of the work of Dryden, whom we must count +as the first of the "classic" school, was accomplished before +chronologically it had begun. As a man and as an author he was very +intimately related to his changing times; he adapted himself to them +with a versatility as remarkable as that of the Vicar of Bray, and, it +may be added, as simple-minded. He mourned in verse the death of +Cromwell and the death of his successor, successively defended the +theological positions of the Church of England and the Church of Rome, +changed his religion and became Poet Laureate to James II., and +acquiesced with perfect equanimity in the Revolution which brought in +his successor. This instability of conviction, though it gave a handle +to his opponents in controversy, does not appear to have caused any +serious scandal or disgust among his contemporaries, and it has +certainly had little effect on the judgment of later times. It has +raised none of the reproaches which have been cast at the suspected +apostasy of Wordsworth. Dryden had little interest in political or +religious questions; his instinct, one must conceive, was to conform to +the prevailing mode and to trouble himself no further about the matter. +Defoe told the truth about him when he wrote that "Dryden might have +been told his fate that, having his extraordinary genius slung and +pitched upon a swivel, it would certainly turn round as fast as the +times, and instruct him how to write elegies to Oliver Cromwell and King +Charles the Second with all the coherence imaginable; how to write +_Religio Laici_ and the _Hind and the Panther_ and yet be the same man, +every day to change his principle, change his religion, change his coat, +change his master, and yet never change his nature." He never changed +his nature, he was as free from cynicism as a barrister who represents +successively opposing parties in suits or politics; and when he wrote +polemics in prose or verse he lent his talents as a barrister lends his +for a fee. His one intellectual interest was in his art, and it is in +his comments on his art--the essays and prefaces in the composition of +which he amused the leisure left in the busy life of a dramatist and a +poet of officialdom--that his most charming and delicate work is to be +found. In a way they begin modern English prose; earlier writing +furnishes no equal to their colloquial ease and the grace of their +expression. And they contain some of the most acute criticism in our +language--"classical" in its tone (_i.e._, with a preference for +conformity) but with its respect for order and tradition always tempered +by good sense and wit, and informed and guided throughout by a taste +whose catholicity and sureness was unmatched in the England of his time. +The preface to his _Fables_ contains some excellent notes on Chaucer. +They may be read as a sample of the breadth and perspicuity of his +critical perceptions. + +His chief poetical works were most of them occasional--designed either +to celebrate some remarkable event or to take a side and interpret a +policy in the conflict, political or religious, of the time. +_Absalom and Achitophel_ and _The Medal_ were levelled at the +Shaftesbury-Monmouth intrigues in the closing years of Charles II. +_Religio Laici_ celebrated the excellence of the Church of England in +its character of _via media_ between the opposite extravagances of +Papacy and Presbyterianism. _The Hind and the Panther_ found this +perfection spotted. The Church of England has become the Panther, whose +coat is a varied pattern of heresy and truth beside the spotless purity +of the Hind, the Church of Rome. _Astrea Reddux_ welcomed the returning +Charles; _Annus Mirabilis_ commemorated a year of fire and victories, +Besides these he wrote many dramas in verse, a number of translations, +and some shorter poems, of which the odes are the most remarkable. + +His qualities as a poet fitted very exactly the work he set himself to +do. His work is always plain and easily understood; he had a fine +faculty for narration, and the vigorous rapidity and point of his style +enabled him to sketch a character or sum up a dialectical position very +surely and effectively. His writing has a kind of spare and masculine +force about it. It is this vigour and the impression which he gives of +intellectual strength and of a logical grasp of his subject, that beyond +question has kept alive work which, if ever poetry was, was ephemeral in +its origin. The careers of the unscrupulous Caroline peers would have +been closed for us were they not visible in the reflected light of his +denunciation of them. Though Buckingham is forgotten and Shaftesbury's +name swallowed up in that of his more philanthropic descendant, we can +read of Achitophel and Zimri still, and feel something of the strength +and heat which he caught from a fiercely fought conflict and transmitted +with his own gravity and purposefulness into verse. The Thirty-nine +Articles are not a proper subject for poetry, but the sustained and +serious allegory which Dryden weaves round theological discussion +preserves his treatment of them from the fate of the controversialists +who opposed him. His work has wit and vitality enough to keep it sweet. + +Strength and wit enter in different proportions into the work of his +successor, Alexander Pope--a poet whom admirers in his own age held to +be the greatest in our language. No one would think of making such a +claim now, but the detraction which he suffered at the hands of +Wordsworth and the Romantics, ought not to make us forget that Pope, +though not our greatest, not even perhaps a great, poet is incomparably +our most brilliant versifier. Dryden's strength turns in his work into +something more fragile and delicate, polished with infinite care like +lacquer, and wrought like filigree work to the last point of conscious +and perfected art. He was not a great thinker; the thoughts which he +embodies in his philosophical poems--the _Essay on Man_ and the rest, +are almost ludicrously out of proportion to the solemnity of the titles +which introduce them, nor does he except very rarely get beyond the +conceptions common to the average man when he attempts introspection or +meditates on his own destiny. The reader in search of philosophy will +find little to stimulate him and in the facile Deism of the time +probably something to smile at. Pope has no message to us now. But he +will find views current in his time or borrowed from other authors put +with perfect felicity and wit, and he will recognize the justice of +Addison's comment that Pope's wit and fine writing consist "not so much +in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that are known an +agreeable turn." And he will not fall into the error of dubbing the +author a minor poet because he is neither subtle nor imaginative nor +profound. A great poet would not have written like Pope--one must grant +it; but a minor poet could not. + +It is characteristic of Pope's type of mind and kind of art that there +is no development visible in his work. Other poets, Shakespeare, for +instance, and Keats, have written work of the highest quality when they +were young, but they have had crudenesses to shed--things to get rid of +as their strength and perceptions grew. But Pope, like Minerva, was full +grown and full armed from the beginning. If we did not know that his +_Essay on Criticism_ was his first poem it would be impossible to place +it in the canon of his work; it might come in anywhere and so might +everything else that he wrote. From the beginning his craftsmanship was +perfect; from the beginning he took his subject-matter from others as he +found it and worked it up into aphorism and epigram till each line shone +like a cut jewel and the essential commonplaceness and poverty of his +material was obscured by the glitter the craftsmanship lent to it. +Subject apart, however, he was quite sure of his medium from the +beginning; it was not long before he found the way to use it to most +brilliant purpose. _The Rape of the Lock_ and the satirical poems come +later in his career. + +As a satirist Pope, though he did not hit so hard as Dryden, struck more +deftly and probed deeper. He wielded a rapier where the other used a +broadsword, and though both used their weapons with the highest skill +and the metaphor must not be imagined to impute clumsiness to Dryden, +the rapier made the cleaner cut. Both employed a method in satire which +their successors (a poor set) in England have not been intelligent +enough to use. They allow every possible good point to the object of +their attack. They appear to deal him an even and regretful justice. His +good points, they put it in effect, being so many, how much blacker and +more deplorable his meannesses and faults! They do not do this out of +charity; there was very little of the milk of human kindness in Pope. +Deformity in his case, as in so many in truth and fiction, seemed to +bring envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness in its train. The +method is employed simply because it gives the maximum satirical effect. +That is why Pope's epistle to Arbuthnot, with its characterisation of +Addison, is the most damning piece of invective in our language. + +_The Rape of the Lock_ is an exquisite piece of workmanship, breathing +the very spirit of the time. You can fancy it like some clock made by +one of the Louis XIV. craftsmen, encrusted with a heap of ormulu +mock-heroics and impertinences and set perfectly to the time of day. +From no other poem could you gather so fully and perfectly the temper +of the society in which our "classic" poetry was brought to perfection, +its elegant assiduity in trifles, its brilliant artifice, its paint and +powder and patches and high-heeled shoes, its measured strutting walk in +life as well as in verse. _The Rape of the Lock_ is a mock-heroic poem; +that is to say it applies the form and treatment which the "classic" +critics of the seventeenth century had laid down as belonging to the +"heroic" or "epic" style to a trifling circumstance--the loss by a young +lady of fashion of a lock of hair. And it is the one instance in which +this "recipe" for a heroic poem which the French critics handed on to +Dryden, and Dryden left to his descendants, has been used well-enough to +keep the work done with it in memory. In a way it condemns the poetical +theory of the time; when forms are fixed, new writing is less likely to +be creative and more likely to exhaust itself in the ingenious but +trifling exercises of parody and burlesque. _The Rape of the Lock_ is +brilliant but it is only play. + +The accepted theory which assumed that the forms of poetry had been +settled in the past and existed to be applied, though it concerned +itself mainly with the ancient writers, included also two moderns in its +scope. You were orthodox if you wrote tragedy and epic as Horace told +you and satire as he had shown you; you were also orthodox if you wrote +in the styles of Spenser or Milton. Spenser, though his predecessors +were counted barbaric and his followers tortured and obscure, never fell +out of admiration; indeed in every age of English poetry after him the +greatest poet in it is always to be found copying him or expressing +their love for him--Milton declaring to Dryden that Spenser was his +"original," Pope reading and praising him, Keats writing his earliest +work in close imitation. His characteristic style and stanza were +recognised by the classic school as a distinct "kind" of poetry which +might be used where the theme fitted instead of the heroic manner, and +Spenserian imitations abound. Sometimes they are serious; sometimes, +like Shenstone's _Schoolmistress_, they are mocking and another +illustration of the dangerous ease with which a conscious and sustained +effort to write in a fixed and acquired style runs to seed in burlesque. +Milton's fame never passed through the period of obscurity that +sometimes has been imagined for him. He had the discerning admiration of +Dryden and others before his death. But to Addison belongs the credit of +introducing him to the writers of this time; his papers in the +_Spectator_ on _Paradise Lost_, with their eulogy of its author's +sublimity, spurred the interest of the poets among his readers. From +Milton the eighteenth century got the chief and most ponderous part of +its poetic diction, high-sounding periphrases and borrowings from Latin +used without the gravity and sincerity and fullness of thought of the +master who brought them in. When they wrote blank verse, the classic +poets wrote it in the Milton manner. + +The use of these two styles may be studied in the writings of one man, +James Thomson. For besides acquiring a kind of anonymous immortality +with patriots as the author of "Rule, Britannia," Thomson wrote two +poems respectively in the Spenserian and the Miltonic manner, the former +_The Castle of Indolence_, the latter _The Seasons_. The Spenserian +manner is caught very effectively, but the adoption of the style of +_Paradise Lost_, with its allusiveness, circumlocution and weight, +removes any freshness the _Seasons_ might have had, had the +circumstances in them been put down as they were observed. As it is, +hardly anything is directly named; birds are always the "feathered +tribe" and everything else has a similar polite generality for its +title. Thomson was a simple-minded man, with a faculty for watching and +enjoying nature which belonged to few in his sophisticated age; it is +unfortunate he should have spent his working hours in rendering the +fruit of country rambles freshly observed into a cold and stilted +diction. It suited the eighteenth century reader well, for not +understanding nature herself he was naturally obliged to read her in +translations. + + +(3) + +The chief merits of "classic" poetry--its clearness, its vigour, its +direct statement--are such as belong theoretically rather to prose than +to poetry. In fact, it was in prose that the most vigorous intellect of +the time found itself. We have seen how Dryden, reversing the habit of +other poets, succeeded in expressing his personality not in poetry which +was his vocation, but in prose which was the amusement of his leisure +hours. Spenser had put his politics into prose and his ideals into +verse; Dryden wrote his politics--to order--in verse, and in prose set +down the thoughts and fancies which were the deepest part of him because +they were about his art. The metaphor of parentage, though honoured by +use, fits badly on to literary history; none the less the tradition +which describes him as the father of modern English prose is very near +the truth. He puts into practice for the first time the ideals, +described in the first chapter of this book, which were set up by the +scholars who let into English the light of the Renaissance. With the +exception of the dialogue on Dramatic Poesy, his work is almost all of +it occasional, the fruit of the mood of a moment, and written rather in +the form of a _causerie_, a kind of informal talk, than of a considered +essay. And it is all couched in clear, flowing, rather loosely jointed +English, carefully avoiding rhetoric and eloquence and striving always +to reproduce the ease and flow of cultured conversation, rather than the +tighter, more closely knit style of consciously "literary" prose. His +methods were the methods of the four great prose-writers who followed +him--Defoe, Addison, Steele, and Swift. + +Of these Defoe was the eldest and in some ways the most remarkable. He +has been called the earliest professional author in our language, and if +that is not strictly true, he is at any rate the earliest literary +journalist. His output of work was enormous; he wrote on any and every +subject; there was no event whether in politics or letters or discovery +but he was not ready with something pat on it before the public interest +faded. It followed that at a time when imprisonment, mutilation, and the +pillory took the place of our modern libel actions he had an adventurous +career. In politics he followed the Whig cause and served the Government +with his pen, notably by his writings in support of the union with +Scotland, in which he won over the Scots by his description of the +commercial advantage which would follow the abolition of the border. +This line of argument, taken at a time when the governing of political +tendencies by commercial interests was by no means the accepted +commonplace it is now, proves him a man of an active and original mind. +His originality, indeed, sometimes over-reached the comprehension both +of the public and his superiors; he was imprisoned for an attack on the +Hanoverian succession, which was intended ironically; apparently he was +ignorant of what every journalist ought to know that irony is at once +the most dangerous and the most ineffectual weapon in the whole armoury +of the press. The fertility and ingenuity of his intellect may be best +gauged by the number of modern enterprises and contrivances that are +foreshadowed in his work. Here are a few, all utterly unknown in his own +day, collected by a student of his works; a Board of Trade register for +seamen; factories for goods: agricultural credit banks; a commission of +enquiry into bankruptcy; and a system of national poor relief. They show +him to have been an independent and courageous thinker where social +questions were concerned. + +He was nearly sixty before he had published his first novel, _Robinson +Crusoe_, the book by which he is universally known, and on which with +the seven other novels which followed it the foundation of his literary +fame rests. But his earlier works--they are reputed to number over two +hundred--possess no less remarkable literary qualities. It is not too +much to say that all the gifts which are habitually recommended for +cultivation by those who aspire to journalistic success are to be found +in his prose. He has in the first place the gift of perfect lucidity no +matter how complicated the subject he is expounding; such a book as his +_Complete English Tradesman_ is full of passages in which complex and +difficult subject-matter is set forth so plainly and clearly that the +least literate of his readers could have no doubt of his understanding +it. He has also an amazingly exact acquaintance with the technicalities +of all kinds of trades and professions; none of our writers, not even +Shakespeare, shows half such a knowledge of the circumstances of life +among different ranks and conditions of men; none of them has realized +with such fidelity how so many different persons lived and moved. His +gift of narrative and description is masterly, as readers of his novels +know (we shall have to come back to it in discussing the growth of the +English novel); several of his works show him to have been endowed with +a fine faculty of psychological observation. Without the least +consciousness of the value of what he was writing, nor indeed with any +deliberate artistic intention, he made himself one of the masters of +English prose. + +Defoe had been the champion of the Whigs; on the Tory side the ablest +pen was that of Jonathan Swift. His works proclaim him to have had an +intellect less wide in its range than that of his antagonist but more +vigorous and powerful. He wrote, too, more carefully. In his youth he +had been private secretary to Sir William Temple, a writer now as good +as forgotten because of the triviality of his matter, but in his day +esteemed because of the easy urbanity and polish of his prose. From him +Swift learned the labour of the file, and he declared in later life that +it was "generally believed that this author has advanced our English +tongue to as great a perfection as it can well bear." In fact he added +to the ease and cadences he had learned from Temple qualities of vigour +and directness of his own which put his work far above his master's. And +he dealt with more important subject-matter than the academic exercises +on which Temple exercised his fastidious and meticulous powers of +revision. + +In temperament he is opposed to all the writers of his time. There is no +doubt but there was some radical disorder in his system; brain disease +clouded his intellect in his old age, and his last years were death in +life; right through his life he was a savagely irritable, sardonic, dark +and violent man, impatient of the slightest contradiction or thwarting, +and given to explosive and instantaneous rage. He delighted in flouting +convention, gloried in outraging decency. The rage, which, as he said +himself, tore his heart out, carried him to strange excesses. There is +something ironical (he would himself have appreciated it) in the +popularity of _Gulliver's Travels_ as a children's book--that ascending +wave of savagery and satire which overwhelms policy and learning to +break against the ultimate citadel of humanity itself. In none of his +contemporaries (except perhaps in the sentimentalities of Steele) can +one detect the traces of emotion; to read Swift is to be conscious of +intense feeling on almost every page. The surface of his style may be +smooth and equable but the central fires of passion are never far +beneath, and through cracks and fissures come intermittent bursts of +flame. Defoe's irony is so measured and studiously commonplace that +perhaps those who imprisoned him because they believed him to be serious +are hardly to be blamed; Swift's quivers and reddens with anger in every +line. + +But his pen seldom slips from the strong grasp of his controlling art. +The extraordinary skill and closeness of his allegorical +writings--unmatched in their kind--is witness to the care and sustained +labour which went to their making. He is content with no general +correspondences; his allegory does not fade away into a story in which +only the main characters have a secondary significance; the minutest +circumstances have a bearing in the satire and the moral. In _The Tale +of a Tub_ and in _Gulliver's Travels_--particularly in the former--the +multitude as well as the aptness of the parallels between the imaginary +narrative and the facts it is meant to represent is unrivalled in works +of the kind. Only the highest mental powers, working with intense +fervour and concentration, could have achieved the sustained brilliancy +of the result. "What a genius I had when I wrote that book!" Swift is +said to have exclaimed in his old age when he re-read _The Tale of a +Tub_, and certainly the book is a marvel of constructive skill, all the +more striking because it makes allegory out of history and consequently +is denied that freedom of narrative so brilliantly employed in the +_Travels_. + +Informing all his writings too, besides intense feeling and an +omnipresent and controlling art, is strong common sense. His aphorisms, +both those collected under the heading of _Thoughts on Various +Subjects_, and countless others scattered up and down his pages, are a +treasury of sound, if a little sardonic, practical wisdom. His most +insistent prejudices foreshadow in their essential sanity and justness +those of that great master of life, Dr. Johnson. He could not endure +over-politeness, a vice which must have been very oppressive in society +of his day. He savagely resented and condemned a display of +affection--particularly marital affection--in public. In an age when it +was the normal social system of settling quarrels, he condemned +duelling; and he said some very wise things--things that might still be +said--on modern education. In economics he was as right-hearted as +Ruskin and as wrong-headed. Carlyle, who was in so many respects an echo +of him, found in a passage in his works a "dim anticipation" of his +philosophy of clothes. + +The leading literary invention of the period--after that of the heroic +couplet for verse--was the prose periodical essay. Defoe, it is hardly +necessary to say, began it; it was his nature to be first with any new +thing: but its establishment as a prevailing literary mode is due to two +authors, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Of the two famous +series--the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_--for which they were both +responsible, Steele must take the first credit; he began them, and +though Addison came in and by the deftness and lightness of his writing +took the lion's share of their popularity, both the plan and the +characters round whom the bulk of the essays in the _Spectator_ came to +revolve was the creation of his collaborator. Steele we know very +intimately from his own writings and from Thackeray's portrait of him. +He was an emotional, full-blooded kind of man, reckless and dissipated +but fundamentally honest and good-hearted--a type very common in his day +as the novels show, but not otherwise to be found in the ranks of its +writers. What there is of pathos and sentiment, and most of what there +is of humour in the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_ are his. And he created +the _dramatis personae_ out of whose adventures the slender thread of +continuity which binds the essays together is woven. Addison, though +less open to the onslaughts of the conventional moralist, was a less +lovable personality. Constitutionally endowed with little vitality, he +suffered mentally as well as bodily from languor and lassitude. His +lack of enthusiasm, his cold-blooded formalism, caused comment even in +an age which prided itself in self-command and decorum. + +His very malevolence proceeded from a flaccidity which meanly envied the +activities and enthusiasms of other men. As a writer he was superficial; +he had not the requisite energy for forming a clear or profound judgment +on any question of difficulty; Johnson's comment, "He thinks justly but +he thinks faintly" sums up the truth about him. His good qualities were +of a slighter kind than Swift's; he was a quiet and accurate observer of +manners and fashions in life and conversation, and he had the gift of a +style--what Johnson calls "The Middle Style"--very exactly suited to the +kind of work on which he was habitually engaged, "always equable, always +easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences" but polished, lucid, +and urbane. + +Steele and Addison were conscious moralists as well as literary men. +They desired to purge society from Restoration licences; to their +efforts we must credit the alteration in morality which _The School for +Scandal_ shows over _The Way of the World_. Their professed object as +they stated themselves was "to banish vice and ignorance out of the +territories of Great Britain, (nothing less!) and to bring philosophy +out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs +and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee-houses." In fact their satires +were politically nearer home, and the chief objects of their aversion +were the Tory squires whom it was their business as Whigs to deride. On +the Coverley papers in the _Spectator_ rests the chief part of their +literary fame; these belong rather to the special history of the novel +than to that of the periodical essay. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + + +DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME + +By 1730 the authors whose work made the "classic" school in England were +dead or had ceased writing; by the same date Samuel Johnson had begun +his career as a man of letters. The difference between the period of his +maturity and the period we have been examining is not perhaps easy to +define; but it exists and it can be felt unmistakably in reading. For +one thing "Classicism" had become completely naturalized; it had ceased +to regard the French as arbiters of elegance and literary taste; indeed +Johnson himself never spoke of them without disdain and hated them as +much as he hated Scotsmen. Writing, like dress and the common way of +life, became plainer and graver and thought stronger and deeper. In +manners and speech something of the brutalism which was at the root of +the English character at the time began to colour the refinement of the +preceding age. Dilettantism gave way to learning and speculation; in the +place of Bolingbroke came Adam Smith; in the place of Addison, Johnson. +In a way it is the solidest and sanest time in English letters. Yet in +the midst of its urbanity and order forces were gathering for its +destruction. The ballad-mongers were busy; Blake was drawing and +rhyming; Burns was giving songs and lays to his country-side. In the +distance--Johnson could not hear them--sounded, like the horns of +elf-land faintly blowing, the trumpet calls of romance. + +If the whole story of Dr. Johnson's life were the story of his published +books it would be very difficult to understand his pre-eminent and +symbolic position in literary history. His best known work--it still +remains so--was his dictionary, and dictionaries, for all the licence +they give and Johnson took for the expression of a personality, are the +business of purely mechanical talents. A lesser man than he might have +cheated us of such delights as the definitions of "oats," or "net" or +"pension," but his book would certainly have been no worse as a book. In +his early years he wrote two satires in verse in imitation of Juvenal; +they were followed later by two series of periodical essays on the model +of the _Spectator_; neither of them--the _Rambler_ nor the _Idler_--were +at all successful. _Rasselas_, a tale with a purpose, is melancholy +reading; the _Journey to the Western Hebrides_ has been utterly eclipsed +by Boswell's livelier and more human chronicle of the same events. The +_Lives of the Poets_, his greatest work, was composed with pain and +difficulty when he was seventy years old; even it is but a quarry from +which a reader may dig the ore of a sound critical judgment summing up +a life's reflection, out of the grit and dust of perfunctory +biographical compilations. There was hardly one of the literary coterie +over which he presided that was not doing better and more lasting work. +Nothing that Johnson wrote is to be compared, for excellence in its own +manner, with _Tom Jones_ or the _Vicar of Wakefield_ or the _Citizen of +the World_. He produced nothing in writing approaching the magnitude of +Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, or the profundity of +Burke's philosophy of politics. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose main +business was painting and not the pen, was almost as good an author as +he; his _Discourses_ have little to fear when they are set beside +Johnson's essays. Yet all these men recognised him as their guide and +leader; the spontaneous selection of such a democratic assembly as men +of genius in a tavern fixed upon him as chairman, and we in these later +days, who are safe from the overpowering force of personality +and presence--or at least can only know of it reflected in +books--instinctively recognize him as the greatest man of his age. What +is the reason? + +Johnson's pre-eminence is the pre-eminence of character. He was a great +moralist; he summed up in himself the tendencies of thought and +literature of his time and excelled all others in his grasp of them; and +he was perhaps more completely than any one else in the whole history of +English literature, the typical Englishman. He was one of those to whom +is applicable the commonplace that he was greater than his books. It is +the fashion nowadays among some critics to speak of his biographer +Boswell as if he were a novelist or a playwright and to classify the +Johnson we know with Hamlet and Don Quixote as the product of creative +or imaginative art, working on a "lost original." No exercise of +critical ingenuity could be more futile or impertinent. The impression +of the solidity and magnitude of Johnson's character which is to be +gathered from Boswell is enforced from other sources; from his essays +and his prayers and meditations, from the half-dozen or so lives and +reminiscences which were published in the years following his death +(their very number establishing the reverence with which he was +regarded), from the homage of other men whose genius their books leave +indisputable. Indeed the Johnson we know from Boswell, though it is the +broadest and most masterly portrait in the whole range of biography, +gives less than the whole magnitude of the man. When Boswell first met +him at the age of twenty-two, Johnson was fifty-four. His long period of +poverty and struggle was past. His _Dictionary_ and all his works except +the _Lives of the Poets_ were behind him; a pension from the Crown had +established him in security for his remaining years; his position was +universally acknowledged. So that though the portrait in the _Life_ is a +full-length study of Johnson the conversationalist and literary +dictator, the proportion it preserves is faulty and its study of the +early years--the years of poverty, of the _Vanity of Human Wishes_ and +_London_, of _Rasselas_, which he wrote to pay the expenses of his +mother's funeral, is slight. + +It was, however, out of the bitterness and struggle of these early +years that the strength and sincerity of character which carried Johnson +surely and tranquilly through the time of his triumph were derived. From +the beginning he made no compromise with the world and no concession to +fashion. The world had to take him at his own valuation or not at all. +He never deviated one hair's breadth from the way he had chosen. Judged +by the standards of journalistic success, the _Rambler_ could not well +be worse than he made it. Compared with the lightness and gaiety and the +mere lip-service to morality of Addison its edification is ponderous. +Both authors state the commonplaces of conduct, but Addison achieves +lightness in the doing of it, and his manner by means of which +platitudes are stated lightly and pointedly and with an air of novelty, +is the classic manner of journalism. Johnson goes heavily and directly +to the point, handling well worn moral themes in general and dogmatic +language without any attempt to enliven them with an air of discovery or +surprise. Yet they were, in a sense, discoveries to him; not one of them +but was deeply and sincerely felt; not one but is not a direct and to us +a pathetically dispassionate statement of the reflection of thirty years +of grinding poverty and a soul's anguish. Viewed in the light of his +life, the _Rambler_ is one of the most moving of books. If its literary +value is slight it is a document in character. + +So that when he came to his own, when gradually the public whom he +despised and neglected raised him into a pontifical position matched by +none before him in England and none since save Carlyle, he was sure of +himself; success did not spoil him. His judgment was unwarped by +flattery. The almost passionate tenderness and humanity which lay +beneath his gruffness was undimmed. His personality triumphed in all the +fullness and richness which had carried it in integrity through his +years of struggle. For over twenty years from his chair in taverns in +the Strand and Fleet Street he ruled literary London, imposed his +critical principles on the great body of English letters, and by his +talk and his friendships became the embodiment of the literary +temperament of his age. + +His talk as it is set down by Boswell is his best monument. It was the +happiest possible fate that threw those two men together, for Boswell +besides being an admirer and reporter sedulously chronicling all his +master said and did, fortunately influenced both the saying and the +doing. Most of us have some one in whose company we best shine, who puts +our wits on their mettle and spurs us to our greatest readiness and +vivacity. There is no doubt that Boswell, for all his assumed humility +and for all Johnson's affected disdain, was just such a companion for +Johnson. Johnson was at his best when Boswell was present, and Boswell +not only drew Johnson out on subjects in which his robust common sense +and readiness of judgment were fitted to shine but actually suggested +and conducted that tour in Scotland which gave Johnson an opportunity +for displaying himself at his best. The recorded talk is +extraordinarily varied and entertaining. It is a mistake to conceive +Johnson as a monster of bear-like rudeness, shouting down opposition, +hectoring his companions, and habitually a blustering verbal bully. We +are too easily hypnotized by Macaulay's flashy caricature. He could be +merciless in argument and often wrongheaded and he was always acute, +uncomfortably acute, in his perception of a fallacy, and a little +disconcerting in his unmasking of pretence. But he could be gay and +tender too and in his heart he was a shrinking and sensitive man. + +As a critic (his criticism is the only side of his literary work that +need be considered), Johnson must be allowed a high place. His natural +indolence in production had prevented him from exhausting his faculties +in the more exacting labours of creative work, and it had left him time +for omnivorous if desultory reading, the fruits of which he stored in a +wonderfully retentive memory against an occasion for their use. To a +very fully equipped mind he brought the service of a robust and acute +judgment. Moreover when he applied his mind to a subject he had a +faculty of intense, if fitful concentration; he could seize with great +force on the heart of a matter; he had the power in a wonderfully short +time of extracting the kernel and leaving the husk. His judgments in +writing are like those recorded by Boswell from his conversation; that +is to say he does not, as a critic whose medium was normally the pen +rather than the tongue would tend to do, search for fine shades of +distinction, subdivide subtleties, or be careful to admit _caveats_ or +exceptions; he passes, on the contrary, rapid and forcible verdicts, +not seldom in their assertions untenably sweeping, and always decided +and dogmatic. He never affects diffidence or defers to the judgments of +others. His power of concentration, of seizing on essentials, has given +us his best critical work--nothing could be better, for instance, than +his characterisation of the poets whom he calls the metaphysical school +(Donne, Crashaw, and the rest) which is the most valuable part of his +life of Cowley. Even where he is most prejudiced--for instance in his +attack on Milton's _Lycidas_--there is usually something to be said for +his point of view. And after this concentration, his excellence depends +on his basic common sense. His classicism is always tempered, like +Dryden's, by a humane and sensible dislike of pedantry; he sets no store +by the unities; in his preface to Shakespeare he allows more than a +"classic" could have been expected to admit, writing in it, in truth, +some of the manliest and wisest things in Shakespearean literature. Of +course, he had his failings--the greatest of them what Lamb called +imperfect sympathy. He could see no good in republicans or agnostics, +and none in Scotland or France. Not that the phrase "imperfect +sympathy," which expresses by implication the romantic critic's point of +view, would have appealed to him. When Dr. Johnson did not like people +the fault was in them, not in him; a ruthless objectivity is part of the +classic equipment. He failed, too, because he could neither understand +nor appreciate poetry which concerned itself with the sensations that +come from external nature. Nature was to him a closed book, very likely +for a purely physical reason. He was short-sighted to the point of +myopia, and a landscape meant nothing to him; when he tried to describe +one as he did in the chapter on the "happy valley" in _Rasselas_ he +failed. What he did not see he could not appreciate; perhaps it is too +much to ask of his self-contained and unbending intellect that he should +appreciate the report of it by other men. + + +(2) + +As we have seen, Johnson was not only great in himself, he was great in +his friends. Round him, meeting him as an equal, gathered the greatest +and most prolific writers of the time. There is no better way to study +the central and accepted men of letters of the period than to take some +full evening at the club from Boswell, read a page or two, watch what +the talkers said, and then trace each back to his own works for a +complete picture of his personality. The lie of the literary landscape +in this wonderful time will become apparent to you as you read. You will +find Johnson enthroned, Boswell at his ear, round him men like Reynolds +and Burke, Richardson and Fielding and Goldsmith, Robertson and Gibbon, +and occasionally drawn to the circle minnows like Beattie and a genius +like Adam Smith. Gray, studious in his college at Cambridge, is +exercising his fastidious talent; Collins' sequestered, carefully +nurtured muse is silent; a host of minor poets are riding Pope's poetic +diction, and heroic couplet to death. Outside scattered about is the +van of Romance--Percy collecting his ballads; Burns making songs and +verses in Scotland; the "mad" people, Smart and Chatterton, and above +all Blake, obscurely beginning the work that was to finish in Wordsworth +and Coleridge and Keats. + +Of Johnson's set the most remarkable figure was Edmund Burke--"the +supreme writer," as De Quincey called him, "of his century." His +writings belong more to the history of politics than to that of +literature, and a close examination of them would be out of place here. +His political theory strikes a middle course which offends--and in his +own day offended--both parties in the common strife of political +thinking. He believed the best government to consist in a patriotic +aristocracy, ruling for the good of the people. By birth an Irishman, he +had the innate practicality which commonly lies beneath the flash and +colour of Irish forcefulness and rhetoric. That, and his historical +training, which influenced him in the direction of conceiving every +institution as the culmination of an evolutionary development, sent him +directly counter to the newest and most enthusiastically urged political +philosophy of his day--the philosophy stated by Rousseau, and put in +action by the French Revolution. He disliked and distrusted +"metaphysical theories," when they left the field of speculation for +that of practice, had no patience with "natural rights" (which as an +Irishman he conceived as the product of sentimentalism) and applied what +would nowadays be called a "pragmatic" test to political affairs. +Practice was the touchstone; a theory was useless unless you could prove +that it had worked. It followed that he was not a democrat, opposed +parliamentary reform, and held that the true remedy for corruption and +venality was not to increase the size of the electorate, but to reduce +it so as to obtain electors of greater weight and independence. For him +a member of Parliament was a representative and not a delegate, and must +act not on his elector's wishes but on his own judgment. These opinions +are little in fashion in our own day, but it is well to remember that in +Burke's case they were the outcome not of prejudice but of thought, and +that even democracy may admit they present a case that must be met and +answered. + +Burke's reputation as a thinker has suffered somewhat unjustly as a +result of his refusal to square his tenets either with democracy or with +its opposite. It has been said that ideas were only of use to him so far +as they were of polemical service, that the amazing fertility and +acuteness of his mind worked only in a not too scrupulous determination +to overwhelm his antagonists in the several arguments--on India, or +America, on Ireland or on France--which made up his political career. He +was, said Carlyle, "vehement rather than earnest; a resplendent +far-sighted rhetorician, rather than a deep and earnest thinker." The +words as they stand would be a good description of a certain type of +politician; they would fit, for instance, very well on Mr. Gladstone; +but they do Burke less than justice. He was an innovator in modern +political thought, and his application of the historical method to the +study of institutions is in its way a not less epoch-making achievement +than Bacon's application of the inductive method to science. At a time +when current political thought, led by Rousseau, was drawing its +theories from the abstract conception of "natural rights" Burke was +laying down that sounder and deeper notion of politics which has +governed thinking in that department of knowledge since. Besides this, +he had face to face with the affairs of his own day, a far-sightedness +and sagacity which kept him right where other men went wrong. In a +nation of the blind he saw the truth about the American colonies; he +predicted with exactitude the culmination of the revolution in Napoleon. +Mere rhetorical vehemence cannot explain the earnestness with which in a +day of diplomatic cynicism he preached the doctrine of an international +morality as strict and as binding as the morality which exists between +man and man. Surest of all, we have the testimony, uninfluenced by the +magic of language, of the men he met. You could not, said Dr. Johnson, +shelter with him in a shed for a few moments from the rain without +saying, "This is an extraordinary man." + +His literary position depends chiefly on his amazing gift of expression, +on a command of language unapproached by any writer of his time. His +eloquence (in writing not in speaking; he is said to have had a +monotonous delivery) was no doubt at bottom a matter of race, but to his +Irish readiness and flash and colour he added the strength of a full +mind, fortified by a wonderful store of reading which a retentive and +exact memory enabled him to bring instantly to bear on the subject in +hand. No writer before him, except Defoe, had such a wide knowledge of +the technicalities of different men's occupations, and of all sorts of +the processes of daily business, nor could enlighten an abstract matter +with such a wealth of luminous analogy. It is this characteristic of his +style which has led to the common comparison of his writing with +Shakespeare's; both seem to be preternaturally endowed with more +information, to have a wider sweep of interest than ordinary men. Both +were not only, as Matthew Arnold said of Burke, "saturated with ideas," +but saturated too in the details of the business and desire of ordinary +men's lives; nothing human was alien from them. Burke's language is, +therefore, always interesting and always appropriate to his thought; it +is also on occasion very beautiful. He had a wonderful command of clear +and ringing utterance and could appeal when he liked very powerfully to +the sensibilities of his readers. Rhetoricians are seldom free from +occasional extravagance, and Burke fell under the common danger of his +kind. He had his moments of falsity, could heap coarse and outrageous +abuse on Warren Hastings, illustrate the horrors of the Revolution by +casting a dagger on the floor of the House of Commons, and nourish +hatred beyond the bounds of justice or measure. But these things do not +affect his position, nor take from the solid greatness of his work. + +Boswell we have seen; after Burke and Boswell, Goldsmith was the most +brilliant member of the Johnson circle. If part of Burke's genius is +referable to his nationality, Goldsmith's is wholly so. The beginning +and the end of him was Irish; every quality he possessed as a man and as +a writer belongs to his race. He had the Irish carelessness, the Irish +generosity, the Irish quick temper, the Irish humour. This latter gift, +displayed constantly in a company which had little knowledge of the +peculiar quality of Irish wit and no faculty of sympathy or imagination, +is at the bottom of the constant depreciation of him on the part of +Boswell and others of his set. His mock self-importance they thought +ill-breeding; his humorous self-depreciation and keen sense of his own +ridiculousness, mere lack of dignity and folly. It is curious to read +Boswell and watch how often Goldsmith, without Boswell's knowing it, got +the best of the joke. In writing he had what we can now recognise as +peculiarly Irish gifts. All our modern writers of light half-farcical +comedy are Irish. Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_, is only the first +of a series which includes _The School for Scandal, The Importance of +being Earnest_, and _You Never can Tell_. And his essays--particularly +those of the _Citizen of the World_ with its Chinese vision of England +and English life--are the first fruit of that Irish detachment, that +ability to see "normally" English habits and institutions and foibles +which in our own day has given us the prefaces of Mr. Shaw. As a writer +Goldsmith has a lightness and delicate ease which belongs rather to the +school of the earlier eighteenth century than to his own day; the +enthusiasm of Addison for French literature which he retained gave him a +more graceful model than the "Johnsonian" school, to which he professed +himself to belong, could afford. + + +(3) + +The eighteenth century novel demands separate treatment, and of the +other prose authors the most eminent, Edward Gibbon, belongs to +historical rather than to literary studies. It is time to turn to +poetry. + +There orthodox classicism still held sway; the manner and metre of Pope +or Thomson ruled the roost of singing fowl. In the main it had done its +work, and the bulk of fresh things conceived in it were dull and +imitative, even though occasionally, as in the poems of Johnson himself +and of Goldsmith, an author arose who was able to infuse sincerity and +emotion into a now moribund convention. The classic manner--now more +that of Thomson than of Pope--persisted till it overlapped romanticism; +Cowper and Crabbe each owe a doubtful allegiance, leaning by their +formal metre and level monotony of thought to the one and by their +realism to the other. In the meantime its popularity and its assured +position were beginning to be assailed in the coteries by the work of +two new poets. + +The output of Thomas Gray and William Collins is small; you might almost +read the complete poetical works of either in an evening. But for all +that they mark a period; they are the first definite break with the +classic convention which had been triumphant for upwards of seventy +years when their prime came. It is a break, however, in style rather +than in essentials, and a reader who seeks in them the inspiriting +freshness which came later with Wordsworth and Coleridge will be +disappointed. Their carefully drawn still wine tastes insipidly after +the "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" of romance. They are fastidious +and academic; they lack the authentic fire; their poetry is "made" +poetry like Tennyson's and Matthew Arnold's. On their comparative merits +a deal of critical ink has been spilt, Arnold's characterisation of Gray +is well known--"he never spoke out." Sterility fell upon him because he +lived in an age of prose just as it fell upon Arnold himself because he +lived too much immersed in business and routine. But in what he wrote he +had the genuine poetic gift--the gift of insight and feeling. Against +this, Swinburne with characteristic vehemence raised the standard of +Collins, the latchet of whose shoe Gray, as a lyric poet, was not worthy +to unloose. "The muse gave birth to Collins, she did but give suck to +Gray." It is more to our point to observe that neither, though their +work abounds in felicities and in touches of a genuine poetic sense, was +fitted to raise the standard of revolt. Revolution is for another and +braver kind of genius than theirs. Romanticism had to wait for Burns and +Blake. + +In every country at any one time there are in all probability not one +but several literatures flourishing. The main stream flowing through +the publishers and booksellers, conned by critics and coteries, +recognized as the national literature, is commonly only the largest of +several channels of thought. There are besides the national literature +local literatures--books, that is, are published which enjoy popularity +and critical esteem in their own county or parish and are utterly +unknown outside; there may even be (indeed, there are in several parts +of the country) distinct local schools of writing and dynasties of local +authors. These localized literatures rarely become known to the outside +world; the national literature takes little account of them, though +their existence and probably some special knowledge of one or other of +them is within the experience of most of us. But every now and again +some one of their authors transcends his local importance, gives +evidence of a genius which is not to be denied even by those who +normally have not the knowledge to appreciate the particular flavour of +locality which his writings impart, and becomes a national figure. While +he lives and works the national and his local stream turn and flow +together. + +This was the case of Robert Burns. All his life long he was the singer +of a parish--the last of a long line of "forbears" who had used the +Scottish lowland vernacular to rhyme in about their neighbours and their +scandals, their loves and their church. Himself at the confluence of the +two streams, the national and the local, he pays his tribute to two sets +of originals, talks with equal reverence of names known to us like Pope +and Gray and Shenstone and names unknown which belonged to local +"bards," as he would have called them, who wrote their poems for an +Ayrshire public. If he came upon England as an innovator it was simply +because he brought with him the highly individualized style of Scottish +local vernacular verse; to his own people he was no innovator but a +fulfilment; as his best critic[5] says he brought nothing to the +literature he became a part of but himself. His daring and splendid +genius made the local universal, raised out of rough and cynical +satirizing a style as rich and humorous and astringent as that of +Rabelais, lent inevitableness and pathos and romance to lyric and song. +But he was content to better the work of other men. He made hardly +anything new. + +[Footnote 5: W.E. Henley, "Essay on Burns." Works, David Nutt.] + +Stevenson in his essay on Burns remarks his readiness to use up the work +of others or take a large hint from it "as if he had some difficulty in +commencing." He omits to observe that the very same trait applies to +other great artists. There seem to be two orders of creative writers. On +the one hand are the innovators, the new men like Blake, Wordsworth, +Byron and Shelley, and later Browning. These men owe little to their +predecessors; they work on their own devices and construct their medium +afresh for themselves. Commonly their fame and acceptance is slow, for +they speak in an unfamiliar tongue and they have to educate a generation +to understand their work. The other order of artists have to be shown +the way. They have little fertility in construction or invention. You +have to say to them "Here is something that you could do too; go and do +it better," or "Here is a story to work on, or a refrain of a song; take +it and give it your subtlety, your music." The villainy you teach them +they will use and it will go hard with them if they do not better the +invention; but they do not invent for themselves. To this order of +artists Burns like Shakespeare, and among the lesser men Tennyson, +belongs. In all his plays Shakespeare is known to have invented only one +plot; in many he is using not only the structure but in many places the +words devised by an older author; his mode of treatment depends on the +conventions common in his day, on the tragedy of blood, and madness and +revenge, on the comedy of intrigue and disguises, on the romance with +its strange happenings and its reuniting of long parted friends. Burns +goes the same way to work; scarcely a page of his but shows traces of +some original in the Scottish vernacular school. The elegy, the verse +epistle, the satirical form of _Holy Willie's Prayer_, the song and +recitative of _The Jolly Beggars_, are all to be found in his +predecessors, in Fergusson, Ramsay, and the local poets of the +south-west of Scotland. In the songs often whole verses, nearly always +the refrains, are from older folk poetry. What he did was to pour into +these forms the incomparable richness of a personality whose fire and +brilliance and humour transcended all locality and all tradition, a +personality which strode like a colossus over the formalism and +correctness of his time. His use of familiar forms explains, more than +anything else, his immediate fame. His countrymen were ready for him; +they could hail him on the instant (just as an Elizabethan audience +could hail Shakespeare) as something familiar and at the same time more +splendid than anything they knew. He spoke in a tongue they could +understand. + +It is impossible to judge Burns from his purely English verse; though he +did it as well as any of the minor followers of the school of Pope he +did it no better. Only the weakest side of his character--his +sentimentalism--finds expression in it; he had not the sense of +tradition nor the intimate knowledge necessary to use English to the +highest poetic effect; it was indeed a foreign tongue to him. In the +vernacular he wrote the language he spoke, a language whose natural +force and colour had become enriched by three centuries of literary use, +which was capable, too, of effects of humour and realism impossible in +any tongue spoken out of reach of the soil. It held within it an +unmatched faculty for pathos, a capacity for expressing a lambent and +kindly humour, a power of pungency in satire and a descriptive vividness +that English could not give. How express in the language of Pope or even +of Wordsworth an effect like this:-- + +"They reeled, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit, + Till ilka carlin swat and reekit, + And coost her duddies to the wark, + And linket at it in her sark." + +or this-- + +"Yestreen when to the trembling string, + The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha' + To thee my fancy took its wing-- + I sat but neither heard nor saw: + Tho' this was fair, and that was braw, + And yon the toast of a' the toun, + I sigh'd and said amang them a', + You are na Mary Morison." + +It may be objected that in all this there is only one word, and but two +or three forms of words that are not English. But the accent, the +rhythm, the air of it are all Scots, and it was a Burns thinking in his +native tongue who wrote it, not the Burns of + +"Anticipation forward points the view "; + +or + +"Pleasures are like poppies spread, + You grasp the flower, the bloom is shed." + +or any other of the exercises in the school of Thomson and Pope. + +It is easy to see that though Burns admired unaffectedly the "classic" +writers, his native realism and his melody made him a potent agent in +the cause of naturalism and romance. In his ideas, even more than in his +style, he belongs to the oncoming school. The French Revolution, which +broke upon Europe when he was at the height of his career, found him +already converted to its principles. As a peasant, particularly a Scotch +peasant, he believed passionately in the native worth of man as man and +gave ringing expression to it in his verse. In his youth his +liberal-mindedness made him a Jacobite out of mere antagonism to the +existing régime; the Revolution only discovered for him the more +logical Republican creed. As the leader of a loose-living, hard drinking +set, such as was to be found in every parish, he was a determined and +free-spoken enemy of the kirk, whose tyranny he several times +encountered. In his writing he is as vehement an anti-clerical as +Shelley and much more practical. The political side of romanticism, in +fact, which in England had to wait for Byron and Shelley, is already +full-grown in his work. He anticipates and gives complete expression to +one half of the Romantic movement. + +What Burns did for the idea of liberty, Blake did for that and every +other idea current among Wordsworth and his successors. There is nothing +stranger in the history of English literature than the miracle by which +this poet and artist, working in obscurity, utterly unknown to the +literary world that existed outside him, summed up in himself all the +thoughts and tendencies which were the fruit of anxious discussion and +propaganda on the part of the authors--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb--who +believed themselves to be the discoverers of fresh truth unknown to +their generation. The contemporary and independent discovery by Wallace +and Darwin of the principle of natural selection furnishes, perhaps, a +rough parallel, but the fact serves to show how impalpable and universal +is the spread of ideas, how impossible it is to settle literary +indebtedness or construct literary genealogy with any hope of accuracy. +Blake, by himself, held and expressed quite calmly that condemnation of +the "classic" school that Wordsworth and Coleridge proclaimed against +the opposition of a deriding world. As was his habit he compressed it +into a rude epigram, + +"Great things are done when men and mountains meet; + This is not done by jostling in the street." + +The case for nature against urbanity could not be more tersely nor +better put. The German metaphysical doctrine which was the deepest part +of the teaching of Wordsworth and Coleridge and their main discovery, he +expresses as curtly and off-handedly, + +"The sun's light when he unfolds it, + Depends on the organ that beholds it." + +In the realm of childhood and innocence, which Wordsworth entered +fearfully and pathetically as an alien traveller, he moves with the +simple and assured ease of one native. He knows the mystical wonder and +horror that Coleridge set forth in _The Ancient Mariner_. As for the +beliefs of Shelley, they are already fully developed in his poems. "The +king and the priest are types of the oppressor; humanity is crippled by +"mind-forg'd manacles"; love is enslaved to the moral law, which is +broken by the Saviour of mankind; and, even more subtly than by Shelley, +life is pictured by Blake as a deceit and a disguise veiling from us the +beams of the Eternal."[6] + +[Footnote 6: Prof. Raleigh.] + +In truth, Blake, despite the imputation of insanity which was his +contemporaries' and has later been his commentators' refuge from +assenting to his conclusions, is as bold a thinker in his own way as +Neitzsche and as consistent. An absolute unity of belief inspires all +his utterances, cryptic and plain. That he never succeeded in founding a +school nor gathering followers must be put down in the first place to +the form in which his work was issued (it never reached the public of +his own day) and the dark and mysterious mythology in which the +prophetic books which are the full and extended statement of his +philosophy, are couched, and in the second place to the inherent +difficulty of the philosophy itself. As he himself says, where we read +black, he reads white. For the common distinction between good and evil, +Blake substitutes the distinction between imagination and reason; and +reason, the rationalizing, measuring, comparing faculty by which we come +to impute praise or blame is the only evil in his eyes. "There is +nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so;" to rid the world +of thinking, to substitute for reason, imagination, and for thought, +vision, was the object of all that he wrote or drew. The implications of +this philosophy carry far, and Blake was not afraid to follow where they +led him. Fortunately for those who hesitate to embark on that dark and +adventurous journey, his work contains delightful and simpler things. He +wrote lyrics of extraordinary freshness and delicacy and spontaneity; he +could speak in a child's voice of innocent joys and sorrows and the +simple elemental things. His odes to "Spring" and "Autumn" are the +harbingers of Keats. Not since Shakespeare and Campion died could +English show songs like his + +"My silks and fine array." + +and the others which carry the Elizabethan accent. He could write these +things as well as the Elizabethans. In others he was unique. + +"Tiger! Tiger! burning bright + In the forests of the night, + What immortal hand or eye + Could frame thy fearful symmetry." + +In all the English lyric there is no voice so clear, so separate or +distinctive as his. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + + +THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL + +(1) + +There are two ways of approaching the periods of change and new birth in +literature. The commonest and, for all the study which it entails, the +easiest, is that summed up in the phrase, literature begets literature. +Following it, you discover and weigh literary influences, the influence +of poet on poet, and book on book. You find one man harking back to +earlier models in his own tongue, which an intervening age misunderstood +or despised; another, turning to the contemporary literatures of +neighbouring countries; another, perhaps, to the splendour and exoticism +of the east. In the matter of form and style, such a study carries you +far. You can trace types of poetry and metres back to curious and +unsuspected originals, find the well-known verse of Burns' epistles +turning up in Provençal; Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ stanza in use by Ben +Jonson; the metre of _Christabel_ in minor Elizabethan poetry; the +peculiar form of Fitzgerald's translation of _Omar Khayyam_ followed by +so many imitators since, itself to be the actual reflection of the rough +metrical scheme of his Persian original. But such a study, though it is +profitable and interesting, can never lead to the whole truth. As we saw +in the beginning of this book, in the matter of the Renaissance, every +age of discovery and re-birth has its double aspect. It is a revolution +in style and language, an age of literary experiment and achievement, +but its experiments are dictated by the excitement of a new +subject-matter, and that subject-matter is so much in the air, so +impalpable and universal that it eludes analysis. Only you can be sure +that it is this weltering contagion of new ideas, and new thought--the +"Zeitgeist," the spirit of the age, or whatever you may call it--that is +the essential and controlling force. Literary loans and imports give the +forms into which it can be moulded, but without them it would still +exist, and they are only the means by which a spirit which is in life +itself, and which expresses itself in action, and in concrete human +achievement, gets itself into the written word. The romantic revival +numbers Napoleon amongst its leaders as well as Byron, Wellington, Pitt +and Wilberforce, as well as Keats and Wordsworth. Only the literary +manifestations of the time concern us here, but it is important to +remember that the passion for simplification and for a return to nature +as a refuge from the artificial complexities of society, which inspired +the _Lyrical Ballads_, inspired no less the course of the Revolution in +France, and later, the destruction by Napoleon of the smaller feudal +states of Germany, which made possible German nationality and a national +spirit. + +In this romantic revival, however, the revolution in form and style +matters more than in most. The classicism of the previous age had been +so fixed and immutable; it had been enthroned in high places, enjoyed +the esteem of society, arrogated to itself the acceptance which good +breeding and good manners demanded. Dryden had been a Court poet, +careful to change his allegiance with the changing monarchy. Pope had +been the equal and intimate of the great people of his day, and his +followers, if they did not enjoy the equality, enjoyed at any rate the +patronage of many noble lords. The effect of this was to give the +prestige of social usage to the verse in which they wrote and the +language they used. "There was," said Dr. Johnson, "before the time of +Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the +grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms +appropriated to particular arts. Words too familiar or too remote to +defeat the purpose of a poet." This poetic diction, refined from the +grossness of domestic use, was the standard poetic speech of the +eighteenth century. The heroic couplet in which it was cast was the +standard metre. So that the first object of the revolt of the romantics +was the purely literary object of getting rid of the vice of an unreal +and artificial manner of writing. They desired simplicity of style. + +When the _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge were published in +1798, the preface which Wordsworth wrote as their manifesto hardly +touched at all on the poetic imagination or the attitude of the poet to +life and nature. The only question is that of diction. "The majority of +the following poems," he writes, "are to be considered as experiments. +They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language +of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to +the purposes of poetic pleasure." And in the longer preface to the +second edition, in which the theories of the new school on the nature +and methods of the poetic imagination are set forth at length, he +returns to the same point. "The language too, of these men (that is +those in humble and rustic life) has been adopted ... because such men +hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of +language is originally derived, and because from their rank in society, +and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less +under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and +notions in simple unelaborated expressions." Social vanity--the armour +which we wear to conceal our deepest thoughts and feelings--that was +what Wordsworth wished to be rid of, and he chose the language of the +common people, not because it fitted, as an earlier school of poets who +used the common speech had asserted, the utterance of habitual feeling +and common sense, but because it is the most sincere expression of the +deepest and rarest passion. His object was the object attained by +Shakespeare in some of his supremest moments; the bare intolerable force +of the speeches after the murder of Macbeth, or of King Lear's + + "Do not laugh at me, +For as I am a man, I think this lady +To be my child Cordelia." + +Here, then, was one avenue of revolt from the tyranny of artificiality, +the getting back of common speech into poetry. But there was another, +earlier and more potent in its effect. The eighteenth century, weary of +its own good sense and sanity, turned to the Middle Ages for +picturesqueness and relief. Romance of course, had not been dead in all +these years, when Pope and Addison made wit and good sense the +fashionable temper for writing. There was a strong romantic tradition in +the eighteenth century, though it does not give its character to the +writing of the time. Dr. Johnson was fond of old romances. When he was +in Skye he amused himself by thinking of his Scottish tour as the +journey of a knight-errant. "These fictions of the Gothic romances," he +said, "are not so remote from credibility as is commonly supposed." It +is a mistake to suppose that the passion for mediaevalism began with +either Coleridge or Scott. Horace Walpole was as enthusiastic as either +of them; good eighteenth century prelates like Hurd and Percy, found in +what they called the Gothic an inexhaustible source of delight. As was +natural, what attracted them in the Middle Ages was not their +resemblances to the time they lived in, but the points in which the two +differed. None of them had knowledge enough, or insight enough, to +conceive or sympathize with the humanity of the thirteenth century, to +shudder at its cruelties and hardnesses and persecutions, or to +comprehend the spiritual elevation and insight of its rarest minds. "It +was art," said William Morris, "art in which all men shared, that made +life romantic as people called it in those days. That and not robber +barons, and inaccessible kings, with their hierarchy of serving nobles, +and other rubbish." Morris belonged to a time which knew its middle ages +better. To the eighteenth century the robber barons and the "other +rubbish" were the essence of romance. For Percy and his followers, +medievalism was a collection of what actors call "properties" gargoyles, +and odds and ends of armour and castle keeps with secret passages, +banners and gay colours, and gay shimmering obsolete words. Mistaking +what was on its surface at any rate a subtle and complex civilization, +for rudeness and quaintness, they seemed to themselves to pass back into +a freer air, where any extravagance was possible, and good breeding and +mere circumspection and restraint vanished like the wind. + +A similar longing to be rid of the precision and order of everyday life +drove them to the mountains, and to the literature of Wales and the +Highlands, to Celtic, or pseudo-Celtic romance. To the fashion of the +time mountains were still frowning and horrid steeps; in Gray's Journal +of his tour in the Lakes, a new understanding and appreciation of nature +is only struggling through; and when mountains became fashionable, it +was at first and remained in part at least, till the time of Byron, for +those very theatrical qualities which had hitherto put them in +abhorrence. Wordsworth, in his _Lines written above Tintern Abbey_, in +which he sets forth the succeeding stages of his mental development, +refers to this love of the mountains for their spectacular qualities, as +the first step in the progress of his mind to poetic maturity: + + "The sounding cataract +Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock, +The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood, +Their colours and their forms were then to me +An appetite." + +This same passion for the "sounding cataract" and the "tall rock," this +appetite for the deep and gloomy wood, gave its vogue in Wordsworth's +boyhood to Macpherson's _Ossian_, a book which whether it be completely +fraudulent or not, was of capital importance in the beginnings of the +romantic movement. + +The love of mediaeval quaintness and obsolete words, however, led to a +more important literary event--the publication of Bishop Percy's edition +of the ballads in the Percy folio--the _Reliques of Ancient Poetry_. +Percy to his own mind knew the Middle Ages better than they knew +themselves, and he took care to dress to advantage the rudeness and +plainness of his originals. Perhaps we should not blame him. Sir Walter +Scott did the same with better tact and skill in his Border minstrelsy, +and how many distinguished editors are there, who have tamed and +smoothed down the natural wildness and irregularity of Blake? But it is +more important to observe that when Percy's reliques came to have their +influence on writing his additions were imitated as much as the poems on +which he grafted them. Chatterton's _Rowley Poems_, which in many places +seem almost inconceivably banal and artificial to us to-day, caught +their accent from the episcopal editor as much as from the ballads +themselves. None the less, whatever its fault, Percy's collection gave +its impetus to one half of the romantic movement; it was eagerly read in +Germany, and when it came to influence Scott and Coleridge it did so not +only directly, but through Burger's imitation of it; it began the modern +study and love of the ballad which has given us _Sister Helen_, the +_White Ship_ and the _Lady of Shalott_. + +But the romantic revival goes deeper than any change, however momentous +of fashion or style. It meant certain fundamental changes in human +outlook. In the first place, one notices in the authors of the time an +extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility; the mind at its +countless points of contact with the sensuous world and the world of +thought, seems to become more alive and alert. It is more sensitive to +fine impressions, to finely graded shades of difference. Outward +objects and philosophical ideas seem to increase in their content and +their meaning, and acquire a new power to enrich the intensest life of +the human spirit. Mountains and lakes, the dignity of the peasant, the +terror of the supernatural, scenes of history, mediaeval architecture +and armour, and mediaeval thought and poetry, the arts and mythology of +Greece--all became springs of poetic inspiration and poetic joy. The +impressions of all these things were unfamiliar and ministered to a +sense of wonder, and by that very fact they were classed as romantic, as +modes of escape from a settled way of life. But they were also in a +sense familiar too. The mountains made their appeal to a deep implanted +feeling in man, to his native sense of his own worth and dignity and +splendour as a part of nature, and his recognition of natural scenery as +necessary, and in its fullest meaning as sufficient for his spiritual +needs. They called him back from the artificiality and complexity of the +cities he had built for himself, and the society he had weaved round +him, to the natural world in which Providence had planted him of old, +and which was full of significance for his soul. The greatest poets of +the romantic revival strove to capture and convey the influence of +nature on the mind, and of the mind on nature interpenetrating one +another. They were none the less artists because they approached nature +in a state of passive receptivity. They believed in the autocracy of the +individual imagination none the less because their mission was to +divine nature and to understand her, rather than to correct her +profusions in the name of art. + +In the second place the romantic revival meant a development of the +historical sense. Thinkers like Burke and Montesquieu helped students of +politics to acquire perspective; to conceive modern institutions not as +things separate, and separately created, but as conditioned by, and +evolved from, the institutions of an earlier day. Even the revolutionary +spirit of the time looked both before and after, and took history as +well as the human perfectibility imagined by philosophers into its +purview. In France the reformers appealed in the first instance for a +States General--a mediaeval institution--as the corrective of their +wrongs, and later when they could not, like their neighbours in Belgium, +demand reform by way of the restoration of their historical rights, they +were driven to go a step further back still, beyond history to what they +conceived to be primitive society, and demand the rights of man. This +development of the historical sense, which had such a widespread +influence on politics, got itself into literature in the creation of the +historical novel. Scott and Chateaubriand revived the old romance in +which by a peculiar ingenuity of form, the adventures of a typical hero +of fiction are cast in a historical setting and set about with portraits +of real personages. The historical sense affected, too, novels dealing +with contemporary life. Scott's best work, his novels of Scottish +character, catch more than half their excellence from the richness of +colour and proportion which the portraiture of the living people +acquires when it is aided by historical knowledge and imagination. + +Lastly, besides this awakened historical sense, and this quickening of +imaginative sensibility to the message of nature, the Romantic revival +brought to literature a revival of the sense of the connection between +the visible world and another world which is unseen. The supernatural +which in all but the crudest of mechanisms had been out of English +literature since _Macbeth_, took hold on the imaginations of authors, +and brought with it a new subtlety and a new and nameless horror and +fascination. There is nothing in earlier English literature to set +beside the strange and terrible indefiniteness of the _Ancient Mariner_, +and though much in this kind has been written since, we have not got far +beyond the skill and imagination with which Coleridge and Scott worked +on the instinctive fears that lie buried in the human mind. + +Of all these aspects of the revival, however, the new sensitiveness and +accessibility to the influences of external nature was the most +pervasive and the most important. Wordsworth speaks for the love that is +in homes where poor men lie, the daily teaching that is in + + "Woods and rills; +The silence that is in the starry sky, +The peace that is among the lonely hills." + +Shelley for the wildness of the west wind, and the ubiquitous spiritual +emotion which speaks equally in the song of a skylark or a political +revolution. Byron for the swing and roar of the sea. Keats for verdurous +glooms and winding mossy ways. Scott and Coleridge, though like Byron +they are less with nature than with romance, share the same communion. + +This imaginative sensibility of the romantics not only deepened their +communion with nature, it brought them into a truer relation with what +had before been created in literature and art. The romantic revival is +the Golden Age of English criticism; all the poets were critics of one +sort or another--either formally in essays and prefaces, or in passing +and desultory flashes of illumination in their correspondence. +Wordsworth, in his prefaces, in his letter to a friend of Burns which +contains such a breadth and clarity of wisdom on things that seem alien +to his sympathies, even in some of his poems; Coleridge, in his +_Biographia Literaria_, in his notes on Shakespeare, in those rhapsodies +at Highgate which were the basis for his recorded table talk; Keats in +his letters; Shelley in his _Defence of Poetry_; Byron in his satires +and journals; Scott in those lives of the novelists which contain so +much truth and insight into the works of fellow craftsmen--they are all +to be found turning the new acuteness of impression which was in the air +they breathed, to the study of literature, as well as to the study of +nature. Alongside of them were two authors, Lamb and Hazlitt, whose bent +was rather critical than creative, and the best part of whose +intelligence and sympathy was spent on the sensitive and loving +divination of our earlier literature. With these two men began the +criticism of acting and of pictorial art that have developed since into +two of the main kinds of modern critical writing. + +Romantic criticism, both in its end and its method, differs widely from +that of Dr. Johnson and his school. Wordsworth and Coleridge were +concerned with deep-seated qualities and temperamental differences. +Their critical work revolved round their conception of the fancy and the +imagination, the one dealing with nature on the surface and decorating +it with imagery, the other penetrating to its deeper significances. +Hazlitt and Lamb applied their analogous conception of wit as a lower +quality than humour, in the same fashion. Dr. Johnson looked on the +other hand for correctness of form, for the subordination of the parts +to the whole, for the self-restraint and good sense which common manners +would demand in society, and wisdom in practical life. His school cared +more for large general outlines than for truth in detail. They would not +permit the idiosyncrasy of a personal or individual point of view: hence +they were incapable of understanding lyricism, and they preferred those +forms of writing which set themselves to express the ideas and feelings +that most men may be supposed to have in common. Dr. Johnson thought a +bombastic and rhetorical passage in Congreve's _Mourning Bride_ better +than the famous description of Dover cliff in _King Lear_. "The crows, +sir," he said of the latter, "impede your fall." Their town breeding, +and possibly, as we saw in the case of Dr. Johnson, an actual physical +disability, made them distrust any clear and sympathetic rendering of +the sense impressions which nature creates. One cannot imagine Dr. +Johnson caring much for the minute observations of Tennyson's nature +poems, or delighting in the verdurous and mossy alleys of Keats. His +test in such a case would be simple; he would not have liked to have +been in such places, nor reluctantly compelled to go there would he in +all likelihood have had much to say about them beyond that they were +damp. For the poetry--such as Shelley's--which worked by means of +impalpable and indefinite suggestion, he would, one may conceive, have +cared even less. New modes of poetry asked of critics new sympathies and +a new way of approach. But it is time to turn to the authors themselves. + + +(2) + +The case of Wordsworth is peculiar. In his own day he was vilified and +misunderstood; poets like Byron, whom most of us would now regard simply +as depending from the school he created, sneered at him. Shelley and +Keats failed to understand him or his motives; he was suspected of +apostasy, and when he became poet laureate he was written off as a +turn-coat who had played false to the ideals of his youth. Now common +opinion regards him as a poet above all the others of his age, and +amongst all the English poets standing beside Milton, but a step below +Shakespeare himself--and we know more about him, more about the +processes by which his soul moved from doubts to certainties, from +troubles to triumph, than we do about any other author we have. This +knowledge we have from the poem called, _The Prelude_, which was +published after his death. It was designed to be only the opening and +explanatory section of a philosophical poem, which was never completed. +Had it been published earlier it would have saved Wordsworth from the +coldness and neglect he suffered at the hands of younger men like +Shelley; it might even have made their work different from what it is. +It has made Wordsworth very clear to us now. + +Wordsworth is that rarest thing amongst poets, a complete innovator. He +looked at things in a new way. He found his subjects in new places; and +he put them into a new poetic form. At the turning point of his life, in +his early manhood, he made one great discovery, had one great vision. By +the light of that vision and to communicate that discovery he wrote his +greatest work. By and by the vision faded, the world fell back into the +light of common day, his philosophy passed from discovery to acceptance, +and all unknown to him his pen fell into a common way of writing. The +faculty of reading which has added fuel to the fire of so many waning +inspirations was denied him. He was much too self-centred to lose +himself in the works of others. Only the shock of a change of +environment--a tour in Scotland, or abroad--shook him into his old +thrill of imagination, so that a few fine things fitfully illumine the +enormous and dreary bulk of his later work. If we lost all but the +_Lyrical Ballads_, the poems of 1804, and the _Prelude_, and the +_Excursion_, Wordsworth's position as a poet would be no lower than it +is now, and he would be more readily accepted by those who still find +themselves uncertain about him. + +The determining factor in his career was the French Revolution--that +great movement which besides re-making France and Europe, made our very +modes of thinking anew. While an undergraduate in Cambridge Wordsworth +made several vacation visits to France. The first peaceful phase of the +Revolution was at its height; France and the assembly were dominated by +the little group of revolutionary orators who took their name from the +south-western province from which most of them came, and with this +group--the Girondists--Wordsworth threw in his lot. Had he remained he +would probably have gone with them to the guillotine. As it was, the +commands of his guardian brought him back to England, and he was forced +to contemplate from a distance the struggle in which he burned to take +an active part. One is accustomed to think of Wordsworth as a mild old +man, but such a picture if it is thrown back as a presentment of the +Wordsworth of the nineties is a far way from the truth. This darkly +passionate man tortured himself with his longings and his horror. War +came and the prayers for victory in churches found him in his heart +praying for defeat; then came the execution of the king; then the plot +which slew the Gironde. Before all this Wordsworth trembled as Hamlet +did when he learned the ghost's story. His faith in the world was +shaken. First his own country had taken up arms against what he believed +to be the cause of liberty. Then faction had destroyed his friends whom +he believed to be its standard bearers. What was in the world, in +religion, in morality that such things could be? In the face of this +tremendous problem, Wordsworth, unlike Hamlet, was resolute and +determined. It was, perhaps, characteristic of him that in his desire to +get his feet on firm rock again he fled for a time to the exactest of +sciences--to mathematics. But though he got certainties there, they must +have been, one judges, certainties too arid for his thirsting mind. Then +he made his great discovery--helped to it, perhaps, by his sister +Dorothy and his friend Coleridge--he found nature, and in nature, peace. + +Not a very wonderful discovery, you will say, but though the cleansing +and healing force of natural surroundings on the mind is a familiar +enough idea in our own day, that is only because Wordsworth found it. +When he gave his message to the world it was a new message. It is worth +while remembering that it is still an unaccepted one. Most of his +critics still consider it only Wordsworth's fun when he wrote: + +"One impulse from the vernal wood + Can teach us more of man, + Of moral evil and of good, + Than all the sages can." + +Yet Wordsworth really believed that moral lessons and ideas were to be +gathered from trees and stones. It was the main part of his teaching. He +claimed that his own morality had been so furnished him, and he wrote +his poetry to convince other people that what had been true for him +could be true for them too. + +For him life was a series of impressions, and the poet's duty was to +recapture those impressions, to isolate them and brood over them, till +gradually as a result of his contemplation emotion stirred again--an +emotion akin to the authentic thrill that had excited him when the +impression was first born in experience. Then poetry is made; this +emotion "recollected" as Wordsworth said (we may add, recreated) "in +tranquillity" passes into enduring verse. He treasured numberless +experiences of this kind in his own life. Some of them are set forth in +the _Prelude_, that for instance on which the poem _The Thorn_ in the +_Lyrical Ballads_ is based; they were one or other of them the occasion +of most of his poems; the best of them produced his finest work--such a +poem for instance as _Resolution and Independence_ or _Gipsies_, where +some chance sight met with in one of the poet's walks is brooded over +till it becomes charged with a tremendous significance for him and for +all the world. If we ask how he differentiated his experiences, which +had most value for him, we shall find something deficient. That is to +say, things which were unique and precious to him do not always appear +so to his readers. He counted as gold much that we regard as dross. But +though we may differ from his judgments, the test which he applied to +his recollected impressions is clear. He attached most value to those +which brought with them the sense of an indwelling spirit, transfusing +and interpenetrating all nature, transfiguring with its radiance, rocks +and fields and trees and the men and women who lived close enough to +them to partake of their strength--the sense, as he calls it in his +_Lines above Tintern Abbey_ of something "more deeply interfused" by +which all nature is made one. Sometimes, as in the hymn to Duty, it is +conceived as law. Duty before whom the flowers laugh, is the daughter of +the voice of God, through whom the most ancient heavens are fresh and +strong. But in most of his poems its ends do not trouble; it is +omnipresent; it penetrates everything and transfigures everything; it is +God. It was Wordsworth's belief that the perception of this indwelling +spirit weakened as age grew. For a few precious and glorious years he +had the vision + +"When meadow, grove, and stream, + The earth, and every common sight + To me did seem + Apparelled in celestial light, + The glory and the freshness of a dream." + +Then as childhood, when "these intimations of immortality," this +perception of the infinite are most strong, passed further and further +away, the vision faded and he was left gazing in the light of common +day. He had his memories and that was all. + +There is, of course, more in the matter than this, and Wordsworth's +beliefs were inextricably entangled with the conception which Coleridge +borrowed from German philosophy. + +"We receive but what we give" + +wrote Coleridge to his friend, + +"And in our life alone doth Nature live." + +And Wordsworth came to know that the light he had imagined to be +bestowed, was a light reflected from his own mind. It is easy to pass +from criticism to metaphysics where Coleridge leads, and wise not to +follow. + +If Wordsworth represents that side of the Romantic Revival which is best +described as the return to Nature, Coleridge has justification for the +phrase "Renascence of Wonder." He revived the supernatural as a literary +force, emancipated it from the crude mechanism which had been applied to +it by dilettantes like Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe, and invested +it instead with that air of suggestion and indefiniteness which gives +the highest potency to it in its effect on the imagination. But +Coleridge is more noteworthy for what he suggested to others than for +what he did in himself. His poetry is, even more than Wordsworth's, +unequal; he is capable of large tracts of dreariness and flatness; he +seldom finished what he began. The _Ancient Mariner_, indeed, which was +the fruit of his close companionship with Wordsworth, is the only +completed thing of the highest quality in the whole of his work. +_Christabel_ is a splendid fragment; for years the first part lay +uncompleted and when the odd accident of an evening's intoxication led +him to commence the second, the inspiration had fled. For the second +part, by giving to the fairy atmosphere of the first a local habitation +and a name, robbed it of its most precious quality; what it gave in +exchange was something the public could get better from Scott. _Kubla +Khan_ went unfinished because the call of a friend broke the thread of +the reverie in which it was composed. In the end came opium and oceans +of talk at Highgate and fouled the springs of poetry. Coleridge never +fulfilled the promise of his early days with Wordsworth. "He never spoke +out." But it is on the lines laid down by his share in the pioneer work +rather than on the lines of Wordsworth's that the second generation of +Romantic poets--that of Shelley and Keats--developed. + +The work of Wordsworth was conditioned by the French Revolution but it +hardly embodied the revolutionary spirit. What he conceived to be its +excesses revolted him, and though he sought and sang freedom, he found +it rather in the later revolt of the nationalities against the +Revolution as manifested in Napoleon himself. The spirit of the +revolution, as it was understood in France and in Europe, had to wait +for Shelley for its complete expression. Freedom is the breath of his +work--freedom not only from the tyranny of earthly powers, but from the +tyranny of religion, expressing itself in republicanism, in atheism, and +in complete emancipation from the current moral code both in conduct and +in writing. The reaction which had followed the overthrow of Napoleon at +Waterloo, sent a wave of absolutism and repression all over Europe, +Italy returned under the heel of Austria; the Bourbons were restored in +France; in England came the days of Castlereagh and Peterloo. The poetry +of Shelley is the expression of what the children of the revolution--men +and women who were brought up in and believed the revolutionary +gospel--thought about these things. + +But it is more than that. Of no poet in English, nor perhaps in any +other tongue, could it be said with more surety, that the pursuit of the +spirit of beauty dominates all his work. For Shelley it interfused all +nature and to possess it was the goal of all endeavour. The visible +world and the world of thought mingle themselves inextricably in his +contemplation of it. For him there is no boundary-line between the two, +the one is as real and actual as the other. In his hands that old trick +of the poets, the simile, takes on a new and surprising form. He does +not enforce the creations of his imagination by the analogy of natural +appearances; his instinct is just the opposite--to describe and illumine +nature by a reference to the creatures of thought. Other poets, Keats +for instance, or Tennyson, or the older poets like Dante and Homer, +might compare ghosts flying from an enchanter like leaves flying before +the wind. They might describe a poet wrapped up in his dreams as being +like a bird singing invisible in the brightness of the sky. But Shelley +can write of the west wind as + +"Before whose unseen presence the leaves, dead, + Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing," + +and he can describe a skylark in the heavens as + +"Like a poet hidden + In the light of thought." + +Of all English poets he is the most completely lyrical. Nothing that he +wrote but is wrought out of the anguish or joy of his own heart. + +"Most wretched souls," + +he writes + +"Are cradled into poetry by wrong + They learn in suffering what they teach in song." + +Perhaps his work is too impalpable and moves in an air too rarefied. It +sometimes lacks strength. It fails to take grip enough of life. Had he +lived he might have given it these things; there are signs in his last +poems that he would have given it. But he could hardly have bettered the +sheer and triumphant lyricism of _The Skylark_, of some of his choruses, +and of the _Ode to Dejection_, and of the _Lines written on the Eugenoen +hills_. + +If the Romantic sense of the one-ness of nature found its highest +exponent in Shelley, the Romantic sensibility to outward impressions +reached its climax in Keats. For him life is a series of sensations, +felt with almost febrile acuteness. Records of sight and touch and smell +crowd every line of his work; the scenery of a garden in Hampstead +becomes like a landscape in the tropics, so extraordinary vivid and +detailed is his apprehension and enjoyment of what it has to give him. +The luxuriance of his sensations is matched by the luxuriance of his +powers of expression. Adjectives heavily charged with messages for the +senses, crowd every line of his work, and in his earlier poems overlay +so heavily the thought they are meant to convey that all sense of +sequence and structure is apt to be smothered under their weight. Not +that consecutive thought claims a place in his conception of his poetry. +His ideal was passive contemplation rather than active mental exertion. +"O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts," he exclaims in one +of his letters; and in another, "It is more noble to sit like Jove than +to fly like Mercury." His work has one message and one only, the +lastingness of beauty and its supreme truth. It is stated in _Endymion_ +in lines that are worn bare with quotation. It is stated again, at the +height of his work in his greatest ode, + +"Beauty is truth, truth beauty: that is all +We know on earth and all we need to know." + +His work has its defects; he died at twenty-six so it would be a miracle +if it were not so. He lacks taste and measure; he offends by an +over-luxuriousness and sensuousness; he fails when he is concerned with +flesh and blood; he is apt, as Mr. Robert Bridges has said, "to class +women with roses and sweetmeats." But in his short life he attained with +surprising rapidity and completeness to poetic maturity, and +perhaps from no other poet could we find things to match his +greatest--_Hyperion, Isabella_, the _Eve of St. Agnes_ and +the _Odes_. + +There remains a poet over whom opinion is more sharply divided than it +is about any other writer in English. In his day Lord Byron was the +idol, not only of his countrymen, but of Europe. Of all the poets of +the time he was, if we except Scott, whose vogue he eclipsed, the only +one whose work was universally known and popular. Everybody read him; he +was admired not only by the multitude and by his equals, but by at least +one who was his superior, the German poet Goethe, who did not hesitate +to say of him that he was the greatest talent of the century Though this +exalted opinion still persists on the Continent, hardly anyone could be +found in England to subscribe to it now. Without insularity, we may +claim to be better judges of authors in our own tongue than foreign +critics, however distinguished and comprehending. How then shall be +explained Lord Byron's instant popularity and the position he won? What +were the qualities which gave him the power he enjoyed? + +In the first place he appealed by virtue of his subject-matter--the +desultory wanderings of _Childe Harold_ traversed ground every mile of +which was memorable to men who had watched the struggle which had been +going on in Europe with scarcely a pause for twenty years. Descriptive +journalism was then and for nearly half a century afterwards unknown, +and the poem by its descriptiveness, by its appeal to the curiosity of +its readers, made the same kind of success that vividly written special +correspondence would to-day, the charm of metre super-added. Lord Byron +gave his readers something more, too, than mere description. He added to +it the charm of a personality, and when that personality was enforced by +a title, when it proclaimed its sorrows as the age's sorrows, endowed +itself with an air of symbolism and set itself up as a kind of scapegoat +for the nation's sins, its triumph was complete. Most men have from time +to time to resist the temptation to pose to themselves; many do not even +resist it. For all those who chose to believe themselves blighted by +pessimism, and for all the others who would have loved to believe it, +Byron and his poetry came as an echo of themselves. Shallow called to +shallow. Men found in him, as their sons found more reputably in +Tennyson, a picture of what they conceived to be the state of their own +minds. + +But he was not altogether a man of pretence. He really and passionately +loved freedom; no one can question his sincerity in that. He could be a +fine and scathing satirist; and though he was careless, he had great +poetic gifts. + + +(3) + +The age of the Romantic Revival was one of poetry rather than of prose; +it was in poetry that the best minds of the time found their means of +expression. But it produced prose of rare quality too, and there is +delightful reading in the works of its essayists and occasional writers. +In its form the periodical essay had changed little since it was first +made popular by Addison and Steele. It remained, primarily, a vehicle +for the expression of a personality, and it continued to seek the +interests of its readers by creating or suggesting an individuality +strong enough to carry off any desultory adventure by the mere force of +its own attractiveness. Yet there is all the difference in the world +between Hazlitt and Addison, or Lamb and Steele. The _Tatler_ and the +_Spectator_ leave you with a sense of artifice; Hazlitt and Lamb leave +you with a grip of a real personality--in the one case very vigorous and +combative, in the other set about with a rare plaintiveness and +gentleness, but in both absolutely sincere. Addison is gay and witty and +delightful but he only plays at being human; Lamb's essays--the +translation into print of a heap of idiosyncrasies and oddities, and +likes and dislikes, and strange humours--come straight and lovably from +a human soul. + +The prose writers of the romantic movement brought back two things into +writing which had been out of it since the seventeenth century. They +brought back egotism and they brought back enthusiasm. They had the +confidence that their own tastes and experiences were enough to interest +their readers; they mastered the gift of putting themselves on paper. +But there is one wide difference between them and their predecessors. +Robert Burton was an egotist but he was an unconscious one; the same is, +perhaps, true though much less certainly of Sir Thomas Browne. In Lamb +and Hazlitt and De Quincey egotism was deliberate, consciously assumed, +the result of a compelling and shaping art. If one reads Lamb's earlier +essays and prose pieces one can see the process at work--watch him +consciously imitating Fuller, or Burton, or Browne, mirroring their +idiosyncrasies, making their quaintnesses and graces his own. By the +time he came to write the _Essays of Elia_, he had mastered the personal +style so completely that his essays seem simply the overflow of talk. +They are so desultory; they move from one subject to another so +waywardly--such an essay as a _Chapter on Ears_, for instance, passing +with the easy inconsequence of conversation from anatomy through organ +music to beer--when they quote, as they do constantly, it is +incorrectly, as in the random reminiscences of talk. Here one would say +is the cream risen to the surface of a full mind and skimmed at one +taking. How far all this is from the truth we know--know, too, how for +months he polished and rewrote these magazine articles, rubbing away +roughnesses and corners, taking off the traces of logical sequences and +argument, till in the finished work of art he mimicked inconsequence so +perfectly that his friends might have been deceived. And the personality +he put on paper was partly an artistic creation, too. In life Lamb was a +nervous, easily excitable and emotional man; his years were worn with +the memory of a great tragedy and the constantly impending fear of a +repetition of it. One must assume him in his way to have been a good man +of business--he was a clerk in the India House, then a throbbing centre +of trade, and the largest commercial concern in England, and when he +retired his employers gave him a very handsome pension. In the early +portrait by Hazlitt there is a dark and gleaming look of fire and +decision. But you would never guess it from his books. There he is the +gentle recluse, dreaming over old books, old furniture, old prints, old +plays and play-bills; living always in the past, loving in the town +secluded byways like the Temple, or the libraries of Oxford Colleges, +and in the country quiet and shaded lanes, none of the age's enthusiasm +for mountains in his soul. When he turned critic it was not to discern +and praise the power and beauty in the works of his contemporaries but +to rediscover and interpret the Elizabethan and Jacobean romantic plays. + +This quality of egotism Lamb shares with other writers of the time, with +De Quincey, for instance, who left buried in work which is extensive and +unequal, much that lives by virtue of the singular elaborateness and +loftiness of the style which he could on occasion command. For the +revival of enthusiasm one must turn to Hazlitt, who brought his +passionate and combative disposition to the service of criticism, and +produced a series of studies remarkable for their earnestness and their +vigour, and for the essential justness which they display despite the +prejudice on which each of them was confessedly based. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + + +THE VICTORIAN AGE + +(1) + +Had it not been that with two exceptions all the poets of the Romantic +Revival died early, it might be more difficult to draw a line between +their school and that of their successors than it is. As it happened, +the only poet who survived and wrote was Wordsworth, the oldest of them +all. For long before his death he did nothing that had one touch of the +fire and beauty of his earlier work. The respect he began, after a +lifetime of neglect, to receive in the years immediately before his +death, was paid not to the conservative laureate of 1848, but to the +revolutionary in art and politics of fifty years before. He had lived on +long after his work was done + +"To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost + That blamed the living man." + +All the others, Keats, Shelley, Byron were dead before 1830, and the +problem which might have confronted us had they lived, of adult work +running counter to the tendencies and ideals of youth, does not exist +for us. Keats or Shelley might have lived as long as Carlyle, with whom +they were almost exactly contemporary; had they done so, the age of the +Romantic Revival and the Victorian age would have been united in the +lives of authors who were working in both. We should conceive that is, +the whole period as one, just as we conceive of the Renaissance in +England, from Surrey to Shirley, as one. As it is, we have accustomed +ourselves to a strongly marked line of division. A man must be on either +one side or the other; Wordsworth, though he wrote on till 1850, is on +the further side, Carlyle, though he was born in the same year as Keats, +on the hither side. Still the accident of length of days must not blind +us to the fact that the Victorian period, though in many respects its +ideals and modes of thinking differed from those of the period which +preceded it, is essentially an extension of the Romantic Revival and not +a fresh start. The coherent inspiration of romanticism disintegrated +into separate lines of development, just as in the seventeenth century +the single inspiration of the Renaissance broke into different schools. +Along these separate lines represented by such men as Browning, the +Pre-Raphaelites, Arnold, and Meredith, literature enriched and +elaborated itself into fresh forms. None the less, every author in each +of these lines of literary activity invites his readers to understand +his direct relations to the romantic movement. Rossetti touches it +through his original, Keats; Arnold through Goethe and Byron; Browning +first through Shelley and then in item after item of his varied +subject-matter. + +In one direction the Victorian age achieved a salient and momentous +advance. The Romantic Revival had been interested in nature, in the +past, and in a lesser degree in art, but it had not been interested in +men and women. To Wordsworth the dalesmen of the lakes were part of the +scenery they moved in; he saw men as trees walking, and when he writes +about them as in such great poems as _Resolution and Independence_, the +_Brothers_, or _Michael_, it is as natural objects he treats them, +invested with the lonely remoteness that separates them from the +complexities and passions of life as it is lived. They are there, you +feel, to teach the same lesson as the landscape teaches in which they +are set. The passing of the old Cumberland beggar through villages and +past farmsteads, brings to those who see him the same kind of +consolation as the impulses from a vernal wood that Wordsworth +celebrated in his purely nature poetry. Compare with Wordsworth, +Browning, and note the fundamental change in the attitude of the poet +that his work reveals. _Pippa Passes_ is a poem on exactly the same +scheme as the _Old Cumberland Beggar_, but in treatment no two things +could be further apart. The intervention of Pippa is dramatic, and +though her song is in the same key as the wordless message of +Wordsworth's beggar she is a world apart from him, because she is +something not out of natural history, but out of life. The Victorian age +extended the imaginative sensibility which its predecessor had brought +to bear on nature and history, to the complexities of human life. It +searched for individuality in character, studied it with a loving +minuteness, and built up out of its discoveries amongst men and women a +body of literature which in its very mode of conception was more closely +related to life, and thus the object of greater interest and excitement +to its readers, than anything which had been written in the previous +ages. It is the direct result of this extension of romanticism that the +novel became the characteristic means of literary expression of the +time, and that Browning, the poet who more than all others represents +the essential spirit of his age, should have been as it were, a novelist +in verse. Only one other literary form, indeed, could have ministered +adequately to this awakened interest, but by some luck not easy to +understand, the drama, which might have done with greater economy and +directness the work the novel had to do, remained outside the main +stream of literary activity. To the drama at last it would seem that we +are returning, and it may be that in the future the direct +representation of the clash of human life which is still mainly in the +hands of our novelists, may come back to its own domain. + +The Victorian age then added humanity to nature and art as the +subject-matter of literature. But it went further than that. For the +first time since the Renaissance, came an era which was conscious of +itself as an epoch in the history of mankind, and confident of its +mission. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries revolutionized +cosmography, and altered the face of the physical world. The nineteenth +century, by the discoveries of its men of science, and by the remarkable +and rapid succession of inventions which revolutionized the outward face +of life, made hardly less alteration in accepted ways of thinking. The +evolutionary theory, which had been in the air since Goethe, and to +which Darwin was able to give an incontrovertible basis of scientific +fact, profoundly influenced man's attitude to nature and to religion. +Physical as apart from natural science made scarcely less advance, and +instead of a world created in some fixed moment of time, on which had +been placed by some outward agency all the forms and shapes of nature +that we know, came the conception of a planet congealing out of a +nebula, and of some lower, simpler and primeval form of life multiplying +and diversifying itself through succeeding stages of development to form +both the animal and the vegetable world. This conception not only +enormously excited and stimulated thought, but it gave thinkers a +strange sense of confidence and certainty not possessed by the age +before. Everything seemed plain to them; they were heirs of all the +ages. Their doubts were as certain as their faith. + +"There lives more faith in honest doubt + Believe me than in half the creeds." + +said Tennyson; "honest doubt," hugged with all the certainty of a +revelation, is the creed of most of his philosophical poetry, and what +is more to the point was the creed of the masses that were beginning to +think for themselves, to whose awakening interest his work so strongly +appealed. There were no doubt, literary side-currents. Disraeli survived +to show that there were still young men who thought Byronically. +Rossetti and his school held themselves proudly aloof from the +rationalistic and scientific tendencies of the time, and found in the +Middle ages, better understood than they had been either by Coleridge or +Scott, a refuge from a time of factories and fact. The Oxford movement +ministered to the same tendencies in religion and philosophy; but it is +the scientific spirit, and all that the scientific spirit implied, its +certain doubt, its care for minuteness, and truth of observation, its +growing interest in social processes, and the conditions under which +life is lived, that is the central fact in Victorian literature. + +Tennyson represents more fully than any other poet this essential spirit +of the age. If it be true, as has been often asserted, that the spirit +of an age is to be found best in the work of lesser men, his complete +identity with the thought of his time is in itself evidence of his +inferiority to his contemporary, Browning. Comparison between the two +men seem inevitable; they were made by readers when _In Memoriam_ and +_Men and Women_ came hot from the press, and they have been made ever +since. There could, of course, scarcely be two men more dissimilar, +Tennyson elaborating and decorating the obvious; Browning delving into +the esoteric and the obscure, and bringing up strange and unfamiliar +finds; Tennyson in faultless verse registering current newly accepted +ways of thought; Browning in advance thinking afresh for himself, +occupied ceaselessly in the arduous labour of creating an audience fit +to judge him. The age justified the accuracy with which Tennyson +mirrored it, by accepting him and rejecting Browning. It is this very +accuracy that almost forces us at this time to minimise and dispraise +Tennyson's work. We have passed from Victorian certainties, and so he is +apt when he writes in the mood of _Locksley Hall_ and the rest, to +appear to us a little shallow, a little empty, and a little pretentious. + +His earlier poetry, before he took upon himself the burden of the age, +is his best work, and it bears strongly marked upon it the influence of +Keats. Such a poem for instance as _Oenone_ shows an extraordinarily +fine sense of language and melody, and the capacity caught from Keats of +conveying a rich and highly coloured pictorial effect. No other poet, +save Keats, has had a sense of colour so highly developed as Tennyson's. +From his boyhood he was an exceedingly close and sympathetic observer of +the outward forms of nature, and he makes a splendid use of what his +eyes had taught him in these earlier poems. Later his interest in +insects and birds and flowers outran the legitimate opportunity he +possessed of using it in poetry. It was his habit, his son tells us, to +keep notebooks of things he had observed in his garden or in his walks, +and to work them up afterwards into similes for the _Princess_ and the +_Idylls of the King_. Read in the books written by admirers, in which +they have been studied and collected (there are several of them) these +similes are pleasing enough; in the text where they stand they are apt +to have the air of impertinences, beautiful and extravagant +impertinences no doubt, but alien to their setting. In one of the +_Idylls of the King_ the fall of a drunken knight from his horse is +compared to the fall of a jutting edge of cliff and with it a lance-like +fir-tree, which Tennyson had observed near his home, and one cannot +resist the feeling that the comparison is a thought too great for the +thing it was meant to illustrate. So, too, in the _Princess_ when he +describes a handwriting, + +"In such a hand as when a field of corn + Bows all its ears before the roaring East." + +he is using up a sight noted in his walks and transmuted into poetry on +a trivial and frivolous occasion. You do not feel, in fact, that the +handwriting visualized spontaneously called up the comparison; you are +as good as certain that the simile existed waiting for use before the +handwriting was thought of. + +The accuracy of his observation of nature, his love of birds and larvae +is matched by the carefulness with which he embodies, as soon as ever +they were made, the discoveries of natural and physical science. +Nowadays, possibly because these things have become commonplace to us, +we may find him a little school-boy-like in his pride of knowledge. He +knows that + +"This world was once a fluid haze of light, + Till toward the centre set the starry tides + And eddied wild suns that wheeling cast + The planets." + +just as he knows what the catkins on the willows are like, or the names +of the butterflies: but he is capable, on occasion of "dragging it in," +as in + +"The nebulous star we call the sun, + If that hypothesis of theirs be sound." + +from the mere pride in his familiarity with the last new thing. His +dealings with science, that is, no more than his dealings with nature, +have that inevitableness, that spontaneous appropriateness that we feel +we have a right to ask from great poetry. + +Had Edgar Allan Poe wanted an example for his theory of the +impossibility of writing, in modern times, a long poem, he might have +found it in Tennyson. His strength is in his shorter pieces; even where +as in _In Memoriam_ he has conceived and written something at once +extended and beautiful, the beauty lies rather in the separate parts; +the thing is more in the nature of a sonnet sequence than a continuous +poem. Of his other larger works, the _Princess_, a scarcely happy blend +between burlesque in the manner of the _Rape of the Lock_, and a serious +apostleship of the liberation of women, is solely redeemed by these +lyrics. Tennyson's innate conservatism hardly squared with the +liberalising tendencies he caught from the more advanced thought of his +age, in writing it. Something of the same kind is true of _Maud_, which +is a novel told in dramatically varied verse. The hero is morbid, his +social satire peevish, and a story which could have been completely +redeemed by the ending (the death of the hero), which artistic fitness +demands, is of value for us now through its three amazing songs, in +which the lyric genius of Tennyson reached its finest flower. It cannot +be denied, either, that he failed--though magnificently--in the _Idylls +of the King_. The odds were heavily against him in the choice of a +subject. Arthur is at once too legendary and too shadowy for an epic +hero, and nothing but the treatment that Milton gave to Satan (i.e. flat +substitution of the legendary person by a newly created character) could +fit him for the place. Even if Arthur had been more promising than he +is, Tennyson's sympathies were fundamentally alien from the moral and +religious atmosphere of Arthurian romance. His robust Protestantism left +no room for mysticism; he could neither appreciate nor render the +mystical fervour and exultation which is in the old history of the Holy +Grail. Nor could he comprehend the morality of a society where courage, +sympathy for the oppressed, loyalty and courtesy were the only essential +virtues, and love took the way of freedom and the heart rather than the +way of law. In his heart Tennyson's attitude to the ideals of chivalry +and the old stories in which they are embodied differed probably very +little from that of Roger Ascham, or of any other Protestant Englishman; +when he endeavoured to make an epic of them and to fasten to it an +allegory in which Arthur should typify the war of soul against sense, +what happened was only what might have been expected. The heroic +enterprise failed, and left us with a series of mid-Victorian novels in +verse in which the knights figure as heroes of the generic mid-Victorian +type. + +But if he failed in his larger poems, he had a genius little short of +perfect in his handling of shorter forms. The Arthurian story which +produced only middling moralizing in the _Idylls_, gave us as well the +supremely written Homeric episode of the _Morte d'Arthur_, and the sharp +and defined beauty of _Sir Galahad_ and the _Lady of Shallott_. Tennyson +had a touch of the pre-Raphaelite faculty of minute painting in words, +and the writing of these poems is as clear and naïve as in the best +things of Rossetti. He had also what neither Rossetti nor any of his +contemporaries in verse, except Browning, had, a fine gift of +understanding humanity. The peasants of his English idylls are conceived +with as much breadth of sympathy and richness of humour, as purely and +as surely, as the peasants of Chaucer or Burns. A note of passionate +humanity is indeed in all his work. It makes vivid and intense his +scholarly handling of Greek myth; always the unchanging human aspect of +it attracts him most, in Oenone's grief, in the indomitableness of +Ulysses, the weariness and disillusionment in Tithonus. It has been the +cause of the comfort he has brought to sorrow; none of his generation +takes such a human attitude to death. Shelley could yearn for the +infinite, Browning treat it as the last and greatest adventure, Arnold +meet it clear eyed and resigned. To Wordsworth it is the mere return of +man the transient to Nature the eternal. + +"No motion has she now; no force, + She neither hears nor sees, + Roiled round in earth's diurnal course + With rocks and stones and trees." + +To Tennyson it brings the fundamental human home-sickness for familiar +things. + +"Ah, sad and strange as on dark summer dawns, + The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds + To dying ears when unto dying eyes + The casement slowly grows a glimmering square." + +It is an accent which wakes an echo in a thousand hearts. + + +(2) + +While Tennyson, in his own special way and, so to speak, in +collaboration with the spirit of the age, was carrying on the work of +Romanticism on its normal lines, Browning was finding a new style and a +new subject matter. In his youth he had begun as an imitator of Shelley, +and _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_ remain to show what the influence of the +"sun-treader" was on his poetry. But as early as his second publication, +_Bells and Pomegranates_, he had begun to speak for himself, and with +_Men and Women_, a series of poems of amazing variety and brilliance, he +placed himself unassailably in the first rank. Like Tennyson's, his +genius continued high and undimmed while life was left him. _Men and +Women_ was followed by an extraordinary narrative poem, _The Ring and +the Book_, and it by several volumes of scarcely less brilliance, the +last of which appeared on the very day of his death. + +Of the two classes into which, as we saw when we were studying Burns, +creative artists can be divided, Browning belongs to that one which +makes everything new for itself, and has in consequence to educate the +readers by whom its work can alone be judged. He was an innovator in +nearly everything he did; he thought for himself; he wrote for himself, +and in his own way. And because he refused to follow ordinary modes of +writing, he was and is still widely credited with being tortured and +obscure.[7] The charge of obscurity is unfortunate because it tends to +shut off from him a large class of readers for whom he has a sane and +special and splendid message. + +[Footnote 7: The deeper causes of Browning's obscurity have been +detailed in Chapter iv. of this book. It may be added for the benefit of +the reader who fights shy on the report of it, that in nine cases out of +ten, it arises simply from his colloquial method; we go to him expecting +the smoothness and completeness of Tennyson; we find in him the +irregularities, the suppressions, the quick changes of talk--the +clipped, clever talk of much idea'd people who hurry breathlessly from +one aspect to another of a subject.] + +His most important innovation in form was his device of the dramatic +lyric. What interested him in life was men and women, and in them, not +their actions, but the motives which governed their actions. To lay bare +fully the working of motive in a narrative form with himself as narrator +was obviously impossible; the strict dramatic form, though he attained +some success in it, does not seem to have attracted him, probably +because in it the ultimate stress must be on the thing done rather than +the thing thought; there remained, therefore, of the ancient forms of +poetry, the lyric. The lyric had of course been used before to express +emotions imagined and not real to the poet himself; Browning was the +first to project it to express imagined emotions of men and women, +whether typical or individual, whom he himself had created. Alongside +this perversion of the lyric, he created a looser and freer form, the +dramatic monologue, in which most of his most famous poems, _Cleon, +Sludge the Medium, Bishop Blougram's Apology_, etc., are cast. In the +convention which Browning established in it, all kinds of people are +endowed with a miraculous articulation, a new gift of tongues; they +explain themselves, their motives, the springs of those motives (for in +Browning's view every thought and act of a man's life is part of an +interdependent whole), and their author's peculiar and robust philosophy +of life. Out of the dramatic monologues he devised the scheme of _The +Ring and the Book_, a narrative poem in which the episodes, and not the +plot, are the basis of the structure, and the story of a trifling and +sordid crime is set forth as it appeared to the minds of the chief +actors in succession. To these new forms he added the originality of an +extraordinary realism in style. Few poets have the power by a word, a +phrase, a flash of observation in detail to make you see the event as +Browning makes you see it. + +Many books have been written on the philosophy of Browning's poetry. +Stated briefly its message is that of an optimism which depends on a +recognition of the strenuousness of life. The base of his creed, as of +Carlyle's, is the gospel of labour; he believes in the supreme moral +worth of effort. Life is a "training school" for a future existence, +and our place in it depends on the courage and strenuousness with which +we have laboured here. Evil is in the world only as an instrument in the +process of development; by conquering it we exercise our spiritual +faculties the more. Only torpor is the supreme sin, even as in _The +Statue and the Bust_ where effort would have been to a criminal end. + +"The counter our lovers staked was lost + As surely as if it were lawful coin: + And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost + Was, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, + Though the end in sight was a crime, I say." + +All the other main ideas of his poetry fit with perfect consistency on +to his scheme. Love, the manifestation of a man's or a woman's nature, +is the highest and most intimate relationship possible, for it is an +opportunity--the highest opportunity--for spiritual growth. It can reach +this end though an actual and earthly union is impossible. + +"She has lost me, I have gained her; + Her soul's mine and thus grown perfect, + I shall pass my life's remainder. + Life will just hold out the proving + Both our powers, alone and blended: + And then come the next life quickly! + This world's use will have been ended." + +It follows that the reward of effort is the promise of immortality, and +that for each man, just because his thoughts and motives taken together +count, and not one alone, there is infinite hope. + +The contemporaries of Tennyson and Browning in poetry divide themselves +into three separate schools. Nearest to them in temper is the school of +Matthew Arnold and Clough; they have the same quick sensitiveness to the +intellectual tendencies of the age, but their foothold in a time of +shifting and dissolving creeds is a stoical resignation very different +from the buoyant optimism of Browning, or Tennyson's mixture of science +and doubt and faith. Very remote from them on the other hand is the +backward-gazing mediaevalism of Rossetti and his circle, who revived +(Rossetti from Italian sources, Morris from Norman) a Middle age which +neither Scott nor Coleridge had more than partially and brokenly +understood. The last school, that to which Swinburne and Meredith with +all their differences unite in belonging, gave up Christianity with +scarcely so much as a regret, + +"We have said to the dream that caress'd and the dread that smote us, +Good-night and good-bye." + +and turned with a new hope and exultation to the worship of our +immemorial mother the earth. In both of them, the note of enthusiasm for +political liberty which had been lost in Wordsworth after 1815, and was +too early extinguished with Shelley, was revived by the Italian +Revolution in splendour and fire. + + +(3) + +As one gets nearer one's own time, a certain change comes insensibly +over one's literary studies. Literature comes more and more to mean +imaginative literature or writing about imaginative literature. The mass +of writing comes to be taken not as literature, but as argument or +information; we consider it purely from the point of view of its subject +matter. A comparison will make this at once clear. When a man reads +Bacon, he commonly regards himself as engaged in the study of English +literature; when he reads Darwin he is occupied in the study of natural +science. A reader of Bacon's time would have looked on him as we look on +Darwin now. + +The distinction is obviously illogical, but a writer on English +literature within brief limits is forced to bow to it if he wishes his +book to avoid the dreariness of a summary, and he can plead in +extenuation the increased literary output of the later age, and the +incompleteness with which time so far has done its work in sifting the +memorable from the forgettable, the ephemeral from what is going to +last. The main body of imaginative prose literature--the novel--is +treated of in the next chapter and here no attempt will be made to deal +with any but the admittedly greatest names. Nothing can be said, for +instance, of that fluent journalist and biased historian Macaulay, nor +of the mellifluousness of Newman, nor of the vigour of Kingsley or +Maurice; nor of the writings, admirable in their literary qualities of +purity and terseness, of Darwin or Huxley; nor of the culture and +apostleship of Matthew Arnold. These authors, one and all, interpose no +barrier, so to speak, between their subject-matter and their readers; +you are not when you read them conscious of a literary intention, but of +some utilitarian one, and as an essay on English literature is by no +means a handbook to serious reading they will be no more mentioned here. + +In the case of one nineteenth century writer in prose, this method of +exclusion cannot apply. Both Carlyle and Ruskin were professional men of +letters; both in the voluminous compass of their works touched on a +large variety of subjects; both wrote highly individual and peculiar +styles; and both without being either professional philosophers or +professional preachers, were as every good man of letters, whether he +denies it or not, is and must be, lay moralists and prophets. Of the two +Ruskin is plain and easily read, and he derives his message; Carlyle, +his original, is apt to be tortured and obscure. Inside the body of his +work the student of nineteenth century literature is probably in need of +some guidance; outside so far as prose is concerned he can fend for +himself. + +As we saw, Carlyle was the oldest of the Victorians; he was over forty +when the Queen came to the throne. Already his years of preparation in +Scotland, town and country, were over, and he had settled in that famous +little house in Chelsea which for nearly half a century to come was to +be one of the central hearths of literary London. More than that, he had +already fully formed his mode of thought and his peculiar style. _Sartor +Resartus_ was written and published serially before the Queen came to +the throne; the _French Revolution_ came in the year of her accession at +the very time that Carlyle's lectures were making him a fashionable +sensation; most of his miscellaneous essays had already appeared in the +reviews. But with the strict Victorian era, as if to justify the usually +arbitrary division of literary history by dynastic periods, there came a +new spirit into his work. For the first time he applied his peculiar +system of ideas to contemporary politics. _Chartism_ appeared in 1839; +_Past and Present_, which does the same thing as _Chartism_ in an +artistic form, three years later. They were followed by one other +book--_Latter Day Pamphlets_--addressed particularly to contemporary +conditions, and by two remarkable and voluminous historical works. Then +came the death of his wife, and for the last fifteen years of his life +silence, broken only briefly and at rare intervals. + +The reader who comes to Carlyle with preconceived notions based on what +he has heard of the subject-matter of his books is certain to be +surprised by what he finds. There are histories in the canon of his +works and pamphlets on contemporary problems, but they are composed on a +plan that no other historian and no other social reformer would own. A +reader will find in them no argument, next to no reasoning, and little +practical judgment. Carlyle was not a great "thinker" in the strictest +sense of that term. He was under the control, not of his reason, but of +his emotions; deep feeling, a volcanic intensity of temperament flaming +into the light and heat of prophecy, invective, derision, or a simple +splendour of eloquence, is the characteristic of his work. Against +cold-blooded argument his passionate nature rose in fierce rebellion; +he had no patience with the formalist or the doctrinaire. Nor had he the +faculty of analysis; his historical works are a series of pictures or +tableaux, splendidly and vividly conceived, and with enormous colour and +a fine illusion of reality, but one-sided as regards the truth. In his +essays on hero-worship he contents himself with a noisy reiteration of +the general predicate of heroism; there is very little except their +names and the titles to differentiate one sort of hero from another. His +picture of contemporary conditions is not so much a reasoned indictment +as a wild and fantastic orgy of epithets: "dark simmering pit of +Tophet," "bottomless universal hypocrisies," and all the rest. In it all +he left no practical scheme. His works are fundamentally not about +politics or history or literature, but about himself. They are the +exposition of a splendid egotism, fiercely enthusiastic about one or two +deeply held convictions; their strength does not lie in their matter of +fact. + +This is, perhaps, a condemnation of him in the minds of those people who +ask of a social reformer an actuarially accurate scheme for the +abolition of poverty, or from a prophet a correct forecast of the result +of the next general election. Carlyle has little help for these and no +message save the disconcerting one of their own futility. His message is +at once larger and simpler, for though his form was prose, his soul was +a poet's soul, and what he has to say is a poet's word. In a way, it is +partly Wordsworth's own. The chief end of life, his message is, is the +performance of duty, chiefly the duty of work. "Do thy little stroke of +work; this is Nature's voice, and the sum of all the commandments, to +each man." All true work is religion, all true work is worship; to +labour is to pray. And after work, obedience the best discipline, so he +says in _Past and Present_, for governing, and "our universal duty and +destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break." Carlyle asked of every +man, action and obedience and to bow to duty; he also required of him +sincerity and veracity, the duty of being a real and not a sham, a +strenuous warfare against cant. The historical facts with which he had +to deal he grouped under these embracing categories, and in the _French +Revolution_, which is as much a treasure-house of his philosophy as a +history, there is hardly a page on which they do not appear. +"Quack-ridden," he says, "in that one word lies all misery whatsoever." + +These bare elemental precepts he clothes in a garment of amazing and +bizarre richness. There is nothing else in English faintly resembling +the astonishing eccentricity and individuality of his style. Gifted with +an extraordinarily excitable and vivid imagination; seeing things with +sudden and tremendous vividness, as in a searchlight or a lightning +flash, he contrived to convey to his readers his impressions full +charged with the original emotion that produced them, and thus with the +highest poetic effect. There is nothing in all descriptive writing to +match the vividness of some of the scenes in the _French Revolution_ or +in the narrative part of _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_, or more +than perhaps in any of his books, because in it he was setting down +deep-seated impressions of his boyhood rather than those got from +brooding over documents, in _Sartor Resartus_. Alongside this unmatched +pictorial vividness and a quite amazing richness and rhythm of language, +more surprising and original than anything out of Shakespeare, there are +of course, striking defects--a wearisome reiteration of emphasis, a +clumsiness of construction, a saddening fondness for solecisms and +hybrid inventions of his own. The reader who is interested in these (and +every one who reads him is forced to become so) will find them +faithfully dealt with in John Sterling's remarkable letter (quoted in +Carlyle's _Life of Sterling_) on _Sartor Resartus_. But gross as they +are, and frequently as they provide matter for serious offence, these +eccentricities of language link themselves up in a strange indissoluble +way with Carlyle's individuality and his power as an artist. They are +not to be imitated, but he would be much less than he is without them, +and they act by their very strength and pungency as a preservative of +his work. That of all the political pamphlets which the new era of +reform occasioned, his, which were the least in sympathy with it and are +the furthest off the main stream of our political thinking now, alone +continue to be read, must be laid down not only to the prophetic fervour +and fire of their inspiration but to the dark and violent magic of their +style. + + + + +CHAPTER IX + + +THE NOVEL + +(1) + +The faculty for telling stories is the oldest artistic faculty in the +world, and the deepest implanted in the heart of man. Before the rudest +cave-pictures were scratched on the stone, the story-teller, it is not +unreasonable to suppose, was plying his trade. All early poetry is +simply story-telling in verse. Stories are the first literary interest +of the awakening mind of a child. As that is so, it is strange that the +novel, which of all literary ways of story-telling seems closest to the +unstudied tale-spinning of talk, should be the late discovery that it +is. Of all the main forms into which the literary impulse moulds the +stuff of imagination, the novel is the last to be devised. The drama +dates from prehistoric times, so does the epic, the ballad and the +lyric. The novel, as we know it, dates practically speaking from 1740. +What is the reason it is so late in appearing? + +The answer is simply that there seems no room for good drama and good +fiction at the same time in literature; drama and novels cannot exist +side by side, and the novel had to wait for the decadence of the drama +before it could appear and triumph. If one were to make a table of +succession for the various kinds of literature as they have been used +naturally and spontaneously (not academically), the order would be the +epic, the drama, the novel; and it would be obvious at once that the +order stood for something more than chronological succession, and that +literature in its function as a representation and criticism of life +passed from form to form in the search of greater freedom, greater +subtlety, and greater power. At present we seem to be at the climax of +the third stage in this development; there are signs that the fourth is +on the way, and that it will be a return to drama, not to the old, +formal, ordered kind, but, something new and freer, ready to gather up +and interpret what there is of newness and freedom in the spirit of man +and the society in which he lives. + +The novel, then, had to wait for the drama's decline, but there was +literary story-telling long before that. There were mediaeval romances +in prose and verse; Renaissance pastoral tales, and stories of +adventure; collections, plenty of them, of short stories like +Boccaccio's, and those in Painter's _Palace of Pleasure_. But none of +these, not even romances which deal in moral and sententious advice like +_Euphues_, approach the essence of the novel as we know it. They are all +(except _Euphues_, which is simply a framework of travel for a book of +aphorisms) simple and objective; they set forth incidents or series of +incidents; long or short they are anecdotes only--they take no account +of character. It was impossible we should have the novel as distinct +from the tale, till stories acquired a subjective interest for us; till +we began to think about character and to look at actions not only +outwardly, but within at their springs. + +As has been stated early in this book, it was in the seventeenth century +that this interest in character was first wakened. Shakespeare had +brought to the drama, which before him was concerned with actions viewed +outwardly, a psychological interest; he had taught that "character is +destiny," and that men's actions and fates spring not from outward +agencies, but from within in their own souls. The age began to take a +deep and curious interest in men's lives; biography was written for the +first time and autobiography; it is the great period of memoir-writing +both in England and France; authors like Robert Burton came, whose +delight it was to dig down into human nature in search for oddities and +individualities of disposition; humanity as the great subject of enquiry +for all men, came to its own. All this has a direct bearing on the birth +of the novel. One transient form of literature in the seventeenth +century--the Character--is an ancestor in the direct line. The +collections of them--Earle's _Microcosmography_ is the best--are not +very exciting reading, and they never perhaps quite succeeded in +naturalizing a form borrowed from the later age of Greece, but their +importance in the history of the novel to come is clear. Take them and +add them to the story of adventure--_i.e._, introduce each fresh person +in your plot with a description in the character form, and the step you +have made towards the novel is enormous; you have given to plot which +was already there, the added interest of character. + +That, however, was not quite how the thing worked in actual fact. At the +heels of the "Character" came the periodical essay of Addison and +Steele. Their interest in contemporary types was of the same quality as +Earle's or Hall's, but they went a different way to work. Where these +compressed and cultivated a style which was staccato and epigrammatic, +huddling all the traits of their subject in short sharp sentences that +follow each other with all the brevity and curtness of items in a +prescription, Addison and Steele observed a more artistic plan. They +made, as it were, the prescription up, adding one ingredient after +another slowly as the mixture dissolved. You are introduced to Sir Roger +de Coverley, and to a number of other typical people, and then in a +series of essays which if they were disengaged from their setting would +be to all intents a novel and a fine one, you are made aware one by one +of different traits in his character and those of his friends, each +trait generally enshrined in an incident which illustrates it; you get +to know them, that is, gradually, as you would in real life, and not all +in a breath, in a series of compressed statements, as is the way of the +character writers. With the Coverley essays in the _Spectator_, the +novel in one of its forms--that in which an invisible and all knowing +narrator tells a story in which some one else whose character he lays +bare for us is the hero--is as good as achieved. + +Another manner of fiction--the autobiographical--had already been +invented. It grew directly out of the public interest in autobiography, +and particularly in the tales of their voyages which the discoverers +wrote and published on their return from their adventures. Its +establishment in literature was the work of two authors, Bunyan and +Defoe. The books of Bunyan, whether they are told in the first person or +no, are and were meant to be autobiographical; their interest is a +subjective interest. Here is a man who endeavours to interest you, not +in the character of some other person he has imagined or observed, but +in himself. His treatment of it is characteristic of the awakening +talent for fiction of his time. _The Pilgrim's Progress_ is begun as an +allegory, and so continues for a little space till the story takes hold +of the author. When it does, whether he knew it or not, allegory goes to +the winds. But the autobiographical form of fiction in its highest art +is the creation of Defoe. He told stories of adventure, incidents +modelled on real life as many tellers of tales had done before him, but +to the form as he found it he super-added a psychological interest--the +interest of the character of the narrator. He contrived to observe in +his writing a scrupulous and realistic fidelity and appropriateness to +the conditions in which the story was to be told. We learn about +Crusoe's island, for instance, gradually just as Crusoe learns of it +himself, though the author is careful by taking his narrator up to a +high point of vantage the day after his arrival, that we shall learn +the essentials of it, as long as verisimilitude is not sacrificed, as +soon as possible. It is the paradox of the English novel that these our +earliest efforts in fiction were meant, unlike the romances which +preceded them, to pass for truth. Defoe's _Journal of the Plague Year_ +was widely taken as literal fact, and it is still quoted as such +occasionally by rash though reputable historians. So that in England the +novel began with realism as it has culminated, and across two centuries +Defoe and the "naturalists" join hands. Defoe, it is proper also in this +place to notice, fixed the peculiar form of the historical novel. In his +_Memoirs of a Cavalier_, the narrative of an imaginary person's +adventures in a historical setting is interspersed with the entrance of +actual historical personages, exactly the method of historical romancing +which was brought to perfection by Sir Walter Scott. + + +(2) + +In the eighteenth century came the decline of the drama for which the +novel had been waiting. By 1660 the romantic drama of Elizabeth's time +was dead; the comedy of the Restoration which followed, witty and +brilliant though it was, reflected a society too licentious and +artificial to secure it permanence; by the time of Addison play-writing +had fallen to journey-work, and the theatre to openly expressed +contempt. When Richardson and Fielding published their novels there was +nothing to compete with fiction in the popular taste. It would seem as +though the novel had been waiting for this favourable circumstance. In a +sudden burst of prolific inventiveness, which can be paralleled in all +letters only by the period of Marlowe and Shakespeare, masterpiece after +masterpiece poured from the press. Within two generations, besides +Richardson and Fielding came Sterne and Goldsmith and Smollett and Fanny +Burney in naturalism, and Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe in the new +way of romance. Novels by minor authors were published in thousands as +well. The novel, in fact, besides being the occasion of literature of +the highest class, attracted by its lucrativeness that under-current of +journey-work authorship which had hitherto busied itself in poetry or +plays. Fiction has been its chief occupation ever since. + +Anything like a detailed criticism or even a bare narrative of this +voluminous literature is plainly impossible without the limits of a +single chapter. Readers must go for it to books on the subject. It is +possible here merely to draw attention to those authors to whom the +English novel as a more or less fixed form is indebted for its peculiar +characteristics. Foremost amongst these are Richardson and Fielding; +after them there is Walter Scott. After him, in the nineteenth century, +Dickens and Meredith and Mr. Hardy; last of all the French realists and +the new school of romance. To one or other of these originals all the +great authors in the long list of English novelists owe their method +and their choice of subject-matter. + +With Defoe fiction gained verisimilitude, it ceased to deal with the +incredible; it aimed at exhibiting, though in strange and memorable +circumstances, the workings of the ordinary mind. It is Richardson's +main claim to fame that he contrived a form of novel which exhibited an +ordinary mind working in normal circumstances, and that he did this with +a minuteness which till then had never been thought of and has not since +been surpassed. His talent is very exactly a microscopical talent; under +it the common stuff of life separated from its surroundings and +magnified beyond previous knowledge, yields strange and new and deeply +interesting sights. He carried into the study of character which had +begun in Addison with an eye to externals and eccentricities, a minute +faculty of inspection which watched and recorded unconscious mental and +emotional processes. + +To do this he employed a method which was, in effect, a compromise +between that of the autobiography, and that of the tale told by an +invisible narrator. The weakness of the autobiography is that it can +write only of events within the knowledge of the supposed speaker, and +that consequently the presentation of all but one of the characters of +the book is an external presentation. We know, that is, of Man Friday +only what Crusoe could, according to realistic appropriateness, tell us +about him. We do not know what he thought or felt within himself. On +the other hand the method of invisible narration had not at his time +acquired the faculty which it possesses now of doing Friday's thinking +aloud or exposing fully the workings of his mind. So that Richardson, +whose interests were psychological, whose strength and talent lay in the +presentation of the states of mind appropriate to situations of passion +or intrigue, had to look about him for a new form, and that form he +found in the novel of letters. In a way, if the end of a novel be the +presentation not of action, but of the springs of action; if the +external event is in it always of less importance than the emotions +which conditioned it, and the emotions which it set working, the novel +of letters is the supreme manner for fiction. Consider the possibilities +of it; there is a series of events in which A, B, and C are concerned. +Not only can the outward events be narrated as they appeared to all +three separately by means of letters from each to another, or to a +fourth party, but the motives of each and the emotions which each +experiences as a result of the actions of the others or them all, can be +laid bare. No other method can wind itself so completely into the +psychological intricacies and recesses which lie behind every event. Yet +the form, as everybody knows, has not been popular; even an expert +novel-reader could hardly name off-hand more than two or three examples +of it since Richardson's day. Why is this? Well, chiefly it is because +the mass of novelists have not had Richardson's knowledge of, or +interest in, the psychological under side of life, and those who have, +as, amongst the moderns, Henry James, have devised out of the convention +of the invisible narrator a method by which they can with greater +economy attain in practice fairly good results. For the mere narration +of action in which the study of character plays a subsidiary part, it +was, of course, from the beginning impossible. Scott turned aside at the +height of his power to try it in "Redgauntlet"; he never made a second +attempt. + +For Richardson's purpose, it answered admirably, and he used it with +supreme effect. Particularly he excelled in that side of the novelist's +craft which has ever since (whether because he started it or not) proved +the subtlest and most attractive, the presentation of women. Richardson +was one of those men who are not at their ease in other men's society, +and whom other men, to put it plainly, are apt to regard as coxcombs and +fools. But he had a genius for the friendship and confidence of women. +In his youth he wrote love-letters for them. His first novel grew out of +a plan to exhibit in a series of letters the quality of feminine virtue, +and in its essence (though with a ludicrous, and so to speak +"kitchen-maidish" misunderstanding of his own sex) adheres to the plan. +His second novel, which designs to set up a model man against the +monster of iniquity in _Pamela_, is successful only so far as it +exhibits the thoughts and feelings of the heroine whom he ultimately +marries. His last, _Clarissa Harlowe_ is a masterpiece of sympathetic +divination into the feminine mind. _Clarissa_ is, as has been well said, +the "Eve of fiction, the prototype of the modern heroine"; feminine +psychology as good as unknown before (Shakespeare's women being the +"Fridays" of a highly intelligent Crusoe) has hardly been brought +further since. But _Clarissa_ is more than mere psychology; whether she +represents a contemporary tendency or whether Richardson made her so, +she starts a new epoch. "This," says Henley, "is perhaps her finest +virtue as it is certainly her greatest charm; that until she set the +example, woman in literature as a self-suffering individuality, as an +existence endowed with equal rights to independence--of choice, +volition, action--with man had not begun to be." She had not begun to be +it in life either. + +What Richardson did for the subtlest part of a novelist's business, his +dealings with psychology, Fielding did for the most necessary part of +it, the telling of the story. Before him hardly any story had been told +well; even if it had been plain and clear as in Bunyan and Defoe it had +lacked the emphasis, the light and shade of skilful grouping. On the +"picaresque" (so the autobiographical form was called abroad) convention +of a journey he grafted a structure based in its outline on the form of +the ancient epic. It proved extraordinarily suitable for his purpose. +Not only did it make it easy for him to lighten his narrative with +excursions in a heightened style, burlesquing his origins, but it gave +him at once the right attitude to his material. He told his story as +one who knew everything; could tell conversations and incidents as he +conceived them happening, with no violation of credibility, nor any +strain on his reader's imagination, and without any impropriety could +interpose in his own person, pointing things to the reader which might +have escaped his attention, pointing at parallels he might have missed, +laying bare the irony or humour beneath a situation. He allowed himself +digressions and episodes, told separate tales in the middle of the +action, introduced, as in Partridge's visit to the theatre, the added +piquancy of topical allusion; in fact he did anything he chose. And he +laid down that free form of the novel which is characteristically +English, and from which, in its essence, no one till the modern realists +has made a serious departure. + +In the matter of his novels, he excels by reason of a Shakespearean +sense of character and by the richness and rightness of his faculty of +humour. He had a quick eye for contemporary types, and an amazing power +of building out of them men and women whose individuality is full and +rounded. You do not feel as you do with Richardson that his fabric is +spun silk-worm-wise out of himself; on the contrary you know it to be +the fruit of a gentle and observant nature, and a stock of fundamental +human sympathy. His gallery of portraits, Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams, +Parson Trulliber, Jones, Blifil, Partridge, Sophia and her father and +all the rest are each of them minute studies of separate people; they +live and move according to their proper natures; they are conceived not +from without but from within. Both Richardson and Fielding were +conscious of a moral intention; but where Richardson is sentimental, +vulgar, and moral only so far as it is moral (as in _Pamela_), to +inculcate selling at the highest price or (as in _Grandison_) to avoid +temptations which never come in your way, Fielding's morality is fresh +and healthy, and (though not quite free from the sentimentality of +scoundrelism) at bottom sane and true. His knowledge of the world kept +him right. His acquaintance with life is wide, and his insight is keen +and deep. His taste is almost as catholic as Shakespeare's own, and the +life he knew, and which other men knew, he handles for the first time +with the freedom and imagination of an artist. + +Each of the two--Fielding and Richardson--had his host of followers. +Abroad Richardson won immediate recognition; in France Diderot went so +far as to compare him with Homer and Moses! He gave the first impulse to +modern French fiction. At home, less happily, he set going the +sentimental school, and it was only when that had passed away that--in +the delicate and subtle character-study of Miss Austen--his influence +comes to its own. Miss Austen carried a step further, and with an +observation which was first hand and seconded by intuitive knowledge, +Richardson's analysis of the feminine mind, adding to it a delicate and +finely humorous feeling for character in both sexes which was all her +own. Fielding's imitators (they number each in his own way, and with his +own graces or talent added his rival Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith) +kept the way which leads to Thackeray and Dickens--the main road of the +English Novel. + +That road was widened two ways by Sir Walter Scott. The historical +novel, which had been before his day either an essay in anachronism with +nothing historical in it but the date, or a laborious and uninspired +compilation of antiquarian research, took form and life under his hands. +His wide reading, stored as it was in a marvellously retentive memory, +gave him all the background he needed to achieve a historical setting, +and allowed him to concentrate his attention on the actual telling of +his story; to which his genial and sympathetic humanity and his quick +eye for character gave a humorous depth and richness that was all his +own. It is not surprising that he made the historical novel a literary +vogue all over Europe. In the second place, he began in his novels of +Scottish character a sympathetic study of nationality. He is not, +perhaps, a fair guide to contemporary conditions; his interests were too +romantic and too much in the past to catch the rattle of the looms that +caught the ear of Galt, and if we want a picture of the great fact of +modern Scotland, its industrialisation, it is to Galt we must go. But in +his comprehension of the essential character of the people he has no +rival; in it his historical sense seconded his observation, and the two +mingling gave us the pictures whose depth of colour and truth make his +Scottish novels, _Old Mortality, The Antiquary, Redgauntlet_, the +greatest things of their kind in literature. + + +(3) + +The peculiarly national style of fiction founded by Fielding and carried +on by his followers reached its culminating point in _Vanity Fair_. In +it the reader does not seem to be simply present at the unfolding of a +plot the end of which is constantly present to the mind of the author +and to which he is always consciously working, every incident having a +bearing on the course of the action; rather he feels himself to be the +spectator of a piece of life which is too large and complex to be under +the control of a creator, which moves to its close not under the +impulsion of a directing hand, but independently impelled by causes +evolved in the course of its happening. With this added complexity goes +a more frequent interposition of the author in his own person--one of +the conventions as we have seen of this national style. Thackeray is +present to his readers, indeed, not as the manager who pulls the strings +and sets the puppets in motion, but as an interpreter who directs the +reader's attention to the events on which he lays stress, and makes them +a starting-point for his own moralising. This persistent +moralizing--sham cynical, real sentimental--this thumping of death-bed +pillows as in the dreadful case of Miss Crawley, makes Thackeray's use +of the personal interposition almost less effective than that of any +other novelist. Already while he was doing it, Dickens had conquered the +public; and the English novel was making its second fresh start. + +He is an innovator in more ways than one. In the first place he is the +earliest novelist to practise a conscious artistry of plot. _The Mystery +of Edwin Drood_ remains mysterious, but those who essay to conjecture +the end of that unfinished story have at last the surety that its end, +full worked out in all its details, had been in its author's mind before +he set pen to paper. His imagination was as diligent and as disciplined +as his pen, Dickens' practice in this matter could not be better put +than in his own words, when he describes himself as "in the first stage +of a new book, which consists in going round and round the idea, as you +see a bird in his cage go about and about his sugar before he touches +it." That his plots are always highly elaborated is the fruit of this +preliminary disciplined exercise of thought. The method is familiar to +many novelists now; Dickens was the first to put it into practice. In +the second place he made a new departure by his frankly admitted +didacticism and by the skill with which in all but two or three of his +books--_Bleak House_, perhaps, and _Little Dorrit_--he squared his +purpose with his art. Lastly he made the discovery which has made him +immortal. In him for the first time the English novel produced an +author who dug down into the masses of the people for his subjects; +apprehended them in all their inexhaustible character and humour and +pathos, and reproduced them with a lively and loving artistic skill. + +Dickens has, of course, serious faults. In particular, readers +emancipated by lapse of time from the enslavement of the first +enthusiasm, have quarrelled with the mawkishness and sentimentality of +his pathos, and with the exaggeration of his studies of character. It +has been said of him, as it has of Thackeray, that he could not draw a +"good woman" and that Agnes Copperfield, like Amelia Sedley, is a very +doll-like type of person. To critics of this kind it may be retorted +that though "good" and "bad" are categories relevant to melodrama, they +apply very ill to serious fiction, and that indeed to the characters of +any of the novelists--the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell or the like--who lay +bare character with fullness and intimacy, they could not well be +applied at all. The faultiness of them in Dickens is less than in +Thackeray, for in Dickens they are only incident to the scheme, which +lies in the hero (his heroes are excellent) and in the grotesque +characters, whereas in his rival they are in the theme itself. For his +pathos, not even his warmest admirer could perhaps offer a satisfactory +case. The charge of exaggeration however is another matter. To the +person who complains that he has never met Dick Swiveller or Micawber or +Mrs. Gamp the answer is simply Turner's to the sceptical critic of his +sunset, "Don't you wish you could?" To the other, who objects more +plausibly to Dickens's habit of attaching to each of his characters some +label which is either so much flaunted all through that you cannot see +the character at all or else mysteriously and unaccountably disappears +when the story begins to grip the author, Dickens has himself offered an +amusing and convincing defence. In the preface to _Pickwick_ he answers +those who criticised the novel on the ground that Pickwick began by +being purely ludicrous and developed into a serious and sympathetic +individuality, by pointing to the analogous process which commonly takes +place in actual human relationships. You begin a new acquaintanceship +with perhaps not very charitable prepossessions; these later a deeper +and better knowledge removes, and where you have before seen an +idiosyncrasy you come to love a character. It is ingenious and it helps +to explain Mrs. Nickleby, the Pecksniff daughters, and many another. +Whether it is true or not (and it does not explain the faultiness of +such pictures as Carker and his kind) there can be no doubt that this +trick in Dickens of beginning with a salient impression and working +outward to a fuller conception of character is part at least of the +reason of his enormous hold upon his readers. No man leads you into the +mazes of his invention so easily and with such a persuasive hand. + +The great novelists who were writing contemporarily with him--the +Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot--it is impossible to deal with +here, except to say that the last is indisputably, because of her +inability to fuse completely art and ethics, inferior to Mrs. Gaskell or +to either of the Brontë sisters. Nor of the later Victorians who added +fresh variety to the national style can the greatest, Meredith, be more +than mentioned for the exquisiteness of his comic spirit and the brave +gallery of English men and women he has given us in what is, perhaps, +fundamentally the most English thing in fiction since Fielding wrote. +For our purpose Mr. Hardy, though he is a less brilliant artist, is more +to the point. His novels brought into England the contemporary pessimism +of Schopenhaur and the Russians, and found a home for it among the +English peasantry. Convinced that in the upper classes character could +be studied and portrayed only subjectively because of the artificiality +of a society which prevented its outlet in action, he turned to the +peasantry because with them conduct is the direct expression of the +inner life. Character could be shown working, therefore, not +subjectively but in the act, if you chose a peasant subject. His +philosophy, expressed in this medium, is sombre. In his novels you can +trace a gradual realization of the defects of natural laws and the +quandary men are put to by their operation. Chance, an irritating and +trifling series of coincidences, plays the part of fate. Nature seems to +enter with the hopelessness of man's mood. Finally the novelist turns +against life itself. "Birth," he says, speaking of Tess, "seemed to her +an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion whose gratuitousness nothing +in the result seemed to justify and at best could only palliate." It is +strange to find pessimism in a romantic setting; strange, too, to find a +paganism which is so little capable of light or joy. + + +(4) + +The characteristic form of English fiction, that in which the requisite +illusion of the complexity and variety of life is rendered by +discursiveness, by an author's licence to digress, to double back on +himself, to start may be in the middle of a story and work subsequently +to the beginning and the end; in short by his power to do whatever is +most expressive of his individuality, found a rival in the last twenty +years of the nineteenth century in the French Naturalistic or Realist +school, in which the illusion of life is got by a studied and sober +veracity of statement, and by the minute accumulation of detail. To the +French Naturalists a novel approached in importance the work of a man of +science, and they believed it ought to be based on documentary evidence, +as a scientific work would be. Above all it ought not to allow itself to +be coloured by the least gloss of imagination or idealism; it ought +never to shrink from a confrontation of the naked fact. On the contrary +it was its business to carry it to the dissecting table and there +minutely examine everything that lay beneath its surface. + +The school first became an English possession in the early translations +of the work of Zola; its methods were transplanted into English fiction +by Mr. George Moore. From his novels, both in passages of direct +statement and in the light of his practice, it is possible to gather +together the materials of a manifesto of the English Naturalistic +school. The naturalists complained that English fiction lacked +construction in the strictest sense; they found in the English novel a +remarkable absence of organic wholeness; it did not fulfil their first +and broadest canon of subject-matter--by which a novel has to deal in +the first place with a single and rhythmical series of events; it was +too discursive. They made this charge against English fiction; they also +retorted the charge brought by native writers and their readers against +the French of foulness, sordidness and pessimism in their view of life. +"We do not," says a novelist in one of Mr. Moore's books, "we do not +always choose what you call unpleasant subjects, but we do try to get to +the roots of things; and the basis of life being material and not +spiritual, the analyst sooner or later finds himself invariably handling +what this sentimental age calls coarse." "The novel," says the same +character, "if it be anything is contemporary history, an exact and +complete reproduction of the social surroundings of the age we live in." +That succinctly is the naturalistic theory of the novel as a work of +science--that as the history of a nation lies hidden often in social +wrongs and in domestic grief as much as in the movements of parties or +dynasties, the novelist must do for the former what the historian does +for the latter. It is his business in the scheme of knowledge of his +time. + +But the naturalists believed quite as profoundly in the novel as a work +of art. They claimed for their careful pictures of the grey and sad and +sordid an artistic worth, varying in proportion to the intensity of the +emotion in which the picture was composed and according to the picture's +truth, but in its essence just as real and permanent as the artistic +worth of romance. "Seen from afar," writes Mr. Moore, "all things in +nature are of equal worth; and the meanest things, when viewed with the +eyes of God, are raised to heights of tragic awe which conventionality +would limit to the deaths of kings and patriots." On such a lofty theory +they built their treatment and their style. It is a mistake to suppose +that the realist school deliberately cultivates the sordid or shocking. +Examine in this connection Mr. Moore's _Mummer's Wife_, our greatest +English realist novel, and for the matter of that one of the supreme +things in English fiction, and you will see that the scrupulous fidelity +of the author's method, though it denies him those concessions to a +sentimentalist or romantic view of life which are the common implements +of fiction, denies him no less the extremities of horror or +loathsomeness. The heroine sinks into the miserable squalor of a +dipsomaniac and dies from a drunkard's disease, but her end is shown as +the ineluctable consequence of her life, its early greyness and +monotony, the sudden shock of a new and strange environment and the +resultant weakness of will which a morbid excitability inevitably +brought about. The novel, that is to say, deals with a "rhythmical +series of events and follows them to their conclusion"; it gets at the +roots of things; it tells us of something which we know to be true in +life whether we care to read it in fiction or not. There is nothing in +it of sordidness for sordidness' sake nor have the realists any +philosophy of an unhappy ending. In this case the ending is unhappy +because the sequence of events admitted of no other solution; in others +the ending is happy or merely neutral as the preceding story decides. If +what one may call neutral endings predominate, it is because they +also--notoriously--predominate in life. But the question of unhappiness +or its opposite has nothing whatever to do with the larger matter of +beauty; it is the triumph of the realists that at their best they +discovered a new beauty in things, the loveliness that lies in obscure +places, the splendour of sordidness, humility, and pain. They have +taught us that beauty, like the Spirit, blows where it lists and we know +from them that the antithesis between realism and idealism is only on +their lower levels; at their summits they unite and are one. No true +realist but is an idealist too. + +Most of what is best in English fiction since has been directly +occasioned by their work; Gissing and Mr. Arnold Bennett may be +mentioned as two authors who are fundamentally realist in their +conception of the art of the novel, and the realist ideal partakes in a +greater or less degree in the work of nearly all our eminent novelists +to-day. But realism is not and cannot be interesting to the great +public; it portrays people as they are, not as they would like to be, +and where they are, not where they would like to be. It gives no +background for day-dreaming. Now literature (to repeat what has been +than more once stated earlier in this book) is a way of escape from life +as well as an echo or mirror of it, and the novel as the form of +literature which more than any other men read for pleasure, is the main +avenue for this escape. So that alongside this invasion of realism it is +not strange that there grew a revival in romance. + +The main agent of it, Robert Louis Stevenson, had the romantic strain in +him intensified by the conditions under which he worked; a +weak and anaemic man, he loved bloodshed as a cripple loves +athletics--passionately and with the intimate enthusiasm of make-believe +which an imaginative man can bring to bear on the contemplation of what +can never be his. His natural attraction for "redness and juice" in life +was seconded by a delightful and fantastic sense of the boundless +possibilities of romance in every-day things. To a realist a hansom-cab +driver is a man who makes twenty-five shillings a week, lives in a back +street in Pimlico, has a wife who drinks and children who grow up with +an alcoholic taint; the realist will compare his lot with other +cab-drivers, and find what part of his life is the product of the +cab-driving environment, and on that basis he will write his book. To +Stevenson and to the romanticist generally, a hansom cab-driver is a +mystery behind whose apparent commonplaceness lie magic possibilities +beyond all telling; not one but may be the agent of the Prince of +Bohemia, ready to drive you off to some mad and magic adventure in a +street which is just as commonplace to the outward eye as the cab-driver +himself, but which implicates by its very deceitful commonness whole +volumes of romance. The novel-reader to whom _Demos_ was the repetition +of what he had seen and known, and what had planted sickness in his +soul, found the _New Arabian Nights_ a refreshing miracle. Stevenson had +discovered that modern London had its possibilities of romance. To these +two elements of his romantic equipment must be added a third--travel. +Defoe never left England, and other early romanticists less gifted with +invention than he wrote from the mind's eye and from books. To +Stevenson, and to his successor Mr. Kipling, whose "discovery" of India +is one of the salient facts of modern English letters, and to Mr. Conrad +belongs the credit of teaching novelists to draw on experience for the +scenes they seek to present. A fourth element in the equipment of modern +romanticism--that which draws its effects from the "miracles" of modern +science, has been added since by Mr. H. G. Wells, in whose latest work +the realistic and romantic schools seem to have united. + + + + +CHAPTER X + + +THE PRESENT AGE + +We have carried our study down to the death of Ruskin and included in it +authors like Swinburne and Meredith who survived till recently; and in +discussing the novel we have included men like Kipling and Hardy--living +authors. It would be possible and perhaps safer to stop there and make +no attempt to bring writers later than these into our survey. To do so +is to court an easily and quickly stated objection. One is anticipating +the verdict of posterity. How can we who are contemporaries tell whether +an author's work is permanent or no? + +Of course, in a sense the point of view expressed by these questions is +true enough. It is always idle to anticipate the verdict of posterity. +Remember Matthew Arnold's prophecy that at the end of the nineteenth +century Wordsworth and Byron would be the two great names in Romantic +poetry. We are ten years and more past that date now, and so far as +Byron is concerned, at any rate, there is no sign that Arnold's +prediction has come true. But the obvious fact that we cannot do our +grandchildren's thinking for them, is no reason why we should refuse to +think for ourselves. No notion is so destructive to the formation of a +sound literary taste as the notion that books become literature only +when their authors are dead. Round us men and women are putting into +plays and poetry and novels the best that they can or know. They are +writing not for a dim and uncertain future but for us, and on our +recognition and welcome they depend, sometimes for their livelihood, +always for the courage which carries them on to fresh endeavour. +Literature is an ever-living and continuous thing, and we do it less +than its due service if we are so occupied reading Shakespeare and +Milton and Scott that we have no time to read Mr. Yeats, Mr. Shaw or Mr. +Wells. Students of literature must remember that classics are being +manufactured daily under their eyes, and that on their sympathy and +comprehension depends whether an author receives the success he merits +when he is alive to enjoy it. + +The purpose of this chapter, then, is to draw a rough picture of some of +the lines or schools of contemporary writing--of the writing mainly, +though not altogether, of living authors. It is intended to indicate +some characteristics of the general trend or drift of literary effort as +a whole. The most remarkable feature of the age, as far as writing is +concerned, is without doubt its inattention to poetry. Tennyson was a +popular author; his books sold in thousands; his lines passed into that +common conversational currency of unconscious quotation which is the +surest testimony to the permeation of a poet's influence. Even Browning, +though his popularity came late, found himself carried into all the +nooks and corners of the reading public. His robust and masculine +morality, understood at last, or expounded by a semi-priestly class of +interpreters, made him popular with those readers--and they are the +majority--who love their reading to convey a moral lesson, just as +Tennyson's reflection of his time's distraction between science and +religion endeared them to those who found in him an answer or at least +an echo to their own perplexities. A work widely different from either +of these, Fitzgerald's _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_, shared and has +probably exceeded their popularity for similar reasons. Its easy +pessimism and cult of pleasure, its delightful freedom from any demand +for continuous thought from its readers, its appeal to the indolence and +moral flaccidity which is implicit in all men, all contributed to its +immense vogue; and among people who perhaps did not fully understand it +but were merely lulled by its sonorousness, a knowledge of it has passed +for the insignia of a love of literature and the possession of literary +taste. But after Fitzgerald--who? What poet has commanded the ear of the +reading public or even a fraction of it? Not Swinburne certainly, partly +because of his undoubted difficulty, partly because of a suspicion held +of his moral and religious tenets, largely from material reasons quite +unconnected with the quality of his work; not Morris, nor his +followers; none of the so-called minor poets whom we shall notice +presently--poets who have drawn the moods that have nourished their work +from the decadents of France. Probably the only writer of verse who is +at the same time a poet and has acquired a large popularity and public +influence is Mr. Kipling. His work as a novelist we mentioned in the +last chapter. It remains to say something of his achievements in verse. + +Let us grant at once his faults. He can be violent, and over-rhetorical; +he belabours you with sense impressions, and with the polysyllabic +rhetoric he learned from Swinburne--and (though this is not the place +for a discussion of political ideas) he can offend by the sentimental +brutalism which too often passes for patriotism in his poetry. Not that +this last represents the total impression of his attitude as an +Englishman. His later work in poetry and prose, devoted to the +reconstruction of English history, is remarkable for the justness and +saneness of its temper. There are other faults--a lack of sureness in +taste is one--that could be mentioned but they do not affect the main +greatness of his work. He is great because he discovered a new +subject-matter, and because of the white heat of imagination which in +his best things he brought to bear on it and by which he transposed it +into poetry. It is Mr. Kipling's special distinction that the apparatus +of modern civilization--steam engines, and steamships, and telegraph +lines, and the art of flight--take on in his hands a poetic quality as +authentic and inspiring as any that ever was cast over the implements of +other and what the mass of men believe to have been more picturesque +days. Romance is in the present, so he teaches us, not in the past, and +we do it wrong to leave it only the territory we have ourselves +discarded in the advance of the race. That and the great discovery of +India--an India misunderstood for his own purposes no doubt, but still +the first presentiment of an essential fact in our modern history as a +people--give him the hold that he has, and rightly, over the minds of +his readers. + +It is in a territory poles apart from Mr. Kipling's that the main stream +of romantic poetry flows. Apart from the gravely delicate and scholarly +work of Mr. Bridges, and the poetry of some others who work separately +away from their fellows, English romantic poetry has concentrated itself +into one chief school--the school of the "Celtic Revival" of which the +leader is Mr. W.B. Yeats. Two sources went to its making. In its +inception, it arose out of a group of young poets who worked in a +conscious imitation of the methods of the French decadents; chiefly of +Baudelaire and Verlaine. As a whole their work was merely imitative and +not very profound, but each of them--Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson, +who are both now dead, and others who are still living--produced enough +to show that they had at their command a vein of poetry that might have +deepened and proved more rich had they gone on working it. One of them, +Mr. W.B. Yeats, by his birth and his reading in Irish legend and +folklore, became possessed of a subject-matter denied to his fellows, +and it is from the combination of the mood of the decadents with the +dreaminess and mystery of Celtic tradition and romance--a combination +which came to pass in his poetry--that the Celtic school has sprung. In +a sense it has added to the territory explored by Coleridge and Scott +and Morris a new province. Only nothing could be further from the +objectivity of these men, than the way in which the Celtic school +approaches its material. Its stories are clear to itself, it may be, but +not to its readers. Deirdre and Conchubar, and Angus and Maeve and +Dectora and all the shadowy figures in them scarcely become embodied. +Their lives and deaths and loves and hates are only a scheme on which +they weave a delicate and dim embroidery of pure poetry--of love and +death and old age and the passing of beauty and all the sorrows that +have been since the world began and will be till the world ends. If Mr. +Kipling is of the earth earthy, if the clangour and rush of the world is +in everything he writes, Mr. Yeats and his school live consciously +sequestered and withdrawn, and the world never breaks in on their +ghostly troubles or their peace. Poetry never fails to relate itself to +its age; if it is not with it, it is against it; it is never merely +indifferent. The poetry of these men is the denial, passionately made, +of everything the world prizes. While such a denial is sincere, as in +the best of them, then the verses they make are true and fine. But when +it is assumed, as in some of their imitators, then the work they did is +not true poetry. + +But the literary characteristic of the present age--the one which is +most likely to differentiate it from its predecessor, is the revival of +the drama. When we left it before the Commonwealth the great English +literary school of playwriting--the romantic drama--was already dead. It +has had since no second birth. There followed after it the heroic +tragedy of Dryden and Shadwell--a turgid, declamatory form of art +without importance--and two brilliant comic periods, the earlier and +greater that of Congreve and Wycherley, the later more sentimental with +less art and vivacity, that of Goldsmith and Sheridan. With Sheridan the +drama as a literary force died a second time. It has been born again +only in our own day. It is, of course, unnecessary to point out that the +writing of plays did not cease in the interval; it never does cease. The +production of dramatic journey-work has been continuous since the +re-opening of the theatres in 1660, and it is carried on as plentifully +as ever at this present time. Only side by side with it there has grown +up a new literary drama, and gradually the main stream of artistic +endeavour which for nearly a century has preoccupied itself with the +novel almost to the exclusion of other forms of art, has turned back to +the stage as its channel to articulation and an audience. An influence +from abroad set it in motion. The plays of Ibsen--produced, the best of +them, in the eighties of last century--came to England in the nineties. +In a way, perhaps, they were misunderstood by their worshippers hardly +less than by their enemies, but all excrescences of enthusiasm apart +they taught men a new and freer approach to moral questions, and a new +and freer dramatic technique. Where plays had been constructed on a +journeyman plan evolved by Labiche and Sardou--mid-nineteenth century +writers in France--a plan delighting in symmetry, close-jointedness, +false correspondences, an impossible use of coincidence, and a quite +unreal complexity and elaboration, they become bolder and less +artificial, more close to the likelihoods of real life. The gravity of +the problems with which they set themselves to deal heightened their +influence. In England men began to ask themselves whether the theatre +here too could not be made an avenue towards the discussion of living +difficulties, and then arose the new school of dramatists--of whom the +first and most remarkable is Mr. George Bernard Shaw. In his earlier +plays he set himself boldly to attack established conventions, and to +ask his audiences to think for themselves. _Arms and the Man_ dealt a +blow at the cheap romanticism with which a peace-living public invests +the profession of arms; _The Devil's Disciple_ was a shrewd criticism of +the preposterous self-sacrifice on which melodrama, which is the most +popular non-literary form of play-writing, is commonly based; _Mrs. +Warren's Profession_ made a brave and plain-spoken attempt to drag the +public face to face with the nauseous realities of prostitution; +_Widowers' Houses_ laid bare the sordidness of a Society which bases +itself on the exploitation of the poor for the luxuries of the rich. It +took Mr. Shaw close on ten years to persuade even the moderate number of +men and women who make up a theatre audience that his plays were worth +listening to. But before his final success came he had attained a +substantial popularity with the public which reads. Possibly his early +failure on the stage--mainly due to the obstinacy of playgoers immersed +in a stock tradition--was partly due also to his failure in constructive +power. He is an adept at tying knots and impatient of unravelling them; +his third acts are apt either to evaporate in talk or to find some +unreal and unsatisfactory solution for the complexity he has created. +But constructive weakness apart, his amazing brilliance and fecundity of +dialogue ought to have given him an immediate and lasting grip of the +stage. There has probably never been a dramatist who could invest +conversation with the same vivacity and point, the same combination of +surprise and inevitableness that distinguishes his best work. + +Alongside of Mr. Shaw more immediately successful, and not traceable to +any obvious influence, English or foreign, came the comedies of Oscar +Wilde. For a parallel to their pure delight and high spirits, and to the +exquisite wit and artifice with which they were constructed, one would +have to go back to the dramatists of the Restoration. To Congreve and +his school, indeed, Wilde belongs rather than to any later period. With +his own age he had little in common; he was without interest in its +social and moral problems; when he approved of socialism it was because +in a socialist state the artist might be absolved from the necessity of +carrying a living, and be free to follow his art undisturbed. He loved +to think of himself as symbolic, but all he symbolized was a fantasy of +his own creating; his attitude to his age was decorative and withdrawn +rather than representative. He was the licensed jester to society, and +in that capacity he gave us his plays. Mr. Shaw may be said to have +founded a school; at any rate he gave the start to Mr. Galsworthy and +some lesser dramatists. Wilde founded nothing, and his works remain as +complete and separate as those of the earlier artificial dramatists of +two centuries before. + +Another school of drama, homogeneous and quite apart from the rest, +remains. We have seen how the "Celtic Revival," as the Irish literary +movement has been called by its admirers, gave us a new kind of romantic +poetry. As an offshoot from it there came into being some ten years ago +an Irish school of drama, drawing its inspiration from two sources--the +body of the old Irish legends and the highly individualized and +richly-coloured life of the Irish peasants in the mountains of Wicklow +and of the West, a life, so the dramatists believed, still unspoiled by +the deepening influences of a false system of education and the wear +and tear of a civilization whose values are commercial and not spiritual +or artistic. The school founded its own theatre, trained its own actors, +fashioned its own modes of speech (the chief of which was a frank +restoration of rhythm in the speaking of verse and of cadence in prose), +and having all these things it produced a series of plays all directed +to its special ends, and all composed and written with a special +fidelity to country life as it has been preserved, or to what it +conceived to be the spirit of Irish folk-legend. It reached its zenith +quickly, and as far as the production of plays is concerned, it would +seem to be already in its decline. That is to say, what in the beginning +was a fresh and vivid inspiration caught direct from life has become a +pattern whose colours and shape can be repeated or varied by lesser +writers who take their teaching from the original discoverers. But in +the course of its brief and striking course it produced one great +dramatist--a writer whom already not three years after his death, men +instinctively class with the masters of his art. + +J.M. Synge, in the earlier years of his manhood, lived entirely abroad, +leading the life of a wandering scholar from city to city and country to +country till he was persuaded to give up the Continent and the criticism +and imitation of French literature, to return to England, and to go and +live on the Aran Islands. From that time till his death--some ten +years--he spent a large part of each year amongst the peasantry of the +desolate Atlantic coast and wrote the plays by which his name is known. +His literary output was not large, but he supplied the Irish dramatic +movement with exactly what it needed--a vivid contact with the realities +of life. Not that he was a mere student or transcriber of manners. His +wandering life among many peoples and his study of classical French and +German literature had equipped him as perhaps no other modern dramatist +has been equipped with an imaginative insight and a reach of perception +which enabled him to give universality and depth to his pourtrayal of +the peasant types around him. He got down to the great elemental forces +which throb and pulse beneath the common crises of everyday life and +laid them bare, not as ugly and horrible, but with a sense of their +terror, their beauty and their strength. His earliest play, _The Well of +the Saints_, treats of a sorrow that is as old as Helen of the vanishing +of beauty and the irony of fulfilled desire. The great realities of +death pass through the _Riders to the Sea_, till the language takes on a +kind of simplicity as of written words shrivelling up in a flame. _The +Playboy of the Western World_ is a study of character, terrible in its +clarity, but never losing the savour of imagination and of the +astringency and saltness that was characteristic of his temper. He had +at his command an instrument of incomparable fineness and range in the +language which he fashioned out the speech of the common people amongst +whom he lived. In his dramatic writings this language took on a kind of +rhythm which had the effect of producing a certain remoteness of the +highest possible artistic value. The people of his imagination appear a +little disembodied. They talk with that straightforward and simple kind +of innocency which makes strange and impressive the dialogue of +Maeterlinck's earlier plays. Through it, as Mr. Yeats has said, he saw +the subject-matter of his art "with wise, clear-seeing, unreflecting +eyes--and he preserved the innocence of good art in an age of reasons +and purposes." He had no theory except of his art; no "ideas" and no +"problems"; he did not wish to change anything or to reform anything; +but he saw all his people pass by as before a window, and he heard their +words. This resolute refusal to be interested in or to take account of +current modes of thought has been considered by some to detract from his +eminence. Certainly if by "ideas" we mean current views on society or +morality, he is deficient in them; only his very deficiency brings him +nearer to the great masters of drama--to Ben Johnson, to Cervantes, to +Molière--even to Shakespeare himself. Probably in no single case amongst +our contemporaries could a high and permanent place in literature be +prophesied with more confidence than in his. + +In the past it has seemed impossible for fiction and the drama, i.e. +serious drama of high literary quality, to flourish, side by side. It +seems as though the best creative minds in any age could find strength +for any one of these two great outlets for the activity of the creative +imagination. In the reign of Elizabeth the drama outshone fiction; in +the reign of Victoria the novel crowded out the drama. There are signs +that a literary era is commencing, in which the drama will again regain +to the full its position as a literature. More and more the bigger +creative artists will turn to a form which by its economy of means to +ends, and the chance it gives not merely of observing but of creating +and displaying character in action, has a more vigorous principle of +life in it than its rival. + + + + +BIBLIOGRAPHY + +It is best to study English literature one period, or, even in the case +of the greatest, one author at a time. In every case the student should +see to it that he knows the _text_ of his authors; a knowledge of what +critics have said about our poets is a poor substitute for a knowledge +of what they have said themselves. Poetry ought to be read slowly and +carefully, and the reader ought to pay his author the compliment of +crediting him with ideas as important and, on occasion, as abstruse as +any in a work of philosophy or abstract science. When the meaning is +mastered, the poem ought to be read a second time aloud to catch the +magic of the language and the verse. The reading of prose presents less +difficulty, but there again the rule is, never allow yourself to be +lulled by sound. Reading is an intellectual and not an hypnotic +exercise. + +The following short bibliography is divided to correspond with the +chapters in this book. Prices and publishers are mentioned only when +there is no more than one cheap edition of a book known to the author. +For the subject as a whole, Chamber's _Cyclopaedia of English +Literature_ (3 vols., 10s. 6d. net each), which contains biographical +and critical articles on all authors, arranged chronologically and +furnished very copiously with specimen passages, may be consulted at any +library. + +* The books with an asterisk are suggested as those on which reading +should be begun. The reader can then proceed to the others and after +them to the many authors--great authors--who are not included in this +short list. + +Chapter I.--*More's _Utopia_; _Haklyut's Voyages_ (Ed. J. Masefield, +Everyman's Library, 8 vols., 1s. net each). North's _Translation of +Plutarch's Lives_ (Temple Classics). + +Chapter II.--Surrey's and Wyatt's Poems (Aldine Edition. G. Bells & +Sons); *Spenser's Works, Sidney's Poems. A good idea of the atmosphere +in which poetry was written is to be obtained from Scott's _Kenilworth_. +It is full of inaccuracy in detail. + +Chapter III.--*The dramatists in the Mermaid Series (T. Fisher Unwin); +*_Everyman and other Plays_; ed. by A.W. Pollard (Everyman's Library). + +Chapter IV.--*Bacon's Essays; Sir Thomas Browne's Works; *Milton's +Works; *Poems of John Donne (Muses Library, Routledge); Poems of Robert +Herrick. + +Chapter V.--*Poems of Dryden; *Poems of Pope; Poems of Thomson; *_The +Spectator_ (Routledge's Universal Library or Everyman's); *Swift's +_Gulliver's Travels_; Defoe's Novels. + +Chapter VI.--*Boswell's _Life of Johnson_; *Burke (in selections); +Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_ (Temple Classics); *Burns' Poetical +Works; *Poems of Blake (Clarendon Press). + +Chapter VII.--*Wordsworth (Golden Treasury Series); *Wordsworth's +Prelude (Temple Classics); Coleridge's Poems; *Keats's Poems; *Shelley's +Poems; *Byron (Golden Treasury Series); *Lamb, _Essays of Elia_; Hazlitt +(volumes of Essays in World's Classics Series). + +Chapter VIII.--*Tennyson's Works; *Browning's Works; Rossetti's Works; +*Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus, Past and Present_, and _French Revolution_; +Ruskin's _Unto this Last, Seven Lamps of Architecture_; Arnold's Poems; +Swinburne (Selections). + +Chapter IX.--*Fielding's _Tom Jones_; Smollett, _Roderick Random_; +*Jane Austen's _Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice,_ and _Northanger Abbey_ +(as a parody of the Radcliffe School); *Scott's _Waverley, Antiquary, +Ivanhoe, Old Mortality, Bride of Lammermoor_. It seems hardly necessary +to give a selection of later novels. + +Chapter X.--W.B. Yeats' Poems; Wilde, _Importance of Being Earnest_; +*Synge, Dramatic Works. + +And every new work of the best contemporary authors. + +G.H.M. + + + + +LIST OF THE CHIEF WORKS AND AUTHORS MENTIONED + +The dates attached to the authors are those of birth and death; those +with the books, of publication. + + +CHAPTER I + +Sir Thomas More, 1480-1535. + _Utopia_. 1516 (in Latin). +William Tindall, 1484-1536. + _Translation of the New Testament_, 1526. +Sir John Cheke, 1514-1557. +Roger Ascham, 1515-1568. + _Toxophilus_, 1545. + _Schoolmaster_, 1570. +Richard Hakluyt, 1553-1616. + His _Voyages_, 1598. + + +CHAPTER II + +Sir Thomas Wyatt, 1503-1542. +The Earl of Surrey, 1517-1547. + _Tottel's Miscellany_ (containing their poems), 1557. +Sir Philip Sidney. 1554-1586. + _Arcadia_, 1590. + _Astrophel and Stella_, 1591. +Edmund Spenser, 1552-1599. + _Shepherd's Calendar_, 1579. + _Fairy Queen_, 1589, 1596. +John Lyly, 1554-1606. + _Euphues_, 1579. + _Euphues and his England_, 1580. +Richard Hooker, 1553-1600. + _Ecclesiastical Polity_, 1594. + + +CHAPTER III + +Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593. + _Tamburlaine_, 1587 (date of performance). + _Dr. Faustus_, 1588 (date of performance). + _Edward II._, 1593. +Thomas Kyd, 1557(?)-1595(?). + _The Spanish Tragedy_, 1594 (published). +John Webster, 1580(?)-1625(?). + _The White Devil_, 1608 (date of performance). + _Duchess of Malfi_, 1616 (date of performance). +Ben Jonson, 1573-1637. + _Every Man in his Humour_, 1598. + _Volpone_, 1605. + _Poems_, 1616. + + +CHAPTER IV + +John Donne, 1573-1631. + _Poems_, 1633 (first published, but known, like those of all +Elizabethan poets, in manuscript long before). +William Browne, 1591-1643. +George Herbert, 1593-1633. +Robert Herrick, 1593-1674. +Richard Crashaw, 1613-1649. +Francis Bacon, 1561-1626. + _Advancement of Learning_, 1605. + _Essays_, 1625. + The Bible, _Authorised Version_, 1611. +Robert Burton, 1577-1640. + _Anatomy of Melancholy_, 1621. +Sir Thomas Browne, 1605-1682. + _Religio Medici_, 1642. +John Bunyan, 1628-1688. + _Pilgrim's Progress_, 1678. +John Milton, 1608-1674. + _Paradise Lost_, 1667. + _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_, 1671. + + +CHAPTER V + +John Dryden, 1631-1700. + _Absalom and Achitophel_ and _Religio Laici_, 1682. + _The Hind and the Panther_, 1687. +Alexander Pope, 1688-1744. + _Essay on Criticism_, 1711. + _Rape of the Lock_, 1714. +James Thomson, 1700-1748. + _The Seasons_, 1730. +Daniel Defoe, 1661-1731. + _Robinson Crusoe_, 1719. +Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745. + _The Tale of a Tub_, 1704. + _Gulliver's Travels_, 1726. +Joseph Addison, 1672-1719. +Richard Steele, 1675-1729. + _The Tatler_, 1709-1711. + _The Spectator_, 1711-1712. + + +CHAPTER VI + +Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784. +Edmund Burke, 1728-1797. +Oliver Goldsmith, 1728-1774. +Thomas Gray, 1716-1771. +William Collins, 1721-1759. +Robert Burns, 1759-1796. + _Poems_, 1786. +William Blake, 1757-1827. + _Songs of Innocence_, 1789. + + +CHAPTER VII + +William Wordsworth, 1770-1850. + _Lyrical Ballads_, 1798. +Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1772-1834. +Sir Walter Scott, 1771-1832. +Lord Byron, 1788-1824. + _Child Harold's Pilgrimage_, 1812-1817. +Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822. +John Keats, 1796-1821. +Charles Lamb, 1775-1884. + _Essays of Elia_, 1823. +William Hazlitt, 1778-1830. +Thomas de Quincey, 1785-1859. + + +CHAPTER VIII + +Lord Tennyson, 1809-1892. + _Poems_, 1842. + _Idylls of the King_, 1859. +Robert Browning, 1812-1889. + _Men and Women_, 1855. + _The Ring and the Book_, 1868. +D. G. Rossetti, 1828-1882. +William Morris, 1834-1896. +A. C. Swinburne, 1836-1909. +Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1880. +John Ruskin, 1819-1900. + + +CHAPTER IX + +Samuel Richardson, 1689-1761. + _Pamela_, 1740. + _Clarissa Harlowe_, 1750. +Henry Fielding, 1707-1754. + _Joseph Andrews_, 1742. + _Tom Jones_, 1749. +Jane Austen, 1775-1817. +William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863. +Charles Dickens, 1812-1870. +George Meredith, 1832-1909. + + + + + +INDEX + + +ADDISON, JOSEPH, +_Advancement of Learning, The_, +_Anatomy of Melancholy, The_, +_Antonio and Mellida_, +_Arcadia_, the Countess of Pembroke's, +Arnold, Matthew, +Ascham, Roger, +_Astrophel and Stella_, +_Atheist's Tragedy, The_, +Augustan Age, +Austen, Jane, +Autobiography, + +Bacon, Francis, +Ballad, the, +Beaumont and Fletcher, +Bennett, Arnold, +Bible, the, +Biography, +Blake, William, +Blank Verse, +Boswell, James, +Brontës, the, +Browne, Sir Thomas, +Browne, William, +Browning, Robert, +Bunyan, John, +Burke, Edmund, +Burns, Robert, +Burton, Robert, +Byron, Lord, + +Carew, Thomas, +Carlyle, Thomas, +Celtic Revival, +Character-writing, +Chatterton, Thomas, +Cheke, Sir John, +_Christ's Victory and Death_, +Classicism, +Clough, Thomas, +Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, +Collins, William, +Conrad, Joseph, +Cowley, Abraham, +Cowper, William, +Crabbe, George, +Crashaw, Richard, +Criticism, + +Decadence, +Defoe, Daniel, +De Quincey, Thomas, +Dekker, Thomas, +Dickens, Charles, +Discovery, Voyages of, +Disraeli, Benjamin, +_Dr. Faustus_, +Donne, John, +Drama, the, +Dryden, John, +_Duchess of Malfi, The_, + +Earle, John, +_Edward II._, +_Elia, Essays of_, +Elizabethan Poetry, +Elizabethan Prose, +_Essays, Civil and Moral_, +_Euphues_, +_Everyman_, + +_Fairy Queen, The_, +Fantastics, the, +Fielding, Henry, +Fitzgerald, Edward, +Fletcher, Giles, +Fletcher, Phineas, +Ford, John, +French Revolution, the, + +Gaskell, Mrs., +George Eliot, +Gibbon, Edward, +Gissing, George, +Goldsmith, Oliver, +_Gorboduc_, +Gray, Thomas, +Greene, Robert, +Greville, Sir Fulke, +_Gulliver's Travels_, + +_Hakluyt's Voyages_, +Hardy, Thomas, +Hazlitt, William, +Hawthorne, Nathaniel, +_Henry VII., History of_, +Herbert, George, +Herrick, Robert, +Hobbes, Thomas, +Hooper, Richard, + +Italy, influence of, + +_Jew of Malta_, +Johnson, Samuel, +Jonson, Ben, + +Keats, John, +Kipling, Rudyard, +Kyd, Thomas, + +Lamb, Charles, +Locke, John, +Lodge, Thomas, +Lyly, John, +Lyric, the, +Lyrical Ballads, + +Marlowe, Christopher, +Marston, John, +Massinger, Philip, +Meredith, George, +Middleton, Thomas, +Milton, John, +Miracle Play, the, +Moore, George, +Morality, the, +More, Sir Thomas, +Morris, William, + +_New Atlantis, The_, +Novel, the, + +Obscurity in Poetry, +_Omar Khayyam_, +_Ossian_, +Oxford Movement, the, + +_Paradise Lost_, +Pastoral Prose and Poetry, +Peele, George, +Percy, William, +_Pilgrim's Progress_, +Platonism, +Poetic Diction, +Pope, Alexander, +Puritanism, +_Purple Island, The_, + +Raleigh, Sir Walter, +_Rape of the Lock_, +Realism, +_Religio Medici_, +Renaissance, the, +Reynolds, Sir Joshua, +Rhetoric, study of, +Richardson, Samuel, +_Robinson Crusoe_, +Romanticism, +Romantic Revival, the, +Rossetti, D. G., +Ruskin, John, + +Sackville, Thomas, +Satire, +Scott, Sir Walter, +Senecan Tragedy, +Seventeenth Century, the, +Shaw, G. Bernard, +Shelley, P. B., +Shenstone, Thomas, +Sheridan, R. B., +Shirley, John, +Sidney, Sir Philip, +Smollett, T., +Sonnet, the, +Sonneteers, the, +_Spanish Tragedy, The_, +_Spectator, The_, +Spenser, Edmund, +Spenserians, the, +Steele, Richard, +Sterne, Lawrence, +Stevenson, R. L., +Supernatural, the, +Surrey, the Earl of, +Swift, Jonathan, +Swinburne, A. C., +Synge, J. M., + +_Tale of a Tub, The_, +_Tamburlaine_, +_Tatler, The_, +_Temple, Sir William_, +Tennyson, Alfred, +Thackeray, W. M., +Theatre, the Elizabethan, +Thomson, James, +_Tottel's Miscellany_, + +_Utopia_, + +_Vaughan, Henry_, +Victorian Age, the, +_View of the State of Ireland_, + +Waller, Edmund, +Walton, Isaac, +Webster, John, +Wells, H. G., +_White Devil, The_, +Wilde, Oscar, +Wilson, Thomas, +Wither, George, +Wordsworth, William, +Wyatt, Thomas, + +Yeats, W. B., + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's English Literature: Modern, by G. H. Mair + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11327 *** diff --git a/11327-h/11327-h.htm b/11327-h/11327-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ca6130a --- /dev/null +++ b/11327-h/11327-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,6914 @@ +<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> +<html> +<head> +<meta name="generator" content= +"HTML Tidy for Windows (vers 1st February 2004), see www.w3.org"> +<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content= +"text/html; charset=UTF-8"> +<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of English Literature: Modern by +G. H. Mair, M.A. Sometime Scholar Of Christ Church.</title> + +<style type="text/css"> + <!-- + * { font-family: Times;} + P { text-indent: 1em; + margin-top: .75em; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .75em; } + H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; } + HR { width: 33%; + margin-top: 1em; + margin-bottom: 1em;} + PRE { font-family: Courier, monospaced; } + .poem {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;} + .poem .stanza {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;} + .poem p {margin: 0; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} + .poem p.i2 {margin-left: 2em;} + .poem p.i4 {margin-left: 4em;} + .poem p.i6 {margin-left: 6em;} + .poem p.i10 {margin-left: 10em;} + + .poem .caesura {vertical-align: -200%;} + BODY{margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%;} + .linenum {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */ + .note {margin-left: 2em; margin-right: 2em; margin-bottom: 1em;} /* block indent */ + .pagenum {position: absolute; left: 92%; right: 100%; font-size: 8pt; justify: right;} /* page numbers */ + // --> +</style> +</head> +<body> +<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11327 ***</div> + +<br> +<h1>HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE</h1> +<h1>ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN</h1> +<h3>BY G. H. MAIR, M.A. SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF CHRIST CHURCH</h3> +<h4>First Printed, October, 1911 Revised & Printed February, +1914</h4> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="PREFACE"></a> +<h2>PREFACE</h2> +<br> +<p>The intention of this book is to lay stress on ideas and +tendencies that have to be understood and appreciated, rather than +on facts that have to be learned by heart. Many authors are not +mentioned and others receive scanty treatment, because of the +necessities of this method of approach. The book aims at dealing +with the matter of authors more than with their lives; consequently +it contains few dates. All that the reader need require to help him +have been included in a short chronological table at the end.</p> +<p>To have attempted a severely ordered and analytic treatment of +the subject would have been, for the author at least, impossible +within the limits imposed, and, in any case, would have been +foreign to the purpose indicated by the editors of the Home +University Library. The book pretends no more than to be a general +introduction to a very great subject, and it will have fulfilled +all that is intended for it if it stimulates those who read it to +set about reading for themselves the books of which it treats.</p> +<p>Its debts are many, its chief creditors two teachers, Professor +Grierson at Aberdeen University and Sir Walter Raleigh at Oxford, +to the stimulation of whose books and teaching my pleasure in +English literature and any understanding I have of it are due. To +them and to the other writers (chief of them Professor Herford) +whose ideas I have wittingly or unwittingly incorporated in it, as +well as to the kindness and patience of Professor Gilbert Murray, I +wish here to express my indebtedness.</p> +<br> +G.H.M.<br> +MANCHESTER,<br> +<em>August</em>, 1911.<br> +<br> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CONTENTS"></a> +<h2>CONTENTS</h2> +<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. --> +<a href="#PREFACE"><b>PREFACE</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_I"><b>CHAPTER I</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_II"><b>CHAPTER II</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_III"><b>CHAPTER III</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_IV"><b>CHAPTER IV</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_V"><b>CHAPTER V</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_VI"><b>CHAPTER VI</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_VII"><b>CHAPTER VII</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_IX"><b>CHAPTER IX</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_X"><b>CHAPTER X</b></a><br> +<a href="#BIBLIOGRAPHY"><b>BIBLIOGRAPHY</b></a><br> +<a href="#LIST_OF_THE_CHIEF_WORKS_AND_AUTHORS_MENTIONED"><b>LIST OF +THE CHIEF WORKS AND AUTHORS MENTIONED</b></a><br> +<a href="#INDEX"><b>INDEX</b></a><br> +<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. --> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<h2>ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN</h2> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_I"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER I</h2> +<br> +<h3>THE RENAISSANCE</h3> +<h4>(1)</h4> +<p>There are times in every man's experience when some sudden +widening of the boundaries of his knowledge, some vision of +hitherto untried and unrealized possibilities, has come and seemed +to bring with it new life and the inspiration of fresh and splendid +endeavour. It may be some great book read for the first time not as +a book, but as a revelation; it may be the first realization of the +extent and moment of what physical science has to teach us; it may +be, like Carlyle's "Everlasting Yea," an ethical illumination, or +spiritual like Augustine's or John Wesley's. But whatever it is, it +brings with it new eyes, new powers of comprehension, and seems to +reveal a treasury of latent and unsuspected talents in the mind and +heart. The history of mankind has its parallels to these moments of +illumination in the life of the individual. There are times when +the boundaries of human experience, always narrow, and fluctuating +but little between age and age, suddenly widen themselves, and the +spirit of man leaps forward to possess and explore its new domain. +These are the great ages of the world. They could be counted, +perhaps, on one hand. The age of Pericles in Athens; the less +defined age, when Europe passed, spiritually and artistically, from +what we call the Dark, to what we call the Middle Ages; the +Renaissance; the period of the French Revolution. Two of them, so +far as English literature is concerned, fall within the compass of +this book, and it is with one of them—the +Renaissance—that it begins.</p> +<p>It is as difficult to find a comprehensive formula for what the +Renaissance meant as to tie it down to a date. The year 1453 A.D., +when the Eastern Empire—the last relic of the continuous +spirit of Rome—fell before the Turks, used to be given as the +date, and perhaps the word "Renaissance" itself—"a new +birth"—is as much as can be accomplished shortly by way of +definition. Michelet's resonant "discovery by mankind of himself +and of the world" rather expresses what a man of the Renaissance +himself must have thought it, than what we in this age can declare +it to be. But both endeavours to date and to define are alike +impossible. One cannot fix a term to day or night, and the theory +of the Renaissance as a kind of tropical dawn—a sudden +passage to light from darkness—is not to be considered. The +Renaissance was, and was the result of, a numerous and various +series of events which followed and accompanied one another from +the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. First +and most immediate in its influence on art and literature and +thought, was the rediscovery of the ancient literatures. In the +Middle Ages knowledge of Greek and Latin literatures had withdrawn +itself into monasteries, and there narrowed till of secular Latin +writing scarcely any knowledge remained save of Vergil (because of +his supposed Messianic prophecy) and Statius, and of Greek, except +Aristotle, none at all. What had been lost in the Western Empire, +however, subsisted in the East, and the continual advance of the +Turk on the territories of the Emperors of Constantinople drove +westward to the shelter of Italy and the Church, and to the +patronage of the Medicis, a crowd of scholars who brought with them +their manuscripts of Homer and the dramatists, of Thucydides and +Herodotus, and most momentous perhaps for the age to come, of Plato +and Demosthenes and of the New Testament in its original Greek. The +quick and vivid intellect of Italy, which had been torpid in the +decadence of mediaevalism and its mysticism and piety, seized with +avidity the revelation of the classical world which the scholars +and their manuscripts brought. Human life, which the mediaeval +Church had taught them to regard but as a threshold and +stepping-stone to eternity, acquired suddenly a new momentousness +and value; the promises of the Church paled like its lamps at +sunrise; and a new paganism, which had Plato for its high priest, +and Demosthenes and Pericles for its archetypes and examples, ran +like wild-fire through Italy. The Greek spirit seized on art, and +produced Raphael, Leonardo, and Michel Angelo; on literature and +philosophy and gave us Pico della Mirandula, on life and gave us +the Medicis and Castiglione and Machiavelli. Then—the +invention not of Italy but of Germany—came the art of +printing, and made this revival of Greek literature quickly +portable into other lands.</p> +<p>Even more momentous was the new knowledge the age brought of the +physical world. The brilliant conjectures of Copernicus paved the +way for Galileo, and the warped and narrow cosmology which +conceived the earth as the centre of the universe, suffered a blow +that in shaking it shook also religion. And while the conjectures +of the men of science were adding regions undreamt of to the +physical universe, the discoverers were enlarging the territories +of the earth itself. The Portuguese, with the aid of sailors +trained in the great Mediterranean ports of Genoa and Venice, +pushed the track of exploration down the western coast of Africa; +the Cape was circumnavigated by Vasco da Gama, and India reached +for the first time by Western men by way of the sea. Columbus +reached Trinidad and discovered the "New" World; his successors +pushed past him and touched the Continent. Spanish colonies grew up +along the coasts of North and Central America and in Peru, and the +Portuguese reached Brazil. Cabot and the English voyagers reached +Newfoundland and Labrador; the French made their way up the St. +Lawrence. The discovery of the gold mines brought new and +unimagined possibilities of wealth to the Old World, while the +imagination of Europe, bounded since the beginning of recorded time +by the Western ocean, and with the Mediterranean as its centre, +shot out to the romance and mystery of untried seas.</p> +<p>It is difficult for us in these later days to conceive the +profound and stirring influence of such an alteration on thought +and literature. To the men at the end of the fifteenth century +scarcely a year but brought another bit of received and recognized +thinking to the scrap-heap; scarcely a year but some new discovery +found itself surpassed and in its turn discarded, or lessened in +significance by something still more new. Columbus sailed westward +to find a new sea route, and as he imagined, a more expeditious one +to "the Indies"; the name West Indies still survives to show the +theory on which the early discoverers worked. The rapidity with +which knowledge widened can be gathered by a comparison of the maps +of the day. In the earlier of them the mythical Brazil, a relic +perhaps of the lost Atlantis, lay a regularly and mystically blue +island off the west coast of Ireland; then the Azores were +discovered and the name fastened on to one of the islands of that +archipelago. Then Amerigo reached South America and the name became +finally fixed to the country that we know. There is nothing +nowadays that can give us a parallel to the stirring and exaltation +of the imagination which intoxicated the men of the Renaissance, +and gave a new birth to thought and art. The great scientific +discoveries of the nineteenth century came to men more prepared for +the shock of new surprises, and they carried evidence less tangible +and indisputable to the senses. Perhaps if the strivings of science +should succeed in proving as evident and comprehensible the +existences which spiritualist and psychical research is striving to +establish, we should know the thrill that the great twin +discoverers, Copernicus and Columbus, brought to Europe.</p> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>This rough sketch of the Renaissance has been set down because +it is only by realizing the period in its largest and broadest +sense that we can understand the beginnings of our own modern +literature. The Renaissance reached England late. By the time that +the impulse was at its height with Spenser and Shakespeare, it had +died out in Italy, and in France to which in its turn Italy had +passed the torch, it was already a waning fire. When it came to +England it came in a special form shaped by political and social +conditions, and by the accidents of temperament and inclination in +the men who began the movement. But the essence of the inspiration +remained the same as it had been on the Continent, and the twin +threads of its two main impulses, the impulse from the study of the +classics, and the impulse given to men's minds by the voyages of +discovery, runs through all the texture of our Renaissance +literature.</p> +<p>Literature as it developed in the reign of Elizabeth ran counter +to the hopes and desires of the men who began the movement; the +common usage which extends the term Elizabethan backwards outside +the limits of the reign itself, has nothing but its carelessness to +recommend it. The men of the early renaissance in the reigns of +Edward VI. and Mary, belonged to a graver school than their +successors. They were no splendid courtiers, nor daring and hardy +adventurers, still less swashbucklers, exquisites, or literary +dandies. Their names—Sir John Cheke, Roger Ascham, Nicholas +Udall, Thomas Wilson, Walter Haddon, belong rather to the +universities and to the coteries of learning, than to the court. To +the nobility, from whose essays and <em>belles lettres</em> +Elizabethan poetry was to develop, they stood in the relation of +tutors rather than of companions, suspecting the extravagances of +their pupils rather than sympathising with their ideals. They were +a band of serious and dignified scholars, men preoccupied with +morality and good-citizenship, and holding those as worth more than +the lighter interests of learning and style. It is perhaps +characteristic of the English temper that the revival of the +classical tongues, which in Italy made for paganism, and the +pursuit of pleasure in life and art, in England brought with it in +the first place a new seriousness and gravity of life, and in +religion the Reformation. But in a way the scholars fought against +tendencies in their age, which were both too fast and too strong +for them. At a time when young men were writing poetry modelled on +the delicate and extravagant verse of Italy, were reading Italian +novels, and affecting Italian fashions in speech and dress, they +were fighting for sound education, for good classical scholarship, +for the purity of native English, and behind all these for the +native strength and worth of the English character, which they felt +to be endangered by orgies of reckless assimilation from abroad. +The revival of the classics at Oxford and Cambridge could not +produce an Erasmus or a Scaliger; we have no fine critical +scholarship of this age to put beside that of Holland or France. +Sir John Cheke and his followers felt they had a public and +national duty to perform, and their knowledge of the classics only +served them for examples of high living and morality, on which +education, in its sense of the formation of character, could be +based.</p> +<p>The literary influence of the revival of letters in England, +apart from its moral influence, took two contradictory and opposing +forms. In the curricula of schools, logic, which in the Middle Ages +had been the groundwork of thought and letters, gave place to +rhetoric. The reading of the ancients awakened new delight in the +melody and beauty of language: men became intoxicated with words. +The practice of rhetoric was universal and it quickly coloured all +literature. It was the habit of the rhetoricians to choose some +subject for declamation and round it to encourage their pupils to +set embellishments and decorations, which commonly proceeded rather +from a delight in language for language's sake, than from any +effect in enforcing an argument. Their models for these exercises +can be traced in their influence on later writers. One of the most +popular of them, Erasmus's "Discourse Persuading a Young Man to +Marriage," which was translated in an English text-book of +rhetoric, reminds one of the first part of Shakespeare's sonnets. +The literary affectation called euphuism was directly based on the +precepts of the handbooks on rhetoric; its author, John Lyly, only +elaborated and made more precise tricks of phrase and writing, +which had been used as exercises in the schools of his youth. The +prose of his school, with its fantastic delight in exuberance of +figure and sound, owed its inspiration, in its form ultimately to +Cicero, and in the decorations with which it was embellished, to +the elder Pliny and later writers of his kind. The long declamatory +speeches and the sententiousness of the early drama were directly +modelled on Seneca, through whom was faintly reflected the tragedy +of Greece, unknown directly or almost unknown to English readers. +Latinism, like every new craze, became a passion, and ran through +the less intelligent kinds of writing in a wild excess. Not much of +the literature of this time remains in common knowledge, and for +examples of these affectations one must turn over the black letter +pages of forgotten books. There high-sounding and familiar words +are handled and bandied about with delight, and you can see in +volume after volume these minor and forgotten authors gloating over +the new found treasure which placed them in their time in the van +of literary success. That they are obsolete now, and indeed were +obsolete before they were dead, is a warning to authors who intend +similar extravagances. Strangeness and exoticism are not lasting +wares. By the time of "Love's Labour Lost" they had become nothing +more than matter for laughter, and it is only through their +reflection and distortion in Shakespeare's pages that we know them +now.</p> +<p>Had not a restraining influence, anxiously and even +acrimoniously urged, broken in on their endeavours the English +language to-day might have been almost as completely latinized as +Spanish or Italian. That the essential Saxon purity of our tongue +has been preserved is to the credit not of sensible unlettered +people eschewing new fashions they could not comprehend, but to the +scholars themselves. The chief service that Cheke and Ascham and +their fellows rendered to English literature was their crusade +against the exaggerated latinity that they had themselves helped to +make possible, the crusade against what they called "inkhorn +terms." "I am of this opinion," said Cheke in a prefatory letter to +a book translated by a friend of his, "that our own tongue should +be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with the borrowing +of other tongues, wherein if we take not heed by time, ever +borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as +bankrupt." Writings in the Saxon vernacular like the sermons of +Latimer, who was careful to use nothing not familiar to the common +people, did much to help the scholars to save our prose from the +extravagances which they dreaded. Their attack was directed no less +against the revival of really obsolete words. It is a paradox worth +noting for its strangeness that the first revival of mediaevalism +in modern English literature was in the Renaissance itself. Talking +in studious archaism seems to have been a fashionable practice in +society and court circles. "The fine courtier," says Thomas Wilson +in his <cite>Art of Rhetoric</cite>, "will talk nothing but +Chaucer." The scholars of the English Renaissance fought not only +against the ignorant adoption of their importations, but against +the renewal of forgotten habits of speech.</p> +<p>Their efforts failed, and their ideals had to wait for their +acceptance till the age of Dryden, when Shakespeare and Spenser and +Milton, all of them authors who consistently violated the standards +of Cheke, had done their work. The fine courtier who would talk +nothing but Chaucer was in Elizabeth's reign the saving of English +verse. The beauty and richness of Spenser is based directly on +words he got from <cite>Troilus and Cressida</cite> and the +<cite>Canterbury Tales</cite>. Some of the most sonorous and +beautiful lines in Shakespeare break every canon laid down by the +humanists.</p> +<div class="poem">"Th' extravagant and erring spirit hies<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">To his confine"</span></div> +<br> +is a line, three of the chief words of which are Latin importations +that come unfamiliarly, bearing their original interpretation with +them. Milton is packed with similar things: he will talk of a +crowded meeting as "frequent" and use constructions which are +unintelligible to anyone who does not possess a knowledge—and +a good knowledge—of Latin syntax. Yet the effect is a good +poetic effect. In attacking latinisms in the language borrowed from +older poets Cheke and his companions were attacking the two chief +sources of Elizabethan poetic vocabulary. All the sonorousness, +beauty and dignity of the poetry and the drama which followed them +would have been lost had they succeeded in their object, and their +verse would have been constrained into the warped and ugly forms of +Sternhold and Hopkins, and those with them who composed the first +and worst metrical version of the Psalms. When their idea +reappeared for its fulfilment phantasy and imagery had temporarily +worn themselves out, and the richer language made simplicity +possible and adequate for poetry.<br> +<br> +<p>There are other directions in which the classical revival +influenced writing that need not detain us here. The attempt to +transplant classical metres into English verse which was the +concern of a little group of authors who called themselves the +Areopagus came to no more success than a similar and contemporary +attempt did in France. An earlier and more lasting result of the +influence of the classics on new ways of thinking is the +<cite>Utopia</cite> of Sir Thomas More, based on Plato's +<cite>Republic</cite>, and followed by similar attempts on the part +of other authors, of which the most notable are Harrington's +<cite>Oceana</cite> and Bacon's <cite>New Atlantis</cite>. In one +way or another the rediscovery of Plato proved the most valuable +part of the Renaissance's gift from Greece. The doctrines of the +Symposium coloured in Italy the writings of Castiglione and +Mirandula. In England they gave us Spenser's "Hymn to Intellectual +Beauty," and they affected, each in his own way, Sir Philip Sidney, +and others of the circle of court writers of his time. More's book +was written in Latin, though there is an English translation almost +contemporary. He combines in himself the two strains that we found +working in the Renaissance, for besides its origin in Plato, +<cite>Utopia</cite> owes not a little to the influence of the +voyages of discovery. In 1507 there was published a little book +called an <cite>Introduction to Cosmography</cite>, which gave an +account of the four voyages of Amerigo. In the story of the fourth +voyage it is narrated that twenty-four men were left in a fort near +Cape Bahia. More used this detail as a starting-point, and one of +the men whom Amerigo left tells the story of this "Nowhere," a +republic partly resembling England but most of all the ideal world +of Plato. Partly resembling England, because no man can escape from +the influences of his own time, whatever road he takes, whether the +road of imagination or any other. His imagination can only build +out of the materials afforded him by his own experience: he can +alter, he can rearrange, but he cannot in the strictest sense of +the word create, and every city of dreams is only the scheme of +things as they are remoulded nearer to the desire of a man's heart. +In a way More has less invention than some of his subtler +followers, but his book is interesting because it is the first +example of a kind of writing which has been attractive to many men +since his time, and particularly to writers of our own day.</p> +<p>There remains one circumstance in the revival of the classics +which had a marked and continuous influence on the literary age +that followed. To get the classics English scholars had as we have +seen to go to Italy. Cheke went there and so did Wilson, and the +path of travel across France and through Lombardy to Florence and +Rome was worn hard by the feet of their followers for over a +hundred years after. On the heels of the men of learning went the +men of fashion, eager to learn and copy the new manners of a +society whose moral teacher was Machiavelli, and whose patterns of +splendour were the courts of Florence and Ferrara, and to learn the +trick of verse that in the hands of Petrarch and his followers had +fashioned the sonnet and other new lyric forms. This could not be +without its influence on the manners of the nation, and the +scholars who had been the first to show the way were the first to +deplore the pell-mell assimilation of Italian manners and vices, +which was the unintended result of the inroad on insularity which +had already begun. They saw the danger ahead, and they laboured to +meet it as it came. Ascham in his <cite>Schoolmaster</cite> railed +against the translation of Italian books, and the corrupt manners +of living and false ideas which they seemed to him to breed. The +Italianate Englishman became the chief part of the stock-in-trade +of the satirists and moralists of the day. Stubbs, a Puritan +chronicler, whose book <cite>The Anatomy of Abuses</cite> is a +valuable aid to the study of Tudor social history, and Harrison, +whose description of England prefaces Holinshed's Chronicles, both +deal in detail with the Italian menace, and condemn in good set +terms the costliness in dress and the looseness in morals which +they laid to its charge. Indeed, the effect on England was +profound, and it lasted for more than two generations. The romantic +traveller, Coryat, writing well within the seventeenth century in +praise of the luxuries of Italy (among which he numbers forks for +table use), is as enthusiastic as the authors who began the +imitation of Italian metres in Tottel's <cite>Miscellany</cite>, +and Donne and Hall in their satires written under James wield the +rod of censure as sternly as had Ascham a good half century before. +No doubt there was something in the danger they dreaded, but the +evil was not unmixed with good, for insularity will always be an +enemy of good literature. The Elizabethans learned much more than +their plots from Italian models, and the worst effects dreaded by +the patriots never reached our shores. Italian vice stopped short +of real life; poisoning and hired ruffianism flourished only on the +stage.</p> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>The influence of the spirit of discovery and adventure, though +it is less quickly marked, more pervasive, and less easy to define, +is perhaps more universal than that of the classics or of the +Italian fashions which came in their train. It runs right through +the literature of Elizabeth's age and after it, affecting, each in +their special way, all the dramatists, authors who were also +adventurers like Raleigh, scholars like Milton, and philosophers +like Hobbes and Locke. It reappears in the Romantic revival with +Coleridge, whose "Ancient Mariner" owes much to reminiscences of +his favourite reading—<cite>Purchas, his Pilgrimes</cite>, +and other old books of voyages. The matter of this too-little +noticed strain in English literature would suffice to fill a whole +book; only a few of the main lines of its influence can be noted +here.</p> +<p>For the English Renaissance—for Elizabeth's England, +action and imagination went hand in hand; the dramatists and poets +held up the mirror to the voyagers. In a sense, the cult of the sea +is the oldest note in English literature. There is not a poem in +Anglo-Saxon but breathes the saltness and the bitterness of the +sea-air. To the old English the sea was something inexpressibly +melancholy and desolate, mist-shrouded, and lonely, terrible in its +grey and shivering spaces; and their tone about it is always +elegiac and plaintive, as a place of dreary spiritless wandering +and unmarked graves. When the English settled they lost the sense +of the sea; they became a little parochial people, tilling fields +and tending cattle, wool-gathering and wool-bartering, their +shipping confined to cross-Channel merchandise, and coastwise +sailing from port to port. Chaucer's shipman, almost the sole +representative of the sea in mediaeval English literature, plied a +coastwise trade. But with the Cabots and their followers, Frobisher +and Gilbert and Drake and Hawkins, all this was changed; once more +the ocean became the highway of our national progress and +adventure, and by virtue of our shipping we became competitors for +the dominion of the earth. The rising tide of national enthusiasm +and exaltation that this occasioned flooded popular literature. The +voyagers themselves wrote down the stories of their adventures; and +collections of these—Hakluyt's and Purchas's—were among +the most popular books of the age. To them, indeed, we must look +for the first beginnings of our modern English prose, and some of +its noblest passages. The writers, as often as not, were otherwise +utterly unknown—ship's pursers, super-cargoes, and the +like—men without much literary craft or training, whose style +is great because of the greatness of their subject, because they +had no literary artifices to stand between them and the plain and +direct telling of a stirring tale. But the ferment worked outside +the actual doings of the voyagers themselves, and it can be traced +beyond definite allusions to them. Allusions, indeed, are +surprisingly few; Drake is scarcely as much as mentioned among the +greater writers of the age. None the less there is not one of them +that is not deeply touched by his spirit and that of the movement +which he led. New lands had been discovered, new territories opened +up, wonders exposed which were perhaps only the first fruits of +greater wonders to come. Spenser makes the voyagers his warrant for +his excursion into fairyland. Some, he says, have condemned his +fairy world as an idle fiction,</p> +<div class="poem">"But let that man with better sense advise;<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">That of the world least part to +us is red;</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And daily how through hardy +enterprise</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Many great regions are +discovered,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Which to late age were never +mentioned.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Who ever heard of the 'Indian +Peru'?</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Or who in venturous vessel +measured</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The Amazon, huge river, now found +true?</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Or fruitfullest Virginia who did +ever view?</span><br> +<br> +"Yet all these were, when no man did them know,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Yet have from wiser ages hidden +been;</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And later times things more +unknown shall show."</span></div> +<p>It is in the drama that this spirit of adventure caught from the +voyagers gets its full play. "Without the voyagers," says Professor +Walter Raleigh,[<a href="#note-1">1</a>] "Marlowe is +inconceivable." His imagination in every one of his plays is +preoccupied with the lust of adventure, and the wealth and power +adventure brings. Tamburlaine, Eastern conqueror though he is, is +at heart an Englishman of the school of Hawkins and Drake. Indeed +the comparison must have occurred to his own age, for a historian +of the day, the antiquary Stow, declares Drake to have been "as +famous in Europe and America as Tamburlaine was in Asia and +Africa." The high-sounding names and quests which seem to us to +give the play an air of unreality and romance were to the +Elizabethans real and actual; things as strange and foreign were to +be heard any day amongst the motley crowd in the Bankside outside +the theatre door. Tamburlaine's last speech, when he calls for a +map and points the way to unrealised conquests, is the very epitome +of the age of discovery.</p> +<div class="poem">"Lo, here my sons, are all the golden mines,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Inestimable wares and precious +stones,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">More worth than Asia and all the +world beside;</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And from the Antarctic Pole +eastward behold</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">As much more land, which never +was descried.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Wherein are rocks of pearl that +shine as bright</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">As all the lamps that beautify +the sky."</span></div> +<br> +<p>It is the same in his other plays. Dr. Faustus assigns to his +serviceable spirits tasks that might have been studied from the +books of Hakluyt</p> +<div class="poem">"I'll have them fly to India for gold,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Ransack the ocean for orient +pearl,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And search all corners of the new +round world</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">For pleasant fruits and princely +delicates."</span></div> +<p>When there is no actual expression of the spirit of adventure, +the air of the sea which it carried with it still blows. +Shakespeare, save for his scenes in <cite>The Tempest</cite> and in +<cite>Pericles</cite>, which seize in all its dramatic poignancy +the terror of storm and shipwreck, has nothing dealing directly +with the sea or with travel; but it comes out, none the less, in +figure and metaphor, and plays like the <cite>Merchant of +Venice</cite> and <cite>Othello</cite> testify to his accessibility +to its spirit. Milton, a scholar whose mind was occupied by other +and more ultimate matters, is full of allusions to it. Satan's +journey through Chaos in <cite>Paradise Lost</cite> is the occasion +for a whole series of metaphors drawn from seafaring. In +<cite>Samson Agonistes</cite> Dalila comes in,</p> +<div class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">"Like a stately +ship ...</span><br> +With all her bravery on and tackle trim<br> +Sails frilled and streamers waving<br> +Courted by all the winds that hold them play."</div> +<br> +and Samson speaks of himself as one who,<br> +<br> +<div class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Like a foolish +pilot have shipwracked</span><br> +My vessel trusted to me from above<br> +Gloriously rigged."</div> +<p>The influence of the voyages of discovery persisted long after +the first bloom of the Renaissance had flowered and withered. On +the reports brought home by the voyagers were founded in part those +conceptions of the condition of the "natural" man which form such a +large part of the philosophic discussions of the seventeenth and +eighteenth centuries, Hobbes's description of the life of nature as +"nasty, solitary, brutish, and short," Locke's theories of civil +government, and eighteenth century speculators like Monboddo all +took as the basis of their theory the observations of the men of +travel. Abroad this connection of travellers and philosophers was +no less intimate. Both Montesquieu and Rousseau owed much to the +tales of the Iroquois, the North American Indian allies of France. +Locke himself is the best example of the closeness of this +alliance. He was a diligent student of the texts of the voyagers, +and himself edited out of Hakluyt and Purchas the best collection +of them current in his day. The purely literary influence of the +age of discovery persisted down to <cite>Robinson Crusoe</cite>; in +that book by a refinement of satire a return to travel itself (it +must be remembered Defoe posed not as a novelist but as an actual +traveller) is used to make play with the deductions founded on it. +Crusoe's conversation with the man Friday will be found to be a +satire of Locke's famous controversy with the Bishop of Worcester. +With <cite>Robinson Crusoe</cite> the influence of the age of +discovery finally perishes. An inspiration hardens into the mere +subject matter of books of adventure. We need not follow it +further.</p> +<h4>Footnotes</h4> +<p><a name="note-1"><!-- Note Anchor 1 --></a>[Footnote 1: To whose +terminal essay in "Hakluyt's Voyages" (Maclehose) I am indebted for +much of the matter in this section.]</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_II"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER II</h2> +<br> +<h3>ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE</h3> +<h4>(1)</h4> +<p>To understand Elizabethan literature it is necessary to remember +that the social status it enjoyed was far different from that of +literature in our own day. The splendours of the Medicis in Italy +had set up an ideal of courtliness, in which letters formed an +integral and indispensable part. For the Renaissance, the man of +letters was only one aspect of the gentleman, and the true +gentleman, as books so early and late respectively as Castiglione's +<cite>Courtier</cite> and Peacham's <cite>Complete Gentleman</cite> +show, numbered poetry as a necessary part of his accomplishments. +In England special circumstances intensified this tendency of the +time. The queen was unmarried: she was the first single woman to +wear the English crown, and her vanity made her value the devotion +of the men about her as something more intimate than mere loyalty +or patriotism. She loved personal homage, particularly the homage +of half-amatory eulogy in prose and verse. It followed that the +ambition of every courtier was to be an author, and of every author +to be a courtier; in fact, outside the drama, which was almost the +only popular writing at the time, every author was in a greater or +less degree attached to the court. If they were not enjoying its +favours they were pleading for them, mingling high and fantastic +compliment with bitter reproaches and a tale of misery. And +consequently both the poetry and the prose of the time are +restricted in their scope and temper to the artificial and +romantic, to high-flown eloquence, to the celebration of love and +devotion, or to the inculcation of those courtly virtues and +accomplishments which composed the perfect pattern of a gentleman. +Not that there was not both poetry and prose written outside this +charmed circle. The pamphleteers and chroniclers, Dekker and Nash, +Holinshed and Harrison and Stow, were setting down their histories +and descriptions, and penning those detailed and realistic +indictments of the follies and extravagances of fashion, which +together with the comedies have enabled us to picture accurately +the England and especially the London of Elizabeth's reign. There +was fine poetry written by Marlowe and Chapman as well as by Sidney +and Spenser, but the court was still the main centre of literary +endeavour, and the main incitement to literary fame and +success.</p> +<p>But whether an author was a courtier or a Londoner living by his +wits, writing was never the main business of his life: all the +writers of the time were in one way or another men of action and +affairs. As late as Milton it is probably true to say that writing +was in the case even of the greatest an avocation, something +indulged in at leisure outside a man's main business. All the +Elizabethan authors had crowded and various careers. Of Sir Philip +Sidney his earliest biographer says, "The truth is his end was not +writing, even while he wrote, but both his wit and understanding +bent upon his heart to make himself and others not in words or +opinion but in life and action good and great." Ben Jonson was in +turn a soldier, a poet, a bricklayer, an actor, and ultimately the +first poet laureate. Lodge, after leaving Oxford, passed through +the various professions of soldiering, medicine, playwriting, and +fiction, and he wrote his novel <cite>Rosalind</cite>, on which +Shakespeare based <cite>As You Like It</cite> while he was sailing +on a piratical venture on the Spanish Main. This connection between +life and action affected as we have seen the tone and quality of +Elizabethan writing. "All the distinguished writers of the period," +says Thoreau, "possess a greater vigour and naturalness than the +more modern ... you have constantly the warrant of life and +experience in what you read. The little that is said is eked out by +implication of the much that was done." In another passage the same +writer explains the strength and fineness of the writings of Sir +Walter Raleigh by this very test of action, "The word which is best +said came nearest to not being spoken at all, for it is cousin to a +deed which the speaker could have better done. Nay almost it must +have taken the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by +some misfortune, so that the truest writer will be some captive +knight after all." This bond between literature and action explains +more than the writings of the voyagers or the pamphlets of men who +lived in London by what they could make of their fellows. +Literature has always a two-fold relation to life as it is lived. +It is both a mirror and an escape: in our own day the stirring +romances of Stevenson, the full-blooded and vigorous life which +beats through the pages of Mr. Kipling, the conscious brutalism of +such writers as Mr. Conrad and Mr. Hewlett, the plays of J.M. +Synge, occupied with the vigorous and coarse-grained life of +tinkers and peasants, are all in their separate ways a reaction +against an age in which the overwhelming majority of men and women +have sedentary pursuits. Just in the same way the Elizabethan who +passed his commonly short and crowded life in an atmosphere of +throat-cutting and powder and shot, and in a time when affairs of +state were more momentous for the future of the nation than they +have ever been since, needed his escape from the things which +pressed in upon him every day. So grew the vogue and popularity of +pastoral poetry and of pastoral romance.</p> +<a name="2"></a> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>It is with two courtiers that modern English poetry begins. The +lives of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey both ended early +and unhappily, and it was not until ten years after the death of +the second of them that their poems appeared in print. The book +that contained them, Tottel's <cite>Miscellany of Songs and +Sonnets</cite>, is one of the landmarks of English literature. It +begins lyrical love poetry in our language. It begins, too, the +imitation and adaptation of foreign and chiefly Italian metrical +forms, many of which have since become characteristic forms of +English verse: so characteristic, that we scarcely think of them as +other than native in origin. To Wyatt belongs the honour of +introducing the sonnet, and to Surrey the more momentous credit of +writing, for the first time in English, blank verse. Wyatt fills +the most important place in the <cite>Miscellany</cite>, and his +work, experimental in tone and quality, formed the example which +Surrey and minor writers in the same volume and all the later poets +of the age copied. He tries his hand at everything—songs, +madrigals, elegies, complaints, and sonnets—and he takes his +models from both ancient Rome and modern Italy. Indeed there is +scarcely anything in the volume for which with some trouble and +research one might not find an original in Petrarch, or in the +poets of Italy who followed him. But imitation, universal though it +is in his work, does not altogether crowd out originality of +feeling and poetic temper. At times, he sounds a personal note, his +joy on leaving Spain for England, his feelings in the Tower, his +life at the Court amongst his books, and as a country gentleman +enjoying hunting and other outdoor sports.</p> +<div class="poem">"This maketh me at home to hunt and hawk,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And in foul weather at my book to +sit,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">In frost and snow, then with my +bow to stalk,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">No man does mark whereas I ride +or go:</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">In lusty leas at liberty I +walk."</span></div> +<p>It is easy to see that poetry as a melodious and enriched +expression of a man's own feelings is in its infancy here. The new +poets had to find their own language, to enrich with borrowings +from other tongues the stock of words suitable for poetry which the +dropping of inflection had left to English. Wyatt was at the +beginning of the process, and apart from a gracious and courtly +temper, his work has, it must be confessed, hardly more than an +antiquarian interest. Surrey, it is possible to say on reading his +work, went one step further. He allows himself oftener the luxury +of a reference to personal feelings, and his poetry contains from +place to place a fairly full record of the vicissitudes of his +life. A prisoner at Windsor, he recalls his childhood there</p> +<div class="poem">"The large green courts where we were wont to +hove,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The palme-play, where, despoiled +for the game.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">With dazzled eyes oft we by +gleams of love</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Have missed the ball, and got +sight of our dame."</span></div> +<p>Like Wyatt's, his verses are poor stuff, but a sympathetic ear +can catch in them something of the accent that distinguishes the +verse of Sidney and Spenser. He is greater than Wyatt, not so much +for greater skill as for more boldness in experiment. Wyatt in his +sonnets had used the Petrarchan or Italian form, the form used +later in England by Milton and in the nineteenth century by +Rossetti. He built up each poem, that is, in two parts, the octave, +a two-rhymed section of eight lines at the beginning, followed by +the sestet, a six line close with three rhymes. The form fits +itself very well to the double mood which commonly inspires a poet +using the sonnet form; the second section as it were both echoing +and answering the first, following doubt with hope, or sadness with +resignation, or resolving a problem set itself by the heart. Surrey +tried another manner, the manner which by its use in Shakespeare's +sonnets has come to be regarded as the English form of this kind of +lyric. His sonnets are virtually three-stanza poems with a couplet +for close, and he allows himself as many rhymes as he chooses. The +structure is obviously easier, and it gives a better chance to an +inferior workman, but in the hands of a master its harmonies are no +less delicate, and its capacity to represent changing modes of +thought no less complete than those of the true form of Petrarch. +Blank verse, which was Surrey's other gift to English poetry, was +in a way a compromise between the two sources from which the +English Renaissance drew its inspiration. Latin and Greek verse is +quantitative and rhymeless; Italian verse, built up on the metres +of the troubadours and the degeneration of Latin which gave the +world the Romance languages, used many elaborate forms of rhyme. +Blank verse took from Latin its rhymelessness, but it retained +accent instead of quantity as the basis of its line. The line +Surrey used is the five-foot or ten-syllable line of what is called +"heroic verse"—the line used by Chaucer in his Prologue and +most of his tales. Like Milton he deplored rhyme as the invention +of a barbarous age, and no doubt he would have rejoiced to go +further and banish accent as well as rhymed endings. That, however, +was not to be, though in the best blank verse of later time accent +and quantity both have their share in the effect. The instrument he +forged passed into the hands of the dramatists: Marlowe perfected +its rhythm, Shakespeare broke its monotony and varied its cadences +by altering the spacing of the accents, and occasionally by adding +an extra unaccented syllable. It came back from the drama to poetry +with Milton. His blindness and the necessity under which it laid +him of keeping in his head long stretches of verse at one time, +because he could not look back to see what he had written, probably +helped his naturally quick and delicate sense of cadence to vary +the pauses, so that a variety of accent and interval might replace +the valuable aid to memory which he put aside in putting aside +rhyme. Perhaps it is to two accidents, the accident by which blank +verse as the medium of the actor had to be retained easily in the +memory, and the accident of Milton's blindness, that must be laid +the credit of more than a little of the richness of rhythm of this, +the chief and greatest instrument of English verse.</p> +<p>The imitation of Italian and French forms which Wyatt and Surrey +began, was continued by a host of younger amateurs of poetry. +Laborious research has indeed found a Continental original for +almost every great poem of the time, and for very many forgotten +ones as well. It is easy for the student engaged in this kind of +literary exploration to exaggerate the importance of what he finds, +and of late years criticism, written mainly by these explorers, has +tended to assume that since it can be found that Sidney, and +Daniel, and Watson, and all the other writers of mythological +poetry and sonnet sequences took their ideas and their phrases from +foreign poetry, their work is therefore to be classed merely as +imitative literary exercise, that it is frigid, that it contains or +conveys no real feeling, and that except in the secondary and +derived sense, it is not really lyrical at all. Petrarch, they will +tell you, may have felt deeply and sincerely about Laura, but when +Sidney uses Petrarch's imagery and even translates his words in +order to express his feelings for Stella, he is only a plagiarist +and not a lover, and the passion for Lady Rich which is supposed to +have inspired his sonnets, nothing more than a not too seriously +intended trick to add the excitement of a transcript of real +emotion to what was really an academic exercise. If that were +indeed so, then Elizabethan poetry is a very much lesser and meaner +thing than later ages have thought it. But is it so? Let us look +into the matter a little more closely. The unit of all ordinary +kinds of writing is the word, and one is not commonly quarrelled +with for using words that have belonged to other people. But the +unit of the lyric, like the unit of spoken conversation, is not the +word but the phrase. Now in daily human intercourse the use, which +is universal and habitual, of set forms and phrases of talk is not +commonly supposed to detract from, or destroy sincerity. In the +crises indeed of emotion it must be most people's experience that +the natural speech that rises unbidden and easiest to the lips is +something quite familiar and commonplace, some form which the +accumulated experience of many generations of separate people has +found best for such circumstances or such an occasion. The lyric is +just in the position of conversation, at such a heightened and +emotional moment. It is the speech of deep feeling, that must be +articulate or choke, and it falls naturally and inevitably into +some form which accumulated passionate moments have created and +fixed. The course of emotional experiences differs very little from +age to age, and from individual to individual, and so the same +phrases may be used quite sincerely and naturally as the direct +expression of feeling at its highest point by men apart in country, +circumstances, or time. This is not to say that there is no such +thing as originality; a poet is a poet first and most of all +because he discovers truths that have been known for ages, as +things that are fresh and new and vital for himself. He must speak +of them in language that has been used by other men just because +they are known truths, but he will use that language in a new way, +and with a new significance, and it is just in proportion to the +freshness, and the air of personal conviction and sincerity which +he imparts to it, that he is great.</p> +<p>The point at issue bears very directly on the work of Sir Philip +Sidney. In the course of the history of English letters certain +authors disengage themselves who have more than a merely literary +position: they are symbolic of the whole age in which they live, +its life and action, its thoughts and ideals, as well as its mere +modes of writing. There are not many of them and they could be +easily numbered; Addison, perhaps, certainly Dr. Johnson, certainly +Byron, and in the later age probably Tennyson. But the greatest of +them all is Sir Philip Sidney: his symbolical relation to the time +in which he lived was realized by his contemporaries, and it has +been a commonplace of history and criticism ever since. Elizabeth +called him one of the jewels of her crown, and at the age of +twenty-three, so fast did genius ripen in that summer time of the +Renaissance, William the Silent could speak of him as "one of the +ripest statesmen of the age." He travelled widely in Europe, knew +many languages, and dreamed of adventure in America and on the high +seas. In a court of brilliant figures, his was the most dazzling, +and his death at Zutphen only served to intensify the halo of +romance which had gathered round his name. His literary exercises +were various: in prose he wrote the <cite>Arcadia</cite> and the +<cite>Apology for Poetry</cite>, the one the beginning of a new +kind of imaginative writing, and the other the first of the series +of those rare and precious commentaries on their own art which some +of our English poets have left us. To the <cite>Arcadia</cite> we +shall have to return later in this chapter. It is his other great +work, the sequence of sonnets entitled <cite>Astrophel and +Stella</cite>, which concerns us here. They celebrate the history +of his love for Penelope Devereux, sister of the Earl of Essex, a +love brought to disaster by the intervention of Queen Elizabeth +with whom he had quarrelled. As poetry they mark an epoch. They are +the first direct expression of an intimate and personal experience +in English literature, struck off in the white heat of passion, and +though they are coloured at times with that over-fantastic imagery +which is at once a characteristic fault and excellence of the +writing of the time, they never lose the one merit above all others +of lyric poetry, the merit of sincerity. The note is struck with +certainty and power in the first sonnet of the series:—</p> +<div class="poem">"Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to +show,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">That she, dear she, might take +some pleasure of my pain,—</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Pleasure might cause her read, +reading might make her know,—</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Knowledge might pity win, and +pity grace obtain,—</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">I sought fit words to paint the +blackest face of woe,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Studying inventions fine her wits +to entertain;</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Oft turning others' leaves to see +if thence would flow</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Some fresh and fruitful flower +upon my sunburned brain.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">But words came halting forth +...</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Biting my truant pen, beating +myself for spite,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">'Fool,' said my muse to me, 'look +in thy heart and write.'"</span></div> +<br> +And though he turned others' leaves it was quite literally looking +in his heart that he wrote. He analyses the sequence of his +feelings with a vividness and minuteness which assure us of their +truth. All that he tells is the fruit of experience, dearly +bought:<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Desire! desire! I have too dearly bought<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">With price of mangled mind thy +worthless ware.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Too long, too long! asleep thou +hast me brought,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Who shouldst my mind to higher +things prepare."</span></div> +<br> +and earlier in the sequence—<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"I now have learned love right and learned even +so<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">As those that being poisoned +poison know."</span></div> +<br> +In the last two sonnets, with crowning truth and pathos he +renounces earthly love which reaches but to dust, and which because +it fades brings but fading pleasure:<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Then farewell, world! Thy uttermost I see.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Eternal love, maintain thy life +in me."</span></div> +<p>The sonnets were published after Sidney's death, and it is +certain that like Shakespeare's they were never intended for +publication at all. The point is important because it helps to +vindicate Sidney's sincerity, but were any vindication needed +another more certain might be found. The <cite>Arcadia</cite> is +strewn with love songs and sonnets, the exercises solely of the +literary imagination. Let any one who wishes to gauge the sincerity +of the impulse of the Stella sequence compare any of the poems in +it with those in the romance.</p> +<p>With Sir Philip Sidney literature was an avocation, constantly +indulged in, but outside the main business of his life; with Edmund +Spenser public life and affairs were subservient to an +overmastering poetic impulse. He did his best to carve out a career +for himself like other young men of his time, followed the fortunes +of the Earl of Leicester, sought desperately and unavailingly the +favour of the Queen, and ultimately accepted a place in her service +in Ireland, which meant banishment as virtually as a place in India +would to-day. Henceforward his visits to London and the Court were +few; sometimes a lover of travel would visit him in his house in +Ireland as Raleigh did, but for the most he was left alone. It was +in this atmosphere of loneliness and separation, hostile tribes +pinning him in on every side, murder lurking in the woods and +marshes round him, that he composed his greatest work. In it at +last he died, on the heels of a sudden rising in which his house +was burnt and his lands over-run by the wild Irish whom the tyranny +of the English planters had driven to vengeance. Spenser was not +without interest in his public duties; his <cite>View of the State +of Ireland</cite> shows that. But it shows, too, that he brought to +them singularly little sympathy or imagination. Throughout his tone +is that of the worst kind of English officialdom; rigid subjection +and in the last resort massacre are the remedies he would apply to +Irish discontent. He would be a fine text—which might be +enforced by modern examples—for a discourse on the evil +effects of immersion in the government of a subject race upon men +of letters. No man of action can be so consistently and cynically +an advocate of brutalism as your man of letters, Spenser, of +course, had his excuses; the problem of Ireland was new and it was +something remote and difficult; in all but the mere distance for +travel, Dublin was as far from London as Bombay is to-day. But to +him and his like we must lay down partly the fact that to-day we +have still an Irish problem.</p> +<p>But though fate and the necessity of a livelihood drove him to +Ireland and the life of a colonist, poetry was his main business. +He had been the centre of a brilliant set at Cambridge, one of +those coteries whose fame, if they are brilliant and vivacious +enough and have enough self-confidence, penetrates to the outer +world before they leave the University. The thing happens in our +own day, as the case of Oscar Wilde is witness; it happened in the +case of Spenser; and when he and his friends Gabriel Harvey and +Edward Kirke came "down" it was to immediate fame amongst amateurs +of the arts. They corresponded with each other about literary +matters, and Harvey published his part of the correspondence; they +played like Du Bellay in France, with the idea of writing English +verse in the quantitative measures of classical poetry; Spenser had +a love affair in Yorkshire and wrote poetry about it, letting just +enough be known to stimulate the imagination of the public. They +tried their hands at everything, imitated everything, and in all +were brilliant, sparkling, and decorative; they got a kind of +entrance to the circle of the Court. Then Spenser published his +<cite>Shepherd's Calendar</cite>, a series of pastoral eclogues for +every month of the year, after a manner taken from French and +Italian pastoral writers, but coming ultimately from Vergil, and +Edward Kirke furnished it with an elaborate prose commentary. +Spenser took the same liberties with the pastoral form as did +Vergil himself; that is to say he used it as a vehicle for satire +and allegory, made it carry political and social allusions, and +planted in it references to his friends. By its publication Spenser +became the first poet of the day. It was followed by some of his +finest and most beautiful things—by the Platonic hymns, by +the <cite>Amoretti</cite>, a series of sonnets inspired by his love +for his wife; by the <cite>Epithalamium</cite>, on the occasion of +his marriage to her; by <cite>Mother Hubbard's Tale</cite>, a +satire written when despair at the coldness of the Queen and the +enmity of Burleigh was beginning to take hold on the poet and +endowed with a plainness and vigour foreign to most of his other +work—and then by <cite>The Fairy Queen</cite>.</p> +<p>The poets of the Renaissance were not afraid of big things; +every one of them had in his mind as the goal of poetic endeavour +the idea of the heroic poem, aimed at doing for his own country +what Vergil had intended to do for Rome in the <cite>Aeneid</cite>, +to celebrate it—its origin, its prowess, its greatness, and +the causes of it, in epic verse. Milton, three-quarters of a +century later, turned over in his mind the plan of an English epic +on the wars of Arthur, and when he left it was only to forsake the +singing of English origins for the more ultimate theme of the +origins of mankind. Spenser designed to celebrate the character, +the qualities and the training of the English gentleman. And +because poetry, unlike philosophy, cannot deal with abstractions +but must be vivid and concrete, he was forced to embody his virtues +and foes to virtue and to use the way of allegory. His outward +plan, with its knights and dragons and desperate adventures, he +procured from Ariosto. As for the use of allegory, it was one of +the discoveries of the Middle Ages which the Renaissance +condescended to retain. Spenser elaborated it beyond the wildest +dreams of those students of Holy Writ who had first conceived it. +His stories were to be interesting in themselves as tales of +adventure, but within them they were to conceal an intricate +treatment of the conflict of truth and falsehood in morals and +religion. A character might typify at once Protestantism and +England and Elizabeth and chastity and half the cardinal virtues, +and it would have all the while the objective interest attaching to +it as part of a story of adventure. All this must have made the +poem difficult enough. Spenser's manner of writing it made it worse +still. One is familiar with the type of novel which only explains +itself when the last chapter is reached—Stevenson's +<cite>Wrecker</cite> is an example. <cite>The Fairy Queen</cite> +was designed on somewhat the same plan. The last section was to +relate and explain the unrelated and unexplained books which made +up the poem, and at the court to which the separate knights of the +separate books—the Red Cross Knight and the rest—were +to bring the fruit of their adventures, everything was to be made +clear. Spenser did not live to finish his work; <cite>The Fairy +Queen</cite>, like the <cite>Aeneid</cite>, is an uncompleted poem, +and it is only from a prefatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh issued +with the second published section that we know what the poem was +intended to be. Had Spenser not published this explanation, it is +impossible that anybody, even the acutest minded German professor, +could have guessed.</p> +<p>The poem, as we have seen, was composed in Ireland, in the +solitude of a colonists' plantation, and the author was shut off +from his fellows while he wrote. The influence of his surroundings +is visible in the writing. The elaboration of the theme would have +been impossible or at least very unlikely if its author had not +been thrown in on himself during its composition. Its intricacy and +involution is the product of an over-concentration born of empty +surroundings. It lacks vigour and rapidity; it winds itself into +itself. The influence of Ireland, too, is visible in its +landscapes, in its description of bogs and desolation, of dark +forests in which lurk savages ready to spring out on those who are +rash enough to wander within their confines. All the scenery in it +which is not imaginary is Irish and not English scenery.</p> +<p>Its reception in England and at the Court was enthusiastic. Men +and women read it eagerly and longed for the next section as our +grandfathers longed for the next section of <cite>Pickwick</cite>. +They really liked it, really loved the intricacy and luxuriousness +of it, the heavy exotic language, the thickly painted descriptions, +the languorous melody of the verse. Mainly, perhaps, that was so +because they were all either in wish or in deed poets themselves. +Spenser has always been "the poets' poet." Milton loved him; so did +Dryden, who said that Milton confessed to him that Spenser was "his +original," a statement which has been pronounced incredible, but +is, in truth, perfectly comprehensible, and most likely true. Pope +admired him; Keats learned from him the best part of his music. You +can trace echoes of him in Mr. Yeats. What is it that gives him +this hold on his peers? Well, in the first place his defects do not +detract from his purely poetic qualities. The story is impossibly +told, but that will only worry those who are looking for a story. +The allegory is hopelessly difficult; but as Hazlitt said "the +allegory will not bite you"; you can let it alone. The crudeness +and bigotry of Spenser's dealings with Catholicism, which are +ridiculous when he pictures the monster Error vomiting books and +pamphlets, and disgusting when he draws Mary Queen of Scots, do not +hinder the pleasure of those who read him for his language and his +art. He is great for other reasons than these. First because of the +extraordinary smoothness and melody of his verse and the richness +of his language—a golden diction that he drew from every +source—new words, old words, obsolete words—such a +mixture that the purist Ben Jonson remarked acidly that he wrote no +language at all. Secondly because of the profusion of his imagery, +and the extraordinarily keen sense for beauty and sweetness that +went to its making. In an age of golden language and gallant +imagery his was the most golden and the most gallant. And the +language of poetry in England is richer and more varied than that +in any other country in Europe to-day, because of what he did.</p> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>Elizabethan prose brings us face to face with a difficulty which +has to be met by every student of literature. Does the word +"literature" cover every kind of writing? Ought we to include in it +writing that aims merely at instruction or is merely journey-work, +as well as writing that has an artistic intention, or writing that, +whether its author knew it or no, is artistic in its result? Of +course such a question causes us no sort of difficulty when it +concerns itself only with what is being published to-day. We know +very well that some things are literature and some merely +journalism; that of novels, for instance, some deliberately intend +to be works of art and others only to meet a passing desire for +amusement or mental occupation. We know that most books serve or +attempt to serve only a useful and not a literary purpose. But in +reading the books of three centuries ago, unconsciously one's point +of view shifts. Antiquity gilds journey-work; remoteness and +quaintness of phrasing lend a kind of distinction to what are +simply pamphlets or text-books that have been preserved by accident +from the ephemeralness which was the common lot of hundreds of +their fellows. One comes to regard as literature things that had no +kind of literary value for their first audiences; to apply the same +seriousness of judgment and the same tests to the pamphlets of Nash +and Dekker as to the prose of Sidney and Bacon. One loses, in fact, +that power to distinguish the important from the trivial which is +one of the functions of a sound literary taste. Now, a study of the +minor writing of the past is, of course, well worth a reader's +pains. Pamphlets, chronicle histories, text-books and the like have +an historical importance; they give us glimpses of the manners and +habits and modes of thought of the day. They tell us more about the +outward show of life than do the greater books. If you are +interested in social history, they are the very thing. But the +student of literature ought to beware of them, nor ought he to +touch them till he is familiar with the big and lasting things. A +man does not possess English literature if he knows what Dekker +tells of the seven deadly sins of London and does not know the +<cite>Fairy Queen</cite>. Though the wide and curious interest of +the Romantic critics of the nineteenth century found and illumined +the byways of Elizabethan writing, the safest method of approach is +the method of their predecessors—to keep hold on common +sense, to look at literature, not historically as through the wrong +end of a telescope, but closely and without a sense of intervening +time, to know the best—the "classic"—and study it +before the minor things.</p> +<p>In Elizabeth's reign, prose became for the first time, with +cheapened printing, the common vehicle of amusement and +information, and the books that remain to us cover many departments +of writing. There are the historians who set down for us for the +first time what they knew of the earlier history of England. There +are the writers, like Harrison and Stubbs, who described the +England of their own day, and there are many authors, mainly +anonymous, who wrote down the accounts of the voyages of the +discoverers in the Western Seas. There are the novelists who +translated stories mainly from Italian sources. But of authors as +conscious of a literary intention as the poets were, there are only +two, Sidney and Lyly, and of authors who, though their first aim +was hardly an artistic one, achieved an artistic result, only +Hooker and the translators of the Bible. The Authorized Version of +the Bible belongs strictly not to the reign of Elizabeth but to +that of James, and we shall have to look at it when we come to +discuss the seventeenth century. Hooker, in his book on +Ecclesiastical Polity (an endeavour to set forth the grounds of +orthodox Anglicanism) employed a generous, flowing, melodious style +which has influenced many writers since and is familiar to us +to-day in the copy of it used by Ruskin in his earlier works. Lyly +and Sidney are worth looking at more closely.</p> +<p>The age was intoxicated with language. It went mad of a mere +delight in words. Its writers were using a new tongue, for English +was enriched beyond all recognition with borrowings from the +ancient authors; and like all artists who become possessed of a new +medium, they used it to excess. The early Elizabethans' use of the +new prose was very like the use that educated Indians make of +English to-day. It is not that these write it incorrectly, but only +that they write too richly. And just as fuller use and knowledge +teaches them spareness and economy and gives their writing +simplicity and vigour, so seventeenth century practice taught +Englishmen to write a more direct and undecorated style and gave us +the smooth, simple, and vigorous writing of Dryden—the first +really modern English prose. But the Elizabethans loved gaudier +methods; they liked highly decorative modes of expression, in prose +no less than in verse. The first author to give them these things +was John Lyly, whose book <cite>Euphues</cite> was for the five or +six years following its publication a fashionable craze that +infected all society and gave its name to a peculiar and highly +artificial style of writing that coloured the work of hosts of +obscure and forgotten followers. Lyly wrote other things; his +comedies may have taught Shakespeare the trick of <cite>Love's +Labour Lost</cite>; he attempted a sequel of his most famous work +with better success than commonly attends sequels, but for us and +for his own generation he is the author of one book. Everybody read +it, everybody copied it. The maxims and sentences of advice for +gentlemen which it contained were quoted and admired in the Court, +where the author, though he never attained the lucrative position +he hoped for, did what flattery could do to make a name for +himself. The name "Euphuism" became a current description of an +artificial way of using words that overflowed out of writing into +speech and was in the mouths, while the vogue lasted, of everybody +who was anybody in the circle that fluttered round the Queen.</p> +<p>The style of <cite>Euphues</cite> was parodied by Shakespeare +and many attempts have been made to imitate it since. Most of them +are inaccurate—Sir Walter Scott's wild attempt the most +inaccurate of all. They fail because their authors have imagined +that "Euphuism" is simply a highly artificial and "flowery" way of +talking. As a matter of fact it is made up of a very exact and very +definite series of parts. The writing is done on a plan which has +three main characteristics as follows. First, the structure of the +sentence is based on antithesis and alliteration; that is to say, +it falls into equal parts similar in sound but with a different +sense; for example, Euphues is described as a young gallant "of +more wit than wealth, yet of more wealth than wisdom." All the +characters in the book, which is roughly in the form of a novel, +speak in this way, sometimes in sentences long drawn out which are +oppressively monotonous and tedious, and sometimes shortly with a +certain approach to epigram. The second characteristic of the style +is the reference of every stated fact to some classical authority, +that is to say, the author cannot mention friendship without +quoting David and Jonathan, nor can lovers in his book accuse each +other of faithlessness without quoting the instance of Cressida or +Aeneas. This appeal to classical authority and wealth of classical +allusion is used to decorate pages which deal with matters of +every-day experience. Seneca, for instance, is quoted as reporting +"that too much bending breaketh the bow," a fact which might +reasonably have been supposed to be known to the author himself. +This particular form of writing perhaps influenced those who copied +Lyly more than anything else in his book. It is a fashion of the +more artificial kind of Elizabethan writing in all schools to +employ a wealth of classical allusion. Even the simple narratives +in <cite>Hakluyt's Voyages</cite> are not free from it, and one may +hardly hope to read an account of a voyage to the Indies without +stumbling on a preliminary reference to the opinions of Aristotle +and Plato. Lastly, <cite>Euphues</cite> is characterised by an +extraordinary wealth of allusion to natural history, mostly of a +fabulous kind. "I have read that the bull being tied to the fig +tree loseth his tail; that the whole herd of deer stand at gaze if +they smell a sweet apple; that the dolphin after the sound of music +is brought to the shore," and so on. His book is full of these +things, and the style weakens and loses its force because of +them.</p> +<p>Of course there is much more in his book than this outward +decoration. He wrote with the avowed purpose of instructing +courtiers and gentlemen how to live. <cite>Euphues</cite> is full +of grave reflections and weighty morals, and is indeed a collection +of essays on education, on friendship, on religion and philosophy, +and on the favourite occupation and curriculum of Elizabethan +youth—foreign travel. The fashions and customs of his +countrymen which he condemns in the course of his teaching are the +same as those inveighed against by Stubbs and other contemporaries. +He disliked manners and fashions copied from Italy; particularly he +disliked the extravagant fashions of women. One woman only escapes +his censure, and she, of course, is the Queen, whom Euphues and his +companion in the book come to England to see. In the main the +teaching of Euphues inculcates a humane and liberal, if not very +profound creed, and the book shares with <cite>The Fairy +Queen</cite> the honour of the earlier Puritanism—the +Puritanism that besides the New Testament had the +<cite>Republic</cite>.</p> +<p>But Euphues, though he was in his time the popular idol, was not +long in finding a successful rival. Seven years before his death +Sir Philip Sidney, in a period of retirement from the Court wrote +"<cite>The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia</cite>"; it was published +ten years after it had been composed. The <cite>Arcadia</cite> is +the first English example of the prose pastoral romance, as the +<cite>Shepherd's Calendar</cite> is of our pastoral verse. +Imitative essays in its style kept appearing for two hundred years +after it, till Wordsworth and other poets who knew the country +drove its unrealities out of literature. The aim of it and of the +school to which it belonged abroad was to find a setting for a +story which should leave the author perfectly free to plant in it +any improbability he liked, and to do what he liked with the +relations of his characters. In the shade of beech trees, the coils +of elaborated and intricate love-making wind and unravel themselves +through an endless afternoon. In that art nothing is too +far-fetched, nothing too sentimental, no sorrow too unreal. The +pastoral romance was used, too, to cover other things besides a +sentimental and decorative treatment of love. Authors wrapped up as +shepherds their political friends and enemies, and the pastoral +eclogues in verse which Spenser and others composed are full of +personal and political allusion. Sidney's story carries no politics +and he depends for its interest solely on the wealth of differing +episodes and the stories and arguments of love which it contains. +The story would furnish plot enough for twenty ordinary novels, but +probably those who read it when it was published were attracted by +other things than the march of its incidents. Certainly no one +could read it for the plot now. Its attraction is mainly one of +style. It goes, you feel, one degree beyond <cite>Euphues</cite> in +the direction of freedom and poetry. And just because of this +greater freedom, its characteristics are much less easy to fix than +those of <cite>Euphues</cite>. Perhaps its chief quality is best +described as that of exhaustiveness. Sidney will take a word and +toss it to and fro in a page till its meaning is sucked dry and +more than sucked dry. On page after page the same trick is +employed, often in some new and charming way, but with the +inevitable effect of wearying the reader, who tries to do the +unwisest of all things with a book of this kind—to read on. +This trick of bandying words is, of course, common in Shakespeare. +Other marks of Sidney's style belong similarly to poetry rather +than to prose. Chief of them is what Ruskin christened the +"pathetic fallacy"—the assumption (not common in his day) +which connects the appearance of nature with the moods of the +artist who looks at it, or demands such a connection. In its day +the <cite>Arcadia</cite> was hailed as a reformation by men +nauseated by the rhythmical patterns of Lyly. A modern reader finds +himself confronting it in something of the spirit that he would +confront the prose romances, say, of William Morris, finding it +charming as a poet's essay in prose but no more: not to be ranked +with the highest.</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_III"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER III</h2> +<h3>THE DRAMA</h3> +<h4>(1)</h4> +<p>Biologists tell us that the hybrid—the product of a +variety of ancestral stocks—is more fertile than an organism +with a direct and unmixed ancestry; perhaps the analogy is not too +fanciful as the starting-point of a study of Elizabethan drama, +which owed its strength and vitality, more than to anything else, +to the variety of the discordant and contradictory elements of +which it was made up. The drama was the form into which were +moulded the thoughts and desires of the best spirits of the time. +It was the flower of the age. To appreciate its many-sided +significances and achievements it is necessary to disentangle +carefully its roots, in religion, in the revival of the classics, +in popular entertainments, in imports from abroad, in the air of +enterprise and adventure which belonged to the time.</p> +<p>As in Greece, drama in England was in its beginning a religious +thing. Its oldest continuous tradition was from the mediaeval +Church. Early in the Middle Ages the clergy and their parishioners +began the habit, at Christmas, Easter and other holy days, of +playing some part of the story of Christ's life suitable to the +festival of the day. These plays were liturgical, and originally, +no doubt, overshadowed by a choral element. But gradually the +inherent human capacity for mimicry and drama took the upper hand; +from ceremonies they developed into performances; they passed from +the stage in the church porch to the stage in the street. A waggon, +the natural human platform for mimicry or oratory, became in +England as it was in Greece, the cradle of the drama. This +momentous change in the history of the miracle play, which made it +in all but its occasion and its subject a secular thing, took place +about the end of the twelfth century. The rise of the town guilds +gave the plays a new character; the friendly rivalry of leagued +craftsmen elaborated their production; and at length elaborate +cycles were founded which were performed at Whitsuntide, beginning +at sunrise and lasting all through the day right on to dusk. Each +town had its own cycle, and of these the cycles of York, Wakefield, +Chester and Coventry still remain. So too, does an eye-witness's +account of a Chester performance where the plays took place yearly +on three days, beginning with Whit Monday. "The manner of these +plays were, every company had his pageant or part, a high scaffold +with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels. In the +lower they apparelled themselves and in the higher room they +played, being all open on the top that all beholders might hear and +see them. They began first at the abbey gates, and when the first +pageant was played, it was wheeled to the high cross before the +mayor and so to every street. So every street had a pageant playing +upon it at one time, till all the pageants for the day appointed +were played." The "companies" were the town guilds and the several +"pageants" different scenes in Old or New Testament story. As far +as was possible each company took for its pageant some Bible story +fitting to its trade; in York the goldsmiths played the three Kings +of the East bringing precious gifts, the fishmongers the flood, and +the shipwrights the building of Noah's ark. The tone of these plays +was not reverent; reverence after all implies near at hand its +opposite in unbelief. But they were realistic and they contained +within them the seeds of later drama in the aptitude with which +they grafted into the sacred story pastoral and city manners taken +straight from life. The shepherds who watched by night at Bethlehem +were real English shepherds furnished with boisterous and realistic +comic relief. Noah was a real shipwright.</p> +<div class="poem">"It shall be clinched each ilk and deal.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">With nails that are both noble +and new</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Thus shall I fix it to the +keel,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Take here a rivet and there a +screw,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">With there bow there now, work I +well,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">This work, I warrant, both good +and true."</span></div> +<p>Cain and Abel were English farmers just as truly as Bottom and +his fellows were English craftsmen. But then Julius Caesar has a +doublet and in Dutch pictures the apostles wear broad-brimmed hats. +Squeamishness about historical accuracy is of a later date, and +when it came we gained in correctness less than we lost in art.</p> +<p>The miracle plays, then, are the oldest antecedent of +Elizabethan drama, but it must not be supposed they were over and +done with before the great age began. The description of the +Chester performances, part of which has been quoted, was written in +1594. Shakespeare must, one would think, have seen the Coventry +cycle; at any rate he was familiar, as every one of the time must +have been, with the performances; "Out-heroding Herod" bears +witness to that. One must conceive the development of the +Elizabethan age as something so rapid in its accessibility to new +impressions and new manners and learning and modes of thought that +for years the old and new subsisted side by side. Think of modern +Japan, a welter of old faiths and crafts and ideals and inrushing +Western civilization all mixed up and side by side in the strangest +contrasts and you will understand what it was. The miracle plays +stayed on beside Marlowe and Shakespeare till Puritanism frowned +upon them. But when the end came it came quickly. The last recorded +performance took place in London when King James entertained +Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador. And perhaps we should regard that +as a "command" performance, reviving as command performances +commonly do, something dead for a generation—in this case, +purely out of compliment to the faith and inclination of a +distinguished guest.</p> +<p>Next in order of development after the miracle or mystery plays, +though contemporary in their popularity, came what we called +"moralities" or "moral interludes"—pieces designed to enforce +a religious or ethical lesson and perhaps to get back into drama +something of the edification which realism had ousted from the +miracles. They dealt in allegorical and figurative personages, +expounded wise saws and moral lessons, and squared rather with the +careful self-concern of the newly established Protestantism than +with the frank and joyous jest in life which was more +characteristic of the time. <cite>Everyman</cite>, the oftenest +revived and best known of them, if not the best, is very typical of +the class. They had their influences, less profound than that of +the miracles, on the full drama. It is said the +"Vice"—unregeneracy commonly degenerated into comic +relief—is the ancestor of the fool in Shakespeare, but more +likely both are successive creations of a dynasty of actors who +practised the unchanging and immemorial art of the clown. The +general structure of <cite>Everyman</cite> and some of its fellows, +heightened and made more dramatic, gave us Marlowe's +<cite>Faustus</cite>. There perhaps the influence ends.</p> +<p>The rise of a professional class of actors brought one step +nearer the full growth of drama. Companies of strolling players +formed themselves and passed from town to town, seeking like the +industrious amateurs of the guilds, civic patronage, and performing +in town-halls, market-place booths, or inn yards, whichever served +them best. The structure of the Elizabethan inn yard (you may see +some survivals still, and there are the pictures in +<cite>Pickwick</cite>) was very favourable for their purpose. The +galleries round it made seats like our boxes and circle for the +more privileged spectators; in the centre on the floor of the yard +stood the crowd or sat, if they had stools with them. The stage was +a platform set on this floor space with its back against one side +of the yard, where perhaps one of the inn-rooms served as a +dressing room. So suitable was this "fit-up" as actors call it, +that when theatres came to be built in London they were built on +the inn-yard pattern. All the playhouses of the Bankside from the +"Curtain" to the "Globe" were square or circular places with +galleries rising above one another three parts round, a floor space +of beaten earth open to the sky in the middle, and jutting out on +to it a platform stage with a tiring room capped by a gallery +behind it.</p> +<p>The entertainment given by these companies of players (who +usually got the patronage and took the title of some lord) was +various. They played moralities and interludes, they played +formless chronicle history plays like the <cite>Troublesome Reign +of King John</cite>, on which Shakespeare worked for his <cite>King +John</cite>; but above and before all they were each a company of +specialists, every one of whom had his own talent and performance +for which he was admired. The Elizabethan stage was the ancestor of +our music-hall, and to the modern music-hall rather than to the +theatre it bears its affinity. If you wish to realize the aspect of +the Globe or the Blackfriars it is to a lower class music-hall you +must go. The quality of the audience is a point of agreement. The +Globe was frequented by young "bloods" and by the more disreputable +portions of the community, racing men (or their equivalents of that +day) "coney catchers" and the like; commonly the only women present +were women of the town. The similarity extends from the auditorium +to the stage. The Elizabethan playgoer delighted in virtuosity; in +exhibitions of strength or skill from his actors; the broad sword +combat in <cite>Macbeth</cite>, and the wrestling in <cite>As You +Like It</cite>, were real trials of skill. The bear in the +<cite>Winter's Tale</cite> was no doubt a real bear got from a bear +pit, near by in the Bankside. The comic actors especially were the +very grandfathers of our music-hall stars; Tarleton and Kemp and +Cowley, the chief of them, were as much popular favourites and +esteemed as separate from the plays they played in as is Harry +Lauder. Their songs and tunes were printed and sold in hundreds as +broadsheets, just as pirated music-hall songs are sold to-day. This +is to be noted because it explains a great deal in the subsequent +evolution of the drama. It explains the delight in having +everything represented actually on the stage, all murders, battles, +duels. It explains the magnificent largesse given by Shakespeare to +the professional fool. Work had to be found for him, and +Shakespeare, whose difficulties were stepping-stones to his +triumphs, gave him Touchstone and Feste, the Porter in +<cite>Macbeth</cite> and the Fool in <cite>Lear</cite>. Others met +the problem in an attitude of frank despair. Not all great tragic +writers can easily or gracefully wield the pen of comedy, and +Marlowe in <cite>Dr. Faustus</cite> took the course of leaving the +low comedy which the audience loved and a high salaried actor +demanded, to an inferior collaborator.</p> +<p>Alongside this drama of street platforms and inn-yards and +public theatres, there grew another which, blending with it, +produced the Elizabethan drama which we know. The public theatres +were not the only places at which plays were produced. At the +University, at the Inns of Court (which then more than now, were +besides centres of study rather exclusive and expensive clubs), and +at the Court they were an important part of almost every festival. +At these places were produced academic compositions, either +allegorical like the masques, copies of which we find in +Shakespeare and by Ben Jonson, or comedies modelled on Plautus or +Terence, or tragedies modelled on Seneca. The last were +incomparably the most important. The Elizabethan age, which always +thought of literature as a guide or handmaid to life, was naturally +attracted to a poet who dealt in maxims and "sentences"; his +rhetoric appealed to men for whom words and great passages of verse +were an intoxication that only a few to-day can understand or +sympathize with; his bloodthirstiness and gloom to an age so +full-blooded as not to shrink from horrors. Tragedies early began +to be written on the strictly Senecan model, and generally, like +Seneca's, with some ulterior intention. Sackville's +<cite>Gorboduc</cite>, the first tragedy in English, produced at a +great festival at the Inner Temple, aimed at inducing Elizabeth to +marry and save the miseries of a disputed succession. To be put to +such a use argues the importance and dignity of this classical +tragedy of the learned societies and the court. None of the pieces +composed in this style were written for the popular theatre, and +indeed they could not have been a success on it. The Elizabethan +audience, as we have seen, loved action, and in these Senecan +tragedies the action took place "off." But they had a strong and +abiding influence on the popular stage; they gave it its ghosts, +its supernatural warnings, its conception of nemesis and revenge, +they gave it its love of introspection and the long passages in +which introspection, description or reflection, either in soliloquy +or dialogue, holds up the action; contradictorily enough they gave +it something at least of its melodrama. Perhaps they helped to +enforce the lesson of the miracle plays that a dramatist's proper +business was elaboration rather than invention. None of the +Elizabethan dramatists except Ben Jonson habitually constructed +their own plots. Their method was to take something ready at their +hands and overlay it with realism or poetry or romance. The stories +of their plays, like that of Hamlet's Mousetrap, were "extant and +writ in choice Italian," and very often their methods of +preparation were very like his.</p> +<p>Something of the way in which the spirit of adventure of the +time affected and finished the drama we have already seen. It is +time now to turn to the dramatists themselves.</p> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>Of Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, and Peele, the "University Wits" who +fused the academic and the popular drama, and by giving the latter +a sense of literature and learning to mould it to finer issues, +gave us Shakespeare, only Marlowe can be treated here. Greene and +Peele, the former by his comedies, the latter by his historical +plays, and Kyd by his tragedies, have their places in the +text-books, but they belong to a secondary order of dramatic +talent. Marlowe ranks amongst the greatest. It is not merely that +historically he is the head and fount of the whole movement, that +he changed blank verse, which had been a lumbering instrument +before him, into something rich and ringing and rapid and made it +the vehicle for the greatest English poetry after him. Historical +relations apart, he is great in himself. More than any other +English writer of any age, except Byron, he symbolizes the youth of +his time; its hot-bloodedness, its lust after knowledge and power +and life inspires all his pages. The teaching of Machiavelli, +misunderstood for their own purposes by would-be imitators, +furnished the reign of Elizabeth with the only political ideals it +possessed. The simple brutalism of the creed, with means justified +by ends and the unbridled self-regarding pursuit of power, +attracted men for whom the Spanish monarchy and the struggle to +overthrow it were the main factors and politics. Marlowe took it +and turned it to his own uses. There is in his writings a lust of +power, "a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness," a glow of the +imagination unhallowed by anything but its own energy which is in +the spirit of the time. In <cite>Tamburlaine</cite> it is the power +of conquest, stirred by and reflecting, as we have seen, the great +deeds of his day. In <cite>Dr. Faustus</cite> it is the pride of +will and eagerness of curiosity. Faustus is devoured by a +tormenting desire to enlarge his knowledge to the utmost bounds of +nature and art and to extend his power with his knowledge. His is +the spirit of Renaissance scholarship heightened to a passionate +excess. The play gleams with the pride of learning and a knowledge +which learning brings, and with the nemesis that comes after it. +"Oh! gentlemen! hear me with patience and tremble not at my +speeches. Though my heart pant and quiver to remember that I have +been a student here these thirty years; oh! I would I had never +seen Wittemburg, never read book!" And after the agonizing struggle +in which Faustus's soul is torn from him to hell, learning comes in +at the quiet close.</p> +<div class="poem"> +<p class="i4">"Yet, for he was a scholar once admired,</p> +<p class="i2">For wondrous knowledge in our German Schools;</p> +<p class="i4">We'll give his mangled limbs due burial;</p> +<p class="i2">And all the students, clothed in mourning black</p> +<p class="i4">Shall wait upon his heavy funeral."</p> +</div> +<p>Some one character is a centre of over-mastering pride and +ambition in every play. In the <cite>Jew of Malta</cite> it is the +hero Barabbas. In <cite>Edward II</cite>. it is Piers Gaveston. In +<cite>Edward II</cite>. indeed, two elements are mixed—the +element of Machiavelli and Tamburlaine in Gaveston, and the purely +tragic element which evolves from within itself the style in which +it shall be treated, in the King. "The reluctant pangs of +abdicating Royalty," wrote Charles Lamb in a famous passage, +"furnished hints which Shakespeare scarcely improved in his +<cite>Richard II</cite>; and the death scene of Marlowe's King +moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with +which I am acquainted." Perhaps the play gives the hint of what +Marlowe might have become had not the dagger of a groom in a tavern +cut short at thirty his burning career.</p> +<p>Even in that time of romance and daring speculation he went +further than his fellows. He was said to have been tainted with +atheism, to have denied God and the Trinity; had he lived he might +have had trouble with the Star Chamber. The free-voyaging intellect +of the age found this one way of outlet, but if literary evidences +are to be trusted sixteenth and seventeenth century atheism was a +very crude business. The <cite>Atheist's Tragedy</cite> of Tourneur +(a dramatist who need not otherwise detain us) gives some measure +of its intelligence and depth. Says the villain to the heroine,</p> +<div class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 7.5em;">"No? Then +invoke</span><br> +Your great supposed Protector. I will do't."</div> +<br> +to which she:<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Supposed Protector! Are you an atheist, then<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">I know my fears and prayers are +spent in vain."</span></div> +<p>Marlowe's very faults and extravagances, and they are many, are +only the obverse of his greatness. Magnitude and splendour of +language when the thought is too shrunken to fill it out, becomes +mere inflation. He was a butt of the parodists of the day. And +Shakespeare, though he honoured him "on this side idolatry," did +his share of ridicule. Ancient Pistol is fed and stuffed with relic +and rags of Marlowesque affectation—</p> +<div class="poem">"Holla! ye pampered jades of Asia,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Can ye not draw but twenty miles +a day."</span></div> +<br> +is a quotation taken straight from <cite>Tamburlaine</cite>.<br> +<br> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>A study of Shakespeare, who refuses to be crushed within the +limits of a general essay is no part of the plan of this book. We +must take up the story of the drama with the reign of James and +with the contemporaries of his later period, though of course, a +treatment which is conditioned by the order of development is not +strictly chronological, and some of the plays we shall have to +refer to belong to the close of the sixteenth century. We are apt +to forget that alongside Shakespeare and at his heels other +dramatists were supplying material for the theatre. The influence +of Marlowe and particularly of Kyd, whose <cite>Spanish +Tragedy</cite> with its crude mechanism of ghosts and madness and +revenge caught the popular taste, worked itself out in a score of +journeymen dramatists, mere hack writers, who turned their hand to +plays as the hacks of to-day turn their hand to novels, and with no +more literary merit than that caught as an echo from better men +than themselves. One of the worst of these—he is also one of +the most typical—was John Marston, a purveyor of tragic gloom +and sardonic satire, and an impostor in both, whose tragedy +<cite>Antonio and Mellida</cite> was published in the same year as +Shakespeare's <cite>Hamlet</cite>. Both plays owed their style and +plot to the same tradition—the tradition created by Kyd's +<cite>Spanish Tragedy</cite>—in which ghostly promptings to +revenge, terrible crime, and a feigned madman waiting his +opportunity are the elements of tragedy. Nothing could be more +fruitful in an understanding of the relations of Shakespeare to his +age than a comparison of the two. The style of <cite>Antonio and +Mellida</cite> is the style of <cite>The Murder of Gonzago</cite>. +There is no subtlety nor introspection, the pale cast of thought +falls with no shadow over its scenes. And it is typical of a score +of plays of the kind we have and beyond doubt of hundreds that have +perished. Shakespeare stands alone.</p> +<p>Beside this journey-work tragedy of revenge and murder which had +its root through Kyd and Marlowe in Seneca and in Italian romance, +there was a journey-work comedy of low life made up of loosely +constructed strings of incidents, buffoonery and romance, that had +its roots in a joyous and fantastic study of the common people. +These plays are happy and high-spirited and, compared with the +ordinary run of the tragedies, of better workmanship. They deal in +the familiar situations of low comedy—the clown, the thrifty +citizen and his frivolous wife, the gallant, the bawd, the good +apprentice and the bad portrayed vigorously and tersely and with a +careless kindly gaiety that still charms in the reading. The best +writers in this kind were Middleton and Dekker—and the best +play to read as a sample of it <cite>Eastward Ho!</cite> in which +Marston put off his affectation of sardonical melancholy and joined +with Jonson and Dekker to produce what is the masterpiece of the +non-Shakespearean comedy of the time.</p> +<p>For all our habit of grouping their works together it is a far +cry in spirit and temperament from the dramatists whose heyday was +under Elizabeth and those who reached their prime under her +successor. Quickly though insensibly the temper of the nation +suffered eclipse. The high hopes and the ardency of the reign of +Elizabeth saddened into a profound pessimism and gloom in that of +James. This apparition of unsought melancholy has been widely noted +and generally assumed to be inexplicable. In broad outline its +causes are clear enough, "To travel hopefully is a better thing +than to arrive." The Elizabethans were, if ever any were, hopeful +travellers. The winds blew them to the four quarters of the world; +they navigated all seas; they sacked rich cities. They beat off the +great Armada, and harried the very coasts of Spain. They pushed +discovery to the ends of the world and amassed great wealth. Under +James all these things were over. Peace was made with Spain: +national pride was wounded by the solicitous anxiety of the King +for a Spanish marriage for the heir to the throne. Sir Walter +Raleigh, a romantic adventurer lingering beyond his time, was +beheaded out of hand by the ungenerous timidity of the monarch to +whom had been transferred devotion and loyalty he was unfitted to +receive. The Court which had been a centre of flashing and gleaming +brilliance degenerated into a knot of sycophants humouring the +pragmatic and self-important folly of a king in whom had implanted +themselves all the vices of the Scots and none of their virtues. +Nothing seemed left remarkable beneath the visiting moon. The +bright day was done and they were for the dark. The uprising of +Puritanism and the shadow of impending religious strife darkened +the temper of the time.</p> +<p>The change affected all literature and particularly the drama, +which because it appeals to what all men have in common, commonly +reflects soonest a change in the outlook or spirits of a people. +The onslaughts of the dramatists on the Puritans, always implacable +enemies of the theatre, became more virulent and envenomed. What a +difference between the sunny satire of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and the +dark animosity of <cite>The Atheists' Tragedy</cite> with its +Languebeau Snuffe ready to carry out any villainy proposed to him! +"I speak sir," says a lady in the same play to a courtier who +played with her in an attempt to carry on a quick witted, +"conceited" love passage in the vein of <cite>Much Ado</cite>, "I +speak, sir, as the fashion now: is, in earnest." The quick-witted, +light-hearted age was gone. It is natural that tragedy reflected +this melancholy in its deepest form. Gloom deepened and had no +light to relieve it, men supped full of horrors—there was no +slackening of the tension, no concession to overwrought nerves, no +resting-place for the overwrought soul. It is in the dramatist John +Webster that this new spirit has its most powerful exponent.</p> +<p>The influence of Machiavelli, which had given Marlowe tragic +figures that were bright and splendid and burning, smouldered in +Webster into a duskier and intenser heat. His fame rests on two +tragedies, <cite>The White Devil</cite> and <cite>The Duchess of +Malf</cite>. Both are stories of lust and crime, full of hate and +hideous vengeances, and through each runs a vein of bitter and +ironical comment on men and women. In them chance plays the part of +fate. "Blind accident and blundering mishap—'such a mistake,' +says one of the criminals, 'as I have often seen in a play' are the +steersmen of their fortunes and the doomsmen of their deeds." His +characters are gloomy; meditative and philosophic murderers, +cynical informers, sad and loving women, and they are all +themselves in every phrase that they utter. But they are studied in +earnestness and sincerity. Unquestionably he is the greatest of +Shakespeare's successors in the romantic drama, perhaps his only +direct imitator. He has single lines worthy to set beside those in +<cite>Othello</cite> or <cite>King Lear</cite>. His dirge in the +<cite>Duchess of Malfi</cite>, Charles Lamb thought worthy to be +set beside the ditty in <cite>The Tempest</cite>, which reminds +Ferdinand of his drowned father. "As that is of the water, watery, +so this is of the earth, earthy." He has earned his place among the +greatest of our dramatists by his two plays, the theme of which +matched his sombre genius and the sombreness of the season in which +it flowered.</p> +<p>But the drama could not survive long the altered times, and the +voluminous plays of Beaumont and Fletcher mark the beginning of the +end. They are the decadence of Elizabethan drama. Decadence is a +term often used loosely and therefore hard to define, but we may +say broadly that an art is decadent when any particular one of the +elements which go to its making occurs in excess and disturbs the +balance of forces which keeps the work a coherent and intact whole. +Poetry is decadent when the sound is allowed to outrun the sense or +when the suggestions, say, of colour, which it contains are allowed +to crowd out its deeper implications. Thus we can call such a poem +as this one well-known of O'Shaughnessy's</p> +<div class="poem">"We are the music-makers,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">We are the dreamers of +dreams,"</span></div> +<br> +decadent because it conveys nothing but the mere delight in an +obvious rhythm of words, or such a poem as Morris's "Two red roses +across the moon;" because a meaningless refrain, merely pleasing in +its word texture, breaks in at intervals on the reader. The drama +of Beaumont and Fletcher is decadent in two ways. In the first +place those variations and licences with which Shakespeare in his +later plays diversified the blank verse handed on to him by +Marlowe, they use without any restraint or measure. "Weak" endings +and "double" endings, <em>i.e.</em> lines which end either on a +conjunction or proposition or some other unstressed word, or lines +in which there is a syllable too many—abound in their plays. +They destroyed blank verse as a musical and resonant poetic +instrument by letting this element of variety outrun the sparing +and skilful use which alone could justify it. But they were +decadent in other and deeper ways than that. Sentiment in their +plays usurps the place of character. Eloquent and moving speeches +and fine figures are no longer subservient to the presentation of +character in action, but are set down for their own sake, "What +strange self-trumpeters and tongue-bullies all the brave soldiers +of Beaumont and Fletcher are," said Coleridge. When they die they +die to the music of their own virtue. When dreadful deeds are done +they are described not with that authentic and lurid vividness +which throws light on the working of the human heart in Shakespeare +or Webster but in tedious rhetoric. Resignation, not fortitude, is +the authors' forte and they play upon it amazingly. The sterner +tones of their predecessors melt into the long drawn broken accent +of pathos and woe. This delight not in action or in emotion arising +from action but in passivity of suffering is only one aspect of a +certain mental flaccidity in grain. Shakespeare may be free and +even coarse. Beaumont and Fletcher cultivate indecency. They made +their subject not their master but their plaything, or an occasion +for the convenient exercise of their own powers of figure and +rhetoric.<br> +<br> +<p>Of their followers, Massinger, Ford and Shirley, no more need be +said than they carried one step further the faults of their +masters. Emotion and tragic passion give way to wire-drawn +sentiment. Tragedy takes on the air of a masquerade. With them +romantic drama died a natural death and the Puritans' closing of +the theatre only gave it a <em>coup de grace</em>. In England it +has had no second birth.</p> +<br> +<h4>(4)</h4> +<p>Outside the direct romantic succession there worked another +author whose lack of sympathy with it, as well as his close +connection with the age which followed, justifies his separate +treatment. Ben Jonson shows a marked contrast to Shakespeare in his +character, his accomplishments, and his attitude to letters, while +his career was more varied than Shakespeare's own. The first +"classic" in English writing, he was a "romantic" in action. In his +adventurous youth he was by turns scholar, soldier, bricklayer, +actor. He trailed a pike with Leicester in the Low Countries; on +his return to England fought a duel and killed his man, only +escaping hanging by benefit of clergy; at the end of his life he +was Poet Laureate. Such a career is sufficiently diversified, and +it forms a striking contrast to the plainness and severity of his +work. But it must not lead us to forget or under-estimate his +learning and knowledge. Not Gray nor Tennyson, nor +Swinburne—perhaps not even Milton—was a better scholar. +He is one of the earliest of English writers to hold and express +different theories about literature. He consciously appointed +himself a teacher; was a missionary of literature with a definite +creed.</p> +<p>But though in a general way his dramatic principles are opposed +to the romantic tendencies of his age, he is by no means blindly +classical. He never consented to be bound by the +"Unities"—that conception of dramatic construction evolved +out of Aristotle and Horace and elaborated in the Renaissance till, +in its strictest form, it laid down that the whole scene of a play +should be in one place, its whole action deal with one single +series of events, and the time it represented as elapsing be no +greater than the time it took in playing. He was always +pre-eminently an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather +than a poet's temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, +and only limited because in ruling out these things he ruled out +much else that was essential to the spirit of the time. As a +craftsman he was uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes of +the public and never veiled his scorn of those—Shakespeare +among them—whom he conceived to do so; but he knew and valued +his own work, as his famous last word to an audience who might be +unsympathetic stands to witness,</p> +<div class="poem">"By God 'tis good, and if you like it you +may."</div> +<p>Compare the temper it reveals with the titles of the two +contemporary comedies of his gentler and greater brother, the one +<cite>As You Like It</cite>, the other <cite>What You Will</cite>. +Of the two attitudes towards the public, and they might stand as +typical of two kinds of artists, neither perhaps can claim complete +sincerity. A truculent and noisy disclaimer of their favours is not +a bad tone to assume towards an audience; in the end it is apt to +succeed as well as the sub-ironical compliance which is its +opposite.</p> +<p>Jonson's theory of comedy and the consciousness with which he +set it against the practice of his contemporaries and particularly +of Shakespeare receive explicit statement in the prologue to +<cite>Every Man Out of His Humour</cite>—one of his earlier +plays. "I travail with another objection, Signor, which I fear will +be enforced against the author ere I can be delivered of it," says +Mitis. "What's that, sir?" replies Cordatus. Mitis:—"That the +argument of his comedy might have been of some other nature, as of +a duke to be in love with a countess, and that countess to be in +love with the duke's son, and the son to love the lady's waiting +maid; some such cross-wooing, better than to be thus near and +familiarly allied to the times." Cordatus: "You say well, but I +would fain hear one of these autumn-judgments define <em>Quin sit +comoedia</em>? If he cannot, let him concern himself with Cicero's +definition, till he have strength to propose to himself a better, +who would have a comedy to be <em>invitatio vitae, speculum +consuetudinis, imago veritatis</em>; a thing throughout pleasant +and ridiculous and accommodated to the correction of manners." That +was what he meant his comedy to be, and so he conceived the popular +comedy of the day, <cite>Twelfth Night</cite> and <cite>Much +Ado</cite>. Shakespeare might play with dukes and countesses, +serving-women and pages, clowns and disguises; he would come down +more near and ally himself familiarly with the times. So comedy was +to be medicinal, to purge contemporary London of its follies and +its sins; and it was to be constructed with regularity and +elaboration, respectful to the Unities if not ruled by them, and +built up of characters each the embodiment of some "humour" or +eccentricity, and each when his eccentricity is displaying itself +at its fullest, outwitted and exposed. This conception of +"humours," based on a physiology which was already obsolescent, +takes heavily from the realism of Jonson's methods, nor does his +use of a careful vocabulary of contemporary colloquialism and slang +save him from a certain dryness and tediousness to modern readers. +The truth is he was less a satirist of contemporary manners than a +satirist in the abstract who followed the models of classical +writers in this style, and he found the vices and follies of his +own day hardly adequate to the intricacy and elaborateness of the +plots which he constructed for their exposure. At the first glance +his people are contemporary types, at the second they betray +themselves for what they are really—cock-shies set up by the +new comedy of Greece that every "classical" satirist in Rome or +France or England has had his shot at since. One wonders whether +Ben Jonson, for all his satirical intention, had as much +observation—as much of an eye for contemporary types—as +Shakespeare's rustics and roysterers prove him to have had. It +follows that all but one or two of his plays, when they are put on +the stage to-day are apt to come to one with a sense of remoteness +and other-worldliness which we hardly feel with Shakespeare or +Molière. His muse moves along the high-road of comedy which +is the Roman road, and she carries in her train types that have +done service to many since the ancients fashioned them years ago. +Jealous husbands, foolish pragmatic fathers, a dissolute son, a +boastful soldier, a cunning slave—they all are merely +counters by which the game of comedy used to be played. In England, +since Shakespeare took his hold on the stage, that road has been +stopped for us, that game has ceased to amuse.</p> +<p>Ben Jonson, then, in a certain degree failed in his intention. +Had he kept closer to contemporary life, instead of merely grafting +on to it types he had learned from books, he might have made +himself an English Molière—without Molière's +breadth and clarity—but with a corresponding vigour and +strength which would have kept his work sweet. And he might have +founded a school of comedy that would have got its roots deeper +into our national life than the trivial and licentious Restoration +comedy ever succeeded in doing. As it is, his importance is mostly +historical. One must credit him with being the first of the English +classics—of the age which gave us Dryden and Swift and Pope. +Perhaps that is enough in his praise.</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_IV"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2> +<br> +<h3>THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY</h3> +<h4>(1)</h4> +<p>With the seventeenth century the great school of imaginative +writers that made glorious the last years of Elizabeth's reign, had +passed away. Spenser was dead before 1600, Sir Philip Sidney a +dozen years earlier, and though Shakespeare and Drayton and many +other men whom we class roughly as Elizabethan lived on to work +under James, their temper and their ideals belong to the earlier +day. The seventeenth century, not in England only but in Europe, +brought a new way of thinking with it, and gave a new direction to +human interest and to human affairs. It is not perhaps easy to +define nor is it visible in the greater writers of the time. +Milton, for instance, and Sir Thomas Browne are both of them too +big, and in their genius too far separated from their fellows to +give us much clue to altered conditions. It is commonly in the work +of lesser and forgotten writers that the spirit of an age has its +fullest expression. Genius is a law to itself; it moves in another +dimension; it is out of time. To define this seventeenth century +spirit, then, one must look at the literature of the age as a +whole. What is there that one finds in it which marks a change in +temperament and outlook from the Renaissance, and the time which +immediately followed it?</p> +<p>Putting it very broadly one may say that literature in the +seventeenth century becomes for the first time essentially modern +in spirit. We began our survey of modern English literature at the +Renaissance because the discovery of the New World, and the +widening of human experience and knowledge, which that and the +revival of classical learning implied, mark a definite break from a +way of thought which had been continuous since the break up of the +Roman Empire. The men of the Renaissance felt themselves to be +modern. They started afresh, owing nothing to their immediate +forbears, and when they talked, say, of Chaucer, they did so in +very much the same accent as we do to-day. He was mediaeval and +obsolete; the interest which he possessed was a purely literary +interest; his readers did not meet him easily on the same plane of +thought, or forget the lapse of time which separated him from them. +And in another way too, the Renaissance began modern writing. +Inflections had been dropped. The revival of the classics had +enriched our vocabulary, and the English language, after a gradual +impoverishment which followed the obsolescence one after another of +the local dialects, attained a fairly fixed form. There is more +difference between the language of the English writings of Sir +Thomas More and that of the prose of Chaucer than there is between +that of More and of Ruskin. But it is not till the seventeenth +century that the modern spirit, in the fullest sense of the word, +comes into being. Defined it means a spirit of observation, of +preoccupation with detail, of stress laid on matter of fact, of +analysis of feelings and mental processes, of free argument upon +institutions and government. In relation to knowledge, it is the +spirit of science, and the study of science, which is the essential +intellectual fact in modern history, dates from just this time, +from Bacon and Newton and Descartes. In relation to literature, it +is the spirit of criticism, and criticism in England is the +creation of the seventeenth century. The positive temper, the +attitude of realism, is everywhere in the ascendant. The sixteenth +century made voyages of discovery; the seventeenth sat down to take +stock of the riches it had gathered. For the first time in English +literature writing becomes a vehicle for storing and conveying +facts.</p> +<p>It would be easy to give instances: one must suffice here. +Biography, which is one of the most characteristic kinds of English +writing, was unknown to the moderns as late as the sixteenth +century. Partly the awakened interest in the careers of the ancient +statesmen and soldiers which the study of Plutarch had excited, and +partly the general interest in, and craving for, facts set men +writing down the lives of their fellows. The earliest English +biographies date from this time. In the beginning they were +concerned, like Plutarch, with men of action, and when Sir Fulke +Greville wrote a brief account of his friend Sir Philip Sidney it +was the courtier and the soldier, and not the author, that he +designed to celebrate. But soon men of letters came within their +scope, and though the interest in the lives of authors came too +late to give us the contemporary life of Shakespeare we so much +long for, it was early enough to make possible those masterpieces +of condensed biography in which Isaak Walton celebrates Herbert and +Donne. Fuller and Aubrey, to name only two authors, spent lives of +laborious industry in hunting down and chronicling the smallest +facts about the worthies of their day and the time immediately +before them. Autobiography followed where biography led. Lord +Herbert of Cherbury and Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, as well as +less reputable persons, followed the new mode. By the time of the +Restoration Pepys and Evelyn were keeping their diaries, and Fox +his journal. Just as in poetry the lyric, that is the expression of +personal feeling, became more widely practised, more subtle and +more sincere, in prose the letter, the journal, and the +autobiography formed themselves to meet the new and growing demand +for analysis of the feelings and the intimate thoughts and +sensations of real men and women. A minor form of literature which +had a brief but popular vogue ministered less directly to the same +need. The "Character," a brief descriptive essay on a contemporary +type—a tobacco seller, an old college butler or the +like—was popular because in its own way it matched the newly +awakened taste for realism and fact. The drama which in the hands +of Ben Jonson had attacked folly and wickedness proper to no place +or time, descended to the drawing-rooms of the day, and Congreve +occupied himself with the portrayal of the social frauds and +foolishnesses perpetrated by actual living men and women of fashion +in contemporary London. Satire ceased to be a mere expression of a +vague discontent, and became a weapon against opposing men and +policies. The new generation of readers were nothing if not +critical. They were for testing directly institutions whether they +were literary, social, or political. They wanted facts, and they +wanted to take a side.</p> +<p>In the distinct and separate realm of poetry a revolution no +less remarkable took place. Spenser had been both a poet and a +Puritan: he had designed to show by his great poem the training and +fashioning of a Puritan English gentleman. But the alliance between +poetry and Puritanism which he typified failed to survive his +death. The essentially pagan spirit of the Renaissance which caused +him no doubts nor difficulties proved too strong for his readers +and his followers, and the emancipated artistic enthusiasm in which +it worked alienated from secular poetry men with deep and strong +religious convictions. Religion and morality and poetry, which in +Sidney and Spenser had gone hand in hand, separated from each +other. Poems like <cite>Venus and Adonis</cite> or like +Shakespeare's sonnets could hardly be squared with the sterner +temper which persecution began to breed. Even within orthodox +Anglicanism poetry and religion began to be deemed no fit company +for each other. When George Herbert left off courtier and took +orders he burnt his earlier love poetry, and only the persuasion of +his friends prevented Donne from following the same course. Pure +poetry became more and more an exotic. All Milton's belongs to his +earlier youth; his middle age was occupied with controversy and +propaganda in prose; when he returned to poetry in blindness and +old age it was "to justify the ways of God to man"—to use +poetry, that is, for a spiritual and moral rather than an artistic +end.</p> +<p>Though the age was curious and inquiring, though poetry and +prose tended more and more to be enlisted in the service of +non-artistic enthusiasms and to be made the vehicle of deeper +emotions and interests than perhaps a northern people could ever +find in art, pure and simple, it was not like the time that +followed it, a "prosaic" age. Enthusiasm burned fierce and clear, +displaying itself in the passionate polemic of Milton, in the +fanaticism of Bunyan and Fox, hardly more than in the gentle, +steadfast search for knowledge in Burton, and the wide and vigilant +curiousness of Bacon. Its eager experimentalism tried the +impossible; wrote poems and then gave them a weight of meaning they +could not carry, as when Fletcher in <cite>The Purple Island</cite> +designed to allegorize all that the physiology of his day knew of +the human body, or Donne sought to convey abstruse scientific fact +in a lyric. It gave men a passion for pure learning, set Jonson to +turn himself from a bricklayer into the best equipped scholar of +his day, and Fuller and Camden grubbing among English records and +gathering for the first time materials of scientific value for +English history. Enthusiasm gave us poetry that was at once full of +learning and of imagination, poetry that was harsh and brutal in +its roughness and at the same time impassioned. And it set up a +school of prose that combined colloquial readiness and fluency, +pregnancy and high sentiment with a cumbrous pedantry of learning +which was the fruit of its own excess.</p> +<p>The form in which enthusiasm manifested itself most fiercely was +as we have seen not favourable to literature. Puritanism drove +itself like a wedge into the art of the time, broadening as it +went. Had there been no more in it than the moral earnestness and +religiousness of Sidney and Spenser, Cavalier would not have +differed from Roundhead, and there might have been no civil war; +each party was endowed deeply with the religious sense and Charles +I. was a sincerely pious man. But while Spenser and Sidney held +that life as a preparation for eternity must be ordered and +strenuous and devout but that care for the hereafter was not +incompatible with a frank and full enjoyment of life as it is +lived, Puritanism as it developed in the middle classes became a +sterner and darker creed. The doctrine of original sin, face to +face with the fact that art, like other pleasures, was naturally +and readily entered into and enjoyed, forced them to the plain +conclusion that art was an evil thing. As early as Shakespeare's +youth they had been strong enough to keep the theatres outside +London walls; at the time of the Civil War they closed them +altogether, and the feud which had lasted for over a generation +between them and the dramatists ended in the destruction of the +literary drama. In the brief years of their ascendancy they +produced no literature, for Milton is much too large to be tied +down to their negative creed, and, indeed, in many of his +qualities, his love of music and his sensuousness for instance, he +is antagonistic to the temper of his day. With the Restoration +their earnest and strenuous spirit fled to America. It is +noteworthy that it had no literary manifestation there till two +centuries after the time of its passage. Hawthorne's novels are the +fruit—the one ripe fruit in art—of the Puritan +imagination.</p> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>If the reader adopts the seventeenth century habit himself and +takes stock of what the Elizabethans accomplished in poetry, he +will recognize speedily that their work reached various stages of +completeness. They perfected the poetic drama and its instrument, +blank verse; they perfected, though not in the severer Italian +form, the sonnet; they wrote with extraordinary delicacy and finish +short lyrics in which a simple and freer manner drawn from the +classics took the place of the mediaeval intricacies of the ballad +and the rondeau. And in the forms which they failed to bring to +perfection they did beautiful and noble work. The splendour of +<cite>The Fairy Queen</cite> is in separate passages; as a whole it +is over tortuous and slow; its affectations, its sensuousness, the +mere difficulty of reading it, makes us feel it a collection of +great passages, strung it is true on a large conception, rather +than a great work. The Elizabethans, that is, had not discovered +the secret of the long poem; the abstract idea of the "heroic" epic +which was in all their minds had to wait for embodiment till +<cite>Paradise Lost</cite>. In a way their treatment of the +pastoral or eclogue form was imperfect too. They used it well but +not so well as their models, Vergil and Theocritus; they had not +quite mastered the convention on which it is built.</p> +<p>The seventeenth century, taking stock in some such fashion of +its artistic possessions, found some things it were vain to try to +do. It could add nothing to the accomplishment of the English +sonnet, so it hardly tried; with the exception of a few sonnets in +the Italian form of Milton, the century can show us nothing in this +mode of verse. The literary drama was brought to perfection in the +early years of it by the surviving Elizabethans; later decades +could add nothing to it but licence, and as we saw, the licences +they added hastened its destruction. But in other forms the poets +of the new time experimented eagerly, and in the stress of +experiment, poetry which under Elizabeth had been integral and +coherent split into different schools. As the period of the +Renaissance was also that of the Reformation it was only natural a +determined effort should sooner or later be made to use poetry for +religious purposes. The earliest English hymn writing, our first +devotional verse in the vernacular, belongs to this time, and a +Catholic and religious school of lyricism grew and flourished +beside the pagan neo-classical writers. From the tumult of +experiment three schools disengage themselves, the school of +Spenser, the school of Jonson, and the school of Donne.</p> +<p>At the outset of the century Spenser's influence was triumphant +and predominant; his was the main stream with which the other +poetic influences of the time merely mingled. His popularity is +referable to qualities other than those which belonged peculiarly +to his talent as a poet. Puritans loved his religious ardour, and +in those Puritan households where the stricter conception of the +diabolical nature of all poetry had not penetrated, his works were +read—standing on a shelf, may be, between the new translation +of the Bible and Sylvester's translation of the French poet Du +Bartas' work on the creation, that had a large popularity at that +time as family reading. Probably the Puritans were as blind to the +sensuousness of Spenser's language and imagery as they were (and +are) to the same qualities in the Bible itself. <cite>The Fairy +Queen</cite> would easily achieve innocuousness amongst those who +can find nothing but an allegory of the Church in the "Song of +Songs." His followers made their allegory a great deal plainer than +he had done his. In his poem called <cite>The Purple Island</cite>, +Phineas Fletcher, a Puritan imitator of Spenser in Cambridge, +essayed to set forth the struggle of the soul at grip with evil, a +battle in which the body—the "Purple Island"—is the +field. To a modern reader it is a desolating and at times a mildly +amusing book, in which everything from the liver to the seven +deadly sins is personified; in which after four books of +allegorized contemporary anatomy and physiology, the will (Voletta) +engages in a struggle with Satan and conquers by the help of Christ +and King James! The allegory is clever—too clever—and +the author can paint a pleasant picture, but on the whole he was +happier in his pastoral work. His brother Giles made a better +attempt at the Spenserian manner. His long poem, <cite>Christ's +Victory and Death</cite>, shows for all its carefully Protestant +tone high qualities of mysticism; across it Spenser and Milton join +hands.</p> +<p>It was, however, in pastoral poetry that Spenser's influence +found its pleasantest outlet. One might hesitate to advise a reader +to embark on either of the Fletchers. There is no reason why any +modern should not read and enjoy Browne or Wither, in whose softly +flowing verse the sweetness and contentment of the countryside, +that "merry England" which was the background of all sectarian and +intellectual strife and labour, finds as in a placid stream a calm +reflection and picture of itself. The seventeenth century gave +birth to many things that only came to maturity in the nineteenth; +if you care for that kind of literary study which searches out +origins and digs for hints and models of accented styles, you will +find in Browne that which influenced more than any other single +thing the early work of Keats. Browne has another claim to +immortality; if it be true as is now thought that he was the author +of the epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke:</p> +<div class="poem">"Underneath this sable hearse<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Lies the subject of all +verse,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Sidney's sister, Pembroke's +mother.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Death, ere thou hast slain +another</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Fair and learned and good as +she,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Time shall throw a dart at +thee."</span></div> +<br> +then he achieved the miracle of a quintessential statement of the +spirit of the English Renaissance. For the breath of it stirs in +these slow quiet moving lines, and its few and simple words +implicate the soul of a period.<br> +<br> +<p>By the end of the first quarter of the century the influence of +Spenser and the school which worked under it had died out. Its +place was taken by the twin schools of Jonson and Donne. Jonson's +poetic method is something like his dramatic; he formed himself as +exactly as possible on classical models. Horace had written satires +and elegies, and epistles and complimentary verses, and Jonson +quite consciously and deliberately followed where Horace led. He +wrote elegies on the great, letters and courtly compliments and +love-lyrics to his friends, satires with an air of general censure. +But though he was classical, his style was never latinized. In all +of them he strove to pour into an ancient form language that was as +intense and vigorous and as purely English as the earliest +trumpeters of the Renaissance in England could have wished. The +result is not entirely successful. He seldom fails to reproduce +classic dignity and good sense; on the other hand he seldom +succeeds in achieving classic grace and ease. Occasionally, as in +his best known lyric, he is perfect and achieves an air of +spontaneity little short of marvellous, when we know that his +images and even his words in the song are all plagiarized from +other men. His expression is always clear and vigorous and his +sense good and noble. The native earnestness and sincerity of the +man shines through as it does in his dramas and his prose. In an +age of fantastic and meaningless eulogy—eulogy so amazing in +its unexpectedness and abstruseness that the wonder is not so much +that it should have been written as that it could have been thought +of—Jonson maintains his personal dignity and his good sense. +You feel his compliments are such as the best should be, not +necessarily understood and properly valued by the public, but of a +discriminating sort that by their very comprehending sincerity +would be most warmly appreciated by the people to whom they were +addressed. His verses to Shakespeare and his prose commentaries on +him too, are models of what self-respecting admiration should be, +generous in its praise of excellence, candid in its statement of +defects. They are the kind of compliments that Shakespeare himself, +if he had grace enough, must have loved to receive.</p> +<p>Very different from his direct and dignified manner is the +closely packed style of Donne, who, Milton apart, is the greatest +English writer of the century, though his obscurity has kept him +out of general reading. No poetry in English, not even Browning, is +more difficult to understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning +proceed from such similar causes that they are worth examining +together. In both, as in the obscure passages in Shakespeare's +later plays, obscurity arises not because the poet says too little +but because he attempts to say too much. He huddles a new thought +on the one before it, before the first has had time to express +itself; he sees things or analyses emotions so swiftly and subtly +himself that he forgets the slower comprehensions of his readers; +he is for analysing things far deeper than the ordinary mind +commonly can. His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and +likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things +from a dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each +separate vision in a heap out on to the page; his restless +intellect finds new and subtler shades of emotion and thought +invisible to other pairs of eyes, and cannot, because speech is +modelled on the average of our intelligences, find words to express +them; he is always trembling on the brink of the inarticulate. All +this applies to both Donne and Browning, and the comparison could +be pushed further still. Both draw the knowledge which is the main +cause of their obscurity from the same source, the bypaths of +mediaevalism. Browning's <cite>Sordello</cite> is obscure because +he knows too much about mediaeval Italian history; Donne's +<cite>Anniversary</cite> because he is too deeply read in mediaeval +scholasticism and speculation. Both make themselves more difficult +to the reader who is familiar with the poetry of their +contemporaries by the disconcerting freshness of their point of +view. Seventeenth century love poetry was idyllic and idealist; +Donne's is passionate and realistic to the point of cynicism. To +read him after reading Browne or Jonson is to have the same shock +as reading Browning after Tennyson. Both poets are salutary in the +strong and biting antidote they bring to sentimentalism in thought +and melodious facility in writing. They are the corrective of lazy +thinking and lazy composition.</p> +<p>Elizabethan love poetry was written on a convention which though +it was used with manliness and entire sincerity by Sidney did not +escape the fate of its kind. Dante's love for Beatrice, Petrarch's +for Laura, the gallant and passionate adoration of Sidney for his +Stella became the models for a dismal succession of imaginary woes. +They were all figments of the mind, perhaps hardly that; they all +use the same terms and write in fixed strains, epicurean and +sensuous like Ronsard, ideal and intellectualized like Dante, +sentimental and adoring like Petrarch. Into this enclosed garden of +sentiment and illusion Donne burst passionately and rudely, pulling +up the gay-coloured tangled weeds that choked thoughts, planting, +as one of his followers said, the seeds of fresh invention. Where +his forerunners had been idealist, epicurean, or adoring, he was +brutal, cynical and immitigably realist. He could begin a poem, +"For God's sake hold your tongue and let me live"; he could be as +resolutely free from illusion as Shakespeare when he addressed his +Dark Lady—</p> +<div class="poem">"Hope not for mind in women; at their best,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Sweetness and wit they're but +mummy possest."</span></div> +<p>And where the sonneteers pretended to a sincerity which was none +of theirs, he was, like Browning, unaffectedly a dramatic lyrist. +"I did best," he said, "when I had least truth for my subject."</p> +<p>His love poetry was written in his turbulent and brilliant +youth, and the poetic talent which made it turned in his later +years to express itself in hymns and religious poetry. But there is +no essential distinction between the two halves of his work. It is +all of a piece. The same swift and subtle spirit which analyses +experiences of passion, analyses, in his later poetry, those of +religion. His devotional poems, though they probe and question, are +none the less never sermons, but rather confessions or prayers. His +intense individuality, eager always, as his best critic has said, +"to find a North-West passage of his own,"[<a href="#note-2">2</a>] +pressed its curious and sceptical questioning into every corner of +love and life and religion, explored unsuspected depths, exploited +new discovered paradoxes, and turned its discoveries always into +poetry of the closely-packed artificial style which was all its own. +Simplicity indeed would have been for him an affectation; his +elaborateness is not like that of his followers, constructed +painfully in a vicious desire to compass the unexpected, but the +natural overflow of an amazingly fertile and ingenious mind. The +curiosity, the desire for truth, the search after minute and +detailed knowledge of his age is all in his verse. He bears the +spirit of his time not less markedly than Bacon does, or Newton, or +Descartes.</p> +<p>The work of the followers of Donne and Jonson leads straight to +the new school, Jonson's by giving that school a model on which to +work, Donne's by producing an era of extravagance and absurdity +which made a literary revolution imperative. The school of +Donne—the "fantastics" as they have been called (Dr. Johnson +called them the metaphysical poets), produced in Herbert and +Vaughan, our two noblest writers of religious verse, the flower of +a mode of writing which ended in the somewhat exotic religiousness +of Crashaw. In the hands of Cowley the use of far-sought and +intricate imagery became a trick, and the fantastic school, the +soul of sincerity gone out of it, died when he died. To the +followers of Jonson we owe that delightful and simple lyric poetry +which fills our anthologies, their courtly lyricism receiving a new +impulse in the intenser loyalty of troubled times. The most +finished of them is perhaps Carew; the best, because of the +freshness and varity of his subject-matter and his easy grace, +Herrick. At the end of them came Waller and gave to the +five-accented rhymed verse (the heroic couplet) that trick of +regularity and balance which gave us the classical school.</p> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>The prose literature of the seventeenth century is +extraordinarily rich and varied, and a study of it would cover a +wide field of human knowledge. The new and unsuspected harmonies +discovered by the Elizabethans were applied indeed to all the tasks +of which prose is capable, from telling stories to setting down the +results of speculation which was revolutionizing science and +philosophy. For the first time the vernacular and not Latin became +the language of scientific research, and though Bacon in his +<cite>Novum Organum</cite> adhered to the older mode its +disappearance was rapid. English was proving itself too flexible an +instrument for conveying ideas to be longer neglected. It was +applied too to preaching of a more formal and grandiose kind than +the plain and homely Latimer ever dreamed of. The preachers, though +their golden-mouthed oratory, which blended in its combination of +vigour and cadence the euphuistic and colloquial styles of the +Elizabethans, is in itself a glory of English literature, belong by +their matter too exclusively to the province of Church history to +be dealt with here. The men of science and philosophy, Newton, +Hobbes, and Locke, are in a like way outside our province. For the +purpose of the literary student the achievement of the seventeenth +century can be judged in four separate men or books—in the +Bible, in Francis Bacon, and in Burton and Browne.</p> +<p>In a way the Bible, like the preachers, lies outside the domain +of literary study in the narrow sense; but its sheer literary +magnitude, the abiding significance of it in our subsequent +history, social, political, and artistic as well as religious, +compel us to turn aside to examine the causes that have produced +such great results. The Authorized Version is not, of course, a +purely seventeenth century work. Though the scholars[<a href= +"#note-3">3</a>] who wrote and compiled it had before them all the +previous vernacular texts and chose the best readings where they +found them or devised new ones in accordance with the original, the +basis is undoubtedly the Tudor version of Tindall. It has, none the +less, the qualities of the time of its publication. It could hardly +have been done earlier; had it been so, it would not have been done +half so well. In it English has lost both its roughness and its +affectation and retained its strength; the Bible is the supreme +example of early English prose style. The reason is not far to +seek. Of all recipes for good or noble writing that which enjoins +the writer to be careful about the matter and never mind the +manner, is the most sure. The translators had the handling of +matter of the gravest dignity and momentousness, and their sense of +reverence kept them right in their treatment of it. They cared +passionately for the truth; they were virtually anonymous and not +ambitious of originality or literary fame; they had no desire to +stand between the book and its readers. It followed that they +cultivated that naked plainness and spareness which makes their +work supreme. The Authorized Version is the last and greatest of +those English translations which were the fruit of Renaissance +scholarship and pioneering. It is the first and greatest piece of +English prose.</p> +<p>Its influence is one of those things on which it is profitless +to comment or enlarge simply because they are an understood part of +every man's experience. In its own time it helped to weld England, +for where before one Bible was read at home and another in +churches, all now read the new version. Its supremacy was +instantaneous and unchallenged, and it quickly coloured speech and +literature; it could produce a Bunyan in the century of its birth. +To it belongs the native dignity and eloquence of peasant speech. +It runs like a golden thread through all our writing subsequent to +its coming; men so diverse as Huxley and Carlyle have paid their +tribute to its power; Ruskin counted it the one essential part of +its education. It will be a bad day for the mere quality of our +language when it ceases to be read.</p> +<p>At the time the translators were sitting, Francis Bacon was at +the height of his fame. By profession a lawyer—time-serving +and over-compliant to wealth and influence—he gives +singularly little evidence of it in the style of his books. +Lawyers, from the necessity they are under of exerting persuasion, +of planting an unfamiliar argument in the minds of hearers of whose +favour they are doubtful, but whose sympathy they must gain, are +usually of purpose diffuse. They cultivate the gift, possessed by +Edmund Burke above all other English authors, of putting the same +thing freshly and in different forms a great many times in +succession. They value copiousness and fertility of illustration. +Nothing could be more unlike this normal legal manner than the +style of Bacon. "No man," says Ben Jonson, speaking in one of those +vivid little notes of his, of his oratorical method, "no man ever +coughed or turned aside from him without loss." He is a master of +the aphoristic style. He compresses his wisdom into the +quintessential form of an epigram; so complete and concentrated is +his form of statement, so shortly is everything put, that the mere +transition from one thought to another gives his prose a curious +air of disjointedness as if he flitted arbitrarily from one thing +to another, and jotted down anything that came into his head. His +writing has clarity and lucidity, it abounds in terseness of +expression and in exact and discriminating phraseology, and in the +minor arts of composition—in the use of quotations for +instance—it can be extraordinarily felicitous. But it lacks +spaciousness and ease and rhythm; it makes too inexorable a demand +on the attention, and the harassed reader soon finds himself +longing for those breathing spaces which consideration or perhaps +looseness of thought has implanted in the prose of other +writers.</p> +<p>His <cite>Essays</cite>, the work by which he is best known, +were in their origin merely jottings gradually cohered and enlarged +into the series we know. In them he had the advantage of a subject +which he had studied closely through life. He counted himself a +master in the art of managing men, and "Human Nature and how to +manage it" would be a good title for his book. Men are studied in +the spirit of Machiavelli, whose philosophy of government appealed +so powerfully to the Elizabethan mind. Taken together the essays +which deal with public matters are in effect a kind of manual for +statesmen and princes, instructing them how to acquire power and +how to keep it, deliberating how far they may go safely in the +direction of self-interest, and to what degree the principle of +self-interest must be subordinated to the wider interests of the +people who are ruled. Democracy, which in England was to make its +splendid beginnings in the seventeenth century, finds little to +foretell it in the works of Bacon. Though he never advocates +cruelty or oppression and is wise enough to see that no statesman +can entirely set aside moral considerations, his ethical tone is +hardly elevating; the moral obliquity of his public life is to a +certain extent explained, in all but its grosser elements, in his +published writings. The essays, of course, contain much more than +this; the spirit of curious and restless enquiry which animated +Bacon finds expression in those on "Health," or "Gardens" and +"Plantations" and others of the kind; and a deeper vein of +earnestness runs through some of them—those for instance on +"Friendship," or "Truth" and on "Death."</p> +<p>The <cite>Essays</cite> sum up in a condensed form the +intellectual interests which find larger treatment in his other +works. His <cite>Henry VII.</cite>, the first piece of scientific +history in the English language (indeed in the modern world) is +concerned with a king whose practice was the outcome of a political +theory identical with Bacon's own. The <cite>Advancement of +Learning</cite> is a brilliant popular exposition of the cause of +scientific enquiry and of the inductive or investigatory method of +research. The <cite>New Atlantis</cite> is the picture of an ideal +community whose common purpose is scientific investigation. Bacon's +name is not upon the roll of those who have enlarged by brilliant +conjectures or discoveries the store of human knowledge; his own +investigations so far as they are recorded are all of a trivial +nature. The truth about him is that he was a brilliantly clever +populariser of the cause of science, a kind of seventeenth century +Huxley, concerned rather to lay down large general principles for +the guidance of the work of others, than to be a serious worker +himself. The superstition of later times, acting on and refracting +his amazing intellectual gifts, has raised him to a godlike +eminence which is by right none of his; it has even credited him +with the authorship of Shakespeare, and in its wilder moments with +the composition of all that is of supreme worth in Elizabethan +literature. It is not necessary to take these delusions seriously. +The ignorance of mediaevalism was in the habit of crediting Vergil +with the construction of the Roman aqueducts and temples whose +ruins are scattered over Europe. The modern Baconians reach much +the same intellectual level.</p> +<p>A similar enthusiasm for knowledge and at any rate a pretence to +science belong to the author of the <cite>Anatomy of +Melancholy</cite>, Robert Burton. His one book is surely the most +amazing in English prose. Its professed object was simple and +comprehensive; it was to analyze human melancholy, to describe its +effects, and prescribe for its removal. But as his task grew, +melancholy came to mean to Burton all the ills that flesh is heir +to. He tracked it in obscure and unsuspected forms; drew +illustrations from a range of authors so much wider than the +compass of the reading of even the most learned since, that he is +generally credited with the invention of a large part of his +quotations. Ancients and moderns, poets and prose writers, +schoolmen and dramatists are all drawn upon for the copious store +of his examples; they are always cited with an air of quietly +humorous shrewdness in the comments and enclosed in a prose that is +straightforward, simple and vigorous, and can on occasion command +both rhythm and beauty of phrase. It is a mistake to regard Burton +from the point of view (due largely to Charles Lamb) of tolerant or +loving delight in quaintness for quaintness' sake. His book is +anything but scientific in form, but it is far from being the work +of a recluse or a fool. Behind his lack of system, he takes a broad +and psychologically an essentially just view of human ills, and +modern medicine has gone far in its admiration of what is at bottom +a most comprehensive and subtle treatise in diagnosis.</p> +<p>A writer of a very different quality is Sir Thomas Browne. Of +all the men of his time, he is the only one of whom one can say for +certain that he held the manner of saying a thing more important +than the thing said. He is our first deliberate and conscious +stylist, the forerunner of Charles Lamb, of Stevenson (whose +<cite>Virginibus Puerisque</cite> is modelled on his method of +treatment) and of the stylistic school of our own day. His +eloquence is too studied to rise to the greatest heights, and his +speculation, though curious and discursive, never really results in +deep thinking. He is content to embroider his pattern out of the +stray fancies of an imaginative nature. His best known work, the +<cite>Religio Medici</cite>, is a random confession of belief and +thoughts, full of the inconsequent speculations of a man with some +knowledge of science but not deeply or earnestly interested about +it, content rather to follow the wayward imaginations of a mind +naturally gifted with a certain poetic quality, than to engage in +serious intellectual exercise. Such work could never maintain its +hold on taste if it were not carefully finished and constructed +with elaborate care. Browne, if he was not a great writer, was a +literary artist of a high quality. He exploits a quaint and lovable +egoism with extraordinary skill; and though his delicately figured +and latinized sentences commonly sound platitudinous and trivial +when they are translated into rough Saxon prose, as they stand they +are rich and melodious enough.</p> +<br> +<h4>(4)</h4> +<p>In a century of surpassing richness in prose and poetry, one +author stands by himself. John Milton refuses to be classed with +any of the schools. Though Dryden tells us Milton confessed to him +that Spenser was his "original," he has no connection—other +than a general similarity of purpose, moral and +religious—with Spenser's followers. To the fantastics he paid +in his youth the doubtful compliment of one or two +half-contemptuous imitations and never touched them again. He had +no turn for the love lyrics or the courtliness of the school of +Jonson. In everything he did he was himself and his own master; he +devised his own subjects and wrote his own style. He stands alone +and must be judged alone.</p> +<p>No author, however, can ever escape from the influences of his +time, and, just as much as his lesser contemporaries, Milton has +his place in literary history and derives from the great original +impulse which set in motion all the enterprises of the century. He +is the last and greatest figure in the English Renaissance. The new +passion for art and letters which in its earnest fumbling +beginnings gave us the prose of Cheke and Ascham and the poetry of +Surrey and Sackville, comes to a full and splendid and perfect end +in his work. In it the Renaissance and the Reformation, imperfectly +fused by Sidney and Spenser, blend in their just proportions. The +transplantation into English of classical forms which had been the +aim of Sidney and the endeavour of Jonson he finally accomplished; +in his work the dream of all the poets of the Renaissance—the +heroic poem—finds its fulfilment. There was no poet of the +time but wanted to do for his country what Vergil had planned to do +for Rome, to sing its origins, and to celebrate its morality and +its citizenship in the epic form. Spenser had tried it in <cite>The +Fairy Queen</cite> and failed splendidly. Where he failed, Milton +succeeded, though his poem is not on the origins of England but on +the ultimate subject of the origins of mankind. We know from his +notebooks that he turned over in his mind a national subject and +that the Arthurian legend for a while appealed to him. But to +Milton's earnest temper nothing that was not true was a fit subject +for poetry. It was inevitable he should lay it aside. The Arthurian +story he knew to be a myth and a myth was a lie; the story of the +Fall, on the other hand, he accepted in common with his time for +literal fact. It is to be noted as characteristic of his confident +and assured egotism that he accepted no less sincerely and +literally the imaginative structure which he himself reared on it. +However that may be, the solid fact about him is that in this +"adventurous song" with its pursuit of</p> +<div class="poem">"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,"</div> +<br> +he succeeded in his attempt, that alone among the moderns he +contrived to write an epic which stands on the same eminence as the +ancient writings of the kind, and that he found time in a life, +which hardly extended to old age as we know it, to write, besides +noble lyrics and a series of fiercely argumentative prose +treatises, two other masterpieces in the grand style, a tragedy +modelled on the Greeks and a second epic on the "compact" style of +the book of Job. No English poet can compare with him in majesty or +completeness.<br> +<br> +<p>An adequate study of his achievement is impossible within the +limits of the few pages that are all a book like this can spare to +a single author. Readers who desire it will find it in the work of +his two best critics, Mark Pattison and Sir Walter +Raleigh.[<a href="#note-4">4</a>] All that can be done here is to +call attention to some of his most striking qualities. Foremost, of +course, is the temper of the man. From the beginning he was sure of +himself and sure of his mission; he had his purpose plain and +clear. There is no mental development, hardly, visible in his work, +only training, undertaken anxiously and prayerfully and with a +clearly conceived end. He designed to write a masterpiece and he +would not start till he was ready. The first twenty years of his +life were spent in assiduous reading; for twenty more he was +immersed in the dust and toil of political conflict, using his pen +and his extraordinary equipment of learning and eloquence to defend +the cause of liberty, civil and religious, and to attack its +enemies; not till he was past middle age had he reached the leisure +and the preparedness necessary to accomplish his self-imposed work. +But all the time, as we know, he had it in his mind. In +<cite>Lycidas</cite>, written in his Cambridge days, he apologizes +to his readers for plucking the fruit of his poetry before it is +ripe. In passage after passage in his prose works he begs for his +reader's patience for a little while longer till his preparation be +complete. When the time came at last for beginning he was in no +doubt; in his very opening lines he intends, he says, to soar no +"middle flight." This self-assured unrelenting certainty of his, +carried into his prose essays in argument, produces sometimes +strange results. One is peculiarly interesting to us now in view of +current controversy. He was unhappily married, and because he was +unhappy the law of divorce must be changed. A modern—George +Eliot for instance—would have pleaded the artistic +temperament and been content to remain outside the law. Milton +always argued from himself to mankind at large.</p> +<p>In everything he did, he put forth all his strength. Each of his +poems, long or short, is by itself a perfect whole, wrought +complete. The reader always must feel that the planning of each is +the work of conscious, deliberate, and selecting art. Milton never +digresses; he never violates harmony of sound or sense; his poems +have all their regular movement from quiet beginning through a +rising and breaking wave of passion and splendour to quiet close. +His art is nowhere better seen than in his endings.</p> +<p>Is it <cite>Lycidas</cite>? After the thunder of approaching +vengeance on the hireling shepherds of the Church, comes sunset and +quiet:</p> +<div class="poem">"And now the sun had stretch'd out all the +hills,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And now was dropt into the +western bay;</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">At last he rose, and twitched his +mantle blue:</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">To-morrow to fresh woods and +pastures new."</span></div> +<p>Is it <cite>Paradise Lost</cite>? After the agonies of expulsion +and the flaming sword—</p> +<div class="poem">"Some natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them +soon;<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The world was all before them +where to choose</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Their place of rest, and +Providence their guide;</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">They hand in hand with wandering +steps and slow,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Through Eden took their solitary +way."</span></div> +<p>Is it finally <cite>Samson Agonistes</cite>?</p> +<div class="poem">"His servants he with new acquist,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Of true experience from this +great event,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">With peace and consolation hath +dismist,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And calm of mind all passion +spent."</span></div> +<p>"Calm of mind, all passion spent," it is the essence of Milton's +art.</p> +<p>He worked in large ideas and painted splendid canvases; it was +necessary for him to invent a style which should be capable of +sustained and lofty dignity, which should be ornate enough to +maintain the interest of the reader and charm him and at the same +time not so ornate as to give an air of meretricious decoration to +what was largely and simply conceived. Particularly it was +necessary for him to avoid those incursions of vulgar associations +which words carelessly used will bring in their train. He succeeded +brilliantly in this difficult task. The unit of the Miltonic style +is not the phrase but the word, each word fastidiously chosen, +commonly with some air of an original and lost meaning about it, +and all set in a verse in which he contrived by an artful variation +of pause and stress to give the variety which other writers had +from rhyme. In this as in his structure he accomplished what the +Renaissance had only dreamed. Though he had imitators (the poetic +diction of the age following is modelled on him) he had no +followers. No one has been big enough to find his secret since.</p> +<h4>Footnotes</h4> +<p><a name="note-2"><!-- Note Anchor 2 --></a>[Footnote 2: Prof. +Grierson in <cite>Cambridge History of English +Literature</cite>.]</p> +<p><a name="note-3"><!-- Note Anchor 3 --></a>[Footnote 3: There is +a graphic little pen-picture of their method in Selden's "Table +Talk."]</p> +<p><a name="note-4"><!-- Note Anchor 2 --></a>[Footnote 4: +"Milton," E.M.L., and "Milton" (Edward Arnold).]</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_V"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER V</h2> +<br> +<h3>THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE</h3> +<p>The student of literature, when he passes in his reading from +the age of Shakespeare and Milton to that of Dryden and Pope, will +be conscious of certain sharply defined differences between the +temper and styles of the writers of the two periods. If besides +being a student of literature he is also (for this is a different +thing) a student of literary criticism he will find that these +differences have led to the affixing of certain labels—that +the school to which writers of the former period belong is called +"Romantic" and that of the latter "Classic," this "Classic" school +being again overthrown towards the end of the eighteenth century by +a set of writers who unlike the Elizabethans gave the name +"Romantic" to themselves. What is he to understand by these two +labels; what are the characteristics of "Classicism" and how far is +it opposite to and conflicting with "Romanticism"? The question is +difficult because the names are used vaguely and they do not +adequately cover everything that is commonly put under them. It +would be difficult, for instance, to find anything in Ben Jonson +which proclaims him as belonging to a different school from Dryden, +and perhaps the same could be said in the second and self-styled +period of Romanticism of the work of Crabbe. But in the main the +differences are real and easily visible, even though they hardly +convince us that the names chosen are the happiest that could be +found by way of description.</p> +<p>This period of Dryden and Pope on which we are now entering +sometimes styled itself the Augustan Age of English poetry. It +grounded its claim to classicism on a fancied resemblance to the +Roman poets of the golden age of Latin poetry, the reign of the +Emperor Augustus. Its authors saw themselves each as a second +Vergil, a second Ovid, most of all a second Horace, and they +believed that their relation to the big world, their assured +position in society, heightened the resemblances. They endeavoured +to form their poetry on the lines laid down in the critical writing +of the original Augustan age as elaborated and interpreted in +Renaissance criticism. It was tacitly assumed—some of them +openly asserted it—that the kinds, modes of treatment and all +the minor details of literature, figures of speech, use of epithets +and the rest, had been settled by the ancients once and for all. +What the Greeks began the critics and authors of the time of +Augustus had settled in its completed form, and the scholars of the +Renaissance had only interpreted their findings for modern use. +There was the tragedy, which had certain proper parts and a certain +fixed order of treatment laid down for it; there was the heroic +poem, which had a story or "fable," which must be treated in a +certain fixed manner, and so on. The authors of the "Classic" +period so christened themselves because they observed these rules. +And they fancied that they had the temper of the Augustan +time—the temper displayed in the works of Horace more than in +those of any one else—its urbanity, its love of good sense +and moderation, its instinctive distrust of emotion, and its +invincible good breeding. If you had asked them to state as simply +and broadly as possible their purpose they would have said it was +to follow nature, and if you had enquired what they meant by nature +it would turn out that they thought of it mainly as the opposite of +art and the negation of what was fantastic, tortured, or far sought +in thinking or writing. The later "Romantic" Revival, when it +called itself a return to nature, was only claiming the intention +which the classical school itself had proclaimed as its main +endeavour. The explanation of that paradox we shall see presently; +in the meantime it is worth looking at some of the characteristics +of classicism as they appear in the work of the "Classic" +authors.</p> +<p>In the first place the "Classic" writers aimed at simplicity of +style, at a normal standard of writing. They were intolerant of +individual eccentricities; they endeavoured, and with success, to +infuse into English letters something of the academic spirit that +was already controlling their fellow-craftsmen in France. For this +end amongst others they and the men of science founded the Royal +Society, an academic committee which has been restricted since to +the physical and natural sciences and been supplemented by similar +bodies representing literature and learning only in our own day. +Clearness, plainness, conversational ease and directness were the +aims the society set before its members where their writing was +concerned. "The Royal Society," wrote the Bishop of Rochester, its +first historian, "have exacted from all their members a close, +naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear sense, +a native easiness, bringing all things as near the mathematical +plainness as they can; and preferring the language of artisans, +countrymen, and merchants before that of wits and scholars." +Artisans, countrymen, and merchants—the ideal had been +already accepted in France, Malesherbes striving to use no word +that was not in the vocabulary of the day labourers of Paris, +Molière making his washerwoman first critic of his comedies. +It meant for England the disuse of the turgidities and involutions +which had marked the prose of the preachers and moralists of the +times of James and Charles I.; scholars and men of letters were +arising who would have taken John Bunyan, the unlettered tinker of +Bedford, for their model rather than the learned physician Sir +Thomas Browne.</p> +<p>But genius like Bunyan's apart, there is nothing in the world +more difficult than to write with the easy and forthright +simplicity of talk, as any one may see who tries for +himself—or even compares the letter-writing with the +conversation of his friends. So that this desire of simplicity, of +clarity, of lucidity led at once to a more deliberate art. Dryden +and Swift and Addison were assiduous in their labour with the file; +they excel all their predecessors in polish as much as the writers +of the first Augustan age excelled theirs in the same quality. Not +that it was all the result of deliberate art; in a way it was in +the air, and quite unlearned people—journalists and +pamphleteers and the like who wrote unconsciously and hurriedly to +buy their supper—partook of it as well as leisured people and +conscious artists. Defoe is as plain and easy and polished as +Swift, yet it is certain his amazing activity and productiveness +never permitted him to look back over a sentence he had written. +Something had happened, that is, to the English language. The +assimilation of latinisms and the revival of obsolete terms of +speech had ceased; it had become finally a more or less fixed form, +shedding so much of its imports as it had failed to make part of +itself and acquiring a grammatical and syntactical fixity which it +had not possessed in Elizabethan times. When Shakespeare wrote</p> +<div class="poem">"What cares these roarers for the name of +king,"</div> +<br> +he was using, as students of his language never tire of pointing +out to us, a perfectly correct local grammatical form. Fifty years +after that line was written, at the Restoration, local forms had +dropped out of written English. We had acquired a normal standard +of language, and either genius or labour was polishing it for +literary uses.<br> +<br> +<p>What they did for prose these "Classic" writers did even more +exactly—and less happily—for verse. Fashions often +become exaggerated before their disappearance, and the decadence of +Elizabethan romanticism had produced poetry the wildness and +extravagance of whose images was well-nigh unbounded. The passion +for intricate and far-sought metaphor which had possessed Donne was +accompanied in his work and even more in that of his followers with +a passion for what was elusive and recondite in thought and emotion +and with an increasing habit of rudeness and wilful difficultness +in language and versification. Against these ultimate licences of a +great artistic period, the classical writers invoked the qualities +of smoothness and lucidity, in the same way, so they fancied, as +Vergil might have invoked them against Lucretius. In the treatment +of thought and feeling they wanted clearness, they wanted ideas +which the mass of men would readily apprehend and assent to, and +they wanted not hints or half-spoken suggestions but complete +statement. In the place of the logical subtleties which Donne and +his school had sought in the scholastic writers of the Middle Ages, +they brought back the typically Renaissance study of rhetoric; the +characteristic of all the poetry of the period is that it has a +rhetorical quality. It is never intimate and never profound, but it +has point and wit, and it appeals with confidence to the balanced +judgment which men who distrust emotion and have no patience with +subtleties intellectual, emotional, or merely verbal, have in +common. Alongside of this lucidity, this air of complete statement +in substance they strove for and achieved smoothness in form. To +the poet Waller, the immediate predecessor of Dryden, the classical +writers themselves ascribed the honour of the innovation. In fact +Waller was only carrying out the ideals counselled and followed by +Ben Jonson. It was in the school of Waller and Dryden and not in +that of the minor writers who called themselves his followers that +he came to his own.</p> +<p>What then are the main differences between classicism of the +best period—the classicism whose characteristics we have been +describing—and the Romanticism which came before and after? +In the first place we must put the quality we have described as +that of complete statement. Classical poetry is, so to speak, "all +there." Its meaning is all of it on the surface; it conveys nothing +but what it says, and what it says, it says completely. It is +always vigorous and direct, often pointed and aphoristic, never +merely suggestive, never given to half statement, and never +obscure. You feel that as an instrument of expression it is sharp +and polished and shining; it is always bright and defined in +detail. The Great Romantics go to work in other ways. Their poetry +is a thing of half lights and half spoken suggestions, of hints +that imagination will piece together, of words that are charged +with an added meaning of sound over sense, a thing that stirs the +vague and impalpable restlessness of memory or terror or desire +that lies down beneath in the minds of men. It rouses what a +philosopher has called the "Transcendental feeling," the solemn +sense of the immediate presence of "that which was and is and ever +shall be," to induce which is the property of the highest poetry. +You will find nothing in classical poetry so poignant or highly +wrought as Webster's</p> +<div class="poem">"Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died +young,"</div> +<br> +and the answer,<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"I think not so: her infelicity<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Seemed to have years too +many,"</span></div> +<br> +or so subtle in its suggestion, sense echoing back to primeval +terrors and despairs, as this from <cite>Macbeth</cite>:<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Stones have been known to move and trees to +speak;<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Augurs and understood relations +have</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">By magot-pies, and choughs, and +rooks brought forth</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The secret'st man of +blood."</span></div> +<br> +or so intoxicating to the imagination and the senses as an ode of +Keats or a sonnet by Rossetti. But you will find eloquent and +pointed statements of thoughts and feelings that are common to most +of us—the expression of ordinary human nature—<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"What oft was thought but ne'er so well +exprest,"</div> +<p>"Wit and fine writing" consisting, as Addison put it in a review +of Pope's first published poem, not so much "in advancing things +that are new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable +turn."</p> +<p>Though in this largest sense the "classic" writers eschewed the +vagueness of romanticism, in another and more restricted way they +cultivated it. They were not realists as all good romanticists have +to be. They had no love for oddities or idiosyncrasies or +exceptions. They loved uniformity, they had no use for truth in +detail. They liked the broad generalised, descriptive style of +Milton, for instance, better than the closely packed style of +Shakespeare, which gets its effects from a series of minute +observations huddled one after the other and giving the reader, so +to speak, the materials for his own impression, rather than +rendering, as does Milton, the expression itself.</p> +<p>Every literary discovery hardens ultimately into a convention; +it has its day and then its work is done, and it has to be +destroyed so that the ascending spirit of humanity can find a +better means of self-expression. Out of the writing which aimed at +simplicity and truth to nature grew "Poetic Diction," a special +treasury of words and phrases deemed suitable for poetry, providing +poets with a common stock of imagery, removing from them the +necessity of seeing life and nature each one for himself. The +poetry which Dryden and Pope wrought out of their mental vigour, +their followers wrote to pattern. Poetry became reduced, as it +never was before and has never been since, to a formula. The +Elizabethan sonneteers, as we saw, used a vocabulary and +phraseology in common with their fellows in Italy and France, and +none the less produced fine poetry. But they used it to express +things they really felt. The truth is it is not the fact of a +poetic diction which matters so much as its quality—whether +it squares with sincerity, whether it is capable of expressing +powerfully and directly one's deepest feelings. The history of +literature can show poetic dictions—special vocabularies and +forms for poetry—that have these qualities; the diction, for +instance, of the Greek choruses, or of the Scottish poets who +followed Chaucer, or of the troubadours. That of the classic +writers of an Augustan age was not of such a kind. Words clothe +thought; poetic diction had the artifice of the crinoline; it would +stand by itself. The Romantics in their return to nature had +necessarily to abolish it.</p> +<p>But when all is said in criticism the poetry of the earlier half +of the eighteenth century excels all other English poetry in two +respects. Two qualities belong to it by virtue of the metre in +which it is most of it written—rapidity and antithesis. Its +antithesis made it an incomparable vehicle for satire, its rapidity +for narrative. Outside its limits we have hardly any even passable +satirical verse; within them there are half-a-dozen works of the +highest excellence in this kind. And if we except Chaucer, there is +no one else in the whole range of English poetry who have the +narrative gift so completely as the classic poets. Bentleys will +always exist who will assure us with civility that Pope's +<cite>Homer</cite>, though "very pretty," bears little relation to +the Greek, and that Dryden's <cite>Vergil</cite>, though vigorous +and virile, is a poor representation of its original. The truth +remains that for a reader who knows no ancient languages either of +those translations will probably give a better idea of their +originals than any other rendering in English that we possess. The +foundation of their method has been vindicated in the best modern +translations from the Greek.</p> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>The term "eighteenth century" in the vocabulary of the literary +historian is commonly as vaguely used as the term Elizabethan. It +borrows as much as forty years from the seventeenth and gives away +ten to the nineteenth. The whole of the work of Dryden, whom we +must count as the first of the "classic" school, was accomplished +before chronologically it had begun. As a man and as an author he +was very intimately related to his changing times; he adapted +himself to them with a versatility as remarkable as that of the +Vicar of Bray, and, it may be added, as simple-minded. He mourned +in verse the death of Cromwell and the death of his successor, +successively defended the theological positions of the Church of +England and the Church of Rome, changed his religion and became +Poet Laureate to James II., and acquiesced with perfect equanimity +in the Revolution which brought in his successor. This instability +of conviction, though it gave a handle to his opponents in +controversy, does not appear to have caused any serious scandal or +disgust among his contemporaries, and it has certainly had little +effect on the judgment of later times. It has raised none of the +reproaches which have been cast at the suspected apostasy of +Wordsworth. Dryden had little interest in political or religious +questions; his instinct, one must conceive, was to conform to the +prevailing mode and to trouble himself no further about the matter. +Defoe told the truth about him when he wrote that "Dryden might +have been told his fate that, having his extraordinary genius slung +and pitched upon a swivel, it would certainly turn round as fast as +the times, and instruct him how to write elegies to Oliver Cromwell +and King Charles the Second with all the coherence imaginable; how +to write <cite>Religio Laici</cite> and the <cite>Hind and the +Panther</cite> and yet be the same man, every day to change his +principle, change his religion, change his coat, change his master, +and yet never change his nature." He never changed his nature, he +was as free from cynicism as a barrister who represents +successively opposing parties in suits or politics; and when he +wrote polemics in prose or verse he lent his talents as a barrister +lends his for a fee. His one intellectual interest was in his art, +and it is in his comments on his art—the essays and prefaces +in the composition of which he amused the leisure left in the busy +life of a dramatist and a poet of officialdom—that his most +charming and delicate work is to be found. In a way they begin +modern English prose; earlier writing furnishes no equal to their +colloquial ease and the grace of their expression. And they contain +some of the most acute criticism in our language—"classical" +in its tone (<em>i.e.</em>, with a preference for conformity) but +with its respect for order and tradition always tempered by good +sense and wit, and informed and guided throughout by a taste whose +catholicity and sureness was unmatched in the England of his time. +The preface to his <cite>Fables</cite> contains some excellent +notes on Chaucer. They may be read as a sample of the breadth and +perspicuity of his critical perceptions.</p> +<p>His chief poetical works were most of them +occasional—designed either to celebrate some remarkable event +or to take a side and interpret a policy in the conflict, political +or religious, of the time. <cite>Absalom and Achitophel</cite> and +<cite>The Medal</cite> were levelled at the Shaftesbury-Monmouth +intrigues in the closing years of Charles II. <cite>Religio +Laici</cite> celebrated the excellence of the Church of England in +its character of <em>via media</em> between the opposite +extravagances of Papacy and Presbyterianism. <cite>The Hind and the +Panther</cite> found this perfection spotted. The Church of England +has become the Panther, whose coat is a varied pattern of heresy +and truth beside the spotless purity of the Hind, the Church of +Rome. <cite>Astrea Reddux</cite> welcomed the returning Charles; +<cite>Annus Mirabilis</cite> commemorated a year of fire and +victories, Besides these he wrote many dramas in verse, a number of +translations, and some shorter poems, of which the odes are the +most remarkable.</p> +<p>His qualities as a poet fitted very exactly the work he set +himself to do. His work is always plain and easily understood; he +had a fine faculty for narration, and the vigorous rapidity and +point of his style enabled him to sketch a character or sum up a +dialectical position very surely and effectively. His writing has a +kind of spare and masculine force about it. It is this vigour and +the impression which he gives of intellectual strength and of a +logical grasp of his subject, that beyond question has kept alive +work which, if ever poetry was, was ephemeral in its origin. The +careers of the unscrupulous Caroline peers would have been closed +for us were they not visible in the reflected light of his +denunciation of them. Though Buckingham is forgotten and +Shaftesbury's name swallowed up in that of his more philanthropic +descendant, we can read of Achitophel and Zimri still, and feel +something of the strength and heat which he caught from a fiercely +fought conflict and transmitted with his own gravity and +purposefulness into verse. The Thirty-nine Articles are not a +proper subject for poetry, but the sustained and serious allegory +which Dryden weaves round theological discussion preserves his +treatment of them from the fate of the controversialists who +opposed him. His work has wit and vitality enough to keep it +sweet.</p> +<p>Strength and wit enter in different proportions into the work of +his successor, Alexander Pope—a poet whom admirers in his own +age held to be the greatest in our language. No one would think of +making such a claim now, but the detraction which he suffered at +the hands of Wordsworth and the Romantics, ought not to make us +forget that Pope, though not our greatest, not even perhaps a +great, poet is incomparably our most brilliant versifier. Dryden's +strength turns in his work into something more fragile and +delicate, polished with infinite care like lacquer, and wrought +like filigree work to the last point of conscious and perfected +art. He was not a great thinker; the thoughts which he embodies in +his philosophical poems—the <cite>Essay on Man</cite> and the +rest, are almost ludicrously out of proportion to the solemnity of +the titles which introduce them, nor does he except very rarely get +beyond the conceptions common to the average man when he attempts +introspection or meditates on his own destiny. The reader in search +of philosophy will find little to stimulate him and in the facile +Deism of the time probably something to smile at. Pope has no +message to us now. But he will find views current in his time or +borrowed from other authors put with perfect felicity and wit, and +he will recognize the justice of Addison's comment that Pope's wit +and fine writing consist "not so much in advancing things that are +new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable turn." And he +will not fall into the error of dubbing the author a minor poet +because he is neither subtle nor imaginative nor profound. A great +poet would not have written like Pope—one must grant it; but +a minor poet could not.</p> +<p>It is characteristic of Pope's type of mind and kind of art that +there is no development visible in his work. Other poets, +Shakespeare, for instance, and Keats, have written work of the +highest quality when they were young, but they have had crudenesses +to shed—things to get rid of as their strength and +perceptions grew. But Pope, like Minerva, was full grown and full +armed from the beginning. If we did not know that his <cite>Essay +on Criticism</cite> was his first poem it would be impossible to +place it in the canon of his work; it might come in anywhere and so +might everything else that he wrote. From the beginning his +craftsmanship was perfect; from the beginning he took his +subject-matter from others as he found it and worked it up into +aphorism and epigram till each line shone like a cut jewel and the +essential commonplaceness and poverty of his material was obscured +by the glitter the craftsmanship lent to it. Subject apart, +however, he was quite sure of his medium from the beginning; it was +not long before he found the way to use it to most brilliant +purpose. <cite>The Rape of the Lock</cite> and the satirical poems +come later in his career.</p> +<p>As a satirist Pope, though he did not hit so hard as Dryden, +struck more deftly and probed deeper. He wielded a rapier where the +other used a broadsword, and though both used their weapons with +the highest skill and the metaphor must not be imagined to impute +clumsiness to Dryden, the rapier made the cleaner cut. Both +employed a method in satire which their successors (a poor set) in +England have not been intelligent enough to use. They allow every +possible good point to the object of their attack. They appear to +deal him an even and regretful justice. His good points, they put +it in effect, being so many, how much blacker and more deplorable +his meannesses and faults! They do not do this out of charity; +there was very little of the milk of human kindness in Pope. +Deformity in his case, as in so many in truth and fiction, seemed +to bring envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness in its +train. The method is employed simply because it gives the maximum +satirical effect. That is why Pope's epistle to Arbuthnot, with its +characterisation of Addison, is the most damning piece of invective +in our language.</p> +<p><cite>The Rape of the Lock</cite> is an exquisite piece of +workmanship, breathing the very spirit of the time. You can fancy +it like some clock made by one of the Louis XIV. craftsmen, +encrusted with a heap of ormulu mock-heroics and impertinences and +set perfectly to the time of day. From no other poem could you +gather so fully and perfectly the temper of the society in which +our "classic" poetry was brought to perfection, its elegant +assiduity in trifles, its brilliant artifice, its paint and powder +and patches and high-heeled shoes, its measured strutting walk in +life as well as in verse. <cite>The Rape of the Lock</cite> is a +mock-heroic poem; that is to say it applies the form and treatment +which the "classic" critics of the seventeenth century had laid +down as belonging to the "heroic" or "epic" style to a trifling +circumstance—the loss by a young lady of fashion of a lock of +hair. And it is the one instance in which this "recipe" for a +heroic poem which the French critics handed on to Dryden, and +Dryden left to his descendants, has been used well-enough to keep +the work done with it in memory. In a way it condemns the poetical +theory of the time; when forms are fixed, new writing is less +likely to be creative and more likely to exhaust itself in the +ingenious but trifling exercises of parody and burlesque. <cite>The +Rape of the Lock</cite> is brilliant but it is only play.</p> +<p>The accepted theory which assumed that the forms of poetry had +been settled in the past and existed to be applied, though it +concerned itself mainly with the ancient writers, included also two +moderns in its scope. You were orthodox if you wrote tragedy and +epic as Horace told you and satire as he had shown you; you were +also orthodox if you wrote in the styles of Spenser or Milton. +Spenser, though his predecessors were counted barbaric and his +followers tortured and obscure, never fell out of admiration; +indeed in every age of English poetry after him the greatest poet +in it is always to be found copying him or expressing their love +for him—Milton declaring to Dryden that Spenser was his +"original," Pope reading and praising him, Keats writing his +earliest work in close imitation. His characteristic style and +stanza were recognised by the classic school as a distinct "kind" +of poetry which might be used where the theme fitted instead of the +heroic manner, and Spenserian imitations abound. Sometimes they are +serious; sometimes, like Shenstone's <cite>Schoolmistress</cite>, +they are mocking and another illustration of the dangerous ease +with which a conscious and sustained effort to write in a fixed and +acquired style runs to seed in burlesque. Milton's fame never +passed through the period of obscurity that sometimes has been +imagined for him. He had the discerning admiration of Dryden and +others before his death. But to Addison belongs the credit of +introducing him to the writers of this time; his papers in the +<cite>Spectator</cite> on <cite>Paradise Lost</cite>, with their +eulogy of its author's sublimity, spurred the interest of the poets +among his readers. From Milton the eighteenth century got the chief +and most ponderous part of its poetic diction, high-sounding +periphrases and borrowings from Latin used without the gravity and +sincerity and fullness of thought of the master who brought them +in. When they wrote blank verse, the classic poets wrote it in the +Milton manner.</p> +<p>The use of these two styles may be studied in the writings of +one man, James Thomson. For besides acquiring a kind of anonymous +immortality with patriots as the author of "Rule, Britannia," +Thomson wrote two poems respectively in the Spenserian and the +Miltonic manner, the former <cite>The Castle of Indolence</cite>, +the latter <cite>The Seasons</cite>. The Spenserian manner is +caught very effectively, but the adoption of the style of +<cite>Paradise Lost</cite>, with its allusiveness, circumlocution +and weight, removes any freshness the <cite>Seasons</cite> might +have had, had the circumstances in them been put down as they were +observed. As it is, hardly anything is directly named; birds are +always the "feathered tribe" and everything else has a similar +polite generality for its title. Thomson was a simple-minded man, +with a faculty for watching and enjoying nature which belonged to +few in his sophisticated age; it is unfortunate he should have +spent his working hours in rendering the fruit of country rambles +freshly observed into a cold and stilted diction. It suited the +eighteenth century reader well, for not understanding nature +herself he was naturally obliged to read her in translations.</p> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>The chief merits of "classic" poetry—its clearness, its +vigour, its direct statement—are such as belong theoretically +rather to prose than to poetry. In fact, it was in prose that the +most vigorous intellect of the time found itself. We have seen how +Dryden, reversing the habit of other poets, succeeded in expressing +his personality not in poetry which was his vocation, but in prose +which was the amusement of his leisure hours. Spenser had put his +politics into prose and his ideals into verse; Dryden wrote his +politics—to order—in verse, and in prose set down the +thoughts and fancies which were the deepest part of him because +they were about his art. The metaphor of parentage, though honoured +by use, fits badly on to literary history; none the less the +tradition which describes him as the father of modern English prose +is very near the truth. He puts into practice for the first time +the ideals, described in the first chapter of this book, which were +set up by the scholars who let into English the light of the +Renaissance. With the exception of the dialogue on Dramatic Poesy, +his work is almost all of it occasional, the fruit of the mood of a +moment, and written rather in the form of a <em>causerie</em>, a +kind of informal talk, than of a considered essay. And it is all +couched in clear, flowing, rather loosely jointed English, +carefully avoiding rhetoric and eloquence and striving always to +reproduce the ease and flow of cultured conversation, rather than +the tighter, more closely knit style of consciously "literary" +prose. His methods were the methods of the four great prose-writers +who followed him—Defoe, Addison, Steele, and Swift.</p> +<p>Of these Defoe was the eldest and in some ways the most +remarkable. He has been called the earliest professional author in +our language, and if that is not strictly true, he is at any rate +the earliest literary journalist. His output of work was enormous; +he wrote on any and every subject; there was no event whether in +politics or letters or discovery but he was not ready with +something pat on it before the public interest faded. It followed +that at a time when imprisonment, mutilation, and the pillory took +the place of our modern libel actions he had an adventurous career. +In politics he followed the Whig cause and served the Government +with his pen, notably by his writings in support of the union with +Scotland, in which he won over the Scots by his description of the +commercial advantage which would follow the abolition of the +border. This line of argument, taken at a time when the governing +of political tendencies by commercial interests was by no means the +accepted commonplace it is now, proves him a man of an active and +original mind. His originality, indeed, sometimes over-reached the +comprehension both of the public and his superiors; he was +imprisoned for an attack on the Hanoverian succession, which was +intended ironically; apparently he was ignorant of what every +journalist ought to know that irony is at once the most dangerous +and the most ineffectual weapon in the whole armoury of the press. +The fertility and ingenuity of his intellect may be best gauged by +the number of modern enterprises and contrivances that are +foreshadowed in his work. Here are a few, all utterly unknown in +his own day, collected by a student of his works; a Board of Trade +register for seamen; factories for goods: agricultural credit +banks; a commission of enquiry into bankruptcy; and a system of +national poor relief. They show him to have been an independent and +courageous thinker where social questions were concerned.</p> +<p>He was nearly sixty before he had published his first novel, +<cite>Robinson Crusoe</cite>, the book by which he is universally +known, and on which with the seven other novels which followed it +the foundation of his literary fame rests. But his earlier +works—they are reputed to number over two +hundred—possess no less remarkable literary qualities. It is +not too much to say that all the gifts which are habitually +recommended for cultivation by those who aspire to journalistic +success are to be found in his prose. He has in the first place the +gift of perfect lucidity no matter how complicated the subject he +is expounding; such a book as his <cite>Complete English +Tradesman</cite> is full of passages in which complex and difficult +subject-matter is set forth so plainly and clearly that the least +literate of his readers could have no doubt of his understanding +it. He has also an amazingly exact acquaintance with the +technicalities of all kinds of trades and professions; none of our +writers, not even Shakespeare, shows half such a knowledge of the +circumstances of life among different ranks and conditions of men; +none of them has realized with such fidelity how so many different +persons lived and moved. His gift of narrative and description is +masterly, as readers of his novels know (we shall have to come back +to it in discussing the growth of the English novel); several of +his works show him to have been endowed with a fine faculty of +psychological observation. Without the least consciousness of the +value of what he was writing, nor indeed with any deliberate +artistic intention, he made himself one of the masters of English +prose.</p> +<p>Defoe had been the champion of the Whigs; on the Tory side the +ablest pen was that of Jonathan Swift. His works proclaim him to +have had an intellect less wide in its range than that of his +antagonist but more vigorous and powerful. He wrote, too, more +carefully. In his youth he had been private secretary to Sir +William Temple, a writer now as good as forgotten because of the +triviality of his matter, but in his day esteemed because of the +easy urbanity and polish of his prose. From him Swift learned the +labour of the file, and he declared in later life that it was +"generally believed that this author has advanced our English +tongue to as great a perfection as it can well bear." In fact he +added to the ease and cadences he had learned from Temple qualities +of vigour and directness of his own which put his work far above +his master's. And he dealt with more important subject-matter than +the academic exercises on which Temple exercised his fastidious and +meticulous powers of revision.</p> +<p>In temperament he is opposed to all the writers of his time. +There is no doubt but there was some radical disorder in his +system; brain disease clouded his intellect in his old age, and his +last years were death in life; right through his life he was a +savagely irritable, sardonic, dark and violent man, impatient of +the slightest contradiction or thwarting, and given to explosive +and instantaneous rage. He delighted in flouting convention, +gloried in outraging decency. The rage, which, as he said himself, +tore his heart out, carried him to strange excesses. There is +something ironical (he would himself have appreciated it) in the +popularity of <cite>Gulliver's Travels</cite> as a children's +book—that ascending wave of savagery and satire which +overwhelms policy and learning to break against the ultimate +citadel of humanity itself. In none of his contemporaries (except +perhaps in the sentimentalities of Steele) can one detect the +traces of emotion; to read Swift is to be conscious of intense +feeling on almost every page. The surface of his style may be +smooth and equable but the central fires of passion are never far +beneath, and through cracks and fissures come intermittent bursts +of flame. Defoe's irony is so measured and studiously commonplace +that perhaps those who imprisoned him because they believed him to +be serious are hardly to be blamed; Swift's quivers and reddens +with anger in every line.</p> +<p>But his pen seldom slips from the strong grasp of his +controlling art. The extraordinary skill and closeness of his +allegorical writings—unmatched in their kind—is witness +to the care and sustained labour which went to their making. He is +content with no general correspondences; his allegory does not fade +away into a story in which only the main characters have a +secondary significance; the minutest circumstances have a bearing +in the satire and the moral. In <cite>The Tale of a Tub</cite> and +in <cite>Gulliver's Travels</cite>—particularly in the +former—the multitude as well as the aptness of the parallels +between the imaginary narrative and the facts it is meant to +represent is unrivalled in works of the kind. Only the highest +mental powers, working with intense fervour and concentration, +could have achieved the sustained brilliancy of the result. "What a +genius I had when I wrote that book!" Swift is said to have +exclaimed in his old age when he re-read <cite>The Tale of a +Tub</cite>, and certainly the book is a marvel of constructive +skill, all the more striking because it makes allegory out of +history and consequently is denied that freedom of narrative so +brilliantly employed in the <cite>Travels</cite>.</p> +<p>Informing all his writings too, besides intense feeling and an +omnipresent and controlling art, is strong common sense. His +aphorisms, both those collected under the heading of <cite>Thoughts +on Various Subjects</cite>, and countless others scattered up and +down his pages, are a treasury of sound, if a little sardonic, +practical wisdom. His most insistent prejudices foreshadow in their +essential sanity and justness those of that great master of life, +Dr. Johnson. He could not endure over-politeness, a vice which must +have been very oppressive in society of his day. He savagely +resented and condemned a display of affection—particularly +marital affection—in public. In an age when it was the normal +social system of settling quarrels, he condemned duelling; and he +said some very wise things—things that might still be +said—on modern education. In economics he was as +right-hearted as Ruskin and as wrong-headed. Carlyle, who was in so +many respects an echo of him, found in a passage in his works a +"dim anticipation" of his philosophy of clothes.</p> +<p>The leading literary invention of the period—after that of +the heroic couplet for verse—was the prose periodical essay. +Defoe, it is hardly necessary to say, began it; it was his nature +to be first with any new thing: but its establishment as a +prevailing literary mode is due to two authors, Joseph Addison and +Richard Steele. Of the two famous series—the +<cite>Tatler</cite> and the <cite>Spectator</cite>—for which +they were both responsible, Steele must take the first credit; he +began them, and though Addison came in and by the deftness and +lightness of his writing took the lion's share of their popularity, +both the plan and the characters round whom the bulk of the essays +in the <cite>Spectator</cite> came to revolve was the creation of +his collaborator. Steele we know very intimately from his own +writings and from Thackeray's portrait of him. He was an emotional, +full-blooded kind of man, reckless and dissipated but fundamentally +honest and good-hearted—a type very common in his day as the +novels show, but not otherwise to be found in the ranks of its +writers. What there is of pathos and sentiment, and most of what +there is of humour in the <cite>Tatler</cite> and the +<cite>Spectator</cite> are his. And he created the <em>dramatis +personae</em> out of whose adventures the slender thread of +continuity which binds the essays together is woven. Addison, +though less open to the onslaughts of the conventional moralist, +was a less lovable personality. Constitutionally endowed with +little vitality, he suffered mentally as well as bodily from +languor and lassitude. His lack of enthusiasm, his cold-blooded +formalism, caused comment even in an age which prided itself in +self-command and decorum.</p> +<p>His very malevolence proceeded from a flaccidity which meanly +envied the activities and enthusiasms of other men. As a writer he +was superficial; he had not the requisite energy for forming a +clear or profound judgment on any question of difficulty; Johnson's +comment, "He thinks justly but he thinks faintly" sums up the truth +about him. His good qualities were of a slighter kind than Swift's; +he was a quiet and accurate observer of manners and fashions in +life and conversation, and he had the gift of a style—what +Johnson calls "The Middle Style"—very exactly suited to the +kind of work on which he was habitually engaged, "always equable, +always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences" but +polished, lucid, and urbane.</p> +<p>Steele and Addison were conscious moralists as well as literary +men. They desired to purge society from Restoration licences; to +their efforts we must credit the alteration in morality which +<cite>The School for Scandal</cite> shows over <cite>The Way of the +World</cite>. Their professed object as they stated themselves was +"to banish vice and ignorance out of the territories of Great +Britain, (nothing less!) and to bring philosophy out of closets and +libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, +at tea-tables and coffee-houses." In fact their satires were +politically nearer home, and the chief objects of their aversion +were the Tory squires whom it was their business as Whigs to +deride. On the Coverley papers in the <cite>Spectator</cite> rests +the chief part of their literary fame; these belong rather to the +special history of the novel than to that of the periodical +essay.</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_VI"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2> +<br> +<h3>DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME</h3> +<p>By 1730 the authors whose work made the "classic" school in +England were dead or had ceased writing; by the same date Samuel +Johnson had begun his career as a man of letters. The difference +between the period of his maturity and the period we have been +examining is not perhaps easy to define; but it exists and it can +be felt unmistakably in reading. For one thing "Classicism" had +become completely naturalized; it had ceased to regard the French +as arbiters of elegance and literary taste; indeed Johnson himself +never spoke of them without disdain and hated them as much as he +hated Scotsmen. Writing, like dress and the common way of life, +became plainer and graver and thought stronger and deeper. In +manners and speech something of the brutalism which was at the root +of the English character at the time began to colour the refinement +of the preceding age. Dilettantism gave way to learning and +speculation; in the place of Bolingbroke came Adam Smith; in the +place of Addison, Johnson. In a way it is the solidest and sanest +time in English letters. Yet in the midst of its urbanity and order +forces were gathering for its destruction. The ballad-mongers were +busy; Blake was drawing and rhyming; Burns was giving songs and +lays to his country-side. In the distance—Johnson could not +hear them—sounded, like the horns of elf-land faintly +blowing, the trumpet calls of romance.</p> +<p>If the whole story of Dr. Johnson's life were the story of his +published books it would be very difficult to understand his +pre-eminent and symbolic position in literary history. His best +known work—it still remains so—was his dictionary, and +dictionaries, for all the licence they give and Johnson took for +the expression of a personality, are the business of purely +mechanical talents. A lesser man than he might have cheated us of +such delights as the definitions of "oats," or "net" or "pension," +but his book would certainly have been no worse as a book. In his +early years he wrote two satires in verse in imitation of Juvenal; +they were followed later by two series of periodical essays on the +model of the <cite>Spectator</cite>; neither of them—the +<cite>Rambler</cite> nor the <cite>Idler</cite>—were at all +successful. <cite>Rasselas</cite>, a tale with a purpose, is +melancholy reading; the <cite>Journey to the Western +Hebrides</cite> has been utterly eclipsed by Boswell's livelier and +more human chronicle of the same events. The <cite>Lives of the +Poets</cite>, his greatest work, was composed with pain and +difficulty when he was seventy years old; even it is but a quarry +from which a reader may dig the ore of a sound critical judgment +summing up a life's reflection, out of the grit and dust of +perfunctory biographical compilations. There was hardly one of the +literary coterie over which he presided that was not doing better +and more lasting work. Nothing that Johnson wrote is to be +compared, for excellence in its own manner, with <cite>Tom +Jones</cite> or the <cite>Vicar of Wakefield</cite> or the +<cite>Citizen of the World</cite>. He produced nothing in writing +approaching the magnitude of Gibbon's <cite>Decline and Fall of the +Roman Empire</cite>, or the profundity of Burke's philosophy of +politics. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose main business was +painting and not the pen, was almost as good an author as he; his +<cite>Discourses</cite> have little to fear when they are set +beside Johnson's essays. Yet all these men recognised him as their +guide and leader; the spontaneous selection of such a democratic +assembly as men of genius in a tavern fixed upon him as chairman, +and we in these later days, who are safe from the overpowering +force of personality and presence—or at least can only know +of it reflected in books—instinctively recognize him as the +greatest man of his age. What is the reason?</p> +<p>Johnson's pre-eminence is the pre-eminence of character. He was +a great moralist; he summed up in himself the tendencies of thought +and literature of his time and excelled all others in his grasp of +them; and he was perhaps more completely than any one else in the +whole history of English literature, the typical Englishman. He was +one of those to whom is applicable the commonplace that he was +greater than his books. It is the fashion nowadays among some +critics to speak of his biographer Boswell as if he were a novelist +or a playwright and to classify the Johnson we know with Hamlet and +Don Quixote as the product of creative or imaginative art, working +on a "lost original." No exercise of critical ingenuity could be +more futile or impertinent. The impression of the solidity and +magnitude of Johnson's character which is to be gathered from +Boswell is enforced from other sources; from his essays and his +prayers and meditations, from the half-dozen or so lives and +reminiscences which were published in the years following his death +(their very number establishing the reverence with which he was +regarded), from the homage of other men whose genius their books +leave indisputable. Indeed the Johnson we know from Boswell, though +it is the broadest and most masterly portrait in the whole range of +biography, gives less than the whole magnitude of the man. When +Boswell first met him at the age of twenty-two, Johnson was +fifty-four. His long period of poverty and struggle was past. His +<cite>Dictionary</cite> and all his works except the <cite>Lives of +the Poets</cite> were behind him; a pension from the Crown had +established him in security for his remaining years; his position +was universally acknowledged. So that though the portrait in the +<cite>Life</cite> is a full-length study of Johnson the +conversationalist and literary dictator, the proportion it +preserves is faulty and its study of the early years—the +years of poverty, of the <cite>Vanity of Human Wishes</cite> and +<cite>London</cite>, of <cite>Rasselas</cite>, which he wrote to +pay the expenses of his mother's funeral, is slight.</p> +<p>It was, however, out of the bitterness and struggle of these +early years that the strength and sincerity of character which +carried Johnson surely and tranquilly through the time of his +triumph were derived. From the beginning he made no compromise with +the world and no concession to fashion. The world had to take him +at his own valuation or not at all. He never deviated one hair's +breadth from the way he had chosen. Judged by the standards of +journalistic success, the <cite>Rambler</cite> could not well be +worse than he made it. Compared with the lightness and gaiety and +the mere lip-service to morality of Addison its edification is +ponderous. Both authors state the commonplaces of conduct, but +Addison achieves lightness in the doing of it, and his manner by +means of which platitudes are stated lightly and pointedly and with +an air of novelty, is the classic manner of journalism. Johnson +goes heavily and directly to the point, handling well worn moral +themes in general and dogmatic language without any attempt to +enliven them with an air of discovery or surprise. Yet they were, +in a sense, discoveries to him; not one of them but was deeply and +sincerely felt; not one but is not a direct and to us a +pathetically dispassionate statement of the reflection of thirty +years of grinding poverty and a soul's anguish. Viewed in the light +of his life, the <cite>Rambler</cite> is one of the most moving of +books. If its literary value is slight it is a document in +character.</p> +<p>So that when he came to his own, when gradually the public whom +he despised and neglected raised him into a pontifical position +matched by none before him in England and none since save Carlyle, +he was sure of himself; success did not spoil him. His judgment was +unwarped by flattery. The almost passionate tenderness and humanity +which lay beneath his gruffness was undimmed. His personality +triumphed in all the fullness and richness which had carried it in +integrity through his years of struggle. For over twenty years from +his chair in taverns in the Strand and Fleet Street he ruled +literary London, imposed his critical principles on the great body +of English letters, and by his talk and his friendships became the +embodiment of the literary temperament of his age.</p> +<p>His talk as it is set down by Boswell is his best monument. It +was the happiest possible fate that threw those two men together, +for Boswell besides being an admirer and reporter sedulously +chronicling all his master said and did, fortunately influenced +both the saying and the doing. Most of us have some one in whose +company we best shine, who puts our wits on their mettle and spurs +us to our greatest readiness and vivacity. There is no doubt that +Boswell, for all his assumed humility and for all Johnson's +affected disdain, was just such a companion for Johnson. Johnson +was at his best when Boswell was present, and Boswell not only drew +Johnson out on subjects in which his robust common sense and +readiness of judgment were fitted to shine but actually suggested +and conducted that tour in Scotland which gave Johnson an +opportunity for displaying himself at his best. The recorded talk +is extraordinarily varied and entertaining. It is a mistake to +conceive Johnson as a monster of bear-like rudeness, shouting down +opposition, hectoring his companions, and habitually a blustering +verbal bully. We are too easily hypnotized by Macaulay's flashy +caricature. He could be merciless in argument and often wrongheaded +and he was always acute, uncomfortably acute, in his perception of +a fallacy, and a little disconcerting in his unmasking of pretence. +But he could be gay and tender too and in his heart he was a +shrinking and sensitive man.</p> +<p>As a critic (his criticism is the only side of his literary work +that need be considered), Johnson must be allowed a high place. His +natural indolence in production had prevented him from exhausting +his faculties in the more exacting labours of creative work, and it +had left him time for omnivorous if desultory reading, the fruits +of which he stored in a wonderfully retentive memory against an +occasion for their use. To a very fully equipped mind he brought +the service of a robust and acute judgment. Moreover when he +applied his mind to a subject he had a faculty of intense, if +fitful concentration; he could seize with great force on the heart +of a matter; he had the power in a wonderfully short time of +extracting the kernel and leaving the husk. His judgments in +writing are like those recorded by Boswell from his conversation; +that is to say he does not, as a critic whose medium was normally +the pen rather than the tongue would tend to do, search for fine +shades of distinction, subdivide subtleties, or be careful to admit +<em>caveats</em> or exceptions; he passes, on the contrary, rapid +and forcible verdicts, not seldom in their assertions untenably +sweeping, and always decided and dogmatic. He never affects +diffidence or defers to the judgments of others. His power of +concentration, of seizing on essentials, has given us his best +critical work—nothing could be better, for instance, than his +characterisation of the poets whom he calls the metaphysical school +(Donne, Crashaw, and the rest) which is the most valuable part of +his life of Cowley. Even where he is most prejudiced—for +instance in his attack on Milton's <cite>Lycidas</cite>—there +is usually something to be said for his point of view. And after +this concentration, his excellence depends on his basic common +sense. His classicism is always tempered, like Dryden's, by a +humane and sensible dislike of pedantry; he sets no store by the +unities; in his preface to Shakespeare he allows more than a +"classic" could have been expected to admit, writing in it, in +truth, some of the manliest and wisest things in Shakespearean +literature. Of course, he had his failings—the greatest of +them what Lamb called imperfect sympathy. He could see no good in +republicans or agnostics, and none in Scotland or France. Not that +the phrase "imperfect sympathy," which expresses by implication the +romantic critic's point of view, would have appealed to him. When +Dr. Johnson did not like people the fault was in them, not in him; +a ruthless objectivity is part of the classic equipment. He failed, +too, because he could neither understand nor appreciate poetry +which concerned itself with the sensations that come from external +nature. Nature was to him a closed book, very likely for a purely +physical reason. He was short-sighted to the point of myopia, and a +landscape meant nothing to him; when he tried to describe one as he +did in the chapter on the "happy valley" in <cite>Rasselas</cite> +he failed. What he did not see he could not appreciate; perhaps it +is too much to ask of his self-contained and unbending intellect +that he should appreciate the report of it by other men.</p> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>As we have seen, Johnson was not only great in himself, he was +great in his friends. Round him, meeting him as an equal, gathered +the greatest and most prolific writers of the time. There is no +better way to study the central and accepted men of letters of the +period than to take some full evening at the club from Boswell, +read a page or two, watch what the talkers said, and then trace +each back to his own works for a complete picture of his +personality. The lie of the literary landscape in this wonderful +time will become apparent to you as you read. You will find Johnson +enthroned, Boswell at his ear, round him men like Reynolds and +Burke, Richardson and Fielding and Goldsmith, Robertson and Gibbon, +and occasionally drawn to the circle minnows like Beattie and a +genius like Adam Smith. Gray, studious in his college at Cambridge, +is exercising his fastidious talent; Collins' sequestered, +carefully nurtured muse is silent; a host of minor poets are riding +Pope's poetic diction, and heroic couplet to death. Outside +scattered about is the van of Romance—Percy collecting his +ballads; Burns making songs and verses in Scotland; the "mad" +people, Smart and Chatterton, and above all Blake, obscurely +beginning the work that was to finish in Wordsworth and Coleridge +and Keats.</p> +<p>Of Johnson's set the most remarkable figure was Edmund +Burke—"the supreme writer," as De Quincey called him, "of his +century." His writings belong more to the history of politics than +to that of literature, and a close examination of them would be out +of place here. His political theory strikes a middle course which +offends—and in his own day offended—both parties in the +common strife of political thinking. He believed the best +government to consist in a patriotic aristocracy, ruling for the +good of the people. By birth an Irishman, he had the innate +practicality which commonly lies beneath the flash and colour of +Irish forcefulness and rhetoric. That, and his historical training, +which influenced him in the direction of conceiving every +institution as the culmination of an evolutionary development, sent +him directly counter to the newest and most enthusiastically urged +political philosophy of his day—the philosophy stated by +Rousseau, and put in action by the French Revolution. He disliked +and distrusted "metaphysical theories," when they left the field of +speculation for that of practice, had no patience with "natural +rights" (which as an Irishman he conceived as the product of +sentimentalism) and applied what would nowadays be called a +"pragmatic" test to political affairs. Practice was the touchstone; +a theory was useless unless you could prove that it had worked. It +followed that he was not a democrat, opposed parliamentary reform, +and held that the true remedy for corruption and venality was not +to increase the size of the electorate, but to reduce it so as to +obtain electors of greater weight and independence. For him a +member of Parliament was a representative and not a delegate, and +must act not on his elector's wishes but on his own judgment. These +opinions are little in fashion in our own day, but it is well to +remember that in Burke's case they were the outcome not of +prejudice but of thought, and that even democracy may admit they +present a case that must be met and answered.</p> +<p>Burke's reputation as a thinker has suffered somewhat unjustly +as a result of his refusal to square his tenets either with +democracy or with its opposite. It has been said that ideas were +only of use to him so far as they were of polemical service, that +the amazing fertility and acuteness of his mind worked only in a +not too scrupulous determination to overwhelm his antagonists in +the several arguments—on India, or America, on Ireland or on +France—which made up his political career. He was, said +Carlyle, "vehement rather than earnest; a resplendent far-sighted +rhetorician, rather than a deep and earnest thinker." The words as +they stand would be a good description of a certain type of +politician; they would fit, for instance, very well on Mr. +Gladstone; but they do Burke less than justice. He was an innovator +in modern political thought, and his application of the historical +method to the study of institutions is in its way a not less +epoch-making achievement than Bacon's application of the inductive +method to science. At a time when current political thought, led by +Rousseau, was drawing its theories from the abstract conception of +"natural rights" Burke was laying down that sounder and deeper +notion of politics which has governed thinking in that department +of knowledge since. Besides this, he had face to face with the +affairs of his own day, a far-sightedness and sagacity which kept +him right where other men went wrong. In a nation of the blind he +saw the truth about the American colonies; he predicted with +exactitude the culmination of the revolution in Napoleon. Mere +rhetorical vehemence cannot explain the earnestness with which in a +day of diplomatic cynicism he preached the doctrine of an +international morality as strict and as binding as the morality +which exists between man and man. Surest of all, we have the +testimony, uninfluenced by the magic of language, of the men he +met. You could not, said Dr. Johnson, shelter with him in a shed +for a few moments from the rain without saying, "This is an +extraordinary man."</p> +<p>His literary position depends chiefly on his amazing gift of +expression, on a command of language unapproached by any writer of +his time. His eloquence (in writing not in speaking; he is said to +have had a monotonous delivery) was no doubt at bottom a matter of +race, but to his Irish readiness and flash and colour he added the +strength of a full mind, fortified by a wonderful store of reading +which a retentive and exact memory enabled him to bring instantly +to bear on the subject in hand. No writer before him, except Defoe, +had such a wide knowledge of the technicalities of different men's +occupations, and of all sorts of the processes of daily business, +nor could enlighten an abstract matter with such a wealth of +luminous analogy. It is this characteristic of his style which has +led to the common comparison of his writing with Shakespeare's; +both seem to be preternaturally endowed with more information, to +have a wider sweep of interest than ordinary men. Both were not +only, as Matthew Arnold said of Burke, "saturated with ideas," but +saturated too in the details of the business and desire of ordinary +men's lives; nothing human was alien from them. Burke's language +is, therefore, always interesting and always appropriate to his +thought; it is also on occasion very beautiful. He had a wonderful +command of clear and ringing utterance and could appeal when he +liked very powerfully to the sensibilities of his readers. +Rhetoricians are seldom free from occasional extravagance, and +Burke fell under the common danger of his kind. He had his moments +of falsity, could heap coarse and outrageous abuse on Warren +Hastings, illustrate the horrors of the Revolution by casting a +dagger on the floor of the House of Commons, and nourish hatred +beyond the bounds of justice or measure. But these things do not +affect his position, nor take from the solid greatness of his +work.</p> +<p>Boswell we have seen; after Burke and Boswell, Goldsmith was the +most brilliant member of the Johnson circle. If part of Burke's +genius is referable to his nationality, Goldsmith's is wholly so. +The beginning and the end of him was Irish; every quality he +possessed as a man and as a writer belongs to his race. He had the +Irish carelessness, the Irish generosity, the Irish quick temper, +the Irish humour. This latter gift, displayed constantly in a +company which had little knowledge of the peculiar quality of Irish +wit and no faculty of sympathy or imagination, is at the bottom of +the constant depreciation of him on the part of Boswell and others +of his set. His mock self-importance they thought ill-breeding; his +humorous self-depreciation and keen sense of his own +ridiculousness, mere lack of dignity and folly. It is curious to +read Boswell and watch how often Goldsmith, without Boswell's +knowing it, got the best of the joke. In writing he had what we can +now recognise as peculiarly Irish gifts. All our modern writers of +light half-farcical comedy are Irish. Goldsmith's <cite>She Stoops +to Conquer</cite>, is only the first of a series which includes +<cite>The School for Scandal, The Importance of being +Earnest</cite>, and <cite>You Never can Tell</cite>. And his +essays—particularly those of the <cite>Citizen of the +World</cite> with its Chinese vision of England and English +life—are the first fruit of that Irish detachment, that +ability to see "normally" English habits and institutions and +foibles which in our own day has given us the prefaces of Mr. Shaw. +As a writer Goldsmith has a lightness and delicate ease which +belongs rather to the school of the earlier eighteenth century than +to his own day; the enthusiasm of Addison for French literature +which he retained gave him a more graceful model than the +"Johnsonian" school, to which he professed himself to belong, could +afford.</p> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>The eighteenth century novel demands separate treatment, and of +the other prose authors the most eminent, Edward Gibbon, belongs to +historical rather than to literary studies. It is time to turn to +poetry.</p> +<p>There orthodox classicism still held sway; the manner and metre +of Pope or Thomson ruled the roost of singing fowl. In the main it +had done its work, and the bulk of fresh things conceived in it +were dull and imitative, even though occasionally, as in the poems +of Johnson himself and of Goldsmith, an author arose who was able +to infuse sincerity and emotion into a now moribund convention. The +classic manner—now more that of Thomson than of +Pope—persisted till it overlapped romanticism; Cowper and +Crabbe each owe a doubtful allegiance, leaning by their formal +metre and level monotony of thought to the one and by their realism +to the other. In the meantime its popularity and its assured +position were beginning to be assailed in the coteries by the work +of two new poets.</p> +<p>The output of Thomas Gray and William Collins is small; you +might almost read the complete poetical works of either in an +evening. But for all that they mark a period; they are the first +definite break with the classic convention which had been +triumphant for upwards of seventy years when their prime came. It +is a break, however, in style rather than in essentials, and a +reader who seeks in them the inspiriting freshness which came later +with Wordsworth and Coleridge will be disappointed. Their carefully +drawn still wine tastes insipidly after the "beaded bubbles winking +at the brim" of romance. They are fastidious and academic; they +lack the authentic fire; their poetry is "made" poetry like +Tennyson's and Matthew Arnold's. On their comparative merits a deal +of critical ink has been spilt, Arnold's characterisation of Gray +is well known—"he never spoke out." Sterility fell upon him +because he lived in an age of prose just as it fell upon Arnold +himself because he lived too much immersed in business and routine. +But in what he wrote he had the genuine poetic gift—the gift +of insight and feeling. Against this, Swinburne with characteristic +vehemence raised the standard of Collins, the latchet of whose shoe +Gray, as a lyric poet, was not worthy to unloose. "The muse gave +birth to Collins, she did but give suck to Gray." It is more to our +point to observe that neither, though their work abounds in +felicities and in touches of a genuine poetic sense, was fitted to +raise the standard of revolt. Revolution is for another and braver +kind of genius than theirs. Romanticism had to wait for Burns and +Blake.</p> +<p>In every country at any one time there are in all probability +not one but several literatures flourishing. The main stream +flowing through the publishers and booksellers, conned by critics +and coteries, recognized as the national literature, is commonly +only the largest of several channels of thought. There are besides +the national literature local literatures—books, that is, are +published which enjoy popularity and critical esteem in their own +county or parish and are utterly unknown outside; there may even be +(indeed, there are in several parts of the country) distinct local +schools of writing and dynasties of local authors. These localized +literatures rarely become known to the outside world; the national +literature takes little account of them, though their existence and +probably some special knowledge of one or other of them is within +the experience of most of us. But every now and again some one of +their authors transcends his local importance, gives evidence of a +genius which is not to be denied even by those who normally have +not the knowledge to appreciate the particular flavour of locality +which his writings impart, and becomes a national figure. While he +lives and works the national and his local stream turn and flow +together.</p> +<p>This was the case of Robert Burns. All his life long he was the +singer of a parish—the last of a long line of "forbears" who +had used the Scottish lowland vernacular to rhyme in about their +neighbours and their scandals, their loves and their church. +Himself at the confluence of the two streams, the national and the +local, he pays his tribute to two sets of originals, talks with +equal reverence of names known to us like Pope and Gray and +Shenstone and names unknown which belonged to local "bards," as he +would have called them, who wrote their poems for an Ayrshire +public. If he came upon England as an innovator it was simply +because he brought with him the highly individualized style of +Scottish local vernacular verse; to his own people he was no +innovator but a fulfilment; as his best critic[<a href= +"#note-5">5</a>] says he brought nothing to the literature he +became a part of but himself. His daring and splendid genius made +the local universal, raised out of rough and cynical satirizing a +style as rich and humorous and astringent as that of Rabelais, lent +inevitableness and pathos and romance to lyric and song. But he was +content to better the work of other men. He made hardly anything +new.</p> +<p>Stevenson in his essay on Burns remarks his readiness to use up +the work of others or take a large hint from it "as if he had some +difficulty in commencing." He omits to observe that the very same +trait applies to other great artists. There seem to be two orders +of creative writers. On the one hand are the innovators, the new +men like Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, and later Browning. +These men owe little to their predecessors; they work on their own +devices and construct their medium afresh for themselves. Commonly +their fame and acceptance is slow, for they speak in an unfamiliar +tongue and they have to educate a generation to understand their +work. The other order of artists have to be shown the way. They +have little fertility in construction or invention. You have to say +to them "Here is something that you could do too; go and do it +better," or "Here is a story to work on, or a refrain of a song; +take it and give it your subtlety, your music." The villainy you +teach them they will use and it will go hard with them if they do +not better the invention; but they do not invent for themselves. To +this order of artists Burns like Shakespeare, and among the lesser +men Tennyson, belongs. In all his plays Shakespeare is known to +have invented only one plot; in many he is using not only the +structure but in many places the words devised by an older author; +his mode of treatment depends on the conventions common in his day, +on the tragedy of blood, and madness and revenge, on the comedy of +intrigue and disguises, on the romance with its strange happenings +and its reuniting of long parted friends. Burns goes the same way +to work; scarcely a page of his but shows traces of some original +in the Scottish vernacular school. The elegy, the verse epistle, +the satirical form of <cite>Holy Willie's Prayer</cite>, the song +and recitative of <cite>The Jolly Beggars</cite>, are all to be +found in his predecessors, in Fergusson, Ramsay, and the local +poets of the south-west of Scotland. In the songs often whole +verses, nearly always the refrains, are from older folk poetry. +What he did was to pour into these forms the incomparable richness +of a personality whose fire and brilliance and humour transcended +all locality and all tradition, a personality which strode like a +colossus over the formalism and correctness of his time. His use of +familiar forms explains, more than anything else, his immediate +fame. His countrymen were ready for him; they could hail him on the +instant (just as an Elizabethan audience could hail Shakespeare) as +something familiar and at the same time more splendid than anything +they knew. He spoke in a tongue they could understand.</p> +<p>It is impossible to judge Burns from his purely English verse; +though he did it as well as any of the minor followers of the +school of Pope he did it no better. Only the weakest side of his +character—his sentimentalism—finds expression in it; he +had not the sense of tradition nor the intimate knowledge necessary +to use English to the highest poetic effect; it was indeed a +foreign tongue to him. In the vernacular he wrote the language he +spoke, a language whose natural force and colour had become +enriched by three centuries of literary use, which was capable, +too, of effects of humour and realism impossible in any tongue +spoken out of reach of the soil. It held within it an unmatched +faculty for pathos, a capacity for expressing a lambent and kindly +humour, a power of pungency in satire and a descriptive vividness +that English could not give. How express in the language of Pope or +even of Wordsworth an effect like this:—</p> +<div class="poem">"They reeled, they set, they cross'd, they +cleekit,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Till ilka carlin swat and +reekit,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And coost her duddies to the +wark,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And linket at it in her +sark."</span></div> +<br> +or this—<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Yestreen when to the trembling string,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The dance gaed thro' the lighted +ha'</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">To thee my fancy took its +wing—</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">I sat but neither heard nor +saw:</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Tho' this was fair, and that was +braw,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And yon the toast of a' the +toun,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">I sigh'd and said amang them +a',</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">You are na Mary +Morison."</span></div> +<p>It may be objected that in all this there is only one word, and +but two or three forms of words that are not English. But the +accent, the rhythm, the air of it are all Scots, and it was a Burns +thinking in his native tongue who wrote it, not the Burns of</p> +<div class="poem">"Anticipation forward points the view ";</div> +<br> +or<br> +<div class="poem">"Pleasures are like poppies spread,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">You grasp the flower, the bloom +is shed."</span></div> +<br> +or any other of the exercises in the school of Thomson and +Pope.<br> +<br> +<p>It is easy to see that though Burns admired unaffectedly the +"classic" writers, his native realism and his melody made him a +potent agent in the cause of naturalism and romance. In his ideas, +even more than in his style, he belongs to the oncoming school. The +French Revolution, which broke upon Europe when he was at the +height of his career, found him already converted to its +principles. As a peasant, particularly a Scotch peasant, he +believed passionately in the native worth of man as man and gave +ringing expression to it in his verse. In his youth his +liberal-mindedness made him a Jacobite out of mere antagonism to +the existing régime; the Revolution only discovered for him +the more logical Republican creed. As the leader of a loose-living, +hard drinking set, such as was to be found in every parish, he was +a determined and free-spoken enemy of the kirk, whose tyranny he +several times encountered. In his writing he is as vehement an +anti-clerical as Shelley and much more practical. The political +side of romanticism, in fact, which in England had to wait for +Byron and Shelley, is already full-grown in his work. He +anticipates and gives complete expression to one half of the +Romantic movement.</p> +<p>What Burns did for the idea of liberty, Blake did for that and +every other idea current among Wordsworth and his successors. There +is nothing stranger in the history of English literature than the +miracle by which this poet and artist, working in obscurity, +utterly unknown to the literary world that existed outside him, +summed up in himself all the thoughts and tendencies which were the +fruit of anxious discussion and propaganda on the part of the +authors—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb—who believed +themselves to be the discoverers of fresh truth unknown to their +generation. The contemporary and independent discovery by Wallace +and Darwin of the principle of natural selection furnishes, +perhaps, a rough parallel, but the fact serves to show how +impalpable and universal is the spread of ideas, how impossible it +is to settle literary indebtedness or construct literary genealogy +with any hope of accuracy. Blake, by himself, held and expressed +quite calmly that condemnation of the "classic" school that +Wordsworth and Coleridge proclaimed against the opposition of a +deriding world. As was his habit he compressed it into a rude +epigram,</p> +<div class="poem">"Great things are done when men and mountains +meet;<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">This is not done by jostling in +the street."</span></div> +<p>The case for nature against urbanity could not be more tersely +nor better put. The German metaphysical doctrine which was the +deepest part of the teaching of Wordsworth and Coleridge and their +main discovery, he expresses as curtly and off-handedly,</p> +<div class="poem">"The sun's light when he unfolds it,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Depends on the organ that beholds +it."</span></div> +<p>In the realm of childhood and innocence, which Wordsworth +entered fearfully and pathetically as an alien traveller, he moves +with the simple and assured ease of one native. He knows the +mystical wonder and horror that Coleridge set forth in <cite>The +Ancient Mariner</cite>. As for the beliefs of Shelley, they are +already fully developed in his poems. "The king and the priest are +types of the oppressor; humanity is crippled by "mind-forg'd +manacles"; love is enslaved to the moral law, which is broken by +the Saviour of mankind; and, even more subtly than by Shelley, life +is pictured by Blake as a deceit and a disguise veiling from us the +beams of the Eternal."[<a href="#note-6">6</a>]</p> +<p>In truth, Blake, despite the imputation of insanity which was +his contemporaries' and has later been his commentators' refuge +from assenting to his conclusions, is as bold a thinker in his own +way as Neitzsche and as consistent. An absolute unity of belief +inspires all his utterances, cryptic and plain. That he never +succeeded in founding a school nor gathering followers must be put +down in the first place to the form in which his work was issued +(it never reached the public of his own day) and the dark and +mysterious mythology in which the prophetic books which are the +full and extended statement of his philosophy, are couched, and in +the second place to the inherent difficulty of the philosophy +itself. As he himself says, where we read black, he reads white. +For the common distinction between good and evil, Blake substitutes +the distinction between imagination and reason; and reason, the +rationalizing, measuring, comparing faculty by which we come to +impute praise or blame is the only evil in his eyes. "There is +nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so;" to rid the +world of thinking, to substitute for reason, imagination, and for +thought, vision, was the object of all that he wrote or drew. The +implications of this philosophy carry far, and Blake was not afraid +to follow where they led him. Fortunately for those who hesitate to +embark on that dark and adventurous journey, his work contains +delightful and simpler things. He wrote lyrics of extraordinary +freshness and delicacy and spontaneity; he could speak in a child's +voice of innocent joys and sorrows and the simple elemental things. +His odes to "Spring" and "Autumn" are the harbingers of Keats. Not +since Shakespeare and Campion died could English show songs like +his</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"My silks and fine array."</div> +<br> +and the others which carry the Elizabethan accent. He could write +these things as well as the Elizabethans. In others he was +unique.<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Tiger! Tiger! burning bright<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">In the forests of the +night,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">What immortal hand or +eye</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Could frame thy fearful +symmetry."</span></div> +<p>In all the English lyric there is no voice so clear, so separate +or distinctive as his.</p> +<h4>Footnotes</h4> +<p><a name="note-5"><!-- Note Anchor 5 --></a>[Footnote 5: W.E. +Henley, "Essay on Burns." Works, David Nutt.]</p> +<p><a name="note-6"><!-- Note Anchor 6 --></a>[Footnote 6: Prof. +Raleigh.]</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_VII"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2> +<br> +<h3>THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL</h3> +<h4>(1)</h4> +<p>There are two ways of approaching the periods of change and new +birth in literature. The commonest and, for all the study which it +entails, the easiest, is that summed up in the phrase, literature +begets literature. Following it, you discover and weigh literary +influences, the influence of poet on poet, and book on book. You +find one man harking back to earlier models in his own tongue, +which an intervening age misunderstood or despised; another, +turning to the contemporary literatures of neighbouring countries; +another, perhaps, to the splendour and exoticism of the east. In +the matter of form and style, such a study carries you far. You can +trace types of poetry and metres back to curious and unsuspected +originals, find the well-known verse of Burns' epistles turning up +in Provençal; Tennyson's <cite>In Memoriam</cite> stanza in +use by Ben Jonson; the metre of <cite>Christabel</cite> in minor +Elizabethan poetry; the peculiar form of Fitzgerald's translation +of <cite>Omar Khayyam</cite> followed by so many imitators since, +itself to be the actual reflection of the rough metrical scheme of +his Persian original. But such a study, though it is profitable and +interesting, can never lead to the whole truth. As we saw in the +beginning of this book, in the matter of the Renaissance, every age +of discovery and re-birth has its double aspect. It is a revolution +in style and language, an age of literary experiment and +achievement, but its experiments are dictated by the excitement of +a new subject-matter, and that subject-matter is so much in the +air, so impalpable and universal that it eludes analysis. Only you +can be sure that it is this weltering contagion of new ideas, and +new thought—the "Zeitgeist," the spirit of the age, or +whatever you may call it—that is the essential and +controlling force. Literary loans and imports give the forms into +which it can be moulded, but without them it would still exist, and +they are only the means by which a spirit which is in life itself, +and which expresses itself in action, and in concrete human +achievement, gets itself into the written word. The romantic +revival numbers Napoleon amongst its leaders as well as Byron, +Wellington, Pitt and Wilberforce, as well as Keats and Wordsworth. +Only the literary manifestations of the time concern us here, but +it is important to remember that the passion for simplification and +for a return to nature as a refuge from the artificial complexities +of society, which inspired the <cite>Lyrical Ballads</cite>, +inspired no less the course of the Revolution in France, and later, +the destruction by Napoleon of the smaller feudal states of +Germany, which made possible German nationality and a national +spirit.</p> +<p>In this romantic revival, however, the revolution in form and +style matters more than in most. The classicism of the previous age +had been so fixed and immutable; it had been enthroned in high +places, enjoyed the esteem of society, arrogated to itself the +acceptance which good breeding and good manners demanded. Dryden +had been a Court poet, careful to change his allegiance with the +changing monarchy. Pope had been the equal and intimate of the +great people of his day, and his followers, if they did not enjoy +the equality, enjoyed at any rate the patronage of many noble +lords. The effect of this was to give the prestige of social usage +to the verse in which they wrote and the language they used. "There +was," said Dr. Johnson, "before the time of Dryden no poetical +diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of +domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to +particular arts. Words too familiar or too remote to defeat the +purpose of a poet." This poetic diction, refined from the grossness +of domestic use, was the standard poetic speech of the eighteenth +century. The heroic couplet in which it was cast was the standard +metre. So that the first object of the revolt of the romantics was +the purely literary object of getting rid of the vice of an unreal +and artificial manner of writing. They desired simplicity of +style.</p> +<p>When the <cite>Lyrical Ballads</cite> of Wordsworth and +Coleridge were published in 1798, the preface which Wordsworth +wrote as their manifesto hardly touched at all on the poetic +imagination or the attitude of the poet to life and nature. The +only question is that of diction. "The majority of the following +poems," he writes, "are to be considered as experiments. They were +written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of +conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted +to the purposes of poetic pleasure." And in the longer preface to +the second edition, in which the theories of the new school on the +nature and methods of the poetic imagination are set forth at +length, he returns to the same point. "The language too, of these +men (that is those in humble and rustic life) has been adopted ... +because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from +which the best part of language is originally derived, and because +from their rank in society, and the sameness and narrow circle of +their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity, +they convey their feelings and notions in simple unelaborated +expressions." Social vanity—the armour which we wear to +conceal our deepest thoughts and feelings—that was what +Wordsworth wished to be rid of, and he chose the language of the +common people, not because it fitted, as an earlier school of poets +who used the common speech had asserted, the utterance of habitual +feeling and common sense, but because it is the most sincere +expression of the deepest and rarest passion. His object was the +object attained by Shakespeare in some of his supremest moments; +the bare intolerable force of the speeches after the murder of +Macbeth, or of King Lear's</p> +<div class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">"Do not laugh +at me,</span><br> +For as I am a man, I think this lady<br> +To be my child Cordelia."</div> +<p>Here, then, was one avenue of revolt from the tyranny of +artificiality, the getting back of common speech into poetry. But +there was another, earlier and more potent in its effect. The +eighteenth century, weary of its own good sense and sanity, turned +to the Middle Ages for picturesqueness and relief. Romance of +course, had not been dead in all these years, when Pope and Addison +made wit and good sense the fashionable temper for writing. There +was a strong romantic tradition in the eighteenth century, though +it does not give its character to the writing of the time. Dr. +Johnson was fond of old romances. When he was in Skye he amused +himself by thinking of his Scottish tour as the journey of a +knight-errant. "These fictions of the Gothic romances," he said, +"are not so remote from credibility as is commonly supposed." It is +a mistake to suppose that the passion for mediaevalism began with +either Coleridge or Scott. Horace Walpole was as enthusiastic as +either of them; good eighteenth century prelates like Hurd and +Percy, found in what they called the Gothic an inexhaustible source +of delight. As was natural, what attracted them in the Middle Ages +was not their resemblances to the time they lived in, but the +points in which the two differed. None of them had knowledge +enough, or insight enough, to conceive or sympathize with the +humanity of the thirteenth century, to shudder at its cruelties and +hardnesses and persecutions, or to comprehend the spiritual +elevation and insight of its rarest minds. "It was art," said +William Morris, "art in which all men shared, that made life +romantic as people called it in those days. That and not robber +barons, and inaccessible kings, with their hierarchy of serving +nobles, and other rubbish." Morris belonged to a time which knew +its middle ages better. To the eighteenth century the robber barons +and the "other rubbish" were the essence of romance. For Percy and +his followers, medievalism was a collection of what actors call +"properties" gargoyles, and odds and ends of armour and castle +keeps with secret passages, banners and gay colours, and gay +shimmering obsolete words. Mistaking what was on its surface at any +rate a subtle and complex civilization, for rudeness and +quaintness, they seemed to themselves to pass back into a freer +air, where any extravagance was possible, and good breeding and +mere circumspection and restraint vanished like the wind.</p> +<p>A similar longing to be rid of the precision and order of +everyday life drove them to the mountains, and to the literature of +Wales and the Highlands, to Celtic, or pseudo-Celtic romance. To +the fashion of the time mountains were still frowning and horrid +steeps; in Gray's Journal of his tour in the Lakes, a new +understanding and appreciation of nature is only struggling +through; and when mountains became fashionable, it was at first and +remained in part at least, till the time of Byron, for those very +theatrical qualities which had hitherto put them in abhorrence. +Wordsworth, in his <cite>Lines written above Tintern Abbey</cite>, +in which he sets forth the succeeding stages of his mental +development, refers to this love of the mountains for their +spectacular qualities, as the first step in the progress of his +mind to poetic maturity:</p> +<div class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">"The sounding +cataract</span><br> +Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,<br> +The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood,<br> +Their colours and their forms were then to me<br> +An appetite."</div> +<p>This same passion for the "sounding cataract" and the "tall +rock," this appetite for the deep and gloomy wood, gave its vogue +in Wordsworth's boyhood to Macpherson's <cite>Ossian</cite>, a book +which whether it be completely fraudulent or not, was of capital +importance in the beginnings of the romantic movement.</p> +<p>The love of mediaeval quaintness and obsolete words, however, +led to a more important literary event—the publication of +Bishop Percy's edition of the ballads in the Percy folio—the +<cite>Reliques of Ancient Poetry</cite>. Percy to his own mind knew +the Middle Ages better than they knew themselves, and he took care +to dress to advantage the rudeness and plainness of his originals. +Perhaps we should not blame him. Sir Walter Scott did the same with +better tact and skill in his Border minstrelsy, and how many +distinguished editors are there, who have tamed and smoothed down +the natural wildness and irregularity of Blake? But it is more +important to observe that when Percy's reliques came to have their +influence on writing his additions were imitated as much as the +poems on which he grafted them. Chatterton's <cite>Rowley +Poems</cite>, which in many places seem almost inconceivably banal +and artificial to us to-day, caught their accent from the episcopal +editor as much as from the ballads themselves. None the less, +whatever its fault, Percy's collection gave its impetus to one half +of the romantic movement; it was eagerly read in Germany, and when +it came to influence Scott and Coleridge it did so not only +directly, but through Burger's imitation of it; it began the modern +study and love of the ballad which has given us <cite>Sister +Helen</cite>, the <cite>White Ship</cite> and the <cite>Lady of +Shalott</cite>.</p> +<p>But the romantic revival goes deeper than any change, however +momentous of fashion or style. It meant certain fundamental changes +in human outlook. In the first place, one notices in the authors of +the time an extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility; +the mind at its countless points of contact with the sensuous world +and the world of thought, seems to become more alive and alert. It +is more sensitive to fine impressions, to finely graded shades of +difference. Outward objects and philosophical ideas seem to +increase in their content and their meaning, and acquire a new +power to enrich the intensest life of the human spirit. Mountains +and lakes, the dignity of the peasant, the terror of the +supernatural, scenes of history, mediaeval architecture and armour, +and mediaeval thought and poetry, the arts and mythology of +Greece—all became springs of poetic inspiration and poetic +joy. The impressions of all these things were unfamiliar and +ministered to a sense of wonder, and by that very fact they were +classed as romantic, as modes of escape from a settled way of life. +But they were also in a sense familiar too. The mountains made +their appeal to a deep implanted feeling in man, to his native +sense of his own worth and dignity and splendour as a part of +nature, and his recognition of natural scenery as necessary, and in +its fullest meaning as sufficient for his spiritual needs. They +called him back from the artificiality and complexity of the cities +he had built for himself, and the society he had weaved round him, +to the natural world in which Providence had planted him of old, +and which was full of significance for his soul. The greatest poets +of the romantic revival strove to capture and convey the influence +of nature on the mind, and of the mind on nature interpenetrating +one another. They were none the less artists because they +approached nature in a state of passive receptivity. They believed +in the autocracy of the individual imagination none the less +because their mission was to divine nature and to understand her, +rather than to correct her profusions in the name of art.</p> +<p>In the second place the romantic revival meant a development of +the historical sense. Thinkers like Burke and Montesquieu helped +students of politics to acquire perspective; to conceive modern +institutions not as things separate, and separately created, but as +conditioned by, and evolved from, the institutions of an earlier +day. Even the revolutionary spirit of the time looked both before +and after, and took history as well as the human perfectibility +imagined by philosophers into its purview. In France the reformers +appealed in the first instance for a States General—a +mediaeval institution—as the corrective of their wrongs, and +later when they could not, like their neighbours in Belgium, demand +reform by way of the restoration of their historical rights, they +were driven to go a step further back still, beyond history to what +they conceived to be primitive society, and demand the rights of +man. This development of the historical sense, which had such a +widespread influence on politics, got itself into literature in the +creation of the historical novel. Scott and Chateaubriand revived +the old romance in which by a peculiar ingenuity of form, the +adventures of a typical hero of fiction are cast in a historical +setting and set about with portraits of real personages. The +historical sense affected, too, novels dealing with contemporary +life. Scott's best work, his novels of Scottish character, catch +more than half their excellence from the richness of colour and +proportion which the portraiture of the living people acquires when +it is aided by historical knowledge and imagination.</p> +<p>Lastly, besides this awakened historical sense, and this +quickening of imaginative sensibility to the message of nature, the +Romantic revival brought to literature a revival of the sense of +the connection between the visible world and another world which is +unseen. The supernatural which in all but the crudest of mechanisms +had been out of English literature since <cite>Macbeth</cite>, took +hold on the imaginations of authors, and brought with it a new +subtlety and a new and nameless horror and fascination. There is +nothing in earlier English literature to set beside the strange and +terrible indefiniteness of the <cite>Ancient Mariner</cite>, and +though much in this kind has been written since, we have not got +far beyond the skill and imagination with which Coleridge and Scott +worked on the instinctive fears that lie buried in the human +mind.</p> +<p>Of all these aspects of the revival, however, the new +sensitiveness and accessibility to the influences of external +nature was the most pervasive and the most important. Wordsworth +speaks for the love that is in homes where poor men lie, the daily +teaching that is in</p> +<div class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">"Woods and +rills;</span><br> +The silence that is in the starry sky,<br> +The peace that is among the lonely hills."</div> +<br> +Shelley for the wildness of the west wind, and the ubiquitous +spiritual emotion which speaks equally in the song of a skylark or +a political revolution. Byron for the swing and roar of the sea. +Keats for verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. Scott and +Coleridge, though like Byron they are less with nature than with +romance, share the same communion.<br> +<br> +<p>This imaginative sensibility of the romantics not only deepened +their communion with nature, it brought them into a truer relation +with what had before been created in literature and art. The +romantic revival is the Golden Age of English criticism; all the +poets were critics of one sort or another—either formally in +essays and prefaces, or in passing and desultory flashes of +illumination in their correspondence. Wordsworth, in his prefaces, +in his letter to a friend of Burns which contains such a breadth +and clarity of wisdom on things that seem alien to his sympathies, +even in some of his poems; Coleridge, in his <cite>Biographia +Literaria</cite>, in his notes on Shakespeare, in those rhapsodies +at Highgate which were the basis for his recorded table talk; Keats +in his letters; Shelley in his <cite>Defence of Poetry</cite>; +Byron in his satires and journals; Scott in those lives of the +novelists which contain so much truth and insight into the works of +fellow craftsmen—they are all to be found turning the new +acuteness of impression which was in the air they breathed, to the +study of literature, as well as to the study of nature. Alongside +of them were two authors, Lamb and Hazlitt, whose bent was rather +critical than creative, and the best part of whose intelligence and +sympathy was spent on the sensitive and loving divination of our +earlier literature. With these two men began the criticism of +acting and of pictorial art that have developed since into two of +the main kinds of modern critical writing.</p> +<p>Romantic criticism, both in its end and its method, differs +widely from that of Dr. Johnson and his school. Wordsworth and +Coleridge were concerned with deep-seated qualities and +temperamental differences. Their critical work revolved round their +conception of the fancy and the imagination, the one dealing with +nature on the surface and decorating it with imagery, the other +penetrating to its deeper significances. Hazlitt and Lamb applied +their analogous conception of wit as a lower quality than humour, +in the same fashion. Dr. Johnson looked on the other hand for +correctness of form, for the subordination of the parts to the +whole, for the self-restraint and good sense which common manners +would demand in society, and wisdom in practical life. His school +cared more for large general outlines than for truth in detail. +They would not permit the idiosyncrasy of a personal or individual +point of view: hence they were incapable of understanding lyricism, +and they preferred those forms of writing which set themselves to +express the ideas and feelings that most men may be supposed to +have in common. Dr. Johnson thought a bombastic and rhetorical +passage in Congreve's <cite>Mourning Bride</cite> better than the +famous description of Dover cliff in <cite>King Lear</cite>. "The +crows, sir," he said of the latter, "impede your fall." Their town +breeding, and possibly, as we saw in the case of Dr. Johnson, an +actual physical disability, made them distrust any clear and +sympathetic rendering of the sense impressions which nature +creates. One cannot imagine Dr. Johnson caring much for the minute +observations of Tennyson's nature poems, or delighting in the +verdurous and mossy alleys of Keats. His test in such a case would +be simple; he would not have liked to have been in such places, nor +reluctantly compelled to go there would he in all likelihood have +had much to say about them beyond that they were damp. For the +poetry—such as Shelley's—which worked by means of +impalpable and indefinite suggestion, he would, one may conceive, +have cared even less. New modes of poetry asked of critics new +sympathies and a new way of approach. But it is time to turn to the +authors themselves.</p> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>The case of Wordsworth is peculiar. In his own day he was +vilified and misunderstood; poets like Byron, whom most of us would +now regard simply as depending from the school he created, sneered +at him. Shelley and Keats failed to understand him or his motives; +he was suspected of apostasy, and when he became poet laureate he +was written off as a turn-coat who had played false to the ideals +of his youth. Now common opinion regards him as a poet above all +the others of his age, and amongst all the English poets standing +beside Milton, but a step below Shakespeare himself—and we +know more about him, more about the processes by which his soul +moved from doubts to certainties, from troubles to triumph, than we +do about any other author we have. This knowledge we have from the +poem called, <cite>The Prelude</cite>, which was published after +his death. It was designed to be only the opening and explanatory +section of a philosophical poem, which was never completed. Had it +been published earlier it would have saved Wordsworth from the +coldness and neglect he suffered at the hands of younger men like +Shelley; it might even have made their work different from what it +is. It has made Wordsworth very clear to us now.</p> +<p>Wordsworth is that rarest thing amongst poets, a complete +innovator. He looked at things in a new way. He found his subjects +in new places; and he put them into a new poetic form. At the +turning point of his life, in his early manhood, he made one great +discovery, had one great vision. By the light of that vision and to +communicate that discovery he wrote his greatest work. By and by +the vision faded, the world fell back into the light of common day, +his philosophy passed from discovery to acceptance, and all unknown +to him his pen fell into a common way of writing. The faculty of +reading which has added fuel to the fire of so many waning +inspirations was denied him. He was much too self-centred to lose +himself in the works of others. Only the shock of a change of +environment—a tour in Scotland, or abroad—shook him +into his old thrill of imagination, so that a few fine things +fitfully illumine the enormous and dreary bulk of his later work. +If we lost all but the <cite>Lyrical Ballads</cite>, the poems of +1804, and the <cite>Prelude</cite>, and the <cite>Excursion</cite>, +Wordsworth's position as a poet would be no lower than it is now, +and he would be more readily accepted by those who still find +themselves uncertain about him.</p> +<p>The determining factor in his career was the French +Revolution—that great movement which besides re-making France +and Europe, made our very modes of thinking anew. While an +undergraduate in Cambridge Wordsworth made several vacation visits +to France. The first peaceful phase of the Revolution was at its +height; France and the assembly were dominated by the little group +of revolutionary orators who took their name from the south-western +province from which most of them came, and with this +group—the Girondists—Wordsworth threw in his lot. Had +he remained he would probably have gone with them to the +guillotine. As it was, the commands of his guardian brought him +back to England, and he was forced to contemplate from a distance +the struggle in which he burned to take an active part. One is +accustomed to think of Wordsworth as a mild old man, but such a +picture if it is thrown back as a presentment of the Wordsworth of +the nineties is a far way from the truth. This darkly passionate +man tortured himself with his longings and his horror. War came and +the prayers for victory in churches found him in his heart praying +for defeat; then came the execution of the king; then the plot +which slew the Gironde. Before all this Wordsworth trembled as +Hamlet did when he learned the ghost's story. His faith in the +world was shaken. First his own country had taken up arms against +what he believed to be the cause of liberty. Then faction had +destroyed his friends whom he believed to be its standard bearers. +What was in the world, in religion, in morality that such things +could be? In the face of this tremendous problem, Wordsworth, +unlike Hamlet, was resolute and determined. It was, perhaps, +characteristic of him that in his desire to get his feet on firm +rock again he fled for a time to the exactest of sciences—to +mathematics. But though he got certainties there, they must have +been, one judges, certainties too arid for his thirsting mind. Then +he made his great discovery—helped to it, perhaps, by his +sister Dorothy and his friend Coleridge—he found nature, and +in nature, peace.</p> +<p>Not a very wonderful discovery, you will say, but though the +cleansing and healing force of natural surroundings on the mind is +a familiar enough idea in our own day, that is only because +Wordsworth found it. When he gave his message to the world it was a +new message. It is worth while remembering that it is still an +unaccepted one. Most of his critics still consider it only +Wordsworth's fun when he wrote:</p> +<div class="poem">"One impulse from the vernal wood<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Can teach us more of +man,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Of moral evil and of +good,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Than all the sages +can."</span></div> +<br> +Yet Wordsworth really believed that moral lessons and ideas were to +be gathered from trees and stones. It was the main part of his +teaching. He claimed that his own morality had been so furnished +him, and he wrote his poetry to convince other people that what had +been true for him could be true for them too.<br> +<br> +<p>For him life was a series of impressions, and the poet's duty +was to recapture those impressions, to isolate them and brood over +them, till gradually as a result of his contemplation emotion +stirred again—an emotion akin to the authentic thrill that +had excited him when the impression was first born in experience. +Then poetry is made; this emotion "recollected" as Wordsworth said +(we may add, recreated) "in tranquillity" passes into enduring +verse. He treasured numberless experiences of this kind in his own +life. Some of them are set forth in the <cite>Prelude</cite>, that +for instance on which the poem <cite>The Thorn</cite> in the +<cite>Lyrical Ballads</cite> is based; they were one or other of +them the occasion of most of his poems; the best of them produced +his finest work—such a poem for instance as <cite>Resolution +and Independence</cite> or <cite>Gipsies</cite>, where some chance +sight met with in one of the poet's walks is brooded over till it +becomes charged with a tremendous significance for him and for all +the world. If we ask how he differentiated his experiences, which +had most value for him, we shall find something deficient. That is +to say, things which were unique and precious to him do not always +appear so to his readers. He counted as gold much that we regard as +dross. But though we may differ from his judgments, the test which +he applied to his recollected impressions is clear. He attached +most value to those which brought with them the sense of an +indwelling spirit, transfusing and interpenetrating all nature, +transfiguring with its radiance, rocks and fields and trees and the +men and women who lived close enough to them to partake of their +strength—the sense, as he calls it in his <cite>Lines above +Tintern Abbey</cite> of something "more deeply interfused" by which +all nature is made one. Sometimes, as in the hymn to Duty, it is +conceived as law. Duty before whom the flowers laugh, is the +daughter of the voice of God, through whom the most ancient heavens +are fresh and strong. But in most of his poems its ends do not +trouble; it is omnipresent; it penetrates everything and +transfigures everything; it is God. It was Wordsworth's belief that +the perception of this indwelling spirit weakened as age grew. For +a few precious and glorious years he had the vision</p> +<div class="poem">"When meadow, grove, and stream,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The earth, and every common +sight</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">To me did seem</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Apparelled in celestial +light,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">The glory and the freshness of a +dream."</span></div> +<br> +Then as childhood, when "these intimations of immortality," this +perception of the infinite are most strong, passed further and +further away, the vision faded and he was left gazing in the light +of common day. He had his memories and that was all.<br> +<br> +<p>There is, of course, more in the matter than this, and +Wordsworth's beliefs were inextricably entangled with the +conception which Coleridge borrowed from German philosophy.</p> +<div class="poem">"We receive but what we give"</div> +<br> +wrote Coleridge to his friend,<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"And in our life alone doth Nature live."</div> +<br> +And Wordsworth came to know that the light he had imagined to be +bestowed, was a light reflected from his own mind. It is easy to +pass from criticism to metaphysics where Coleridge leads, and wise +not to follow.<br> +<br> +<p>If Wordsworth represents that side of the Romantic Revival which +is best described as the return to Nature, Coleridge has +justification for the phrase "Renascence of Wonder." He revived the +supernatural as a literary force, emancipated it from the crude +mechanism which had been applied to it by dilettantes like Horace +Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe, and invested it instead with that air +of suggestion and indefiniteness which gives the highest potency to +it in its effect on the imagination. But Coleridge is more +noteworthy for what he suggested to others than for what he did in +himself. His poetry is, even more than Wordsworth's, unequal; he is +capable of large tracts of dreariness and flatness; he seldom +finished what he began. The <cite>Ancient Mariner</cite>, indeed, +which was the fruit of his close companionship with Wordsworth, is +the only completed thing of the highest quality in the whole of his +work. <cite>Christabel</cite> is a splendid fragment; for years the +first part lay uncompleted and when the odd accident of an +evening's intoxication led him to commence the second, the +inspiration had fled. For the second part, by giving to the fairy +atmosphere of the first a local habitation and a name, robbed it of +its most precious quality; what it gave in exchange was something +the public could get better from Scott. <cite>Kubla Khan</cite> +went unfinished because the call of a friend broke the thread of +the reverie in which it was composed. In the end came opium and +oceans of talk at Highgate and fouled the springs of poetry. +Coleridge never fulfilled the promise of his early days with +Wordsworth. "He never spoke out." But it is on the lines laid down +by his share in the pioneer work rather than on the lines of +Wordsworth's that the second generation of Romantic +poets—that of Shelley and Keats—developed.</p> +<p>The work of Wordsworth was conditioned by the French Revolution +but it hardly embodied the revolutionary spirit. What he conceived +to be its excesses revolted him, and though he sought and sang +freedom, he found it rather in the later revolt of the +nationalities against the Revolution as manifested in Napoleon +himself. The spirit of the revolution, as it was understood in +France and in Europe, had to wait for Shelley for its complete +expression. Freedom is the breath of his work—freedom not +only from the tyranny of earthly powers, but from the tyranny of +religion, expressing itself in republicanism, in atheism, and in +complete emancipation from the current moral code both in conduct +and in writing. The reaction which had followed the overthrow of +Napoleon at Waterloo, sent a wave of absolutism and repression all +over Europe, Italy returned under the heel of Austria; the Bourbons +were restored in France; in England came the days of Castlereagh +and Peterloo. The poetry of Shelley is the expression of what the +children of the revolution—men and women who were brought up +in and believed the revolutionary gospel—thought about these +things.</p> +<p>But it is more than that. Of no poet in English, nor perhaps in +any other tongue, could it be said with more surety, that the +pursuit of the spirit of beauty dominates all his work. For Shelley +it interfused all nature and to possess it was the goal of all +endeavour. The visible world and the world of thought mingle +themselves inextricably in his contemplation of it. For him there +is no boundary-line between the two, the one is as real and actual +as the other. In his hands that old trick of the poets, the simile, +takes on a new and surprising form. He does not enforce the +creations of his imagination by the analogy of natural appearances; +his instinct is just the opposite—to describe and illumine +nature by a reference to the creatures of thought. Other poets, +Keats for instance, or Tennyson, or the older poets like Dante and +Homer, might compare ghosts flying from an enchanter like leaves +flying before the wind. They might describe a poet wrapped up in +his dreams as being like a bird singing invisible in the brightness +of the sky. But Shelley can write of the west wind as</p> +<div class="poem">"Before whose unseen presence the leaves, +dead,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Are driven like ghosts from an +enchanter fleeing,"</span></div> +<br> +and he can describe a skylark in the heavens as<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Like a poet hidden<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">In the light of +thought."</span></div> +<p>Of all English poets he is the most completely lyrical. Nothing +that he wrote but is wrought out of the anguish or joy of his own +heart.</p> +<div class="poem">"Most wretched souls,"</div> +<br> +he writes<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Are cradled into poetry by wrong<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">They learn in suffering what they +teach in song."</span></div> +<br> +Perhaps his work is too impalpable and moves in an air too +rarefied. It sometimes lacks strength. It fails to take grip enough +of life. Had he lived he might have given it these things; there +are signs in his last poems that he would have given it. But he +could hardly have bettered the sheer and triumphant lyricism of +<cite>The Skylark</cite>, of some of his choruses, and of the +<cite>Ode to Dejection</cite>, and of the <cite>Lines written on +the Eugenoen hills</cite>.<br> +<br> +<p>If the Romantic sense of the one-ness of nature found its +highest exponent in Shelley, the Romantic sensibility to outward +impressions reached its climax in Keats. For him life is a series +of sensations, felt with almost febrile acuteness. Records of sight +and touch and smell crowd every line of his work; the scenery of a +garden in Hampstead becomes like a landscape in the tropics, so +extraordinary vivid and detailed is his apprehension and enjoyment +of what it has to give him. The luxuriance of his sensations is +matched by the luxuriance of his powers of expression. Adjectives +heavily charged with messages for the senses, crowd every line of +his work, and in his earlier poems overlay so heavily the thought +they are meant to convey that all sense of sequence and structure +is apt to be smothered under their weight. Not that consecutive +thought claims a place in his conception of his poetry. His ideal +was passive contemplation rather than active mental exertion. "O +for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts," he exclaims in +one of his letters; and in another, "It is more noble to sit like +Jove than to fly like Mercury." His work has one message and one +only, the lastingness of beauty and its supreme truth. It is stated +in <cite>Endymion</cite> in lines that are worn bare with +quotation. It is stated again, at the height of his work in his +greatest ode,</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Beauty is truth, truth beauty: that is all<br> +We know on earth and all we need to know."</div> +<br> +His work has its defects; he died at twenty-six so it would be a +miracle if it were not so. He lacks taste and measure; he offends +by an over-luxuriousness and sensuousness; he fails when he is +concerned with flesh and blood; he is apt, as Mr. Robert Bridges +has said, "to class women with roses and sweetmeats." But in his +short life he attained with surprising rapidity and completeness to +poetic maturity, and perhaps from no other poet could we find +things to match his greatest—<cite>Hyperion, Isabella</cite>, +the <cite>Eve of St. Agnes</cite> and the <cite>Odes</cite>.<br> +<br> +<p>There remains a poet over whom opinion is more sharply divided +than it is about any other writer in English. In his day Lord Byron +was the idol, not only of his countrymen, but of Europe. Of all the +poets of the time he was, if we except Scott, whose vogue he +eclipsed, the only one whose work was universally known and +popular. Everybody read him; he was admired not only by the +multitude and by his equals, but by at least one who was his +superior, the German poet Goethe, who did not hesitate to say of +him that he was the greatest talent of the century Though this +exalted opinion still persists on the Continent, hardly anyone +could be found in England to subscribe to it now. Without +insularity, we may claim to be better judges of authors in our own +tongue than foreign critics, however distinguished and +comprehending. How then shall be explained Lord Byron's instant +popularity and the position he won? What were the qualities which +gave him the power he enjoyed?</p> +<p>In the first place he appealed by virtue of his +subject-matter—the desultory wanderings of <cite>Childe +Harold</cite> traversed ground every mile of which was memorable to +men who had watched the struggle which had been going on in Europe +with scarcely a pause for twenty years. Descriptive journalism was +then and for nearly half a century afterwards unknown, and the poem +by its descriptiveness, by its appeal to the curiosity of its +readers, made the same kind of success that vividly written special +correspondence would to-day, the charm of metre super-added. Lord +Byron gave his readers something more, too, than mere description. +He added to it the charm of a personality, and when that +personality was enforced by a title, when it proclaimed its sorrows +as the age's sorrows, endowed itself with an air of symbolism and +set itself up as a kind of scapegoat for the nation's sins, its +triumph was complete. Most men have from time to time to resist the +temptation to pose to themselves; many do not even resist it. For +all those who chose to believe themselves blighted by pessimism, +and for all the others who would have loved to believe it, Byron +and his poetry came as an echo of themselves. Shallow called to +shallow. Men found in him, as their sons found more reputably in +Tennyson, a picture of what they conceived to be the state of their +own minds.</p> +<p>But he was not altogether a man of pretence. He really and +passionately loved freedom; no one can question his sincerity in +that. He could be a fine and scathing satirist; and though he was +careless, he had great poetic gifts.</p> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>The age of the Romantic Revival was one of poetry rather than of +prose; it was in poetry that the best minds of the time found their +means of expression. But it produced prose of rare quality too, and +there is delightful reading in the works of its essayists and +occasional writers. In its form the periodical essay had changed +little since it was first made popular by Addison and Steele. It +remained, primarily, a vehicle for the expression of a personality, +and it continued to seek the interests of its readers by creating +or suggesting an individuality strong enough to carry off any +desultory adventure by the mere force of its own attractiveness. +Yet there is all the difference in the world between Hazlitt and +Addison, or Lamb and Steele. The <cite>Tatler</cite> and the +<cite>Spectator</cite> leave you with a sense of artifice; Hazlitt +and Lamb leave you with a grip of a real personality—in the +one case very vigorous and combative, in the other set about with a +rare plaintiveness and gentleness, but in both absolutely sincere. +Addison is gay and witty and delightful but he only plays at being +human; Lamb's essays—the translation into print of a heap of +idiosyncrasies and oddities, and likes and dislikes, and strange +humours—come straight and lovably from a human soul.</p> +<p>The prose writers of the romantic movement brought back two +things into writing which had been out of it since the seventeenth +century. They brought back egotism and they brought back +enthusiasm. They had the confidence that their own tastes and +experiences were enough to interest their readers; they mastered +the gift of putting themselves on paper. But there is one wide +difference between them and their predecessors. Robert Burton was +an egotist but he was an unconscious one; the same is, perhaps, +true though much less certainly of Sir Thomas Browne. In Lamb and +Hazlitt and De Quincey egotism was deliberate, consciously assumed, +the result of a compelling and shaping art. If one reads Lamb's +earlier essays and prose pieces one can see the process at +work—watch him consciously imitating Fuller, or Burton, or +Browne, mirroring their idiosyncrasies, making their quaintnesses +and graces his own. By the time he came to write the <cite>Essays +of Elia</cite>, he had mastered the personal style so completely +that his essays seem simply the overflow of talk. They are so +desultory; they move from one subject to another so +waywardly—such an essay as a <cite>Chapter on Ears</cite>, +for instance, passing with the easy inconsequence of conversation +from anatomy through organ music to beer—when they quote, as +they do constantly, it is incorrectly, as in the random +reminiscences of talk. Here one would say is the cream risen to the +surface of a full mind and skimmed at one taking. How far all this +is from the truth we know—know, too, how for months he +polished and rewrote these magazine articles, rubbing away +roughnesses and corners, taking off the traces of logical sequences +and argument, till in the finished work of art he mimicked +inconsequence so perfectly that his friends might have been +deceived. And the personality he put on paper was partly an +artistic creation, too. In life Lamb was a nervous, easily +excitable and emotional man; his years were worn with the memory of +a great tragedy and the constantly impending fear of a repetition +of it. One must assume him in his way to have been a good man of +business—he was a clerk in the India House, then a throbbing +centre of trade, and the largest commercial concern in England, and +when he retired his employers gave him a very handsome pension. In +the early portrait by Hazlitt there is a dark and gleaming look of +fire and decision. But you would never guess it from his books. +There he is the gentle recluse, dreaming over old books, old +furniture, old prints, old plays and play-bills; living always in +the past, loving in the town secluded byways like the Temple, or +the libraries of Oxford Colleges, and in the country quiet and +shaded lanes, none of the age's enthusiasm for mountains in his +soul. When he turned critic it was not to discern and praise the +power and beauty in the works of his contemporaries but to +rediscover and interpret the Elizabethan and Jacobean romantic +plays.</p> +<p>This quality of egotism Lamb shares with other writers of the +time, with De Quincey, for instance, who left buried in work which +is extensive and unequal, much that lives by virtue of the singular +elaborateness and loftiness of the style which he could on occasion +command. For the revival of enthusiasm one must turn to Hazlitt, +who brought his passionate and combative disposition to the service +of criticism, and produced a series of studies remarkable for their +earnestness and their vigour, and for the essential justness which +they display despite the prejudice on which each of them was +confessedly based.</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_VIII"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2> +<br> +<h3>THE VICTORIAN AGE</h3> +<h4>(1)</h4> +<p>Had it not been that with two exceptions all the poets of the +Romantic Revival died early, it might be more difficult to draw a +line between their school and that of their successors than it is. +As it happened, the only poet who survived and wrote was +Wordsworth, the oldest of them all. For long before his death he +did nothing that had one touch of the fire and beauty of his +earlier work. The respect he began, after a lifetime of neglect, to +receive in the years immediately before his death, was paid not to +the conservative laureate of 1848, but to the revolutionary in art +and politics of fifty years before. He had lived on long after his +work was done</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">That blamed the living +man."</span></div> +<br> +All the others, Keats, Shelley, Byron were dead before 1830, and +the problem which might have confronted us had they lived, of adult +work running counter to the tendencies and ideals of youth, does +not exist for us. Keats or Shelley might have lived as long as +Carlyle, with whom they were almost exactly contemporary; had they +done so, the age of the Romantic Revival and the Victorian age +would have been united in the lives of authors who were working in +both. We should conceive that is, the whole period as one, just as +we conceive of the Renaissance in England, from Surrey to Shirley, +as one. As it is, we have accustomed ourselves to a strongly marked +line of division. A man must be on either one side or the other; +Wordsworth, though he wrote on till 1850, is on the further side, +Carlyle, though he was born in the same year as Keats, on the +hither side. Still the accident of length of days must not blind us +to the fact that the Victorian period, though in many respects its +ideals and modes of thinking differed from those of the period +which preceded it, is essentially an extension of the Romantic +Revival and not a fresh start. The coherent inspiration of +romanticism disintegrated into separate lines of development, just +as in the seventeenth century the single inspiration of the +Renaissance broke into different schools. Along these separate +lines represented by such men as Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, +Arnold, and Meredith, literature enriched and elaborated itself +into fresh forms. None the less, every author in each of these +lines of literary activity invites his readers to understand his +direct relations to the romantic movement. Rossetti touches it +through his original, Keats; Arnold through Goethe and Byron; +Browning first through Shelley and then in item after item of his +varied subject-matter.<br> +<br> +<p>In one direction the Victorian age achieved a salient and +momentous advance. The Romantic Revival had been interested in +nature, in the past, and in a lesser degree in art, but it had not +been interested in men and women. To Wordsworth the dalesmen of the +lakes were part of the scenery they moved in; he saw men as trees +walking, and when he writes about them as in such great poems as +<cite>Resolution and Independence</cite>, the +<cite>Brothers</cite>, or <cite>Michael</cite>, it is as natural +objects he treats them, invested with the lonely remoteness that +separates them from the complexities and passions of life as it is +lived. They are there, you feel, to teach the same lesson as the +landscape teaches in which they are set. The passing of the old +Cumberland beggar through villages and past farmsteads, brings to +those who see him the same kind of consolation as the impulses from +a vernal wood that Wordsworth celebrated in his purely nature +poetry. Compare with Wordsworth, Browning, and note the fundamental +change in the attitude of the poet that his work reveals. +<cite>Pippa Passes</cite> is a poem on exactly the same scheme as +the <cite>Old Cumberland Beggar</cite>, but in treatment no two +things could be further apart. The intervention of Pippa is +dramatic, and though her song is in the same key as the wordless +message of Wordsworth's beggar she is a world apart from him, +because she is something not out of natural history, but out of +life. The Victorian age extended the imaginative sensibility which +its predecessor had brought to bear on nature and history, to the +complexities of human life. It searched for individuality in +character, studied it with a loving minuteness, and built up out of +its discoveries amongst men and women a body of literature which in +its very mode of conception was more closely related to life, and +thus the object of greater interest and excitement to its readers, +than anything which had been written in the previous ages. It is +the direct result of this extension of romanticism that the novel +became the characteristic means of literary expression of the time, +and that Browning, the poet who more than all others represents the +essential spirit of his age, should have been as it were, a +novelist in verse. Only one other literary form, indeed, could have +ministered adequately to this awakened interest, but by some luck +not easy to understand, the drama, which might have done with +greater economy and directness the work the novel had to do, +remained outside the main stream of literary activity. To the drama +at last it would seem that we are returning, and it may be that in +the future the direct representation of the clash of human life +which is still mainly in the hands of our novelists, may come back +to its own domain.</p> +<p>The Victorian age then added humanity to nature and art as the +subject-matter of literature. But it went further than that. For +the first time since the Renaissance, came an era which was +conscious of itself as an epoch in the history of mankind, and +confident of its mission. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries +revolutionized cosmography, and altered the face of the physical +world. The nineteenth century, by the discoveries of its men of +science, and by the remarkable and rapid succession of inventions +which revolutionized the outward face of life, made hardly less +alteration in accepted ways of thinking. The evolutionary theory, +which had been in the air since Goethe, and to which Darwin was +able to give an incontrovertible basis of scientific fact, +profoundly influenced man's attitude to nature and to religion. +Physical as apart from natural science made scarcely less advance, +and instead of a world created in some fixed moment of time, on +which had been placed by some outward agency all the forms and +shapes of nature that we know, came the conception of a planet +congealing out of a nebula, and of some lower, simpler and primeval +form of life multiplying and diversifying itself through succeeding +stages of development to form both the animal and the vegetable +world. This conception not only enormously excited and stimulated +thought, but it gave thinkers a strange sense of confidence and +certainty not possessed by the age before. Everything seemed plain +to them; they were heirs of all the ages. Their doubts were as +certain as their faith.</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"There lives more faith in honest doubt<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Believe me than in half the +creeds."</span></div> +<br> +said Tennyson; "honest doubt," hugged with all the certainty of a +revelation, is the creed of most of his philosophical poetry, and +what is more to the point was the creed of the masses that were +beginning to think for themselves, to whose awakening interest his +work so strongly appealed. There were no doubt, literary +side-currents. Disraeli survived to show that there were still +young men who thought Byronically. Rossetti and his school held +themselves proudly aloof from the rationalistic and scientific +tendencies of the time, and found in the Middle ages, better +understood than they had been either by Coleridge or Scott, a +refuge from a time of factories and fact. The Oxford movement +ministered to the same tendencies in religion and philosophy; but +it is the scientific spirit, and all that the scientific spirit +implied, its certain doubt, its care for minuteness, and truth of +observation, its growing interest in social processes, and the +conditions under which life is lived, that is the central fact in +Victorian literature.<br> +<br> +<p>Tennyson represents more fully than any other poet this +essential spirit of the age. If it be true, as has been often +asserted, that the spirit of an age is to be found best in the work +of lesser men, his complete identity with the thought of his time +is in itself evidence of his inferiority to his contemporary, +Browning. Comparison between the two men seem inevitable; they were +made by readers when <cite>In Memoriam</cite> and <cite>Men and +Women</cite> came hot from the press, and they have been made ever +since. There could, of course, scarcely be two men more dissimilar, +Tennyson elaborating and decorating the obvious; Browning delving +into the esoteric and the obscure, and bringing up strange and +unfamiliar finds; Tennyson in faultless verse registering current +newly accepted ways of thought; Browning in advance thinking afresh +for himself, occupied ceaselessly in the arduous labour of creating +an audience fit to judge him. The age justified the accuracy with +which Tennyson mirrored it, by accepting him and rejecting +Browning. It is this very accuracy that almost forces us at this +time to minimise and dispraise Tennyson's work. We have passed from +Victorian certainties, and so he is apt when he writes in the mood +of <cite>Locksley Hall</cite> and the rest, to appear to us a +little shallow, a little empty, and a little pretentious.</p> +<p>His earlier poetry, before he took upon himself the burden of +the age, is his best work, and it bears strongly marked upon it the +influence of Keats. Such a poem for instance as <cite>Oenone</cite> +shows an extraordinarily fine sense of language and melody, and the +capacity caught from Keats of conveying a rich and highly coloured +pictorial effect. No other poet, save Keats, has had a sense of +colour so highly developed as Tennyson's. From his boyhood he was +an exceedingly close and sympathetic observer of the outward forms +of nature, and he makes a splendid use of what his eyes had taught +him in these earlier poems. Later his interest in insects and birds +and flowers outran the legitimate opportunity he possessed of using +it in poetry. It was his habit, his son tells us, to keep notebooks +of things he had observed in his garden or in his walks, and to +work them up afterwards into similes for the <cite>Princess</cite> +and the <cite>Idylls of the King</cite>. Read in the books written +by admirers, in which they have been studied and collected (there +are several of them) these similes are pleasing enough; in the text +where they stand they are apt to have the air of impertinences, +beautiful and extravagant impertinences no doubt, but alien to +their setting. In one of the <cite>Idylls of the King</cite> the +fall of a drunken knight from his horse is compared to the fall of +a jutting edge of cliff and with it a lance-like fir-tree, which +Tennyson had observed near his home, and one cannot resist the +feeling that the comparison is a thought too great for the thing it +was meant to illustrate. So, too, in the <cite>Princess</cite> when +he describes a handwriting,</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"In such a hand as when a field of corn<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Bows all its ears before the +roaring East."</span></div> +<br> +he is using up a sight noted in his walks and transmuted into +poetry on a trivial and frivolous occasion. You do not feel, in +fact, that the handwriting visualized spontaneously called up the +comparison; you are as good as certain that the simile existed +waiting for use before the handwriting was thought of.<br> +<br> +<p>The accuracy of his observation of nature, his love of birds and +larvae is matched by the carefulness with which he embodies, as +soon as ever they were made, the discoveries of natural and +physical science. Nowadays, possibly because these things have +become commonplace to us, we may find him a little school-boy-like +in his pride of knowledge. He knows that</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"This world was once a fluid haze of light,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Till toward the centre set the +starry tides</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And eddied wild suns that +wheeling cast</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The planets."</span></div> +<br> +just as he knows what the catkins on the willows are like, or the +names of the butterflies: but he is capable, on occasion of +"dragging it in," as in<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"The nebulous star we call the sun,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">If that hypothesis of theirs be +sound."</span></div> +<br> +from the mere pride in his familiarity with the last new thing. His +dealings with science, that is, no more than his dealings with +nature, have that inevitableness, that spontaneous appropriateness +that we feel we have a right to ask from great poetry.<br> +<br> +<p>Had Edgar Allan Poe wanted an example for his theory of the +impossibility of writing, in modern times, a long poem, he might +have found it in Tennyson. His strength is in his shorter pieces; +even where as in <cite>In Memoriam</cite> he has conceived and +written something at once extended and beautiful, the beauty lies +rather in the separate parts; the thing is more in the nature of a +sonnet sequence than a continuous poem. Of his other larger works, +the <cite>Princess</cite>, a scarcely happy blend between burlesque +in the manner of the <cite>Rape of the Lock</cite>, and a serious +apostleship of the liberation of women, is solely redeemed by these +lyrics. Tennyson's innate conservatism hardly squared with the +liberalising tendencies he caught from the more advanced thought of +his age, in writing it. Something of the same kind is true of +<cite>Maud</cite>, which is a novel told in dramatically varied +verse. The hero is morbid, his social satire peevish, and a story +which could have been completely redeemed by the ending (the death +of the hero), which artistic fitness demands, is of value for us +now through its three amazing songs, in which the lyric genius of +Tennyson reached its finest flower. It cannot be denied, either, +that he failed—though magnificently—in the <cite>Idylls +of the King</cite>. The odds were heavily against him in the choice +of a subject. Arthur is at once too legendary and too shadowy for +an epic hero, and nothing but the treatment that Milton gave to +Satan (i.e. flat substitution of the legendary person by a newly +created character) could fit him for the place. Even if Arthur had +been more promising than he is, Tennyson's sympathies were +fundamentally alien from the moral and religious atmosphere of +Arthurian romance. His robust Protestantism left no room for +mysticism; he could neither appreciate nor render the mystical +fervour and exultation which is in the old history of the Holy +Grail. Nor could he comprehend the morality of a society where +courage, sympathy for the oppressed, loyalty and courtesy were the +only essential virtues, and love took the way of freedom and the +heart rather than the way of law. In his heart Tennyson's attitude +to the ideals of chivalry and the old stories in which they are +embodied differed probably very little from that of Roger Ascham, +or of any other Protestant Englishman; when he endeavoured to make +an epic of them and to fasten to it an allegory in which Arthur +should typify the war of soul against sense, what happened was only +what might have been expected. The heroic enterprise failed, and +left us with a series of mid-Victorian novels in verse in which the +knights figure as heroes of the generic mid-Victorian type.</p> +<p>But if he failed in his larger poems, he had a genius little +short of perfect in his handling of shorter forms. The Arthurian +story which produced only middling moralizing in the +<cite>Idylls</cite>, gave us as well the supremely written Homeric +episode of the <cite>Morte d'Arthur</cite>, and the sharp and +defined beauty of <cite>Sir Galahad</cite> and the <cite>Lady of +Shallott</cite>. Tennyson had a touch of the pre-Raphaelite faculty +of minute painting in words, and the writing of these poems is as +clear and naïve as in the best things of Rossetti. He had also +what neither Rossetti nor any of his contemporaries in verse, +except Browning, had, a fine gift of understanding humanity. The +peasants of his English idylls are conceived with as much breadth +of sympathy and richness of humour, as purely and as surely, as the +peasants of Chaucer or Burns. A note of passionate humanity is +indeed in all his work. It makes vivid and intense his scholarly +handling of Greek myth; always the unchanging human aspect of it +attracts him most, in Oenone's grief, in the indomitableness of +Ulysses, the weariness and disillusionment in Tithonus. It has been +the cause of the comfort he has brought to sorrow; none of his +generation takes such a human attitude to death. Shelley could +yearn for the infinite, Browning treat it as the last and greatest +adventure, Arnold meet it clear eyed and resigned. To Wordsworth it +is the mere return of man the transient to Nature the eternal.</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"No motion has she now; no force,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">She neither hears nor +sees,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Roiled round in earth's diurnal +course</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">With rocks and stones and +trees."</span></div> +<br> +To Tennyson it brings the fundamental human home-sickness for +familiar things.<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Ah, sad and strange as on dark summer dawns,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The earliest pipe of +half-awakened birds</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">To dying ears when unto dying +eyes</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The casement slowly grows a +glimmering square."</span></div> +<br> +It is an accent which wakes an echo in a thousand hearts.<br> +<br> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>While Tennyson, in his own special way and, so to speak, in +collaboration with the spirit of the age, was carrying on the work +of Romanticism on its normal lines, Browning was finding a new +style and a new subject matter. In his youth he had begun as an +imitator of Shelley, and <cite>Pauline</cite> and +<cite>Paracelsus</cite> remain to show what the influence of the +"sun-treader" was on his poetry. But as early as his second +publication, <cite>Bells and Pomegranates</cite>, he had begun to +speak for himself, and with <cite>Men and Women</cite>, a series of +poems of amazing variety and brilliance, he placed himself +unassailably in the first rank. Like Tennyson's, his genius +continued high and undimmed while life was left him. <cite>Men and +Women</cite> was followed by an extraordinary narrative poem, +<cite>The Ring and the Book</cite>, and it by several volumes of +scarcely less brilliance, the last of which appeared on the very +day of his death.</p> +<p>Of the two classes into which, as we saw when we were studying +Burns, creative artists can be divided, Browning belongs to that +one which makes everything new for itself, and has in consequence +to educate the readers by whom its work can alone be judged. He was +an innovator in nearly everything he did; he thought for himself; +he wrote for himself, and in his own way. And because he refused to +follow ordinary modes of writing, he was and is still widely +credited with being tortured and obscure.[<a href="#note-7">7</a>] +The charge of obscurity is unfortunate because it tends to shut off +from him a large class of readers for whom he has a sane and +special and splendid message.</p> +<p>His most important innovation in form was his device of the +dramatic lyric. What interested him in life was men and women, and +in them, not their actions, but the motives which governed their +actions. To lay bare fully the working of motive in a narrative +form with himself as narrator was obviously impossible; the strict +dramatic form, though he attained some success in it, does not seem +to have attracted him, probably because in it the ultimate stress +must be on the thing done rather than the thing thought; there +remained, therefore, of the ancient forms of poetry, the lyric. The +lyric had of course been used before to express emotions imagined +and not real to the poet himself; Browning was the first to project +it to express imagined emotions of men and women, whether typical +or individual, whom he himself had created. Alongside this +perversion of the lyric, he created a looser and freer form, the +dramatic monologue, in which most of his most famous poems, +<cite>Cleon, Sludge the Medium, Bishop Blougram's Apology</cite>, +etc., are cast. In the convention which Browning established in it, +all kinds of people are endowed with a miraculous articulation, a +new gift of tongues; they explain themselves, their motives, the +springs of those motives (for in Browning's view every thought and +act of a man's life is part of an interdependent whole), and their +author's peculiar and robust philosophy of life. Out of the +dramatic monologues he devised the scheme of <cite>The Ring and the +Book</cite>, a narrative poem in which the episodes, and not the +plot, are the basis of the structure, and the story of a trifling +and sordid crime is set forth as it appeared to the minds of the +chief actors in succession. To these new forms he added the +originality of an extraordinary realism in style. Few poets have +the power by a word, a phrase, a flash of observation in detail to +make you see the event as Browning makes you see it.</p> +<p>Many books have been written on the philosophy of Browning's +poetry. Stated briefly its message is that of an optimism which +depends on a recognition of the strenuousness of life. The base of +his creed, as of Carlyle's, is the gospel of labour; he believes in +the supreme moral worth of effort. Life is a "training school" for +a future existence, and our place in it depends on the courage and +strenuousness with which we have laboured here. Evil is in the +world only as an instrument in the process of development; by +conquering it we exercise our spiritual faculties the more. Only +torpor is the supreme sin, even as in <cite>The Statue and the +Bust</cite> where effort would have been to a criminal end.</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"The counter our lovers staked was lost<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">As surely as if it were lawful +coin:</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And the sin I impute to each +frustrate ghost</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Was, the unlit lamp and the +ungirt loin,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Though the end in sight was a +crime, I say."</span></div> +<br> +All the other main ideas of his poetry fit with perfect consistency +on to his scheme. Love, the manifestation of a man's or a woman's +nature, is the highest and most intimate relationship possible, for +it is an opportunity—the highest opportunity—for +spiritual growth. It can reach this end though an actual and +earthly union is impossible.<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"She has lost me, I have gained her;<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Her soul's mine and thus grown +perfect,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">I shall pass my life's +remainder.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Life will just hold out the +proving</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Both our powers, alone and +blended:</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And then come the next life +quickly!</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">This world's use will have been +ended."</span></div> +<br> +It follows that the reward of effort is the promise of immortality, +and that for each man, just because his thoughts and motives taken +together count, and not one alone, there is infinite hope.<br> +<br> +<p>The contemporaries of Tennyson and Browning in poetry divide +themselves into three separate schools. Nearest to them in temper +is the school of Matthew Arnold and Clough; they have the same +quick sensitiveness to the intellectual tendencies of the age, but +their foothold in a time of shifting and dissolving creeds is a +stoical resignation very different from the buoyant optimism of +Browning, or Tennyson's mixture of science and doubt and faith. +Very remote from them on the other hand is the backward-gazing +mediaevalism of Rossetti and his circle, who revived (Rossetti from +Italian sources, Morris from Norman) a Middle age which neither +Scott nor Coleridge had more than partially and brokenly +understood. The last school, that to which Swinburne and Meredith +with all their differences unite in belonging, gave up Christianity +with scarcely so much as a regret,</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"We have said to the dream that caress'd and the +dread that smote us,<br> +Good-night and good-bye."</div> +<br> +and turned with a new hope and exultation to the worship of our +immemorial mother the earth. In both of them, the note of +enthusiasm for political liberty which had been lost in Wordsworth +after 1815, and was too early extinguished with Shelley, was +revived by the Italian Revolution in splendour and fire.<br> +<br> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>As one gets nearer one's own time, a certain change comes +insensibly over one's literary studies. Literature comes more and +more to mean imaginative literature or writing about imaginative +literature. The mass of writing comes to be taken not as +literature, but as argument or information; we consider it purely +from the point of view of its subject matter. A comparison will +make this at once clear. When a man reads Bacon, he commonly +regards himself as engaged in the study of English literature; when +he reads Darwin he is occupied in the study of natural science. A +reader of Bacon's time would have looked on him as we look on +Darwin now.</p> +<p>The distinction is obviously illogical, but a writer on English +literature within brief limits is forced to bow to it if he wishes +his book to avoid the dreariness of a summary, and he can plead in +extenuation the increased literary output of the later age, and the +incompleteness with which time so far has done its work in sifting +the memorable from the forgettable, the ephemeral from what is +going to last. The main body of imaginative prose +literature—the novel—is treated of in the next chapter +and here no attempt will be made to deal with any but the +admittedly greatest names. Nothing can be said, for instance, of +that fluent journalist and biased historian Macaulay, nor of the +mellifluousness of Newman, nor of the vigour of Kingsley or +Maurice; nor of the writings, admirable in their literary qualities +of purity and terseness, of Darwin or Huxley; nor of the culture +and apostleship of Matthew Arnold. These authors, one and all, +interpose no barrier, so to speak, between their subject-matter and +their readers; you are not when you read them conscious of a +literary intention, but of some utilitarian one, and as an essay on +English literature is by no means a handbook to serious reading +they will be no more mentioned here.</p> +<p>In the case of one nineteenth century writer in prose, this +method of exclusion cannot apply. Both Carlyle and Ruskin were +professional men of letters; both in the voluminous compass of +their works touched on a large variety of subjects; both wrote +highly individual and peculiar styles; and both without being +either professional philosophers or professional preachers, were as +every good man of letters, whether he denies it or not, is and must +be, lay moralists and prophets. Of the two Ruskin is plain and +easily read, and he derives his message; Carlyle, his original, is +apt to be tortured and obscure. Inside the body of his work the +student of nineteenth century literature is probably in need of +some guidance; outside so far as prose is concerned he can fend for +himself.</p> +<p>As we saw, Carlyle was the oldest of the Victorians; he was over +forty when the Queen came to the throne. Already his years of +preparation in Scotland, town and country, were over, and he had +settled in that famous little house in Chelsea which for nearly +half a century to come was to be one of the central hearths of +literary London. More than that, he had already fully formed his +mode of thought and his peculiar style. <cite>Sartor +Resartus</cite> was written and published serially before the Queen +came to the throne; the <cite>French Revolution</cite> came in the +year of her accession at the very time that Carlyle's lectures were +making him a fashionable sensation; most of his miscellaneous +essays had already appeared in the reviews. But with the strict +Victorian era, as if to justify the usually arbitrary division of +literary history by dynastic periods, there came a new spirit into +his work. For the first time he applied his peculiar system of +ideas to contemporary politics. <cite>Chartism</cite> appeared in +1839; <cite>Past and Present</cite>, which does the same thing as +<cite>Chartism</cite> in an artistic form, three years later. They +were followed by one other book—<cite>Latter Day +Pamphlets</cite>—addressed particularly to contemporary +conditions, and by two remarkable and voluminous historical works. +Then came the death of his wife, and for the last fifteen years of +his life silence, broken only briefly and at rare intervals.</p> +<p>The reader who comes to Carlyle with preconceived notions based +on what he has heard of the subject-matter of his books is certain +to be surprised by what he finds. There are histories in the canon +of his works and pamphlets on contemporary problems, but they are +composed on a plan that no other historian and no other social +reformer would own. A reader will find in them no argument, next to +no reasoning, and little practical judgment. Carlyle was not a +great "thinker" in the strictest sense of that term. He was under +the control, not of his reason, but of his emotions; deep feeling, +a volcanic intensity of temperament flaming into the light and heat +of prophecy, invective, derision, or a simple splendour of +eloquence, is the characteristic of his work. Against cold-blooded +argument his passionate nature rose in fierce rebellion; he had no +patience with the formalist or the doctrinaire. Nor had he the +faculty of analysis; his historical works are a series of pictures +or tableaux, splendidly and vividly conceived, and with enormous +colour and a fine illusion of reality, but one-sided as regards the +truth. In his essays on hero-worship he contents himself with a +noisy reiteration of the general predicate of heroism; there is +very little except their names and the titles to differentiate one +sort of hero from another. His picture of contemporary conditions +is not so much a reasoned indictment as a wild and fantastic orgy +of epithets: "dark simmering pit of Tophet," "bottomless universal +hypocrisies," and all the rest. In it all he left no practical +scheme. His works are fundamentally not about politics or history +or literature, but about himself. They are the exposition of a +splendid egotism, fiercely enthusiastic about one or two deeply +held convictions; their strength does not lie in their matter of +fact.</p> +<p>This is, perhaps, a condemnation of him in the minds of those +people who ask of a social reformer an actuarially accurate scheme +for the abolition of poverty, or from a prophet a correct forecast +of the result of the next general election. Carlyle has little help +for these and no message save the disconcerting one of their own +futility. His message is at once larger and simpler, for though his +form was prose, his soul was a poet's soul, and what he has to say +is a poet's word. In a way, it is partly Wordsworth's own. The +chief end of life, his message is, is the performance of duty, +chiefly the duty of work. "Do thy little stroke of work; this is +Nature's voice, and the sum of all the commandments, to each man." +All true work is religion, all true work is worship; to labour is +to pray. And after work, obedience the best discipline, so he says +in <cite>Past and Present</cite>, for governing, and "our universal +duty and destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break." Carlyle +asked of every man, action and obedience and to bow to duty; he +also required of him sincerity and veracity, the duty of being a +real and not a sham, a strenuous warfare against cant. The +historical facts with which he had to deal he grouped under these +embracing categories, and in the <cite>French Revolution</cite>, +which is as much a treasure-house of his philosophy as a history, +there is hardly a page on which they do not appear. "Quack-ridden," +he says, "in that one word lies all misery whatsoever."</p> +<p>These bare elemental precepts he clothes in a garment of amazing +and bizarre richness. There is nothing else in English faintly +resembling the astonishing eccentricity and individuality of his +style. Gifted with an extraordinarily excitable and vivid +imagination; seeing things with sudden and tremendous vividness, as +in a searchlight or a lightning flash, he contrived to convey to +his readers his impressions full charged with the original emotion +that produced them, and thus with the highest poetic effect. There +is nothing in all descriptive writing to match the vividness of +some of the scenes in the <cite>French Revolution</cite> or in the +narrative part of <cite>Cromwell's Letters and Speeches</cite>, or +more than perhaps in any of his books, because in it he was setting +down deep-seated impressions of his boyhood rather than those got +from brooding over documents, in <cite>Sartor Resartus</cite>. +Alongside this unmatched pictorial vividness and a quite amazing +richness and rhythm of language, more surprising and original than +anything out of Shakespeare, there are of course, striking +defects—a wearisome reiteration of emphasis, a clumsiness of +construction, a saddening fondness for solecisms and hybrid +inventions of his own. The reader who is interested in these (and +every one who reads him is forced to become so) will find them +faithfully dealt with in John Sterling's remarkable letter (quoted +in Carlyle's <cite>Life of Sterling</cite>) on <cite>Sartor +Resartus</cite>. But gross as they are, and frequently as they +provide matter for serious offence, these eccentricities of +language link themselves up in a strange indissoluble way with +Carlyle's individuality and his power as an artist. They are not to +be imitated, but he would be much less than he is without them, and +they act by their very strength and pungency as a preservative of +his work. That of all the political pamphlets which the new era of +reform occasioned, his, which were the least in sympathy with it +and are the furthest off the main stream of our political thinking +now, alone continue to be read, must be laid down not only to the +prophetic fervour and fire of their inspiration but to the dark and +violent magic of their style.</p> +<h4>Footnotes</h4> +<p><a name="note-7"><!-- Note Anchor 7 --></a>[Footnote 7: The +deeper causes of Browning's obscurity have been detailed in Chapter +iv. of this book. It may be added for the benefit of the reader who +fights shy on the report of it, that in nine cases out of ten, it +arises simply from his colloquial method; we go to him expecting +the smoothness and completeness of Tennyson; we find in him the +irregularities, the suppressions, the quick changes of +talk—the clipped, clever talk of much idea'd people who hurry +breathlessly from one aspect to another of a subject.]</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_IX"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2> +<br> +<h3>THE NOVEL</h3> +<h4>(1)</h4> +<p>The faculty for telling stories is the oldest artistic faculty +in the world, and the deepest implanted in the heart of man. Before +the rudest cave-pictures were scratched on the stone, the +story-teller, it is not unreasonable to suppose, was plying his +trade. All early poetry is simply story-telling in verse. Stories +are the first literary interest of the awakening mind of a child. +As that is so, it is strange that the novel, which of all literary +ways of story-telling seems closest to the unstudied tale-spinning +of talk, should be the late discovery that it is. Of all the main +forms into which the literary impulse moulds the stuff of +imagination, the novel is the last to be devised. The drama dates +from prehistoric times, so does the epic, the ballad and the lyric. +The novel, as we know it, dates practically speaking from 1740. +What is the reason it is so late in appearing?</p> +<p>The answer is simply that there seems no room for good drama and +good fiction at the same time in literature; drama and novels +cannot exist side by side, and the novel had to wait for the +decadence of the drama before it could appear and triumph. If one +were to make a table of succession for the various kinds of +literature as they have been used naturally and spontaneously (not +academically), the order would be the epic, the drama, the novel; +and it would be obvious at once that the order stood for something +more than chronological succession, and that literature in its +function as a representation and criticism of life passed from form +to form in the search of greater freedom, greater subtlety, and +greater power. At present we seem to be at the climax of the third +stage in this development; there are signs that the fourth is on +the way, and that it will be a return to drama, not to the old, +formal, ordered kind, but, something new and freer, ready to gather +up and interpret what there is of newness and freedom in the spirit +of man and the society in which he lives.</p> +<p>The novel, then, had to wait for the drama's decline, but there +was literary story-telling long before that. There were mediaeval +romances in prose and verse; Renaissance pastoral tales, and +stories of adventure; collections, plenty of them, of short stories +like Boccaccio's, and those in Painter's <cite>Palace of +Pleasure</cite>. But none of these, not even romances which deal in +moral and sententious advice like <cite>Euphues</cite>, approach +the essence of the novel as we know it. They are all (except +<cite>Euphues</cite>, which is simply a framework of travel for a +book of aphorisms) simple and objective; they set forth incidents +or series of incidents; long or short they are anecdotes +only—they take no account of character. It was impossible we +should have the novel as distinct from the tale, till stories +acquired a subjective interest for us; till we began to think about +character and to look at actions not only outwardly, but within at +their springs.</p> +<p>As has been stated early in this book, it was in the seventeenth +century that this interest in character was first wakened. +Shakespeare had brought to the drama, which before him was +concerned with actions viewed outwardly, a psychological interest; +he had taught that "character is destiny," and that men's actions +and fates spring not from outward agencies, but from within in +their own souls. The age began to take a deep and curious interest +in men's lives; biography was written for the first time and +autobiography; it is the great period of memoir-writing both in +England and France; authors like Robert Burton came, whose delight +it was to dig down into human nature in search for oddities and +individualities of disposition; humanity as the great subject of +enquiry for all men, came to its own. All this has a direct bearing +on the birth of the novel. One transient form of literature in the +seventeenth century—the Character—is an ancestor in the +direct line. The collections of them—Earle's +<cite>Microcosmography</cite> is the best—are not very +exciting reading, and they never perhaps quite succeeded in +naturalizing a form borrowed from the later age of Greece, but +their importance in the history of the novel to come is clear. Take +them and add them to the story of adventure—<em>i.e.</em>, +introduce each fresh person in your plot with a description in the +character form, and the step you have made towards the novel is +enormous; you have given to plot which was already there, the added +interest of character.</p> +<p>That, however, was not quite how the thing worked in actual +fact. At the heels of the "Character" came the periodical essay of +Addison and Steele. Their interest in contemporary types was of the +same quality as Earle's or Hall's, but they went a different way to +work. Where these compressed and cultivated a style which was +staccato and epigrammatic, huddling all the traits of their subject +in short sharp sentences that follow each other with all the +brevity and curtness of items in a prescription, Addison and Steele +observed a more artistic plan. They made, as it were, the +prescription up, adding one ingredient after another slowly as the +mixture dissolved. You are introduced to Sir Roger de Coverley, and +to a number of other typical people, and then in a series of essays +which if they were disengaged from their setting would be to all +intents a novel and a fine one, you are made aware one by one of +different traits in his character and those of his friends, each +trait generally enshrined in an incident which illustrates it; you +get to know them, that is, gradually, as you would in real life, +and not all in a breath, in a series of compressed statements, as +is the way of the character writers. With the Coverley essays in +the <cite>Spectator</cite>, the novel in one of its +forms—that in which an invisible and all knowing narrator +tells a story in which some one else whose character he lays bare +for us is the hero—is as good as achieved.</p> +<p>Another manner of fiction—the autobiographical—had +already been invented. It grew directly out of the public interest +in autobiography, and particularly in the tales of their voyages +which the discoverers wrote and published on their return from +their adventures. Its establishment in literature was the work of +two authors, Bunyan and Defoe. The books of Bunyan, whether they +are told in the first person or no, are and were meant to be +autobiographical; their interest is a subjective interest. Here is +a man who endeavours to interest you, not in the character of some +other person he has imagined or observed, but in himself. His +treatment of it is characteristic of the awakening talent for +fiction of his time. <cite>The Pilgrim's Progress</cite> is begun +as an allegory, and so continues for a little space till the story +takes hold of the author. When it does, whether he knew it or not, +allegory goes to the winds. But the autobiographical form of +fiction in its highest art is the creation of Defoe. He told +stories of adventure, incidents modelled on real life as many +tellers of tales had done before him, but to the form as he found +it he super-added a psychological interest—the interest of +the character of the narrator. He contrived to observe in his +writing a scrupulous and realistic fidelity and appropriateness to +the conditions in which the story was to be told. We learn about +Crusoe's island, for instance, gradually just as Crusoe learns of +it himself, though the author is careful by taking his narrator up +to a high point of vantage the day after his arrival, that we shall +learn the essentials of it, as long as verisimilitude is not +sacrificed, as soon as possible. It is the paradox of the English +novel that these our earliest efforts in fiction were meant, unlike +the romances which preceded them, to pass for truth. Defoe's +<cite>Journal of the Plague Year</cite> was widely taken as literal +fact, and it is still quoted as such occasionally by rash though +reputable historians. So that in England the novel began with +realism as it has culminated, and across two centuries Defoe and +the "naturalists" join hands. Defoe, it is proper also in this +place to notice, fixed the peculiar form of the historical novel. +In his <cite>Memoirs of a Cavalier</cite>, the narrative of an +imaginary person's adventures in a historical setting is +interspersed with the entrance of actual historical personages, +exactly the method of historical romancing which was brought to +perfection by Sir Walter Scott.</p> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>In the eighteenth century came the decline of the drama for +which the novel had been waiting. By 1660 the romantic drama of +Elizabeth's time was dead; the comedy of the Restoration which +followed, witty and brilliant though it was, reflected a society +too licentious and artificial to secure it permanence; by the time +of Addison play-writing had fallen to journey-work, and the theatre +to openly expressed contempt. When Richardson and Fielding +published their novels there was nothing to compete with fiction in +the popular taste. It would seem as though the novel had been +waiting for this favourable circumstance. In a sudden burst of +prolific inventiveness, which can be paralleled in all letters only +by the period of Marlowe and Shakespeare, masterpiece after +masterpiece poured from the press. Within two generations, besides +Richardson and Fielding came Sterne and Goldsmith and Smollett and +Fanny Burney in naturalism, and Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe +in the new way of romance. Novels by minor authors were published +in thousands as well. The novel, in fact, besides being the +occasion of literature of the highest class, attracted by its +lucrativeness that under-current of journey-work authorship which +had hitherto busied itself in poetry or plays. Fiction has been its +chief occupation ever since.</p> +<p>Anything like a detailed criticism or even a bare narrative of +this voluminous literature is plainly impossible without the limits +of a single chapter. Readers must go for it to books on the +subject. It is possible here merely to draw attention to those +authors to whom the English novel as a more or less fixed form is +indebted for its peculiar characteristics. Foremost amongst these +are Richardson and Fielding; after them there is Walter Scott. +After him, in the nineteenth century, Dickens and Meredith and Mr. +Hardy; last of all the French realists and the new school of +romance. To one or other of these originals all the great authors +in the long list of English novelists owe their method and their +choice of subject-matter.</p> +<p>With Defoe fiction gained verisimilitude, it ceased to deal with +the incredible; it aimed at exhibiting, though in strange and +memorable circumstances, the workings of the ordinary mind. It is +Richardson's main claim to fame that he contrived a form of novel +which exhibited an ordinary mind working in normal circumstances, +and that he did this with a minuteness which till then had never +been thought of and has not since been surpassed. His talent is +very exactly a microscopical talent; under it the common stuff of +life separated from its surroundings and magnified beyond previous +knowledge, yields strange and new and deeply interesting sights. He +carried into the study of character which had begun in Addison with +an eye to externals and eccentricities, a minute faculty of +inspection which watched and recorded unconscious mental and +emotional processes.</p> +<p>To do this he employed a method which was, in effect, a +compromise between that of the autobiography, and that of the tale +told by an invisible narrator. The weakness of the autobiography is +that it can write only of events within the knowledge of the +supposed speaker, and that consequently the presentation of all but +one of the characters of the book is an external presentation. We +know, that is, of Man Friday only what Crusoe could, according to +realistic appropriateness, tell us about him. We do not know what +he thought or felt within himself. On the other hand the method of +invisible narration had not at his time acquired the faculty which +it possesses now of doing Friday's thinking aloud or exposing fully +the workings of his mind. So that Richardson, whose interests were +psychological, whose strength and talent lay in the presentation of +the states of mind appropriate to situations of passion or +intrigue, had to look about him for a new form, and that form he +found in the novel of letters. In a way, if the end of a novel be +the presentation not of action, but of the springs of action; if +the external event is in it always of less importance than the +emotions which conditioned it, and the emotions which it set +working, the novel of letters is the supreme manner for fiction. +Consider the possibilities of it; there is a series of events in +which A, B, and C are concerned. Not only can the outward events be +narrated as they appeared to all three separately by means of +letters from each to another, or to a fourth party, but the motives +of each and the emotions which each experiences as a result of the +actions of the others or them all, can be laid bare. No other +method can wind itself so completely into the psychological +intricacies and recesses which lie behind every event. Yet the +form, as everybody knows, has not been popular; even an expert +novel-reader could hardly name off-hand more than two or three +examples of it since Richardson's day. Why is this? Well, chiefly +it is because the mass of novelists have not had Richardson's +knowledge of, or interest in, the psychological under side of life, +and those who have, as, amongst the moderns, Henry James, have +devised out of the convention of the invisible narrator a method by +which they can with greater economy attain in practice fairly good +results. For the mere narration of action in which the study of +character plays a subsidiary part, it was, of course, from the +beginning impossible. Scott turned aside at the height of his power +to try it in "Redgauntlet"; he never made a second attempt.</p> +<p>For Richardson's purpose, it answered admirably, and he used it +with supreme effect. Particularly he excelled in that side of the +novelist's craft which has ever since (whether because he started +it or not) proved the subtlest and most attractive, the +presentation of women. Richardson was one of those men who are not +at their ease in other men's society, and whom other men, to put it +plainly, are apt to regard as coxcombs and fools. But he had a +genius for the friendship and confidence of women. In his youth he +wrote love-letters for them. His first novel grew out of a plan to +exhibit in a series of letters the quality of feminine virtue, and +in its essence (though with a ludicrous, and so to speak +"kitchen-maidish" misunderstanding of his own sex) adheres to the +plan. His second novel, which designs to set up a model man against +the monster of iniquity in <cite>Pamela</cite>, is successful only +so far as it exhibits the thoughts and feelings of the heroine whom +he ultimately marries. His last, <cite>Clarissa Harlowe</cite> is a +masterpiece of sympathetic divination into the feminine mind. +<cite>Clarissa</cite> is, as has been well said, the "Eve of +fiction, the prototype of the modern heroine"; feminine psychology +as good as unknown before (Shakespeare's women being the "Fridays" +of a highly intelligent Crusoe) has hardly been brought further +since. But <cite>Clarissa</cite> is more than mere psychology; +whether she represents a contemporary tendency or whether +Richardson made her so, she starts a new epoch. "This," says +Henley, "is perhaps her finest virtue as it is certainly her +greatest charm; that until she set the example, woman in literature +as a self-suffering individuality, as an existence endowed with +equal rights to independence—of choice, volition, +action—with man had not begun to be." She had not begun to be +it in life either.</p> +<p>What Richardson did for the subtlest part of a novelist's +business, his dealings with psychology, Fielding did for the most +necessary part of it, the telling of the story. Before him hardly +any story had been told well; even if it had been plain and clear +as in Bunyan and Defoe it had lacked the emphasis, the light and +shade of skilful grouping. On the "picaresque" (so the +autobiographical form was called abroad) convention of a journey he +grafted a structure based in its outline on the form of the ancient +epic. It proved extraordinarily suitable for his purpose. Not only +did it make it easy for him to lighten his narrative with +excursions in a heightened style, burlesquing his origins, but it +gave him at once the right attitude to his material. He told his +story as one who knew everything; could tell conversations and +incidents as he conceived them happening, with no violation of +credibility, nor any strain on his reader's imagination, and +without any impropriety could interpose in his own person, pointing +things to the reader which might have escaped his attention, +pointing at parallels he might have missed, laying bare the irony +or humour beneath a situation. He allowed himself digressions and +episodes, told separate tales in the middle of the action, +introduced, as in Partridge's visit to the theatre, the added +piquancy of topical allusion; in fact he did anything he chose. And +he laid down that free form of the novel which is +characteristically English, and from which, in its essence, no one +till the modern realists has made a serious departure.</p> +<p>In the matter of his novels, he excels by reason of a +Shakespearean sense of character and by the richness and rightness +of his faculty of humour. He had a quick eye for contemporary +types, and an amazing power of building out of them men and women +whose individuality is full and rounded. You do not feel as you do +with Richardson that his fabric is spun silk-worm-wise out of +himself; on the contrary you know it to be the fruit of a gentle +and observant nature, and a stock of fundamental human sympathy. +His gallery of portraits, Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams, Parson +Trulliber, Jones, Blifil, Partridge, Sophia and her father and all +the rest are each of them minute studies of separate people; they +live and move according to their proper natures; they are conceived +not from without but from within. Both Richardson and Fielding were +conscious of a moral intention; but where Richardson is +sentimental, vulgar, and moral only so far as it is moral (as in +<cite>Pamela</cite>), to inculcate selling at the highest price or +(as in <cite>Grandison</cite>) to avoid temptations which never +come in your way, Fielding's morality is fresh and healthy, and +(though not quite free from the sentimentality of scoundrelism) at +bottom sane and true. His knowledge of the world kept him right. +His acquaintance with life is wide, and his insight is keen and +deep. His taste is almost as catholic as Shakespeare's own, and the +life he knew, and which other men knew, he handles for the first +time with the freedom and imagination of an artist.</p> +<p>Each of the two—Fielding and Richardson—had his host +of followers. Abroad Richardson won immediate recognition; in +France Diderot went so far as to compare him with Homer and Moses! +He gave the first impulse to modern French fiction. At home, less +happily, he set going the sentimental school, and it was only when +that had passed away that—in the delicate and subtle +character-study of Miss Austen—his influence comes to its +own. Miss Austen carried a step further, and with an observation +which was first hand and seconded by intuitive knowledge, +Richardson's analysis of the feminine mind, adding to it a delicate +and finely humorous feeling for character in both sexes which was +all her own. Fielding's imitators (they number each in his own way, +and with his own graces or talent added his rival Smollett, Sterne, +and Goldsmith) kept the way which leads to Thackeray and +Dickens—the main road of the English Novel.</p> +<p>That road was widened two ways by Sir Walter Scott. The +historical novel, which had been before his day either an essay in +anachronism with nothing historical in it but the date, or a +laborious and uninspired compilation of antiquarian research, took +form and life under his hands. His wide reading, stored as it was +in a marvellously retentive memory, gave him all the background he +needed to achieve a historical setting, and allowed him to +concentrate his attention on the actual telling of his story; to +which his genial and sympathetic humanity and his quick eye for +character gave a humorous depth and richness that was all his own. +It is not surprising that he made the historical novel a literary +vogue all over Europe. In the second place, he began in his novels +of Scottish character a sympathetic study of nationality. He is +not, perhaps, a fair guide to contemporary conditions; his +interests were too romantic and too much in the past to catch the +rattle of the looms that caught the ear of Galt, and if we want a +picture of the great fact of modern Scotland, its +industrialisation, it is to Galt we must go. But in his +comprehension of the essential character of the people he has no +rival; in it his historical sense seconded his observation, and the +two mingling gave us the pictures whose depth of colour and truth +make his Scottish novels, <cite>Old Mortality, The Antiquary, +Redgauntlet</cite>, the greatest things of their kind in +literature.</p> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>The peculiarly national style of fiction founded by Fielding and +carried on by his followers reached its culminating point in +<cite>Vanity Fair</cite>. In it the reader does not seem to be +simply present at the unfolding of a plot the end of which is +constantly present to the mind of the author and to which he is +always consciously working, every incident having a bearing on the +course of the action; rather he feels himself to be the spectator +of a piece of life which is too large and complex to be under the +control of a creator, which moves to its close not under the +impulsion of a directing hand, but independently impelled by causes +evolved in the course of its happening. With this added complexity +goes a more frequent interposition of the author in his own +person—one of the conventions as we have seen of this +national style. Thackeray is present to his readers, indeed, not as +the manager who pulls the strings and sets the puppets in motion, +but as an interpreter who directs the reader's attention to the +events on which he lays stress, and makes them a starting-point for +his own moralising. This persistent moralizing—sham cynical, +real sentimental—this thumping of death-bed pillows as in the +dreadful case of Miss Crawley, makes Thackeray's use of the +personal interposition almost less effective than that of any other +novelist. Already while he was doing it, Dickens had conquered the +public; and the English novel was making its second fresh +start.</p> +<p>He is an innovator in more ways than one. In the first place he +is the earliest novelist to practise a conscious artistry of plot. +<cite>The Mystery of Edwin Drood</cite> remains mysterious, but +those who essay to conjecture the end of that unfinished story have +at last the surety that its end, full worked out in all its +details, had been in its author's mind before he set pen to paper. +His imagination was as diligent and as disciplined as his pen, +Dickens' practice in this matter could not be better put than in +his own words, when he describes himself as "in the first stage of +a new book, which consists in going round and round the idea, as +you see a bird in his cage go about and about his sugar before he +touches it." That his plots are always highly elaborated is the +fruit of this preliminary disciplined exercise of thought. The +method is familiar to many novelists now; Dickens was the first to +put it into practice. In the second place he made a new departure +by his frankly admitted didacticism and by the skill with which in +all but two or three of his books—<cite>Bleak House</cite>, +perhaps, and <cite>Little Dorrit</cite>—he squared his +purpose with his art. Lastly he made the discovery which has made +him immortal. In him for the first time the English novel produced +an author who dug down into the masses of the people for his +subjects; apprehended them in all their inexhaustible character and +humour and pathos, and reproduced them with a lively and loving +artistic skill.</p> +<p>Dickens has, of course, serious faults. In particular, readers +emancipated by lapse of time from the enslavement of the first +enthusiasm, have quarrelled with the mawkishness and sentimentality +of his pathos, and with the exaggeration of his studies of +character. It has been said of him, as it has of Thackeray, that he +could not draw a "good woman" and that Agnes Copperfield, like +Amelia Sedley, is a very doll-like type of person. To critics of +this kind it may be retorted that though "good" and "bad" are +categories relevant to melodrama, they apply very ill to serious +fiction, and that indeed to the characters of any of the +novelists—the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell or the +like—who lay bare character with fullness and intimacy, they +could not well be applied at all. The faultiness of them in Dickens +is less than in Thackeray, for in Dickens they are only incident to +the scheme, which lies in the hero (his heroes are excellent) and +in the grotesque characters, whereas in his rival they are in the +theme itself. For his pathos, not even his warmest admirer could +perhaps offer a satisfactory case. The charge of exaggeration +however is another matter. To the person who complains that he has +never met Dick Swiveller or Micawber or Mrs. Gamp the answer is +simply Turner's to the sceptical critic of his sunset, "Don't you +wish you could?" To the other, who objects more plausibly to +Dickens's habit of attaching to each of his characters some label +which is either so much flaunted all through that you cannot see +the character at all or else mysteriously and unaccountably +disappears when the story begins to grip the author, Dickens has +himself offered an amusing and convincing defence. In the preface +to <cite>Pickwick</cite> he answers those who criticised the novel +on the ground that Pickwick began by being purely ludicrous and +developed into a serious and sympathetic individuality, by pointing +to the analogous process which commonly takes place in actual human +relationships. You begin a new acquaintanceship with perhaps not +very charitable prepossessions; these later a deeper and better +knowledge removes, and where you have before seen an idiosyncrasy +you come to love a character. It is ingenious and it helps to +explain Mrs. Nickleby, the Pecksniff daughters, and many another. +Whether it is true or not (and it does not explain the faultiness +of such pictures as Carker and his kind) there can be no doubt that +this trick in Dickens of beginning with a salient impression and +working outward to a fuller conception of character is part at +least of the reason of his enormous hold upon his readers. No man +leads you into the mazes of his invention so easily and with such a +persuasive hand.</p> +<p>The great novelists who were writing contemporarily with +him—the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot—it is +impossible to deal with here, except to say that the last is +indisputably, because of her inability to fuse completely art and +ethics, inferior to Mrs. Gaskell or to either of the Brontë +sisters. Nor of the later Victorians who added fresh variety to the +national style can the greatest, Meredith, be more than mentioned +for the exquisiteness of his comic spirit and the brave gallery of +English men and women he has given us in what is, perhaps, +fundamentally the most English thing in fiction since Fielding +wrote. For our purpose Mr. Hardy, though he is a less brilliant +artist, is more to the point. His novels brought into England the +contemporary pessimism of Schopenhaur and the Russians, and found a +home for it among the English peasantry. Convinced that in the +upper classes character could be studied and portrayed only +subjectively because of the artificiality of a society which +prevented its outlet in action, he turned to the peasantry because +with them conduct is the direct expression of the inner life. +Character could be shown working, therefore, not subjectively but +in the act, if you chose a peasant subject. His philosophy, +expressed in this medium, is sombre. In his novels you can trace a +gradual realization of the defects of natural laws and the quandary +men are put to by their operation. Chance, an irritating and +trifling series of coincidences, plays the part of fate. Nature +seems to enter with the hopelessness of man's mood. Finally the +novelist turns against life itself. "Birth," he says, speaking of +Tess, "seemed to her an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion +whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify and at +best could only palliate." It is strange to find pessimism in a +romantic setting; strange, too, to find a paganism which is so +little capable of light or joy.</p> +<br> +<h4>(4)</h4> +<p>The characteristic form of English fiction, that in which the +requisite illusion of the complexity and variety of life is +rendered by discursiveness, by an author's licence to digress, to +double back on himself, to start may be in the middle of a story +and work subsequently to the beginning and the end; in short by his +power to do whatever is most expressive of his individuality, found +a rival in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century in the +French Naturalistic or Realist school, in which the illusion of +life is got by a studied and sober veracity of statement, and by +the minute accumulation of detail. To the French Naturalists a +novel approached in importance the work of a man of science, and +they believed it ought to be based on documentary evidence, as a +scientific work would be. Above all it ought not to allow itself to +be coloured by the least gloss of imagination or idealism; it ought +never to shrink from a confrontation of the naked fact. On the +contrary it was its business to carry it to the dissecting table +and there minutely examine everything that lay beneath its +surface.</p> +<p>The school first became an English possession in the early +translations of the work of Zola; its methods were transplanted +into English fiction by Mr. George Moore. From his novels, both in +passages of direct statement and in the light of his practice, it +is possible to gather together the materials of a manifesto of the +English Naturalistic school. The naturalists complained that +English fiction lacked construction in the strictest sense; they +found in the English novel a remarkable absence of organic +wholeness; it did not fulfil their first and broadest canon of +subject-matter—by which a novel has to deal in the first +place with a single and rhythmical series of events; it was too +discursive. They made this charge against English fiction; they +also retorted the charge brought by native writers and their +readers against the French of foulness, sordidness and pessimism in +their view of life. "We do not," says a novelist in one of Mr. +Moore's books, "we do not always choose what you call unpleasant +subjects, but we do try to get to the roots of things; and the +basis of life being material and not spiritual, the analyst sooner +or later finds himself invariably handling what this sentimental +age calls coarse." "The novel," says the same character, "if it be +anything is contemporary history, an exact and complete +reproduction of the social surroundings of the age we live in." +That succinctly is the naturalistic theory of the novel as a work +of science—that as the history of a nation lies hidden often +in social wrongs and in domestic grief as much as in the movements +of parties or dynasties, the novelist must do for the former what +the historian does for the latter. It is his business in the scheme +of knowledge of his time.</p> +<p>But the naturalists believed quite as profoundly in the novel as +a work of art. They claimed for their careful pictures of the grey +and sad and sordid an artistic worth, varying in proportion to the +intensity of the emotion in which the picture was composed and +according to the picture's truth, but in its essence just as real +and permanent as the artistic worth of romance. "Seen from afar," +writes Mr. Moore, "all things in nature are of equal worth; and the +meanest things, when viewed with the eyes of God, are raised to +heights of tragic awe which conventionality would limit to the +deaths of kings and patriots." On such a lofty theory they built +their treatment and their style. It is a mistake to suppose that +the realist school deliberately cultivates the sordid or shocking. +Examine in this connection Mr. Moore's <cite>Mummer's Wife</cite>, +our greatest English realist novel, and for the matter of that one +of the supreme things in English fiction, and you will see that the +scrupulous fidelity of the author's method, though it denies him +those concessions to a sentimentalist or romantic view of life +which are the common implements of fiction, denies him no less the +extremities of horror or loathsomeness. The heroine sinks into the +miserable squalor of a dipsomaniac and dies from a drunkard's +disease, but her end is shown as the ineluctable consequence of her +life, its early greyness and monotony, the sudden shock of a new +and strange environment and the resultant weakness of will which a +morbid excitability inevitably brought about. The novel, that is to +say, deals with a "rhythmical series of events and follows them to +their conclusion"; it gets at the roots of things; it tells us of +something which we know to be true in life whether we care to read +it in fiction or not. There is nothing in it of sordidness for +sordidness' sake nor have the realists any philosophy of an unhappy +ending. In this case the ending is unhappy because the sequence of +events admitted of no other solution; in others the ending is happy +or merely neutral as the preceding story decides. If what one may +call neutral endings predominate, it is because they +also—notoriously—predominate in life. But the question +of unhappiness or its opposite has nothing whatever to do with the +larger matter of beauty; it is the triumph of the realists that at +their best they discovered a new beauty in things, the loveliness +that lies in obscure places, the splendour of sordidness, humility, +and pain. They have taught us that beauty, like the Spirit, blows +where it lists and we know from them that the antithesis between +realism and idealism is only on their lower levels; at their +summits they unite and are one. No true realist but is an idealist +too.</p> +<p>Most of what is best in English fiction since has been directly +occasioned by their work; Gissing and Mr. Arnold Bennett may be +mentioned as two authors who are fundamentally realist in their +conception of the art of the novel, and the realist ideal partakes +in a greater or less degree in the work of nearly all our eminent +novelists to-day. But realism is not and cannot be interesting to +the great public; it portrays people as they are, not as they would +like to be, and where they are, not where they would like to be. It +gives no background for day-dreaming. Now literature (to repeat +what has been than more once stated earlier in this book) is a way +of escape from life as well as an echo or mirror of it, and the +novel as the form of literature which more than any other men read +for pleasure, is the main avenue for this escape. So that alongside +this invasion of realism it is not strange that there grew a +revival in romance.</p> +<p>The main agent of it, Robert Louis Stevenson, had the romantic +strain in him intensified by the conditions under which he worked; +a weak and anaemic man, he loved bloodshed as a cripple loves +athletics—passionately and with the intimate enthusiasm of +make-believe which an imaginative man can bring to bear on the +contemplation of what can never be his. His natural attraction for +"redness and juice" in life was seconded by a delightful and +fantastic sense of the boundless possibilities of romance in +every-day things. To a realist a hansom-cab driver is a man who +makes twenty-five shillings a week, lives in a back street in +Pimlico, has a wife who drinks and children who grow up with an +alcoholic taint; the realist will compare his lot with other +cab-drivers, and find what part of his life is the product of the +cab-driving environment, and on that basis he will write his book. +To Stevenson and to the romanticist generally, a hansom cab-driver +is a mystery behind whose apparent commonplaceness lie magic +possibilities beyond all telling; not one but may be the agent of +the Prince of Bohemia, ready to drive you off to some mad and magic +adventure in a street which is just as commonplace to the outward +eye as the cab-driver himself, but which implicates by its very +deceitful commonness whole volumes of romance. The novel-reader to +whom <cite>Demos</cite> was the repetition of what he had seen and +known, and what had planted sickness in his soul, found the +<cite>New Arabian Nights</cite> a refreshing miracle. Stevenson had +discovered that modern London had its possibilities of romance. To +these two elements of his romantic equipment must be added a +third—travel. Defoe never left England, and other early +romanticists less gifted with invention than he wrote from the +mind's eye and from books. To Stevenson, and to his successor Mr. +Kipling, whose "discovery" of India is one of the salient facts of +modern English letters, and to Mr. Conrad belongs the credit of +teaching novelists to draw on experience for the scenes they seek +to present. A fourth element in the equipment of modern +romanticism—that which draws its effects from the "miracles" +of modern science, has been added since by Mr. H. G. Wells, in +whose latest work the realistic and romantic schools seem to have +united.</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_X"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER X</h2> +<br> +<h3>THE PRESENT AGE</h3> +<p>We have carried our study down to the death of Ruskin and +included in it authors like Swinburne and Meredith who survived +till recently; and in discussing the novel we have included men +like Kipling and Hardy—living authors. It would be possible +and perhaps safer to stop there and make no attempt to bring +writers later than these into our survey. To do so is to court an +easily and quickly stated objection. One is anticipating the +verdict of posterity. How can we who are contemporaries tell +whether an author's work is permanent or no?</p> +<p>Of course, in a sense the point of view expressed by these +questions is true enough. It is always idle to anticipate the +verdict of posterity. Remember Matthew Arnold's prophecy that at +the end of the nineteenth century Wordsworth and Byron would be the +two great names in Romantic poetry. We are ten years and more past +that date now, and so far as Byron is concerned, at any rate, there +is no sign that Arnold's prediction has come true. But the obvious +fact that we cannot do our grandchildren's thinking for them, is no +reason why we should refuse to think for ourselves. No notion is so +destructive to the formation of a sound literary taste as the +notion that books become literature only when their authors are +dead. Round us men and women are putting into plays and poetry and +novels the best that they can or know. They are writing not for a +dim and uncertain future but for us, and on our recognition and +welcome they depend, sometimes for their livelihood, always for the +courage which carries them on to fresh endeavour. Literature is an +ever-living and continuous thing, and we do it less than its due +service if we are so occupied reading Shakespeare and Milton and +Scott that we have no time to read Mr. Yeats, Mr. Shaw or Mr. +Wells. Students of literature must remember that classics are being +manufactured daily under their eyes, and that on their sympathy and +comprehension depends whether an author receives the success he +merits when he is alive to enjoy it.</p> +<p>The purpose of this chapter, then, is to draw a rough picture of +some of the lines or schools of contemporary writing—of the +writing mainly, though not altogether, of living authors. It is +intended to indicate some characteristics of the general trend or +drift of literary effort as a whole. The most remarkable feature of +the age, as far as writing is concerned, is without doubt its +inattention to poetry. Tennyson was a popular author; his books +sold in thousands; his lines passed into that common conversational +currency of unconscious quotation which is the surest testimony to +the permeation of a poet's influence. Even Browning, though his +popularity came late, found himself carried into all the nooks and +corners of the reading public. His robust and masculine morality, +understood at last, or expounded by a semi-priestly class of +interpreters, made him popular with those readers—and they +are the majority—who love their reading to convey a moral +lesson, just as Tennyson's reflection of his time's distraction +between science and religion endeared them to those who found in +him an answer or at least an echo to their own perplexities. A work +widely different from either of these, Fitzgerald's <cite>Rubaiyat +of Omar Khayyam</cite>, shared and has probably exceeded their +popularity for similar reasons. Its easy pessimism and cult of +pleasure, its delightful freedom from any demand for continuous +thought from its readers, its appeal to the indolence and moral +flaccidity which is implicit in all men, all contributed to its +immense vogue; and among people who perhaps did not fully +understand it but were merely lulled by its sonorousness, a +knowledge of it has passed for the insignia of a love of literature +and the possession of literary taste. But after +Fitzgerald—who? What poet has commanded the ear of the +reading public or even a fraction of it? Not Swinburne certainly, +partly because of his undoubted difficulty, partly because of a +suspicion held of his moral and religious tenets, largely from +material reasons quite unconnected with the quality of his work; +not Morris, nor his followers; none of the so-called minor poets +whom we shall notice presently—poets who have drawn the moods +that have nourished their work from the decadents of France. +Probably the only writer of verse who is at the same time a poet +and has acquired a large popularity and public influence is Mr. +Kipling. His work as a novelist we mentioned in the last chapter. +It remains to say something of his achievements in verse.</p> +<p>Let us grant at once his faults. He can be violent, and +over-rhetorical; he belabours you with sense impressions, and with +the polysyllabic rhetoric he learned from Swinburne—and +(though this is not the place for a discussion of political ideas) +he can offend by the sentimental brutalism which too often passes +for patriotism in his poetry. Not that this last represents the +total impression of his attitude as an Englishman. His later work +in poetry and prose, devoted to the reconstruction of English +history, is remarkable for the justness and saneness of its temper. +There are other faults—a lack of sureness in taste is +one—that could be mentioned but they do not affect the main +greatness of his work. He is great because he discovered a new +subject-matter, and because of the white heat of imagination which +in his best things he brought to bear on it and by which he +transposed it into poetry. It is Mr. Kipling's special distinction +that the apparatus of modern civilization—steam engines, and +steamships, and telegraph lines, and the art of flight—take +on in his hands a poetic quality as authentic and inspiring as any +that ever was cast over the implements of other and what the mass +of men believe to have been more picturesque days. Romance is in +the present, so he teaches us, not in the past, and we do it wrong +to leave it only the territory we have ourselves discarded in the +advance of the race. That and the great discovery of India—an +India misunderstood for his own purposes no doubt, but still the +first presentiment of an essential fact in our modern history as a +people—give him the hold that he has, and rightly, over the +minds of his readers.</p> +<p>It is in a territory poles apart from Mr. Kipling's that the +main stream of romantic poetry flows. Apart from the gravely +delicate and scholarly work of Mr. Bridges, and the poetry of some +others who work separately away from their fellows, English +romantic poetry has concentrated itself into one chief +school—the school of the "Celtic Revival" of which the leader +is Mr. W.B. Yeats. Two sources went to its making. In its +inception, it arose out of a group of young poets who worked in a +conscious imitation of the methods of the French decadents; chiefly +of Baudelaire and Verlaine. As a whole their work was merely +imitative and not very profound, but each of them—Ernest +Dowson and Lionel Johnson, who are both now dead, and others who +are still living—produced enough to show that they had at +their command a vein of poetry that might have deepened and proved +more rich had they gone on working it. One of them, Mr. W.B. Yeats, +by his birth and his reading in Irish legend and folklore, became +possessed of a subject-matter denied to his fellows, and it is from +the combination of the mood of the decadents with the dreaminess +and mystery of Celtic tradition and romance—a combination +which came to pass in his poetry—that the Celtic school has +sprung. In a sense it has added to the territory explored by +Coleridge and Scott and Morris a new province. Only nothing could +be further from the objectivity of these men, than the way in which +the Celtic school approaches its material. Its stories are clear to +itself, it may be, but not to its readers. Deirdre and Conchubar, +and Angus and Maeve and Dectora and all the shadowy figures in them +scarcely become embodied. Their lives and deaths and loves and +hates are only a scheme on which they weave a delicate and dim +embroidery of pure poetry—of love and death and old age and +the passing of beauty and all the sorrows that have been since the +world began and will be till the world ends. If Mr. Kipling is of +the earth earthy, if the clangour and rush of the world is in +everything he writes, Mr. Yeats and his school live consciously +sequestered and withdrawn, and the world never breaks in on their +ghostly troubles or their peace. Poetry never fails to relate +itself to its age; if it is not with it, it is against it; it is +never merely indifferent. The poetry of these men is the denial, +passionately made, of everything the world prizes. While such a +denial is sincere, as in the best of them, then the verses they +make are true and fine. But when it is assumed, as in some of their +imitators, then the work they did is not true poetry.</p> +<p>But the literary characteristic of the present age—the one +which is most likely to differentiate it from its predecessor, is +the revival of the drama. When we left it before the Commonwealth +the great English literary school of playwriting—the romantic +drama—was already dead. It has had since no second birth. +There followed after it the heroic tragedy of Dryden and +Shadwell—a turgid, declamatory form of art without +importance—and two brilliant comic periods, the earlier and +greater that of Congreve and Wycherley, the later more sentimental +with less art and vivacity, that of Goldsmith and Sheridan. With +Sheridan the drama as a literary force died a second time. It has +been born again only in our own day. It is, of course, unnecessary +to point out that the writing of plays did not cease in the +interval; it never does cease. The production of dramatic +journey-work has been continuous since the re-opening of the +theatres in 1660, and it is carried on as plentifully as ever at +this present time. Only side by side with it there has grown up a +new literary drama, and gradually the main stream of artistic +endeavour which for nearly a century has preoccupied itself with +the novel almost to the exclusion of other forms of art, has turned +back to the stage as its channel to articulation and an audience. +An influence from abroad set it in motion. The plays of +Ibsen—produced, the best of them, in the eighties of last +century—came to England in the nineties. In a way, perhaps, +they were misunderstood by their worshippers hardly less than by +their enemies, but all excrescences of enthusiasm apart they taught +men a new and freer approach to moral questions, and a new and +freer dramatic technique. Where plays had been constructed on a +journeyman plan evolved by Labiche and Sardou—mid-nineteenth +century writers in France—a plan delighting in symmetry, +close-jointedness, false correspondences, an impossible use of +coincidence, and a quite unreal complexity and elaboration, they +become bolder and less artificial, more close to the likelihoods of +real life. The gravity of the problems with which they set +themselves to deal heightened their influence. In England men began +to ask themselves whether the theatre here too could not be made an +avenue towards the discussion of living difficulties, and then +arose the new school of dramatists—of whom the first and most +remarkable is Mr. George Bernard Shaw. In his earlier plays he set +himself boldly to attack established conventions, and to ask his +audiences to think for themselves. <cite>Arms and the Man</cite> +dealt a blow at the cheap romanticism with which a peace-living +public invests the profession of arms; <cite>The Devil's +Disciple</cite> was a shrewd criticism of the preposterous +self-sacrifice on which melodrama, which is the most popular +non-literary form of play-writing, is commonly based; <cite>Mrs. +Warren's Profession</cite> made a brave and plain-spoken attempt to +drag the public face to face with the nauseous realities of +prostitution; <cite>Widowers' Houses</cite> laid bare the +sordidness of a Society which bases itself on the exploitation of +the poor for the luxuries of the rich. It took Mr. Shaw close on +ten years to persuade even the moderate number of men and women who +make up a theatre audience that his plays were worth listening to. +But before his final success came he had attained a substantial +popularity with the public which reads. Possibly his early failure +on the stage—mainly due to the obstinacy of playgoers +immersed in a stock tradition—was partly due also to his +failure in constructive power. He is an adept at tying knots and +impatient of unravelling them; his third acts are apt either to +evaporate in talk or to find some unreal and unsatisfactory +solution for the complexity he has created. But constructive +weakness apart, his amazing brilliance and fecundity of dialogue +ought to have given him an immediate and lasting grip of the stage. +There has probably never been a dramatist who could invest +conversation with the same vivacity and point, the same combination +of surprise and inevitableness that distinguishes his best +work.</p> +<p>Alongside of Mr. Shaw more immediately successful, and not +traceable to any obvious influence, English or foreign, came the +comedies of Oscar Wilde. For a parallel to their pure delight and +high spirits, and to the exquisite wit and artifice with which they +were constructed, one would have to go back to the dramatists of +the Restoration. To Congreve and his school, indeed, Wilde belongs +rather than to any later period. With his own age he had little in +common; he was without interest in its social and moral problems; +when he approved of socialism it was because in a socialist state +the artist might be absolved from the necessity of carrying a +living, and be free to follow his art undisturbed. He loved to +think of himself as symbolic, but all he symbolized was a fantasy +of his own creating; his attitude to his age was decorative and +withdrawn rather than representative. He was the licensed jester to +society, and in that capacity he gave us his plays. Mr. Shaw may be +said to have founded a school; at any rate he gave the start to Mr. +Galsworthy and some lesser dramatists. Wilde founded nothing, and +his works remain as complete and separate as those of the earlier +artificial dramatists of two centuries before.</p> +<p>Another school of drama, homogeneous and quite apart from the +rest, remains. We have seen how the "Celtic Revival," as the Irish +literary movement has been called by its admirers, gave us a new +kind of romantic poetry. As an offshoot from it there came into +being some ten years ago an Irish school of drama, drawing its +inspiration from two sources—the body of the old Irish +legends and the highly individualized and richly-coloured life of +the Irish peasants in the mountains of Wicklow and of the West, a +life, so the dramatists believed, still unspoiled by the deepening +influences of a false system of education and the wear and tear of +a civilization whose values are commercial and not spiritual or +artistic. The school founded its own theatre, trained its own +actors, fashioned its own modes of speech (the chief of which was a +frank restoration of rhythm in the speaking of verse and of cadence +in prose), and having all these things it produced a series of +plays all directed to its special ends, and all composed and +written with a special fidelity to country life as it has been +preserved, or to what it conceived to be the spirit of Irish +folk-legend. It reached its zenith quickly, and as far as the +production of plays is concerned, it would seem to be already in +its decline. That is to say, what in the beginning was a fresh and +vivid inspiration caught direct from life has become a pattern +whose colours and shape can be repeated or varied by lesser writers +who take their teaching from the original discoverers. But in the +course of its brief and striking course it produced one great +dramatist—a writer whom already not three years after his +death, men instinctively class with the masters of his art.</p> +<p>J.M. Synge, in the earlier years of his manhood, lived entirely +abroad, leading the life of a wandering scholar from city to city +and country to country till he was persuaded to give up the +Continent and the criticism and imitation of French literature, to +return to England, and to go and live on the Aran Islands. From +that time till his death—some ten years—he spent a +large part of each year amongst the peasantry of the desolate +Atlantic coast and wrote the plays by which his name is known. His +literary output was not large, but he supplied the Irish dramatic +movement with exactly what it needed—a vivid contact with the +realities of life. Not that he was a mere student or transcriber of +manners. His wandering life among many peoples and his study of +classical French and German literature had equipped him as perhaps +no other modern dramatist has been equipped with an imaginative +insight and a reach of perception which enabled him to give +universality and depth to his pourtrayal of the peasant types +around him. He got down to the great elemental forces which throb +and pulse beneath the common crises of everyday life and laid them +bare, not as ugly and horrible, but with a sense of their terror, +their beauty and their strength. His earliest play, <cite>The Well +of the Saints</cite>, treats of a sorrow that is as old as Helen of +the vanishing of beauty and the irony of fulfilled desire. The +great realities of death pass through the <cite>Riders to the +Sea</cite>, till the language takes on a kind of simplicity as of +written words shrivelling up in a flame. <cite>The Playboy of the +Western World</cite> is a study of character, terrible in its +clarity, but never losing the savour of imagination and of the +astringency and saltness that was characteristic of his temper. He +had at his command an instrument of incomparable fineness and range +in the language which he fashioned out the speech of the common +people amongst whom he lived. In his dramatic writings this +language took on a kind of rhythm which had the effect of producing +a certain remoteness of the highest possible artistic value. The +people of his imagination appear a little disembodied. They talk +with that straightforward and simple kind of innocency which makes +strange and impressive the dialogue of Maeterlinck's earlier plays. +Through it, as Mr. Yeats has said, he saw the subject-matter of his +art "with wise, clear-seeing, unreflecting eyes—and he +preserved the innocence of good art in an age of reasons and +purposes." He had no theory except of his art; no "ideas" and no +"problems"; he did not wish to change anything or to reform +anything; but he saw all his people pass by as before a window, and +he heard their words. This resolute refusal to be interested in or +to take account of current modes of thought has been considered by +some to detract from his eminence. Certainly if by "ideas" we mean +current views on society or morality, he is deficient in them; only +his very deficiency brings him nearer to the great masters of +drama—to Ben Johnson, to Cervantes, to +Molière—even to Shakespeare himself. Probably in no +single case amongst our contemporaries could a high and permanent +place in literature be prophesied with more confidence than in +his.</p> +<p>In the past it has seemed impossible for fiction and the drama, +i.e. serious drama of high literary quality, to flourish, side by +side. It seems as though the best creative minds in any age could +find strength for any one of these two great outlets for the +activity of the creative imagination. In the reign of Elizabeth the +drama outshone fiction; in the reign of Victoria the novel crowded +out the drama. There are signs that a literary era is commencing, +in which the drama will again regain to the full its position as a +literature. More and more the bigger creative artists will turn to +a form which by its economy of means to ends, and the chance it +gives not merely of observing but of creating and displaying +character in action, has a more vigorous principle of life in it +than its rival.</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="BIBLIOGRAPHY"></a> +<h2>BIBLIOGRAPHY</h2> +<p>It is best to study English literature one period, or, even in +the case of the greatest, one author at a time. In every case the +student should see to it that he knows the <em>text</em> of his +authors; a knowledge of what critics have said about our poets is a +poor substitute for a knowledge of what they have said themselves. +Poetry ought to be read slowly and carefully, and the reader ought +to pay his author the compliment of crediting him with ideas as +important and, on occasion, as abstruse as any in a work of +philosophy or abstract science. When the meaning is mastered, the +poem ought to be read a second time aloud to catch the magic of the +language and the verse. The reading of prose presents less +difficulty, but there again the rule is, never allow yourself to be +lulled by sound. Reading is an intellectual and not an hypnotic +exercise.</p> +<p>The following short bibliography is divided to correspond with +the chapters in this book. Prices and publishers are mentioned only +when there is no more than one cheap edition of a book known to the +author. For the subject as a whole, Chamber's <cite>Cyclopaedia of +English Literature</cite> (3 vols., 10s. 6d. net each), which +contains biographical and critical articles on all authors, +arranged chronologically and furnished very copiously with specimen +passages, may be consulted at any library.</p> +<p>* The books with an asterisk are suggested as those on which +reading should be begun. The reader can then proceed to the others +and after them to the many authors—great authors—who +are not included in this short list.</p> +<p>Chapter I.—*More's <cite>Utopia</cite>; <cite>Haklyut's +Voyages</cite> (Ed. J. Masefield, Everyman's Library, 8 vols., 1s. +net each). North's <cite>Translation of Plutarch's Lives</cite> +(Temple Classics).</p> +<p>Chapter II.—Surrey's and Wyatt's Poems (Aldine Edition. G. +Bells & Sons); *Spenser's Works, Sidney's Poems. A good idea of +the atmosphere in which poetry was written is to be obtained from +Scott's <cite>Kenilworth</cite>. It is full of inaccuracy in +detail.</p> +<p>Chapter III.—*The dramatists in the Mermaid Series (T. +Fisher Unwin); *<cite>Everyman and other Plays</cite>; ed. by A.W. +Pollard (Everyman's Library).</p> +<p>Chapter IV.—*Bacon's Essays; Sir Thomas Browne's Works; +*Milton's Works; *Poems of John Donne (Muses Library, Routledge); +Poems of Robert Herrick.</p> +<p>Chapter V.—*Poems of Dryden; *Poems of Pope; Poems of +Thomson; *<cite>The Spectator</cite> (Routledge's Universal Library +or Everyman's); *Swift's <cite>Gulliver's Travels</cite>; Defoe's +Novels.</p> +<p>Chapter VI.—*Boswell's <cite>Life of Johnson</cite>; +*Burke (in selections); Goldsmith's <cite>Citizen of the +World</cite> (Temple Classics); *Burns' Poetical Works; *Poems of +Blake (Clarendon Press).</p> +<p>Chapter VII.—*Wordsworth (Golden Treasury Series); +*Wordsworth's Prelude (Temple Classics); Coleridge's Poems; +*Keats's Poems; *Shelley's Poems; *Byron (Golden Treasury Series); +*Lamb, <cite>Essays of Elia</cite>; Hazlitt (volumes of Essays in +World's Classics Series).</p> +<p>Chapter VIII.—*Tennyson's Works; *Browning's Works; +Rossetti's Works; *Carlyle's <cite>Sartor Resartus, Past and +Present</cite>, and <cite>French Revolution</cite>; Ruskin's +<cite>Unto this Last, Seven Lamps of Architecture</cite>; Arnold's +Poems; Swinburne (Selections).</p> +<p>Chapter IX.--*Fielding's <cite>Tom Jones</cite>; Smollett, +<cite>Roderick Random</cite>; *Jane Austen's <cite>Persuasion, +Pride and Prejudice,</cite> and <cite>Northanger Abbey</cite> (as a +parody of the Radcliffe School); *Scott's <cite>Waverley, +Antiquary, Ivanhoe, Old Mortality, Bride of Lammermoor</cite>. It +seems hardly necessary to give a selection of later novels.</p> +<p>Chapter X.—W.B. Yeats' Poems; Wilde, <cite>Importance of +Being Earnest</cite>; *Synge, Dramatic Works.</p> +<p>And every new work of the best contemporary authors.</p> +<p>G.H.M.</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="LIST_OF_THE_CHIEF_WORKS_AND_AUTHORS_MENTIONED"></a> +<h2>LIST OF THE CHIEF WORKS AND AUTHORS MENTIONED</h2> +<p>The dates attached to the authors are those of birth and death; +those with the books, of publication.</p> +<br> +CHAPTER I<br> +<br> +Sir Thomas More, 1480-1535.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Utopia</cite>. 1516 (in +Latin).</span><br> +William Tindall, 1484-1536.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Translation of the New +Testament</cite>, 1526.</span><br> +Sir John Cheke, 1514-1557.<br> +Roger Ascham, 1515-1568.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Toxophilus</cite>, +1545.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Schoolmaster</cite>, +1570.</span><br> +Richard Hakluyt, 1553-1616.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His <cite>Voyages</cite>, +1598.</span><br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER II<br> +<br> +Sir Thomas Wyatt, 1503-1542.<br> +The Earl of Surrey, 1517-1547.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Tottel's Miscellany</cite> +(containing their poems), 1557.</span><br> +Sir Philip Sidney. 1554-1586.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Arcadia</cite>, +1590.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Astrophel and Stella</cite>, +1591.</span><br> +Edmund Spenser, 1552-1599.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Shepherd's Calendar</cite>, +1579.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Fairy Queen</cite>, 1589, +1596.</span><br> +John Lyly, 1554-1606.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Euphues</cite>, +1579.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Euphues and his +England</cite>, 1580.</span><br> +Richard Hooker, 1553-1600.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Ecclesiastical Polity</cite>, +1594.</span><br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER III<br> +<br> +Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Tamburlaine</cite>, 1587 +(date of performance).</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Dr. Faustus</cite>, 1588 +(date of performance).</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Edward II.</cite>, +1593.</span><br> +Thomas Kyd, 1557(?)-1595(?).<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The Spanish Tragedy</cite>, +1594 (published).</span><br> +John Webster, 1580(?)-1625(?).<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The White Devil</cite>, 1608 +(date of performance).</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Duchess of Malfi</cite>, 1616 +(date of performance).</span><br> +Ben Jonson, 1573-1637.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Every Man in his +Humour</cite>, 1598.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Volpone</cite>, +1605.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Poems</cite>, +1616.</span><br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER IV<br> +<br> +John Donne, 1573-1631.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Poems</cite>, 1633 (first +published, but known, like those of all Elizabethan poets, in +manuscript long before).</span><br> +William Browne, 1591-1643.<br> +George Herbert, 1593-1633.<br> +Robert Herrick, 1593-1674.<br> +Richard Crashaw, 1613-1649.<br> +Francis Bacon, 1561-1626.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Advancement of +Learning</cite>, 1605.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Essays</cite>, +1625.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The Bible, <cite>Authorised +Version</cite>, 1611.</span><br> +Robert Burton, 1577-1640.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Anatomy of Melancholy</cite>, +1621.</span><br> +Sir Thomas Browne, 1605-1682.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Religio Medici</cite>, +1642.</span><br> +John Bunyan, 1628-1688.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Pilgrim's Progress</cite>, +1678.</span><br> +John Milton, 1608-1674.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Paradise Lost</cite>, +1667.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Paradise Regained</cite> and +<cite>Samson Agonistes</cite>, 1671.</span><br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER V<br> +<br> +John Dryden, 1631-1700.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Absalom and Achitophel</cite> +and <cite>Religio Laici</cite>, 1682.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The Hind and the +Panther</cite>, 1687.</span><br> +Alexander Pope, 1688-1744.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Essay on Criticism</cite>, +1711.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Rape of the Lock</cite>, +1714.</span><br> +James Thomson, 1700-1748.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The Seasons</cite>, +1730.</span><br> +Daniel Defoe, 1661-1731.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Robinson Crusoe</cite>, +1719.</span><br> +Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The Tale of a Tub</cite>, +1704.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Gulliver's Travels</cite>, +1726.</span><br> +Joseph Addison, 1672-1719.<br> +Richard Steele, 1675-1729.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The Tatler</cite>, +1709-1711.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The Spectator</cite>, +1711-1712.</span><br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER VI<br> +<br> +Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784.<br> +Edmund Burke, 1728-1797.<br> +Oliver Goldsmith, 1728-1774.<br> +Thomas Gray, 1716-1771.<br> +William Collins, 1721-1759.<br> +Robert Burns, 1759-1796.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Poems</cite>, +1786.</span><br> +William Blake, 1757-1827.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Songs of Innocence</cite>, +1789.</span><br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER VII<br> +<br> +William Wordsworth, 1770-1850.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Lyrical Ballads</cite>, +1798.</span><br> +Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1772-1834.<br> +Sir Walter Scott, 1771-1832.<br> +Lord Byron, 1788-1824.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Child Harold's +Pilgrimage</cite>, 1812-1817.</span><br> +Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822.<br> +John Keats, 1796-1821.<br> +Charles Lamb, 1775-1884.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Essays of Elia</cite>, +1823.</span><br> +William Hazlitt, 1778-1830.<br> +Thomas de Quincey, 1785-1859.<br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER VIII<br> +<br> +Lord Tennyson, 1809-1892.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Poems</cite>, +1842.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Idylls of the King</cite>, +1859.</span><br> +Robert Browning, 1812-1889.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Men and Women</cite>, +1855.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The Ring and the Book</cite>, +1868.</span><br> +D. G. Rossetti, 1828-1882.<br> +William Morris, 1834-1896.<br> +A. C. Swinburne, 1836-1909.<br> +Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1880.<br> +John Ruskin, 1819-1900.<br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER IX<br> +<br> +Samuel Richardson, 1689-1761.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Pamela</cite>, +1740.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Clarissa Harlowe</cite>, +1750.</span><br> +Henry Fielding, 1707-1754.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Joseph Andrews</cite>, +1742.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Tom Jones</cite>, +1749.</span><br> +Jane Austen, 1775-1817.<br> +William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863.<br> +Charles Dickens, 1812-1870.<br> +George Meredith, 1832-1909.<br> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="INDEX"></a> +<h2>INDEX</h2> +ADDISON, JOSEPH,<br> +<cite>Advancement of Learning, The</cite>,<br> +<cite>Anatomy of Melancholy, The</cite>,<br> +<cite>Antonio and Mellida</cite>,<br> +<cite>Arcadia</cite>, the Countess of Pembroke's,<br> +Arnold, Matthew,<br> +Ascham, Roger,<br> +<cite>Astrophel and Stella</cite>,<br> +<cite>Atheist's Tragedy, The</cite>,<br> +Augustan Age,<br> +Austen, Jane,<br> +Autobiography,<br> +<br> +Bacon, Francis,<br> +Ballad, the,<br> +Beaumont and Fletcher,<br> +Bennett, Arnold,<br> +Bible, the,<br> +Biography,<br> +Blake, William,<br> +Blank Verse,<br> +Boswell, James,<br> +Brontës, the,<br> +Browne, Sir Thomas,<br> +Browne, William,<br> +Browning, Robert,<br> +Bunyan, John,<br> +Burke, Edmund,<br> +Burns, Robert,<br> +Burton, Robert,<br> +Byron, Lord,<br> +<br> +Carew, Thomas,<br> +Carlyle, Thomas,<br> +Celtic Revival,<br> +Character-writing,<br> +Chatterton, Thomas,<br> +Cheke, Sir John,<br> +<cite>Christ's Victory and Death</cite>,<br> +Classicism,<br> +Clough, Thomas,<br> +Coleridge, Samuel Taylor,<br> +Collins, William,<br> +Conrad, Joseph,<br> +Cowley, Abraham,<br> +Cowper, William,<br> +Crabbe, George,<br> +Crashaw, Richard,<br> +Criticism,<br> +<br> +Decadence,<br> +Defoe, Daniel,<br> +De Quincey, Thomas,<br> +Dekker, Thomas,<br> +Dickens, Charles,<br> +Discovery, Voyages of,<br> +Disraeli, Benjamin,<br> +<cite>Dr. Faustus</cite>,<br> +Donne, John,<br> +Drama, the,<br> +Dryden, John,<br> +<cite>Duchess of Malfi, The</cite>,<br> +<br> +Earle, John,<br> +<cite>Edward II.</cite>,<br> +<cite>Elia, Essays of</cite>,<br> +Elizabethan Poetry,<br> +Elizabethan Prose,<br> +<cite>Essays, Civil and Moral</cite>,<br> +<cite>Euphues</cite>,<br> +<cite>Everyman</cite>,<br> +<br> +<cite>Fairy Queen, The</cite>,<br> +Fantastics, the,<br> +Fielding, Henry,<br> +Fitzgerald, Edward,<br> +Fletcher, Giles,<br> +Fletcher, Phineas,<br> +Ford, John,<br> +French Revolution, the,<br> +<br> +Gaskell, Mrs.,<br> +George Eliot,<br> +Gibbon, Edward,<br> +Gissing, George,<br> +Goldsmith, Oliver,<br> +<cite>Gorboduc</cite>,<br> +Gray, Thomas,<br> +Greene, Robert,<br> +Greville, Sir Fulke,<br> +<cite>Gulliver's Travels</cite>,<br> +<br> +<cite>Hakluyt's Voyages</cite>,<br> +Hardy, Thomas,<br> +Hazlitt, William,<br> +Hawthorne, Nathaniel,<br> +<cite>Henry VII., History of</cite>,<br> +Herbert, George,<br> +Herrick, Robert,<br> +Hobbes, Thomas,<br> +Hooper, Richard,<br> +<br> +Italy, influence of,<br> +<br> +<cite>Jew of Malta</cite>,<br> +Johnson, Samuel,<br> +Jonson, Ben,<br> +<br> +Keats, John,<br> +Kipling, Rudyard,<br> +Kyd, Thomas,<br> +<br> +Lamb, Charles,<br> +Locke, John,<br> +Lodge, Thomas,<br> +Lyly, John,<br> +Lyric, the,<br> +Lyrical Ballads,<br> +<br> +Marlowe, Christopher,<br> +Marston, John,<br> +Massinger, Philip,<br> +Meredith, George,<br> +Middleton, Thomas,<br> +Milton, John,<br> +Miracle Play, the,<br> +Moore, George,<br> +Morality, the,<br> +More, Sir Thomas,<br> +Morris, William,<br> +<br> +<cite>New Atlantis, The</cite>,<br> +Novel, the,<br> +<br> +Obscurity in Poetry,<br> +<cite>Omar Khayyam</cite>,<br> +<cite>Ossian</cite>,<br> +Oxford Movement, the,<br> +<br> +<cite>Paradise Lost</cite>,<br> +Pastoral Prose and Poetry,<br> +Peele, George,<br> +Percy, William,<br> +<cite>Pilgrim's Progress</cite>,<br> +Platonism,<br> +Poetic Diction,<br> +Pope, Alexander,<br> +Puritanism,<br> +<cite>Purple Island, The</cite>,<br> +<br> +Raleigh, Sir Walter,<br> +<cite>Rape of the Lock</cite>,<br> +Realism,<br> +<cite>Religio Medici</cite>,<br> +Renaissance, the,<br> +Reynolds, Sir Joshua,<br> +Rhetoric, study of,<br> +Richardson, Samuel,<br> +<cite>Robinson Crusoe</cite>,<br> +Romanticism,<br> +Romantic Revival, the,<br> +Rossetti, D. G.,<br> +Ruskin, John,<br> +<br> +Sackville, Thomas,<br> +Satire,<br> +Scott, Sir Walter,<br> +Senecan Tragedy,<br> +Seventeenth Century, the,<br> +Shaw, G. Bernard,<br> +Shelley, P. B.,<br> +Shenstone, Thomas,<br> +Sheridan, R. B.,<br> +Shirley, John,<br> +Sidney, Sir Philip,<br> +Smollett, T.,<br> +Sonnet, the,<br> +Sonneteers, the,<br> +<cite>Spanish Tragedy, The</cite>,<br> +<cite>Spectator, The</cite>,<br> +Spenser, Edmund,<br> +Spenserians, the,<br> +Steele, Richard,<br> +Sterne, Lawrence,<br> +Stevenson, R. L.,<br> +Supernatural, the,<br> +Surrey, the Earl of,<br> +Swift, Jonathan,<br> +Swinburne, A. C.,<br> +Synge, J. M.,<br> +<br> +<cite>Tale of a Tub, The</cite>,<br> +<cite>Tamburlaine</cite>,<br> +<cite>Tatler, The</cite>,<br> +<cite>Temple, Sir William</cite>,<br> +Tennyson, Alfred,<br> +Thackeray, W. M.,<br> +Theatre, the Elizabethan,<br> +Thomson, James,<br> +<cite>Tottel's Miscellany</cite>,<br> +<br> +<cite>Utopia</cite>,<br> +<br> +<cite>Vaughan, Henry</cite>,<br> +Victorian Age, the,<br> +<cite>View of the State of Ireland</cite>,<br> +<br> +Waller, Edmund,<br> +Walton, Isaac,<br> +Webster, John,<br> +Wells, H. G.,<br> +<cite>White Devil, The</cite>,<br> +Wilde, Oscar,<br> +Wilson, Thomas,<br> +Wither, George,<br> +Wordsworth, William,<br> +Wyatt, Thomas,<br> +<br> +Yeats, W. B.,<br> + +<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11327 ***</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dfa05fc --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #11327 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11327) diff --git a/old/11327-8.txt b/old/11327-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..eacc5a0 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/11327-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6940 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of English Literature: Modern, by G. H. Mair + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: English Literature: Modern + Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge + +Author: G. H. Mair + +Release Date: February 27, 2004 [EBook #11327] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN *** + + + + +Produced by Cera Kruger and PG Distributed Proofreaders + + + + +HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE + +ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN + +BY G. H. MAIR, M.A. SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF CHRIST CHURCH + +First Printed, October, 1911 Revised & Printed February, 1914 + + + +PREFACE + + +The intention of this book is to lay stress on ideas and tendencies that +have to be understood and appreciated, rather than on facts that have to +be learned by heart. Many authors are not mentioned and others receive +scanty treatment, because of the necessities of this method of approach. +The book aims at dealing with the matter of authors more than with their +lives; consequently it contains few dates. All that the reader need +require to help him have been included in a short chronological table at +the end. + +To have attempted a severely ordered and analytic treatment of the +subject would have been, for the author at least, impossible within the +limits imposed, and, in any case, would have been foreign to the purpose +indicated by the editors of the Home University Library. The book +pretends no more than to be a general introduction to a very great +subject, and it will have fulfilled all that is intended for it if it +stimulates those who read it to set about reading for themselves the +books of which it treats. + +Its debts are many, its chief creditors two teachers, Professor +Grierson at Aberdeen University and Sir Walter Raleigh at Oxford, to the +stimulation of whose books and teaching my pleasure in English +literature and any understanding I have of it are due. To them and to +the other writers (chief of them Professor Herford) whose ideas I have +wittingly or unwittingly incorporated in it, as well as to the kindness +and patience of Professor Gilbert Murray, I wish here to express my +indebtedness. + +G.H.M. +MANCHESTER, +_August_, 1911. + + + + +CONTENTS + + +CHAPTER + + PREFACE + +I THE RENAISSANCE + +II ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE + +III THE DRAMA + +IV THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY + +V THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE + +VI DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME + +VII THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL + +VIII THE VICTORIAN AGE + +IX THE NOVEL + +X THE PRESENT AGE + + BIBLIOGRAPHY + + CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE + + INDEX + + + + +ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN + + + + +CHAPTER I + + +THE RENAISSANCE + +(1) + +There are times in every man's experience when some sudden widening of +the boundaries of his knowledge, some vision of hitherto untried and +unrealized possibilities, has come and seemed to bring with it new life +and the inspiration of fresh and splendid endeavour. It may be some +great book read for the first time not as a book, but as a revelation; +it may be the first realization of the extent and moment of what +physical science has to teach us; it may be, like Carlyle's "Everlasting +Yea," an ethical illumination, or spiritual like Augustine's or John +Wesley's. But whatever it is, it brings with it new eyes, new powers of +comprehension, and seems to reveal a treasury of latent and unsuspected +talents in the mind and heart. The history of mankind has its parallels +to these moments of illumination in the life of the individual. There +are times when the boundaries of human experience, always narrow, and +fluctuating but little between age and age, suddenly widen themselves, +and the spirit of man leaps forward to possess and explore its new +domain. These are the great ages of the world. They could be counted, +perhaps, on one hand. The age of Pericles in Athens; the less defined +age, when Europe passed, spiritually and artistically, from what we call +the Dark, to what we call the Middle Ages; the Renaissance; the period +of the French Revolution. Two of them, so far as English literature is +concerned, fall within the compass of this book, and it is with one of +them--the Renaissance--that it begins. + +It is as difficult to find a comprehensive formula for what the +Renaissance meant as to tie it down to a date. The year 1453 A.D., when +the Eastern Empire--the last relic of the continuous spirit of +Rome--fell before the Turks, used to be given as the date, and perhaps +the word "Renaissance" itself--"a new birth"--is as much as can be +accomplished shortly by way of definition. Michelet's resonant +"discovery by mankind of himself and of the world" rather expresses what +a man of the Renaissance himself must have thought it, than what we in +this age can declare it to be. But both endeavours to date and to define +are alike impossible. One cannot fix a term to day or night, and the +theory of the Renaissance as a kind of tropical dawn--a sudden passage +to light from darkness--is not to be considered. The Renaissance was, +and was the result of, a numerous and various series of events which +followed and accompanied one another from the fourteenth to the +beginning of the sixteenth centuries. First and most immediate in its +influence on art and literature and thought, was the rediscovery of the +ancient literatures. In the Middle Ages knowledge of Greek and Latin +literatures had withdrawn itself into monasteries, and there narrowed +till of secular Latin writing scarcely any knowledge remained save of +Vergil (because of his supposed Messianic prophecy) and Statius, and of +Greek, except Aristotle, none at all. What had been lost in the Western +Empire, however, subsisted in the East, and the continual advance of the +Turk on the territories of the Emperors of Constantinople drove westward +to the shelter of Italy and the Church, and to the patronage of the +Medicis, a crowd of scholars who brought with them their manuscripts of +Homer and the dramatists, of Thucydides and Herodotus, and most +momentous perhaps for the age to come, of Plato and Demosthenes and of +the New Testament in its original Greek. The quick and vivid intellect +of Italy, which had been torpid in the decadence of mediaevalism and its +mysticism and piety, seized with avidity the revelation of the classical +world which the scholars and their manuscripts brought. Human life, +which the mediaeval Church had taught them to regard but as a threshold +and stepping-stone to eternity, acquired suddenly a new momentousness +and value; the promises of the Church paled like its lamps at sunrise; +and a new paganism, which had Plato for its high priest, and Demosthenes +and Pericles for its archetypes and examples, ran like wild-fire through +Italy. The Greek spirit seized on art, and produced Raphael, Leonardo, +and Michel Angelo; on literature and philosophy and gave us Pico della +Mirandula, on life and gave us the Medicis and Castiglione and +Machiavelli. Then--the invention not of Italy but of Germany--came the +art of printing, and made this revival of Greek literature quickly +portable into other lands. + +Even more momentous was the new knowledge the age brought of the +physical world. The brilliant conjectures of Copernicus paved the way +for Galileo, and the warped and narrow cosmology which conceived the +earth as the centre of the universe, suffered a blow that in shaking it +shook also religion. And while the conjectures of the men of science +were adding regions undreamt of to the physical universe, the +discoverers were enlarging the territories of the earth itself. The +Portuguese, with the aid of sailors trained in the great Mediterranean +ports of Genoa and Venice, pushed the track of exploration down the +western coast of Africa; the Cape was circumnavigated by Vasco da Gama, +and India reached for the first time by Western men by way of the sea. +Columbus reached Trinidad and discovered the "New" World; his successors +pushed past him and touched the Continent. Spanish colonies grew up +along the coasts of North and Central America and in Peru, and the +Portuguese reached Brazil. Cabot and the English voyagers reached +Newfoundland and Labrador; the French made their way up the St. +Lawrence. The discovery of the gold mines brought new and unimagined +possibilities of wealth to the Old World, while the imagination of +Europe, bounded since the beginning of recorded time by the Western +ocean, and with the Mediterranean as its centre, shot out to the romance +and mystery of untried seas. + +It is difficult for us in these later days to conceive the profound and +stirring influence of such an alteration on thought and literature. To +the men at the end of the fifteenth century scarcely a year but brought +another bit of received and recognized thinking to the scrap-heap; +scarcely a year but some new discovery found itself surpassed and in its +turn discarded, or lessened in significance by something still more new. +Columbus sailed westward to find a new sea route, and as he imagined, a +more expeditious one to "the Indies"; the name West Indies still +survives to show the theory on which the early discoverers worked. The +rapidity with which knowledge widened can be gathered by a comparison of +the maps of the day. In the earlier of them the mythical Brazil, a relic +perhaps of the lost Atlantis, lay a regularly and mystically blue island +off the west coast of Ireland; then the Azores were discovered and the +name fastened on to one of the islands of that archipelago. Then Amerigo +reached South America and the name became finally fixed to the country +that we know. There is nothing nowadays that can give us a parallel to +the stirring and exaltation of the imagination which intoxicated the men +of the Renaissance, and gave a new birth to thought and art. The great +scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century came to men more +prepared for the shock of new surprises, and they carried evidence less +tangible and indisputable to the senses. Perhaps if the strivings of +science should succeed in proving as evident and comprehensible the +existences which spiritualist and psychical research is striving to +establish, we should know the thrill that the great twin discoverers, +Copernicus and Columbus, brought to Europe. + + +(2) + +This rough sketch of the Renaissance has been set down because it is +only by realizing the period in its largest and broadest sense that we +can understand the beginnings of our own modern literature. The +Renaissance reached England late. By the time that the impulse was at +its height with Spenser and Shakespeare, it had died out in Italy, and +in France to which in its turn Italy had passed the torch, it was +already a waning fire. When it came to England it came in a special form +shaped by political and social conditions, and by the accidents of +temperament and inclination in the men who began the movement. But the +essence of the inspiration remained the same as it had been on the +Continent, and the twin threads of its two main impulses, the impulse +from the study of the classics, and the impulse given to men's minds by +the voyages of discovery, runs through all the texture of our +Renaissance literature. + +Literature as it developed in the reign of Elizabeth ran counter to the +hopes and desires of the men who began the movement; the common usage +which extends the term Elizabethan backwards outside the limits of the +reign itself, has nothing but its carelessness to recommend it. The men +of the early renaissance in the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, belonged +to a graver school than their successors. They were no splendid +courtiers, nor daring and hardy adventurers, still less swashbucklers, +exquisites, or literary dandies. Their names--Sir John Cheke, Roger +Ascham, Nicholas Udall, Thomas Wilson, Walter Haddon, belong rather to +the universities and to the coteries of learning, than to the court. To +the nobility, from whose essays and _belles lettres_ Elizabethan poetry +was to develop, they stood in the relation of tutors rather than of +companions, suspecting the extravagances of their pupils rather than +sympathising with their ideals. They were a band of serious and +dignified scholars, men preoccupied with morality and good-citizenship, +and holding those as worth more than the lighter interests of learning +and style. It is perhaps characteristic of the English temper that the +revival of the classical tongues, which in Italy made for paganism, and +the pursuit of pleasure in life and art, in England brought with it in +the first place a new seriousness and gravity of life, and in religion +the Reformation. But in a way the scholars fought against tendencies in +their age, which were both too fast and too strong for them. At a time +when young men were writing poetry modelled on the delicate and +extravagant verse of Italy, were reading Italian novels, and affecting +Italian fashions in speech and dress, they were fighting for sound +education, for good classical scholarship, for the purity of native +English, and behind all these for the native strength and worth of the +English character, which they felt to be endangered by orgies of +reckless assimilation from abroad. The revival of the classics at Oxford +and Cambridge could not produce an Erasmus or a Scaliger; we have no +fine critical scholarship of this age to put beside that of Holland or +France. Sir John Cheke and his followers felt they had a public and +national duty to perform, and their knowledge of the classics only +served them for examples of high living and morality, on which +education, in its sense of the formation of character, could be based. + +The literary influence of the revival of letters in England, apart from +its moral influence, took two contradictory and opposing forms. In the +curricula of schools, logic, which in the Middle Ages had been the +groundwork of thought and letters, gave place to rhetoric. The reading +of the ancients awakened new delight in the melody and beauty of +language: men became intoxicated with words. The practice of rhetoric +was universal and it quickly coloured all literature. It was the habit +of the rhetoricians to choose some subject for declamation and round it +to encourage their pupils to set embellishments and decorations, which +commonly proceeded rather from a delight in language for language's +sake, than from any effect in enforcing an argument. Their models for +these exercises can be traced in their influence on later writers. One +of the most popular of them, Erasmus's "Discourse Persuading a Young Man +to Marriage," which was translated in an English text-book of rhetoric, +reminds one of the first part of Shakespeare's sonnets. The literary +affectation called euphuism was directly based on the precepts of the +handbooks on rhetoric; its author, John Lyly, only elaborated and made +more precise tricks of phrase and writing, which had been used as +exercises in the schools of his youth. The prose of his school, with its +fantastic delight in exuberance of figure and sound, owed its +inspiration, in its form ultimately to Cicero, and in the decorations +with which it was embellished, to the elder Pliny and later writers of +his kind. The long declamatory speeches and the sententiousness of the +early drama were directly modelled on Seneca, through whom was faintly +reflected the tragedy of Greece, unknown directly or almost unknown to +English readers. Latinism, like every new craze, became a passion, and +ran through the less intelligent kinds of writing in a wild excess. Not +much of the literature of this time remains in common knowledge, and for +examples of these affectations one must turn over the black letter pages +of forgotten books. There high-sounding and familiar words are handled +and bandied about with delight, and you can see in volume after volume +these minor and forgotten authors gloating over the new found treasure +which placed them in their time in the van of literary success. That +they are obsolete now, and indeed were obsolete before they were dead, +is a warning to authors who intend similar extravagances. Strangeness +and exoticism are not lasting wares. By the time of "Love's Labour Lost" +they had become nothing more than matter for laughter, and it is only +through their reflection and distortion in Shakespeare's pages that we +know them now. + +Had not a restraining influence, anxiously and even acrimoniously urged, +broken in on their endeavours the English language to-day might have +been almost as completely latinized as Spanish or Italian. That the +essential Saxon purity of our tongue has been preserved is to the credit +not of sensible unlettered people eschewing new fashions they could not +comprehend, but to the scholars themselves. The chief service that Cheke +and Ascham and their fellows rendered to English literature was their +crusade against the exaggerated latinity that they had themselves helped +to make possible, the crusade against what they called "inkhorn terms." +"I am of this opinion," said Cheke in a prefatory letter to a book +translated by a friend of his, "that our own tongue should be written +clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with the borrowing of other +tongues, wherein if we take not heed by time, ever borrowing and never +paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt." Writings in +the Saxon vernacular like the sermons of Latimer, who was careful to use +nothing not familiar to the common people, did much to help the scholars +to save our prose from the extravagances which they dreaded. Their +attack was directed no less against the revival of really obsolete +words. It is a paradox worth noting for its strangeness that the first +revival of mediaevalism in modern English literature was in the +Renaissance itself. Talking in studious archaism seems to have been a +fashionable practice in society and court circles. "The fine courtier," +says Thomas Wilson in his _Art of Rhetoric_, "will talk nothing but +Chaucer." The scholars of the English Renaissance fought not only +against the ignorant adoption of their importations, but against the +renewal of forgotten habits of speech. + +Their efforts failed, and their ideals had to wait for their acceptance +till the age of Dryden, when Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, all of +them authors who consistently violated the standards of Cheke, had done +their work. The fine courtier who would talk nothing but Chaucer was in +Elizabeth's reign the saving of English verse. The beauty and richness +of Spenser is based directly on words he got from _Troilus and Cressida_ +and the _Canterbury Tales_. Some of the most sonorous and beautiful +lines in Shakespeare break every canon laid down by the humanists. + +"Th' extravagant and erring spirit hies + To his confine" + +is a line, three of the chief words of which are Latin importations that +come unfamiliarly, bearing their original interpretation with them. +Milton is packed with similar things: he will talk of a crowded meeting +as "frequent" and use constructions which are unintelligible to anyone +who does not possess a knowledge--and a good knowledge--of Latin syntax. +Yet the effect is a good poetic effect. In attacking latinisms in the +language borrowed from older poets Cheke and his companions were +attacking the two chief sources of Elizabethan poetic vocabulary. All +the sonorousness, beauty and dignity of the poetry and the drama which +followed them would have been lost had they succeeded in their object, +and their verse would have been constrained into the warped and ugly +forms of Sternhold and Hopkins, and those with them who composed the +first and worst metrical version of the Psalms. When their idea +reappeared for its fulfilment phantasy and imagery had temporarily worn +themselves out, and the richer language made simplicity possible and +adequate for poetry. + +There are other directions in which the classical revival influenced +writing that need not detain us here. The attempt to transplant +classical metres into English verse which was the concern of a little +group of authors who called themselves the Areopagus came to no more +success than a similar and contemporary attempt did in France. An +earlier and more lasting result of the influence of the classics on new +ways of thinking is the _Utopia_ of Sir Thomas More, based on Plato's +_Republic_, and followed by similar attempts on the part of other +authors, of which the most notable are Harrington's _Oceana_ and Bacon's +_New Atlantis_. In one way or another the rediscovery of Plato proved +the most valuable part of the Renaissance's gift from Greece. The +doctrines of the Symposium coloured in Italy the writings of Castiglione +and Mirandula. In England they gave us Spenser's "Hymn to Intellectual +Beauty," and they affected, each in his own way, Sir Philip Sidney, and +others of the circle of court writers of his time. More's book was +written in Latin, though there is an English translation almost +contemporary. He combines in himself the two strains that we found +working in the Renaissance, for besides its origin in Plato, _Utopia_ +owes not a little to the influence of the voyages of discovery. In 1507 +there was published a little book called an _Introduction to +Cosmography_, which gave an account of the four voyages of Amerigo. In +the story of the fourth voyage it is narrated that twenty-four men were +left in a fort near Cape Bahia. More used this detail as a +starting-point, and one of the men whom Amerigo left tells the story of +this "Nowhere," a republic partly resembling England but most of all the +ideal world of Plato. Partly resembling England, because no man can +escape from the influences of his own time, whatever road he takes, +whether the road of imagination or any other. His imagination can only +build out of the materials afforded him by his own experience: he can +alter, he can rearrange, but he cannot in the strictest sense of the +word create, and every city of dreams is only the scheme of things as +they are remoulded nearer to the desire of a man's heart. In a way More +has less invention than some of his subtler followers, but his book is +interesting because it is the first example of a kind of writing which +has been attractive to many men since his time, and particularly to +writers of our own day. + +There remains one circumstance in the revival of the classics which had +a marked and continuous influence on the literary age that followed. To +get the classics English scholars had as we have seen to go to Italy. +Cheke went there and so did Wilson, and the path of travel across France +and through Lombardy to Florence and Rome was worn hard by the feet of +their followers for over a hundred years after. On the heels of the men +of learning went the men of fashion, eager to learn and copy the new +manners of a society whose moral teacher was Machiavelli, and whose +patterns of splendour were the courts of Florence and Ferrara, and to +learn the trick of verse that in the hands of Petrarch and his followers +had fashioned the sonnet and other new lyric forms. This could not be +without its influence on the manners of the nation, and the scholars who +had been the first to show the way were the first to deplore the +pell-mell assimilation of Italian manners and vices, which was the +unintended result of the inroad on insularity which had already begun. +They saw the danger ahead, and they laboured to meet it as it came. +Ascham in his _Schoolmaster_ railed against the translation of Italian +books, and the corrupt manners of living and false ideas which they +seemed to him to breed. The Italianate Englishman became the chief part +of the stock-in-trade of the satirists and moralists of the day. Stubbs, +a Puritan chronicler, whose book _The Anatomy of Abuses_ is a valuable +aid to the study of Tudor social history, and Harrison, whose +description of England prefaces Holinshed's Chronicles, both deal in +detail with the Italian menace, and condemn in good set terms the +costliness in dress and the looseness in morals which they laid to its +charge. Indeed, the effect on England was profound, and it lasted for +more than two generations. The romantic traveller, Coryat, writing well +within the seventeenth century in praise of the luxuries of Italy (among +which he numbers forks for table use), is as enthusiastic as the authors +who began the imitation of Italian metres in Tottel's _Miscellany_, and +Donne and Hall in their satires written under James wield the rod of +censure as sternly as had Ascham a good half century before. No doubt +there was something in the danger they dreaded, but the evil was not +unmixed with good, for insularity will always be an enemy of good +literature. The Elizabethans learned much more than their plots from +Italian models, and the worst effects dreaded by the patriots never +reached our shores. Italian vice stopped short of real life; poisoning +and hired ruffianism flourished only on the stage. + + +(3) + +The influence of the spirit of discovery and adventure, though it is +less quickly marked, more pervasive, and less easy to define, is perhaps +more universal than that of the classics or of the Italian fashions +which came in their train. It runs right through the literature of +Elizabeth's age and after it, affecting, each in their special way, all +the dramatists, authors who were also adventurers like Raleigh, scholars +like Milton, and philosophers like Hobbes and Locke. It reappears in the +Romantic revival with Coleridge, whose "Ancient Mariner" owes much to +reminiscences of his favourite reading--_Purchas, his Pilgrimes_, and +other old books of voyages. The matter of this too-little noticed strain +in English literature would suffice to fill a whole book; only a few of +the main lines of its influence can be noted here. + +For the English Renaissance--for Elizabeth's England, action and +imagination went hand in hand; the dramatists and poets held up the +mirror to the voyagers. In a sense, the cult of the sea is the oldest +note in English literature. There is not a poem in Anglo-Saxon but +breathes the saltness and the bitterness of the sea-air. To the old +English the sea was something inexpressibly melancholy and desolate, +mist-shrouded, and lonely, terrible in its grey and shivering spaces; +and their tone about it is always elegiac and plaintive, as a place of +dreary spiritless wandering and unmarked graves. When the English +settled they lost the sense of the sea; they became a little parochial +people, tilling fields and tending cattle, wool-gathering and +wool-bartering, their shipping confined to cross-Channel merchandise, +and coastwise sailing from port to port. Chaucer's shipman, almost the +sole representative of the sea in mediaeval English literature, plied a +coastwise trade. But with the Cabots and their followers, Frobisher and +Gilbert and Drake and Hawkins, all this was changed; once more the ocean +became the highway of our national progress and adventure, and by virtue +of our shipping we became competitors for the dominion of the earth. The +rising tide of national enthusiasm and exaltation that this occasioned +flooded popular literature. The voyagers themselves wrote down the +stories of their adventures; and collections of these--Hakluyt's and +Purchas's--were among the most popular books of the age. To them, +indeed, we must look for the first beginnings of our modern English +prose, and some of its noblest passages. The writers, as often as not, +were otherwise utterly unknown--ship's pursers, super-cargoes, and the +like--men without much literary craft or training, whose style is great +because of the greatness of their subject, because they had no literary +artifices to stand between them and the plain and direct telling of a +stirring tale. But the ferment worked outside the actual doings of the +voyagers themselves, and it can be traced beyond definite allusions to +them. Allusions, indeed, are surprisingly few; Drake is scarcely as much +as mentioned among the greater writers of the age. None the less there +is not one of them that is not deeply touched by his spirit and that of +the movement which he led. New lands had been discovered, new +territories opened up, wonders exposed which were perhaps only the first +fruits of greater wonders to come. Spenser makes the voyagers his +warrant for his excursion into fairyland. Some, he says, have condemned +his fairy world as an idle fiction, + +"But let that man with better sense advise; + That of the world least part to us is red; + And daily how through hardy enterprise + Many great regions are discovered, + Which to late age were never mentioned. + Who ever heard of the 'Indian Peru'? + Or who in venturous vessel measured + The Amazon, huge river, now found true? + Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view? + +"Yet all these were, when no man did them know, + Yet have from wiser ages hidden been; + And later times things more unknown shall show." + +It is in the drama that this spirit of adventure caught from the +voyagers gets its full play. "Without the voyagers," says Professor +Walter Raleigh,[1] "Marlowe is inconceivable." His imagination in every +one of his plays is preoccupied with the lust of adventure, and the +wealth and power adventure brings. Tamburlaine, Eastern conqueror though +he is, is at heart an Englishman of the school of Hawkins and Drake. +Indeed the comparison must have occurred to his own age, for a historian +of the day, the antiquary Stow, declares Drake to have been "as famous +in Europe and America as Tamburlaine was in Asia and Africa." The +high-sounding names and quests which seem to us to give the play an air +of unreality and romance were to the Elizabethans real and actual; +things as strange and foreign were to be heard any day amongst the +motley crowd in the Bankside outside the theatre door. Tamburlaine's +last speech, when he calls for a map and points the way to unrealised +conquests, is the very epitome of the age of discovery. + +"Lo, here my sons, are all the golden mines, + Inestimable wares and precious stones, + More worth than Asia and all the world beside; + And from the Antarctic Pole eastward behold + As much more land, which never was descried. + Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright + As all the lamps that beautify the sky." + + +[Footnote 1: To whose terminal essay in "Hakluyt's Voyages" (Maclehose) +I am indebted for much of the matter in this section.] + +It is the same in his other plays. Dr. Faustus assigns to his +serviceable spirits tasks that might have been studied from the books of +Hakluyt + +"I'll have them fly to India for gold, + Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, + And search all corners of the new round world + For pleasant fruits and princely delicates." + +When there is no actual expression of the spirit of adventure, the air +of the sea which it carried with it still blows. Shakespeare, save for +his scenes in _The Tempest_ and in _Pericles_, which seize in all its +dramatic poignancy the terror of storm and shipwreck, has nothing +dealing directly with the sea or with travel; but it comes out, none the +less, in figure and metaphor, and plays like the _Merchant of Venice_ +and _Othello_ testify to his accessibility to its spirit. Milton, a +scholar whose mind was occupied by other and more ultimate matters, is +full of allusions to it. Satan's journey through Chaos in _Paradise +Lost_ is the occasion for a whole series of metaphors drawn from +seafaring. In _Samson Agonistes_ Dalila comes in, + + "Like a stately ship ... +With all her bravery on and tackle trim +Sails frilled and streamers waving +Courted by all the winds that hold them play." + +and Samson speaks of himself as one who, + + "Like a foolish pilot have shipwracked +My vessel trusted to me from above +Gloriously rigged." + +The influence of the voyages of discovery persisted long after the first +bloom of the Renaissance had flowered and withered. On the reports +brought home by the voyagers were founded in part those conceptions of +the condition of the "natural" man which form such a large part of the +philosophic discussions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, +Hobbes's description of the life of nature as "nasty, solitary, brutish, +and short," Locke's theories of civil government, and eighteenth century +speculators like Monboddo all took as the basis of their theory the +observations of the men of travel. Abroad this connection of travellers +and philosophers was no less intimate. Both Montesquieu and Rousseau +owed much to the tales of the Iroquois, the North American Indian allies +of France. Locke himself is the best example of the closeness of this +alliance. He was a diligent student of the texts of the voyagers, and +himself edited out of Hakluyt and Purchas the best collection of them +current in his day. The purely literary influence of the age of +discovery persisted down to _Robinson Crusoe_; in that book by a +refinement of satire a return to travel itself (it must be remembered +Defoe posed not as a novelist but as an actual traveller) is used to +make play with the deductions founded on it. Crusoe's conversation with +the man Friday will be found to be a satire of Locke's famous +controversy with the Bishop of Worcester. With _Robinson Crusoe_ the +influence of the age of discovery finally perishes. An inspiration +hardens into the mere subject matter of books of adventure. We need not +follow it further. + + + + +CHAPTER II + + +ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE + +(1) + +To understand Elizabethan literature it is necessary to remember that +the social status it enjoyed was far different from that of literature +in our own day. The splendours of the Medicis in Italy had set up an +ideal of courtliness, in which letters formed an integral and +indispensable part. For the Renaissance, the man of letters was only one +aspect of the gentleman, and the true gentleman, as books so early and +late respectively as Castiglione's _Courtier_ and Peacham's _Complete +Gentleman_ show, numbered poetry as a necessary part of his +accomplishments. In England special circumstances intensified this +tendency of the time. The queen was unmarried: she was the first single +woman to wear the English crown, and her vanity made her value the +devotion of the men about her as something more intimate than mere +loyalty or patriotism. She loved personal homage, particularly the +homage of half-amatory eulogy in prose and verse. It followed that the +ambition of every courtier was to be an author, and of every author to +be a courtier; in fact, outside the drama, which was almost the only +popular writing at the time, every author was in a greater or less +degree attached to the court. If they were not enjoying its favours they +were pleading for them, mingling high and fantastic compliment with +bitter reproaches and a tale of misery. And consequently both the poetry +and the prose of the time are restricted in their scope and temper to +the artificial and romantic, to high-flown eloquence, to the celebration +of love and devotion, or to the inculcation of those courtly virtues and +accomplishments which composed the perfect pattern of a gentleman. Not +that there was not both poetry and prose written outside this charmed +circle. The pamphleteers and chroniclers, Dekker and Nash, Holinshed and +Harrison and Stow, were setting down their histories and descriptions, +and penning those detailed and realistic indictments of the follies and +extravagances of fashion, which together with the comedies have enabled +us to picture accurately the England and especially the London of +Elizabeth's reign. There was fine poetry written by Marlowe and Chapman +as well as by Sidney and Spenser, but the court was still the main +centre of literary endeavour, and the main incitement to literary fame +and success. + +But whether an author was a courtier or a Londoner living by his wits, +writing was never the main business of his life: all the writers of the +time were in one way or another men of action and affairs. As late as +Milton it is probably true to say that writing was in the case even of +the greatest an avocation, something indulged in at leisure outside a +man's main business. All the Elizabethan authors had crowded and various +careers. Of Sir Philip Sidney his earliest biographer says, "The truth +is his end was not writing, even while he wrote, but both his wit and +understanding bent upon his heart to make himself and others not in +words or opinion but in life and action good and great." Ben Jonson was +in turn a soldier, a poet, a bricklayer, an actor, and ultimately the +first poet laureate. Lodge, after leaving Oxford, passed through the +various professions of soldiering, medicine, playwriting, and fiction, +and he wrote his novel _Rosalind_, on which Shakespeare based _As You +Like It_ while he was sailing on a piratical venture on the Spanish +Main. This connection between life and action affected as we have seen +the tone and quality of Elizabethan writing. "All the distinguished +writers of the period," says Thoreau, "possess a greater vigour and +naturalness than the more modern ... you have constantly the warrant of +life and experience in what you read. The little that is said is eked +out by implication of the much that was done." In another passage the +same writer explains the strength and fineness of the writings of Sir +Walter Raleigh by this very test of action, "The word which is best said +came nearest to not being spoken at all, for it is cousin to a deed +which the speaker could have better done. Nay almost it must have taken +the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, +so that the truest writer will be some captive knight after all." This +bond between literature and action explains more than the writings of +the voyagers or the pamphlets of men who lived in London by what they +could make of their fellows. Literature has always a two-fold relation +to life as it is lived. It is both a mirror and an escape: in our own +day the stirring romances of Stevenson, the full-blooded and vigorous +life which beats through the pages of Mr. Kipling, the conscious +brutalism of such writers as Mr. Conrad and Mr. Hewlett, the plays of +J.M. Synge, occupied with the vigorous and coarse-grained life of +tinkers and peasants, are all in their separate ways a reaction against +an age in which the overwhelming majority of men and women have +sedentary pursuits. Just in the same way the Elizabethan who passed his +commonly short and crowded life in an atmosphere of throat-cutting and +powder and shot, and in a time when affairs of state were more momentous +for the future of the nation than they have ever been since, needed his +escape from the things which pressed in upon him every day. So grew the +vogue and popularity of pastoral poetry and of pastoral romance. + + + +(2) + +It is with two courtiers that modern English poetry begins. The lives of +Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey both ended early and unhappily, +and it was not until ten years after the death of the second of them +that their poems appeared in print. The book that contained them, +Tottel's _Miscellany of Songs and Sonnets_, is one of the landmarks of +English literature. It begins lyrical love poetry in our language. It +begins, too, the imitation and adaptation of foreign and chiefly Italian +metrical forms, many of which have since become characteristic forms of +English verse: so characteristic, that we scarcely think of them as +other than native in origin. To Wyatt belongs the honour of introducing +the sonnet, and to Surrey the more momentous credit of writing, for the +first time in English, blank verse. Wyatt fills the most important place +in the _Miscellany_, and his work, experimental in tone and quality, +formed the example which Surrey and minor writers in the same volume and +all the later poets of the age copied. He tries his hand at +everything--songs, madrigals, elegies, complaints, and sonnets--and he +takes his models from both ancient Rome and modern Italy. Indeed there +is scarcely anything in the volume for which with some trouble and +research one might not find an original in Petrarch, or in the poets of +Italy who followed him. But imitation, universal though it is in his +work, does not altogether crowd out originality of feeling and poetic +temper. At times, he sounds a personal note, his joy on leaving Spain +for England, his feelings in the Tower, his life at the Court amongst +his books, and as a country gentleman enjoying hunting and other outdoor +sports. + +"This maketh me at home to hunt and hawk, + And in foul weather at my book to sit, + In frost and snow, then with my bow to stalk, + No man does mark whereas I ride or go: + In lusty leas at liberty I walk." + +It is easy to see that poetry as a melodious and enriched expression of +a man's own feelings is in its infancy here. The new poets had to find +their own language, to enrich with borrowings from other tongues the +stock of words suitable for poetry which the dropping of inflection had +left to English. Wyatt was at the beginning of the process, and apart +from a gracious and courtly temper, his work has, it must be confessed, +hardly more than an antiquarian interest. Surrey, it is possible to say +on reading his work, went one step further. He allows himself oftener +the luxury of a reference to personal feelings, and his poetry contains +from place to place a fairly full record of the vicissitudes of his +life. A prisoner at Windsor, he recalls his childhood there + +"The large green courts where we were wont to hove, + The palme-play, where, despoiled for the game. + With dazzled eyes oft we by gleams of love + Have missed the ball, and got sight of our dame." + +Like Wyatt's, his verses are poor stuff, but a sympathetic ear can catch +in them something of the accent that distinguishes the verse of Sidney +and Spenser. He is greater than Wyatt, not so much for greater skill as +for more boldness in experiment. Wyatt in his sonnets had used the +Petrarchan or Italian form, the form used later in England by Milton and +in the nineteenth century by Rossetti. He built up each poem, that is, +in two parts, the octave, a two-rhymed section of eight lines at the +beginning, followed by the sestet, a six line close with three rhymes. +The form fits itself very well to the double mood which commonly +inspires a poet using the sonnet form; the second section as it were +both echoing and answering the first, following doubt with hope, or +sadness with resignation, or resolving a problem set itself by the +heart. Surrey tried another manner, the manner which by its use in +Shakespeare's sonnets has come to be regarded as the English form of +this kind of lyric. His sonnets are virtually three-stanza poems with a +couplet for close, and he allows himself as many rhymes as he chooses. +The structure is obviously easier, and it gives a better chance to an +inferior workman, but in the hands of a master its harmonies are no less +delicate, and its capacity to represent changing modes of thought no +less complete than those of the true form of Petrarch. Blank verse, +which was Surrey's other gift to English poetry, was in a way a +compromise between the two sources from which the English Renaissance +drew its inspiration. Latin and Greek verse is quantitative and +rhymeless; Italian verse, built up on the metres of the troubadours and +the degeneration of Latin which gave the world the Romance languages, +used many elaborate forms of rhyme. Blank verse took from Latin its +rhymelessness, but it retained accent instead of quantity as the basis +of its line. The line Surrey used is the five-foot or ten-syllable line +of what is called "heroic verse"--the line used by Chaucer in his +Prologue and most of his tales. Like Milton he deplored rhyme as the +invention of a barbarous age, and no doubt he would have rejoiced to go +further and banish accent as well as rhymed endings. That, however, was +not to be, though in the best blank verse of later time accent and +quantity both have their share in the effect. The instrument he forged +passed into the hands of the dramatists: Marlowe perfected its rhythm, +Shakespeare broke its monotony and varied its cadences by altering the +spacing of the accents, and occasionally by adding an extra unaccented +syllable. It came back from the drama to poetry with Milton. His +blindness and the necessity under which it laid him of keeping in his +head long stretches of verse at one time, because he could not look back +to see what he had written, probably helped his naturally quick and +delicate sense of cadence to vary the pauses, so that a variety of +accent and interval might replace the valuable aid to memory which he +put aside in putting aside rhyme. Perhaps it is to two accidents, the +accident by which blank verse as the medium of the actor had to be +retained easily in the memory, and the accident of Milton's blindness, +that must be laid the credit of more than a little of the richness of +rhythm of this, the chief and greatest instrument of English verse. + +The imitation of Italian and French forms which Wyatt and Surrey began, +was continued by a host of younger amateurs of poetry. Laborious +research has indeed found a Continental original for almost every great +poem of the time, and for very many forgotten ones as well. It is easy +for the student engaged in this kind of literary exploration to +exaggerate the importance of what he finds, and of late years criticism, +written mainly by these explorers, has tended to assume that since it +can be found that Sidney, and Daniel, and Watson, and all the other +writers of mythological poetry and sonnet sequences took their ideas and +their phrases from foreign poetry, their work is therefore to be classed +merely as imitative literary exercise, that it is frigid, that it +contains or conveys no real feeling, and that except in the secondary +and derived sense, it is not really lyrical at all. Petrarch, they will +tell you, may have felt deeply and sincerely about Laura, but when +Sidney uses Petrarch's imagery and even translates his words in order to +express his feelings for Stella, he is only a plagiarist and not a +lover, and the passion for Lady Rich which is supposed to have inspired +his sonnets, nothing more than a not too seriously intended trick to add +the excitement of a transcript of real emotion to what was really an +academic exercise. If that were indeed so, then Elizabethan poetry is a +very much lesser and meaner thing than later ages have thought it. But +is it so? Let us look into the matter a little more closely. The unit of +all ordinary kinds of writing is the word, and one is not commonly +quarrelled with for using words that have belonged to other people. But +the unit of the lyric, like the unit of spoken conversation, is not the +word but the phrase. Now in daily human intercourse the use, which is +universal and habitual, of set forms and phrases of talk is not commonly +supposed to detract from, or destroy sincerity. In the crises indeed of +emotion it must be most people's experience that the natural speech that +rises unbidden and easiest to the lips is something quite familiar and +commonplace, some form which the accumulated experience of many +generations of separate people has found best for such circumstances or +such an occasion. The lyric is just in the position of conversation, at +such a heightened and emotional moment. It is the speech of deep +feeling, that must be articulate or choke, and it falls naturally and +inevitably into some form which accumulated passionate moments have +created and fixed. The course of emotional experiences differs very +little from age to age, and from individual to individual, and so the +same phrases may be used quite sincerely and naturally as the direct +expression of feeling at its highest point by men apart in country, +circumstances, or time. This is not to say that there is no such thing +as originality; a poet is a poet first and most of all because he +discovers truths that have been known for ages, as things that are fresh +and new and vital for himself. He must speak of them in language that +has been used by other men just because they are known truths, but he +will use that language in a new way, and with a new significance, and +it is just in proportion to the freshness, and the air of personal +conviction and sincerity which he imparts to it, that he is great. + +The point at issue bears very directly on the work of Sir Philip Sidney. +In the course of the history of English letters certain authors +disengage themselves who have more than a merely literary position: they +are symbolic of the whole age in which they live, its life and action, +its thoughts and ideals, as well as its mere modes of writing. There are +not many of them and they could be easily numbered; Addison, perhaps, +certainly Dr. Johnson, certainly Byron, and in the later age probably +Tennyson. But the greatest of them all is Sir Philip Sidney: his +symbolical relation to the time in which he lived was realized by his +contemporaries, and it has been a commonplace of history and criticism +ever since. Elizabeth called him one of the jewels of her crown, and at +the age of twenty-three, so fast did genius ripen in that summer time of +the Renaissance, William the Silent could speak of him as "one of the +ripest statesmen of the age." He travelled widely in Europe, knew many +languages, and dreamed of adventure in America and on the high seas. In +a court of brilliant figures, his was the most dazzling, and his death +at Zutphen only served to intensify the halo of romance which had +gathered round his name. His literary exercises were various: in prose +he wrote the _Arcadia_ and the _Apology for Poetry_, the one the +beginning of a new kind of imaginative writing, and the other the first +of the series of those rare and precious commentaries on their own art +which some of our English poets have left us. To the _Arcadia_ we shall +have to return later in this chapter. It is his other great work, the +sequence of sonnets entitled _Astrophel and Stella_, which concerns us +here. They celebrate the history of his love for Penelope Devereux, +sister of the Earl of Essex, a love brought to disaster by the +intervention of Queen Elizabeth with whom he had quarrelled. As poetry +they mark an epoch. They are the first direct expression of an intimate +and personal experience in English literature, struck off in the white +heat of passion, and though they are coloured at times with that +over-fantastic imagery which is at once a characteristic fault and +excellence of the writing of the time, they never lose the one merit +above all others of lyric poetry, the merit of sincerity. The note is +struck with certainty and power in the first sonnet of the series:-- + +"Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, + That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,-- + Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,-- + Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,-- + I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, + Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain; + Oft turning others' leaves to see if thence would flow + Some fresh and fruitful flower upon my sunburned brain. + But words came halting forth ... + Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, + 'Fool,' said my muse to me, 'look in thy heart and write.'" + +And though he turned others' leaves it was quite literally looking in +his heart that he wrote. He analyses the sequence of his feelings with a +vividness and minuteness which assure us of their truth. All that he +tells is the fruit of experience, dearly bought: + +"Desire! desire! I have too dearly bought + With price of mangled mind thy worthless ware. + Too long, too long! asleep thou hast me brought, + Who shouldst my mind to higher things prepare." + +and earlier in the sequence-- + +"I now have learned love right and learned even so + As those that being poisoned poison know." + +In the last two sonnets, with crowning truth and pathos he renounces +earthly love which reaches but to dust, and which because it fades +brings but fading pleasure: + +"Then farewell, world! Thy uttermost I see. + Eternal love, maintain thy life in me." + +The sonnets were published after Sidney's death, and it is certain that +like Shakespeare's they were never intended for publication at all. The +point is important because it helps to vindicate Sidney's sincerity, but +were any vindication needed another more certain might be found. The +_Arcadia_ is strewn with love songs and sonnets, the exercises solely of +the literary imagination. Let any one who wishes to gauge the sincerity +of the impulse of the Stella sequence compare any of the poems in it +with those in the romance. + +With Sir Philip Sidney literature was an avocation, constantly indulged +in, but outside the main business of his life; with Edmund Spenser +public life and affairs were subservient to an overmastering poetic +impulse. He did his best to carve out a career for himself like other +young men of his time, followed the fortunes of the Earl of Leicester, +sought desperately and unavailingly the favour of the Queen, and +ultimately accepted a place in her service in Ireland, which meant +banishment as virtually as a place in India would to-day. Henceforward +his visits to London and the Court were few; sometimes a lover of travel +would visit him in his house in Ireland as Raleigh did, but for the most +he was left alone. It was in this atmosphere of loneliness and +separation, hostile tribes pinning him in on every side, murder lurking +in the woods and marshes round him, that he composed his greatest work. +In it at last he died, on the heels of a sudden rising in which his +house was burnt and his lands over-run by the wild Irish whom the +tyranny of the English planters had driven to vengeance. Spenser was not +without interest in his public duties; his _View of the State of +Ireland_ shows that. But it shows, too, that he brought to them +singularly little sympathy or imagination. Throughout his tone is that +of the worst kind of English officialdom; rigid subjection and in the +last resort massacre are the remedies he would apply to Irish +discontent. He would be a fine text--which might be enforced by modern +examples--for a discourse on the evil effects of immersion in the +government of a subject race upon men of letters. No man of action can +be so consistently and cynically an advocate of brutalism as your man of +letters, Spenser, of course, had his excuses; the problem of Ireland +was new and it was something remote and difficult; in all but the mere +distance for travel, Dublin was as far from London as Bombay is to-day. +But to him and his like we must lay down partly the fact that to-day we +have still an Irish problem. + +But though fate and the necessity of a livelihood drove him to Ireland +and the life of a colonist, poetry was his main business. He had been +the centre of a brilliant set at Cambridge, one of those coteries whose +fame, if they are brilliant and vivacious enough and have enough +self-confidence, penetrates to the outer world before they leave the +University. The thing happens in our own day, as the case of Oscar Wilde +is witness; it happened in the case of Spenser; and when he and his +friends Gabriel Harvey and Edward Kirke came "down" it was to immediate +fame amongst amateurs of the arts. They corresponded with each other +about literary matters, and Harvey published his part of the +correspondence; they played like Du Bellay in France, with the idea of +writing English verse in the quantitative measures of classical poetry; +Spenser had a love affair in Yorkshire and wrote poetry about it, +letting just enough be known to stimulate the imagination of the public. +They tried their hands at everything, imitated everything, and in all +were brilliant, sparkling, and decorative; they got a kind of entrance +to the circle of the Court. Then Spenser published his _Shepherd's +Calendar_, a series of pastoral eclogues for every month of the year, +after a manner taken from French and Italian pastoral writers, but +coming ultimately from Vergil, and Edward Kirke furnished it with an +elaborate prose commentary. Spenser took the same liberties with the +pastoral form as did Vergil himself; that is to say he used it as a +vehicle for satire and allegory, made it carry political and social +allusions, and planted in it references to his friends. By its +publication Spenser became the first poet of the day. It was followed by +some of his finest and most beautiful things--by the Platonic hymns, by +the _Amoretti_, a series of sonnets inspired by his love for his wife; +by the _Epithalamium_, on the occasion of his marriage to her; by +_Mother Hubbard's Tale_, a satire written when despair at the coldness +of the Queen and the enmity of Burleigh was beginning to take hold on +the poet and endowed with a plainness and vigour foreign to most of his +other work--and then by _The Fairy Queen_. + +The poets of the Renaissance were not afraid of big things; every one of +them had in his mind as the goal of poetic endeavour the idea of the +heroic poem, aimed at doing for his own country what Vergil had intended +to do for Rome in the _Aeneid_, to celebrate it--its origin, its +prowess, its greatness, and the causes of it, in epic verse. Milton, +three-quarters of a century later, turned over in his mind the plan of +an English epic on the wars of Arthur, and when he left it was only to +forsake the singing of English origins for the more ultimate theme of +the origins of mankind. Spenser designed to celebrate the character, the +qualities and the training of the English gentleman. And because poetry, +unlike philosophy, cannot deal with abstractions but must be vivid and +concrete, he was forced to embody his virtues and foes to virtue and to +use the way of allegory. His outward plan, with its knights and dragons +and desperate adventures, he procured from Ariosto. As for the use of +allegory, it was one of the discoveries of the Middle Ages which the +Renaissance condescended to retain. Spenser elaborated it beyond the +wildest dreams of those students of Holy Writ who had first conceived +it. His stories were to be interesting in themselves as tales of +adventure, but within them they were to conceal an intricate treatment +of the conflict of truth and falsehood in morals and religion. A +character might typify at once Protestantism and England and Elizabeth +and chastity and half the cardinal virtues, and it would have all the +while the objective interest attaching to it as part of a story of +adventure. All this must have made the poem difficult enough. Spenser's +manner of writing it made it worse still. One is familiar with the type +of novel which only explains itself when the last chapter is +reached--Stevenson's _Wrecker_ is an example. _The Fairy Queen_ was +designed on somewhat the same plan. The last section was to relate and +explain the unrelated and unexplained books which made up the poem, and +at the court to which the separate knights of the separate books--the +Red Cross Knight and the rest--were to bring the fruit of their +adventures, everything was to be made clear. Spenser did not live to +finish his work; _The Fairy Queen_, like the _Aeneid_, is an uncompleted +poem, and it is only from a prefatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh +issued with the second published section that we know what the poem was +intended to be. Had Spenser not published this explanation, it is +impossible that anybody, even the acutest minded German professor, could +have guessed. + +The poem, as we have seen, was composed in Ireland, in the solitude of a +colonists' plantation, and the author was shut off from his fellows +while he wrote. The influence of his surroundings is visible in the +writing. The elaboration of the theme would have been impossible or at +least very unlikely if its author had not been thrown in on himself +during its composition. Its intricacy and involution is the product of +an over-concentration born of empty surroundings. It lacks vigour and +rapidity; it winds itself into itself. The influence of Ireland, too, is +visible in its landscapes, in its description of bogs and desolation, of +dark forests in which lurk savages ready to spring out on those who are +rash enough to wander within their confines. All the scenery in it which +is not imaginary is Irish and not English scenery. + +Its reception in England and at the Court was enthusiastic. Men and +women read it eagerly and longed for the next section as our +grandfathers longed for the next section of _Pickwick_. They really +liked it, really loved the intricacy and luxuriousness of it, the heavy +exotic language, the thickly painted descriptions, the languorous melody +of the verse. Mainly, perhaps, that was so because they were all either +in wish or in deed poets themselves. Spenser has always been "the +poets' poet." Milton loved him; so did Dryden, who said that Milton +confessed to him that Spenser was "his original," a statement which has +been pronounced incredible, but is, in truth, perfectly comprehensible, +and most likely true. Pope admired him; Keats learned from him the best +part of his music. You can trace echoes of him in Mr. Yeats. What is it +that gives him this hold on his peers? Well, in the first place his +defects do not detract from his purely poetic qualities. The story is +impossibly told, but that will only worry those who are looking for a +story. The allegory is hopelessly difficult; but as Hazlitt said "the +allegory will not bite you"; you can let it alone. The crudeness and +bigotry of Spenser's dealings with Catholicism, which are ridiculous +when he pictures the monster Error vomiting books and pamphlets, and +disgusting when he draws Mary Queen of Scots, do not hinder the pleasure +of those who read him for his language and his art. He is great for +other reasons than these. First because of the extraordinary smoothness +and melody of his verse and the richness of his language--a golden +diction that he drew from every source--new words, old words, obsolete +words--such a mixture that the purist Ben Jonson remarked acidly that he +wrote no language at all. Secondly because of the profusion of his +imagery, and the extraordinarily keen sense for beauty and sweetness +that went to its making. In an age of golden language and gallant +imagery his was the most golden and the most gallant. And the language +of poetry in England is richer and more varied than that in any other +country in Europe to-day, because of what he did. + + +(3) + +Elizabethan prose brings us face to face with a difficulty which has to +be met by every student of literature. Does the word "literature" cover +every kind of writing? Ought we to include in it writing that aims +merely at instruction or is merely journey-work, as well as writing that +has an artistic intention, or writing that, whether its author knew it +or no, is artistic in its result? Of course such a question causes us no +sort of difficulty when it concerns itself only with what is being +published to-day. We know very well that some things are literature and +some merely journalism; that of novels, for instance, some deliberately +intend to be works of art and others only to meet a passing desire for +amusement or mental occupation. We know that most books serve or attempt +to serve only a useful and not a literary purpose. But in reading the +books of three centuries ago, unconsciously one's point of view shifts. +Antiquity gilds journey-work; remoteness and quaintness of phrasing lend +a kind of distinction to what are simply pamphlets or text-books that +have been preserved by accident from the ephemeralness which was the +common lot of hundreds of their fellows. One comes to regard as +literature things that had no kind of literary value for their first +audiences; to apply the same seriousness of judgment and the same tests +to the pamphlets of Nash and Dekker as to the prose of Sidney and +Bacon. One loses, in fact, that power to distinguish the important from +the trivial which is one of the functions of a sound literary taste. +Now, a study of the minor writing of the past is, of course, well worth +a reader's pains. Pamphlets, chronicle histories, text-books and the +like have an historical importance; they give us glimpses of the manners +and habits and modes of thought of the day. They tell us more about the +outward show of life than do the greater books. If you are interested in +social history, they are the very thing. But the student of literature +ought to beware of them, nor ought he to touch them till he is familiar +with the big and lasting things. A man does not possess English +literature if he knows what Dekker tells of the seven deadly sins of +London and does not know the _Fairy Queen_. Though the wide and curious +interest of the Romantic critics of the nineteenth century found and +illumined the byways of Elizabethan writing, the safest method of +approach is the method of their predecessors--to keep hold on common +sense, to look at literature, not historically as through the wrong end +of a telescope, but closely and without a sense of intervening time, to +know the best--the "classic"--and study it before the minor things. + +In Elizabeth's reign, prose became for the first time, with cheapened +printing, the common vehicle of amusement and information, and the books +that remain to us cover many departments of writing. There are the +historians who set down for us for the first time what they knew of the +earlier history of England. There are the writers, like Harrison and +Stubbs, who described the England of their own day, and there are many +authors, mainly anonymous, who wrote down the accounts of the voyages of +the discoverers in the Western Seas. There are the novelists who +translated stories mainly from Italian sources. But of authors as +conscious of a literary intention as the poets were, there are only two, +Sidney and Lyly, and of authors who, though their first aim was hardly +an artistic one, achieved an artistic result, only Hooker and the +translators of the Bible. The Authorized Version of the Bible belongs +strictly not to the reign of Elizabeth but to that of James, and we +shall have to look at it when we come to discuss the seventeenth +century. Hooker, in his book on Ecclesiastical Polity (an endeavour to +set forth the grounds of orthodox Anglicanism) employed a generous, +flowing, melodious style which has influenced many writers since and is +familiar to us to-day in the copy of it used by Ruskin in his earlier +works. Lyly and Sidney are worth looking at more closely. + +The age was intoxicated with language. It went mad of a mere delight in +words. Its writers were using a new tongue, for English was enriched +beyond all recognition with borrowings from the ancient authors; and +like all artists who become possessed of a new medium, they used it to +excess. The early Elizabethans' use of the new prose was very like the +use that educated Indians make of English to-day. It is not that these +write it incorrectly, but only that they write too richly. And just as +fuller use and knowledge teaches them spareness and economy and gives +their writing simplicity and vigour, so seventeenth century practice +taught Englishmen to write a more direct and undecorated style and gave +us the smooth, simple, and vigorous writing of Dryden--the first really +modern English prose. But the Elizabethans loved gaudier methods; they +liked highly decorative modes of expression, in prose no less than in +verse. The first author to give them these things was John Lyly, whose +book _Euphues_ was for the five or six years following its publication a +fashionable craze that infected all society and gave its name to a +peculiar and highly artificial style of writing that coloured the work +of hosts of obscure and forgotten followers. Lyly wrote other things; +his comedies may have taught Shakespeare the trick of _Love's Labour +Lost_; he attempted a sequel of his most famous work with better success +than commonly attends sequels, but for us and for his own generation he +is the author of one book. Everybody read it, everybody copied it. The +maxims and sentences of advice for gentlemen which it contained were +quoted and admired in the Court, where the author, though he never +attained the lucrative position he hoped for, did what flattery could do +to make a name for himself. The name "Euphuism" became a current +description of an artificial way of using words that overflowed out of +writing into speech and was in the mouths, while the vogue lasted, of +everybody who was anybody in the circle that fluttered round the Queen. + +The style of _Euphues_ was parodied by Shakespeare and many attempts +have been made to imitate it since. Most of them are inaccurate--Sir +Walter Scott's wild attempt the most inaccurate of all. They fail +because their authors have imagined that "Euphuism" is simply a highly +artificial and "flowery" way of talking. As a matter of fact it is made +up of a very exact and very definite series of parts. The writing is +done on a plan which has three main characteristics as follows. First, +the structure of the sentence is based on antithesis and alliteration; +that is to say, it falls into equal parts similar in sound but with a +different sense; for example, Euphues is described as a young gallant +"of more wit than wealth, yet of more wealth than wisdom." All the +characters in the book, which is roughly in the form of a novel, speak +in this way, sometimes in sentences long drawn out which are +oppressively monotonous and tedious, and sometimes shortly with a +certain approach to epigram. The second characteristic of the style is +the reference of every stated fact to some classical authority, that is +to say, the author cannot mention friendship without quoting David and +Jonathan, nor can lovers in his book accuse each other of faithlessness +without quoting the instance of Cressida or Aeneas. This appeal to +classical authority and wealth of classical allusion is used to decorate +pages which deal with matters of every-day experience. Seneca, for +instance, is quoted as reporting "that too much bending breaketh the +bow," a fact which might reasonably have been supposed to be known to +the author himself. This particular form of writing perhaps influenced +those who copied Lyly more than anything else in his book. It is a +fashion of the more artificial kind of Elizabethan writing in all +schools to employ a wealth of classical allusion. Even the simple +narratives in _Hakluyt's Voyages_ are not free from it, and one may +hardly hope to read an account of a voyage to the Indies without +stumbling on a preliminary reference to the opinions of Aristotle and +Plato. Lastly, _Euphues_ is characterised by an extraordinary wealth of +allusion to natural history, mostly of a fabulous kind. "I have read +that the bull being tied to the fig tree loseth his tail; that the whole +herd of deer stand at gaze if they smell a sweet apple; that the dolphin +after the sound of music is brought to the shore," and so on. His book +is full of these things, and the style weakens and loses its force +because of them. + +Of course there is much more in his book than this outward decoration. +He wrote with the avowed purpose of instructing courtiers and gentlemen +how to live. _Euphues_ is full of grave reflections and weighty morals, +and is indeed a collection of essays on education, on friendship, on +religion and philosophy, and on the favourite occupation and curriculum +of Elizabethan youth--foreign travel. The fashions and customs of his +countrymen which he condemns in the course of his teaching are the same +as those inveighed against by Stubbs and other contemporaries. He +disliked manners and fashions copied from Italy; particularly he +disliked the extravagant fashions of women. One woman only escapes his +censure, and she, of course, is the Queen, whom Euphues and his +companion in the book come to England to see. In the main the teaching +of Euphues inculcates a humane and liberal, if not very profound creed, +and the book shares with _The Fairy Queen_ the honour of the earlier +Puritanism--the Puritanism that besides the New Testament had the +_Republic_. + +But Euphues, though he was in his time the popular idol, was not long in +finding a successful rival. Seven years before his death Sir Philip +Sidney, in a period of retirement from the Court wrote "_The Countess of +Pembroke's Arcadia_"; it was published ten years after it had been +composed. The _Arcadia_ is the first English example of the prose +pastoral romance, as the _Shepherd's Calendar_ is of our pastoral verse. +Imitative essays in its style kept appearing for two hundred years after +it, till Wordsworth and other poets who knew the country drove its +unrealities out of literature. The aim of it and of the school to which +it belonged abroad was to find a setting for a story which should leave +the author perfectly free to plant in it any improbability he liked, and +to do what he liked with the relations of his characters. In the shade +of beech trees, the coils of elaborated and intricate love-making wind +and unravel themselves through an endless afternoon. In that art nothing +is too far-fetched, nothing too sentimental, no sorrow too unreal. The +pastoral romance was used, too, to cover other things besides a +sentimental and decorative treatment of love. Authors wrapped up as +shepherds their political friends and enemies, and the pastoral eclogues +in verse which Spenser and others composed are full of personal and +political allusion. Sidney's story carries no politics and he depends +for its interest solely on the wealth of differing episodes and the +stories and arguments of love which it contains. The story would furnish +plot enough for twenty ordinary novels, but probably those who read it +when it was published were attracted by other things than the march of +its incidents. Certainly no one could read it for the plot now. Its +attraction is mainly one of style. It goes, you feel, one degree beyond +_Euphues_ in the direction of freedom and poetry. And just because of +this greater freedom, its characteristics are much less easy to fix than +those of _Euphues_. Perhaps its chief quality is best described as that +of exhaustiveness. Sidney will take a word and toss it to and fro in a +page till its meaning is sucked dry and more than sucked dry. On page +after page the same trick is employed, often in some new and charming +way, but with the inevitable effect of wearying the reader, who tries to +do the unwisest of all things with a book of this kind--to read on. This +trick of bandying words is, of course, common in Shakespeare. Other +marks of Sidney's style belong similarly to poetry rather than to prose. +Chief of them is what Ruskin christened the "pathetic fallacy"--the +assumption (not common in his day) which connects the appearance of +nature with the moods of the artist who looks at it, or demands such a +connection. In its day the _Arcadia_ was hailed as a reformation by men +nauseated by the rhythmical patterns of Lyly. A modern reader finds +himself confronting it in something of the spirit that he would confront +the prose romances, say, of William Morris, finding it charming as a +poet's essay in prose but no more: not to be ranked with the highest. + + + + +CHAPTER III + + +THE DRAMA + +(1) + +Biologists tell us that the hybrid--the product of a variety of +ancestral stocks--is more fertile than an organism with a direct and +unmixed ancestry; perhaps the analogy is not too fanciful as the +starting-point of a study of Elizabethan drama, which owed its strength +and vitality, more than to anything else, to the variety of the +discordant and contradictory elements of which it was made up. The drama +was the form into which were moulded the thoughts and desires of the +best spirits of the time. It was the flower of the age. To appreciate +its many-sided significances and achievements it is necessary to +disentangle carefully its roots, in religion, in the revival of the +classics, in popular entertainments, in imports from abroad, in the air +of enterprise and adventure which belonged to the time. + +As in Greece, drama in England was in its beginning a religious thing. +Its oldest continuous tradition was from the mediaeval Church. Early in +the Middle Ages the clergy and their parishioners began the habit, at +Christmas, Easter and other holy days, of playing some part of the story +of Christ's life suitable to the festival of the day. These plays were +liturgical, and originally, no doubt, overshadowed by a choral element. +But gradually the inherent human capacity for mimicry and drama took the +upper hand; from ceremonies they developed into performances; they +passed from the stage in the church porch to the stage in the street. A +waggon, the natural human platform for mimicry or oratory, became in +England as it was in Greece, the cradle of the drama. This momentous +change in the history of the miracle play, which made it in all but its +occasion and its subject a secular thing, took place about the end of +the twelfth century. The rise of the town guilds gave the plays a new +character; the friendly rivalry of leagued craftsmen elaborated their +production; and at length elaborate cycles were founded which were +performed at Whitsuntide, beginning at sunrise and lasting all through +the day right on to dusk. Each town had its own cycle, and of these the +cycles of York, Wakefield, Chester and Coventry still remain. So too, +does an eye-witness's account of a Chester performance where the plays +took place yearly on three days, beginning with Whit Monday. "The +manner of these plays were, every company had his pageant or part, a +high scaffold with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels. In +the lower they apparelled themselves and in the higher room they played, +being all open on the top that all beholders might hear and see them. +They began first at the abbey gates, and when the first pageant was +played, it was wheeled to the high cross before the mayor and so to +every street. So every street had a pageant playing upon it at one time, +till all the pageants for the day appointed were played." The +"companies" were the town guilds and the several "pageants" different +scenes in Old or New Testament story. As far as was possible each +company took for its pageant some Bible story fitting to its trade; in +York the goldsmiths played the three Kings of the East bringing precious +gifts, the fishmongers the flood, and the shipwrights the building of +Noah's ark. The tone of these plays was not reverent; reverence after +all implies near at hand its opposite in unbelief. But they were +realistic and they contained within them the seeds of later drama in the +aptitude with which they grafted into the sacred story pastoral and city +manners taken straight from life. The shepherds who watched by night at +Bethlehem were real English shepherds furnished with boisterous and +realistic comic relief. Noah was a real shipwright. + +"It shall be clinched each ilk and deal. + With nails that are both noble and new + Thus shall I fix it to the keel, + Take here a rivet and there a screw, + With there bow there now, work I well, + This work, I warrant, both good and true." + +Cain and Abel were English farmers just as truly as Bottom and his +fellows were English craftsmen. But then Julius Caesar has a doublet and +in Dutch pictures the apostles wear broad-brimmed hats. Squeamishness +about historical accuracy is of a later date, and when it came we gained +in correctness less than we lost in art. + +The miracle plays, then, are the oldest antecedent of Elizabethan drama, +but it must not be supposed they were over and done with before the +great age began. The description of the Chester performances, part of +which has been quoted, was written in 1594. Shakespeare must, one would +think, have seen the Coventry cycle; at any rate he was familiar, as +every one of the time must have been, with the performances; +"Out-heroding Herod" bears witness to that. One must conceive the +development of the Elizabethan age as something so rapid in its +accessibility to new impressions and new manners and learning and modes +of thought that for years the old and new subsisted side by side. Think +of modern Japan, a welter of old faiths and crafts and ideals and +inrushing Western civilization all mixed up and side by side in the +strangest contrasts and you will understand what it was. The miracle +plays stayed on beside Marlowe and Shakespeare till Puritanism frowned +upon them. But when the end came it came quickly. The last recorded +performance took place in London when King James entertained Gondomar, +the Spanish ambassador. And perhaps we should regard that as a "command" +performance, reviving as command performances commonly do, something +dead for a generation--in this case, purely out of compliment to the +faith and inclination of a distinguished guest. + +Next in order of development after the miracle or mystery plays, though +contemporary in their popularity, came what we called "moralities" or +"moral interludes"--pieces designed to enforce a religious or ethical +lesson and perhaps to get back into drama something of the edification +which realism had ousted from the miracles. They dealt in allegorical +and figurative personages, expounded wise saws and moral lessons, and +squared rather with the careful self-concern of the newly established +Protestantism than with the frank and joyous jest in life which was more +characteristic of the time. _Everyman_, the oftenest revived and best +known of them, if not the best, is very typical of the class. They had +their influences, less profound than that of the miracles, on the full +drama. It is said the "Vice"--unregeneracy commonly degenerated into +comic relief--is the ancestor of the fool in Shakespeare, but more +likely both are successive creations of a dynasty of actors who +practised the unchanging and immemorial art of the clown. The general +structure of _Everyman_ and some of its fellows, heightened and made +more dramatic, gave us Marlowe's _Faustus_. There perhaps the influence +ends. + +The rise of a professional class of actors brought one step nearer the +full growth of drama. Companies of strolling players formed themselves +and passed from town to town, seeking like the industrious amateurs of +the guilds, civic patronage, and performing in town-halls, market-place +booths, or inn yards, whichever served them best. The structure of the +Elizabethan inn yard (you may see some survivals still, and there are +the pictures in _Pickwick_) was very favourable for their purpose. The +galleries round it made seats like our boxes and circle for the more +privileged spectators; in the centre on the floor of the yard stood the +crowd or sat, if they had stools with them. The stage was a platform set +on this floor space with its back against one side of the yard, where +perhaps one of the inn-rooms served as a dressing room. So suitable was +this "fit-up" as actors call it, that when theatres came to be built in +London they were built on the inn-yard pattern. All the playhouses of +the Bankside from the "Curtain" to the "Globe" were square or circular +places with galleries rising above one another three parts round, a +floor space of beaten earth open to the sky in the middle, and jutting +out on to it a platform stage with a tiring room capped by a gallery +behind it. + +The entertainment given by these companies of players (who usually got +the patronage and took the title of some lord) was various. They played +moralities and interludes, they played formless chronicle history plays +like the _Troublesome Reign of King John_, on which Shakespeare worked +for his _King John_; but above and before all they were each a company +of specialists, every one of whom had his own talent and performance for +which he was admired. The Elizabethan stage was the ancestor of our +music-hall, and to the modern music-hall rather than to the theatre it +bears its affinity. If you wish to realize the aspect of the Globe or +the Blackfriars it is to a lower class music-hall you must go. The +quality of the audience is a point of agreement. The Globe was +frequented by young "bloods" and by the more disreputable portions of +the community, racing men (or their equivalents of that day) "coney +catchers" and the like; commonly the only women present were women of +the town. The similarity extends from the auditorium to the stage. The +Elizabethan playgoer delighted in virtuosity; in exhibitions of strength +or skill from his actors; the broad sword combat in _Macbeth_, and the +wrestling in _As You Like It_, were real trials of skill. The bear in +the _Winter's Tale_ was no doubt a real bear got from a bear pit, near +by in the Bankside. The comic actors especially were the very +grandfathers of our music-hall stars; Tarleton and Kemp and Cowley, the +chief of them, were as much popular favourites and esteemed as separate +from the plays they played in as is Harry Lauder. Their songs and tunes +were printed and sold in hundreds as broadsheets, just as pirated +music-hall songs are sold to-day. This is to be noted because it +explains a great deal in the subsequent evolution of the drama. It +explains the delight in having everything represented actually on the +stage, all murders, battles, duels. It explains the magnificent largesse +given by Shakespeare to the professional fool. Work had to be found for +him, and Shakespeare, whose difficulties were stepping-stones to his +triumphs, gave him Touchstone and Feste, the Porter in _Macbeth_ and the +Fool in _Lear_. Others met the problem in an attitude of frank despair. +Not all great tragic writers can easily or gracefully wield the pen of +comedy, and Marlowe in _Dr. Faustus_ took the course of leaving the low +comedy which the audience loved and a high salaried actor demanded, to +an inferior collaborator. + +Alongside this drama of street platforms and inn-yards and public +theatres, there grew another which, blending with it, produced the +Elizabethan drama which we know. The public theatres were not the only +places at which plays were produced. At the University, at the Inns of +Court (which then more than now, were besides centres of study rather +exclusive and expensive clubs), and at the Court they were an important +part of almost every festival. At these places were produced academic +compositions, either allegorical like the masques, copies of which we +find in Shakespeare and by Ben Jonson, or comedies modelled on Plautus +or Terence, or tragedies modelled on Seneca. The last were incomparably +the most important. The Elizabethan age, which always thought of +literature as a guide or handmaid to life, was naturally attracted to a +poet who dealt in maxims and "sentences"; his rhetoric appealed to men +for whom words and great passages of verse were an intoxication that +only a few to-day can understand or sympathize with; his +bloodthirstiness and gloom to an age so full-blooded as not to shrink +from horrors. Tragedies early began to be written on the strictly +Senecan model, and generally, like Seneca's, with some ulterior +intention. Sackville's _Gorboduc_, the first tragedy in English, +produced at a great festival at the Inner Temple, aimed at inducing +Elizabeth to marry and save the miseries of a disputed succession. To be +put to such a use argues the importance and dignity of this classical +tragedy of the learned societies and the court. None of the pieces +composed in this style were written for the popular theatre, and indeed +they could not have been a success on it. The Elizabethan audience, as +we have seen, loved action, and in these Senecan tragedies the action +took place "off." But they had a strong and abiding influence on the +popular stage; they gave it its ghosts, its supernatural warnings, its +conception of nemesis and revenge, they gave it its love of +introspection and the long passages in which introspection, description +or reflection, either in soliloquy or dialogue, holds up the action; +contradictorily enough they gave it something at least of its melodrama. +Perhaps they helped to enforce the lesson of the miracle plays that a +dramatist's proper business was elaboration rather than invention. None +of the Elizabethan dramatists except Ben Jonson habitually constructed +their own plots. Their method was to take something ready at their hands +and overlay it with realism or poetry or romance. The stories of their +plays, like that of Hamlet's Mousetrap, were "extant and writ in choice +Italian," and very often their methods of preparation were very like +his. + +Something of the way in which the spirit of adventure of the time +affected and finished the drama we have already seen. It is time now to +turn to the dramatists themselves. + + +(2) + +Of Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, and Peele, the "University Wits" who fused the +academic and the popular drama, and by giving the latter a sense of +literature and learning to mould it to finer issues, gave us +Shakespeare, only Marlowe can be treated here. Greene and Peele, the +former by his comedies, the latter by his historical plays, and Kyd by +his tragedies, have their places in the text-books, but they belong to a +secondary order of dramatic talent. Marlowe ranks amongst the greatest. +It is not merely that historically he is the head and fount of the whole +movement, that he changed blank verse, which had been a lumbering +instrument before him, into something rich and ringing and rapid and +made it the vehicle for the greatest English poetry after him. +Historical relations apart, he is great in himself. More than any other +English writer of any age, except Byron, he symbolizes the youth of his +time; its hot-bloodedness, its lust after knowledge and power and life +inspires all his pages. The teaching of Machiavelli, misunderstood for +their own purposes by would-be imitators, furnished the reign of +Elizabeth with the only political ideals it possessed. The simple +brutalism of the creed, with means justified by ends and the unbridled +self-regarding pursuit of power, attracted men for whom the Spanish +monarchy and the struggle to overthrow it were the main factors and +politics. Marlowe took it and turned it to his own uses. There is in his +writings a lust of power, "a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness," a +glow of the imagination unhallowed by anything but its own energy which +is in the spirit of the time. In _Tamburlaine_ it is the power of +conquest, stirred by and reflecting, as we have seen, the great deeds of +his day. In _Dr. Faustus_ it is the pride of will and eagerness of +curiosity. Faustus is devoured by a tormenting desire to enlarge his +knowledge to the utmost bounds of nature and art and to extend his power +with his knowledge. His is the spirit of Renaissance scholarship +heightened to a passionate excess. The play gleams with the pride of +learning and a knowledge which learning brings, and with the nemesis +that comes after it. "Oh! gentlemen! hear me with patience and tremble +not at my speeches. Though my heart pant and quiver to remember that I +have been a student here these thirty years; oh! I would I had never +seen Wittemburg, never read book!" And after the agonizing struggle in +which Faustus's soul is torn from him to hell, learning comes in at the +quiet close. + +"Yet, for he was a scholar once admired, +For wondrous knowledge in our German Schools; +We'll give his mangled limbs due burial; +And all the students, clothed in mourning black +Shall wait upon his heavy funeral." + +Some one character is a centre of over-mastering pride and ambition in +every play. In the _Jew of Malta_ it is the hero Barabbas. In _Edward +II_. it is Piers Gaveston. In _Edward II_. indeed, two elements are +mixed--the element of Machiavelli and Tamburlaine in Gaveston, and the +purely tragic element which evolves from within itself the style in +which it shall be treated, in the King. "The reluctant pangs of +abdicating Royalty," wrote Charles Lamb in a famous passage, "furnished +hints which Shakespeare scarcely improved in his _Richard II_; and the +death scene of Marlowe's King moves pity and terror beyond any scene, +ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted." Perhaps the play gives +the hint of what Marlowe might have become had not the dagger of a groom +in a tavern cut short at thirty his burning career. + +Even in that time of romance and daring speculation he went further than +his fellows. He was said to have been tainted with atheism, to have +denied God and the Trinity; had he lived he might have had trouble with +the Star Chamber. The free-voyaging intellect of the age found this one +way of outlet, but if literary evidences are to be trusted sixteenth and +seventeenth century atheism was a very crude business. The _Atheist's +Tragedy_ of Tourneur (a dramatist who need not otherwise detain us) +gives some measure of its intelligence and depth. Says the villain to +the heroine, + + "No? Then invoke +Your great supposed Protector. I will do't." + +to which she: + +"Supposed Protector! Are you an atheist, then + I know my fears and prayers are spent in vain." + +Marlowe's very faults and extravagances, and they are many, are only the +obverse of his greatness. Magnitude and splendour of language when the +thought is too shrunken to fill it out, becomes mere inflation. He was a +butt of the parodists of the day. And Shakespeare, though he honoured +him "on this side idolatry," did his share of ridicule. Ancient Pistol +is fed and stuffed with relic and rags of Marlowesque affectation-- + +"Holla! ye pampered jades of Asia, + Can ye not draw but twenty miles a day." + +is a quotation taken straight from _Tamburlaine_. + + +(3) + +A study of Shakespeare, who refuses to be crushed within the limits of a +general essay is no part of the plan of this book. We must take up the +story of the drama with the reign of James and with the contemporaries +of his later period, though of course, a treatment which is conditioned +by the order of development is not strictly chronological, and some of +the plays we shall have to refer to belong to the close of the sixteenth +century. We are apt to forget that alongside Shakespeare and at his +heels other dramatists were supplying material for the theatre. The +influence of Marlowe and particularly of Kyd, whose _Spanish Tragedy_ +with its crude mechanism of ghosts and madness and revenge caught the +popular taste, worked itself out in a score of journeymen dramatists, +mere hack writers, who turned their hand to plays as the hacks of to-day +turn their hand to novels, and with no more literary merit than that +caught as an echo from better men than themselves. One of the worst of +these--he is also one of the most typical--was John Marston, a purveyor +of tragic gloom and sardonic satire, and an impostor in both, whose +tragedy _Antonio and Mellida_ was published in the same year as +Shakespeare's _Hamlet_. Both plays owed their style and plot to the same +tradition--the tradition created by Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_--in which +ghostly promptings to revenge, terrible crime, and a feigned madman +waiting his opportunity are the elements of tragedy. Nothing could be +more fruitful in an understanding of the relations of Shakespeare to his +age than a comparison of the two. The style of _Antonio and Mellida_ is +the style of _The Murder of Gonzago_. There is no subtlety nor +introspection, the pale cast of thought falls with no shadow over its +scenes. And it is typical of a score of plays of the kind we have and +beyond doubt of hundreds that have perished. Shakespeare stands alone. + +Beside this journey-work tragedy of revenge and murder which had its +root through Kyd and Marlowe in Seneca and in Italian romance, there was +a journey-work comedy of low life made up of loosely constructed strings +of incidents, buffoonery and romance, that had its roots in a joyous and +fantastic study of the common people. These plays are happy and +high-spirited and, compared with the ordinary run of the tragedies, of +better workmanship. They deal in the familiar situations of low +comedy--the clown, the thrifty citizen and his frivolous wife, the +gallant, the bawd, the good apprentice and the bad portrayed vigorously +and tersely and with a careless kindly gaiety that still charms in the +reading. The best writers in this kind were Middleton and Dekker--and +the best play to read as a sample of it _Eastward Ho!_ in which Marston +put off his affectation of sardonical melancholy and joined with Jonson +and Dekker to produce what is the masterpiece of the non-Shakespearean +comedy of the time. + +For all our habit of grouping their works together it is a far cry in +spirit and temperament from the dramatists whose heyday was under +Elizabeth and those who reached their prime under her successor. Quickly +though insensibly the temper of the nation suffered eclipse. The high +hopes and the ardency of the reign of Elizabeth saddened into a profound +pessimism and gloom in that of James. This apparition of unsought +melancholy has been widely noted and generally assumed to be +inexplicable. In broad outline its causes are clear enough, "To travel +hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." The Elizabethans were, if +ever any were, hopeful travellers. The winds blew them to the four +quarters of the world; they navigated all seas; they sacked rich cities. +They beat off the great Armada, and harried the very coasts of Spain. +They pushed discovery to the ends of the world and amassed great wealth. +Under James all these things were over. Peace was made with Spain: +national pride was wounded by the solicitous anxiety of the King for a +Spanish marriage for the heir to the throne. Sir Walter Raleigh, a +romantic adventurer lingering beyond his time, was beheaded out of hand +by the ungenerous timidity of the monarch to whom had been transferred +devotion and loyalty he was unfitted to receive. The Court which had +been a centre of flashing and gleaming brilliance degenerated into a +knot of sycophants humouring the pragmatic and self-important folly of a +king in whom had implanted themselves all the vices of the Scots and +none of their virtues. Nothing seemed left remarkable beneath the +visiting moon. The bright day was done and they were for the dark. The +uprising of Puritanism and the shadow of impending religious strife +darkened the temper of the time. + +The change affected all literature and particularly the drama, which +because it appeals to what all men have in common, commonly reflects +soonest a change in the outlook or spirits of a people. The onslaughts +of the dramatists on the Puritans, always implacable enemies of the +theatre, became more virulent and envenomed. What a difference between +the sunny satire of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and the dark animosity of _The +Atheists' Tragedy_ with its Languebeau Snuffe ready to carry out any +villainy proposed to him! "I speak sir," says a lady in the same play to +a courtier who played with her in an attempt to carry on a quick witted, +"conceited" love passage in the vein of _Much Ado_, "I speak, sir, as +the fashion now: is, in earnest." The quick-witted, light-hearted age +was gone. It is natural that tragedy reflected this melancholy in its +deepest form. Gloom deepened and had no light to relieve it, men supped +full of horrors--there was no slackening of the tension, no concession +to overwrought nerves, no resting-place for the overwrought soul. It is +in the dramatist John Webster that this new spirit has its most powerful +exponent. + +The influence of Machiavelli, which had given Marlowe tragic figures +that were bright and splendid and burning, smouldered in Webster into a +duskier and intenser heat. His fame rests on two tragedies, _The White +Devil_ and _The Duchess of Malf_. Both are stories of lust and crime, +full of hate and hideous vengeances, and through each runs a vein of +bitter and ironical comment on men and women. In them chance plays the +part of fate. "Blind accident and blundering mishap--'such a mistake,' +says one of the criminals, 'as I have often seen in a play' are the +steersmen of their fortunes and the doomsmen of their deeds." His +characters are gloomy; meditative and philosophic murderers, cynical +informers, sad and loving women, and they are all themselves in every +phrase that they utter. But they are studied in earnestness and +sincerity. Unquestionably he is the greatest of Shakespeare's successors +in the romantic drama, perhaps his only direct imitator. He has single +lines worthy to set beside those in _Othello_ or _King Lear_. His dirge +in the _Duchess of Malfi_, Charles Lamb thought worthy to be set beside +the ditty in _The Tempest_, which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned +father. "As that is of the water, watery, so this is of the earth, +earthy." He has earned his place among the greatest of our dramatists by +his two plays, the theme of which matched his sombre genius and the +sombreness of the season in which it flowered. + +But the drama could not survive long the altered times, and the +voluminous plays of Beaumont and Fletcher mark the beginning of the end. +They are the decadence of Elizabethan drama. Decadence is a term often +used loosely and therefore hard to define, but we may say broadly that +an art is decadent when any particular one of the elements which go to +its making occurs in excess and disturbs the balance of forces which +keeps the work a coherent and intact whole. Poetry is decadent when the +sound is allowed to outrun the sense or when the suggestions, say, of +colour, which it contains are allowed to crowd out its deeper +implications. Thus we can call such a poem as this one well-known of +O'Shaughnessy's + +"We are the music-makers, + We are the dreamers of dreams," + +decadent because it conveys nothing but the mere delight in an obvious +rhythm of words, or such a poem as Morris's "Two red roses across the +moon;" because a meaningless refrain, merely pleasing in its word +texture, breaks in at intervals on the reader. The drama of Beaumont and +Fletcher is decadent in two ways. In the first place those variations +and licences with which Shakespeare in his later plays diversified the +blank verse handed on to him by Marlowe, they use without any restraint +or measure. "Weak" endings and "double" endings, _i.e._ lines which end +either on a conjunction or proposition or some other unstressed word, or +lines in which there is a syllable too many--abound in their plays. They +destroyed blank verse as a musical and resonant poetic instrument by +letting this element of variety outrun the sparing and skilful use which +alone could justify it. But they were decadent in other and deeper ways +than that. Sentiment in their plays usurps the place of character. +Eloquent and moving speeches and fine figures are no longer subservient +to the presentation of character in action, but are set down for their +own sake, "What strange self-trumpeters and tongue-bullies all the brave +soldiers of Beaumont and Fletcher are," said Coleridge. When they die +they die to the music of their own virtue. When dreadful deeds are done +they are described not with that authentic and lurid vividness which +throws light on the working of the human heart in Shakespeare or Webster +but in tedious rhetoric. Resignation, not fortitude, is the authors' +forte and they play upon it amazingly. The sterner tones of their +predecessors melt into the long drawn broken accent of pathos and woe. +This delight not in action or in emotion arising from action but in +passivity of suffering is only one aspect of a certain mental flaccidity +in grain. Shakespeare may be free and even coarse. Beaumont and Fletcher +cultivate indecency. They made their subject not their master but their +plaything, or an occasion for the convenient exercise of their own +powers of figure and rhetoric. + +Of their followers, Massinger, Ford and Shirley, no more need be said +than they carried one step further the faults of their masters. Emotion +and tragic passion give way to wire-drawn sentiment. Tragedy takes on +the air of a masquerade. With them romantic drama died a natural death +and the Puritans' closing of the theatre only gave it a _coup de grace_. +In England it has had no second birth. + + +(4) + +Outside the direct romantic succession there worked another author whose +lack of sympathy with it, as well as his close connection with the age +which followed, justifies his separate treatment. Ben Jonson shows a +marked contrast to Shakespeare in his character, his accomplishments, +and his attitude to letters, while his career was more varied than +Shakespeare's own. The first "classic" in English writing, he was a +"romantic" in action. In his adventurous youth he was by turns scholar, +soldier, bricklayer, actor. He trailed a pike with Leicester in the Low +Countries; on his return to England fought a duel and killed his man, +only escaping hanging by benefit of clergy; at the end of his life he +was Poet Laureate. Such a career is sufficiently diversified, and it +forms a striking contrast to the plainness and severity of his work. But +it must not lead us to forget or under-estimate his learning and +knowledge. Not Gray nor Tennyson, nor Swinburne--perhaps not even +Milton--was a better scholar. He is one of the earliest of English +writers to hold and express different theories about literature. He +consciously appointed himself a teacher; was a missionary of literature +with a definite creed. + +But though in a general way his dramatic principles are opposed to the +romantic tendencies of his age, he is by no means blindly classical. He +never consented to be bound by the "Unities"--that conception of +dramatic construction evolved out of Aristotle and Horace and elaborated +in the Renaissance till, in its strictest form, it laid down that the +whole scene of a play should be in one place, its whole action deal with +one single series of events, and the time it represented as elapsing be +no greater than the time it took in playing. He was always pre-eminently +an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather than a poet's +temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, and only limited +because in ruling out these things he ruled out much else that was +essential to the spirit of the time. As a craftsman he was +uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes of the public and never +veiled his scorn of those--Shakespeare among them--whom he conceived to +do so; but he knew and valued his own work, as his famous last word to +an audience who might be unsympathetic stands to witness, + +"By God 'tis good, and if you like it you may." + +Compare the temper it reveals with the titles of the two contemporary +comedies of his gentler and greater brother, the one _As You Like It_, +the other _What You Will_. Of the two attitudes towards the public, and +they might stand as typical of two kinds of artists, neither perhaps can +claim complete sincerity. A truculent and noisy disclaimer of their +favours is not a bad tone to assume towards an audience; in the end it +is apt to succeed as well as the sub-ironical compliance which is its +opposite. + +Jonson's theory of comedy and the consciousness with which he set it +against the practice of his contemporaries and particularly of +Shakespeare receive explicit statement in the prologue to _Every Man Out +of His Humour_--one of his earlier plays. "I travail with another +objection, Signor, which I fear will be enforced against the author ere +I can be delivered of it," says Mitis. "What's that, sir?" replies +Cordatus. Mitis:--"That the argument of his comedy might have been of +some other nature, as of a duke to be in love with a countess, and that +countess to be in love with the duke's son, and the son to love the +lady's waiting maid; some such cross-wooing, better than to be thus near +and familiarly allied to the times." Cordatus: "You say well, but I +would fain hear one of these autumn-judgments define _Quin sit +comoedia_? If he cannot, let him concern himself with Cicero's +definition, till he have strength to propose to himself a better, who +would have a comedy to be _invitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, +imago veritatis_; a thing throughout pleasant and ridiculous and +accommodated to the correction of manners." That was what he meant his +comedy to be, and so he conceived the popular comedy of the day, +_Twelfth Night_ and _Much Ado_. Shakespeare might play with dukes and +countesses, serving-women and pages, clowns and disguises; he would come +down more near and ally himself familiarly with the times. So comedy was +to be medicinal, to purge contemporary London of its follies and its +sins; and it was to be constructed with regularity and elaboration, +respectful to the Unities if not ruled by them, and built up of +characters each the embodiment of some "humour" or eccentricity, and +each when his eccentricity is displaying itself at its fullest, +outwitted and exposed. This conception of "humours," based on a +physiology which was already obsolescent, takes heavily from the realism +of Jonson's methods, nor does his use of a careful vocabulary of +contemporary colloquialism and slang save him from a certain dryness and +tediousness to modern readers. The truth is he was less a satirist of +contemporary manners than a satirist in the abstract who followed the +models of classical writers in this style, and he found the vices and +follies of his own day hardly adequate to the intricacy and +elaborateness of the plots which he constructed for their exposure. At +the first glance his people are contemporary types, at the second they +betray themselves for what they are really--cock-shies set up by the new +comedy of Greece that every "classical" satirist in Rome or France or +England has had his shot at since. One wonders whether Ben Jonson, for +all his satirical intention, had as much observation--as much of an eye +for contemporary types--as Shakespeare's rustics and roysterers prove +him to have had. It follows that all but one or two of his plays, when +they are put on the stage to-day are apt to come to one with a sense of +remoteness and other-worldliness which we hardly feel with Shakespeare +or Molière. His muse moves along the high-road of comedy which is the +Roman road, and she carries in her train types that have done service to +many since the ancients fashioned them years ago. Jealous husbands, +foolish pragmatic fathers, a dissolute son, a boastful soldier, a +cunning slave--they all are merely counters by which the game of comedy +used to be played. In England, since Shakespeare took his hold on the +stage, that road has been stopped for us, that game has ceased to amuse. + +Ben Jonson, then, in a certain degree failed in his intention. Had he +kept closer to contemporary life, instead of merely grafting on to it +types he had learned from books, he might have made himself an English +Molière--without Molière's breadth and clarity--but with a corresponding +vigour and strength which would have kept his work sweet. And he might +have founded a school of comedy that would have got its roots deeper +into our national life than the trivial and licentious Restoration +comedy ever succeeded in doing. As it is, his importance is mostly +historical. One must credit him with being the first of the English +classics--of the age which gave us Dryden and Swift and Pope. Perhaps +that is enough in his praise. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + + +THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY + +(1) + +With the seventeenth century the great school of imaginative writers +that made glorious the last years of Elizabeth's reign, had passed away. +Spenser was dead before 1600, Sir Philip Sidney a dozen years earlier, +and though Shakespeare and Drayton and many other men whom we class +roughly as Elizabethan lived on to work under James, their temper and +their ideals belong to the earlier day. The seventeenth century, not in +England only but in Europe, brought a new way of thinking with it, and +gave a new direction to human interest and to human affairs. It is not +perhaps easy to define nor is it visible in the greater writers of the +time. Milton, for instance, and Sir Thomas Browne are both of them too +big, and in their genius too far separated from their fellows to give us +much clue to altered conditions. It is commonly in the work of lesser +and forgotten writers that the spirit of an age has its fullest +expression. Genius is a law to itself; it moves in another dimension; it +is out of time. To define this seventeenth century spirit, then, one +must look at the literature of the age as a whole. What is there that +one finds in it which marks a change in temperament and outlook from the +Renaissance, and the time which immediately followed it? + +Putting it very broadly one may say that literature in the seventeenth +century becomes for the first time essentially modern in spirit. We +began our survey of modern English literature at the Renaissance because +the discovery of the New World, and the widening of human experience and +knowledge, which that and the revival of classical learning implied, +mark a definite break from a way of thought which had been continuous +since the break up of the Roman Empire. The men of the Renaissance felt +themselves to be modern. They started afresh, owing nothing to their +immediate forbears, and when they talked, say, of Chaucer, they did so +in very much the same accent as we do to-day. He was mediaeval and +obsolete; the interest which he possessed was a purely literary +interest; his readers did not meet him easily on the same plane of +thought, or forget the lapse of time which separated him from them. And +in another way too, the Renaissance began modern writing. Inflections +had been dropped. The revival of the classics had enriched our +vocabulary, and the English language, after a gradual impoverishment +which followed the obsolescence one after another of the local dialects, +attained a fairly fixed form. There is more difference between the +language of the English writings of Sir Thomas More and that of the +prose of Chaucer than there is between that of More and of Ruskin. But +it is not till the seventeenth century that the modern spirit, in the +fullest sense of the word, comes into being. Defined it means a spirit +of observation, of preoccupation with detail, of stress laid on matter +of fact, of analysis of feelings and mental processes, of free argument +upon institutions and government. In relation to knowledge, it is the +spirit of science, and the study of science, which is the essential +intellectual fact in modern history, dates from just this time, from +Bacon and Newton and Descartes. In relation to literature, it is the +spirit of criticism, and criticism in England is the creation of the +seventeenth century. The positive temper, the attitude of realism, is +everywhere in the ascendant. The sixteenth century made voyages of +discovery; the seventeenth sat down to take stock of the riches it had +gathered. For the first time in English literature writing becomes a +vehicle for storing and conveying facts. + +It would be easy to give instances: one must suffice here. Biography, +which is one of the most characteristic kinds of English writing, was +unknown to the moderns as late as the sixteenth century. Partly the +awakened interest in the careers of the ancient statesmen and soldiers +which the study of Plutarch had excited, and partly the general interest +in, and craving for, facts set men writing down the lives of their +fellows. The earliest English biographies date from this time. In the +beginning they were concerned, like Plutarch, with men of action, and +when Sir Fulke Greville wrote a brief account of his friend Sir Philip +Sidney it was the courtier and the soldier, and not the author, that he +designed to celebrate. But soon men of letters came within their scope, +and though the interest in the lives of authors came too late to give us +the contemporary life of Shakespeare we so much long for, it was early +enough to make possible those masterpieces of condensed biography in +which Isaak Walton celebrates Herbert and Donne. Fuller and Aubrey, to +name only two authors, spent lives of laborious industry in hunting down +and chronicling the smallest facts about the worthies of their day and +the time immediately before them. Autobiography followed where biography +led. Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, as well +as less reputable persons, followed the new mode. By the time of the +Restoration Pepys and Evelyn were keeping their diaries, and Fox his +journal. Just as in poetry the lyric, that is the expression of personal +feeling, became more widely practised, more subtle and more sincere, in +prose the letter, the journal, and the autobiography formed themselves +to meet the new and growing demand for analysis of the feelings and the +intimate thoughts and sensations of real men and women. A minor form of +literature which had a brief but popular vogue ministered less directly +to the same need. The "Character," a brief descriptive essay on a +contemporary type--a tobacco seller, an old college butler or the +like--was popular because in its own way it matched the newly awakened +taste for realism and fact. The drama which in the hands of Ben Jonson +had attacked folly and wickedness proper to no place or time, descended +to the drawing-rooms of the day, and Congreve occupied himself with the +portrayal of the social frauds and foolishnesses perpetrated by actual +living men and women of fashion in contemporary London. Satire ceased +to be a mere expression of a vague discontent, and became a weapon +against opposing men and policies. The new generation of readers were +nothing if not critical. They were for testing directly institutions +whether they were literary, social, or political. They wanted facts, and +they wanted to take a side. + +In the distinct and separate realm of poetry a revolution no less +remarkable took place. Spenser had been both a poet and a Puritan: he +had designed to show by his great poem the training and fashioning of a +Puritan English gentleman. But the alliance between poetry and +Puritanism which he typified failed to survive his death. The +essentially pagan spirit of the Renaissance which caused him no doubts +nor difficulties proved too strong for his readers and his followers, +and the emancipated artistic enthusiasm in which it worked alienated +from secular poetry men with deep and strong religious convictions. +Religion and morality and poetry, which in Sidney and Spenser had gone +hand in hand, separated from each other. Poems like _Venus and Adonis_ +or like Shakespeare's sonnets could hardly be squared with the sterner +temper which persecution began to breed. Even within orthodox +Anglicanism poetry and religion began to be deemed no fit company for +each other. When George Herbert left off courtier and took orders he +burnt his earlier love poetry, and only the persuasion of his friends +prevented Donne from following the same course. Pure poetry became more +and more an exotic. All Milton's belongs to his earlier youth; his +middle age was occupied with controversy and propaganda in prose; when +he returned to poetry in blindness and old age it was "to justify the +ways of God to man"--to use poetry, that is, for a spiritual and moral +rather than an artistic end. + +Though the age was curious and inquiring, though poetry and prose tended +more and more to be enlisted in the service of non-artistic enthusiasms +and to be made the vehicle of deeper emotions and interests than perhaps +a northern people could ever find in art, pure and simple, it was not +like the time that followed it, a "prosaic" age. Enthusiasm burned +fierce and clear, displaying itself in the passionate polemic of Milton, +in the fanaticism of Bunyan and Fox, hardly more than in the gentle, +steadfast search for knowledge in Burton, and the wide and vigilant +curiousness of Bacon. Its eager experimentalism tried the impossible; +wrote poems and then gave them a weight of meaning they could not carry, +as when Fletcher in _The Purple Island_ designed to allegorize all that +the physiology of his day knew of the human body, or Donne sought to +convey abstruse scientific fact in a lyric. It gave men a passion for +pure learning, set Jonson to turn himself from a bricklayer into the +best equipped scholar of his day, and Fuller and Camden grubbing among +English records and gathering for the first time materials of scientific +value for English history. Enthusiasm gave us poetry that was at once +full of learning and of imagination, poetry that was harsh and brutal +in its roughness and at the same time impassioned. And it set up a +school of prose that combined colloquial readiness and fluency, +pregnancy and high sentiment with a cumbrous pedantry of learning which +was the fruit of its own excess. + +The form in which enthusiasm manifested itself most fiercely was as we +have seen not favourable to literature. Puritanism drove itself like a +wedge into the art of the time, broadening as it went. Had there been no +more in it than the moral earnestness and religiousness of Sidney and +Spenser, Cavalier would not have differed from Roundhead, and there +might have been no civil war; each party was endowed deeply with the +religious sense and Charles I. was a sincerely pious man. But while +Spenser and Sidney held that life as a preparation for eternity must be +ordered and strenuous and devout but that care for the hereafter was not +incompatible with a frank and full enjoyment of life as it is lived, +Puritanism as it developed in the middle classes became a sterner and +darker creed. The doctrine of original sin, face to face with the fact +that art, like other pleasures, was naturally and readily entered into +and enjoyed, forced them to the plain conclusion that art was an evil +thing. As early as Shakespeare's youth they had been strong enough to +keep the theatres outside London walls; at the time of the Civil War +they closed them altogether, and the feud which had lasted for over a +generation between them and the dramatists ended in the destruction of +the literary drama. In the brief years of their ascendancy they produced +no literature, for Milton is much too large to be tied down to their +negative creed, and, indeed, in many of his qualities, his love of music +and his sensuousness for instance, he is antagonistic to the temper of +his day. With the Restoration their earnest and strenuous spirit fled to +America. It is noteworthy that it had no literary manifestation there +till two centuries after the time of its passage. Hawthorne's novels are +the fruit--the one ripe fruit in art--of the Puritan imagination. + + +(2) + +If the reader adopts the seventeenth century habit himself and takes +stock of what the Elizabethans accomplished in poetry, he will recognize +speedily that their work reached various stages of completeness. They +perfected the poetic drama and its instrument, blank verse; they +perfected, though not in the severer Italian form, the sonnet; they +wrote with extraordinary delicacy and finish short lyrics in which a +simple and freer manner drawn from the classics took the place of the +mediaeval intricacies of the ballad and the rondeau. And in the forms +which they failed to bring to perfection they did beautiful and noble +work. The splendour of _The Fairy Queen_ is in separate passages; as a +whole it is over tortuous and slow; its affectations, its sensuousness, +the mere difficulty of reading it, makes us feel it a collection of +great passages, strung it is true on a large conception, rather than a +great work. The Elizabethans, that is, had not discovered the secret of +the long poem; the abstract idea of the "heroic" epic which was in all +their minds had to wait for embodiment till _Paradise Lost_. In a way +their treatment of the pastoral or eclogue form was imperfect too. They +used it well but not so well as their models, Vergil and Theocritus; +they had not quite mastered the convention on which it is built. + +The seventeenth century, taking stock in some such fashion of its +artistic possessions, found some things it were vain to try to do. It +could add nothing to the accomplishment of the English sonnet, so it +hardly tried; with the exception of a few sonnets in the Italian form of +Milton, the century can show us nothing in this mode of verse. The +literary drama was brought to perfection in the early years of it by the +surviving Elizabethans; later decades could add nothing to it but +licence, and as we saw, the licences they added hastened its +destruction. But in other forms the poets of the new time experimented +eagerly, and in the stress of experiment, poetry which under Elizabeth +had been integral and coherent split into different schools. As the +period of the Renaissance was also that of the Reformation it was only +natural a determined effort should sooner or later be made to use poetry +for religious purposes. The earliest English hymn writing, our first +devotional verse in the vernacular, belongs to this time, and a Catholic +and religious school of lyricism grew and flourished beside the pagan +neo-classical writers. From the tumult of experiment three schools +disengage themselves, the school of Spenser, the school of Jonson, and +the school of Donne. + +At the outset of the century Spenser's influence was triumphant and +predominant; his was the main stream with which the other poetic +influences of the time merely mingled. His popularity is referable to +qualities other than those which belonged peculiarly to his talent as a +poet. Puritans loved his religious ardour, and in those Puritan +households where the stricter conception of the diabolical nature of all +poetry had not penetrated, his works were read--standing on a shelf, may +be, between the new translation of the Bible and Sylvester's translation +of the French poet Du Bartas' work on the creation, that had a large +popularity at that time as family reading. Probably the Puritans were as +blind to the sensuousness of Spenser's language and imagery as they were +(and are) to the same qualities in the Bible itself. _The Fairy Queen_ +would easily achieve innocuousness amongst those who can find nothing +but an allegory of the Church in the "Song of Songs." His followers made +their allegory a great deal plainer than he had done his. In his poem +called _The Purple Island_, Phineas Fletcher, a Puritan imitator of +Spenser in Cambridge, essayed to set forth the struggle of the soul at +grip with evil, a battle in which the body--the "Purple Island"--is the +field. To a modern reader it is a desolating and at times a mildly +amusing book, in which everything from the liver to the seven deadly +sins is personified; in which after four books of allegorized +contemporary anatomy and physiology, the will (Voletta) engages in a +struggle with Satan and conquers by the help of Christ and King James! +The allegory is clever--too clever--and the author can paint a pleasant +picture, but on the whole he was happier in his pastoral work. His +brother Giles made a better attempt at the Spenserian manner. His long +poem, _Christ's Victory and Death_, shows for all its carefully +Protestant tone high qualities of mysticism; across it Spenser and +Milton join hands. + +It was, however, in pastoral poetry that Spenser's influence found its +pleasantest outlet. One might hesitate to advise a reader to embark on +either of the Fletchers. There is no reason why any modern should not +read and enjoy Browne or Wither, in whose softly flowing verse the +sweetness and contentment of the countryside, that "merry England" which +was the background of all sectarian and intellectual strife and labour, +finds as in a placid stream a calm reflection and picture of itself. The +seventeenth century gave birth to many things that only came to maturity +in the nineteenth; if you care for that kind of literary study which +searches out origins and digs for hints and models of accented styles, +you will find in Browne that which influenced more than any other single +thing the early work of Keats. Browne has another claim to immortality; +if it be true as is now thought that he was the author of the epitaph on +the Countess of Pembroke: + +"Underneath this sable hearse + Lies the subject of all verse, + Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother. + Death, ere thou hast slain another + Fair and learned and good as she, + Time shall throw a dart at thee." + +then he achieved the miracle of a quintessential statement of the spirit +of the English Renaissance. For the breath of it stirs in these slow +quiet moving lines, and its few and simple words implicate the soul of a +period. + +By the end of the first quarter of the century the influence of Spenser +and the school which worked under it had died out. Its place was taken +by the twin schools of Jonson and Donne. Jonson's poetic method is +something like his dramatic; he formed himself as exactly as possible on +classical models. Horace had written satires and elegies, and epistles +and complimentary verses, and Jonson quite consciously and deliberately +followed where Horace led. He wrote elegies on the great, letters and +courtly compliments and love-lyrics to his friends, satires with an air +of general censure. But though he was classical, his style was never +latinized. In all of them he strove to pour into an ancient form +language that was as intense and vigorous and as purely English as the +earliest trumpeters of the Renaissance in England could have wished. The +result is not entirely successful. He seldom fails to reproduce classic +dignity and good sense; on the other hand he seldom succeeds in +achieving classic grace and ease. Occasionally, as in his best known +lyric, he is perfect and achieves an air of spontaneity little short of +marvellous, when we know that his images and even his words in the song +are all plagiarized from other men. His expression is always clear and +vigorous and his sense good and noble. The native earnestness and +sincerity of the man shines through as it does in his dramas and his +prose. In an age of fantastic and meaningless eulogy--eulogy so amazing +in its unexpectedness and abstruseness that the wonder is not so much +that it should have been written as that it could have been thought +of--Jonson maintains his personal dignity and his good sense. You feel +his compliments are such as the best should be, not necessarily +understood and properly valued by the public, but of a discriminating +sort that by their very comprehending sincerity would be most warmly +appreciated by the people to whom they were addressed. His verses to +Shakespeare and his prose commentaries on him too, are models of what +self-respecting admiration should be, generous in its praise of +excellence, candid in its statement of defects. They are the kind of +compliments that Shakespeare himself, if he had grace enough, must have +loved to receive. + +Very different from his direct and dignified manner is the closely +packed style of Donne, who, Milton apart, is the greatest English writer +of the century, though his obscurity has kept him out of general +reading. No poetry in English, not even Browning, is more difficult to +understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning proceed from such +similar causes that they are worth examining together. In both, as in +the obscure passages in Shakespeare's later plays, obscurity arises not +because the poet says too little but because he attempts to say too +much. He huddles a new thought on the one before it, before the first +has had time to express itself; he sees things or analyses emotions so +swiftly and subtly himself that he forgets the slower comprehensions of +his readers; he is for analysing things far deeper than the ordinary +mind commonly can. His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and +likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things from a +dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each separate vision +in a heap out on to the page; his restless intellect finds new and +subtler shades of emotion and thought invisible to other pairs of eyes, +and cannot, because speech is modelled on the average of our +intelligences, find words to express them; he is always trembling on the +brink of the inarticulate. All this applies to both Donne and Browning, +and the comparison could be pushed further still. Both draw the +knowledge which is the main cause of their obscurity from the same +source, the bypaths of mediaevalism. Browning's _Sordello_ is obscure +because he knows too much about mediaeval Italian history; Donne's +_Anniversary_ because he is too deeply read in mediaeval scholasticism +and speculation. Both make themselves more difficult to the reader who +is familiar with the poetry of their contemporaries by the disconcerting +freshness of their point of view. Seventeenth century love poetry was +idyllic and idealist; Donne's is passionate and realistic to the point +of cynicism. To read him after reading Browne or Jonson is to have the +same shock as reading Browning after Tennyson. Both poets are salutary +in the strong and biting antidote they bring to sentimentalism in +thought and melodious facility in writing. They are the corrective of +lazy thinking and lazy composition. + +Elizabethan love poetry was written on a convention which though it was +used with manliness and entire sincerity by Sidney did not escape the +fate of its kind. Dante's love for Beatrice, Petrarch's for Laura, the +gallant and passionate adoration of Sidney for his Stella became the +models for a dismal succession of imaginary woes. They were all figments +of the mind, perhaps hardly that; they all use the same terms and write +in fixed strains, epicurean and sensuous like Ronsard, ideal and +intellectualized like Dante, sentimental and adoring like Petrarch. Into +this enclosed garden of sentiment and illusion Donne burst passionately +and rudely, pulling up the gay-coloured tangled weeds that choked +thoughts, planting, as one of his followers said, the seeds of fresh +invention. Where his forerunners had been idealist, epicurean, or +adoring, he was brutal, cynical and immitigably realist. He could begin +a poem, "For God's sake hold your tongue and let me live"; he could be +as resolutely free from illusion as Shakespeare when he addressed his +Dark Lady-- + +"Hope not for mind in women; at their best, + Sweetness and wit they're but mummy possest." + +And where the sonneteers pretended to a sincerity which was none of +theirs, he was, like Browning, unaffectedly a dramatic lyrist. "I did +best," he said, "when I had least truth for my subject." + +His love poetry was written in his turbulent and brilliant youth, and +the poetic talent which made it turned in his later years to express +itself in hymns and religious poetry. But there is no essential +distinction between the two halves of his work. It is all of a piece. +The same swift and subtle spirit which analyses experiences of passion, +analyses, in his later poetry, those of religion. His devotional poems, +though they probe and question, are none the less never sermons, but +rather confessions or prayers. His intense individuality, eager always, +as his best critic has said, "to find a North-West passage of his +own,"[2] pressed its curious and sceptical questioning into every corner +of love and life and religion, explored unsuspected depths, exploited +new discovered paradoxes, and turned its discoveries always into poetry +of the closely-packed artificial style which was all its own. Simplicity +indeed would have been for him an affectation; his elaborateness is not +like that of his followers, constructed painfully in a vicious desire to +compass the unexpected, but the natural overflow of an amazingly fertile +and ingenious mind. The curiosity, the desire for truth, the search +after minute and detailed knowledge of his age is all in his verse. He +bears the spirit of his time not less markedly than Bacon does, or +Newton, or Descartes. + +[Footnote 2: Prof. Grierson in _Cambridge History of English +Literature_.] + +The work of the followers of Donne and Jonson leads straight to the new +school, Jonson's by giving that school a model on which to work, Donne's +by producing an era of extravagance and absurdity which made a literary +revolution imperative. The school of Donne--the "fantastics" as they +have been called (Dr. Johnson called them the metaphysical poets), +produced in Herbert and Vaughan, our two noblest writers of religious +verse, the flower of a mode of writing which ended in the somewhat +exotic religiousness of Crashaw. In the hands of Cowley the use of +far-sought and intricate imagery became a trick, and the fantastic +school, the soul of sincerity gone out of it, died when he died. To the +followers of Jonson we owe that delightful and simple lyric poetry which +fills our anthologies, their courtly lyricism receiving a new impulse in +the intenser loyalty of troubled times. The most finished of them is +perhaps Carew; the best, because of the freshness and varity of his +subject-matter and his easy grace, Herrick. At the end of them came +Waller and gave to the five-accented rhymed verse (the heroic couplet) +that trick of regularity and balance which gave us the classical school. + + +(3) + +The prose literature of the seventeenth century is extraordinarily rich +and varied, and a study of it would cover a wide field of human +knowledge. The new and unsuspected harmonies discovered by the +Elizabethans were applied indeed to all the tasks of which prose is +capable, from telling stories to setting down the results of speculation +which was revolutionizing science and philosophy. For the first time +the vernacular and not Latin became the language of scientific research, +and though Bacon in his _Novum Organum_ adhered to the older mode its +disappearance was rapid. English was proving itself too flexible an +instrument for conveying ideas to be longer neglected. It was applied +too to preaching of a more formal and grandiose kind than the plain and +homely Latimer ever dreamed of. The preachers, though their +golden-mouthed oratory, which blended in its combination of vigour and +cadence the euphuistic and colloquial styles of the Elizabethans, is in +itself a glory of English literature, belong by their matter too +exclusively to the province of Church history to be dealt with here. The +men of science and philosophy, Newton, Hobbes, and Locke, are in a like +way outside our province. For the purpose of the literary student the +achievement of the seventeenth century can be judged in four separate +men or books--in the Bible, in Francis Bacon, and in Burton and Browne. + +In a way the Bible, like the preachers, lies outside the domain of +literary study in the narrow sense; but its sheer literary magnitude, +the abiding significance of it in our subsequent history, social, +political, and artistic as well as religious, compel us to turn aside to +examine the causes that have produced such great results. The Authorized +Version is not, of course, a purely seventeenth century work. Though the +scholars[3] who wrote and compiled it had before them all the previous +vernacular texts and chose the best readings where they found them or +devised new ones in accordance with the original, the basis is +undoubtedly the Tudor version of Tindall. It has, none the less, the +qualities of the time of its publication. It could hardly have been done +earlier; had it been so, it would not have been done half so well. In it +English has lost both its roughness and its affectation and retained its +strength; the Bible is the supreme example of early English prose style. +The reason is not far to seek. Of all recipes for good or noble writing +that which enjoins the writer to be careful about the matter and never +mind the manner, is the most sure. The translators had the handling of +matter of the gravest dignity and momentousness, and their sense of +reverence kept them right in their treatment of it. They cared +passionately for the truth; they were virtually anonymous and not +ambitious of originality or literary fame; they had no desire to stand +between the book and its readers. It followed that they cultivated that +naked plainness and spareness which makes their work supreme. The +Authorized Version is the last and greatest of those English +translations which were the fruit of Renaissance scholarship and +pioneering. It is the first and greatest piece of English prose. + +[Footnote 3: There is a graphic little pen-picture of their method in +Selden's "Table Talk."] + +Its influence is one of those things on which it is profitless to +comment or enlarge simply because they are an understood part of every +man's experience. In its own time it helped to weld England, for where +before one Bible was read at home and another in churches, all now read +the new version. Its supremacy was instantaneous and unchallenged, and +it quickly coloured speech and literature; it could produce a Bunyan in +the century of its birth. To it belongs the native dignity and eloquence +of peasant speech. It runs like a golden thread through all our writing +subsequent to its coming; men so diverse as Huxley and Carlyle have paid +their tribute to its power; Ruskin counted it the one essential part of +its education. It will be a bad day for the mere quality of our language +when it ceases to be read. + +At the time the translators were sitting, Francis Bacon was at the +height of his fame. By profession a lawyer--time-serving and +over-compliant to wealth and influence--he gives singularly little +evidence of it in the style of his books. Lawyers, from the necessity +they are under of exerting persuasion, of planting an unfamiliar +argument in the minds of hearers of whose favour they are doubtful, but +whose sympathy they must gain, are usually of purpose diffuse. They +cultivate the gift, possessed by Edmund Burke above all other English +authors, of putting the same thing freshly and in different forms a +great many times in succession. They value copiousness and fertility of +illustration. Nothing could be more unlike this normal legal manner than +the style of Bacon. "No man," says Ben Jonson, speaking in one of those +vivid little notes of his, of his oratorical method, "no man ever +coughed or turned aside from him without loss." He is a master of the +aphoristic style. He compresses his wisdom into the quintessential form +of an epigram; so complete and concentrated is his form of statement, so +shortly is everything put, that the mere transition from one thought to +another gives his prose a curious air of disjointedness as if he flitted +arbitrarily from one thing to another, and jotted down anything that +came into his head. His writing has clarity and lucidity, it abounds in +terseness of expression and in exact and discriminating phraseology, and +in the minor arts of composition--in the use of quotations for +instance--it can be extraordinarily felicitous. But it lacks +spaciousness and ease and rhythm; it makes too inexorable a demand on +the attention, and the harassed reader soon finds himself longing for +those breathing spaces which consideration or perhaps looseness of +thought has implanted in the prose of other writers. + +His _Essays_, the work by which he is best known, were in their origin +merely jottings gradually cohered and enlarged into the series we know. +In them he had the advantage of a subject which he had studied closely +through life. He counted himself a master in the art of managing men, +and "Human Nature and how to manage it" would be a good title for his +book. Men are studied in the spirit of Machiavelli, whose philosophy of +government appealed so powerfully to the Elizabethan mind. Taken +together the essays which deal with public matters are in effect a kind +of manual for statesmen and princes, instructing them how to acquire +power and how to keep it, deliberating how far they may go safely in +the direction of self-interest, and to what degree the principle of +self-interest must be subordinated to the wider interests of the people +who are ruled. Democracy, which in England was to make its splendid +beginnings in the seventeenth century, finds little to foretell it in +the works of Bacon. Though he never advocates cruelty or oppression and +is wise enough to see that no statesman can entirely set aside moral +considerations, his ethical tone is hardly elevating; the moral +obliquity of his public life is to a certain extent explained, in all +but its grosser elements, in his published writings. The essays, of +course, contain much more than this; the spirit of curious and restless +enquiry which animated Bacon finds expression in those on "Health," or +"Gardens" and "Plantations" and others of the kind; and a deeper vein of +earnestness runs through some of them--those for instance on +"Friendship," or "Truth" and on "Death." + +The _Essays_ sum up in a condensed form the intellectual interests which +find larger treatment in his other works. His _Henry VII._, the first +piece of scientific history in the English language (indeed in the +modern world) is concerned with a king whose practice was the outcome of +a political theory identical with Bacon's own. The _Advancement of +Learning_ is a brilliant popular exposition of the cause of scientific +enquiry and of the inductive or investigatory method of research. The +_New Atlantis_ is the picture of an ideal community whose common purpose +is scientific investigation. Bacon's name is not upon the roll of those +who have enlarged by brilliant conjectures or discoveries the store of +human knowledge; his own investigations so far as they are recorded are +all of a trivial nature. The truth about him is that he was a +brilliantly clever populariser of the cause of science, a kind of +seventeenth century Huxley, concerned rather to lay down large general +principles for the guidance of the work of others, than to be a serious +worker himself. The superstition of later times, acting on and +refracting his amazing intellectual gifts, has raised him to a godlike +eminence which is by right none of his; it has even credited him with +the authorship of Shakespeare, and in its wilder moments with the +composition of all that is of supreme worth in Elizabethan literature. +It is not necessary to take these delusions seriously. The ignorance of +mediaevalism was in the habit of crediting Vergil with the construction +of the Roman aqueducts and temples whose ruins are scattered over +Europe. The modern Baconians reach much the same intellectual level. + +A similar enthusiasm for knowledge and at any rate a pretence to science +belong to the author of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Robert Burton. His +one book is surely the most amazing in English prose. Its professed +object was simple and comprehensive; it was to analyze human melancholy, +to describe its effects, and prescribe for its removal. But as his task +grew, melancholy came to mean to Burton all the ills that flesh is heir +to. He tracked it in obscure and unsuspected forms; drew illustrations +from a range of authors so much wider than the compass of the reading +of even the most learned since, that he is generally credited with the +invention of a large part of his quotations. Ancients and moderns, poets +and prose writers, schoolmen and dramatists are all drawn upon for the +copious store of his examples; they are always cited with an air of +quietly humorous shrewdness in the comments and enclosed in a prose that +is straightforward, simple and vigorous, and can on occasion command +both rhythm and beauty of phrase. It is a mistake to regard Burton from +the point of view (due largely to Charles Lamb) of tolerant or loving +delight in quaintness for quaintness' sake. His book is anything but +scientific in form, but it is far from being the work of a recluse or a +fool. Behind his lack of system, he takes a broad and psychologically an +essentially just view of human ills, and modern medicine has gone far in +its admiration of what is at bottom a most comprehensive and subtle +treatise in diagnosis. + +A writer of a very different quality is Sir Thomas Browne. Of all the +men of his time, he is the only one of whom one can say for certain that +he held the manner of saying a thing more important than the thing said. +He is our first deliberate and conscious stylist, the forerunner of +Charles Lamb, of Stevenson (whose _Virginibus Puerisque_ is modelled on +his method of treatment) and of the stylistic school of our own day. His +eloquence is too studied to rise to the greatest heights, and his +speculation, though curious and discursive, never really results in deep +thinking. He is content to embroider his pattern out of the stray +fancies of an imaginative nature. His best known work, the _Religio +Medici_, is a random confession of belief and thoughts, full of the +inconsequent speculations of a man with some knowledge of science but +not deeply or earnestly interested about it, content rather to follow +the wayward imaginations of a mind naturally gifted with a certain +poetic quality, than to engage in serious intellectual exercise. Such +work could never maintain its hold on taste if it were not carefully +finished and constructed with elaborate care. Browne, if he was not a +great writer, was a literary artist of a high quality. He exploits a +quaint and lovable egoism with extraordinary skill; and though his +delicately figured and latinized sentences commonly sound platitudinous +and trivial when they are translated into rough Saxon prose, as they +stand they are rich and melodious enough. + + +(4) + +In a century of surpassing richness in prose and poetry, one author +stands by himself. John Milton refuses to be classed with any of the +schools. Though Dryden tells us Milton confessed to him that Spenser was +his "original," he has no connection--other than a general similarity of +purpose, moral and religious--with Spenser's followers. To the +fantastics he paid in his youth the doubtful compliment of one or two +half-contemptuous imitations and never touched them again. He had no +turn for the love lyrics or the courtliness of the school of Jonson. In +everything he did he was himself and his own master; he devised his own +subjects and wrote his own style. He stands alone and must be judged +alone. + +No author, however, can ever escape from the influences of his time, +and, just as much as his lesser contemporaries, Milton has his place in +literary history and derives from the great original impulse which set +in motion all the enterprises of the century. He is the last and +greatest figure in the English Renaissance. The new passion for art and +letters which in its earnest fumbling beginnings gave us the prose of +Cheke and Ascham and the poetry of Surrey and Sackville, comes to a full +and splendid and perfect end in his work. In it the Renaissance and the +Reformation, imperfectly fused by Sidney and Spenser, blend in their +just proportions. The transplantation into English of classical forms +which had been the aim of Sidney and the endeavour of Jonson he finally +accomplished; in his work the dream of all the poets of the +Renaissance--the heroic poem--finds its fulfilment. There was no poet of +the time but wanted to do for his country what Vergil had planned to do +for Rome, to sing its origins, and to celebrate its morality and its +citizenship in the epic form. Spenser had tried it in _The Fairy Queen_ +and failed splendidly. Where he failed, Milton succeeded, though his +poem is not on the origins of England but on the ultimate subject of the +origins of mankind. We know from his notebooks that he turned over in +his mind a national subject and that the Arthurian legend for a while +appealed to him. But to Milton's earnest temper nothing that was not +true was a fit subject for poetry. It was inevitable he should lay it +aside. The Arthurian story he knew to be a myth and a myth was a lie; +the story of the Fall, on the other hand, he accepted in common with his +time for literal fact. It is to be noted as characteristic of his +confident and assured egotism that he accepted no less sincerely and +literally the imaginative structure which he himself reared on it. +However that may be, the solid fact about him is that in this +"adventurous song" with its pursuit of + +"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," + +he succeeded in his attempt, that alone among the moderns he contrived +to write an epic which stands on the same eminence as the ancient +writings of the kind, and that he found time in a life, which hardly +extended to old age as we know it, to write, besides noble lyrics and a +series of fiercely argumentative prose treatises, two other masterpieces +in the grand style, a tragedy modelled on the Greeks and a second epic +on the "compact" style of the book of Job. No English poet can compare +with him in majesty or completeness. + +An adequate study of his achievement is impossible within the limits of +the few pages that are all a book like this can spare to a single +author. Readers who desire it will find it in the work of his two best +critics, Mark Pattison and Sir Walter Raleigh.[4] All that can be done +here is to call attention to some of his most striking qualities. +Foremost, of course, is the temper of the man. From the beginning he +was sure of himself and sure of his mission; he had his purpose plain +and clear. There is no mental development, hardly, visible in his work, +only training, undertaken anxiously and prayerfully and with a clearly +conceived end. He designed to write a masterpiece and he would not start +till he was ready. The first twenty years of his life were spent in +assiduous reading; for twenty more he was immersed in the dust and toil +of political conflict, using his pen and his extraordinary equipment of +learning and eloquence to defend the cause of liberty, civil and +religious, and to attack its enemies; not till he was past middle age +had he reached the leisure and the preparedness necessary to accomplish +his self-imposed work. But all the time, as we know, he had it in his +mind. In _Lycidas_, written in his Cambridge days, he apologizes to his +readers for plucking the fruit of his poetry before it is ripe. In +passage after passage in his prose works he begs for his reader's +patience for a little while longer till his preparation be complete. +When the time came at last for beginning he was in no doubt; in his very +opening lines he intends, he says, to soar no "middle flight." This +self-assured unrelenting certainty of his, carried into his prose essays +in argument, produces sometimes strange results. One is peculiarly +interesting to us now in view of current controversy. He was unhappily +married, and because he was unhappy the law of divorce must be changed. +A modern--George Eliot for instance--would have pleaded the artistic +temperament and been content to remain outside the law. Milton always +argued from himself to mankind at large. + +[Footnote 4: "Milton," E.M.L., and "Milton" (Edward Arnold).] + +In everything he did, he put forth all his strength. Each of his poems, +long or short, is by itself a perfect whole, wrought complete. The +reader always must feel that the planning of each is the work of +conscious, deliberate, and selecting art. Milton never digresses; he +never violates harmony of sound or sense; his poems have all their +regular movement from quiet beginning through a rising and breaking wave +of passion and splendour to quiet close. His art is nowhere better seen +than in his endings. + +Is it _Lycidas_? After the thunder of approaching vengeance on the +hireling shepherds of the Church, comes sunset and quiet: + +"And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills, + And now was dropt into the western bay; + At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: + To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." + +Is it _Paradise Lost_? After the agonies of expulsion and the flaming +sword-- + +"Some natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon; + The world was all before them where to choose + Their place of rest, and Providence their guide; + They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, + Through Eden took their solitary way." + +Is it finally _Samson Agonistes_? + +"His servants he with new acquist, + Of true experience from this great event, + With peace and consolation hath dismist, + And calm of mind all passion spent." + +"Calm of mind, all passion spent," it is the essence of Milton's art. + +He worked in large ideas and painted splendid canvases; it was +necessary for him to invent a style which should be capable of sustained +and lofty dignity, which should be ornate enough to maintain the +interest of the reader and charm him and at the same time not so ornate +as to give an air of meretricious decoration to what was largely and +simply conceived. Particularly it was necessary for him to avoid those +incursions of vulgar associations which words carelessly used will bring +in their train. He succeeded brilliantly in this difficult task. The +unit of the Miltonic style is not the phrase but the word, each word +fastidiously chosen, commonly with some air of an original and lost +meaning about it, and all set in a verse in which he contrived by an +artful variation of pause and stress to give the variety which other +writers had from rhyme. In this as in his structure he accomplished what +the Renaissance had only dreamed. Though he had imitators (the poetic +diction of the age following is modelled on him) he had no followers. No +one has been big enough to find his secret since. + + + + +CHAPTER V + + +THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE + +The student of literature, when he passes in his reading from the age of +Shakespeare and Milton to that of Dryden and Pope, will be conscious of +certain sharply defined differences between the temper and styles of +the writers of the two periods. If besides being a student of literature +he is also (for this is a different thing) a student of literary +criticism he will find that these differences have led to the affixing +of certain labels--that the school to which writers of the former period +belong is called "Romantic" and that of the latter "Classic," this +"Classic" school being again overthrown towards the end of the +eighteenth century by a set of writers who unlike the Elizabethans gave +the name "Romantic" to themselves. What is he to understand by these two +labels; what are the characteristics of "Classicism" and how far is it +opposite to and conflicting with "Romanticism"? The question is +difficult because the names are used vaguely and they do not adequately +cover everything that is commonly put under them. It would be difficult, +for instance, to find anything in Ben Jonson which proclaims him as +belonging to a different school from Dryden, and perhaps the same could +be said in the second and self-styled period of Romanticism of the work +of Crabbe. But in the main the differences are real and easily visible, +even though they hardly convince us that the names chosen are the +happiest that could be found by way of description. + +This period of Dryden and Pope on which we are now entering sometimes +styled itself the Augustan Age of English poetry. It grounded its claim +to classicism on a fancied resemblance to the Roman poets of the golden +age of Latin poetry, the reign of the Emperor Augustus. Its authors saw +themselves each as a second Vergil, a second Ovid, most of all a second +Horace, and they believed that their relation to the big world, their +assured position in society, heightened the resemblances. They +endeavoured to form their poetry on the lines laid down in the critical +writing of the original Augustan age as elaborated and interpreted in +Renaissance criticism. It was tacitly assumed--some of them openly +asserted it--that the kinds, modes of treatment and all the minor +details of literature, figures of speech, use of epithets and the rest, +had been settled by the ancients once and for all. What the Greeks began +the critics and authors of the time of Augustus had settled in its +completed form, and the scholars of the Renaissance had only interpreted +their findings for modern use. There was the tragedy, which had certain +proper parts and a certain fixed order of treatment laid down for it; +there was the heroic poem, which had a story or "fable," which must be +treated in a certain fixed manner, and so on. The authors of the +"Classic" period so christened themselves because they observed these +rules. And they fancied that they had the temper of the Augustan +time--the temper displayed in the works of Horace more than in those of +any one else--its urbanity, its love of good sense and moderation, its +instinctive distrust of emotion, and its invincible good breeding. If +you had asked them to state as simply and broadly as possible their +purpose they would have said it was to follow nature, and if you had +enquired what they meant by nature it would turn out that they thought +of it mainly as the opposite of art and the negation of what was +fantastic, tortured, or far sought in thinking or writing. The later +"Romantic" Revival, when it called itself a return to nature, was only +claiming the intention which the classical school itself had proclaimed +as its main endeavour. The explanation of that paradox we shall see +presently; in the meantime it is worth looking at some of the +characteristics of classicism as they appear in the work of the +"Classic" authors. + +In the first place the "Classic" writers aimed at simplicity of style, +at a normal standard of writing. They were intolerant of individual +eccentricities; they endeavoured, and with success, to infuse into +English letters something of the academic spirit that was already +controlling their fellow-craftsmen in France. For this end amongst +others they and the men of science founded the Royal Society, an +academic committee which has been restricted since to the physical and +natural sciences and been supplemented by similar bodies representing +literature and learning only in our own day. Clearness, plainness, +conversational ease and directness were the aims the society set before +its members where their writing was concerned. "The Royal Society," +wrote the Bishop of Rochester, its first historian, "have exacted from +all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive +expressions, clear sense, a native easiness, bringing all things as near +the mathematical plainness as they can; and preferring the language of +artisans, countrymen, and merchants before that of wits and scholars." +Artisans, countrymen, and merchants--the ideal had been already accepted +in France, Malesherbes striving to use no word that was not in the +vocabulary of the day labourers of Paris, Molière making his washerwoman +first critic of his comedies. It meant for England the disuse of the +turgidities and involutions which had marked the prose of the preachers +and moralists of the times of James and Charles I.; scholars and men of +letters were arising who would have taken John Bunyan, the unlettered +tinker of Bedford, for their model rather than the learned physician Sir +Thomas Browne. + +But genius like Bunyan's apart, there is nothing in the world more +difficult than to write with the easy and forthright simplicity of talk, +as any one may see who tries for himself--or even compares the +letter-writing with the conversation of his friends. So that this desire +of simplicity, of clarity, of lucidity led at once to a more deliberate +art. Dryden and Swift and Addison were assiduous in their labour with +the file; they excel all their predecessors in polish as much as the +writers of the first Augustan age excelled theirs in the same quality. +Not that it was all the result of deliberate art; in a way it was in the +air, and quite unlearned people--journalists and pamphleteers and the +like who wrote unconsciously and hurriedly to buy their supper--partook +of it as well as leisured people and conscious artists. Defoe is as +plain and easy and polished as Swift, yet it is certain his amazing +activity and productiveness never permitted him to look back over a +sentence he had written. Something had happened, that is, to the English +language. The assimilation of latinisms and the revival of obsolete +terms of speech had ceased; it had become finally a more or less fixed +form, shedding so much of its imports as it had failed to make part of +itself and acquiring a grammatical and syntactical fixity which it had +not possessed in Elizabethan times. When Shakespeare wrote + +"What cares these roarers for the name of king," + +he was using, as students of his language never tire of pointing out to +us, a perfectly correct local grammatical form. Fifty years after that +line was written, at the Restoration, local forms had dropped out of +written English. We had acquired a normal standard of language, and +either genius or labour was polishing it for literary uses. + +What they did for prose these "Classic" writers did even more +exactly--and less happily--for verse. Fashions often become exaggerated +before their disappearance, and the decadence of Elizabethan romanticism +had produced poetry the wildness and extravagance of whose images was +well-nigh unbounded. The passion for intricate and far-sought metaphor +which had possessed Donne was accompanied in his work and even more in +that of his followers with a passion for what was elusive and recondite +in thought and emotion and with an increasing habit of rudeness and +wilful difficultness in language and versification. Against these +ultimate licences of a great artistic period, the classical writers +invoked the qualities of smoothness and lucidity, in the same way, so +they fancied, as Vergil might have invoked them against Lucretius. In +the treatment of thought and feeling they wanted clearness, they wanted +ideas which the mass of men would readily apprehend and assent to, and +they wanted not hints or half-spoken suggestions but complete statement. +In the place of the logical subtleties which Donne and his school had +sought in the scholastic writers of the Middle Ages, they brought back +the typically Renaissance study of rhetoric; the characteristic of all +the poetry of the period is that it has a rhetorical quality. It is +never intimate and never profound, but it has point and wit, and it +appeals with confidence to the balanced judgment which men who distrust +emotion and have no patience with subtleties intellectual, emotional, or +merely verbal, have in common. Alongside of this lucidity, this air of +complete statement in substance they strove for and achieved smoothness +in form. To the poet Waller, the immediate predecessor of Dryden, the +classical writers themselves ascribed the honour of the innovation. In +fact Waller was only carrying out the ideals counselled and followed by +Ben Jonson. It was in the school of Waller and Dryden and not in that of +the minor writers who called themselves his followers that he came to +his own. + +What then are the main differences between classicism of the best +period--the classicism whose characteristics we have been +describing--and the Romanticism which came before and after? In the +first place we must put the quality we have described as that of +complete statement. Classical poetry is, so to speak, "all there." Its +meaning is all of it on the surface; it conveys nothing but what it +says, and what it says, it says completely. It is always vigorous and +direct, often pointed and aphoristic, never merely suggestive, never +given to half statement, and never obscure. You feel that as an +instrument of expression it is sharp and polished and shining; it is +always bright and defined in detail. The Great Romantics go to work in +other ways. Their poetry is a thing of half lights and half spoken +suggestions, of hints that imagination will piece together, of words +that are charged with an added meaning of sound over sense, a thing that +stirs the vague and impalpable restlessness of memory or terror or +desire that lies down beneath in the minds of men. It rouses what a +philosopher has called the "Transcendental feeling," the solemn sense of +the immediate presence of "that which was and is and ever shall be," to +induce which is the property of the highest poetry. You will find +nothing in classical poetry so poignant or highly wrought as Webster's + +"Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young," + +and the answer, + +"I think not so: her infelicity + Seemed to have years too many," + +or so subtle in its suggestion, sense echoing back to primeval terrors +and despairs, as this from _Macbeth_: + +"Stones have been known to move and trees to speak; + Augurs and understood relations have + By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks brought forth + The secret'st man of blood." + +or so intoxicating to the imagination and the senses as an ode of Keats +or a sonnet by Rossetti. But you will find eloquent and pointed +statements of thoughts and feelings that are common to most of us--the +expression of ordinary human nature-- + +"What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest," + +"Wit and fine writing" consisting, as Addison put it in a review of +Pope's first published poem, not so much "in advancing things that are +new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable turn." + +Though in this largest sense the "classic" writers eschewed the +vagueness of romanticism, in another and more restricted way they +cultivated it. They were not realists as all good romanticists have to +be. They had no love for oddities or idiosyncrasies or exceptions. They +loved uniformity, they had no use for truth in detail. They liked the +broad generalised, descriptive style of Milton, for instance, better +than the closely packed style of Shakespeare, which gets its effects +from a series of minute observations huddled one after the other and +giving the reader, so to speak, the materials for his own impression, +rather than rendering, as does Milton, the expression itself. + +Every literary discovery hardens ultimately into a convention; it has +its day and then its work is done, and it has to be destroyed so that +the ascending spirit of humanity can find a better means of +self-expression. Out of the writing which aimed at simplicity and truth +to nature grew "Poetic Diction," a special treasury of words and phrases +deemed suitable for poetry, providing poets with a common stock of +imagery, removing from them the necessity of seeing life and nature each +one for himself. The poetry which Dryden and Pope wrought out of their +mental vigour, their followers wrote to pattern. Poetry became reduced, +as it never was before and has never been since, to a formula. The +Elizabethan sonneteers, as we saw, used a vocabulary and phraseology in +common with their fellows in Italy and France, and none the less +produced fine poetry. But they used it to express things they really +felt. The truth is it is not the fact of a poetic diction which matters +so much as its quality--whether it squares with sincerity, whether it is +capable of expressing powerfully and directly one's deepest feelings. +The history of literature can show poetic dictions--special vocabularies +and forms for poetry--that have these qualities; the diction, for +instance, of the Greek choruses, or of the Scottish poets who followed +Chaucer, or of the troubadours. That of the classic writers of an +Augustan age was not of such a kind. Words clothe thought; poetic +diction had the artifice of the crinoline; it would stand by itself. The +Romantics in their return to nature had necessarily to abolish it. + +But when all is said in criticism the poetry of the earlier half of the +eighteenth century excels all other English poetry in two respects. Two +qualities belong to it by virtue of the metre in which it is most of it +written--rapidity and antithesis. Its antithesis made it an incomparable +vehicle for satire, its rapidity for narrative. Outside its limits we +have hardly any even passable satirical verse; within them there are +half-a-dozen works of the highest excellence in this kind. And if we +except Chaucer, there is no one else in the whole range of English +poetry who have the narrative gift so completely as the classic poets. +Bentleys will always exist who will assure us with civility that Pope's +_Homer_, though "very pretty," bears little relation to the Greek, and +that Dryden's _Vergil_, though vigorous and virile, is a poor +representation of its original. The truth remains that for a reader who +knows no ancient languages either of those translations will probably +give a better idea of their originals than any other rendering in +English that we possess. The foundation of their method has been +vindicated in the best modern translations from the Greek. + + +(2) + +The term "eighteenth century" in the vocabulary of the literary +historian is commonly as vaguely used as the term Elizabethan. It +borrows as much as forty years from the seventeenth and gives away ten +to the nineteenth. The whole of the work of Dryden, whom we must count +as the first of the "classic" school, was accomplished before +chronologically it had begun. As a man and as an author he was very +intimately related to his changing times; he adapted himself to them +with a versatility as remarkable as that of the Vicar of Bray, and, it +may be added, as simple-minded. He mourned in verse the death of +Cromwell and the death of his successor, successively defended the +theological positions of the Church of England and the Church of Rome, +changed his religion and became Poet Laureate to James II., and +acquiesced with perfect equanimity in the Revolution which brought in +his successor. This instability of conviction, though it gave a handle +to his opponents in controversy, does not appear to have caused any +serious scandal or disgust among his contemporaries, and it has +certainly had little effect on the judgment of later times. It has +raised none of the reproaches which have been cast at the suspected +apostasy of Wordsworth. Dryden had little interest in political or +religious questions; his instinct, one must conceive, was to conform to +the prevailing mode and to trouble himself no further about the matter. +Defoe told the truth about him when he wrote that "Dryden might have +been told his fate that, having his extraordinary genius slung and +pitched upon a swivel, it would certainly turn round as fast as the +times, and instruct him how to write elegies to Oliver Cromwell and King +Charles the Second with all the coherence imaginable; how to write +_Religio Laici_ and the _Hind and the Panther_ and yet be the same man, +every day to change his principle, change his religion, change his coat, +change his master, and yet never change his nature." He never changed +his nature, he was as free from cynicism as a barrister who represents +successively opposing parties in suits or politics; and when he wrote +polemics in prose or verse he lent his talents as a barrister lends his +for a fee. His one intellectual interest was in his art, and it is in +his comments on his art--the essays and prefaces in the composition of +which he amused the leisure left in the busy life of a dramatist and a +poet of officialdom--that his most charming and delicate work is to be +found. In a way they begin modern English prose; earlier writing +furnishes no equal to their colloquial ease and the grace of their +expression. And they contain some of the most acute criticism in our +language--"classical" in its tone (_i.e._, with a preference for +conformity) but with its respect for order and tradition always tempered +by good sense and wit, and informed and guided throughout by a taste +whose catholicity and sureness was unmatched in the England of his time. +The preface to his _Fables_ contains some excellent notes on Chaucer. +They may be read as a sample of the breadth and perspicuity of his +critical perceptions. + +His chief poetical works were most of them occasional--designed either +to celebrate some remarkable event or to take a side and interpret a +policy in the conflict, political or religious, of the time. +_Absalom and Achitophel_ and _The Medal_ were levelled at the +Shaftesbury-Monmouth intrigues in the closing years of Charles II. +_Religio Laici_ celebrated the excellence of the Church of England in +its character of _via media_ between the opposite extravagances of +Papacy and Presbyterianism. _The Hind and the Panther_ found this +perfection spotted. The Church of England has become the Panther, whose +coat is a varied pattern of heresy and truth beside the spotless purity +of the Hind, the Church of Rome. _Astrea Reddux_ welcomed the returning +Charles; _Annus Mirabilis_ commemorated a year of fire and victories, +Besides these he wrote many dramas in verse, a number of translations, +and some shorter poems, of which the odes are the most remarkable. + +His qualities as a poet fitted very exactly the work he set himself to +do. His work is always plain and easily understood; he had a fine +faculty for narration, and the vigorous rapidity and point of his style +enabled him to sketch a character or sum up a dialectical position very +surely and effectively. His writing has a kind of spare and masculine +force about it. It is this vigour and the impression which he gives of +intellectual strength and of a logical grasp of his subject, that beyond +question has kept alive work which, if ever poetry was, was ephemeral in +its origin. The careers of the unscrupulous Caroline peers would have +been closed for us were they not visible in the reflected light of his +denunciation of them. Though Buckingham is forgotten and Shaftesbury's +name swallowed up in that of his more philanthropic descendant, we can +read of Achitophel and Zimri still, and feel something of the strength +and heat which he caught from a fiercely fought conflict and transmitted +with his own gravity and purposefulness into verse. The Thirty-nine +Articles are not a proper subject for poetry, but the sustained and +serious allegory which Dryden weaves round theological discussion +preserves his treatment of them from the fate of the controversialists +who opposed him. His work has wit and vitality enough to keep it sweet. + +Strength and wit enter in different proportions into the work of his +successor, Alexander Pope--a poet whom admirers in his own age held to +be the greatest in our language. No one would think of making such a +claim now, but the detraction which he suffered at the hands of +Wordsworth and the Romantics, ought not to make us forget that Pope, +though not our greatest, not even perhaps a great, poet is incomparably +our most brilliant versifier. Dryden's strength turns in his work into +something more fragile and delicate, polished with infinite care like +lacquer, and wrought like filigree work to the last point of conscious +and perfected art. He was not a great thinker; the thoughts which he +embodies in his philosophical poems--the _Essay on Man_ and the rest, +are almost ludicrously out of proportion to the solemnity of the titles +which introduce them, nor does he except very rarely get beyond the +conceptions common to the average man when he attempts introspection or +meditates on his own destiny. The reader in search of philosophy will +find little to stimulate him and in the facile Deism of the time +probably something to smile at. Pope has no message to us now. But he +will find views current in his time or borrowed from other authors put +with perfect felicity and wit, and he will recognize the justice of +Addison's comment that Pope's wit and fine writing consist "not so much +in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that are known an +agreeable turn." And he will not fall into the error of dubbing the +author a minor poet because he is neither subtle nor imaginative nor +profound. A great poet would not have written like Pope--one must grant +it; but a minor poet could not. + +It is characteristic of Pope's type of mind and kind of art that there +is no development visible in his work. Other poets, Shakespeare, for +instance, and Keats, have written work of the highest quality when they +were young, but they have had crudenesses to shed--things to get rid of +as their strength and perceptions grew. But Pope, like Minerva, was full +grown and full armed from the beginning. If we did not know that his +_Essay on Criticism_ was his first poem it would be impossible to place +it in the canon of his work; it might come in anywhere and so might +everything else that he wrote. From the beginning his craftsmanship was +perfect; from the beginning he took his subject-matter from others as he +found it and worked it up into aphorism and epigram till each line shone +like a cut jewel and the essential commonplaceness and poverty of his +material was obscured by the glitter the craftsmanship lent to it. +Subject apart, however, he was quite sure of his medium from the +beginning; it was not long before he found the way to use it to most +brilliant purpose. _The Rape of the Lock_ and the satirical poems come +later in his career. + +As a satirist Pope, though he did not hit so hard as Dryden, struck more +deftly and probed deeper. He wielded a rapier where the other used a +broadsword, and though both used their weapons with the highest skill +and the metaphor must not be imagined to impute clumsiness to Dryden, +the rapier made the cleaner cut. Both employed a method in satire which +their successors (a poor set) in England have not been intelligent +enough to use. They allow every possible good point to the object of +their attack. They appear to deal him an even and regretful justice. His +good points, they put it in effect, being so many, how much blacker and +more deplorable his meannesses and faults! They do not do this out of +charity; there was very little of the milk of human kindness in Pope. +Deformity in his case, as in so many in truth and fiction, seemed to +bring envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness in its train. The +method is employed simply because it gives the maximum satirical effect. +That is why Pope's epistle to Arbuthnot, with its characterisation of +Addison, is the most damning piece of invective in our language. + +_The Rape of the Lock_ is an exquisite piece of workmanship, breathing +the very spirit of the time. You can fancy it like some clock made by +one of the Louis XIV. craftsmen, encrusted with a heap of ormulu +mock-heroics and impertinences and set perfectly to the time of day. +From no other poem could you gather so fully and perfectly the temper +of the society in which our "classic" poetry was brought to perfection, +its elegant assiduity in trifles, its brilliant artifice, its paint and +powder and patches and high-heeled shoes, its measured strutting walk in +life as well as in verse. _The Rape of the Lock_ is a mock-heroic poem; +that is to say it applies the form and treatment which the "classic" +critics of the seventeenth century had laid down as belonging to the +"heroic" or "epic" style to a trifling circumstance--the loss by a young +lady of fashion of a lock of hair. And it is the one instance in which +this "recipe" for a heroic poem which the French critics handed on to +Dryden, and Dryden left to his descendants, has been used well-enough to +keep the work done with it in memory. In a way it condemns the poetical +theory of the time; when forms are fixed, new writing is less likely to +be creative and more likely to exhaust itself in the ingenious but +trifling exercises of parody and burlesque. _The Rape of the Lock_ is +brilliant but it is only play. + +The accepted theory which assumed that the forms of poetry had been +settled in the past and existed to be applied, though it concerned +itself mainly with the ancient writers, included also two moderns in its +scope. You were orthodox if you wrote tragedy and epic as Horace told +you and satire as he had shown you; you were also orthodox if you wrote +in the styles of Spenser or Milton. Spenser, though his predecessors +were counted barbaric and his followers tortured and obscure, never fell +out of admiration; indeed in every age of English poetry after him the +greatest poet in it is always to be found copying him or expressing +their love for him--Milton declaring to Dryden that Spenser was his +"original," Pope reading and praising him, Keats writing his earliest +work in close imitation. His characteristic style and stanza were +recognised by the classic school as a distinct "kind" of poetry which +might be used where the theme fitted instead of the heroic manner, and +Spenserian imitations abound. Sometimes they are serious; sometimes, +like Shenstone's _Schoolmistress_, they are mocking and another +illustration of the dangerous ease with which a conscious and sustained +effort to write in a fixed and acquired style runs to seed in burlesque. +Milton's fame never passed through the period of obscurity that +sometimes has been imagined for him. He had the discerning admiration of +Dryden and others before his death. But to Addison belongs the credit of +introducing him to the writers of this time; his papers in the +_Spectator_ on _Paradise Lost_, with their eulogy of its author's +sublimity, spurred the interest of the poets among his readers. From +Milton the eighteenth century got the chief and most ponderous part of +its poetic diction, high-sounding periphrases and borrowings from Latin +used without the gravity and sincerity and fullness of thought of the +master who brought them in. When they wrote blank verse, the classic +poets wrote it in the Milton manner. + +The use of these two styles may be studied in the writings of one man, +James Thomson. For besides acquiring a kind of anonymous immortality +with patriots as the author of "Rule, Britannia," Thomson wrote two +poems respectively in the Spenserian and the Miltonic manner, the former +_The Castle of Indolence_, the latter _The Seasons_. The Spenserian +manner is caught very effectively, but the adoption of the style of +_Paradise Lost_, with its allusiveness, circumlocution and weight, +removes any freshness the _Seasons_ might have had, had the +circumstances in them been put down as they were observed. As it is, +hardly anything is directly named; birds are always the "feathered +tribe" and everything else has a similar polite generality for its +title. Thomson was a simple-minded man, with a faculty for watching and +enjoying nature which belonged to few in his sophisticated age; it is +unfortunate he should have spent his working hours in rendering the +fruit of country rambles freshly observed into a cold and stilted +diction. It suited the eighteenth century reader well, for not +understanding nature herself he was naturally obliged to read her in +translations. + + +(3) + +The chief merits of "classic" poetry--its clearness, its vigour, its +direct statement--are such as belong theoretically rather to prose than +to poetry. In fact, it was in prose that the most vigorous intellect of +the time found itself. We have seen how Dryden, reversing the habit of +other poets, succeeded in expressing his personality not in poetry which +was his vocation, but in prose which was the amusement of his leisure +hours. Spenser had put his politics into prose and his ideals into +verse; Dryden wrote his politics--to order--in verse, and in prose set +down the thoughts and fancies which were the deepest part of him because +they were about his art. The metaphor of parentage, though honoured by +use, fits badly on to literary history; none the less the tradition +which describes him as the father of modern English prose is very near +the truth. He puts into practice for the first time the ideals, +described in the first chapter of this book, which were set up by the +scholars who let into English the light of the Renaissance. With the +exception of the dialogue on Dramatic Poesy, his work is almost all of +it occasional, the fruit of the mood of a moment, and written rather in +the form of a _causerie_, a kind of informal talk, than of a considered +essay. And it is all couched in clear, flowing, rather loosely jointed +English, carefully avoiding rhetoric and eloquence and striving always +to reproduce the ease and flow of cultured conversation, rather than the +tighter, more closely knit style of consciously "literary" prose. His +methods were the methods of the four great prose-writers who followed +him--Defoe, Addison, Steele, and Swift. + +Of these Defoe was the eldest and in some ways the most remarkable. He +has been called the earliest professional author in our language, and if +that is not strictly true, he is at any rate the earliest literary +journalist. His output of work was enormous; he wrote on any and every +subject; there was no event whether in politics or letters or discovery +but he was not ready with something pat on it before the public interest +faded. It followed that at a time when imprisonment, mutilation, and the +pillory took the place of our modern libel actions he had an adventurous +career. In politics he followed the Whig cause and served the Government +with his pen, notably by his writings in support of the union with +Scotland, in which he won over the Scots by his description of the +commercial advantage which would follow the abolition of the border. +This line of argument, taken at a time when the governing of political +tendencies by commercial interests was by no means the accepted +commonplace it is now, proves him a man of an active and original mind. +His originality, indeed, sometimes over-reached the comprehension both +of the public and his superiors; he was imprisoned for an attack on the +Hanoverian succession, which was intended ironically; apparently he was +ignorant of what every journalist ought to know that irony is at once +the most dangerous and the most ineffectual weapon in the whole armoury +of the press. The fertility and ingenuity of his intellect may be best +gauged by the number of modern enterprises and contrivances that are +foreshadowed in his work. Here are a few, all utterly unknown in his own +day, collected by a student of his works; a Board of Trade register for +seamen; factories for goods: agricultural credit banks; a commission of +enquiry into bankruptcy; and a system of national poor relief. They show +him to have been an independent and courageous thinker where social +questions were concerned. + +He was nearly sixty before he had published his first novel, _Robinson +Crusoe_, the book by which he is universally known, and on which with +the seven other novels which followed it the foundation of his literary +fame rests. But his earlier works--they are reputed to number over two +hundred--possess no less remarkable literary qualities. It is not too +much to say that all the gifts which are habitually recommended for +cultivation by those who aspire to journalistic success are to be found +in his prose. He has in the first place the gift of perfect lucidity no +matter how complicated the subject he is expounding; such a book as his +_Complete English Tradesman_ is full of passages in which complex and +difficult subject-matter is set forth so plainly and clearly that the +least literate of his readers could have no doubt of his understanding +it. He has also an amazingly exact acquaintance with the technicalities +of all kinds of trades and professions; none of our writers, not even +Shakespeare, shows half such a knowledge of the circumstances of life +among different ranks and conditions of men; none of them has realized +with such fidelity how so many different persons lived and moved. His +gift of narrative and description is masterly, as readers of his novels +know (we shall have to come back to it in discussing the growth of the +English novel); several of his works show him to have been endowed with +a fine faculty of psychological observation. Without the least +consciousness of the value of what he was writing, nor indeed with any +deliberate artistic intention, he made himself one of the masters of +English prose. + +Defoe had been the champion of the Whigs; on the Tory side the ablest +pen was that of Jonathan Swift. His works proclaim him to have had an +intellect less wide in its range than that of his antagonist but more +vigorous and powerful. He wrote, too, more carefully. In his youth he +had been private secretary to Sir William Temple, a writer now as good +as forgotten because of the triviality of his matter, but in his day +esteemed because of the easy urbanity and polish of his prose. From him +Swift learned the labour of the file, and he declared in later life that +it was "generally believed that this author has advanced our English +tongue to as great a perfection as it can well bear." In fact he added +to the ease and cadences he had learned from Temple qualities of vigour +and directness of his own which put his work far above his master's. And +he dealt with more important subject-matter than the academic exercises +on which Temple exercised his fastidious and meticulous powers of +revision. + +In temperament he is opposed to all the writers of his time. There is no +doubt but there was some radical disorder in his system; brain disease +clouded his intellect in his old age, and his last years were death in +life; right through his life he was a savagely irritable, sardonic, dark +and violent man, impatient of the slightest contradiction or thwarting, +and given to explosive and instantaneous rage. He delighted in flouting +convention, gloried in outraging decency. The rage, which, as he said +himself, tore his heart out, carried him to strange excesses. There is +something ironical (he would himself have appreciated it) in the +popularity of _Gulliver's Travels_ as a children's book--that ascending +wave of savagery and satire which overwhelms policy and learning to +break against the ultimate citadel of humanity itself. In none of his +contemporaries (except perhaps in the sentimentalities of Steele) can +one detect the traces of emotion; to read Swift is to be conscious of +intense feeling on almost every page. The surface of his style may be +smooth and equable but the central fires of passion are never far +beneath, and through cracks and fissures come intermittent bursts of +flame. Defoe's irony is so measured and studiously commonplace that +perhaps those who imprisoned him because they believed him to be serious +are hardly to be blamed; Swift's quivers and reddens with anger in every +line. + +But his pen seldom slips from the strong grasp of his controlling art. +The extraordinary skill and closeness of his allegorical +writings--unmatched in their kind--is witness to the care and sustained +labour which went to their making. He is content with no general +correspondences; his allegory does not fade away into a story in which +only the main characters have a secondary significance; the minutest +circumstances have a bearing in the satire and the moral. In _The Tale +of a Tub_ and in _Gulliver's Travels_--particularly in the former--the +multitude as well as the aptness of the parallels between the imaginary +narrative and the facts it is meant to represent is unrivalled in works +of the kind. Only the highest mental powers, working with intense +fervour and concentration, could have achieved the sustained brilliancy +of the result. "What a genius I had when I wrote that book!" Swift is +said to have exclaimed in his old age when he re-read _The Tale of a +Tub_, and certainly the book is a marvel of constructive skill, all the +more striking because it makes allegory out of history and consequently +is denied that freedom of narrative so brilliantly employed in the +_Travels_. + +Informing all his writings too, besides intense feeling and an +omnipresent and controlling art, is strong common sense. His aphorisms, +both those collected under the heading of _Thoughts on Various +Subjects_, and countless others scattered up and down his pages, are a +treasury of sound, if a little sardonic, practical wisdom. His most +insistent prejudices foreshadow in their essential sanity and justness +those of that great master of life, Dr. Johnson. He could not endure +over-politeness, a vice which must have been very oppressive in society +of his day. He savagely resented and condemned a display of +affection--particularly marital affection--in public. In an age when it +was the normal social system of settling quarrels, he condemned +duelling; and he said some very wise things--things that might still be +said--on modern education. In economics he was as right-hearted as +Ruskin and as wrong-headed. Carlyle, who was in so many respects an echo +of him, found in a passage in his works a "dim anticipation" of his +philosophy of clothes. + +The leading literary invention of the period--after that of the heroic +couplet for verse--was the prose periodical essay. Defoe, it is hardly +necessary to say, began it; it was his nature to be first with any new +thing: but its establishment as a prevailing literary mode is due to two +authors, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Of the two famous +series--the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_--for which they were both +responsible, Steele must take the first credit; he began them, and +though Addison came in and by the deftness and lightness of his writing +took the lion's share of their popularity, both the plan and the +characters round whom the bulk of the essays in the _Spectator_ came to +revolve was the creation of his collaborator. Steele we know very +intimately from his own writings and from Thackeray's portrait of him. +He was an emotional, full-blooded kind of man, reckless and dissipated +but fundamentally honest and good-hearted--a type very common in his day +as the novels show, but not otherwise to be found in the ranks of its +writers. What there is of pathos and sentiment, and most of what there +is of humour in the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_ are his. And he created +the _dramatis personae_ out of whose adventures the slender thread of +continuity which binds the essays together is woven. Addison, though +less open to the onslaughts of the conventional moralist, was a less +lovable personality. Constitutionally endowed with little vitality, he +suffered mentally as well as bodily from languor and lassitude. His +lack of enthusiasm, his cold-blooded formalism, caused comment even in +an age which prided itself in self-command and decorum. + +His very malevolence proceeded from a flaccidity which meanly envied the +activities and enthusiasms of other men. As a writer he was superficial; +he had not the requisite energy for forming a clear or profound judgment +on any question of difficulty; Johnson's comment, "He thinks justly but +he thinks faintly" sums up the truth about him. His good qualities were +of a slighter kind than Swift's; he was a quiet and accurate observer of +manners and fashions in life and conversation, and he had the gift of a +style--what Johnson calls "The Middle Style"--very exactly suited to the +kind of work on which he was habitually engaged, "always equable, always +easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences" but polished, lucid, +and urbane. + +Steele and Addison were conscious moralists as well as literary men. +They desired to purge society from Restoration licences; to their +efforts we must credit the alteration in morality which _The School for +Scandal_ shows over _The Way of the World_. Their professed object as +they stated themselves was "to banish vice and ignorance out of the +territories of Great Britain, (nothing less!) and to bring philosophy +out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs +and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee-houses." In fact their satires +were politically nearer home, and the chief objects of their aversion +were the Tory squires whom it was their business as Whigs to deride. On +the Coverley papers in the _Spectator_ rests the chief part of their +literary fame; these belong rather to the special history of the novel +than to that of the periodical essay. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + + +DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME + +By 1730 the authors whose work made the "classic" school in England were +dead or had ceased writing; by the same date Samuel Johnson had begun +his career as a man of letters. The difference between the period of his +maturity and the period we have been examining is not perhaps easy to +define; but it exists and it can be felt unmistakably in reading. For +one thing "Classicism" had become completely naturalized; it had ceased +to regard the French as arbiters of elegance and literary taste; indeed +Johnson himself never spoke of them without disdain and hated them as +much as he hated Scotsmen. Writing, like dress and the common way of +life, became plainer and graver and thought stronger and deeper. In +manners and speech something of the brutalism which was at the root of +the English character at the time began to colour the refinement of the +preceding age. Dilettantism gave way to learning and speculation; in the +place of Bolingbroke came Adam Smith; in the place of Addison, Johnson. +In a way it is the solidest and sanest time in English letters. Yet in +the midst of its urbanity and order forces were gathering for its +destruction. The ballad-mongers were busy; Blake was drawing and +rhyming; Burns was giving songs and lays to his country-side. In the +distance--Johnson could not hear them--sounded, like the horns of +elf-land faintly blowing, the trumpet calls of romance. + +If the whole story of Dr. Johnson's life were the story of his published +books it would be very difficult to understand his pre-eminent and +symbolic position in literary history. His best known work--it still +remains so--was his dictionary, and dictionaries, for all the licence +they give and Johnson took for the expression of a personality, are the +business of purely mechanical talents. A lesser man than he might have +cheated us of such delights as the definitions of "oats," or "net" or +"pension," but his book would certainly have been no worse as a book. In +his early years he wrote two satires in verse in imitation of Juvenal; +they were followed later by two series of periodical essays on the model +of the _Spectator_; neither of them--the _Rambler_ nor the _Idler_--were +at all successful. _Rasselas_, a tale with a purpose, is melancholy +reading; the _Journey to the Western Hebrides_ has been utterly eclipsed +by Boswell's livelier and more human chronicle of the same events. The +_Lives of the Poets_, his greatest work, was composed with pain and +difficulty when he was seventy years old; even it is but a quarry from +which a reader may dig the ore of a sound critical judgment summing up +a life's reflection, out of the grit and dust of perfunctory +biographical compilations. There was hardly one of the literary coterie +over which he presided that was not doing better and more lasting work. +Nothing that Johnson wrote is to be compared, for excellence in its own +manner, with _Tom Jones_ or the _Vicar of Wakefield_ or the _Citizen of +the World_. He produced nothing in writing approaching the magnitude of +Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, or the profundity of +Burke's philosophy of politics. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose main +business was painting and not the pen, was almost as good an author as +he; his _Discourses_ have little to fear when they are set beside +Johnson's essays. Yet all these men recognised him as their guide and +leader; the spontaneous selection of such a democratic assembly as men +of genius in a tavern fixed upon him as chairman, and we in these later +days, who are safe from the overpowering force of personality +and presence--or at least can only know of it reflected in +books--instinctively recognize him as the greatest man of his age. What +is the reason? + +Johnson's pre-eminence is the pre-eminence of character. He was a great +moralist; he summed up in himself the tendencies of thought and +literature of his time and excelled all others in his grasp of them; and +he was perhaps more completely than any one else in the whole history of +English literature, the typical Englishman. He was one of those to whom +is applicable the commonplace that he was greater than his books. It is +the fashion nowadays among some critics to speak of his biographer +Boswell as if he were a novelist or a playwright and to classify the +Johnson we know with Hamlet and Don Quixote as the product of creative +or imaginative art, working on a "lost original." No exercise of +critical ingenuity could be more futile or impertinent. The impression +of the solidity and magnitude of Johnson's character which is to be +gathered from Boswell is enforced from other sources; from his essays +and his prayers and meditations, from the half-dozen or so lives and +reminiscences which were published in the years following his death +(their very number establishing the reverence with which he was +regarded), from the homage of other men whose genius their books leave +indisputable. Indeed the Johnson we know from Boswell, though it is the +broadest and most masterly portrait in the whole range of biography, +gives less than the whole magnitude of the man. When Boswell first met +him at the age of twenty-two, Johnson was fifty-four. His long period of +poverty and struggle was past. His _Dictionary_ and all his works except +the _Lives of the Poets_ were behind him; a pension from the Crown had +established him in security for his remaining years; his position was +universally acknowledged. So that though the portrait in the _Life_ is a +full-length study of Johnson the conversationalist and literary +dictator, the proportion it preserves is faulty and its study of the +early years--the years of poverty, of the _Vanity of Human Wishes_ and +_London_, of _Rasselas_, which he wrote to pay the expenses of his +mother's funeral, is slight. + +It was, however, out of the bitterness and struggle of these early +years that the strength and sincerity of character which carried Johnson +surely and tranquilly through the time of his triumph were derived. From +the beginning he made no compromise with the world and no concession to +fashion. The world had to take him at his own valuation or not at all. +He never deviated one hair's breadth from the way he had chosen. Judged +by the standards of journalistic success, the _Rambler_ could not well +be worse than he made it. Compared with the lightness and gaiety and the +mere lip-service to morality of Addison its edification is ponderous. +Both authors state the commonplaces of conduct, but Addison achieves +lightness in the doing of it, and his manner by means of which +platitudes are stated lightly and pointedly and with an air of novelty, +is the classic manner of journalism. Johnson goes heavily and directly +to the point, handling well worn moral themes in general and dogmatic +language without any attempt to enliven them with an air of discovery or +surprise. Yet they were, in a sense, discoveries to him; not one of them +but was deeply and sincerely felt; not one but is not a direct and to us +a pathetically dispassionate statement of the reflection of thirty years +of grinding poverty and a soul's anguish. Viewed in the light of his +life, the _Rambler_ is one of the most moving of books. If its literary +value is slight it is a document in character. + +So that when he came to his own, when gradually the public whom he +despised and neglected raised him into a pontifical position matched by +none before him in England and none since save Carlyle, he was sure of +himself; success did not spoil him. His judgment was unwarped by +flattery. The almost passionate tenderness and humanity which lay +beneath his gruffness was undimmed. His personality triumphed in all the +fullness and richness which had carried it in integrity through his +years of struggle. For over twenty years from his chair in taverns in +the Strand and Fleet Street he ruled literary London, imposed his +critical principles on the great body of English letters, and by his +talk and his friendships became the embodiment of the literary +temperament of his age. + +His talk as it is set down by Boswell is his best monument. It was the +happiest possible fate that threw those two men together, for Boswell +besides being an admirer and reporter sedulously chronicling all his +master said and did, fortunately influenced both the saying and the +doing. Most of us have some one in whose company we best shine, who puts +our wits on their mettle and spurs us to our greatest readiness and +vivacity. There is no doubt that Boswell, for all his assumed humility +and for all Johnson's affected disdain, was just such a companion for +Johnson. Johnson was at his best when Boswell was present, and Boswell +not only drew Johnson out on subjects in which his robust common sense +and readiness of judgment were fitted to shine but actually suggested +and conducted that tour in Scotland which gave Johnson an opportunity +for displaying himself at his best. The recorded talk is +extraordinarily varied and entertaining. It is a mistake to conceive +Johnson as a monster of bear-like rudeness, shouting down opposition, +hectoring his companions, and habitually a blustering verbal bully. We +are too easily hypnotized by Macaulay's flashy caricature. He could be +merciless in argument and often wrongheaded and he was always acute, +uncomfortably acute, in his perception of a fallacy, and a little +disconcerting in his unmasking of pretence. But he could be gay and +tender too and in his heart he was a shrinking and sensitive man. + +As a critic (his criticism is the only side of his literary work that +need be considered), Johnson must be allowed a high place. His natural +indolence in production had prevented him from exhausting his faculties +in the more exacting labours of creative work, and it had left him time +for omnivorous if desultory reading, the fruits of which he stored in a +wonderfully retentive memory against an occasion for their use. To a +very fully equipped mind he brought the service of a robust and acute +judgment. Moreover when he applied his mind to a subject he had a +faculty of intense, if fitful concentration; he could seize with great +force on the heart of a matter; he had the power in a wonderfully short +time of extracting the kernel and leaving the husk. His judgments in +writing are like those recorded by Boswell from his conversation; that +is to say he does not, as a critic whose medium was normally the pen +rather than the tongue would tend to do, search for fine shades of +distinction, subdivide subtleties, or be careful to admit _caveats_ or +exceptions; he passes, on the contrary, rapid and forcible verdicts, +not seldom in their assertions untenably sweeping, and always decided +and dogmatic. He never affects diffidence or defers to the judgments of +others. His power of concentration, of seizing on essentials, has given +us his best critical work--nothing could be better, for instance, than +his characterisation of the poets whom he calls the metaphysical school +(Donne, Crashaw, and the rest) which is the most valuable part of his +life of Cowley. Even where he is most prejudiced--for instance in his +attack on Milton's _Lycidas_--there is usually something to be said for +his point of view. And after this concentration, his excellence depends +on his basic common sense. His classicism is always tempered, like +Dryden's, by a humane and sensible dislike of pedantry; he sets no store +by the unities; in his preface to Shakespeare he allows more than a +"classic" could have been expected to admit, writing in it, in truth, +some of the manliest and wisest things in Shakespearean literature. Of +course, he had his failings--the greatest of them what Lamb called +imperfect sympathy. He could see no good in republicans or agnostics, +and none in Scotland or France. Not that the phrase "imperfect +sympathy," which expresses by implication the romantic critic's point of +view, would have appealed to him. When Dr. Johnson did not like people +the fault was in them, not in him; a ruthless objectivity is part of the +classic equipment. He failed, too, because he could neither understand +nor appreciate poetry which concerned itself with the sensations that +come from external nature. Nature was to him a closed book, very likely +for a purely physical reason. He was short-sighted to the point of +myopia, and a landscape meant nothing to him; when he tried to describe +one as he did in the chapter on the "happy valley" in _Rasselas_ he +failed. What he did not see he could not appreciate; perhaps it is too +much to ask of his self-contained and unbending intellect that he should +appreciate the report of it by other men. + + +(2) + +As we have seen, Johnson was not only great in himself, he was great in +his friends. Round him, meeting him as an equal, gathered the greatest +and most prolific writers of the time. There is no better way to study +the central and accepted men of letters of the period than to take some +full evening at the club from Boswell, read a page or two, watch what +the talkers said, and then trace each back to his own works for a +complete picture of his personality. The lie of the literary landscape +in this wonderful time will become apparent to you as you read. You will +find Johnson enthroned, Boswell at his ear, round him men like Reynolds +and Burke, Richardson and Fielding and Goldsmith, Robertson and Gibbon, +and occasionally drawn to the circle minnows like Beattie and a genius +like Adam Smith. Gray, studious in his college at Cambridge, is +exercising his fastidious talent; Collins' sequestered, carefully +nurtured muse is silent; a host of minor poets are riding Pope's poetic +diction, and heroic couplet to death. Outside scattered about is the +van of Romance--Percy collecting his ballads; Burns making songs and +verses in Scotland; the "mad" people, Smart and Chatterton, and above +all Blake, obscurely beginning the work that was to finish in Wordsworth +and Coleridge and Keats. + +Of Johnson's set the most remarkable figure was Edmund Burke--"the +supreme writer," as De Quincey called him, "of his century." His +writings belong more to the history of politics than to that of +literature, and a close examination of them would be out of place here. +His political theory strikes a middle course which offends--and in his +own day offended--both parties in the common strife of political +thinking. He believed the best government to consist in a patriotic +aristocracy, ruling for the good of the people. By birth an Irishman, he +had the innate practicality which commonly lies beneath the flash and +colour of Irish forcefulness and rhetoric. That, and his historical +training, which influenced him in the direction of conceiving every +institution as the culmination of an evolutionary development, sent him +directly counter to the newest and most enthusiastically urged political +philosophy of his day--the philosophy stated by Rousseau, and put in +action by the French Revolution. He disliked and distrusted +"metaphysical theories," when they left the field of speculation for +that of practice, had no patience with "natural rights" (which as an +Irishman he conceived as the product of sentimentalism) and applied what +would nowadays be called a "pragmatic" test to political affairs. +Practice was the touchstone; a theory was useless unless you could prove +that it had worked. It followed that he was not a democrat, opposed +parliamentary reform, and held that the true remedy for corruption and +venality was not to increase the size of the electorate, but to reduce +it so as to obtain electors of greater weight and independence. For him +a member of Parliament was a representative and not a delegate, and must +act not on his elector's wishes but on his own judgment. These opinions +are little in fashion in our own day, but it is well to remember that in +Burke's case they were the outcome not of prejudice but of thought, and +that even democracy may admit they present a case that must be met and +answered. + +Burke's reputation as a thinker has suffered somewhat unjustly as a +result of his refusal to square his tenets either with democracy or with +its opposite. It has been said that ideas were only of use to him so far +as they were of polemical service, that the amazing fertility and +acuteness of his mind worked only in a not too scrupulous determination +to overwhelm his antagonists in the several arguments--on India, or +America, on Ireland or on France--which made up his political career. He +was, said Carlyle, "vehement rather than earnest; a resplendent +far-sighted rhetorician, rather than a deep and earnest thinker." The +words as they stand would be a good description of a certain type of +politician; they would fit, for instance, very well on Mr. Gladstone; +but they do Burke less than justice. He was an innovator in modern +political thought, and his application of the historical method to the +study of institutions is in its way a not less epoch-making achievement +than Bacon's application of the inductive method to science. At a time +when current political thought, led by Rousseau, was drawing its +theories from the abstract conception of "natural rights" Burke was +laying down that sounder and deeper notion of politics which has +governed thinking in that department of knowledge since. Besides this, +he had face to face with the affairs of his own day, a far-sightedness +and sagacity which kept him right where other men went wrong. In a +nation of the blind he saw the truth about the American colonies; he +predicted with exactitude the culmination of the revolution in Napoleon. +Mere rhetorical vehemence cannot explain the earnestness with which in a +day of diplomatic cynicism he preached the doctrine of an international +morality as strict and as binding as the morality which exists between +man and man. Surest of all, we have the testimony, uninfluenced by the +magic of language, of the men he met. You could not, said Dr. Johnson, +shelter with him in a shed for a few moments from the rain without +saying, "This is an extraordinary man." + +His literary position depends chiefly on his amazing gift of expression, +on a command of language unapproached by any writer of his time. His +eloquence (in writing not in speaking; he is said to have had a +monotonous delivery) was no doubt at bottom a matter of race, but to his +Irish readiness and flash and colour he added the strength of a full +mind, fortified by a wonderful store of reading which a retentive and +exact memory enabled him to bring instantly to bear on the subject in +hand. No writer before him, except Defoe, had such a wide knowledge of +the technicalities of different men's occupations, and of all sorts of +the processes of daily business, nor could enlighten an abstract matter +with such a wealth of luminous analogy. It is this characteristic of his +style which has led to the common comparison of his writing with +Shakespeare's; both seem to be preternaturally endowed with more +information, to have a wider sweep of interest than ordinary men. Both +were not only, as Matthew Arnold said of Burke, "saturated with ideas," +but saturated too in the details of the business and desire of ordinary +men's lives; nothing human was alien from them. Burke's language is, +therefore, always interesting and always appropriate to his thought; it +is also on occasion very beautiful. He had a wonderful command of clear +and ringing utterance and could appeal when he liked very powerfully to +the sensibilities of his readers. Rhetoricians are seldom free from +occasional extravagance, and Burke fell under the common danger of his +kind. He had his moments of falsity, could heap coarse and outrageous +abuse on Warren Hastings, illustrate the horrors of the Revolution by +casting a dagger on the floor of the House of Commons, and nourish +hatred beyond the bounds of justice or measure. But these things do not +affect his position, nor take from the solid greatness of his work. + +Boswell we have seen; after Burke and Boswell, Goldsmith was the most +brilliant member of the Johnson circle. If part of Burke's genius is +referable to his nationality, Goldsmith's is wholly so. The beginning +and the end of him was Irish; every quality he possessed as a man and as +a writer belongs to his race. He had the Irish carelessness, the Irish +generosity, the Irish quick temper, the Irish humour. This latter gift, +displayed constantly in a company which had little knowledge of the +peculiar quality of Irish wit and no faculty of sympathy or imagination, +is at the bottom of the constant depreciation of him on the part of +Boswell and others of his set. His mock self-importance they thought +ill-breeding; his humorous self-depreciation and keen sense of his own +ridiculousness, mere lack of dignity and folly. It is curious to read +Boswell and watch how often Goldsmith, without Boswell's knowing it, got +the best of the joke. In writing he had what we can now recognise as +peculiarly Irish gifts. All our modern writers of light half-farcical +comedy are Irish. Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_, is only the first +of a series which includes _The School for Scandal, The Importance of +being Earnest_, and _You Never can Tell_. And his essays--particularly +those of the _Citizen of the World_ with its Chinese vision of England +and English life--are the first fruit of that Irish detachment, that +ability to see "normally" English habits and institutions and foibles +which in our own day has given us the prefaces of Mr. Shaw. As a writer +Goldsmith has a lightness and delicate ease which belongs rather to the +school of the earlier eighteenth century than to his own day; the +enthusiasm of Addison for French literature which he retained gave him a +more graceful model than the "Johnsonian" school, to which he professed +himself to belong, could afford. + + +(3) + +The eighteenth century novel demands separate treatment, and of the +other prose authors the most eminent, Edward Gibbon, belongs to +historical rather than to literary studies. It is time to turn to +poetry. + +There orthodox classicism still held sway; the manner and metre of Pope +or Thomson ruled the roost of singing fowl. In the main it had done its +work, and the bulk of fresh things conceived in it were dull and +imitative, even though occasionally, as in the poems of Johnson himself +and of Goldsmith, an author arose who was able to infuse sincerity and +emotion into a now moribund convention. The classic manner--now more +that of Thomson than of Pope--persisted till it overlapped romanticism; +Cowper and Crabbe each owe a doubtful allegiance, leaning by their +formal metre and level monotony of thought to the one and by their +realism to the other. In the meantime its popularity and its assured +position were beginning to be assailed in the coteries by the work of +two new poets. + +The output of Thomas Gray and William Collins is small; you might almost +read the complete poetical works of either in an evening. But for all +that they mark a period; they are the first definite break with the +classic convention which had been triumphant for upwards of seventy +years when their prime came. It is a break, however, in style rather +than in essentials, and a reader who seeks in them the inspiriting +freshness which came later with Wordsworth and Coleridge will be +disappointed. Their carefully drawn still wine tastes insipidly after +the "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" of romance. They are fastidious +and academic; they lack the authentic fire; their poetry is "made" +poetry like Tennyson's and Matthew Arnold's. On their comparative merits +a deal of critical ink has been spilt, Arnold's characterisation of Gray +is well known--"he never spoke out." Sterility fell upon him because he +lived in an age of prose just as it fell upon Arnold himself because he +lived too much immersed in business and routine. But in what he wrote he +had the genuine poetic gift--the gift of insight and feeling. Against +this, Swinburne with characteristic vehemence raised the standard of +Collins, the latchet of whose shoe Gray, as a lyric poet, was not worthy +to unloose. "The muse gave birth to Collins, she did but give suck to +Gray." It is more to our point to observe that neither, though their +work abounds in felicities and in touches of a genuine poetic sense, was +fitted to raise the standard of revolt. Revolution is for another and +braver kind of genius than theirs. Romanticism had to wait for Burns and +Blake. + +In every country at any one time there are in all probability not one +but several literatures flourishing. The main stream flowing through +the publishers and booksellers, conned by critics and coteries, +recognized as the national literature, is commonly only the largest of +several channels of thought. There are besides the national literature +local literatures--books, that is, are published which enjoy popularity +and critical esteem in their own county or parish and are utterly +unknown outside; there may even be (indeed, there are in several parts +of the country) distinct local schools of writing and dynasties of local +authors. These localized literatures rarely become known to the outside +world; the national literature takes little account of them, though +their existence and probably some special knowledge of one or other of +them is within the experience of most of us. But every now and again +some one of their authors transcends his local importance, gives +evidence of a genius which is not to be denied even by those who +normally have not the knowledge to appreciate the particular flavour of +locality which his writings impart, and becomes a national figure. While +he lives and works the national and his local stream turn and flow +together. + +This was the case of Robert Burns. All his life long he was the singer +of a parish--the last of a long line of "forbears" who had used the +Scottish lowland vernacular to rhyme in about their neighbours and their +scandals, their loves and their church. Himself at the confluence of the +two streams, the national and the local, he pays his tribute to two sets +of originals, talks with equal reverence of names known to us like Pope +and Gray and Shenstone and names unknown which belonged to local +"bards," as he would have called them, who wrote their poems for an +Ayrshire public. If he came upon England as an innovator it was simply +because he brought with him the highly individualized style of Scottish +local vernacular verse; to his own people he was no innovator but a +fulfilment; as his best critic[5] says he brought nothing to the +literature he became a part of but himself. His daring and splendid +genius made the local universal, raised out of rough and cynical +satirizing a style as rich and humorous and astringent as that of +Rabelais, lent inevitableness and pathos and romance to lyric and song. +But he was content to better the work of other men. He made hardly +anything new. + +[Footnote 5: W.E. Henley, "Essay on Burns." Works, David Nutt.] + +Stevenson in his essay on Burns remarks his readiness to use up the work +of others or take a large hint from it "as if he had some difficulty in +commencing." He omits to observe that the very same trait applies to +other great artists. There seem to be two orders of creative writers. On +the one hand are the innovators, the new men like Blake, Wordsworth, +Byron and Shelley, and later Browning. These men owe little to their +predecessors; they work on their own devices and construct their medium +afresh for themselves. Commonly their fame and acceptance is slow, for +they speak in an unfamiliar tongue and they have to educate a generation +to understand their work. The other order of artists have to be shown +the way. They have little fertility in construction or invention. You +have to say to them "Here is something that you could do too; go and do +it better," or "Here is a story to work on, or a refrain of a song; take +it and give it your subtlety, your music." The villainy you teach them +they will use and it will go hard with them if they do not better the +invention; but they do not invent for themselves. To this order of +artists Burns like Shakespeare, and among the lesser men Tennyson, +belongs. In all his plays Shakespeare is known to have invented only one +plot; in many he is using not only the structure but in many places the +words devised by an older author; his mode of treatment depends on the +conventions common in his day, on the tragedy of blood, and madness and +revenge, on the comedy of intrigue and disguises, on the romance with +its strange happenings and its reuniting of long parted friends. Burns +goes the same way to work; scarcely a page of his but shows traces of +some original in the Scottish vernacular school. The elegy, the verse +epistle, the satirical form of _Holy Willie's Prayer_, the song and +recitative of _The Jolly Beggars_, are all to be found in his +predecessors, in Fergusson, Ramsay, and the local poets of the +south-west of Scotland. In the songs often whole verses, nearly always +the refrains, are from older folk poetry. What he did was to pour into +these forms the incomparable richness of a personality whose fire and +brilliance and humour transcended all locality and all tradition, a +personality which strode like a colossus over the formalism and +correctness of his time. His use of familiar forms explains, more than +anything else, his immediate fame. His countrymen were ready for him; +they could hail him on the instant (just as an Elizabethan audience +could hail Shakespeare) as something familiar and at the same time more +splendid than anything they knew. He spoke in a tongue they could +understand. + +It is impossible to judge Burns from his purely English verse; though he +did it as well as any of the minor followers of the school of Pope he +did it no better. Only the weakest side of his character--his +sentimentalism--finds expression in it; he had not the sense of +tradition nor the intimate knowledge necessary to use English to the +highest poetic effect; it was indeed a foreign tongue to him. In the +vernacular he wrote the language he spoke, a language whose natural +force and colour had become enriched by three centuries of literary use, +which was capable, too, of effects of humour and realism impossible in +any tongue spoken out of reach of the soil. It held within it an +unmatched faculty for pathos, a capacity for expressing a lambent and +kindly humour, a power of pungency in satire and a descriptive vividness +that English could not give. How express in the language of Pope or even +of Wordsworth an effect like this:-- + +"They reeled, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit, + Till ilka carlin swat and reekit, + And coost her duddies to the wark, + And linket at it in her sark." + +or this-- + +"Yestreen when to the trembling string, + The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha' + To thee my fancy took its wing-- + I sat but neither heard nor saw: + Tho' this was fair, and that was braw, + And yon the toast of a' the toun, + I sigh'd and said amang them a', + You are na Mary Morison." + +It may be objected that in all this there is only one word, and but two +or three forms of words that are not English. But the accent, the +rhythm, the air of it are all Scots, and it was a Burns thinking in his +native tongue who wrote it, not the Burns of + +"Anticipation forward points the view "; + +or + +"Pleasures are like poppies spread, + You grasp the flower, the bloom is shed." + +or any other of the exercises in the school of Thomson and Pope. + +It is easy to see that though Burns admired unaffectedly the "classic" +writers, his native realism and his melody made him a potent agent in +the cause of naturalism and romance. In his ideas, even more than in his +style, he belongs to the oncoming school. The French Revolution, which +broke upon Europe when he was at the height of his career, found him +already converted to its principles. As a peasant, particularly a Scotch +peasant, he believed passionately in the native worth of man as man and +gave ringing expression to it in his verse. In his youth his +liberal-mindedness made him a Jacobite out of mere antagonism to the +existing régime; the Revolution only discovered for him the more +logical Republican creed. As the leader of a loose-living, hard drinking +set, such as was to be found in every parish, he was a determined and +free-spoken enemy of the kirk, whose tyranny he several times +encountered. In his writing he is as vehement an anti-clerical as +Shelley and much more practical. The political side of romanticism, in +fact, which in England had to wait for Byron and Shelley, is already +full-grown in his work. He anticipates and gives complete expression to +one half of the Romantic movement. + +What Burns did for the idea of liberty, Blake did for that and every +other idea current among Wordsworth and his successors. There is nothing +stranger in the history of English literature than the miracle by which +this poet and artist, working in obscurity, utterly unknown to the +literary world that existed outside him, summed up in himself all the +thoughts and tendencies which were the fruit of anxious discussion and +propaganda on the part of the authors--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb--who +believed themselves to be the discoverers of fresh truth unknown to +their generation. The contemporary and independent discovery by Wallace +and Darwin of the principle of natural selection furnishes, perhaps, a +rough parallel, but the fact serves to show how impalpable and universal +is the spread of ideas, how impossible it is to settle literary +indebtedness or construct literary genealogy with any hope of accuracy. +Blake, by himself, held and expressed quite calmly that condemnation of +the "classic" school that Wordsworth and Coleridge proclaimed against +the opposition of a deriding world. As was his habit he compressed it +into a rude epigram, + +"Great things are done when men and mountains meet; + This is not done by jostling in the street." + +The case for nature against urbanity could not be more tersely nor +better put. The German metaphysical doctrine which was the deepest part +of the teaching of Wordsworth and Coleridge and their main discovery, he +expresses as curtly and off-handedly, + +"The sun's light when he unfolds it, + Depends on the organ that beholds it." + +In the realm of childhood and innocence, which Wordsworth entered +fearfully and pathetically as an alien traveller, he moves with the +simple and assured ease of one native. He knows the mystical wonder and +horror that Coleridge set forth in _The Ancient Mariner_. As for the +beliefs of Shelley, they are already fully developed in his poems. "The +king and the priest are types of the oppressor; humanity is crippled by +"mind-forg'd manacles"; love is enslaved to the moral law, which is +broken by the Saviour of mankind; and, even more subtly than by Shelley, +life is pictured by Blake as a deceit and a disguise veiling from us the +beams of the Eternal."[6] + +[Footnote 6: Prof. Raleigh.] + +In truth, Blake, despite the imputation of insanity which was his +contemporaries' and has later been his commentators' refuge from +assenting to his conclusions, is as bold a thinker in his own way as +Neitzsche and as consistent. An absolute unity of belief inspires all +his utterances, cryptic and plain. That he never succeeded in founding a +school nor gathering followers must be put down in the first place to +the form in which his work was issued (it never reached the public of +his own day) and the dark and mysterious mythology in which the +prophetic books which are the full and extended statement of his +philosophy, are couched, and in the second place to the inherent +difficulty of the philosophy itself. As he himself says, where we read +black, he reads white. For the common distinction between good and evil, +Blake substitutes the distinction between imagination and reason; and +reason, the rationalizing, measuring, comparing faculty by which we come +to impute praise or blame is the only evil in his eyes. "There is +nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so;" to rid the world +of thinking, to substitute for reason, imagination, and for thought, +vision, was the object of all that he wrote or drew. The implications of +this philosophy carry far, and Blake was not afraid to follow where they +led him. Fortunately for those who hesitate to embark on that dark and +adventurous journey, his work contains delightful and simpler things. He +wrote lyrics of extraordinary freshness and delicacy and spontaneity; he +could speak in a child's voice of innocent joys and sorrows and the +simple elemental things. His odes to "Spring" and "Autumn" are the +harbingers of Keats. Not since Shakespeare and Campion died could +English show songs like his + +"My silks and fine array." + +and the others which carry the Elizabethan accent. He could write these +things as well as the Elizabethans. In others he was unique. + +"Tiger! Tiger! burning bright + In the forests of the night, + What immortal hand or eye + Could frame thy fearful symmetry." + +In all the English lyric there is no voice so clear, so separate or +distinctive as his. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + + +THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL + +(1) + +There are two ways of approaching the periods of change and new birth in +literature. The commonest and, for all the study which it entails, the +easiest, is that summed up in the phrase, literature begets literature. +Following it, you discover and weigh literary influences, the influence +of poet on poet, and book on book. You find one man harking back to +earlier models in his own tongue, which an intervening age misunderstood +or despised; another, turning to the contemporary literatures of +neighbouring countries; another, perhaps, to the splendour and exoticism +of the east. In the matter of form and style, such a study carries you +far. You can trace types of poetry and metres back to curious and +unsuspected originals, find the well-known verse of Burns' epistles +turning up in Provençal; Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ stanza in use by Ben +Jonson; the metre of _Christabel_ in minor Elizabethan poetry; the +peculiar form of Fitzgerald's translation of _Omar Khayyam_ followed by +so many imitators since, itself to be the actual reflection of the rough +metrical scheme of his Persian original. But such a study, though it is +profitable and interesting, can never lead to the whole truth. As we saw +in the beginning of this book, in the matter of the Renaissance, every +age of discovery and re-birth has its double aspect. It is a revolution +in style and language, an age of literary experiment and achievement, +but its experiments are dictated by the excitement of a new +subject-matter, and that subject-matter is so much in the air, so +impalpable and universal that it eludes analysis. Only you can be sure +that it is this weltering contagion of new ideas, and new thought--the +"Zeitgeist," the spirit of the age, or whatever you may call it--that is +the essential and controlling force. Literary loans and imports give the +forms into which it can be moulded, but without them it would still +exist, and they are only the means by which a spirit which is in life +itself, and which expresses itself in action, and in concrete human +achievement, gets itself into the written word. The romantic revival +numbers Napoleon amongst its leaders as well as Byron, Wellington, Pitt +and Wilberforce, as well as Keats and Wordsworth. Only the literary +manifestations of the time concern us here, but it is important to +remember that the passion for simplification and for a return to nature +as a refuge from the artificial complexities of society, which inspired +the _Lyrical Ballads_, inspired no less the course of the Revolution in +France, and later, the destruction by Napoleon of the smaller feudal +states of Germany, which made possible German nationality and a national +spirit. + +In this romantic revival, however, the revolution in form and style +matters more than in most. The classicism of the previous age had been +so fixed and immutable; it had been enthroned in high places, enjoyed +the esteem of society, arrogated to itself the acceptance which good +breeding and good manners demanded. Dryden had been a Court poet, +careful to change his allegiance with the changing monarchy. Pope had +been the equal and intimate of the great people of his day, and his +followers, if they did not enjoy the equality, enjoyed at any rate the +patronage of many noble lords. The effect of this was to give the +prestige of social usage to the verse in which they wrote and the +language they used. "There was," said Dr. Johnson, "before the time of +Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the +grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms +appropriated to particular arts. Words too familiar or too remote to +defeat the purpose of a poet." This poetic diction, refined from the +grossness of domestic use, was the standard poetic speech of the +eighteenth century. The heroic couplet in which it was cast was the +standard metre. So that the first object of the revolt of the romantics +was the purely literary object of getting rid of the vice of an unreal +and artificial manner of writing. They desired simplicity of style. + +When the _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge were published in +1798, the preface which Wordsworth wrote as their manifesto hardly +touched at all on the poetic imagination or the attitude of the poet to +life and nature. The only question is that of diction. "The majority of +the following poems," he writes, "are to be considered as experiments. +They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language +of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to +the purposes of poetic pleasure." And in the longer preface to the +second edition, in which the theories of the new school on the nature +and methods of the poetic imagination are set forth at length, he +returns to the same point. "The language too, of these men (that is +those in humble and rustic life) has been adopted ... because such men +hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of +language is originally derived, and because from their rank in society, +and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less +under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and +notions in simple unelaborated expressions." Social vanity--the armour +which we wear to conceal our deepest thoughts and feelings--that was +what Wordsworth wished to be rid of, and he chose the language of the +common people, not because it fitted, as an earlier school of poets who +used the common speech had asserted, the utterance of habitual feeling +and common sense, but because it is the most sincere expression of the +deepest and rarest passion. His object was the object attained by +Shakespeare in some of his supremest moments; the bare intolerable force +of the speeches after the murder of Macbeth, or of King Lear's + + "Do not laugh at me, +For as I am a man, I think this lady +To be my child Cordelia." + +Here, then, was one avenue of revolt from the tyranny of artificiality, +the getting back of common speech into poetry. But there was another, +earlier and more potent in its effect. The eighteenth century, weary of +its own good sense and sanity, turned to the Middle Ages for +picturesqueness and relief. Romance of course, had not been dead in all +these years, when Pope and Addison made wit and good sense the +fashionable temper for writing. There was a strong romantic tradition in +the eighteenth century, though it does not give its character to the +writing of the time. Dr. Johnson was fond of old romances. When he was +in Skye he amused himself by thinking of his Scottish tour as the +journey of a knight-errant. "These fictions of the Gothic romances," he +said, "are not so remote from credibility as is commonly supposed." It +is a mistake to suppose that the passion for mediaevalism began with +either Coleridge or Scott. Horace Walpole was as enthusiastic as either +of them; good eighteenth century prelates like Hurd and Percy, found in +what they called the Gothic an inexhaustible source of delight. As was +natural, what attracted them in the Middle Ages was not their +resemblances to the time they lived in, but the points in which the two +differed. None of them had knowledge enough, or insight enough, to +conceive or sympathize with the humanity of the thirteenth century, to +shudder at its cruelties and hardnesses and persecutions, or to +comprehend the spiritual elevation and insight of its rarest minds. "It +was art," said William Morris, "art in which all men shared, that made +life romantic as people called it in those days. That and not robber +barons, and inaccessible kings, with their hierarchy of serving nobles, +and other rubbish." Morris belonged to a time which knew its middle ages +better. To the eighteenth century the robber barons and the "other +rubbish" were the essence of romance. For Percy and his followers, +medievalism was a collection of what actors call "properties" gargoyles, +and odds and ends of armour and castle keeps with secret passages, +banners and gay colours, and gay shimmering obsolete words. Mistaking +what was on its surface at any rate a subtle and complex civilization, +for rudeness and quaintness, they seemed to themselves to pass back into +a freer air, where any extravagance was possible, and good breeding and +mere circumspection and restraint vanished like the wind. + +A similar longing to be rid of the precision and order of everyday life +drove them to the mountains, and to the literature of Wales and the +Highlands, to Celtic, or pseudo-Celtic romance. To the fashion of the +time mountains were still frowning and horrid steeps; in Gray's Journal +of his tour in the Lakes, a new understanding and appreciation of nature +is only struggling through; and when mountains became fashionable, it +was at first and remained in part at least, till the time of Byron, for +those very theatrical qualities which had hitherto put them in +abhorrence. Wordsworth, in his _Lines written above Tintern Abbey_, in +which he sets forth the succeeding stages of his mental development, +refers to this love of the mountains for their spectacular qualities, as +the first step in the progress of his mind to poetic maturity: + + "The sounding cataract +Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock, +The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood, +Their colours and their forms were then to me +An appetite." + +This same passion for the "sounding cataract" and the "tall rock," this +appetite for the deep and gloomy wood, gave its vogue in Wordsworth's +boyhood to Macpherson's _Ossian_, a book which whether it be completely +fraudulent or not, was of capital importance in the beginnings of the +romantic movement. + +The love of mediaeval quaintness and obsolete words, however, led to a +more important literary event--the publication of Bishop Percy's edition +of the ballads in the Percy folio--the _Reliques of Ancient Poetry_. +Percy to his own mind knew the Middle Ages better than they knew +themselves, and he took care to dress to advantage the rudeness and +plainness of his originals. Perhaps we should not blame him. Sir Walter +Scott did the same with better tact and skill in his Border minstrelsy, +and how many distinguished editors are there, who have tamed and +smoothed down the natural wildness and irregularity of Blake? But it is +more important to observe that when Percy's reliques came to have their +influence on writing his additions were imitated as much as the poems on +which he grafted them. Chatterton's _Rowley Poems_, which in many places +seem almost inconceivably banal and artificial to us to-day, caught +their accent from the episcopal editor as much as from the ballads +themselves. None the less, whatever its fault, Percy's collection gave +its impetus to one half of the romantic movement; it was eagerly read in +Germany, and when it came to influence Scott and Coleridge it did so not +only directly, but through Burger's imitation of it; it began the modern +study and love of the ballad which has given us _Sister Helen_, the +_White Ship_ and the _Lady of Shalott_. + +But the romantic revival goes deeper than any change, however momentous +of fashion or style. It meant certain fundamental changes in human +outlook. In the first place, one notices in the authors of the time an +extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility; the mind at its +countless points of contact with the sensuous world and the world of +thought, seems to become more alive and alert. It is more sensitive to +fine impressions, to finely graded shades of difference. Outward +objects and philosophical ideas seem to increase in their content and +their meaning, and acquire a new power to enrich the intensest life of +the human spirit. Mountains and lakes, the dignity of the peasant, the +terror of the supernatural, scenes of history, mediaeval architecture +and armour, and mediaeval thought and poetry, the arts and mythology of +Greece--all became springs of poetic inspiration and poetic joy. The +impressions of all these things were unfamiliar and ministered to a +sense of wonder, and by that very fact they were classed as romantic, as +modes of escape from a settled way of life. But they were also in a +sense familiar too. The mountains made their appeal to a deep implanted +feeling in man, to his native sense of his own worth and dignity and +splendour as a part of nature, and his recognition of natural scenery as +necessary, and in its fullest meaning as sufficient for his spiritual +needs. They called him back from the artificiality and complexity of the +cities he had built for himself, and the society he had weaved round +him, to the natural world in which Providence had planted him of old, +and which was full of significance for his soul. The greatest poets of +the romantic revival strove to capture and convey the influence of +nature on the mind, and of the mind on nature interpenetrating one +another. They were none the less artists because they approached nature +in a state of passive receptivity. They believed in the autocracy of the +individual imagination none the less because their mission was to +divine nature and to understand her, rather than to correct her +profusions in the name of art. + +In the second place the romantic revival meant a development of the +historical sense. Thinkers like Burke and Montesquieu helped students of +politics to acquire perspective; to conceive modern institutions not as +things separate, and separately created, but as conditioned by, and +evolved from, the institutions of an earlier day. Even the revolutionary +spirit of the time looked both before and after, and took history as +well as the human perfectibility imagined by philosophers into its +purview. In France the reformers appealed in the first instance for a +States General--a mediaeval institution--as the corrective of their +wrongs, and later when they could not, like their neighbours in Belgium, +demand reform by way of the restoration of their historical rights, they +were driven to go a step further back still, beyond history to what they +conceived to be primitive society, and demand the rights of man. This +development of the historical sense, which had such a widespread +influence on politics, got itself into literature in the creation of the +historical novel. Scott and Chateaubriand revived the old romance in +which by a peculiar ingenuity of form, the adventures of a typical hero +of fiction are cast in a historical setting and set about with portraits +of real personages. The historical sense affected, too, novels dealing +with contemporary life. Scott's best work, his novels of Scottish +character, catch more than half their excellence from the richness of +colour and proportion which the portraiture of the living people +acquires when it is aided by historical knowledge and imagination. + +Lastly, besides this awakened historical sense, and this quickening of +imaginative sensibility to the message of nature, the Romantic revival +brought to literature a revival of the sense of the connection between +the visible world and another world which is unseen. The supernatural +which in all but the crudest of mechanisms had been out of English +literature since _Macbeth_, took hold on the imaginations of authors, +and brought with it a new subtlety and a new and nameless horror and +fascination. There is nothing in earlier English literature to set +beside the strange and terrible indefiniteness of the _Ancient Mariner_, +and though much in this kind has been written since, we have not got far +beyond the skill and imagination with which Coleridge and Scott worked +on the instinctive fears that lie buried in the human mind. + +Of all these aspects of the revival, however, the new sensitiveness and +accessibility to the influences of external nature was the most +pervasive and the most important. Wordsworth speaks for the love that is +in homes where poor men lie, the daily teaching that is in + + "Woods and rills; +The silence that is in the starry sky, +The peace that is among the lonely hills." + +Shelley for the wildness of the west wind, and the ubiquitous spiritual +emotion which speaks equally in the song of a skylark or a political +revolution. Byron for the swing and roar of the sea. Keats for verdurous +glooms and winding mossy ways. Scott and Coleridge, though like Byron +they are less with nature than with romance, share the same communion. + +This imaginative sensibility of the romantics not only deepened their +communion with nature, it brought them into a truer relation with what +had before been created in literature and art. The romantic revival is +the Golden Age of English criticism; all the poets were critics of one +sort or another--either formally in essays and prefaces, or in passing +and desultory flashes of illumination in their correspondence. +Wordsworth, in his prefaces, in his letter to a friend of Burns which +contains such a breadth and clarity of wisdom on things that seem alien +to his sympathies, even in some of his poems; Coleridge, in his +_Biographia Literaria_, in his notes on Shakespeare, in those rhapsodies +at Highgate which were the basis for his recorded table talk; Keats in +his letters; Shelley in his _Defence of Poetry_; Byron in his satires +and journals; Scott in those lives of the novelists which contain so +much truth and insight into the works of fellow craftsmen--they are all +to be found turning the new acuteness of impression which was in the air +they breathed, to the study of literature, as well as to the study of +nature. Alongside of them were two authors, Lamb and Hazlitt, whose bent +was rather critical than creative, and the best part of whose +intelligence and sympathy was spent on the sensitive and loving +divination of our earlier literature. With these two men began the +criticism of acting and of pictorial art that have developed since into +two of the main kinds of modern critical writing. + +Romantic criticism, both in its end and its method, differs widely from +that of Dr. Johnson and his school. Wordsworth and Coleridge were +concerned with deep-seated qualities and temperamental differences. +Their critical work revolved round their conception of the fancy and the +imagination, the one dealing with nature on the surface and decorating +it with imagery, the other penetrating to its deeper significances. +Hazlitt and Lamb applied their analogous conception of wit as a lower +quality than humour, in the same fashion. Dr. Johnson looked on the +other hand for correctness of form, for the subordination of the parts +to the whole, for the self-restraint and good sense which common manners +would demand in society, and wisdom in practical life. His school cared +more for large general outlines than for truth in detail. They would not +permit the idiosyncrasy of a personal or individual point of view: hence +they were incapable of understanding lyricism, and they preferred those +forms of writing which set themselves to express the ideas and feelings +that most men may be supposed to have in common. Dr. Johnson thought a +bombastic and rhetorical passage in Congreve's _Mourning Bride_ better +than the famous description of Dover cliff in _King Lear_. "The crows, +sir," he said of the latter, "impede your fall." Their town breeding, +and possibly, as we saw in the case of Dr. Johnson, an actual physical +disability, made them distrust any clear and sympathetic rendering of +the sense impressions which nature creates. One cannot imagine Dr. +Johnson caring much for the minute observations of Tennyson's nature +poems, or delighting in the verdurous and mossy alleys of Keats. His +test in such a case would be simple; he would not have liked to have +been in such places, nor reluctantly compelled to go there would he in +all likelihood have had much to say about them beyond that they were +damp. For the poetry--such as Shelley's--which worked by means of +impalpable and indefinite suggestion, he would, one may conceive, have +cared even less. New modes of poetry asked of critics new sympathies and +a new way of approach. But it is time to turn to the authors themselves. + + +(2) + +The case of Wordsworth is peculiar. In his own day he was vilified and +misunderstood; poets like Byron, whom most of us would now regard simply +as depending from the school he created, sneered at him. Shelley and +Keats failed to understand him or his motives; he was suspected of +apostasy, and when he became poet laureate he was written off as a +turn-coat who had played false to the ideals of his youth. Now common +opinion regards him as a poet above all the others of his age, and +amongst all the English poets standing beside Milton, but a step below +Shakespeare himself--and we know more about him, more about the +processes by which his soul moved from doubts to certainties, from +troubles to triumph, than we do about any other author we have. This +knowledge we have from the poem called, _The Prelude_, which was +published after his death. It was designed to be only the opening and +explanatory section of a philosophical poem, which was never completed. +Had it been published earlier it would have saved Wordsworth from the +coldness and neglect he suffered at the hands of younger men like +Shelley; it might even have made their work different from what it is. +It has made Wordsworth very clear to us now. + +Wordsworth is that rarest thing amongst poets, a complete innovator. He +looked at things in a new way. He found his subjects in new places; and +he put them into a new poetic form. At the turning point of his life, in +his early manhood, he made one great discovery, had one great vision. By +the light of that vision and to communicate that discovery he wrote his +greatest work. By and by the vision faded, the world fell back into the +light of common day, his philosophy passed from discovery to acceptance, +and all unknown to him his pen fell into a common way of writing. The +faculty of reading which has added fuel to the fire of so many waning +inspirations was denied him. He was much too self-centred to lose +himself in the works of others. Only the shock of a change of +environment--a tour in Scotland, or abroad--shook him into his old +thrill of imagination, so that a few fine things fitfully illumine the +enormous and dreary bulk of his later work. If we lost all but the +_Lyrical Ballads_, the poems of 1804, and the _Prelude_, and the +_Excursion_, Wordsworth's position as a poet would be no lower than it +is now, and he would be more readily accepted by those who still find +themselves uncertain about him. + +The determining factor in his career was the French Revolution--that +great movement which besides re-making France and Europe, made our very +modes of thinking anew. While an undergraduate in Cambridge Wordsworth +made several vacation visits to France. The first peaceful phase of the +Revolution was at its height; France and the assembly were dominated by +the little group of revolutionary orators who took their name from the +south-western province from which most of them came, and with this +group--the Girondists--Wordsworth threw in his lot. Had he remained he +would probably have gone with them to the guillotine. As it was, the +commands of his guardian brought him back to England, and he was forced +to contemplate from a distance the struggle in which he burned to take +an active part. One is accustomed to think of Wordsworth as a mild old +man, but such a picture if it is thrown back as a presentment of the +Wordsworth of the nineties is a far way from the truth. This darkly +passionate man tortured himself with his longings and his horror. War +came and the prayers for victory in churches found him in his heart +praying for defeat; then came the execution of the king; then the plot +which slew the Gironde. Before all this Wordsworth trembled as Hamlet +did when he learned the ghost's story. His faith in the world was +shaken. First his own country had taken up arms against what he believed +to be the cause of liberty. Then faction had destroyed his friends whom +he believed to be its standard bearers. What was in the world, in +religion, in morality that such things could be? In the face of this +tremendous problem, Wordsworth, unlike Hamlet, was resolute and +determined. It was, perhaps, characteristic of him that in his desire to +get his feet on firm rock again he fled for a time to the exactest of +sciences--to mathematics. But though he got certainties there, they must +have been, one judges, certainties too arid for his thirsting mind. Then +he made his great discovery--helped to it, perhaps, by his sister +Dorothy and his friend Coleridge--he found nature, and in nature, peace. + +Not a very wonderful discovery, you will say, but though the cleansing +and healing force of natural surroundings on the mind is a familiar +enough idea in our own day, that is only because Wordsworth found it. +When he gave his message to the world it was a new message. It is worth +while remembering that it is still an unaccepted one. Most of his +critics still consider it only Wordsworth's fun when he wrote: + +"One impulse from the vernal wood + Can teach us more of man, + Of moral evil and of good, + Than all the sages can." + +Yet Wordsworth really believed that moral lessons and ideas were to be +gathered from trees and stones. It was the main part of his teaching. He +claimed that his own morality had been so furnished him, and he wrote +his poetry to convince other people that what had been true for him +could be true for them too. + +For him life was a series of impressions, and the poet's duty was to +recapture those impressions, to isolate them and brood over them, till +gradually as a result of his contemplation emotion stirred again--an +emotion akin to the authentic thrill that had excited him when the +impression was first born in experience. Then poetry is made; this +emotion "recollected" as Wordsworth said (we may add, recreated) "in +tranquillity" passes into enduring verse. He treasured numberless +experiences of this kind in his own life. Some of them are set forth in +the _Prelude_, that for instance on which the poem _The Thorn_ in the +_Lyrical Ballads_ is based; they were one or other of them the occasion +of most of his poems; the best of them produced his finest work--such a +poem for instance as _Resolution and Independence_ or _Gipsies_, where +some chance sight met with in one of the poet's walks is brooded over +till it becomes charged with a tremendous significance for him and for +all the world. If we ask how he differentiated his experiences, which +had most value for him, we shall find something deficient. That is to +say, things which were unique and precious to him do not always appear +so to his readers. He counted as gold much that we regard as dross. But +though we may differ from his judgments, the test which he applied to +his recollected impressions is clear. He attached most value to those +which brought with them the sense of an indwelling spirit, transfusing +and interpenetrating all nature, transfiguring with its radiance, rocks +and fields and trees and the men and women who lived close enough to +them to partake of their strength--the sense, as he calls it in his +_Lines above Tintern Abbey_ of something "more deeply interfused" by +which all nature is made one. Sometimes, as in the hymn to Duty, it is +conceived as law. Duty before whom the flowers laugh, is the daughter of +the voice of God, through whom the most ancient heavens are fresh and +strong. But in most of his poems its ends do not trouble; it is +omnipresent; it penetrates everything and transfigures everything; it is +God. It was Wordsworth's belief that the perception of this indwelling +spirit weakened as age grew. For a few precious and glorious years he +had the vision + +"When meadow, grove, and stream, + The earth, and every common sight + To me did seem + Apparelled in celestial light, + The glory and the freshness of a dream." + +Then as childhood, when "these intimations of immortality," this +perception of the infinite are most strong, passed further and further +away, the vision faded and he was left gazing in the light of common +day. He had his memories and that was all. + +There is, of course, more in the matter than this, and Wordsworth's +beliefs were inextricably entangled with the conception which Coleridge +borrowed from German philosophy. + +"We receive but what we give" + +wrote Coleridge to his friend, + +"And in our life alone doth Nature live." + +And Wordsworth came to know that the light he had imagined to be +bestowed, was a light reflected from his own mind. It is easy to pass +from criticism to metaphysics where Coleridge leads, and wise not to +follow. + +If Wordsworth represents that side of the Romantic Revival which is best +described as the return to Nature, Coleridge has justification for the +phrase "Renascence of Wonder." He revived the supernatural as a literary +force, emancipated it from the crude mechanism which had been applied to +it by dilettantes like Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe, and invested +it instead with that air of suggestion and indefiniteness which gives +the highest potency to it in its effect on the imagination. But +Coleridge is more noteworthy for what he suggested to others than for +what he did in himself. His poetry is, even more than Wordsworth's, +unequal; he is capable of large tracts of dreariness and flatness; he +seldom finished what he began. The _Ancient Mariner_, indeed, which was +the fruit of his close companionship with Wordsworth, is the only +completed thing of the highest quality in the whole of his work. +_Christabel_ is a splendid fragment; for years the first part lay +uncompleted and when the odd accident of an evening's intoxication led +him to commence the second, the inspiration had fled. For the second +part, by giving to the fairy atmosphere of the first a local habitation +and a name, robbed it of its most precious quality; what it gave in +exchange was something the public could get better from Scott. _Kubla +Khan_ went unfinished because the call of a friend broke the thread of +the reverie in which it was composed. In the end came opium and oceans +of talk at Highgate and fouled the springs of poetry. Coleridge never +fulfilled the promise of his early days with Wordsworth. "He never spoke +out." But it is on the lines laid down by his share in the pioneer work +rather than on the lines of Wordsworth's that the second generation of +Romantic poets--that of Shelley and Keats--developed. + +The work of Wordsworth was conditioned by the French Revolution but it +hardly embodied the revolutionary spirit. What he conceived to be its +excesses revolted him, and though he sought and sang freedom, he found +it rather in the later revolt of the nationalities against the +Revolution as manifested in Napoleon himself. The spirit of the +revolution, as it was understood in France and in Europe, had to wait +for Shelley for its complete expression. Freedom is the breath of his +work--freedom not only from the tyranny of earthly powers, but from the +tyranny of religion, expressing itself in republicanism, in atheism, and +in complete emancipation from the current moral code both in conduct and +in writing. The reaction which had followed the overthrow of Napoleon at +Waterloo, sent a wave of absolutism and repression all over Europe, +Italy returned under the heel of Austria; the Bourbons were restored in +France; in England came the days of Castlereagh and Peterloo. The poetry +of Shelley is the expression of what the children of the revolution--men +and women who were brought up in and believed the revolutionary +gospel--thought about these things. + +But it is more than that. Of no poet in English, nor perhaps in any +other tongue, could it be said with more surety, that the pursuit of the +spirit of beauty dominates all his work. For Shelley it interfused all +nature and to possess it was the goal of all endeavour. The visible +world and the world of thought mingle themselves inextricably in his +contemplation of it. For him there is no boundary-line between the two, +the one is as real and actual as the other. In his hands that old trick +of the poets, the simile, takes on a new and surprising form. He does +not enforce the creations of his imagination by the analogy of natural +appearances; his instinct is just the opposite--to describe and illumine +nature by a reference to the creatures of thought. Other poets, Keats +for instance, or Tennyson, or the older poets like Dante and Homer, +might compare ghosts flying from an enchanter like leaves flying before +the wind. They might describe a poet wrapped up in his dreams as being +like a bird singing invisible in the brightness of the sky. But Shelley +can write of the west wind as + +"Before whose unseen presence the leaves, dead, + Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing," + +and he can describe a skylark in the heavens as + +"Like a poet hidden + In the light of thought." + +Of all English poets he is the most completely lyrical. Nothing that he +wrote but is wrought out of the anguish or joy of his own heart. + +"Most wretched souls," + +he writes + +"Are cradled into poetry by wrong + They learn in suffering what they teach in song." + +Perhaps his work is too impalpable and moves in an air too rarefied. It +sometimes lacks strength. It fails to take grip enough of life. Had he +lived he might have given it these things; there are signs in his last +poems that he would have given it. But he could hardly have bettered the +sheer and triumphant lyricism of _The Skylark_, of some of his choruses, +and of the _Ode to Dejection_, and of the _Lines written on the Eugenoen +hills_. + +If the Romantic sense of the one-ness of nature found its highest +exponent in Shelley, the Romantic sensibility to outward impressions +reached its climax in Keats. For him life is a series of sensations, +felt with almost febrile acuteness. Records of sight and touch and smell +crowd every line of his work; the scenery of a garden in Hampstead +becomes like a landscape in the tropics, so extraordinary vivid and +detailed is his apprehension and enjoyment of what it has to give him. +The luxuriance of his sensations is matched by the luxuriance of his +powers of expression. Adjectives heavily charged with messages for the +senses, crowd every line of his work, and in his earlier poems overlay +so heavily the thought they are meant to convey that all sense of +sequence and structure is apt to be smothered under their weight. Not +that consecutive thought claims a place in his conception of his poetry. +His ideal was passive contemplation rather than active mental exertion. +"O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts," he exclaims in one +of his letters; and in another, "It is more noble to sit like Jove than +to fly like Mercury." His work has one message and one only, the +lastingness of beauty and its supreme truth. It is stated in _Endymion_ +in lines that are worn bare with quotation. It is stated again, at the +height of his work in his greatest ode, + +"Beauty is truth, truth beauty: that is all +We know on earth and all we need to know." + +His work has its defects; he died at twenty-six so it would be a miracle +if it were not so. He lacks taste and measure; he offends by an +over-luxuriousness and sensuousness; he fails when he is concerned with +flesh and blood; he is apt, as Mr. Robert Bridges has said, "to class +women with roses and sweetmeats." But in his short life he attained with +surprising rapidity and completeness to poetic maturity, and +perhaps from no other poet could we find things to match his +greatest--_Hyperion, Isabella_, the _Eve of St. Agnes_ and +the _Odes_. + +There remains a poet over whom opinion is more sharply divided than it +is about any other writer in English. In his day Lord Byron was the +idol, not only of his countrymen, but of Europe. Of all the poets of +the time he was, if we except Scott, whose vogue he eclipsed, the only +one whose work was universally known and popular. Everybody read him; he +was admired not only by the multitude and by his equals, but by at least +one who was his superior, the German poet Goethe, who did not hesitate +to say of him that he was the greatest talent of the century Though this +exalted opinion still persists on the Continent, hardly anyone could be +found in England to subscribe to it now. Without insularity, we may +claim to be better judges of authors in our own tongue than foreign +critics, however distinguished and comprehending. How then shall be +explained Lord Byron's instant popularity and the position he won? What +were the qualities which gave him the power he enjoyed? + +In the first place he appealed by virtue of his subject-matter--the +desultory wanderings of _Childe Harold_ traversed ground every mile of +which was memorable to men who had watched the struggle which had been +going on in Europe with scarcely a pause for twenty years. Descriptive +journalism was then and for nearly half a century afterwards unknown, +and the poem by its descriptiveness, by its appeal to the curiosity of +its readers, made the same kind of success that vividly written special +correspondence would to-day, the charm of metre super-added. Lord Byron +gave his readers something more, too, than mere description. He added to +it the charm of a personality, and when that personality was enforced by +a title, when it proclaimed its sorrows as the age's sorrows, endowed +itself with an air of symbolism and set itself up as a kind of scapegoat +for the nation's sins, its triumph was complete. Most men have from time +to time to resist the temptation to pose to themselves; many do not even +resist it. For all those who chose to believe themselves blighted by +pessimism, and for all the others who would have loved to believe it, +Byron and his poetry came as an echo of themselves. Shallow called to +shallow. Men found in him, as their sons found more reputably in +Tennyson, a picture of what they conceived to be the state of their own +minds. + +But he was not altogether a man of pretence. He really and passionately +loved freedom; no one can question his sincerity in that. He could be a +fine and scathing satirist; and though he was careless, he had great +poetic gifts. + + +(3) + +The age of the Romantic Revival was one of poetry rather than of prose; +it was in poetry that the best minds of the time found their means of +expression. But it produced prose of rare quality too, and there is +delightful reading in the works of its essayists and occasional writers. +In its form the periodical essay had changed little since it was first +made popular by Addison and Steele. It remained, primarily, a vehicle +for the expression of a personality, and it continued to seek the +interests of its readers by creating or suggesting an individuality +strong enough to carry off any desultory adventure by the mere force of +its own attractiveness. Yet there is all the difference in the world +between Hazlitt and Addison, or Lamb and Steele. The _Tatler_ and the +_Spectator_ leave you with a sense of artifice; Hazlitt and Lamb leave +you with a grip of a real personality--in the one case very vigorous and +combative, in the other set about with a rare plaintiveness and +gentleness, but in both absolutely sincere. Addison is gay and witty and +delightful but he only plays at being human; Lamb's essays--the +translation into print of a heap of idiosyncrasies and oddities, and +likes and dislikes, and strange humours--come straight and lovably from +a human soul. + +The prose writers of the romantic movement brought back two things into +writing which had been out of it since the seventeenth century. They +brought back egotism and they brought back enthusiasm. They had the +confidence that their own tastes and experiences were enough to interest +their readers; they mastered the gift of putting themselves on paper. +But there is one wide difference between them and their predecessors. +Robert Burton was an egotist but he was an unconscious one; the same is, +perhaps, true though much less certainly of Sir Thomas Browne. In Lamb +and Hazlitt and De Quincey egotism was deliberate, consciously assumed, +the result of a compelling and shaping art. If one reads Lamb's earlier +essays and prose pieces one can see the process at work--watch him +consciously imitating Fuller, or Burton, or Browne, mirroring their +idiosyncrasies, making their quaintnesses and graces his own. By the +time he came to write the _Essays of Elia_, he had mastered the personal +style so completely that his essays seem simply the overflow of talk. +They are so desultory; they move from one subject to another so +waywardly--such an essay as a _Chapter on Ears_, for instance, passing +with the easy inconsequence of conversation from anatomy through organ +music to beer--when they quote, as they do constantly, it is +incorrectly, as in the random reminiscences of talk. Here one would say +is the cream risen to the surface of a full mind and skimmed at one +taking. How far all this is from the truth we know--know, too, how for +months he polished and rewrote these magazine articles, rubbing away +roughnesses and corners, taking off the traces of logical sequences and +argument, till in the finished work of art he mimicked inconsequence so +perfectly that his friends might have been deceived. And the personality +he put on paper was partly an artistic creation, too. In life Lamb was a +nervous, easily excitable and emotional man; his years were worn with +the memory of a great tragedy and the constantly impending fear of a +repetition of it. One must assume him in his way to have been a good man +of business--he was a clerk in the India House, then a throbbing centre +of trade, and the largest commercial concern in England, and when he +retired his employers gave him a very handsome pension. In the early +portrait by Hazlitt there is a dark and gleaming look of fire and +decision. But you would never guess it from his books. There he is the +gentle recluse, dreaming over old books, old furniture, old prints, old +plays and play-bills; living always in the past, loving in the town +secluded byways like the Temple, or the libraries of Oxford Colleges, +and in the country quiet and shaded lanes, none of the age's enthusiasm +for mountains in his soul. When he turned critic it was not to discern +and praise the power and beauty in the works of his contemporaries but +to rediscover and interpret the Elizabethan and Jacobean romantic plays. + +This quality of egotism Lamb shares with other writers of the time, with +De Quincey, for instance, who left buried in work which is extensive and +unequal, much that lives by virtue of the singular elaborateness and +loftiness of the style which he could on occasion command. For the +revival of enthusiasm one must turn to Hazlitt, who brought his +passionate and combative disposition to the service of criticism, and +produced a series of studies remarkable for their earnestness and their +vigour, and for the essential justness which they display despite the +prejudice on which each of them was confessedly based. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + + +THE VICTORIAN AGE + +(1) + +Had it not been that with two exceptions all the poets of the Romantic +Revival died early, it might be more difficult to draw a line between +their school and that of their successors than it is. As it happened, +the only poet who survived and wrote was Wordsworth, the oldest of them +all. For long before his death he did nothing that had one touch of the +fire and beauty of his earlier work. The respect he began, after a +lifetime of neglect, to receive in the years immediately before his +death, was paid not to the conservative laureate of 1848, but to the +revolutionary in art and politics of fifty years before. He had lived on +long after his work was done + +"To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost + That blamed the living man." + +All the others, Keats, Shelley, Byron were dead before 1830, and the +problem which might have confronted us had they lived, of adult work +running counter to the tendencies and ideals of youth, does not exist +for us. Keats or Shelley might have lived as long as Carlyle, with whom +they were almost exactly contemporary; had they done so, the age of the +Romantic Revival and the Victorian age would have been united in the +lives of authors who were working in both. We should conceive that is, +the whole period as one, just as we conceive of the Renaissance in +England, from Surrey to Shirley, as one. As it is, we have accustomed +ourselves to a strongly marked line of division. A man must be on either +one side or the other; Wordsworth, though he wrote on till 1850, is on +the further side, Carlyle, though he was born in the same year as Keats, +on the hither side. Still the accident of length of days must not blind +us to the fact that the Victorian period, though in many respects its +ideals and modes of thinking differed from those of the period which +preceded it, is essentially an extension of the Romantic Revival and not +a fresh start. The coherent inspiration of romanticism disintegrated +into separate lines of development, just as in the seventeenth century +the single inspiration of the Renaissance broke into different schools. +Along these separate lines represented by such men as Browning, the +Pre-Raphaelites, Arnold, and Meredith, literature enriched and +elaborated itself into fresh forms. None the less, every author in each +of these lines of literary activity invites his readers to understand +his direct relations to the romantic movement. Rossetti touches it +through his original, Keats; Arnold through Goethe and Byron; Browning +first through Shelley and then in item after item of his varied +subject-matter. + +In one direction the Victorian age achieved a salient and momentous +advance. The Romantic Revival had been interested in nature, in the +past, and in a lesser degree in art, but it had not been interested in +men and women. To Wordsworth the dalesmen of the lakes were part of the +scenery they moved in; he saw men as trees walking, and when he writes +about them as in such great poems as _Resolution and Independence_, the +_Brothers_, or _Michael_, it is as natural objects he treats them, +invested with the lonely remoteness that separates them from the +complexities and passions of life as it is lived. They are there, you +feel, to teach the same lesson as the landscape teaches in which they +are set. The passing of the old Cumberland beggar through villages and +past farmsteads, brings to those who see him the same kind of +consolation as the impulses from a vernal wood that Wordsworth +celebrated in his purely nature poetry. Compare with Wordsworth, +Browning, and note the fundamental change in the attitude of the poet +that his work reveals. _Pippa Passes_ is a poem on exactly the same +scheme as the _Old Cumberland Beggar_, but in treatment no two things +could be further apart. The intervention of Pippa is dramatic, and +though her song is in the same key as the wordless message of +Wordsworth's beggar she is a world apart from him, because she is +something not out of natural history, but out of life. The Victorian age +extended the imaginative sensibility which its predecessor had brought +to bear on nature and history, to the complexities of human life. It +searched for individuality in character, studied it with a loving +minuteness, and built up out of its discoveries amongst men and women a +body of literature which in its very mode of conception was more closely +related to life, and thus the object of greater interest and excitement +to its readers, than anything which had been written in the previous +ages. It is the direct result of this extension of romanticism that the +novel became the characteristic means of literary expression of the +time, and that Browning, the poet who more than all others represents +the essential spirit of his age, should have been as it were, a novelist +in verse. Only one other literary form, indeed, could have ministered +adequately to this awakened interest, but by some luck not easy to +understand, the drama, which might have done with greater economy and +directness the work the novel had to do, remained outside the main +stream of literary activity. To the drama at last it would seem that we +are returning, and it may be that in the future the direct +representation of the clash of human life which is still mainly in the +hands of our novelists, may come back to its own domain. + +The Victorian age then added humanity to nature and art as the +subject-matter of literature. But it went further than that. For the +first time since the Renaissance, came an era which was conscious of +itself as an epoch in the history of mankind, and confident of its +mission. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries revolutionized +cosmography, and altered the face of the physical world. The nineteenth +century, by the discoveries of its men of science, and by the remarkable +and rapid succession of inventions which revolutionized the outward face +of life, made hardly less alteration in accepted ways of thinking. The +evolutionary theory, which had been in the air since Goethe, and to +which Darwin was able to give an incontrovertible basis of scientific +fact, profoundly influenced man's attitude to nature and to religion. +Physical as apart from natural science made scarcely less advance, and +instead of a world created in some fixed moment of time, on which had +been placed by some outward agency all the forms and shapes of nature +that we know, came the conception of a planet congealing out of a +nebula, and of some lower, simpler and primeval form of life multiplying +and diversifying itself through succeeding stages of development to form +both the animal and the vegetable world. This conception not only +enormously excited and stimulated thought, but it gave thinkers a +strange sense of confidence and certainty not possessed by the age +before. Everything seemed plain to them; they were heirs of all the +ages. Their doubts were as certain as their faith. + +"There lives more faith in honest doubt + Believe me than in half the creeds." + +said Tennyson; "honest doubt," hugged with all the certainty of a +revelation, is the creed of most of his philosophical poetry, and what +is more to the point was the creed of the masses that were beginning to +think for themselves, to whose awakening interest his work so strongly +appealed. There were no doubt, literary side-currents. Disraeli survived +to show that there were still young men who thought Byronically. +Rossetti and his school held themselves proudly aloof from the +rationalistic and scientific tendencies of the time, and found in the +Middle ages, better understood than they had been either by Coleridge or +Scott, a refuge from a time of factories and fact. The Oxford movement +ministered to the same tendencies in religion and philosophy; but it is +the scientific spirit, and all that the scientific spirit implied, its +certain doubt, its care for minuteness, and truth of observation, its +growing interest in social processes, and the conditions under which +life is lived, that is the central fact in Victorian literature. + +Tennyson represents more fully than any other poet this essential spirit +of the age. If it be true, as has been often asserted, that the spirit +of an age is to be found best in the work of lesser men, his complete +identity with the thought of his time is in itself evidence of his +inferiority to his contemporary, Browning. Comparison between the two +men seem inevitable; they were made by readers when _In Memoriam_ and +_Men and Women_ came hot from the press, and they have been made ever +since. There could, of course, scarcely be two men more dissimilar, +Tennyson elaborating and decorating the obvious; Browning delving into +the esoteric and the obscure, and bringing up strange and unfamiliar +finds; Tennyson in faultless verse registering current newly accepted +ways of thought; Browning in advance thinking afresh for himself, +occupied ceaselessly in the arduous labour of creating an audience fit +to judge him. The age justified the accuracy with which Tennyson +mirrored it, by accepting him and rejecting Browning. It is this very +accuracy that almost forces us at this time to minimise and dispraise +Tennyson's work. We have passed from Victorian certainties, and so he is +apt when he writes in the mood of _Locksley Hall_ and the rest, to +appear to us a little shallow, a little empty, and a little pretentious. + +His earlier poetry, before he took upon himself the burden of the age, +is his best work, and it bears strongly marked upon it the influence of +Keats. Such a poem for instance as _Oenone_ shows an extraordinarily +fine sense of language and melody, and the capacity caught from Keats of +conveying a rich and highly coloured pictorial effect. No other poet, +save Keats, has had a sense of colour so highly developed as Tennyson's. +From his boyhood he was an exceedingly close and sympathetic observer of +the outward forms of nature, and he makes a splendid use of what his +eyes had taught him in these earlier poems. Later his interest in +insects and birds and flowers outran the legitimate opportunity he +possessed of using it in poetry. It was his habit, his son tells us, to +keep notebooks of things he had observed in his garden or in his walks, +and to work them up afterwards into similes for the _Princess_ and the +_Idylls of the King_. Read in the books written by admirers, in which +they have been studied and collected (there are several of them) these +similes are pleasing enough; in the text where they stand they are apt +to have the air of impertinences, beautiful and extravagant +impertinences no doubt, but alien to their setting. In one of the +_Idylls of the King_ the fall of a drunken knight from his horse is +compared to the fall of a jutting edge of cliff and with it a lance-like +fir-tree, which Tennyson had observed near his home, and one cannot +resist the feeling that the comparison is a thought too great for the +thing it was meant to illustrate. So, too, in the _Princess_ when he +describes a handwriting, + +"In such a hand as when a field of corn + Bows all its ears before the roaring East." + +he is using up a sight noted in his walks and transmuted into poetry on +a trivial and frivolous occasion. You do not feel, in fact, that the +handwriting visualized spontaneously called up the comparison; you are +as good as certain that the simile existed waiting for use before the +handwriting was thought of. + +The accuracy of his observation of nature, his love of birds and larvae +is matched by the carefulness with which he embodies, as soon as ever +they were made, the discoveries of natural and physical science. +Nowadays, possibly because these things have become commonplace to us, +we may find him a little school-boy-like in his pride of knowledge. He +knows that + +"This world was once a fluid haze of light, + Till toward the centre set the starry tides + And eddied wild suns that wheeling cast + The planets." + +just as he knows what the catkins on the willows are like, or the names +of the butterflies: but he is capable, on occasion of "dragging it in," +as in + +"The nebulous star we call the sun, + If that hypothesis of theirs be sound." + +from the mere pride in his familiarity with the last new thing. His +dealings with science, that is, no more than his dealings with nature, +have that inevitableness, that spontaneous appropriateness that we feel +we have a right to ask from great poetry. + +Had Edgar Allan Poe wanted an example for his theory of the +impossibility of writing, in modern times, a long poem, he might have +found it in Tennyson. His strength is in his shorter pieces; even where +as in _In Memoriam_ he has conceived and written something at once +extended and beautiful, the beauty lies rather in the separate parts; +the thing is more in the nature of a sonnet sequence than a continuous +poem. Of his other larger works, the _Princess_, a scarcely happy blend +between burlesque in the manner of the _Rape of the Lock_, and a serious +apostleship of the liberation of women, is solely redeemed by these +lyrics. Tennyson's innate conservatism hardly squared with the +liberalising tendencies he caught from the more advanced thought of his +age, in writing it. Something of the same kind is true of _Maud_, which +is a novel told in dramatically varied verse. The hero is morbid, his +social satire peevish, and a story which could have been completely +redeemed by the ending (the death of the hero), which artistic fitness +demands, is of value for us now through its three amazing songs, in +which the lyric genius of Tennyson reached its finest flower. It cannot +be denied, either, that he failed--though magnificently--in the _Idylls +of the King_. The odds were heavily against him in the choice of a +subject. Arthur is at once too legendary and too shadowy for an epic +hero, and nothing but the treatment that Milton gave to Satan (i.e. flat +substitution of the legendary person by a newly created character) could +fit him for the place. Even if Arthur had been more promising than he +is, Tennyson's sympathies were fundamentally alien from the moral and +religious atmosphere of Arthurian romance. His robust Protestantism left +no room for mysticism; he could neither appreciate nor render the +mystical fervour and exultation which is in the old history of the Holy +Grail. Nor could he comprehend the morality of a society where courage, +sympathy for the oppressed, loyalty and courtesy were the only essential +virtues, and love took the way of freedom and the heart rather than the +way of law. In his heart Tennyson's attitude to the ideals of chivalry +and the old stories in which they are embodied differed probably very +little from that of Roger Ascham, or of any other Protestant Englishman; +when he endeavoured to make an epic of them and to fasten to it an +allegory in which Arthur should typify the war of soul against sense, +what happened was only what might have been expected. The heroic +enterprise failed, and left us with a series of mid-Victorian novels in +verse in which the knights figure as heroes of the generic mid-Victorian +type. + +But if he failed in his larger poems, he had a genius little short of +perfect in his handling of shorter forms. The Arthurian story which +produced only middling moralizing in the _Idylls_, gave us as well the +supremely written Homeric episode of the _Morte d'Arthur_, and the sharp +and defined beauty of _Sir Galahad_ and the _Lady of Shallott_. Tennyson +had a touch of the pre-Raphaelite faculty of minute painting in words, +and the writing of these poems is as clear and naïve as in the best +things of Rossetti. He had also what neither Rossetti nor any of his +contemporaries in verse, except Browning, had, a fine gift of +understanding humanity. The peasants of his English idylls are conceived +with as much breadth of sympathy and richness of humour, as purely and +as surely, as the peasants of Chaucer or Burns. A note of passionate +humanity is indeed in all his work. It makes vivid and intense his +scholarly handling of Greek myth; always the unchanging human aspect of +it attracts him most, in Oenone's grief, in the indomitableness of +Ulysses, the weariness and disillusionment in Tithonus. It has been the +cause of the comfort he has brought to sorrow; none of his generation +takes such a human attitude to death. Shelley could yearn for the +infinite, Browning treat it as the last and greatest adventure, Arnold +meet it clear eyed and resigned. To Wordsworth it is the mere return of +man the transient to Nature the eternal. + +"No motion has she now; no force, + She neither hears nor sees, + Roiled round in earth's diurnal course + With rocks and stones and trees." + +To Tennyson it brings the fundamental human home-sickness for familiar +things. + +"Ah, sad and strange as on dark summer dawns, + The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds + To dying ears when unto dying eyes + The casement slowly grows a glimmering square." + +It is an accent which wakes an echo in a thousand hearts. + + +(2) + +While Tennyson, in his own special way and, so to speak, in +collaboration with the spirit of the age, was carrying on the work of +Romanticism on its normal lines, Browning was finding a new style and a +new subject matter. In his youth he had begun as an imitator of Shelley, +and _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_ remain to show what the influence of the +"sun-treader" was on his poetry. But as early as his second publication, +_Bells and Pomegranates_, he had begun to speak for himself, and with +_Men and Women_, a series of poems of amazing variety and brilliance, he +placed himself unassailably in the first rank. Like Tennyson's, his +genius continued high and undimmed while life was left him. _Men and +Women_ was followed by an extraordinary narrative poem, _The Ring and +the Book_, and it by several volumes of scarcely less brilliance, the +last of which appeared on the very day of his death. + +Of the two classes into which, as we saw when we were studying Burns, +creative artists can be divided, Browning belongs to that one which +makes everything new for itself, and has in consequence to educate the +readers by whom its work can alone be judged. He was an innovator in +nearly everything he did; he thought for himself; he wrote for himself, +and in his own way. And because he refused to follow ordinary modes of +writing, he was and is still widely credited with being tortured and +obscure.[7] The charge of obscurity is unfortunate because it tends to +shut off from him a large class of readers for whom he has a sane and +special and splendid message. + +[Footnote 7: The deeper causes of Browning's obscurity have been +detailed in Chapter iv. of this book. It may be added for the benefit of +the reader who fights shy on the report of it, that in nine cases out of +ten, it arises simply from his colloquial method; we go to him expecting +the smoothness and completeness of Tennyson; we find in him the +irregularities, the suppressions, the quick changes of talk--the +clipped, clever talk of much idea'd people who hurry breathlessly from +one aspect to another of a subject.] + +His most important innovation in form was his device of the dramatic +lyric. What interested him in life was men and women, and in them, not +their actions, but the motives which governed their actions. To lay bare +fully the working of motive in a narrative form with himself as narrator +was obviously impossible; the strict dramatic form, though he attained +some success in it, does not seem to have attracted him, probably +because in it the ultimate stress must be on the thing done rather than +the thing thought; there remained, therefore, of the ancient forms of +poetry, the lyric. The lyric had of course been used before to express +emotions imagined and not real to the poet himself; Browning was the +first to project it to express imagined emotions of men and women, +whether typical or individual, whom he himself had created. Alongside +this perversion of the lyric, he created a looser and freer form, the +dramatic monologue, in which most of his most famous poems, _Cleon, +Sludge the Medium, Bishop Blougram's Apology_, etc., are cast. In the +convention which Browning established in it, all kinds of people are +endowed with a miraculous articulation, a new gift of tongues; they +explain themselves, their motives, the springs of those motives (for in +Browning's view every thought and act of a man's life is part of an +interdependent whole), and their author's peculiar and robust philosophy +of life. Out of the dramatic monologues he devised the scheme of _The +Ring and the Book_, a narrative poem in which the episodes, and not the +plot, are the basis of the structure, and the story of a trifling and +sordid crime is set forth as it appeared to the minds of the chief +actors in succession. To these new forms he added the originality of an +extraordinary realism in style. Few poets have the power by a word, a +phrase, a flash of observation in detail to make you see the event as +Browning makes you see it. + +Many books have been written on the philosophy of Browning's poetry. +Stated briefly its message is that of an optimism which depends on a +recognition of the strenuousness of life. The base of his creed, as of +Carlyle's, is the gospel of labour; he believes in the supreme moral +worth of effort. Life is a "training school" for a future existence, +and our place in it depends on the courage and strenuousness with which +we have laboured here. Evil is in the world only as an instrument in the +process of development; by conquering it we exercise our spiritual +faculties the more. Only torpor is the supreme sin, even as in _The +Statue and the Bust_ where effort would have been to a criminal end. + +"The counter our lovers staked was lost + As surely as if it were lawful coin: + And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost + Was, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, + Though the end in sight was a crime, I say." + +All the other main ideas of his poetry fit with perfect consistency on +to his scheme. Love, the manifestation of a man's or a woman's nature, +is the highest and most intimate relationship possible, for it is an +opportunity--the highest opportunity--for spiritual growth. It can reach +this end though an actual and earthly union is impossible. + +"She has lost me, I have gained her; + Her soul's mine and thus grown perfect, + I shall pass my life's remainder. + Life will just hold out the proving + Both our powers, alone and blended: + And then come the next life quickly! + This world's use will have been ended." + +It follows that the reward of effort is the promise of immortality, and +that for each man, just because his thoughts and motives taken together +count, and not one alone, there is infinite hope. + +The contemporaries of Tennyson and Browning in poetry divide themselves +into three separate schools. Nearest to them in temper is the school of +Matthew Arnold and Clough; they have the same quick sensitiveness to the +intellectual tendencies of the age, but their foothold in a time of +shifting and dissolving creeds is a stoical resignation very different +from the buoyant optimism of Browning, or Tennyson's mixture of science +and doubt and faith. Very remote from them on the other hand is the +backward-gazing mediaevalism of Rossetti and his circle, who revived +(Rossetti from Italian sources, Morris from Norman) a Middle age which +neither Scott nor Coleridge had more than partially and brokenly +understood. The last school, that to which Swinburne and Meredith with +all their differences unite in belonging, gave up Christianity with +scarcely so much as a regret, + +"We have said to the dream that caress'd and the dread that smote us, +Good-night and good-bye." + +and turned with a new hope and exultation to the worship of our +immemorial mother the earth. In both of them, the note of enthusiasm for +political liberty which had been lost in Wordsworth after 1815, and was +too early extinguished with Shelley, was revived by the Italian +Revolution in splendour and fire. + + +(3) + +As one gets nearer one's own time, a certain change comes insensibly +over one's literary studies. Literature comes more and more to mean +imaginative literature or writing about imaginative literature. The mass +of writing comes to be taken not as literature, but as argument or +information; we consider it purely from the point of view of its subject +matter. A comparison will make this at once clear. When a man reads +Bacon, he commonly regards himself as engaged in the study of English +literature; when he reads Darwin he is occupied in the study of natural +science. A reader of Bacon's time would have looked on him as we look on +Darwin now. + +The distinction is obviously illogical, but a writer on English +literature within brief limits is forced to bow to it if he wishes his +book to avoid the dreariness of a summary, and he can plead in +extenuation the increased literary output of the later age, and the +incompleteness with which time so far has done its work in sifting the +memorable from the forgettable, the ephemeral from what is going to +last. The main body of imaginative prose literature--the novel--is +treated of in the next chapter and here no attempt will be made to deal +with any but the admittedly greatest names. Nothing can be said, for +instance, of that fluent journalist and biased historian Macaulay, nor +of the mellifluousness of Newman, nor of the vigour of Kingsley or +Maurice; nor of the writings, admirable in their literary qualities of +purity and terseness, of Darwin or Huxley; nor of the culture and +apostleship of Matthew Arnold. These authors, one and all, interpose no +barrier, so to speak, between their subject-matter and their readers; +you are not when you read them conscious of a literary intention, but of +some utilitarian one, and as an essay on English literature is by no +means a handbook to serious reading they will be no more mentioned here. + +In the case of one nineteenth century writer in prose, this method of +exclusion cannot apply. Both Carlyle and Ruskin were professional men of +letters; both in the voluminous compass of their works touched on a +large variety of subjects; both wrote highly individual and peculiar +styles; and both without being either professional philosophers or +professional preachers, were as every good man of letters, whether he +denies it or not, is and must be, lay moralists and prophets. Of the two +Ruskin is plain and easily read, and he derives his message; Carlyle, +his original, is apt to be tortured and obscure. Inside the body of his +work the student of nineteenth century literature is probably in need of +some guidance; outside so far as prose is concerned he can fend for +himself. + +As we saw, Carlyle was the oldest of the Victorians; he was over forty +when the Queen came to the throne. Already his years of preparation in +Scotland, town and country, were over, and he had settled in that famous +little house in Chelsea which for nearly half a century to come was to +be one of the central hearths of literary London. More than that, he had +already fully formed his mode of thought and his peculiar style. _Sartor +Resartus_ was written and published serially before the Queen came to +the throne; the _French Revolution_ came in the year of her accession at +the very time that Carlyle's lectures were making him a fashionable +sensation; most of his miscellaneous essays had already appeared in the +reviews. But with the strict Victorian era, as if to justify the usually +arbitrary division of literary history by dynastic periods, there came a +new spirit into his work. For the first time he applied his peculiar +system of ideas to contemporary politics. _Chartism_ appeared in 1839; +_Past and Present_, which does the same thing as _Chartism_ in an +artistic form, three years later. They were followed by one other +book--_Latter Day Pamphlets_--addressed particularly to contemporary +conditions, and by two remarkable and voluminous historical works. Then +came the death of his wife, and for the last fifteen years of his life +silence, broken only briefly and at rare intervals. + +The reader who comes to Carlyle with preconceived notions based on what +he has heard of the subject-matter of his books is certain to be +surprised by what he finds. There are histories in the canon of his +works and pamphlets on contemporary problems, but they are composed on a +plan that no other historian and no other social reformer would own. A +reader will find in them no argument, next to no reasoning, and little +practical judgment. Carlyle was not a great "thinker" in the strictest +sense of that term. He was under the control, not of his reason, but of +his emotions; deep feeling, a volcanic intensity of temperament flaming +into the light and heat of prophecy, invective, derision, or a simple +splendour of eloquence, is the characteristic of his work. Against +cold-blooded argument his passionate nature rose in fierce rebellion; +he had no patience with the formalist or the doctrinaire. Nor had he the +faculty of analysis; his historical works are a series of pictures or +tableaux, splendidly and vividly conceived, and with enormous colour and +a fine illusion of reality, but one-sided as regards the truth. In his +essays on hero-worship he contents himself with a noisy reiteration of +the general predicate of heroism; there is very little except their +names and the titles to differentiate one sort of hero from another. His +picture of contemporary conditions is not so much a reasoned indictment +as a wild and fantastic orgy of epithets: "dark simmering pit of +Tophet," "bottomless universal hypocrisies," and all the rest. In it all +he left no practical scheme. His works are fundamentally not about +politics or history or literature, but about himself. They are the +exposition of a splendid egotism, fiercely enthusiastic about one or two +deeply held convictions; their strength does not lie in their matter of +fact. + +This is, perhaps, a condemnation of him in the minds of those people who +ask of a social reformer an actuarially accurate scheme for the +abolition of poverty, or from a prophet a correct forecast of the result +of the next general election. Carlyle has little help for these and no +message save the disconcerting one of their own futility. His message is +at once larger and simpler, for though his form was prose, his soul was +a poet's soul, and what he has to say is a poet's word. In a way, it is +partly Wordsworth's own. The chief end of life, his message is, is the +performance of duty, chiefly the duty of work. "Do thy little stroke of +work; this is Nature's voice, and the sum of all the commandments, to +each man." All true work is religion, all true work is worship; to +labour is to pray. And after work, obedience the best discipline, so he +says in _Past and Present_, for governing, and "our universal duty and +destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break." Carlyle asked of every +man, action and obedience and to bow to duty; he also required of him +sincerity and veracity, the duty of being a real and not a sham, a +strenuous warfare against cant. The historical facts with which he had +to deal he grouped under these embracing categories, and in the _French +Revolution_, which is as much a treasure-house of his philosophy as a +history, there is hardly a page on which they do not appear. +"Quack-ridden," he says, "in that one word lies all misery whatsoever." + +These bare elemental precepts he clothes in a garment of amazing and +bizarre richness. There is nothing else in English faintly resembling +the astonishing eccentricity and individuality of his style. Gifted with +an extraordinarily excitable and vivid imagination; seeing things with +sudden and tremendous vividness, as in a searchlight or a lightning +flash, he contrived to convey to his readers his impressions full +charged with the original emotion that produced them, and thus with the +highest poetic effect. There is nothing in all descriptive writing to +match the vividness of some of the scenes in the _French Revolution_ or +in the narrative part of _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_, or more +than perhaps in any of his books, because in it he was setting down +deep-seated impressions of his boyhood rather than those got from +brooding over documents, in _Sartor Resartus_. Alongside this unmatched +pictorial vividness and a quite amazing richness and rhythm of language, +more surprising and original than anything out of Shakespeare, there are +of course, striking defects--a wearisome reiteration of emphasis, a +clumsiness of construction, a saddening fondness for solecisms and +hybrid inventions of his own. The reader who is interested in these (and +every one who reads him is forced to become so) will find them +faithfully dealt with in John Sterling's remarkable letter (quoted in +Carlyle's _Life of Sterling_) on _Sartor Resartus_. But gross as they +are, and frequently as they provide matter for serious offence, these +eccentricities of language link themselves up in a strange indissoluble +way with Carlyle's individuality and his power as an artist. They are +not to be imitated, but he would be much less than he is without them, +and they act by their very strength and pungency as a preservative of +his work. That of all the political pamphlets which the new era of +reform occasioned, his, which were the least in sympathy with it and are +the furthest off the main stream of our political thinking now, alone +continue to be read, must be laid down not only to the prophetic fervour +and fire of their inspiration but to the dark and violent magic of their +style. + + + + +CHAPTER IX + + +THE NOVEL + +(1) + +The faculty for telling stories is the oldest artistic faculty in the +world, and the deepest implanted in the heart of man. Before the rudest +cave-pictures were scratched on the stone, the story-teller, it is not +unreasonable to suppose, was plying his trade. All early poetry is +simply story-telling in verse. Stories are the first literary interest +of the awakening mind of a child. As that is so, it is strange that the +novel, which of all literary ways of story-telling seems closest to the +unstudied tale-spinning of talk, should be the late discovery that it +is. Of all the main forms into which the literary impulse moulds the +stuff of imagination, the novel is the last to be devised. The drama +dates from prehistoric times, so does the epic, the ballad and the +lyric. The novel, as we know it, dates practically speaking from 1740. +What is the reason it is so late in appearing? + +The answer is simply that there seems no room for good drama and good +fiction at the same time in literature; drama and novels cannot exist +side by side, and the novel had to wait for the decadence of the drama +before it could appear and triumph. If one were to make a table of +succession for the various kinds of literature as they have been used +naturally and spontaneously (not academically), the order would be the +epic, the drama, the novel; and it would be obvious at once that the +order stood for something more than chronological succession, and that +literature in its function as a representation and criticism of life +passed from form to form in the search of greater freedom, greater +subtlety, and greater power. At present we seem to be at the climax of +the third stage in this development; there are signs that the fourth is +on the way, and that it will be a return to drama, not to the old, +formal, ordered kind, but, something new and freer, ready to gather up +and interpret what there is of newness and freedom in the spirit of man +and the society in which he lives. + +The novel, then, had to wait for the drama's decline, but there was +literary story-telling long before that. There were mediaeval romances +in prose and verse; Renaissance pastoral tales, and stories of +adventure; collections, plenty of them, of short stories like +Boccaccio's, and those in Painter's _Palace of Pleasure_. But none of +these, not even romances which deal in moral and sententious advice like +_Euphues_, approach the essence of the novel as we know it. They are all +(except _Euphues_, which is simply a framework of travel for a book of +aphorisms) simple and objective; they set forth incidents or series of +incidents; long or short they are anecdotes only--they take no account +of character. It was impossible we should have the novel as distinct +from the tale, till stories acquired a subjective interest for us; till +we began to think about character and to look at actions not only +outwardly, but within at their springs. + +As has been stated early in this book, it was in the seventeenth century +that this interest in character was first wakened. Shakespeare had +brought to the drama, which before him was concerned with actions viewed +outwardly, a psychological interest; he had taught that "character is +destiny," and that men's actions and fates spring not from outward +agencies, but from within in their own souls. The age began to take a +deep and curious interest in men's lives; biography was written for the +first time and autobiography; it is the great period of memoir-writing +both in England and France; authors like Robert Burton came, whose +delight it was to dig down into human nature in search for oddities and +individualities of disposition; humanity as the great subject of enquiry +for all men, came to its own. All this has a direct bearing on the birth +of the novel. One transient form of literature in the seventeenth +century--the Character--is an ancestor in the direct line. The +collections of them--Earle's _Microcosmography_ is the best--are not +very exciting reading, and they never perhaps quite succeeded in +naturalizing a form borrowed from the later age of Greece, but their +importance in the history of the novel to come is clear. Take them and +add them to the story of adventure--_i.e._, introduce each fresh person +in your plot with a description in the character form, and the step you +have made towards the novel is enormous; you have given to plot which +was already there, the added interest of character. + +That, however, was not quite how the thing worked in actual fact. At the +heels of the "Character" came the periodical essay of Addison and +Steele. Their interest in contemporary types was of the same quality as +Earle's or Hall's, but they went a different way to work. Where these +compressed and cultivated a style which was staccato and epigrammatic, +huddling all the traits of their subject in short sharp sentences that +follow each other with all the brevity and curtness of items in a +prescription, Addison and Steele observed a more artistic plan. They +made, as it were, the prescription up, adding one ingredient after +another slowly as the mixture dissolved. You are introduced to Sir Roger +de Coverley, and to a number of other typical people, and then in a +series of essays which if they were disengaged from their setting would +be to all intents a novel and a fine one, you are made aware one by one +of different traits in his character and those of his friends, each +trait generally enshrined in an incident which illustrates it; you get +to know them, that is, gradually, as you would in real life, and not all +in a breath, in a series of compressed statements, as is the way of the +character writers. With the Coverley essays in the _Spectator_, the +novel in one of its forms--that in which an invisible and all knowing +narrator tells a story in which some one else whose character he lays +bare for us is the hero--is as good as achieved. + +Another manner of fiction--the autobiographical--had already been +invented. It grew directly out of the public interest in autobiography, +and particularly in the tales of their voyages which the discoverers +wrote and published on their return from their adventures. Its +establishment in literature was the work of two authors, Bunyan and +Defoe. The books of Bunyan, whether they are told in the first person or +no, are and were meant to be autobiographical; their interest is a +subjective interest. Here is a man who endeavours to interest you, not +in the character of some other person he has imagined or observed, but +in himself. His treatment of it is characteristic of the awakening +talent for fiction of his time. _The Pilgrim's Progress_ is begun as an +allegory, and so continues for a little space till the story takes hold +of the author. When it does, whether he knew it or not, allegory goes to +the winds. But the autobiographical form of fiction in its highest art +is the creation of Defoe. He told stories of adventure, incidents +modelled on real life as many tellers of tales had done before him, but +to the form as he found it he super-added a psychological interest--the +interest of the character of the narrator. He contrived to observe in +his writing a scrupulous and realistic fidelity and appropriateness to +the conditions in which the story was to be told. We learn about +Crusoe's island, for instance, gradually just as Crusoe learns of it +himself, though the author is careful by taking his narrator up to a +high point of vantage the day after his arrival, that we shall learn +the essentials of it, as long as verisimilitude is not sacrificed, as +soon as possible. It is the paradox of the English novel that these our +earliest efforts in fiction were meant, unlike the romances which +preceded them, to pass for truth. Defoe's _Journal of the Plague Year_ +was widely taken as literal fact, and it is still quoted as such +occasionally by rash though reputable historians. So that in England the +novel began with realism as it has culminated, and across two centuries +Defoe and the "naturalists" join hands. Defoe, it is proper also in this +place to notice, fixed the peculiar form of the historical novel. In his +_Memoirs of a Cavalier_, the narrative of an imaginary person's +adventures in a historical setting is interspersed with the entrance of +actual historical personages, exactly the method of historical romancing +which was brought to perfection by Sir Walter Scott. + + +(2) + +In the eighteenth century came the decline of the drama for which the +novel had been waiting. By 1660 the romantic drama of Elizabeth's time +was dead; the comedy of the Restoration which followed, witty and +brilliant though it was, reflected a society too licentious and +artificial to secure it permanence; by the time of Addison play-writing +had fallen to journey-work, and the theatre to openly expressed +contempt. When Richardson and Fielding published their novels there was +nothing to compete with fiction in the popular taste. It would seem as +though the novel had been waiting for this favourable circumstance. In a +sudden burst of prolific inventiveness, which can be paralleled in all +letters only by the period of Marlowe and Shakespeare, masterpiece after +masterpiece poured from the press. Within two generations, besides +Richardson and Fielding came Sterne and Goldsmith and Smollett and Fanny +Burney in naturalism, and Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe in the new +way of romance. Novels by minor authors were published in thousands as +well. The novel, in fact, besides being the occasion of literature of +the highest class, attracted by its lucrativeness that under-current of +journey-work authorship which had hitherto busied itself in poetry or +plays. Fiction has been its chief occupation ever since. + +Anything like a detailed criticism or even a bare narrative of this +voluminous literature is plainly impossible without the limits of a +single chapter. Readers must go for it to books on the subject. It is +possible here merely to draw attention to those authors to whom the +English novel as a more or less fixed form is indebted for its peculiar +characteristics. Foremost amongst these are Richardson and Fielding; +after them there is Walter Scott. After him, in the nineteenth century, +Dickens and Meredith and Mr. Hardy; last of all the French realists and +the new school of romance. To one or other of these originals all the +great authors in the long list of English novelists owe their method +and their choice of subject-matter. + +With Defoe fiction gained verisimilitude, it ceased to deal with the +incredible; it aimed at exhibiting, though in strange and memorable +circumstances, the workings of the ordinary mind. It is Richardson's +main claim to fame that he contrived a form of novel which exhibited an +ordinary mind working in normal circumstances, and that he did this with +a minuteness which till then had never been thought of and has not since +been surpassed. His talent is very exactly a microscopical talent; under +it the common stuff of life separated from its surroundings and +magnified beyond previous knowledge, yields strange and new and deeply +interesting sights. He carried into the study of character which had +begun in Addison with an eye to externals and eccentricities, a minute +faculty of inspection which watched and recorded unconscious mental and +emotional processes. + +To do this he employed a method which was, in effect, a compromise +between that of the autobiography, and that of the tale told by an +invisible narrator. The weakness of the autobiography is that it can +write only of events within the knowledge of the supposed speaker, and +that consequently the presentation of all but one of the characters of +the book is an external presentation. We know, that is, of Man Friday +only what Crusoe could, according to realistic appropriateness, tell us +about him. We do not know what he thought or felt within himself. On +the other hand the method of invisible narration had not at his time +acquired the faculty which it possesses now of doing Friday's thinking +aloud or exposing fully the workings of his mind. So that Richardson, +whose interests were psychological, whose strength and talent lay in the +presentation of the states of mind appropriate to situations of passion +or intrigue, had to look about him for a new form, and that form he +found in the novel of letters. In a way, if the end of a novel be the +presentation not of action, but of the springs of action; if the +external event is in it always of less importance than the emotions +which conditioned it, and the emotions which it set working, the novel +of letters is the supreme manner for fiction. Consider the possibilities +of it; there is a series of events in which A, B, and C are concerned. +Not only can the outward events be narrated as they appeared to all +three separately by means of letters from each to another, or to a +fourth party, but the motives of each and the emotions which each +experiences as a result of the actions of the others or them all, can be +laid bare. No other method can wind itself so completely into the +psychological intricacies and recesses which lie behind every event. Yet +the form, as everybody knows, has not been popular; even an expert +novel-reader could hardly name off-hand more than two or three examples +of it since Richardson's day. Why is this? Well, chiefly it is because +the mass of novelists have not had Richardson's knowledge of, or +interest in, the psychological under side of life, and those who have, +as, amongst the moderns, Henry James, have devised out of the convention +of the invisible narrator a method by which they can with greater +economy attain in practice fairly good results. For the mere narration +of action in which the study of character plays a subsidiary part, it +was, of course, from the beginning impossible. Scott turned aside at the +height of his power to try it in "Redgauntlet"; he never made a second +attempt. + +For Richardson's purpose, it answered admirably, and he used it with +supreme effect. Particularly he excelled in that side of the novelist's +craft which has ever since (whether because he started it or not) proved +the subtlest and most attractive, the presentation of women. Richardson +was one of those men who are not at their ease in other men's society, +and whom other men, to put it plainly, are apt to regard as coxcombs and +fools. But he had a genius for the friendship and confidence of women. +In his youth he wrote love-letters for them. His first novel grew out of +a plan to exhibit in a series of letters the quality of feminine virtue, +and in its essence (though with a ludicrous, and so to speak +"kitchen-maidish" misunderstanding of his own sex) adheres to the plan. +His second novel, which designs to set up a model man against the +monster of iniquity in _Pamela_, is successful only so far as it +exhibits the thoughts and feelings of the heroine whom he ultimately +marries. His last, _Clarissa Harlowe_ is a masterpiece of sympathetic +divination into the feminine mind. _Clarissa_ is, as has been well said, +the "Eve of fiction, the prototype of the modern heroine"; feminine +psychology as good as unknown before (Shakespeare's women being the +"Fridays" of a highly intelligent Crusoe) has hardly been brought +further since. But _Clarissa_ is more than mere psychology; whether she +represents a contemporary tendency or whether Richardson made her so, +she starts a new epoch. "This," says Henley, "is perhaps her finest +virtue as it is certainly her greatest charm; that until she set the +example, woman in literature as a self-suffering individuality, as an +existence endowed with equal rights to independence--of choice, +volition, action--with man had not begun to be." She had not begun to be +it in life either. + +What Richardson did for the subtlest part of a novelist's business, his +dealings with psychology, Fielding did for the most necessary part of +it, the telling of the story. Before him hardly any story had been told +well; even if it had been plain and clear as in Bunyan and Defoe it had +lacked the emphasis, the light and shade of skilful grouping. On the +"picaresque" (so the autobiographical form was called abroad) convention +of a journey he grafted a structure based in its outline on the form of +the ancient epic. It proved extraordinarily suitable for his purpose. +Not only did it make it easy for him to lighten his narrative with +excursions in a heightened style, burlesquing his origins, but it gave +him at once the right attitude to his material. He told his story as +one who knew everything; could tell conversations and incidents as he +conceived them happening, with no violation of credibility, nor any +strain on his reader's imagination, and without any impropriety could +interpose in his own person, pointing things to the reader which might +have escaped his attention, pointing at parallels he might have missed, +laying bare the irony or humour beneath a situation. He allowed himself +digressions and episodes, told separate tales in the middle of the +action, introduced, as in Partridge's visit to the theatre, the added +piquancy of topical allusion; in fact he did anything he chose. And he +laid down that free form of the novel which is characteristically +English, and from which, in its essence, no one till the modern realists +has made a serious departure. + +In the matter of his novels, he excels by reason of a Shakespearean +sense of character and by the richness and rightness of his faculty of +humour. He had a quick eye for contemporary types, and an amazing power +of building out of them men and women whose individuality is full and +rounded. You do not feel as you do with Richardson that his fabric is +spun silk-worm-wise out of himself; on the contrary you know it to be +the fruit of a gentle and observant nature, and a stock of fundamental +human sympathy. His gallery of portraits, Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams, +Parson Trulliber, Jones, Blifil, Partridge, Sophia and her father and +all the rest are each of them minute studies of separate people; they +live and move according to their proper natures; they are conceived not +from without but from within. Both Richardson and Fielding were +conscious of a moral intention; but where Richardson is sentimental, +vulgar, and moral only so far as it is moral (as in _Pamela_), to +inculcate selling at the highest price or (as in _Grandison_) to avoid +temptations which never come in your way, Fielding's morality is fresh +and healthy, and (though not quite free from the sentimentality of +scoundrelism) at bottom sane and true. His knowledge of the world kept +him right. His acquaintance with life is wide, and his insight is keen +and deep. His taste is almost as catholic as Shakespeare's own, and the +life he knew, and which other men knew, he handles for the first time +with the freedom and imagination of an artist. + +Each of the two--Fielding and Richardson--had his host of followers. +Abroad Richardson won immediate recognition; in France Diderot went so +far as to compare him with Homer and Moses! He gave the first impulse to +modern French fiction. At home, less happily, he set going the +sentimental school, and it was only when that had passed away that--in +the delicate and subtle character-study of Miss Austen--his influence +comes to its own. Miss Austen carried a step further, and with an +observation which was first hand and seconded by intuitive knowledge, +Richardson's analysis of the feminine mind, adding to it a delicate and +finely humorous feeling for character in both sexes which was all her +own. Fielding's imitators (they number each in his own way, and with his +own graces or talent added his rival Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith) +kept the way which leads to Thackeray and Dickens--the main road of the +English Novel. + +That road was widened two ways by Sir Walter Scott. The historical +novel, which had been before his day either an essay in anachronism with +nothing historical in it but the date, or a laborious and uninspired +compilation of antiquarian research, took form and life under his hands. +His wide reading, stored as it was in a marvellously retentive memory, +gave him all the background he needed to achieve a historical setting, +and allowed him to concentrate his attention on the actual telling of +his story; to which his genial and sympathetic humanity and his quick +eye for character gave a humorous depth and richness that was all his +own. It is not surprising that he made the historical novel a literary +vogue all over Europe. In the second place, he began in his novels of +Scottish character a sympathetic study of nationality. He is not, +perhaps, a fair guide to contemporary conditions; his interests were too +romantic and too much in the past to catch the rattle of the looms that +caught the ear of Galt, and if we want a picture of the great fact of +modern Scotland, its industrialisation, it is to Galt we must go. But in +his comprehension of the essential character of the people he has no +rival; in it his historical sense seconded his observation, and the two +mingling gave us the pictures whose depth of colour and truth make his +Scottish novels, _Old Mortality, The Antiquary, Redgauntlet_, the +greatest things of their kind in literature. + + +(3) + +The peculiarly national style of fiction founded by Fielding and carried +on by his followers reached its culminating point in _Vanity Fair_. In +it the reader does not seem to be simply present at the unfolding of a +plot the end of which is constantly present to the mind of the author +and to which he is always consciously working, every incident having a +bearing on the course of the action; rather he feels himself to be the +spectator of a piece of life which is too large and complex to be under +the control of a creator, which moves to its close not under the +impulsion of a directing hand, but independently impelled by causes +evolved in the course of its happening. With this added complexity goes +a more frequent interposition of the author in his own person--one of +the conventions as we have seen of this national style. Thackeray is +present to his readers, indeed, not as the manager who pulls the strings +and sets the puppets in motion, but as an interpreter who directs the +reader's attention to the events on which he lays stress, and makes them +a starting-point for his own moralising. This persistent +moralizing--sham cynical, real sentimental--this thumping of death-bed +pillows as in the dreadful case of Miss Crawley, makes Thackeray's use +of the personal interposition almost less effective than that of any +other novelist. Already while he was doing it, Dickens had conquered the +public; and the English novel was making its second fresh start. + +He is an innovator in more ways than one. In the first place he is the +earliest novelist to practise a conscious artistry of plot. _The Mystery +of Edwin Drood_ remains mysterious, but those who essay to conjecture +the end of that unfinished story have at last the surety that its end, +full worked out in all its details, had been in its author's mind before +he set pen to paper. His imagination was as diligent and as disciplined +as his pen, Dickens' practice in this matter could not be better put +than in his own words, when he describes himself as "in the first stage +of a new book, which consists in going round and round the idea, as you +see a bird in his cage go about and about his sugar before he touches +it." That his plots are always highly elaborated is the fruit of this +preliminary disciplined exercise of thought. The method is familiar to +many novelists now; Dickens was the first to put it into practice. In +the second place he made a new departure by his frankly admitted +didacticism and by the skill with which in all but two or three of his +books--_Bleak House_, perhaps, and _Little Dorrit_--he squared his +purpose with his art. Lastly he made the discovery which has made him +immortal. In him for the first time the English novel produced an +author who dug down into the masses of the people for his subjects; +apprehended them in all their inexhaustible character and humour and +pathos, and reproduced them with a lively and loving artistic skill. + +Dickens has, of course, serious faults. In particular, readers +emancipated by lapse of time from the enslavement of the first +enthusiasm, have quarrelled with the mawkishness and sentimentality of +his pathos, and with the exaggeration of his studies of character. It +has been said of him, as it has of Thackeray, that he could not draw a +"good woman" and that Agnes Copperfield, like Amelia Sedley, is a very +doll-like type of person. To critics of this kind it may be retorted +that though "good" and "bad" are categories relevant to melodrama, they +apply very ill to serious fiction, and that indeed to the characters of +any of the novelists--the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell or the like--who lay +bare character with fullness and intimacy, they could not well be +applied at all. The faultiness of them in Dickens is less than in +Thackeray, for in Dickens they are only incident to the scheme, which +lies in the hero (his heroes are excellent) and in the grotesque +characters, whereas in his rival they are in the theme itself. For his +pathos, not even his warmest admirer could perhaps offer a satisfactory +case. The charge of exaggeration however is another matter. To the +person who complains that he has never met Dick Swiveller or Micawber or +Mrs. Gamp the answer is simply Turner's to the sceptical critic of his +sunset, "Don't you wish you could?" To the other, who objects more +plausibly to Dickens's habit of attaching to each of his characters some +label which is either so much flaunted all through that you cannot see +the character at all or else mysteriously and unaccountably disappears +when the story begins to grip the author, Dickens has himself offered an +amusing and convincing defence. In the preface to _Pickwick_ he answers +those who criticised the novel on the ground that Pickwick began by +being purely ludicrous and developed into a serious and sympathetic +individuality, by pointing to the analogous process which commonly takes +place in actual human relationships. You begin a new acquaintanceship +with perhaps not very charitable prepossessions; these later a deeper +and better knowledge removes, and where you have before seen an +idiosyncrasy you come to love a character. It is ingenious and it helps +to explain Mrs. Nickleby, the Pecksniff daughters, and many another. +Whether it is true or not (and it does not explain the faultiness of +such pictures as Carker and his kind) there can be no doubt that this +trick in Dickens of beginning with a salient impression and working +outward to a fuller conception of character is part at least of the +reason of his enormous hold upon his readers. No man leads you into the +mazes of his invention so easily and with such a persuasive hand. + +The great novelists who were writing contemporarily with him--the +Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot--it is impossible to deal with +here, except to say that the last is indisputably, because of her +inability to fuse completely art and ethics, inferior to Mrs. Gaskell or +to either of the Brontë sisters. Nor of the later Victorians who added +fresh variety to the national style can the greatest, Meredith, be more +than mentioned for the exquisiteness of his comic spirit and the brave +gallery of English men and women he has given us in what is, perhaps, +fundamentally the most English thing in fiction since Fielding wrote. +For our purpose Mr. Hardy, though he is a less brilliant artist, is more +to the point. His novels brought into England the contemporary pessimism +of Schopenhaur and the Russians, and found a home for it among the +English peasantry. Convinced that in the upper classes character could +be studied and portrayed only subjectively because of the artificiality +of a society which prevented its outlet in action, he turned to the +peasantry because with them conduct is the direct expression of the +inner life. Character could be shown working, therefore, not +subjectively but in the act, if you chose a peasant subject. His +philosophy, expressed in this medium, is sombre. In his novels you can +trace a gradual realization of the defects of natural laws and the +quandary men are put to by their operation. Chance, an irritating and +trifling series of coincidences, plays the part of fate. Nature seems to +enter with the hopelessness of man's mood. Finally the novelist turns +against life itself. "Birth," he says, speaking of Tess, "seemed to her +an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion whose gratuitousness nothing +in the result seemed to justify and at best could only palliate." It is +strange to find pessimism in a romantic setting; strange, too, to find a +paganism which is so little capable of light or joy. + + +(4) + +The characteristic form of English fiction, that in which the requisite +illusion of the complexity and variety of life is rendered by +discursiveness, by an author's licence to digress, to double back on +himself, to start may be in the middle of a story and work subsequently +to the beginning and the end; in short by his power to do whatever is +most expressive of his individuality, found a rival in the last twenty +years of the nineteenth century in the French Naturalistic or Realist +school, in which the illusion of life is got by a studied and sober +veracity of statement, and by the minute accumulation of detail. To the +French Naturalists a novel approached in importance the work of a man of +science, and they believed it ought to be based on documentary evidence, +as a scientific work would be. Above all it ought not to allow itself to +be coloured by the least gloss of imagination or idealism; it ought +never to shrink from a confrontation of the naked fact. On the contrary +it was its business to carry it to the dissecting table and there +minutely examine everything that lay beneath its surface. + +The school first became an English possession in the early translations +of the work of Zola; its methods were transplanted into English fiction +by Mr. George Moore. From his novels, both in passages of direct +statement and in the light of his practice, it is possible to gather +together the materials of a manifesto of the English Naturalistic +school. The naturalists complained that English fiction lacked +construction in the strictest sense; they found in the English novel a +remarkable absence of organic wholeness; it did not fulfil their first +and broadest canon of subject-matter--by which a novel has to deal in +the first place with a single and rhythmical series of events; it was +too discursive. They made this charge against English fiction; they also +retorted the charge brought by native writers and their readers against +the French of foulness, sordidness and pessimism in their view of life. +"We do not," says a novelist in one of Mr. Moore's books, "we do not +always choose what you call unpleasant subjects, but we do try to get to +the roots of things; and the basis of life being material and not +spiritual, the analyst sooner or later finds himself invariably handling +what this sentimental age calls coarse." "The novel," says the same +character, "if it be anything is contemporary history, an exact and +complete reproduction of the social surroundings of the age we live in." +That succinctly is the naturalistic theory of the novel as a work of +science--that as the history of a nation lies hidden often in social +wrongs and in domestic grief as much as in the movements of parties or +dynasties, the novelist must do for the former what the historian does +for the latter. It is his business in the scheme of knowledge of his +time. + +But the naturalists believed quite as profoundly in the novel as a work +of art. They claimed for their careful pictures of the grey and sad and +sordid an artistic worth, varying in proportion to the intensity of the +emotion in which the picture was composed and according to the picture's +truth, but in its essence just as real and permanent as the artistic +worth of romance. "Seen from afar," writes Mr. Moore, "all things in +nature are of equal worth; and the meanest things, when viewed with the +eyes of God, are raised to heights of tragic awe which conventionality +would limit to the deaths of kings and patriots." On such a lofty theory +they built their treatment and their style. It is a mistake to suppose +that the realist school deliberately cultivates the sordid or shocking. +Examine in this connection Mr. Moore's _Mummer's Wife_, our greatest +English realist novel, and for the matter of that one of the supreme +things in English fiction, and you will see that the scrupulous fidelity +of the author's method, though it denies him those concessions to a +sentimentalist or romantic view of life which are the common implements +of fiction, denies him no less the extremities of horror or +loathsomeness. The heroine sinks into the miserable squalor of a +dipsomaniac and dies from a drunkard's disease, but her end is shown as +the ineluctable consequence of her life, its early greyness and +monotony, the sudden shock of a new and strange environment and the +resultant weakness of will which a morbid excitability inevitably +brought about. The novel, that is to say, deals with a "rhythmical +series of events and follows them to their conclusion"; it gets at the +roots of things; it tells us of something which we know to be true in +life whether we care to read it in fiction or not. There is nothing in +it of sordidness for sordidness' sake nor have the realists any +philosophy of an unhappy ending. In this case the ending is unhappy +because the sequence of events admitted of no other solution; in others +the ending is happy or merely neutral as the preceding story decides. If +what one may call neutral endings predominate, it is because they +also--notoriously--predominate in life. But the question of unhappiness +or its opposite has nothing whatever to do with the larger matter of +beauty; it is the triumph of the realists that at their best they +discovered a new beauty in things, the loveliness that lies in obscure +places, the splendour of sordidness, humility, and pain. They have +taught us that beauty, like the Spirit, blows where it lists and we know +from them that the antithesis between realism and idealism is only on +their lower levels; at their summits they unite and are one. No true +realist but is an idealist too. + +Most of what is best in English fiction since has been directly +occasioned by their work; Gissing and Mr. Arnold Bennett may be +mentioned as two authors who are fundamentally realist in their +conception of the art of the novel, and the realist ideal partakes in a +greater or less degree in the work of nearly all our eminent novelists +to-day. But realism is not and cannot be interesting to the great +public; it portrays people as they are, not as they would like to be, +and where they are, not where they would like to be. It gives no +background for day-dreaming. Now literature (to repeat what has been +than more once stated earlier in this book) is a way of escape from life +as well as an echo or mirror of it, and the novel as the form of +literature which more than any other men read for pleasure, is the main +avenue for this escape. So that alongside this invasion of realism it is +not strange that there grew a revival in romance. + +The main agent of it, Robert Louis Stevenson, had the romantic strain in +him intensified by the conditions under which he worked; a +weak and anaemic man, he loved bloodshed as a cripple loves +athletics--passionately and with the intimate enthusiasm of make-believe +which an imaginative man can bring to bear on the contemplation of what +can never be his. His natural attraction for "redness and juice" in life +was seconded by a delightful and fantastic sense of the boundless +possibilities of romance in every-day things. To a realist a hansom-cab +driver is a man who makes twenty-five shillings a week, lives in a back +street in Pimlico, has a wife who drinks and children who grow up with +an alcoholic taint; the realist will compare his lot with other +cab-drivers, and find what part of his life is the product of the +cab-driving environment, and on that basis he will write his book. To +Stevenson and to the romanticist generally, a hansom cab-driver is a +mystery behind whose apparent commonplaceness lie magic possibilities +beyond all telling; not one but may be the agent of the Prince of +Bohemia, ready to drive you off to some mad and magic adventure in a +street which is just as commonplace to the outward eye as the cab-driver +himself, but which implicates by its very deceitful commonness whole +volumes of romance. The novel-reader to whom _Demos_ was the repetition +of what he had seen and known, and what had planted sickness in his +soul, found the _New Arabian Nights_ a refreshing miracle. Stevenson had +discovered that modern London had its possibilities of romance. To these +two elements of his romantic equipment must be added a third--travel. +Defoe never left England, and other early romanticists less gifted with +invention than he wrote from the mind's eye and from books. To +Stevenson, and to his successor Mr. Kipling, whose "discovery" of India +is one of the salient facts of modern English letters, and to Mr. Conrad +belongs the credit of teaching novelists to draw on experience for the +scenes they seek to present. A fourth element in the equipment of modern +romanticism--that which draws its effects from the "miracles" of modern +science, has been added since by Mr. H. G. Wells, in whose latest work +the realistic and romantic schools seem to have united. + + + + +CHAPTER X + + +THE PRESENT AGE + +We have carried our study down to the death of Ruskin and included in it +authors like Swinburne and Meredith who survived till recently; and in +discussing the novel we have included men like Kipling and Hardy--living +authors. It would be possible and perhaps safer to stop there and make +no attempt to bring writers later than these into our survey. To do so +is to court an easily and quickly stated objection. One is anticipating +the verdict of posterity. How can we who are contemporaries tell whether +an author's work is permanent or no? + +Of course, in a sense the point of view expressed by these questions is +true enough. It is always idle to anticipate the verdict of posterity. +Remember Matthew Arnold's prophecy that at the end of the nineteenth +century Wordsworth and Byron would be the two great names in Romantic +poetry. We are ten years and more past that date now, and so far as +Byron is concerned, at any rate, there is no sign that Arnold's +prediction has come true. But the obvious fact that we cannot do our +grandchildren's thinking for them, is no reason why we should refuse to +think for ourselves. No notion is so destructive to the formation of a +sound literary taste as the notion that books become literature only +when their authors are dead. Round us men and women are putting into +plays and poetry and novels the best that they can or know. They are +writing not for a dim and uncertain future but for us, and on our +recognition and welcome they depend, sometimes for their livelihood, +always for the courage which carries them on to fresh endeavour. +Literature is an ever-living and continuous thing, and we do it less +than its due service if we are so occupied reading Shakespeare and +Milton and Scott that we have no time to read Mr. Yeats, Mr. Shaw or Mr. +Wells. Students of literature must remember that classics are being +manufactured daily under their eyes, and that on their sympathy and +comprehension depends whether an author receives the success he merits +when he is alive to enjoy it. + +The purpose of this chapter, then, is to draw a rough picture of some of +the lines or schools of contemporary writing--of the writing mainly, +though not altogether, of living authors. It is intended to indicate +some characteristics of the general trend or drift of literary effort as +a whole. The most remarkable feature of the age, as far as writing is +concerned, is without doubt its inattention to poetry. Tennyson was a +popular author; his books sold in thousands; his lines passed into that +common conversational currency of unconscious quotation which is the +surest testimony to the permeation of a poet's influence. Even Browning, +though his popularity came late, found himself carried into all the +nooks and corners of the reading public. His robust and masculine +morality, understood at last, or expounded by a semi-priestly class of +interpreters, made him popular with those readers--and they are the +majority--who love their reading to convey a moral lesson, just as +Tennyson's reflection of his time's distraction between science and +religion endeared them to those who found in him an answer or at least +an echo to their own perplexities. A work widely different from either +of these, Fitzgerald's _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_, shared and has +probably exceeded their popularity for similar reasons. Its easy +pessimism and cult of pleasure, its delightful freedom from any demand +for continuous thought from its readers, its appeal to the indolence and +moral flaccidity which is implicit in all men, all contributed to its +immense vogue; and among people who perhaps did not fully understand it +but were merely lulled by its sonorousness, a knowledge of it has passed +for the insignia of a love of literature and the possession of literary +taste. But after Fitzgerald--who? What poet has commanded the ear of the +reading public or even a fraction of it? Not Swinburne certainly, partly +because of his undoubted difficulty, partly because of a suspicion held +of his moral and religious tenets, largely from material reasons quite +unconnected with the quality of his work; not Morris, nor his +followers; none of the so-called minor poets whom we shall notice +presently--poets who have drawn the moods that have nourished their work +from the decadents of France. Probably the only writer of verse who is +at the same time a poet and has acquired a large popularity and public +influence is Mr. Kipling. His work as a novelist we mentioned in the +last chapter. It remains to say something of his achievements in verse. + +Let us grant at once his faults. He can be violent, and over-rhetorical; +he belabours you with sense impressions, and with the polysyllabic +rhetoric he learned from Swinburne--and (though this is not the place +for a discussion of political ideas) he can offend by the sentimental +brutalism which too often passes for patriotism in his poetry. Not that +this last represents the total impression of his attitude as an +Englishman. His later work in poetry and prose, devoted to the +reconstruction of English history, is remarkable for the justness and +saneness of its temper. There are other faults--a lack of sureness in +taste is one--that could be mentioned but they do not affect the main +greatness of his work. He is great because he discovered a new +subject-matter, and because of the white heat of imagination which in +his best things he brought to bear on it and by which he transposed it +into poetry. It is Mr. Kipling's special distinction that the apparatus +of modern civilization--steam engines, and steamships, and telegraph +lines, and the art of flight--take on in his hands a poetic quality as +authentic and inspiring as any that ever was cast over the implements of +other and what the mass of men believe to have been more picturesque +days. Romance is in the present, so he teaches us, not in the past, and +we do it wrong to leave it only the territory we have ourselves +discarded in the advance of the race. That and the great discovery of +India--an India misunderstood for his own purposes no doubt, but still +the first presentiment of an essential fact in our modern history as a +people--give him the hold that he has, and rightly, over the minds of +his readers. + +It is in a territory poles apart from Mr. Kipling's that the main stream +of romantic poetry flows. Apart from the gravely delicate and scholarly +work of Mr. Bridges, and the poetry of some others who work separately +away from their fellows, English romantic poetry has concentrated itself +into one chief school--the school of the "Celtic Revival" of which the +leader is Mr. W.B. Yeats. Two sources went to its making. In its +inception, it arose out of a group of young poets who worked in a +conscious imitation of the methods of the French decadents; chiefly of +Baudelaire and Verlaine. As a whole their work was merely imitative and +not very profound, but each of them--Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson, +who are both now dead, and others who are still living--produced enough +to show that they had at their command a vein of poetry that might have +deepened and proved more rich had they gone on working it. One of them, +Mr. W.B. Yeats, by his birth and his reading in Irish legend and +folklore, became possessed of a subject-matter denied to his fellows, +and it is from the combination of the mood of the decadents with the +dreaminess and mystery of Celtic tradition and romance--a combination +which came to pass in his poetry--that the Celtic school has sprung. In +a sense it has added to the territory explored by Coleridge and Scott +and Morris a new province. Only nothing could be further from the +objectivity of these men, than the way in which the Celtic school +approaches its material. Its stories are clear to itself, it may be, but +not to its readers. Deirdre and Conchubar, and Angus and Maeve and +Dectora and all the shadowy figures in them scarcely become embodied. +Their lives and deaths and loves and hates are only a scheme on which +they weave a delicate and dim embroidery of pure poetry--of love and +death and old age and the passing of beauty and all the sorrows that +have been since the world began and will be till the world ends. If Mr. +Kipling is of the earth earthy, if the clangour and rush of the world is +in everything he writes, Mr. Yeats and his school live consciously +sequestered and withdrawn, and the world never breaks in on their +ghostly troubles or their peace. Poetry never fails to relate itself to +its age; if it is not with it, it is against it; it is never merely +indifferent. The poetry of these men is the denial, passionately made, +of everything the world prizes. While such a denial is sincere, as in +the best of them, then the verses they make are true and fine. But when +it is assumed, as in some of their imitators, then the work they did is +not true poetry. + +But the literary characteristic of the present age--the one which is +most likely to differentiate it from its predecessor, is the revival of +the drama. When we left it before the Commonwealth the great English +literary school of playwriting--the romantic drama--was already dead. It +has had since no second birth. There followed after it the heroic +tragedy of Dryden and Shadwell--a turgid, declamatory form of art +without importance--and two brilliant comic periods, the earlier and +greater that of Congreve and Wycherley, the later more sentimental with +less art and vivacity, that of Goldsmith and Sheridan. With Sheridan the +drama as a literary force died a second time. It has been born again +only in our own day. It is, of course, unnecessary to point out that the +writing of plays did not cease in the interval; it never does cease. The +production of dramatic journey-work has been continuous since the +re-opening of the theatres in 1660, and it is carried on as plentifully +as ever at this present time. Only side by side with it there has grown +up a new literary drama, and gradually the main stream of artistic +endeavour which for nearly a century has preoccupied itself with the +novel almost to the exclusion of other forms of art, has turned back to +the stage as its channel to articulation and an audience. An influence +from abroad set it in motion. The plays of Ibsen--produced, the best of +them, in the eighties of last century--came to England in the nineties. +In a way, perhaps, they were misunderstood by their worshippers hardly +less than by their enemies, but all excrescences of enthusiasm apart +they taught men a new and freer approach to moral questions, and a new +and freer dramatic technique. Where plays had been constructed on a +journeyman plan evolved by Labiche and Sardou--mid-nineteenth century +writers in France--a plan delighting in symmetry, close-jointedness, +false correspondences, an impossible use of coincidence, and a quite +unreal complexity and elaboration, they become bolder and less +artificial, more close to the likelihoods of real life. The gravity of +the problems with which they set themselves to deal heightened their +influence. In England men began to ask themselves whether the theatre +here too could not be made an avenue towards the discussion of living +difficulties, and then arose the new school of dramatists--of whom the +first and most remarkable is Mr. George Bernard Shaw. In his earlier +plays he set himself boldly to attack established conventions, and to +ask his audiences to think for themselves. _Arms and the Man_ dealt a +blow at the cheap romanticism with which a peace-living public invests +the profession of arms; _The Devil's Disciple_ was a shrewd criticism of +the preposterous self-sacrifice on which melodrama, which is the most +popular non-literary form of play-writing, is commonly based; _Mrs. +Warren's Profession_ made a brave and plain-spoken attempt to drag the +public face to face with the nauseous realities of prostitution; +_Widowers' Houses_ laid bare the sordidness of a Society which bases +itself on the exploitation of the poor for the luxuries of the rich. It +took Mr. Shaw close on ten years to persuade even the moderate number of +men and women who make up a theatre audience that his plays were worth +listening to. But before his final success came he had attained a +substantial popularity with the public which reads. Possibly his early +failure on the stage--mainly due to the obstinacy of playgoers immersed +in a stock tradition--was partly due also to his failure in constructive +power. He is an adept at tying knots and impatient of unravelling them; +his third acts are apt either to evaporate in talk or to find some +unreal and unsatisfactory solution for the complexity he has created. +But constructive weakness apart, his amazing brilliance and fecundity of +dialogue ought to have given him an immediate and lasting grip of the +stage. There has probably never been a dramatist who could invest +conversation with the same vivacity and point, the same combination of +surprise and inevitableness that distinguishes his best work. + +Alongside of Mr. Shaw more immediately successful, and not traceable to +any obvious influence, English or foreign, came the comedies of Oscar +Wilde. For a parallel to their pure delight and high spirits, and to the +exquisite wit and artifice with which they were constructed, one would +have to go back to the dramatists of the Restoration. To Congreve and +his school, indeed, Wilde belongs rather than to any later period. With +his own age he had little in common; he was without interest in its +social and moral problems; when he approved of socialism it was because +in a socialist state the artist might be absolved from the necessity of +carrying a living, and be free to follow his art undisturbed. He loved +to think of himself as symbolic, but all he symbolized was a fantasy of +his own creating; his attitude to his age was decorative and withdrawn +rather than representative. He was the licensed jester to society, and +in that capacity he gave us his plays. Mr. Shaw may be said to have +founded a school; at any rate he gave the start to Mr. Galsworthy and +some lesser dramatists. Wilde founded nothing, and his works remain as +complete and separate as those of the earlier artificial dramatists of +two centuries before. + +Another school of drama, homogeneous and quite apart from the rest, +remains. We have seen how the "Celtic Revival," as the Irish literary +movement has been called by its admirers, gave us a new kind of romantic +poetry. As an offshoot from it there came into being some ten years ago +an Irish school of drama, drawing its inspiration from two sources--the +body of the old Irish legends and the highly individualized and +richly-coloured life of the Irish peasants in the mountains of Wicklow +and of the West, a life, so the dramatists believed, still unspoiled by +the deepening influences of a false system of education and the wear +and tear of a civilization whose values are commercial and not spiritual +or artistic. The school founded its own theatre, trained its own actors, +fashioned its own modes of speech (the chief of which was a frank +restoration of rhythm in the speaking of verse and of cadence in prose), +and having all these things it produced a series of plays all directed +to its special ends, and all composed and written with a special +fidelity to country life as it has been preserved, or to what it +conceived to be the spirit of Irish folk-legend. It reached its zenith +quickly, and as far as the production of plays is concerned, it would +seem to be already in its decline. That is to say, what in the beginning +was a fresh and vivid inspiration caught direct from life has become a +pattern whose colours and shape can be repeated or varied by lesser +writers who take their teaching from the original discoverers. But in +the course of its brief and striking course it produced one great +dramatist--a writer whom already not three years after his death, men +instinctively class with the masters of his art. + +J.M. Synge, in the earlier years of his manhood, lived entirely abroad, +leading the life of a wandering scholar from city to city and country to +country till he was persuaded to give up the Continent and the criticism +and imitation of French literature, to return to England, and to go and +live on the Aran Islands. From that time till his death--some ten +years--he spent a large part of each year amongst the peasantry of the +desolate Atlantic coast and wrote the plays by which his name is known. +His literary output was not large, but he supplied the Irish dramatic +movement with exactly what it needed--a vivid contact with the realities +of life. Not that he was a mere student or transcriber of manners. His +wandering life among many peoples and his study of classical French and +German literature had equipped him as perhaps no other modern dramatist +has been equipped with an imaginative insight and a reach of perception +which enabled him to give universality and depth to his pourtrayal of +the peasant types around him. He got down to the great elemental forces +which throb and pulse beneath the common crises of everyday life and +laid them bare, not as ugly and horrible, but with a sense of their +terror, their beauty and their strength. His earliest play, _The Well of +the Saints_, treats of a sorrow that is as old as Helen of the vanishing +of beauty and the irony of fulfilled desire. The great realities of +death pass through the _Riders to the Sea_, till the language takes on a +kind of simplicity as of written words shrivelling up in a flame. _The +Playboy of the Western World_ is a study of character, terrible in its +clarity, but never losing the savour of imagination and of the +astringency and saltness that was characteristic of his temper. He had +at his command an instrument of incomparable fineness and range in the +language which he fashioned out the speech of the common people amongst +whom he lived. In his dramatic writings this language took on a kind of +rhythm which had the effect of producing a certain remoteness of the +highest possible artistic value. The people of his imagination appear a +little disembodied. They talk with that straightforward and simple kind +of innocency which makes strange and impressive the dialogue of +Maeterlinck's earlier plays. Through it, as Mr. Yeats has said, he saw +the subject-matter of his art "with wise, clear-seeing, unreflecting +eyes--and he preserved the innocence of good art in an age of reasons +and purposes." He had no theory except of his art; no "ideas" and no +"problems"; he did not wish to change anything or to reform anything; +but he saw all his people pass by as before a window, and he heard their +words. This resolute refusal to be interested in or to take account of +current modes of thought has been considered by some to detract from his +eminence. Certainly if by "ideas" we mean current views on society or +morality, he is deficient in them; only his very deficiency brings him +nearer to the great masters of drama--to Ben Johnson, to Cervantes, to +Molière--even to Shakespeare himself. Probably in no single case amongst +our contemporaries could a high and permanent place in literature be +prophesied with more confidence than in his. + +In the past it has seemed impossible for fiction and the drama, i.e. +serious drama of high literary quality, to flourish, side by side. It +seems as though the best creative minds in any age could find strength +for any one of these two great outlets for the activity of the creative +imagination. In the reign of Elizabeth the drama outshone fiction; in +the reign of Victoria the novel crowded out the drama. There are signs +that a literary era is commencing, in which the drama will again regain +to the full its position as a literature. More and more the bigger +creative artists will turn to a form which by its economy of means to +ends, and the chance it gives not merely of observing but of creating +and displaying character in action, has a more vigorous principle of +life in it than its rival. + + + + +BIBLIOGRAPHY + +It is best to study English literature one period, or, even in the case +of the greatest, one author at a time. In every case the student should +see to it that he knows the _text_ of his authors; a knowledge of what +critics have said about our poets is a poor substitute for a knowledge +of what they have said themselves. Poetry ought to be read slowly and +carefully, and the reader ought to pay his author the compliment of +crediting him with ideas as important and, on occasion, as abstruse as +any in a work of philosophy or abstract science. When the meaning is +mastered, the poem ought to be read a second time aloud to catch the +magic of the language and the verse. The reading of prose presents less +difficulty, but there again the rule is, never allow yourself to be +lulled by sound. Reading is an intellectual and not an hypnotic +exercise. + +The following short bibliography is divided to correspond with the +chapters in this book. Prices and publishers are mentioned only when +there is no more than one cheap edition of a book known to the author. +For the subject as a whole, Chamber's _Cyclopaedia of English +Literature_ (3 vols., 10s. 6d. net each), which contains biographical +and critical articles on all authors, arranged chronologically and +furnished very copiously with specimen passages, may be consulted at any +library. + +* The books with an asterisk are suggested as those on which reading +should be begun. The reader can then proceed to the others and after +them to the many authors--great authors--who are not included in this +short list. + +Chapter I.--*More's _Utopia_; _Haklyut's Voyages_ (Ed. J. Masefield, +Everyman's Library, 8 vols., 1s. net each). North's _Translation of +Plutarch's Lives_ (Temple Classics). + +Chapter II.--Surrey's and Wyatt's Poems (Aldine Edition. G. Bells & +Sons); *Spenser's Works, Sidney's Poems. A good idea of the atmosphere +in which poetry was written is to be obtained from Scott's _Kenilworth_. +It is full of inaccuracy in detail. + +Chapter III.--*The dramatists in the Mermaid Series (T. Fisher Unwin); +*_Everyman and other Plays_; ed. by A.W. Pollard (Everyman's Library). + +Chapter IV.--*Bacon's Essays; Sir Thomas Browne's Works; *Milton's +Works; *Poems of John Donne (Muses Library, Routledge); Poems of Robert +Herrick. + +Chapter V.--*Poems of Dryden; *Poems of Pope; Poems of Thomson; *_The +Spectator_ (Routledge's Universal Library or Everyman's); *Swift's +_Gulliver's Travels_; Defoe's Novels. + +Chapter VI.--*Boswell's _Life of Johnson_; *Burke (in selections); +Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_ (Temple Classics); *Burns' Poetical +Works; *Poems of Blake (Clarendon Press). + +Chapter VII.--*Wordsworth (Golden Treasury Series); *Wordsworth's +Prelude (Temple Classics); Coleridge's Poems; *Keats's Poems; *Shelley's +Poems; *Byron (Golden Treasury Series); *Lamb, _Essays of Elia_; Hazlitt +(volumes of Essays in World's Classics Series). + +Chapter VIII.--*Tennyson's Works; *Browning's Works; Rossetti's Works; +*Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus, Past and Present_, and _French Revolution_; +Ruskin's _Unto this Last, Seven Lamps of Architecture_; Arnold's Poems; +Swinburne (Selections). + +Chapter IX.--*Fielding's _Tom Jones_; Smollett, _Roderick Random_; +*Jane Austen's _Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice,_ and _Northanger Abbey_ +(as a parody of the Radcliffe School); *Scott's _Waverley, Antiquary, +Ivanhoe, Old Mortality, Bride of Lammermoor_. It seems hardly necessary +to give a selection of later novels. + +Chapter X.--W.B. Yeats' Poems; Wilde, _Importance of Being Earnest_; +*Synge, Dramatic Works. + +And every new work of the best contemporary authors. + +G.H.M. + + + + +LIST OF THE CHIEF WORKS AND AUTHORS MENTIONED + +The dates attached to the authors are those of birth and death; those +with the books, of publication. + + +CHAPTER I + +Sir Thomas More, 1480-1535. + _Utopia_. 1516 (in Latin). +William Tindall, 1484-1536. + _Translation of the New Testament_, 1526. +Sir John Cheke, 1514-1557. +Roger Ascham, 1515-1568. + _Toxophilus_, 1545. + _Schoolmaster_, 1570. +Richard Hakluyt, 1553-1616. + His _Voyages_, 1598. + + +CHAPTER II + +Sir Thomas Wyatt, 1503-1542. +The Earl of Surrey, 1517-1547. + _Tottel's Miscellany_ (containing their poems), 1557. +Sir Philip Sidney. 1554-1586. + _Arcadia_, 1590. + _Astrophel and Stella_, 1591. +Edmund Spenser, 1552-1599. + _Shepherd's Calendar_, 1579. + _Fairy Queen_, 1589, 1596. +John Lyly, 1554-1606. + _Euphues_, 1579. + _Euphues and his England_, 1580. +Richard Hooker, 1553-1600. + _Ecclesiastical Polity_, 1594. + + +CHAPTER III + +Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593. + _Tamburlaine_, 1587 (date of performance). + _Dr. Faustus_, 1588 (date of performance). + _Edward II._, 1593. +Thomas Kyd, 1557(?)-1595(?). + _The Spanish Tragedy_, 1594 (published). +John Webster, 1580(?)-1625(?). + _The White Devil_, 1608 (date of performance). + _Duchess of Malfi_, 1616 (date of performance). +Ben Jonson, 1573-1637. + _Every Man in his Humour_, 1598. + _Volpone_, 1605. + _Poems_, 1616. + + +CHAPTER IV + +John Donne, 1573-1631. + _Poems_, 1633 (first published, but known, like those of all +Elizabethan poets, in manuscript long before). +William Browne, 1591-1643. +George Herbert, 1593-1633. +Robert Herrick, 1593-1674. +Richard Crashaw, 1613-1649. +Francis Bacon, 1561-1626. + _Advancement of Learning_, 1605. + _Essays_, 1625. + The Bible, _Authorised Version_, 1611. +Robert Burton, 1577-1640. + _Anatomy of Melancholy_, 1621. +Sir Thomas Browne, 1605-1682. + _Religio Medici_, 1642. +John Bunyan, 1628-1688. + _Pilgrim's Progress_, 1678. +John Milton, 1608-1674. + _Paradise Lost_, 1667. + _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_, 1671. + + +CHAPTER V + +John Dryden, 1631-1700. + _Absalom and Achitophel_ and _Religio Laici_, 1682. + _The Hind and the Panther_, 1687. +Alexander Pope, 1688-1744. + _Essay on Criticism_, 1711. + _Rape of the Lock_, 1714. +James Thomson, 1700-1748. + _The Seasons_, 1730. +Daniel Defoe, 1661-1731. + _Robinson Crusoe_, 1719. +Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745. + _The Tale of a Tub_, 1704. + _Gulliver's Travels_, 1726. +Joseph Addison, 1672-1719. +Richard Steele, 1675-1729. + _The Tatler_, 1709-1711. + _The Spectator_, 1711-1712. + + +CHAPTER VI + +Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784. +Edmund Burke, 1728-1797. +Oliver Goldsmith, 1728-1774. +Thomas Gray, 1716-1771. +William Collins, 1721-1759. +Robert Burns, 1759-1796. + _Poems_, 1786. +William Blake, 1757-1827. + _Songs of Innocence_, 1789. + + +CHAPTER VII + +William Wordsworth, 1770-1850. + _Lyrical Ballads_, 1798. +Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1772-1834. +Sir Walter Scott, 1771-1832. +Lord Byron, 1788-1824. + _Child Harold's Pilgrimage_, 1812-1817. +Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822. +John Keats, 1796-1821. +Charles Lamb, 1775-1884. + _Essays of Elia_, 1823. +William Hazlitt, 1778-1830. +Thomas de Quincey, 1785-1859. + + +CHAPTER VIII + +Lord Tennyson, 1809-1892. + _Poems_, 1842. + _Idylls of the King_, 1859. +Robert Browning, 1812-1889. + _Men and Women_, 1855. + _The Ring and the Book_, 1868. +D. G. Rossetti, 1828-1882. +William Morris, 1834-1896. +A. C. Swinburne, 1836-1909. +Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1880. +John Ruskin, 1819-1900. + + +CHAPTER IX + +Samuel Richardson, 1689-1761. + _Pamela_, 1740. + _Clarissa Harlowe_, 1750. +Henry Fielding, 1707-1754. + _Joseph Andrews_, 1742. + _Tom Jones_, 1749. +Jane Austen, 1775-1817. +William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863. +Charles Dickens, 1812-1870. +George Meredith, 1832-1909. + + + + + +INDEX + + +ADDISON, JOSEPH, +_Advancement of Learning, The_, +_Anatomy of Melancholy, The_, +_Antonio and Mellida_, +_Arcadia_, the Countess of Pembroke's, +Arnold, Matthew, +Ascham, Roger, +_Astrophel and Stella_, +_Atheist's Tragedy, The_, +Augustan Age, +Austen, Jane, +Autobiography, + +Bacon, Francis, +Ballad, the, +Beaumont and Fletcher, +Bennett, Arnold, +Bible, the, +Biography, +Blake, William, +Blank Verse, +Boswell, James, +Brontës, the, +Browne, Sir Thomas, +Browne, William, +Browning, Robert, +Bunyan, John, +Burke, Edmund, +Burns, Robert, +Burton, Robert, +Byron, Lord, + +Carew, Thomas, +Carlyle, Thomas, +Celtic Revival, +Character-writing, +Chatterton, Thomas, +Cheke, Sir John, +_Christ's Victory and Death_, +Classicism, +Clough, Thomas, +Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, +Collins, William, +Conrad, Joseph, +Cowley, Abraham, +Cowper, William, +Crabbe, George, +Crashaw, Richard, +Criticism, + +Decadence, +Defoe, Daniel, +De Quincey, Thomas, +Dekker, Thomas, +Dickens, Charles, +Discovery, Voyages of, +Disraeli, Benjamin, +_Dr. Faustus_, +Donne, John, +Drama, the, +Dryden, John, +_Duchess of Malfi, The_, + +Earle, John, +_Edward II._, +_Elia, Essays of_, +Elizabethan Poetry, +Elizabethan Prose, +_Essays, Civil and Moral_, +_Euphues_, +_Everyman_, + +_Fairy Queen, The_, +Fantastics, the, +Fielding, Henry, +Fitzgerald, Edward, +Fletcher, Giles, +Fletcher, Phineas, +Ford, John, +French Revolution, the, + +Gaskell, Mrs., +George Eliot, +Gibbon, Edward, +Gissing, George, +Goldsmith, Oliver, +_Gorboduc_, +Gray, Thomas, +Greene, Robert, +Greville, Sir Fulke, +_Gulliver's Travels_, + +_Hakluyt's Voyages_, +Hardy, Thomas, +Hazlitt, William, +Hawthorne, Nathaniel, +_Henry VII., History of_, +Herbert, George, +Herrick, Robert, +Hobbes, Thomas, +Hooper, Richard, + +Italy, influence of, + +_Jew of Malta_, +Johnson, Samuel, +Jonson, Ben, + +Keats, John, +Kipling, Rudyard, +Kyd, Thomas, + +Lamb, Charles, +Locke, John, +Lodge, Thomas, +Lyly, John, +Lyric, the, +Lyrical Ballads, + +Marlowe, Christopher, +Marston, John, +Massinger, Philip, +Meredith, George, +Middleton, Thomas, +Milton, John, +Miracle Play, the, +Moore, George, +Morality, the, +More, Sir Thomas, +Morris, William, + +_New Atlantis, The_, +Novel, the, + +Obscurity in Poetry, +_Omar Khayyam_, +_Ossian_, +Oxford Movement, the, + +_Paradise Lost_, +Pastoral Prose and Poetry, +Peele, George, +Percy, William, +_Pilgrim's Progress_, +Platonism, +Poetic Diction, +Pope, Alexander, +Puritanism, +_Purple Island, The_, + +Raleigh, Sir Walter, +_Rape of the Lock_, +Realism, +_Religio Medici_, +Renaissance, the, +Reynolds, Sir Joshua, +Rhetoric, study of, +Richardson, Samuel, +_Robinson Crusoe_, +Romanticism, +Romantic Revival, the, +Rossetti, D. G., +Ruskin, John, + +Sackville, Thomas, +Satire, +Scott, Sir Walter, +Senecan Tragedy, +Seventeenth Century, the, +Shaw, G. Bernard, +Shelley, P. B., +Shenstone, Thomas, +Sheridan, R. B., +Shirley, John, +Sidney, Sir Philip, +Smollett, T., +Sonnet, the, +Sonneteers, the, +_Spanish Tragedy, The_, +_Spectator, The_, +Spenser, Edmund, +Spenserians, the, +Steele, Richard, +Sterne, Lawrence, +Stevenson, R. L., +Supernatural, the, +Surrey, the Earl of, +Swift, Jonathan, +Swinburne, A. C., +Synge, J. M., + +_Tale of a Tub, The_, +_Tamburlaine_, +_Tatler, The_, +_Temple, Sir William_, +Tennyson, Alfred, +Thackeray, W. M., +Theatre, the Elizabethan, +Thomson, James, +_Tottel's Miscellany_, + +_Utopia_, + +_Vaughan, Henry_, +Victorian Age, the, +_View of the State of Ireland_, + +Waller, Edmund, +Walton, Isaac, +Webster, John, +Wells, H. G., +_White Devil, The_, +Wilde, Oscar, +Wilson, Thomas, +Wither, George, +Wordsworth, William, +Wyatt, Thomas, + +Yeats, W. 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Mair, M.A. Sometime Scholar Of Christ Church.</title> + +<style type="text/css"> + <!-- + * { font-family: Times;} + P { text-indent: 1em; + margin-top: .75em; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .75em; } + H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; } + HR { width: 33%; + margin-top: 1em; + margin-bottom: 1em;} + PRE { font-family: Courier, monospaced; } + .poem {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;} + .poem .stanza {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;} + .poem p {margin: 0; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} + .poem p.i2 {margin-left: 2em;} + .poem p.i4 {margin-left: 4em;} + .poem p.i6 {margin-left: 6em;} + .poem p.i10 {margin-left: 10em;} + + .poem .caesura {vertical-align: -200%;} + BODY{margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%;} + .linenum {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */ + .note {margin-left: 2em; margin-right: 2em; margin-bottom: 1em;} /* block indent */ + .pagenum {position: absolute; left: 92%; right: 100%; font-size: 8pt; justify: right;} /* page numbers */ + // --> +</style> +</head> +<body> + + +<pre> + +The Project Gutenberg EBook of English Literature: Modern, by G. H. Mair + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: English Literature: Modern + Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge + +Author: G. H. Mair + +Release Date: February 27, 2004 [EBook #11327] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN *** + + + + +Produced by Cera Kruger and PG Distributed Proofreaders + + + + + +</pre> + +<br> +<h1>HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE</h1> +<h1>ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN</h1> +<h3>BY G. H. MAIR, M.A. SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF CHRIST CHURCH</h3> +<h4>First Printed, October, 1911 Revised & Printed February, +1914</h4> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="PREFACE"></a> +<h2>PREFACE</h2> +<br> +<p>The intention of this book is to lay stress on ideas and +tendencies that have to be understood and appreciated, rather than +on facts that have to be learned by heart. Many authors are not +mentioned and others receive scanty treatment, because of the +necessities of this method of approach. The book aims at dealing +with the matter of authors more than with their lives; consequently +it contains few dates. All that the reader need require to help him +have been included in a short chronological table at the end.</p> +<p>To have attempted a severely ordered and analytic treatment of +the subject would have been, for the author at least, impossible +within the limits imposed, and, in any case, would have been +foreign to the purpose indicated by the editors of the Home +University Library. The book pretends no more than to be a general +introduction to a very great subject, and it will have fulfilled +all that is intended for it if it stimulates those who read it to +set about reading for themselves the books of which it treats.</p> +<p>Its debts are many, its chief creditors two teachers, Professor +Grierson at Aberdeen University and Sir Walter Raleigh at Oxford, +to the stimulation of whose books and teaching my pleasure in +English literature and any understanding I have of it are due. To +them and to the other writers (chief of them Professor Herford) +whose ideas I have wittingly or unwittingly incorporated in it, as +well as to the kindness and patience of Professor Gilbert Murray, I +wish here to express my indebtedness.</p> +<br> +G.H.M.<br> +MANCHESTER,<br> +<em>August</em>, 1911.<br> +<br> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CONTENTS"></a> +<h2>CONTENTS</h2> +<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. --> +<a href="#PREFACE"><b>PREFACE</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_I"><b>CHAPTER I</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_II"><b>CHAPTER II</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_III"><b>CHAPTER III</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_IV"><b>CHAPTER IV</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_V"><b>CHAPTER V</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_VI"><b>CHAPTER VI</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_VII"><b>CHAPTER VII</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_IX"><b>CHAPTER IX</b></a><br> +<a href="#CHAPTER_X"><b>CHAPTER X</b></a><br> +<a href="#BIBLIOGRAPHY"><b>BIBLIOGRAPHY</b></a><br> +<a href="#LIST_OF_THE_CHIEF_WORKS_AND_AUTHORS_MENTIONED"><b>LIST OF +THE CHIEF WORKS AND AUTHORS MENTIONED</b></a><br> +<a href="#INDEX"><b>INDEX</b></a><br> +<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. --> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<h2>ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN</h2> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_I"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER I</h2> +<br> +<h3>THE RENAISSANCE</h3> +<h4>(1)</h4> +<p>There are times in every man's experience when some sudden +widening of the boundaries of his knowledge, some vision of +hitherto untried and unrealized possibilities, has come and seemed +to bring with it new life and the inspiration of fresh and splendid +endeavour. It may be some great book read for the first time not as +a book, but as a revelation; it may be the first realization of the +extent and moment of what physical science has to teach us; it may +be, like Carlyle's "Everlasting Yea," an ethical illumination, or +spiritual like Augustine's or John Wesley's. But whatever it is, it +brings with it new eyes, new powers of comprehension, and seems to +reveal a treasury of latent and unsuspected talents in the mind and +heart. The history of mankind has its parallels to these moments of +illumination in the life of the individual. There are times when +the boundaries of human experience, always narrow, and fluctuating +but little between age and age, suddenly widen themselves, and the +spirit of man leaps forward to possess and explore its new domain. +These are the great ages of the world. They could be counted, +perhaps, on one hand. The age of Pericles in Athens; the less +defined age, when Europe passed, spiritually and artistically, from +what we call the Dark, to what we call the Middle Ages; the +Renaissance; the period of the French Revolution. Two of them, so +far as English literature is concerned, fall within the compass of +this book, and it is with one of them—the +Renaissance—that it begins.</p> +<p>It is as difficult to find a comprehensive formula for what the +Renaissance meant as to tie it down to a date. The year 1453 A.D., +when the Eastern Empire—the last relic of the continuous +spirit of Rome—fell before the Turks, used to be given as the +date, and perhaps the word "Renaissance" itself—"a new +birth"—is as much as can be accomplished shortly by way of +definition. Michelet's resonant "discovery by mankind of himself +and of the world" rather expresses what a man of the Renaissance +himself must have thought it, than what we in this age can declare +it to be. But both endeavours to date and to define are alike +impossible. One cannot fix a term to day or night, and the theory +of the Renaissance as a kind of tropical dawn—a sudden +passage to light from darkness—is not to be considered. The +Renaissance was, and was the result of, a numerous and various +series of events which followed and accompanied one another from +the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. First +and most immediate in its influence on art and literature and +thought, was the rediscovery of the ancient literatures. In the +Middle Ages knowledge of Greek and Latin literatures had withdrawn +itself into monasteries, and there narrowed till of secular Latin +writing scarcely any knowledge remained save of Vergil (because of +his supposed Messianic prophecy) and Statius, and of Greek, except +Aristotle, none at all. What had been lost in the Western Empire, +however, subsisted in the East, and the continual advance of the +Turk on the territories of the Emperors of Constantinople drove +westward to the shelter of Italy and the Church, and to the +patronage of the Medicis, a crowd of scholars who brought with them +their manuscripts of Homer and the dramatists, of Thucydides and +Herodotus, and most momentous perhaps for the age to come, of Plato +and Demosthenes and of the New Testament in its original Greek. The +quick and vivid intellect of Italy, which had been torpid in the +decadence of mediaevalism and its mysticism and piety, seized with +avidity the revelation of the classical world which the scholars +and their manuscripts brought. Human life, which the mediaeval +Church had taught them to regard but as a threshold and +stepping-stone to eternity, acquired suddenly a new momentousness +and value; the promises of the Church paled like its lamps at +sunrise; and a new paganism, which had Plato for its high priest, +and Demosthenes and Pericles for its archetypes and examples, ran +like wild-fire through Italy. The Greek spirit seized on art, and +produced Raphael, Leonardo, and Michel Angelo; on literature and +philosophy and gave us Pico della Mirandula, on life and gave us +the Medicis and Castiglione and Machiavelli. Then—the +invention not of Italy but of Germany—came the art of +printing, and made this revival of Greek literature quickly +portable into other lands.</p> +<p>Even more momentous was the new knowledge the age brought of the +physical world. The brilliant conjectures of Copernicus paved the +way for Galileo, and the warped and narrow cosmology which +conceived the earth as the centre of the universe, suffered a blow +that in shaking it shook also religion. And while the conjectures +of the men of science were adding regions undreamt of to the +physical universe, the discoverers were enlarging the territories +of the earth itself. The Portuguese, with the aid of sailors +trained in the great Mediterranean ports of Genoa and Venice, +pushed the track of exploration down the western coast of Africa; +the Cape was circumnavigated by Vasco da Gama, and India reached +for the first time by Western men by way of the sea. Columbus +reached Trinidad and discovered the "New" World; his successors +pushed past him and touched the Continent. Spanish colonies grew up +along the coasts of North and Central America and in Peru, and the +Portuguese reached Brazil. Cabot and the English voyagers reached +Newfoundland and Labrador; the French made their way up the St. +Lawrence. The discovery of the gold mines brought new and +unimagined possibilities of wealth to the Old World, while the +imagination of Europe, bounded since the beginning of recorded time +by the Western ocean, and with the Mediterranean as its centre, +shot out to the romance and mystery of untried seas.</p> +<p>It is difficult for us in these later days to conceive the +profound and stirring influence of such an alteration on thought +and literature. To the men at the end of the fifteenth century +scarcely a year but brought another bit of received and recognized +thinking to the scrap-heap; scarcely a year but some new discovery +found itself surpassed and in its turn discarded, or lessened in +significance by something still more new. Columbus sailed westward +to find a new sea route, and as he imagined, a more expeditious one +to "the Indies"; the name West Indies still survives to show the +theory on which the early discoverers worked. The rapidity with +which knowledge widened can be gathered by a comparison of the maps +of the day. In the earlier of them the mythical Brazil, a relic +perhaps of the lost Atlantis, lay a regularly and mystically blue +island off the west coast of Ireland; then the Azores were +discovered and the name fastened on to one of the islands of that +archipelago. Then Amerigo reached South America and the name became +finally fixed to the country that we know. There is nothing +nowadays that can give us a parallel to the stirring and exaltation +of the imagination which intoxicated the men of the Renaissance, +and gave a new birth to thought and art. The great scientific +discoveries of the nineteenth century came to men more prepared for +the shock of new surprises, and they carried evidence less tangible +and indisputable to the senses. Perhaps if the strivings of science +should succeed in proving as evident and comprehensible the +existences which spiritualist and psychical research is striving to +establish, we should know the thrill that the great twin +discoverers, Copernicus and Columbus, brought to Europe.</p> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>This rough sketch of the Renaissance has been set down because +it is only by realizing the period in its largest and broadest +sense that we can understand the beginnings of our own modern +literature. The Renaissance reached England late. By the time that +the impulse was at its height with Spenser and Shakespeare, it had +died out in Italy, and in France to which in its turn Italy had +passed the torch, it was already a waning fire. When it came to +England it came in a special form shaped by political and social +conditions, and by the accidents of temperament and inclination in +the men who began the movement. But the essence of the inspiration +remained the same as it had been on the Continent, and the twin +threads of its two main impulses, the impulse from the study of the +classics, and the impulse given to men's minds by the voyages of +discovery, runs through all the texture of our Renaissance +literature.</p> +<p>Literature as it developed in the reign of Elizabeth ran counter +to the hopes and desires of the men who began the movement; the +common usage which extends the term Elizabethan backwards outside +the limits of the reign itself, has nothing but its carelessness to +recommend it. The men of the early renaissance in the reigns of +Edward VI. and Mary, belonged to a graver school than their +successors. They were no splendid courtiers, nor daring and hardy +adventurers, still less swashbucklers, exquisites, or literary +dandies. Their names—Sir John Cheke, Roger Ascham, Nicholas +Udall, Thomas Wilson, Walter Haddon, belong rather to the +universities and to the coteries of learning, than to the court. To +the nobility, from whose essays and <em>belles lettres</em> +Elizabethan poetry was to develop, they stood in the relation of +tutors rather than of companions, suspecting the extravagances of +their pupils rather than sympathising with their ideals. They were +a band of serious and dignified scholars, men preoccupied with +morality and good-citizenship, and holding those as worth more than +the lighter interests of learning and style. It is perhaps +characteristic of the English temper that the revival of the +classical tongues, which in Italy made for paganism, and the +pursuit of pleasure in life and art, in England brought with it in +the first place a new seriousness and gravity of life, and in +religion the Reformation. But in a way the scholars fought against +tendencies in their age, which were both too fast and too strong +for them. At a time when young men were writing poetry modelled on +the delicate and extravagant verse of Italy, were reading Italian +novels, and affecting Italian fashions in speech and dress, they +were fighting for sound education, for good classical scholarship, +for the purity of native English, and behind all these for the +native strength and worth of the English character, which they felt +to be endangered by orgies of reckless assimilation from abroad. +The revival of the classics at Oxford and Cambridge could not +produce an Erasmus or a Scaliger; we have no fine critical +scholarship of this age to put beside that of Holland or France. +Sir John Cheke and his followers felt they had a public and +national duty to perform, and their knowledge of the classics only +served them for examples of high living and morality, on which +education, in its sense of the formation of character, could be +based.</p> +<p>The literary influence of the revival of letters in England, +apart from its moral influence, took two contradictory and opposing +forms. In the curricula of schools, logic, which in the Middle Ages +had been the groundwork of thought and letters, gave place to +rhetoric. The reading of the ancients awakened new delight in the +melody and beauty of language: men became intoxicated with words. +The practice of rhetoric was universal and it quickly coloured all +literature. It was the habit of the rhetoricians to choose some +subject for declamation and round it to encourage their pupils to +set embellishments and decorations, which commonly proceeded rather +from a delight in language for language's sake, than from any +effect in enforcing an argument. Their models for these exercises +can be traced in their influence on later writers. One of the most +popular of them, Erasmus's "Discourse Persuading a Young Man to +Marriage," which was translated in an English text-book of +rhetoric, reminds one of the first part of Shakespeare's sonnets. +The literary affectation called euphuism was directly based on the +precepts of the handbooks on rhetoric; its author, John Lyly, only +elaborated and made more precise tricks of phrase and writing, +which had been used as exercises in the schools of his youth. The +prose of his school, with its fantastic delight in exuberance of +figure and sound, owed its inspiration, in its form ultimately to +Cicero, and in the decorations with which it was embellished, to +the elder Pliny and later writers of his kind. The long declamatory +speeches and the sententiousness of the early drama were directly +modelled on Seneca, through whom was faintly reflected the tragedy +of Greece, unknown directly or almost unknown to English readers. +Latinism, like every new craze, became a passion, and ran through +the less intelligent kinds of writing in a wild excess. Not much of +the literature of this time remains in common knowledge, and for +examples of these affectations one must turn over the black letter +pages of forgotten books. There high-sounding and familiar words +are handled and bandied about with delight, and you can see in +volume after volume these minor and forgotten authors gloating over +the new found treasure which placed them in their time in the van +of literary success. That they are obsolete now, and indeed were +obsolete before they were dead, is a warning to authors who intend +similar extravagances. Strangeness and exoticism are not lasting +wares. By the time of "Love's Labour Lost" they had become nothing +more than matter for laughter, and it is only through their +reflection and distortion in Shakespeare's pages that we know them +now.</p> +<p>Had not a restraining influence, anxiously and even +acrimoniously urged, broken in on their endeavours the English +language to-day might have been almost as completely latinized as +Spanish or Italian. That the essential Saxon purity of our tongue +has been preserved is to the credit not of sensible unlettered +people eschewing new fashions they could not comprehend, but to the +scholars themselves. The chief service that Cheke and Ascham and +their fellows rendered to English literature was their crusade +against the exaggerated latinity that they had themselves helped to +make possible, the crusade against what they called "inkhorn +terms." "I am of this opinion," said Cheke in a prefatory letter to +a book translated by a friend of his, "that our own tongue should +be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with the borrowing +of other tongues, wherein if we take not heed by time, ever +borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as +bankrupt." Writings in the Saxon vernacular like the sermons of +Latimer, who was careful to use nothing not familiar to the common +people, did much to help the scholars to save our prose from the +extravagances which they dreaded. Their attack was directed no less +against the revival of really obsolete words. It is a paradox worth +noting for its strangeness that the first revival of mediaevalism +in modern English literature was in the Renaissance itself. Talking +in studious archaism seems to have been a fashionable practice in +society and court circles. "The fine courtier," says Thomas Wilson +in his <cite>Art of Rhetoric</cite>, "will talk nothing but +Chaucer." The scholars of the English Renaissance fought not only +against the ignorant adoption of their importations, but against +the renewal of forgotten habits of speech.</p> +<p>Their efforts failed, and their ideals had to wait for their +acceptance till the age of Dryden, when Shakespeare and Spenser and +Milton, all of them authors who consistently violated the standards +of Cheke, had done their work. The fine courtier who would talk +nothing but Chaucer was in Elizabeth's reign the saving of English +verse. The beauty and richness of Spenser is based directly on +words he got from <cite>Troilus and Cressida</cite> and the +<cite>Canterbury Tales</cite>. Some of the most sonorous and +beautiful lines in Shakespeare break every canon laid down by the +humanists.</p> +<div class="poem">"Th' extravagant and erring spirit hies<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">To his confine"</span></div> +<br> +is a line, three of the chief words of which are Latin importations +that come unfamiliarly, bearing their original interpretation with +them. Milton is packed with similar things: he will talk of a +crowded meeting as "frequent" and use constructions which are +unintelligible to anyone who does not possess a knowledge—and +a good knowledge—of Latin syntax. Yet the effect is a good +poetic effect. In attacking latinisms in the language borrowed from +older poets Cheke and his companions were attacking the two chief +sources of Elizabethan poetic vocabulary. All the sonorousness, +beauty and dignity of the poetry and the drama which followed them +would have been lost had they succeeded in their object, and their +verse would have been constrained into the warped and ugly forms of +Sternhold and Hopkins, and those with them who composed the first +and worst metrical version of the Psalms. When their idea +reappeared for its fulfilment phantasy and imagery had temporarily +worn themselves out, and the richer language made simplicity +possible and adequate for poetry.<br> +<br> +<p>There are other directions in which the classical revival +influenced writing that need not detain us here. The attempt to +transplant classical metres into English verse which was the +concern of a little group of authors who called themselves the +Areopagus came to no more success than a similar and contemporary +attempt did in France. An earlier and more lasting result of the +influence of the classics on new ways of thinking is the +<cite>Utopia</cite> of Sir Thomas More, based on Plato's +<cite>Republic</cite>, and followed by similar attempts on the part +of other authors, of which the most notable are Harrington's +<cite>Oceana</cite> and Bacon's <cite>New Atlantis</cite>. In one +way or another the rediscovery of Plato proved the most valuable +part of the Renaissance's gift from Greece. The doctrines of the +Symposium coloured in Italy the writings of Castiglione and +Mirandula. In England they gave us Spenser's "Hymn to Intellectual +Beauty," and they affected, each in his own way, Sir Philip Sidney, +and others of the circle of court writers of his time. More's book +was written in Latin, though there is an English translation almost +contemporary. He combines in himself the two strains that we found +working in the Renaissance, for besides its origin in Plato, +<cite>Utopia</cite> owes not a little to the influence of the +voyages of discovery. In 1507 there was published a little book +called an <cite>Introduction to Cosmography</cite>, which gave an +account of the four voyages of Amerigo. In the story of the fourth +voyage it is narrated that twenty-four men were left in a fort near +Cape Bahia. More used this detail as a starting-point, and one of +the men whom Amerigo left tells the story of this "Nowhere," a +republic partly resembling England but most of all the ideal world +of Plato. Partly resembling England, because no man can escape from +the influences of his own time, whatever road he takes, whether the +road of imagination or any other. His imagination can only build +out of the materials afforded him by his own experience: he can +alter, he can rearrange, but he cannot in the strictest sense of +the word create, and every city of dreams is only the scheme of +things as they are remoulded nearer to the desire of a man's heart. +In a way More has less invention than some of his subtler +followers, but his book is interesting because it is the first +example of a kind of writing which has been attractive to many men +since his time, and particularly to writers of our own day.</p> +<p>There remains one circumstance in the revival of the classics +which had a marked and continuous influence on the literary age +that followed. To get the classics English scholars had as we have +seen to go to Italy. Cheke went there and so did Wilson, and the +path of travel across France and through Lombardy to Florence and +Rome was worn hard by the feet of their followers for over a +hundred years after. On the heels of the men of learning went the +men of fashion, eager to learn and copy the new manners of a +society whose moral teacher was Machiavelli, and whose patterns of +splendour were the courts of Florence and Ferrara, and to learn the +trick of verse that in the hands of Petrarch and his followers had +fashioned the sonnet and other new lyric forms. This could not be +without its influence on the manners of the nation, and the +scholars who had been the first to show the way were the first to +deplore the pell-mell assimilation of Italian manners and vices, +which was the unintended result of the inroad on insularity which +had already begun. They saw the danger ahead, and they laboured to +meet it as it came. Ascham in his <cite>Schoolmaster</cite> railed +against the translation of Italian books, and the corrupt manners +of living and false ideas which they seemed to him to breed. The +Italianate Englishman became the chief part of the stock-in-trade +of the satirists and moralists of the day. Stubbs, a Puritan +chronicler, whose book <cite>The Anatomy of Abuses</cite> is a +valuable aid to the study of Tudor social history, and Harrison, +whose description of England prefaces Holinshed's Chronicles, both +deal in detail with the Italian menace, and condemn in good set +terms the costliness in dress and the looseness in morals which +they laid to its charge. Indeed, the effect on England was +profound, and it lasted for more than two generations. The romantic +traveller, Coryat, writing well within the seventeenth century in +praise of the luxuries of Italy (among which he numbers forks for +table use), is as enthusiastic as the authors who began the +imitation of Italian metres in Tottel's <cite>Miscellany</cite>, +and Donne and Hall in their satires written under James wield the +rod of censure as sternly as had Ascham a good half century before. +No doubt there was something in the danger they dreaded, but the +evil was not unmixed with good, for insularity will always be an +enemy of good literature. The Elizabethans learned much more than +their plots from Italian models, and the worst effects dreaded by +the patriots never reached our shores. Italian vice stopped short +of real life; poisoning and hired ruffianism flourished only on the +stage.</p> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>The influence of the spirit of discovery and adventure, though +it is less quickly marked, more pervasive, and less easy to define, +is perhaps more universal than that of the classics or of the +Italian fashions which came in their train. It runs right through +the literature of Elizabeth's age and after it, affecting, each in +their special way, all the dramatists, authors who were also +adventurers like Raleigh, scholars like Milton, and philosophers +like Hobbes and Locke. It reappears in the Romantic revival with +Coleridge, whose "Ancient Mariner" owes much to reminiscences of +his favourite reading—<cite>Purchas, his Pilgrimes</cite>, +and other old books of voyages. The matter of this too-little +noticed strain in English literature would suffice to fill a whole +book; only a few of the main lines of its influence can be noted +here.</p> +<p>For the English Renaissance—for Elizabeth's England, +action and imagination went hand in hand; the dramatists and poets +held up the mirror to the voyagers. In a sense, the cult of the sea +is the oldest note in English literature. There is not a poem in +Anglo-Saxon but breathes the saltness and the bitterness of the +sea-air. To the old English the sea was something inexpressibly +melancholy and desolate, mist-shrouded, and lonely, terrible in its +grey and shivering spaces; and their tone about it is always +elegiac and plaintive, as a place of dreary spiritless wandering +and unmarked graves. When the English settled they lost the sense +of the sea; they became a little parochial people, tilling fields +and tending cattle, wool-gathering and wool-bartering, their +shipping confined to cross-Channel merchandise, and coastwise +sailing from port to port. Chaucer's shipman, almost the sole +representative of the sea in mediaeval English literature, plied a +coastwise trade. But with the Cabots and their followers, Frobisher +and Gilbert and Drake and Hawkins, all this was changed; once more +the ocean became the highway of our national progress and +adventure, and by virtue of our shipping we became competitors for +the dominion of the earth. The rising tide of national enthusiasm +and exaltation that this occasioned flooded popular literature. The +voyagers themselves wrote down the stories of their adventures; and +collections of these—Hakluyt's and Purchas's—were among +the most popular books of the age. To them, indeed, we must look +for the first beginnings of our modern English prose, and some of +its noblest passages. The writers, as often as not, were otherwise +utterly unknown—ship's pursers, super-cargoes, and the +like—men without much literary craft or training, whose style +is great because of the greatness of their subject, because they +had no literary artifices to stand between them and the plain and +direct telling of a stirring tale. But the ferment worked outside +the actual doings of the voyagers themselves, and it can be traced +beyond definite allusions to them. Allusions, indeed, are +surprisingly few; Drake is scarcely as much as mentioned among the +greater writers of the age. None the less there is not one of them +that is not deeply touched by his spirit and that of the movement +which he led. New lands had been discovered, new territories opened +up, wonders exposed which were perhaps only the first fruits of +greater wonders to come. Spenser makes the voyagers his warrant for +his excursion into fairyland. Some, he says, have condemned his +fairy world as an idle fiction,</p> +<div class="poem">"But let that man with better sense advise;<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">That of the world least part to +us is red;</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And daily how through hardy +enterprise</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Many great regions are +discovered,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Which to late age were never +mentioned.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Who ever heard of the 'Indian +Peru'?</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Or who in venturous vessel +measured</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The Amazon, huge river, now found +true?</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Or fruitfullest Virginia who did +ever view?</span><br> +<br> +"Yet all these were, when no man did them know,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Yet have from wiser ages hidden +been;</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And later times things more +unknown shall show."</span></div> +<p>It is in the drama that this spirit of adventure caught from the +voyagers gets its full play. "Without the voyagers," says Professor +Walter Raleigh,[<a href="#note-1">1</a>] "Marlowe is +inconceivable." His imagination in every one of his plays is +preoccupied with the lust of adventure, and the wealth and power +adventure brings. Tamburlaine, Eastern conqueror though he is, is +at heart an Englishman of the school of Hawkins and Drake. Indeed +the comparison must have occurred to his own age, for a historian +of the day, the antiquary Stow, declares Drake to have been "as +famous in Europe and America as Tamburlaine was in Asia and +Africa." The high-sounding names and quests which seem to us to +give the play an air of unreality and romance were to the +Elizabethans real and actual; things as strange and foreign were to +be heard any day amongst the motley crowd in the Bankside outside +the theatre door. Tamburlaine's last speech, when he calls for a +map and points the way to unrealised conquests, is the very epitome +of the age of discovery.</p> +<div class="poem">"Lo, here my sons, are all the golden mines,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Inestimable wares and precious +stones,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">More worth than Asia and all the +world beside;</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And from the Antarctic Pole +eastward behold</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">As much more land, which never +was descried.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Wherein are rocks of pearl that +shine as bright</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">As all the lamps that beautify +the sky."</span></div> +<br> +<p>It is the same in his other plays. Dr. Faustus assigns to his +serviceable spirits tasks that might have been studied from the +books of Hakluyt</p> +<div class="poem">"I'll have them fly to India for gold,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Ransack the ocean for orient +pearl,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And search all corners of the new +round world</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">For pleasant fruits and princely +delicates."</span></div> +<p>When there is no actual expression of the spirit of adventure, +the air of the sea which it carried with it still blows. +Shakespeare, save for his scenes in <cite>The Tempest</cite> and in +<cite>Pericles</cite>, which seize in all its dramatic poignancy +the terror of storm and shipwreck, has nothing dealing directly +with the sea or with travel; but it comes out, none the less, in +figure and metaphor, and plays like the <cite>Merchant of +Venice</cite> and <cite>Othello</cite> testify to his accessibility +to its spirit. Milton, a scholar whose mind was occupied by other +and more ultimate matters, is full of allusions to it. Satan's +journey through Chaos in <cite>Paradise Lost</cite> is the occasion +for a whole series of metaphors drawn from seafaring. In +<cite>Samson Agonistes</cite> Dalila comes in,</p> +<div class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">"Like a stately +ship ...</span><br> +With all her bravery on and tackle trim<br> +Sails frilled and streamers waving<br> +Courted by all the winds that hold them play."</div> +<br> +and Samson speaks of himself as one who,<br> +<br> +<div class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"Like a foolish +pilot have shipwracked</span><br> +My vessel trusted to me from above<br> +Gloriously rigged."</div> +<p>The influence of the voyages of discovery persisted long after +the first bloom of the Renaissance had flowered and withered. On +the reports brought home by the voyagers were founded in part those +conceptions of the condition of the "natural" man which form such a +large part of the philosophic discussions of the seventeenth and +eighteenth centuries, Hobbes's description of the life of nature as +"nasty, solitary, brutish, and short," Locke's theories of civil +government, and eighteenth century speculators like Monboddo all +took as the basis of their theory the observations of the men of +travel. Abroad this connection of travellers and philosophers was +no less intimate. Both Montesquieu and Rousseau owed much to the +tales of the Iroquois, the North American Indian allies of France. +Locke himself is the best example of the closeness of this +alliance. He was a diligent student of the texts of the voyagers, +and himself edited out of Hakluyt and Purchas the best collection +of them current in his day. The purely literary influence of the +age of discovery persisted down to <cite>Robinson Crusoe</cite>; in +that book by a refinement of satire a return to travel itself (it +must be remembered Defoe posed not as a novelist but as an actual +traveller) is used to make play with the deductions founded on it. +Crusoe's conversation with the man Friday will be found to be a +satire of Locke's famous controversy with the Bishop of Worcester. +With <cite>Robinson Crusoe</cite> the influence of the age of +discovery finally perishes. An inspiration hardens into the mere +subject matter of books of adventure. We need not follow it +further.</p> +<h4>Footnotes</h4> +<p><a name="note-1"><!-- Note Anchor 1 --></a>[Footnote 1: To whose +terminal essay in "Hakluyt's Voyages" (Maclehose) I am indebted for +much of the matter in this section.]</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_II"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER II</h2> +<br> +<h3>ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE</h3> +<h4>(1)</h4> +<p>To understand Elizabethan literature it is necessary to remember +that the social status it enjoyed was far different from that of +literature in our own day. The splendours of the Medicis in Italy +had set up an ideal of courtliness, in which letters formed an +integral and indispensable part. For the Renaissance, the man of +letters was only one aspect of the gentleman, and the true +gentleman, as books so early and late respectively as Castiglione's +<cite>Courtier</cite> and Peacham's <cite>Complete Gentleman</cite> +show, numbered poetry as a necessary part of his accomplishments. +In England special circumstances intensified this tendency of the +time. The queen was unmarried: she was the first single woman to +wear the English crown, and her vanity made her value the devotion +of the men about her as something more intimate than mere loyalty +or patriotism. She loved personal homage, particularly the homage +of half-amatory eulogy in prose and verse. It followed that the +ambition of every courtier was to be an author, and of every author +to be a courtier; in fact, outside the drama, which was almost the +only popular writing at the time, every author was in a greater or +less degree attached to the court. If they were not enjoying its +favours they were pleading for them, mingling high and fantastic +compliment with bitter reproaches and a tale of misery. And +consequently both the poetry and the prose of the time are +restricted in their scope and temper to the artificial and +romantic, to high-flown eloquence, to the celebration of love and +devotion, or to the inculcation of those courtly virtues and +accomplishments which composed the perfect pattern of a gentleman. +Not that there was not both poetry and prose written outside this +charmed circle. The pamphleteers and chroniclers, Dekker and Nash, +Holinshed and Harrison and Stow, were setting down their histories +and descriptions, and penning those detailed and realistic +indictments of the follies and extravagances of fashion, which +together with the comedies have enabled us to picture accurately +the England and especially the London of Elizabeth's reign. There +was fine poetry written by Marlowe and Chapman as well as by Sidney +and Spenser, but the court was still the main centre of literary +endeavour, and the main incitement to literary fame and +success.</p> +<p>But whether an author was a courtier or a Londoner living by his +wits, writing was never the main business of his life: all the +writers of the time were in one way or another men of action and +affairs. As late as Milton it is probably true to say that writing +was in the case even of the greatest an avocation, something +indulged in at leisure outside a man's main business. All the +Elizabethan authors had crowded and various careers. Of Sir Philip +Sidney his earliest biographer says, "The truth is his end was not +writing, even while he wrote, but both his wit and understanding +bent upon his heart to make himself and others not in words or +opinion but in life and action good and great." Ben Jonson was in +turn a soldier, a poet, a bricklayer, an actor, and ultimately the +first poet laureate. Lodge, after leaving Oxford, passed through +the various professions of soldiering, medicine, playwriting, and +fiction, and he wrote his novel <cite>Rosalind</cite>, on which +Shakespeare based <cite>As You Like It</cite> while he was sailing +on a piratical venture on the Spanish Main. This connection between +life and action affected as we have seen the tone and quality of +Elizabethan writing. "All the distinguished writers of the period," +says Thoreau, "possess a greater vigour and naturalness than the +more modern ... you have constantly the warrant of life and +experience in what you read. The little that is said is eked out by +implication of the much that was done." In another passage the same +writer explains the strength and fineness of the writings of Sir +Walter Raleigh by this very test of action, "The word which is best +said came nearest to not being spoken at all, for it is cousin to a +deed which the speaker could have better done. Nay almost it must +have taken the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by +some misfortune, so that the truest writer will be some captive +knight after all." This bond between literature and action explains +more than the writings of the voyagers or the pamphlets of men who +lived in London by what they could make of their fellows. +Literature has always a two-fold relation to life as it is lived. +It is both a mirror and an escape: in our own day the stirring +romances of Stevenson, the full-blooded and vigorous life which +beats through the pages of Mr. Kipling, the conscious brutalism of +such writers as Mr. Conrad and Mr. Hewlett, the plays of J.M. +Synge, occupied with the vigorous and coarse-grained life of +tinkers and peasants, are all in their separate ways a reaction +against an age in which the overwhelming majority of men and women +have sedentary pursuits. Just in the same way the Elizabethan who +passed his commonly short and crowded life in an atmosphere of +throat-cutting and powder and shot, and in a time when affairs of +state were more momentous for the future of the nation than they +have ever been since, needed his escape from the things which +pressed in upon him every day. So grew the vogue and popularity of +pastoral poetry and of pastoral romance.</p> +<a name="2"></a> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>It is with two courtiers that modern English poetry begins. The +lives of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey both ended early +and unhappily, and it was not until ten years after the death of +the second of them that their poems appeared in print. The book +that contained them, Tottel's <cite>Miscellany of Songs and +Sonnets</cite>, is one of the landmarks of English literature. It +begins lyrical love poetry in our language. It begins, too, the +imitation and adaptation of foreign and chiefly Italian metrical +forms, many of which have since become characteristic forms of +English verse: so characteristic, that we scarcely think of them as +other than native in origin. To Wyatt belongs the honour of +introducing the sonnet, and to Surrey the more momentous credit of +writing, for the first time in English, blank verse. Wyatt fills +the most important place in the <cite>Miscellany</cite>, and his +work, experimental in tone and quality, formed the example which +Surrey and minor writers in the same volume and all the later poets +of the age copied. He tries his hand at everything—songs, +madrigals, elegies, complaints, and sonnets—and he takes his +models from both ancient Rome and modern Italy. Indeed there is +scarcely anything in the volume for which with some trouble and +research one might not find an original in Petrarch, or in the +poets of Italy who followed him. But imitation, universal though it +is in his work, does not altogether crowd out originality of +feeling and poetic temper. At times, he sounds a personal note, his +joy on leaving Spain for England, his feelings in the Tower, his +life at the Court amongst his books, and as a country gentleman +enjoying hunting and other outdoor sports.</p> +<div class="poem">"This maketh me at home to hunt and hawk,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And in foul weather at my book to +sit,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">In frost and snow, then with my +bow to stalk,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">No man does mark whereas I ride +or go:</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">In lusty leas at liberty I +walk."</span></div> +<p>It is easy to see that poetry as a melodious and enriched +expression of a man's own feelings is in its infancy here. The new +poets had to find their own language, to enrich with borrowings +from other tongues the stock of words suitable for poetry which the +dropping of inflection had left to English. Wyatt was at the +beginning of the process, and apart from a gracious and courtly +temper, his work has, it must be confessed, hardly more than an +antiquarian interest. Surrey, it is possible to say on reading his +work, went one step further. He allows himself oftener the luxury +of a reference to personal feelings, and his poetry contains from +place to place a fairly full record of the vicissitudes of his +life. A prisoner at Windsor, he recalls his childhood there</p> +<div class="poem">"The large green courts where we were wont to +hove,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The palme-play, where, despoiled +for the game.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">With dazzled eyes oft we by +gleams of love</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Have missed the ball, and got +sight of our dame."</span></div> +<p>Like Wyatt's, his verses are poor stuff, but a sympathetic ear +can catch in them something of the accent that distinguishes the +verse of Sidney and Spenser. He is greater than Wyatt, not so much +for greater skill as for more boldness in experiment. Wyatt in his +sonnets had used the Petrarchan or Italian form, the form used +later in England by Milton and in the nineteenth century by +Rossetti. He built up each poem, that is, in two parts, the octave, +a two-rhymed section of eight lines at the beginning, followed by +the sestet, a six line close with three rhymes. The form fits +itself very well to the double mood which commonly inspires a poet +using the sonnet form; the second section as it were both echoing +and answering the first, following doubt with hope, or sadness with +resignation, or resolving a problem set itself by the heart. Surrey +tried another manner, the manner which by its use in Shakespeare's +sonnets has come to be regarded as the English form of this kind of +lyric. His sonnets are virtually three-stanza poems with a couplet +for close, and he allows himself as many rhymes as he chooses. The +structure is obviously easier, and it gives a better chance to an +inferior workman, but in the hands of a master its harmonies are no +less delicate, and its capacity to represent changing modes of +thought no less complete than those of the true form of Petrarch. +Blank verse, which was Surrey's other gift to English poetry, was +in a way a compromise between the two sources from which the +English Renaissance drew its inspiration. Latin and Greek verse is +quantitative and rhymeless; Italian verse, built up on the metres +of the troubadours and the degeneration of Latin which gave the +world the Romance languages, used many elaborate forms of rhyme. +Blank verse took from Latin its rhymelessness, but it retained +accent instead of quantity as the basis of its line. The line +Surrey used is the five-foot or ten-syllable line of what is called +"heroic verse"—the line used by Chaucer in his Prologue and +most of his tales. Like Milton he deplored rhyme as the invention +of a barbarous age, and no doubt he would have rejoiced to go +further and banish accent as well as rhymed endings. That, however, +was not to be, though in the best blank verse of later time accent +and quantity both have their share in the effect. The instrument he +forged passed into the hands of the dramatists: Marlowe perfected +its rhythm, Shakespeare broke its monotony and varied its cadences +by altering the spacing of the accents, and occasionally by adding +an extra unaccented syllable. It came back from the drama to poetry +with Milton. His blindness and the necessity under which it laid +him of keeping in his head long stretches of verse at one time, +because he could not look back to see what he had written, probably +helped his naturally quick and delicate sense of cadence to vary +the pauses, so that a variety of accent and interval might replace +the valuable aid to memory which he put aside in putting aside +rhyme. Perhaps it is to two accidents, the accident by which blank +verse as the medium of the actor had to be retained easily in the +memory, and the accident of Milton's blindness, that must be laid +the credit of more than a little of the richness of rhythm of this, +the chief and greatest instrument of English verse.</p> +<p>The imitation of Italian and French forms which Wyatt and Surrey +began, was continued by a host of younger amateurs of poetry. +Laborious research has indeed found a Continental original for +almost every great poem of the time, and for very many forgotten +ones as well. It is easy for the student engaged in this kind of +literary exploration to exaggerate the importance of what he finds, +and of late years criticism, written mainly by these explorers, has +tended to assume that since it can be found that Sidney, and +Daniel, and Watson, and all the other writers of mythological +poetry and sonnet sequences took their ideas and their phrases from +foreign poetry, their work is therefore to be classed merely as +imitative literary exercise, that it is frigid, that it contains or +conveys no real feeling, and that except in the secondary and +derived sense, it is not really lyrical at all. Petrarch, they will +tell you, may have felt deeply and sincerely about Laura, but when +Sidney uses Petrarch's imagery and even translates his words in +order to express his feelings for Stella, he is only a plagiarist +and not a lover, and the passion for Lady Rich which is supposed to +have inspired his sonnets, nothing more than a not too seriously +intended trick to add the excitement of a transcript of real +emotion to what was really an academic exercise. If that were +indeed so, then Elizabethan poetry is a very much lesser and meaner +thing than later ages have thought it. But is it so? Let us look +into the matter a little more closely. The unit of all ordinary +kinds of writing is the word, and one is not commonly quarrelled +with for using words that have belonged to other people. But the +unit of the lyric, like the unit of spoken conversation, is not the +word but the phrase. Now in daily human intercourse the use, which +is universal and habitual, of set forms and phrases of talk is not +commonly supposed to detract from, or destroy sincerity. In the +crises indeed of emotion it must be most people's experience that +the natural speech that rises unbidden and easiest to the lips is +something quite familiar and commonplace, some form which the +accumulated experience of many generations of separate people has +found best for such circumstances or such an occasion. The lyric is +just in the position of conversation, at such a heightened and +emotional moment. It is the speech of deep feeling, that must be +articulate or choke, and it falls naturally and inevitably into +some form which accumulated passionate moments have created and +fixed. The course of emotional experiences differs very little from +age to age, and from individual to individual, and so the same +phrases may be used quite sincerely and naturally as the direct +expression of feeling at its highest point by men apart in country, +circumstances, or time. This is not to say that there is no such +thing as originality; a poet is a poet first and most of all +because he discovers truths that have been known for ages, as +things that are fresh and new and vital for himself. He must speak +of them in language that has been used by other men just because +they are known truths, but he will use that language in a new way, +and with a new significance, and it is just in proportion to the +freshness, and the air of personal conviction and sincerity which +he imparts to it, that he is great.</p> +<p>The point at issue bears very directly on the work of Sir Philip +Sidney. In the course of the history of English letters certain +authors disengage themselves who have more than a merely literary +position: they are symbolic of the whole age in which they live, +its life and action, its thoughts and ideals, as well as its mere +modes of writing. There are not many of them and they could be +easily numbered; Addison, perhaps, certainly Dr. Johnson, certainly +Byron, and in the later age probably Tennyson. But the greatest of +them all is Sir Philip Sidney: his symbolical relation to the time +in which he lived was realized by his contemporaries, and it has +been a commonplace of history and criticism ever since. Elizabeth +called him one of the jewels of her crown, and at the age of +twenty-three, so fast did genius ripen in that summer time of the +Renaissance, William the Silent could speak of him as "one of the +ripest statesmen of the age." He travelled widely in Europe, knew +many languages, and dreamed of adventure in America and on the high +seas. In a court of brilliant figures, his was the most dazzling, +and his death at Zutphen only served to intensify the halo of +romance which had gathered round his name. His literary exercises +were various: in prose he wrote the <cite>Arcadia</cite> and the +<cite>Apology for Poetry</cite>, the one the beginning of a new +kind of imaginative writing, and the other the first of the series +of those rare and precious commentaries on their own art which some +of our English poets have left us. To the <cite>Arcadia</cite> we +shall have to return later in this chapter. It is his other great +work, the sequence of sonnets entitled <cite>Astrophel and +Stella</cite>, which concerns us here. They celebrate the history +of his love for Penelope Devereux, sister of the Earl of Essex, a +love brought to disaster by the intervention of Queen Elizabeth +with whom he had quarrelled. As poetry they mark an epoch. They are +the first direct expression of an intimate and personal experience +in English literature, struck off in the white heat of passion, and +though they are coloured at times with that over-fantastic imagery +which is at once a characteristic fault and excellence of the +writing of the time, they never lose the one merit above all others +of lyric poetry, the merit of sincerity. The note is struck with +certainty and power in the first sonnet of the series:—</p> +<div class="poem">"Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to +show,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">That she, dear she, might take +some pleasure of my pain,—</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Pleasure might cause her read, +reading might make her know,—</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Knowledge might pity win, and +pity grace obtain,—</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">I sought fit words to paint the +blackest face of woe,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Studying inventions fine her wits +to entertain;</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Oft turning others' leaves to see +if thence would flow</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Some fresh and fruitful flower +upon my sunburned brain.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">But words came halting forth +...</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Biting my truant pen, beating +myself for spite,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">'Fool,' said my muse to me, 'look +in thy heart and write.'"</span></div> +<br> +And though he turned others' leaves it was quite literally looking +in his heart that he wrote. He analyses the sequence of his +feelings with a vividness and minuteness which assure us of their +truth. All that he tells is the fruit of experience, dearly +bought:<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Desire! desire! I have too dearly bought<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">With price of mangled mind thy +worthless ware.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Too long, too long! asleep thou +hast me brought,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Who shouldst my mind to higher +things prepare."</span></div> +<br> +and earlier in the sequence—<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"I now have learned love right and learned even +so<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">As those that being poisoned +poison know."</span></div> +<br> +In the last two sonnets, with crowning truth and pathos he +renounces earthly love which reaches but to dust, and which because +it fades brings but fading pleasure:<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Then farewell, world! Thy uttermost I see.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Eternal love, maintain thy life +in me."</span></div> +<p>The sonnets were published after Sidney's death, and it is +certain that like Shakespeare's they were never intended for +publication at all. The point is important because it helps to +vindicate Sidney's sincerity, but were any vindication needed +another more certain might be found. The <cite>Arcadia</cite> is +strewn with love songs and sonnets, the exercises solely of the +literary imagination. Let any one who wishes to gauge the sincerity +of the impulse of the Stella sequence compare any of the poems in +it with those in the romance.</p> +<p>With Sir Philip Sidney literature was an avocation, constantly +indulged in, but outside the main business of his life; with Edmund +Spenser public life and affairs were subservient to an +overmastering poetic impulse. He did his best to carve out a career +for himself like other young men of his time, followed the fortunes +of the Earl of Leicester, sought desperately and unavailingly the +favour of the Queen, and ultimately accepted a place in her service +in Ireland, which meant banishment as virtually as a place in India +would to-day. Henceforward his visits to London and the Court were +few; sometimes a lover of travel would visit him in his house in +Ireland as Raleigh did, but for the most he was left alone. It was +in this atmosphere of loneliness and separation, hostile tribes +pinning him in on every side, murder lurking in the woods and +marshes round him, that he composed his greatest work. In it at +last he died, on the heels of a sudden rising in which his house +was burnt and his lands over-run by the wild Irish whom the tyranny +of the English planters had driven to vengeance. Spenser was not +without interest in his public duties; his <cite>View of the State +of Ireland</cite> shows that. But it shows, too, that he brought to +them singularly little sympathy or imagination. Throughout his tone +is that of the worst kind of English officialdom; rigid subjection +and in the last resort massacre are the remedies he would apply to +Irish discontent. He would be a fine text—which might be +enforced by modern examples—for a discourse on the evil +effects of immersion in the government of a subject race upon men +of letters. No man of action can be so consistently and cynically +an advocate of brutalism as your man of letters, Spenser, of +course, had his excuses; the problem of Ireland was new and it was +something remote and difficult; in all but the mere distance for +travel, Dublin was as far from London as Bombay is to-day. But to +him and his like we must lay down partly the fact that to-day we +have still an Irish problem.</p> +<p>But though fate and the necessity of a livelihood drove him to +Ireland and the life of a colonist, poetry was his main business. +He had been the centre of a brilliant set at Cambridge, one of +those coteries whose fame, if they are brilliant and vivacious +enough and have enough self-confidence, penetrates to the outer +world before they leave the University. The thing happens in our +own day, as the case of Oscar Wilde is witness; it happened in the +case of Spenser; and when he and his friends Gabriel Harvey and +Edward Kirke came "down" it was to immediate fame amongst amateurs +of the arts. They corresponded with each other about literary +matters, and Harvey published his part of the correspondence; they +played like Du Bellay in France, with the idea of writing English +verse in the quantitative measures of classical poetry; Spenser had +a love affair in Yorkshire and wrote poetry about it, letting just +enough be known to stimulate the imagination of the public. They +tried their hands at everything, imitated everything, and in all +were brilliant, sparkling, and decorative; they got a kind of +entrance to the circle of the Court. Then Spenser published his +<cite>Shepherd's Calendar</cite>, a series of pastoral eclogues for +every month of the year, after a manner taken from French and +Italian pastoral writers, but coming ultimately from Vergil, and +Edward Kirke furnished it with an elaborate prose commentary. +Spenser took the same liberties with the pastoral form as did +Vergil himself; that is to say he used it as a vehicle for satire +and allegory, made it carry political and social allusions, and +planted in it references to his friends. By its publication Spenser +became the first poet of the day. It was followed by some of his +finest and most beautiful things—by the Platonic hymns, by +the <cite>Amoretti</cite>, a series of sonnets inspired by his love +for his wife; by the <cite>Epithalamium</cite>, on the occasion of +his marriage to her; by <cite>Mother Hubbard's Tale</cite>, a +satire written when despair at the coldness of the Queen and the +enmity of Burleigh was beginning to take hold on the poet and +endowed with a plainness and vigour foreign to most of his other +work—and then by <cite>The Fairy Queen</cite>.</p> +<p>The poets of the Renaissance were not afraid of big things; +every one of them had in his mind as the goal of poetic endeavour +the idea of the heroic poem, aimed at doing for his own country +what Vergil had intended to do for Rome in the <cite>Aeneid</cite>, +to celebrate it—its origin, its prowess, its greatness, and +the causes of it, in epic verse. Milton, three-quarters of a +century later, turned over in his mind the plan of an English epic +on the wars of Arthur, and when he left it was only to forsake the +singing of English origins for the more ultimate theme of the +origins of mankind. Spenser designed to celebrate the character, +the qualities and the training of the English gentleman. And +because poetry, unlike philosophy, cannot deal with abstractions +but must be vivid and concrete, he was forced to embody his virtues +and foes to virtue and to use the way of allegory. His outward +plan, with its knights and dragons and desperate adventures, he +procured from Ariosto. As for the use of allegory, it was one of +the discoveries of the Middle Ages which the Renaissance +condescended to retain. Spenser elaborated it beyond the wildest +dreams of those students of Holy Writ who had first conceived it. +His stories were to be interesting in themselves as tales of +adventure, but within them they were to conceal an intricate +treatment of the conflict of truth and falsehood in morals and +religion. A character might typify at once Protestantism and +England and Elizabeth and chastity and half the cardinal virtues, +and it would have all the while the objective interest attaching to +it as part of a story of adventure. All this must have made the +poem difficult enough. Spenser's manner of writing it made it worse +still. One is familiar with the type of novel which only explains +itself when the last chapter is reached—Stevenson's +<cite>Wrecker</cite> is an example. <cite>The Fairy Queen</cite> +was designed on somewhat the same plan. The last section was to +relate and explain the unrelated and unexplained books which made +up the poem, and at the court to which the separate knights of the +separate books—the Red Cross Knight and the rest—were +to bring the fruit of their adventures, everything was to be made +clear. Spenser did not live to finish his work; <cite>The Fairy +Queen</cite>, like the <cite>Aeneid</cite>, is an uncompleted poem, +and it is only from a prefatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh issued +with the second published section that we know what the poem was +intended to be. Had Spenser not published this explanation, it is +impossible that anybody, even the acutest minded German professor, +could have guessed.</p> +<p>The poem, as we have seen, was composed in Ireland, in the +solitude of a colonists' plantation, and the author was shut off +from his fellows while he wrote. The influence of his surroundings +is visible in the writing. The elaboration of the theme would have +been impossible or at least very unlikely if its author had not +been thrown in on himself during its composition. Its intricacy and +involution is the product of an over-concentration born of empty +surroundings. It lacks vigour and rapidity; it winds itself into +itself. The influence of Ireland, too, is visible in its +landscapes, in its description of bogs and desolation, of dark +forests in which lurk savages ready to spring out on those who are +rash enough to wander within their confines. All the scenery in it +which is not imaginary is Irish and not English scenery.</p> +<p>Its reception in England and at the Court was enthusiastic. Men +and women read it eagerly and longed for the next section as our +grandfathers longed for the next section of <cite>Pickwick</cite>. +They really liked it, really loved the intricacy and luxuriousness +of it, the heavy exotic language, the thickly painted descriptions, +the languorous melody of the verse. Mainly, perhaps, that was so +because they were all either in wish or in deed poets themselves. +Spenser has always been "the poets' poet." Milton loved him; so did +Dryden, who said that Milton confessed to him that Spenser was "his +original," a statement which has been pronounced incredible, but +is, in truth, perfectly comprehensible, and most likely true. Pope +admired him; Keats learned from him the best part of his music. You +can trace echoes of him in Mr. Yeats. What is it that gives him +this hold on his peers? Well, in the first place his defects do not +detract from his purely poetic qualities. The story is impossibly +told, but that will only worry those who are looking for a story. +The allegory is hopelessly difficult; but as Hazlitt said "the +allegory will not bite you"; you can let it alone. The crudeness +and bigotry of Spenser's dealings with Catholicism, which are +ridiculous when he pictures the monster Error vomiting books and +pamphlets, and disgusting when he draws Mary Queen of Scots, do not +hinder the pleasure of those who read him for his language and his +art. He is great for other reasons than these. First because of the +extraordinary smoothness and melody of his verse and the richness +of his language—a golden diction that he drew from every +source—new words, old words, obsolete words—such a +mixture that the purist Ben Jonson remarked acidly that he wrote no +language at all. Secondly because of the profusion of his imagery, +and the extraordinarily keen sense for beauty and sweetness that +went to its making. In an age of golden language and gallant +imagery his was the most golden and the most gallant. And the +language of poetry in England is richer and more varied than that +in any other country in Europe to-day, because of what he did.</p> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>Elizabethan prose brings us face to face with a difficulty which +has to be met by every student of literature. Does the word +"literature" cover every kind of writing? Ought we to include in it +writing that aims merely at instruction or is merely journey-work, +as well as writing that has an artistic intention, or writing that, +whether its author knew it or no, is artistic in its result? Of +course such a question causes us no sort of difficulty when it +concerns itself only with what is being published to-day. We know +very well that some things are literature and some merely +journalism; that of novels, for instance, some deliberately intend +to be works of art and others only to meet a passing desire for +amusement or mental occupation. We know that most books serve or +attempt to serve only a useful and not a literary purpose. But in +reading the books of three centuries ago, unconsciously one's point +of view shifts. Antiquity gilds journey-work; remoteness and +quaintness of phrasing lend a kind of distinction to what are +simply pamphlets or text-books that have been preserved by accident +from the ephemeralness which was the common lot of hundreds of +their fellows. One comes to regard as literature things that had no +kind of literary value for their first audiences; to apply the same +seriousness of judgment and the same tests to the pamphlets of Nash +and Dekker as to the prose of Sidney and Bacon. One loses, in fact, +that power to distinguish the important from the trivial which is +one of the functions of a sound literary taste. Now, a study of the +minor writing of the past is, of course, well worth a reader's +pains. Pamphlets, chronicle histories, text-books and the like have +an historical importance; they give us glimpses of the manners and +habits and modes of thought of the day. They tell us more about the +outward show of life than do the greater books. If you are +interested in social history, they are the very thing. But the +student of literature ought to beware of them, nor ought he to +touch them till he is familiar with the big and lasting things. A +man does not possess English literature if he knows what Dekker +tells of the seven deadly sins of London and does not know the +<cite>Fairy Queen</cite>. Though the wide and curious interest of +the Romantic critics of the nineteenth century found and illumined +the byways of Elizabethan writing, the safest method of approach is +the method of their predecessors—to keep hold on common +sense, to look at literature, not historically as through the wrong +end of a telescope, but closely and without a sense of intervening +time, to know the best—the "classic"—and study it +before the minor things.</p> +<p>In Elizabeth's reign, prose became for the first time, with +cheapened printing, the common vehicle of amusement and +information, and the books that remain to us cover many departments +of writing. There are the historians who set down for us for the +first time what they knew of the earlier history of England. There +are the writers, like Harrison and Stubbs, who described the +England of their own day, and there are many authors, mainly +anonymous, who wrote down the accounts of the voyages of the +discoverers in the Western Seas. There are the novelists who +translated stories mainly from Italian sources. But of authors as +conscious of a literary intention as the poets were, there are only +two, Sidney and Lyly, and of authors who, though their first aim +was hardly an artistic one, achieved an artistic result, only +Hooker and the translators of the Bible. The Authorized Version of +the Bible belongs strictly not to the reign of Elizabeth but to +that of James, and we shall have to look at it when we come to +discuss the seventeenth century. Hooker, in his book on +Ecclesiastical Polity (an endeavour to set forth the grounds of +orthodox Anglicanism) employed a generous, flowing, melodious style +which has influenced many writers since and is familiar to us +to-day in the copy of it used by Ruskin in his earlier works. Lyly +and Sidney are worth looking at more closely.</p> +<p>The age was intoxicated with language. It went mad of a mere +delight in words. Its writers were using a new tongue, for English +was enriched beyond all recognition with borrowings from the +ancient authors; and like all artists who become possessed of a new +medium, they used it to excess. The early Elizabethans' use of the +new prose was very like the use that educated Indians make of +English to-day. It is not that these write it incorrectly, but only +that they write too richly. And just as fuller use and knowledge +teaches them spareness and economy and gives their writing +simplicity and vigour, so seventeenth century practice taught +Englishmen to write a more direct and undecorated style and gave us +the smooth, simple, and vigorous writing of Dryden—the first +really modern English prose. But the Elizabethans loved gaudier +methods; they liked highly decorative modes of expression, in prose +no less than in verse. The first author to give them these things +was John Lyly, whose book <cite>Euphues</cite> was for the five or +six years following its publication a fashionable craze that +infected all society and gave its name to a peculiar and highly +artificial style of writing that coloured the work of hosts of +obscure and forgotten followers. Lyly wrote other things; his +comedies may have taught Shakespeare the trick of <cite>Love's +Labour Lost</cite>; he attempted a sequel of his most famous work +with better success than commonly attends sequels, but for us and +for his own generation he is the author of one book. Everybody read +it, everybody copied it. The maxims and sentences of advice for +gentlemen which it contained were quoted and admired in the Court, +where the author, though he never attained the lucrative position +he hoped for, did what flattery could do to make a name for +himself. The name "Euphuism" became a current description of an +artificial way of using words that overflowed out of writing into +speech and was in the mouths, while the vogue lasted, of everybody +who was anybody in the circle that fluttered round the Queen.</p> +<p>The style of <cite>Euphues</cite> was parodied by Shakespeare +and many attempts have been made to imitate it since. Most of them +are inaccurate—Sir Walter Scott's wild attempt the most +inaccurate of all. They fail because their authors have imagined +that "Euphuism" is simply a highly artificial and "flowery" way of +talking. As a matter of fact it is made up of a very exact and very +definite series of parts. The writing is done on a plan which has +three main characteristics as follows. First, the structure of the +sentence is based on antithesis and alliteration; that is to say, +it falls into equal parts similar in sound but with a different +sense; for example, Euphues is described as a young gallant "of +more wit than wealth, yet of more wealth than wisdom." All the +characters in the book, which is roughly in the form of a novel, +speak in this way, sometimes in sentences long drawn out which are +oppressively monotonous and tedious, and sometimes shortly with a +certain approach to epigram. The second characteristic of the style +is the reference of every stated fact to some classical authority, +that is to say, the author cannot mention friendship without +quoting David and Jonathan, nor can lovers in his book accuse each +other of faithlessness without quoting the instance of Cressida or +Aeneas. This appeal to classical authority and wealth of classical +allusion is used to decorate pages which deal with matters of +every-day experience. Seneca, for instance, is quoted as reporting +"that too much bending breaketh the bow," a fact which might +reasonably have been supposed to be known to the author himself. +This particular form of writing perhaps influenced those who copied +Lyly more than anything else in his book. It is a fashion of the +more artificial kind of Elizabethan writing in all schools to +employ a wealth of classical allusion. Even the simple narratives +in <cite>Hakluyt's Voyages</cite> are not free from it, and one may +hardly hope to read an account of a voyage to the Indies without +stumbling on a preliminary reference to the opinions of Aristotle +and Plato. Lastly, <cite>Euphues</cite> is characterised by an +extraordinary wealth of allusion to natural history, mostly of a +fabulous kind. "I have read that the bull being tied to the fig +tree loseth his tail; that the whole herd of deer stand at gaze if +they smell a sweet apple; that the dolphin after the sound of music +is brought to the shore," and so on. His book is full of these +things, and the style weakens and loses its force because of +them.</p> +<p>Of course there is much more in his book than this outward +decoration. He wrote with the avowed purpose of instructing +courtiers and gentlemen how to live. <cite>Euphues</cite> is full +of grave reflections and weighty morals, and is indeed a collection +of essays on education, on friendship, on religion and philosophy, +and on the favourite occupation and curriculum of Elizabethan +youth—foreign travel. The fashions and customs of his +countrymen which he condemns in the course of his teaching are the +same as those inveighed against by Stubbs and other contemporaries. +He disliked manners and fashions copied from Italy; particularly he +disliked the extravagant fashions of women. One woman only escapes +his censure, and she, of course, is the Queen, whom Euphues and his +companion in the book come to England to see. In the main the +teaching of Euphues inculcates a humane and liberal, if not very +profound creed, and the book shares with <cite>The Fairy +Queen</cite> the honour of the earlier Puritanism—the +Puritanism that besides the New Testament had the +<cite>Republic</cite>.</p> +<p>But Euphues, though he was in his time the popular idol, was not +long in finding a successful rival. Seven years before his death +Sir Philip Sidney, in a period of retirement from the Court wrote +"<cite>The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia</cite>"; it was published +ten years after it had been composed. The <cite>Arcadia</cite> is +the first English example of the prose pastoral romance, as the +<cite>Shepherd's Calendar</cite> is of our pastoral verse. +Imitative essays in its style kept appearing for two hundred years +after it, till Wordsworth and other poets who knew the country +drove its unrealities out of literature. The aim of it and of the +school to which it belonged abroad was to find a setting for a +story which should leave the author perfectly free to plant in it +any improbability he liked, and to do what he liked with the +relations of his characters. In the shade of beech trees, the coils +of elaborated and intricate love-making wind and unravel themselves +through an endless afternoon. In that art nothing is too +far-fetched, nothing too sentimental, no sorrow too unreal. The +pastoral romance was used, too, to cover other things besides a +sentimental and decorative treatment of love. Authors wrapped up as +shepherds their political friends and enemies, and the pastoral +eclogues in verse which Spenser and others composed are full of +personal and political allusion. Sidney's story carries no politics +and he depends for its interest solely on the wealth of differing +episodes and the stories and arguments of love which it contains. +The story would furnish plot enough for twenty ordinary novels, but +probably those who read it when it was published were attracted by +other things than the march of its incidents. Certainly no one +could read it for the plot now. Its attraction is mainly one of +style. It goes, you feel, one degree beyond <cite>Euphues</cite> in +the direction of freedom and poetry. And just because of this +greater freedom, its characteristics are much less easy to fix than +those of <cite>Euphues</cite>. Perhaps its chief quality is best +described as that of exhaustiveness. Sidney will take a word and +toss it to and fro in a page till its meaning is sucked dry and +more than sucked dry. On page after page the same trick is +employed, often in some new and charming way, but with the +inevitable effect of wearying the reader, who tries to do the +unwisest of all things with a book of this kind—to read on. +This trick of bandying words is, of course, common in Shakespeare. +Other marks of Sidney's style belong similarly to poetry rather +than to prose. Chief of them is what Ruskin christened the +"pathetic fallacy"—the assumption (not common in his day) +which connects the appearance of nature with the moods of the +artist who looks at it, or demands such a connection. In its day +the <cite>Arcadia</cite> was hailed as a reformation by men +nauseated by the rhythmical patterns of Lyly. A modern reader finds +himself confronting it in something of the spirit that he would +confront the prose romances, say, of William Morris, finding it +charming as a poet's essay in prose but no more: not to be ranked +with the highest.</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_III"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER III</h2> +<h3>THE DRAMA</h3> +<h4>(1)</h4> +<p>Biologists tell us that the hybrid—the product of a +variety of ancestral stocks—is more fertile than an organism +with a direct and unmixed ancestry; perhaps the analogy is not too +fanciful as the starting-point of a study of Elizabethan drama, +which owed its strength and vitality, more than to anything else, +to the variety of the discordant and contradictory elements of +which it was made up. The drama was the form into which were +moulded the thoughts and desires of the best spirits of the time. +It was the flower of the age. To appreciate its many-sided +significances and achievements it is necessary to disentangle +carefully its roots, in religion, in the revival of the classics, +in popular entertainments, in imports from abroad, in the air of +enterprise and adventure which belonged to the time.</p> +<p>As in Greece, drama in England was in its beginning a religious +thing. Its oldest continuous tradition was from the mediaeval +Church. Early in the Middle Ages the clergy and their parishioners +began the habit, at Christmas, Easter and other holy days, of +playing some part of the story of Christ's life suitable to the +festival of the day. These plays were liturgical, and originally, +no doubt, overshadowed by a choral element. But gradually the +inherent human capacity for mimicry and drama took the upper hand; +from ceremonies they developed into performances; they passed from +the stage in the church porch to the stage in the street. A waggon, +the natural human platform for mimicry or oratory, became in +England as it was in Greece, the cradle of the drama. This +momentous change in the history of the miracle play, which made it +in all but its occasion and its subject a secular thing, took place +about the end of the twelfth century. The rise of the town guilds +gave the plays a new character; the friendly rivalry of leagued +craftsmen elaborated their production; and at length elaborate +cycles were founded which were performed at Whitsuntide, beginning +at sunrise and lasting all through the day right on to dusk. Each +town had its own cycle, and of these the cycles of York, Wakefield, +Chester and Coventry still remain. So too, does an eye-witness's +account of a Chester performance where the plays took place yearly +on three days, beginning with Whit Monday. "The manner of these +plays were, every company had his pageant or part, a high scaffold +with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels. In the +lower they apparelled themselves and in the higher room they +played, being all open on the top that all beholders might hear and +see them. They began first at the abbey gates, and when the first +pageant was played, it was wheeled to the high cross before the +mayor and so to every street. So every street had a pageant playing +upon it at one time, till all the pageants for the day appointed +were played." The "companies" were the town guilds and the several +"pageants" different scenes in Old or New Testament story. As far +as was possible each company took for its pageant some Bible story +fitting to its trade; in York the goldsmiths played the three Kings +of the East bringing precious gifts, the fishmongers the flood, and +the shipwrights the building of Noah's ark. The tone of these plays +was not reverent; reverence after all implies near at hand its +opposite in unbelief. But they were realistic and they contained +within them the seeds of later drama in the aptitude with which +they grafted into the sacred story pastoral and city manners taken +straight from life. The shepherds who watched by night at Bethlehem +were real English shepherds furnished with boisterous and realistic +comic relief. Noah was a real shipwright.</p> +<div class="poem">"It shall be clinched each ilk and deal.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">With nails that are both noble +and new</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Thus shall I fix it to the +keel,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Take here a rivet and there a +screw,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">With there bow there now, work I +well,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">This work, I warrant, both good +and true."</span></div> +<p>Cain and Abel were English farmers just as truly as Bottom and +his fellows were English craftsmen. But then Julius Caesar has a +doublet and in Dutch pictures the apostles wear broad-brimmed hats. +Squeamishness about historical accuracy is of a later date, and +when it came we gained in correctness less than we lost in art.</p> +<p>The miracle plays, then, are the oldest antecedent of +Elizabethan drama, but it must not be supposed they were over and +done with before the great age began. The description of the +Chester performances, part of which has been quoted, was written in +1594. Shakespeare must, one would think, have seen the Coventry +cycle; at any rate he was familiar, as every one of the time must +have been, with the performances; "Out-heroding Herod" bears +witness to that. One must conceive the development of the +Elizabethan age as something so rapid in its accessibility to new +impressions and new manners and learning and modes of thought that +for years the old and new subsisted side by side. Think of modern +Japan, a welter of old faiths and crafts and ideals and inrushing +Western civilization all mixed up and side by side in the strangest +contrasts and you will understand what it was. The miracle plays +stayed on beside Marlowe and Shakespeare till Puritanism frowned +upon them. But when the end came it came quickly. The last recorded +performance took place in London when King James entertained +Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador. And perhaps we should regard that +as a "command" performance, reviving as command performances +commonly do, something dead for a generation—in this case, +purely out of compliment to the faith and inclination of a +distinguished guest.</p> +<p>Next in order of development after the miracle or mystery plays, +though contemporary in their popularity, came what we called +"moralities" or "moral interludes"—pieces designed to enforce +a religious or ethical lesson and perhaps to get back into drama +something of the edification which realism had ousted from the +miracles. They dealt in allegorical and figurative personages, +expounded wise saws and moral lessons, and squared rather with the +careful self-concern of the newly established Protestantism than +with the frank and joyous jest in life which was more +characteristic of the time. <cite>Everyman</cite>, the oftenest +revived and best known of them, if not the best, is very typical of +the class. They had their influences, less profound than that of +the miracles, on the full drama. It is said the +"Vice"—unregeneracy commonly degenerated into comic +relief—is the ancestor of the fool in Shakespeare, but more +likely both are successive creations of a dynasty of actors who +practised the unchanging and immemorial art of the clown. The +general structure of <cite>Everyman</cite> and some of its fellows, +heightened and made more dramatic, gave us Marlowe's +<cite>Faustus</cite>. There perhaps the influence ends.</p> +<p>The rise of a professional class of actors brought one step +nearer the full growth of drama. Companies of strolling players +formed themselves and passed from town to town, seeking like the +industrious amateurs of the guilds, civic patronage, and performing +in town-halls, market-place booths, or inn yards, whichever served +them best. The structure of the Elizabethan inn yard (you may see +some survivals still, and there are the pictures in +<cite>Pickwick</cite>) was very favourable for their purpose. The +galleries round it made seats like our boxes and circle for the +more privileged spectators; in the centre on the floor of the yard +stood the crowd or sat, if they had stools with them. The stage was +a platform set on this floor space with its back against one side +of the yard, where perhaps one of the inn-rooms served as a +dressing room. So suitable was this "fit-up" as actors call it, +that when theatres came to be built in London they were built on +the inn-yard pattern. All the playhouses of the Bankside from the +"Curtain" to the "Globe" were square or circular places with +galleries rising above one another three parts round, a floor space +of beaten earth open to the sky in the middle, and jutting out on +to it a platform stage with a tiring room capped by a gallery +behind it.</p> +<p>The entertainment given by these companies of players (who +usually got the patronage and took the title of some lord) was +various. They played moralities and interludes, they played +formless chronicle history plays like the <cite>Troublesome Reign +of King John</cite>, on which Shakespeare worked for his <cite>King +John</cite>; but above and before all they were each a company of +specialists, every one of whom had his own talent and performance +for which he was admired. The Elizabethan stage was the ancestor of +our music-hall, and to the modern music-hall rather than to the +theatre it bears its affinity. If you wish to realize the aspect of +the Globe or the Blackfriars it is to a lower class music-hall you +must go. The quality of the audience is a point of agreement. The +Globe was frequented by young "bloods" and by the more disreputable +portions of the community, racing men (or their equivalents of that +day) "coney catchers" and the like; commonly the only women present +were women of the town. The similarity extends from the auditorium +to the stage. The Elizabethan playgoer delighted in virtuosity; in +exhibitions of strength or skill from his actors; the broad sword +combat in <cite>Macbeth</cite>, and the wrestling in <cite>As You +Like It</cite>, were real trials of skill. The bear in the +<cite>Winter's Tale</cite> was no doubt a real bear got from a bear +pit, near by in the Bankside. The comic actors especially were the +very grandfathers of our music-hall stars; Tarleton and Kemp and +Cowley, the chief of them, were as much popular favourites and +esteemed as separate from the plays they played in as is Harry +Lauder. Their songs and tunes were printed and sold in hundreds as +broadsheets, just as pirated music-hall songs are sold to-day. This +is to be noted because it explains a great deal in the subsequent +evolution of the drama. It explains the delight in having +everything represented actually on the stage, all murders, battles, +duels. It explains the magnificent largesse given by Shakespeare to +the professional fool. Work had to be found for him, and +Shakespeare, whose difficulties were stepping-stones to his +triumphs, gave him Touchstone and Feste, the Porter in +<cite>Macbeth</cite> and the Fool in <cite>Lear</cite>. Others met +the problem in an attitude of frank despair. Not all great tragic +writers can easily or gracefully wield the pen of comedy, and +Marlowe in <cite>Dr. Faustus</cite> took the course of leaving the +low comedy which the audience loved and a high salaried actor +demanded, to an inferior collaborator.</p> +<p>Alongside this drama of street platforms and inn-yards and +public theatres, there grew another which, blending with it, +produced the Elizabethan drama which we know. The public theatres +were not the only places at which plays were produced. At the +University, at the Inns of Court (which then more than now, were +besides centres of study rather exclusive and expensive clubs), and +at the Court they were an important part of almost every festival. +At these places were produced academic compositions, either +allegorical like the masques, copies of which we find in +Shakespeare and by Ben Jonson, or comedies modelled on Plautus or +Terence, or tragedies modelled on Seneca. The last were +incomparably the most important. The Elizabethan age, which always +thought of literature as a guide or handmaid to life, was naturally +attracted to a poet who dealt in maxims and "sentences"; his +rhetoric appealed to men for whom words and great passages of verse +were an intoxication that only a few to-day can understand or +sympathize with; his bloodthirstiness and gloom to an age so +full-blooded as not to shrink from horrors. Tragedies early began +to be written on the strictly Senecan model, and generally, like +Seneca's, with some ulterior intention. Sackville's +<cite>Gorboduc</cite>, the first tragedy in English, produced at a +great festival at the Inner Temple, aimed at inducing Elizabeth to +marry and save the miseries of a disputed succession. To be put to +such a use argues the importance and dignity of this classical +tragedy of the learned societies and the court. None of the pieces +composed in this style were written for the popular theatre, and +indeed they could not have been a success on it. The Elizabethan +audience, as we have seen, loved action, and in these Senecan +tragedies the action took place "off." But they had a strong and +abiding influence on the popular stage; they gave it its ghosts, +its supernatural warnings, its conception of nemesis and revenge, +they gave it its love of introspection and the long passages in +which introspection, description or reflection, either in soliloquy +or dialogue, holds up the action; contradictorily enough they gave +it something at least of its melodrama. Perhaps they helped to +enforce the lesson of the miracle plays that a dramatist's proper +business was elaboration rather than invention. None of the +Elizabethan dramatists except Ben Jonson habitually constructed +their own plots. Their method was to take something ready at their +hands and overlay it with realism or poetry or romance. The stories +of their plays, like that of Hamlet's Mousetrap, were "extant and +writ in choice Italian," and very often their methods of +preparation were very like his.</p> +<p>Something of the way in which the spirit of adventure of the +time affected and finished the drama we have already seen. It is +time now to turn to the dramatists themselves.</p> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>Of Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, and Peele, the "University Wits" who +fused the academic and the popular drama, and by giving the latter +a sense of literature and learning to mould it to finer issues, +gave us Shakespeare, only Marlowe can be treated here. Greene and +Peele, the former by his comedies, the latter by his historical +plays, and Kyd by his tragedies, have their places in the +text-books, but they belong to a secondary order of dramatic +talent. Marlowe ranks amongst the greatest. It is not merely that +historically he is the head and fount of the whole movement, that +he changed blank verse, which had been a lumbering instrument +before him, into something rich and ringing and rapid and made it +the vehicle for the greatest English poetry after him. Historical +relations apart, he is great in himself. More than any other +English writer of any age, except Byron, he symbolizes the youth of +his time; its hot-bloodedness, its lust after knowledge and power +and life inspires all his pages. The teaching of Machiavelli, +misunderstood for their own purposes by would-be imitators, +furnished the reign of Elizabeth with the only political ideals it +possessed. The simple brutalism of the creed, with means justified +by ends and the unbridled self-regarding pursuit of power, +attracted men for whom the Spanish monarchy and the struggle to +overthrow it were the main factors and politics. Marlowe took it +and turned it to his own uses. There is in his writings a lust of +power, "a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness," a glow of the +imagination unhallowed by anything but its own energy which is in +the spirit of the time. In <cite>Tamburlaine</cite> it is the power +of conquest, stirred by and reflecting, as we have seen, the great +deeds of his day. In <cite>Dr. Faustus</cite> it is the pride of +will and eagerness of curiosity. Faustus is devoured by a +tormenting desire to enlarge his knowledge to the utmost bounds of +nature and art and to extend his power with his knowledge. His is +the spirit of Renaissance scholarship heightened to a passionate +excess. The play gleams with the pride of learning and a knowledge +which learning brings, and with the nemesis that comes after it. +"Oh! gentlemen! hear me with patience and tremble not at my +speeches. Though my heart pant and quiver to remember that I have +been a student here these thirty years; oh! I would I had never +seen Wittemburg, never read book!" And after the agonizing struggle +in which Faustus's soul is torn from him to hell, learning comes in +at the quiet close.</p> +<div class="poem"> +<p class="i4">"Yet, for he was a scholar once admired,</p> +<p class="i2">For wondrous knowledge in our German Schools;</p> +<p class="i4">We'll give his mangled limbs due burial;</p> +<p class="i2">And all the students, clothed in mourning black</p> +<p class="i4">Shall wait upon his heavy funeral."</p> +</div> +<p>Some one character is a centre of over-mastering pride and +ambition in every play. In the <cite>Jew of Malta</cite> it is the +hero Barabbas. In <cite>Edward II</cite>. it is Piers Gaveston. In +<cite>Edward II</cite>. indeed, two elements are mixed—the +element of Machiavelli and Tamburlaine in Gaveston, and the purely +tragic element which evolves from within itself the style in which +it shall be treated, in the King. "The reluctant pangs of +abdicating Royalty," wrote Charles Lamb in a famous passage, +"furnished hints which Shakespeare scarcely improved in his +<cite>Richard II</cite>; and the death scene of Marlowe's King +moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with +which I am acquainted." Perhaps the play gives the hint of what +Marlowe might have become had not the dagger of a groom in a tavern +cut short at thirty his burning career.</p> +<p>Even in that time of romance and daring speculation he went +further than his fellows. He was said to have been tainted with +atheism, to have denied God and the Trinity; had he lived he might +have had trouble with the Star Chamber. The free-voyaging intellect +of the age found this one way of outlet, but if literary evidences +are to be trusted sixteenth and seventeenth century atheism was a +very crude business. The <cite>Atheist's Tragedy</cite> of Tourneur +(a dramatist who need not otherwise detain us) gives some measure +of its intelligence and depth. Says the villain to the heroine,</p> +<div class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 7.5em;">"No? Then +invoke</span><br> +Your great supposed Protector. I will do't."</div> +<br> +to which she:<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Supposed Protector! Are you an atheist, then<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">I know my fears and prayers are +spent in vain."</span></div> +<p>Marlowe's very faults and extravagances, and they are many, are +only the obverse of his greatness. Magnitude and splendour of +language when the thought is too shrunken to fill it out, becomes +mere inflation. He was a butt of the parodists of the day. And +Shakespeare, though he honoured him "on this side idolatry," did +his share of ridicule. Ancient Pistol is fed and stuffed with relic +and rags of Marlowesque affectation—</p> +<div class="poem">"Holla! ye pampered jades of Asia,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Can ye not draw but twenty miles +a day."</span></div> +<br> +is a quotation taken straight from <cite>Tamburlaine</cite>.<br> +<br> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>A study of Shakespeare, who refuses to be crushed within the +limits of a general essay is no part of the plan of this book. We +must take up the story of the drama with the reign of James and +with the contemporaries of his later period, though of course, a +treatment which is conditioned by the order of development is not +strictly chronological, and some of the plays we shall have to +refer to belong to the close of the sixteenth century. We are apt +to forget that alongside Shakespeare and at his heels other +dramatists were supplying material for the theatre. The influence +of Marlowe and particularly of Kyd, whose <cite>Spanish +Tragedy</cite> with its crude mechanism of ghosts and madness and +revenge caught the popular taste, worked itself out in a score of +journeymen dramatists, mere hack writers, who turned their hand to +plays as the hacks of to-day turn their hand to novels, and with no +more literary merit than that caught as an echo from better men +than themselves. One of the worst of these—he is also one of +the most typical—was John Marston, a purveyor of tragic gloom +and sardonic satire, and an impostor in both, whose tragedy +<cite>Antonio and Mellida</cite> was published in the same year as +Shakespeare's <cite>Hamlet</cite>. Both plays owed their style and +plot to the same tradition—the tradition created by Kyd's +<cite>Spanish Tragedy</cite>—in which ghostly promptings to +revenge, terrible crime, and a feigned madman waiting his +opportunity are the elements of tragedy. Nothing could be more +fruitful in an understanding of the relations of Shakespeare to his +age than a comparison of the two. The style of <cite>Antonio and +Mellida</cite> is the style of <cite>The Murder of Gonzago</cite>. +There is no subtlety nor introspection, the pale cast of thought +falls with no shadow over its scenes. And it is typical of a score +of plays of the kind we have and beyond doubt of hundreds that have +perished. Shakespeare stands alone.</p> +<p>Beside this journey-work tragedy of revenge and murder which had +its root through Kyd and Marlowe in Seneca and in Italian romance, +there was a journey-work comedy of low life made up of loosely +constructed strings of incidents, buffoonery and romance, that had +its roots in a joyous and fantastic study of the common people. +These plays are happy and high-spirited and, compared with the +ordinary run of the tragedies, of better workmanship. They deal in +the familiar situations of low comedy—the clown, the thrifty +citizen and his frivolous wife, the gallant, the bawd, the good +apprentice and the bad portrayed vigorously and tersely and with a +careless kindly gaiety that still charms in the reading. The best +writers in this kind were Middleton and Dekker—and the best +play to read as a sample of it <cite>Eastward Ho!</cite> in which +Marston put off his affectation of sardonical melancholy and joined +with Jonson and Dekker to produce what is the masterpiece of the +non-Shakespearean comedy of the time.</p> +<p>For all our habit of grouping their works together it is a far +cry in spirit and temperament from the dramatists whose heyday was +under Elizabeth and those who reached their prime under her +successor. Quickly though insensibly the temper of the nation +suffered eclipse. The high hopes and the ardency of the reign of +Elizabeth saddened into a profound pessimism and gloom in that of +James. This apparition of unsought melancholy has been widely noted +and generally assumed to be inexplicable. In broad outline its +causes are clear enough, "To travel hopefully is a better thing +than to arrive." The Elizabethans were, if ever any were, hopeful +travellers. The winds blew them to the four quarters of the world; +they navigated all seas; they sacked rich cities. They beat off the +great Armada, and harried the very coasts of Spain. They pushed +discovery to the ends of the world and amassed great wealth. Under +James all these things were over. Peace was made with Spain: +national pride was wounded by the solicitous anxiety of the King +for a Spanish marriage for the heir to the throne. Sir Walter +Raleigh, a romantic adventurer lingering beyond his time, was +beheaded out of hand by the ungenerous timidity of the monarch to +whom had been transferred devotion and loyalty he was unfitted to +receive. The Court which had been a centre of flashing and gleaming +brilliance degenerated into a knot of sycophants humouring the +pragmatic and self-important folly of a king in whom had implanted +themselves all the vices of the Scots and none of their virtues. +Nothing seemed left remarkable beneath the visiting moon. The +bright day was done and they were for the dark. The uprising of +Puritanism and the shadow of impending religious strife darkened +the temper of the time.</p> +<p>The change affected all literature and particularly the drama, +which because it appeals to what all men have in common, commonly +reflects soonest a change in the outlook or spirits of a people. +The onslaughts of the dramatists on the Puritans, always implacable +enemies of the theatre, became more virulent and envenomed. What a +difference between the sunny satire of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and the +dark animosity of <cite>The Atheists' Tragedy</cite> with its +Languebeau Snuffe ready to carry out any villainy proposed to him! +"I speak sir," says a lady in the same play to a courtier who +played with her in an attempt to carry on a quick witted, +"conceited" love passage in the vein of <cite>Much Ado</cite>, "I +speak, sir, as the fashion now: is, in earnest." The quick-witted, +light-hearted age was gone. It is natural that tragedy reflected +this melancholy in its deepest form. Gloom deepened and had no +light to relieve it, men supped full of horrors—there was no +slackening of the tension, no concession to overwrought nerves, no +resting-place for the overwrought soul. It is in the dramatist John +Webster that this new spirit has its most powerful exponent.</p> +<p>The influence of Machiavelli, which had given Marlowe tragic +figures that were bright and splendid and burning, smouldered in +Webster into a duskier and intenser heat. His fame rests on two +tragedies, <cite>The White Devil</cite> and <cite>The Duchess of +Malf</cite>. Both are stories of lust and crime, full of hate and +hideous vengeances, and through each runs a vein of bitter and +ironical comment on men and women. In them chance plays the part of +fate. "Blind accident and blundering mishap—'such a mistake,' +says one of the criminals, 'as I have often seen in a play' are the +steersmen of their fortunes and the doomsmen of their deeds." His +characters are gloomy; meditative and philosophic murderers, +cynical informers, sad and loving women, and they are all +themselves in every phrase that they utter. But they are studied in +earnestness and sincerity. Unquestionably he is the greatest of +Shakespeare's successors in the romantic drama, perhaps his only +direct imitator. He has single lines worthy to set beside those in +<cite>Othello</cite> or <cite>King Lear</cite>. His dirge in the +<cite>Duchess of Malfi</cite>, Charles Lamb thought worthy to be +set beside the ditty in <cite>The Tempest</cite>, which reminds +Ferdinand of his drowned father. "As that is of the water, watery, +so this is of the earth, earthy." He has earned his place among the +greatest of our dramatists by his two plays, the theme of which +matched his sombre genius and the sombreness of the season in which +it flowered.</p> +<p>But the drama could not survive long the altered times, and the +voluminous plays of Beaumont and Fletcher mark the beginning of the +end. They are the decadence of Elizabethan drama. Decadence is a +term often used loosely and therefore hard to define, but we may +say broadly that an art is decadent when any particular one of the +elements which go to its making occurs in excess and disturbs the +balance of forces which keeps the work a coherent and intact whole. +Poetry is decadent when the sound is allowed to outrun the sense or +when the suggestions, say, of colour, which it contains are allowed +to crowd out its deeper implications. Thus we can call such a poem +as this one well-known of O'Shaughnessy's</p> +<div class="poem">"We are the music-makers,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">We are the dreamers of +dreams,"</span></div> +<br> +decadent because it conveys nothing but the mere delight in an +obvious rhythm of words, or such a poem as Morris's "Two red roses +across the moon;" because a meaningless refrain, merely pleasing in +its word texture, breaks in at intervals on the reader. The drama +of Beaumont and Fletcher is decadent in two ways. In the first +place those variations and licences with which Shakespeare in his +later plays diversified the blank verse handed on to him by +Marlowe, they use without any restraint or measure. "Weak" endings +and "double" endings, <em>i.e.</em> lines which end either on a +conjunction or proposition or some other unstressed word, or lines +in which there is a syllable too many—abound in their plays. +They destroyed blank verse as a musical and resonant poetic +instrument by letting this element of variety outrun the sparing +and skilful use which alone could justify it. But they were +decadent in other and deeper ways than that. Sentiment in their +plays usurps the place of character. Eloquent and moving speeches +and fine figures are no longer subservient to the presentation of +character in action, but are set down for their own sake, "What +strange self-trumpeters and tongue-bullies all the brave soldiers +of Beaumont and Fletcher are," said Coleridge. When they die they +die to the music of their own virtue. When dreadful deeds are done +they are described not with that authentic and lurid vividness +which throws light on the working of the human heart in Shakespeare +or Webster but in tedious rhetoric. Resignation, not fortitude, is +the authors' forte and they play upon it amazingly. The sterner +tones of their predecessors melt into the long drawn broken accent +of pathos and woe. This delight not in action or in emotion arising +from action but in passivity of suffering is only one aspect of a +certain mental flaccidity in grain. Shakespeare may be free and +even coarse. Beaumont and Fletcher cultivate indecency. They made +their subject not their master but their plaything, or an occasion +for the convenient exercise of their own powers of figure and +rhetoric.<br> +<br> +<p>Of their followers, Massinger, Ford and Shirley, no more need be +said than they carried one step further the faults of their +masters. Emotion and tragic passion give way to wire-drawn +sentiment. Tragedy takes on the air of a masquerade. With them +romantic drama died a natural death and the Puritans' closing of +the theatre only gave it a <em>coup de grace</em>. In England it +has had no second birth.</p> +<br> +<h4>(4)</h4> +<p>Outside the direct romantic succession there worked another +author whose lack of sympathy with it, as well as his close +connection with the age which followed, justifies his separate +treatment. Ben Jonson shows a marked contrast to Shakespeare in his +character, his accomplishments, and his attitude to letters, while +his career was more varied than Shakespeare's own. The first +"classic" in English writing, he was a "romantic" in action. In his +adventurous youth he was by turns scholar, soldier, bricklayer, +actor. He trailed a pike with Leicester in the Low Countries; on +his return to England fought a duel and killed his man, only +escaping hanging by benefit of clergy; at the end of his life he +was Poet Laureate. Such a career is sufficiently diversified, and +it forms a striking contrast to the plainness and severity of his +work. But it must not lead us to forget or under-estimate his +learning and knowledge. Not Gray nor Tennyson, nor +Swinburne—perhaps not even Milton—was a better scholar. +He is one of the earliest of English writers to hold and express +different theories about literature. He consciously appointed +himself a teacher; was a missionary of literature with a definite +creed.</p> +<p>But though in a general way his dramatic principles are opposed +to the romantic tendencies of his age, he is by no means blindly +classical. He never consented to be bound by the +"Unities"—that conception of dramatic construction evolved +out of Aristotle and Horace and elaborated in the Renaissance till, +in its strictest form, it laid down that the whole scene of a play +should be in one place, its whole action deal with one single +series of events, and the time it represented as elapsing be no +greater than the time it took in playing. He was always +pre-eminently an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather +than a poet's temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, +and only limited because in ruling out these things he ruled out +much else that was essential to the spirit of the time. As a +craftsman he was uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes of +the public and never veiled his scorn of those—Shakespeare +among them—whom he conceived to do so; but he knew and valued +his own work, as his famous last word to an audience who might be +unsympathetic stands to witness,</p> +<div class="poem">"By God 'tis good, and if you like it you +may."</div> +<p>Compare the temper it reveals with the titles of the two +contemporary comedies of his gentler and greater brother, the one +<cite>As You Like It</cite>, the other <cite>What You Will</cite>. +Of the two attitudes towards the public, and they might stand as +typical of two kinds of artists, neither perhaps can claim complete +sincerity. A truculent and noisy disclaimer of their favours is not +a bad tone to assume towards an audience; in the end it is apt to +succeed as well as the sub-ironical compliance which is its +opposite.</p> +<p>Jonson's theory of comedy and the consciousness with which he +set it against the practice of his contemporaries and particularly +of Shakespeare receive explicit statement in the prologue to +<cite>Every Man Out of His Humour</cite>—one of his earlier +plays. "I travail with another objection, Signor, which I fear will +be enforced against the author ere I can be delivered of it," says +Mitis. "What's that, sir?" replies Cordatus. Mitis:—"That the +argument of his comedy might have been of some other nature, as of +a duke to be in love with a countess, and that countess to be in +love with the duke's son, and the son to love the lady's waiting +maid; some such cross-wooing, better than to be thus near and +familiarly allied to the times." Cordatus: "You say well, but I +would fain hear one of these autumn-judgments define <em>Quin sit +comoedia</em>? If he cannot, let him concern himself with Cicero's +definition, till he have strength to propose to himself a better, +who would have a comedy to be <em>invitatio vitae, speculum +consuetudinis, imago veritatis</em>; a thing throughout pleasant +and ridiculous and accommodated to the correction of manners." That +was what he meant his comedy to be, and so he conceived the popular +comedy of the day, <cite>Twelfth Night</cite> and <cite>Much +Ado</cite>. Shakespeare might play with dukes and countesses, +serving-women and pages, clowns and disguises; he would come down +more near and ally himself familiarly with the times. So comedy was +to be medicinal, to purge contemporary London of its follies and +its sins; and it was to be constructed with regularity and +elaboration, respectful to the Unities if not ruled by them, and +built up of characters each the embodiment of some "humour" or +eccentricity, and each when his eccentricity is displaying itself +at its fullest, outwitted and exposed. This conception of +"humours," based on a physiology which was already obsolescent, +takes heavily from the realism of Jonson's methods, nor does his +use of a careful vocabulary of contemporary colloquialism and slang +save him from a certain dryness and tediousness to modern readers. +The truth is he was less a satirist of contemporary manners than a +satirist in the abstract who followed the models of classical +writers in this style, and he found the vices and follies of his +own day hardly adequate to the intricacy and elaborateness of the +plots which he constructed for their exposure. At the first glance +his people are contemporary types, at the second they betray +themselves for what they are really—cock-shies set up by the +new comedy of Greece that every "classical" satirist in Rome or +France or England has had his shot at since. One wonders whether +Ben Jonson, for all his satirical intention, had as much +observation—as much of an eye for contemporary types—as +Shakespeare's rustics and roysterers prove him to have had. It +follows that all but one or two of his plays, when they are put on +the stage to-day are apt to come to one with a sense of remoteness +and other-worldliness which we hardly feel with Shakespeare or +Molière. His muse moves along the high-road of comedy which +is the Roman road, and she carries in her train types that have +done service to many since the ancients fashioned them years ago. +Jealous husbands, foolish pragmatic fathers, a dissolute son, a +boastful soldier, a cunning slave—they all are merely +counters by which the game of comedy used to be played. In England, +since Shakespeare took his hold on the stage, that road has been +stopped for us, that game has ceased to amuse.</p> +<p>Ben Jonson, then, in a certain degree failed in his intention. +Had he kept closer to contemporary life, instead of merely grafting +on to it types he had learned from books, he might have made +himself an English Molière—without Molière's +breadth and clarity—but with a corresponding vigour and +strength which would have kept his work sweet. And he might have +founded a school of comedy that would have got its roots deeper +into our national life than the trivial and licentious Restoration +comedy ever succeeded in doing. As it is, his importance is mostly +historical. One must credit him with being the first of the English +classics—of the age which gave us Dryden and Swift and Pope. +Perhaps that is enough in his praise.</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_IV"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2> +<br> +<h3>THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY</h3> +<h4>(1)</h4> +<p>With the seventeenth century the great school of imaginative +writers that made glorious the last years of Elizabeth's reign, had +passed away. Spenser was dead before 1600, Sir Philip Sidney a +dozen years earlier, and though Shakespeare and Drayton and many +other men whom we class roughly as Elizabethan lived on to work +under James, their temper and their ideals belong to the earlier +day. The seventeenth century, not in England only but in Europe, +brought a new way of thinking with it, and gave a new direction to +human interest and to human affairs. It is not perhaps easy to +define nor is it visible in the greater writers of the time. +Milton, for instance, and Sir Thomas Browne are both of them too +big, and in their genius too far separated from their fellows to +give us much clue to altered conditions. It is commonly in the work +of lesser and forgotten writers that the spirit of an age has its +fullest expression. Genius is a law to itself; it moves in another +dimension; it is out of time. To define this seventeenth century +spirit, then, one must look at the literature of the age as a +whole. What is there that one finds in it which marks a change in +temperament and outlook from the Renaissance, and the time which +immediately followed it?</p> +<p>Putting it very broadly one may say that literature in the +seventeenth century becomes for the first time essentially modern +in spirit. We began our survey of modern English literature at the +Renaissance because the discovery of the New World, and the +widening of human experience and knowledge, which that and the +revival of classical learning implied, mark a definite break from a +way of thought which had been continuous since the break up of the +Roman Empire. The men of the Renaissance felt themselves to be +modern. They started afresh, owing nothing to their immediate +forbears, and when they talked, say, of Chaucer, they did so in +very much the same accent as we do to-day. He was mediaeval and +obsolete; the interest which he possessed was a purely literary +interest; his readers did not meet him easily on the same plane of +thought, or forget the lapse of time which separated him from them. +And in another way too, the Renaissance began modern writing. +Inflections had been dropped. The revival of the classics had +enriched our vocabulary, and the English language, after a gradual +impoverishment which followed the obsolescence one after another of +the local dialects, attained a fairly fixed form. There is more +difference between the language of the English writings of Sir +Thomas More and that of the prose of Chaucer than there is between +that of More and of Ruskin. But it is not till the seventeenth +century that the modern spirit, in the fullest sense of the word, +comes into being. Defined it means a spirit of observation, of +preoccupation with detail, of stress laid on matter of fact, of +analysis of feelings and mental processes, of free argument upon +institutions and government. In relation to knowledge, it is the +spirit of science, and the study of science, which is the essential +intellectual fact in modern history, dates from just this time, +from Bacon and Newton and Descartes. In relation to literature, it +is the spirit of criticism, and criticism in England is the +creation of the seventeenth century. The positive temper, the +attitude of realism, is everywhere in the ascendant. The sixteenth +century made voyages of discovery; the seventeenth sat down to take +stock of the riches it had gathered. For the first time in English +literature writing becomes a vehicle for storing and conveying +facts.</p> +<p>It would be easy to give instances: one must suffice here. +Biography, which is one of the most characteristic kinds of English +writing, was unknown to the moderns as late as the sixteenth +century. Partly the awakened interest in the careers of the ancient +statesmen and soldiers which the study of Plutarch had excited, and +partly the general interest in, and craving for, facts set men +writing down the lives of their fellows. The earliest English +biographies date from this time. In the beginning they were +concerned, like Plutarch, with men of action, and when Sir Fulke +Greville wrote a brief account of his friend Sir Philip Sidney it +was the courtier and the soldier, and not the author, that he +designed to celebrate. But soon men of letters came within their +scope, and though the interest in the lives of authors came too +late to give us the contemporary life of Shakespeare we so much +long for, it was early enough to make possible those masterpieces +of condensed biography in which Isaak Walton celebrates Herbert and +Donne. Fuller and Aubrey, to name only two authors, spent lives of +laborious industry in hunting down and chronicling the smallest +facts about the worthies of their day and the time immediately +before them. Autobiography followed where biography led. Lord +Herbert of Cherbury and Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, as well as +less reputable persons, followed the new mode. By the time of the +Restoration Pepys and Evelyn were keeping their diaries, and Fox +his journal. Just as in poetry the lyric, that is the expression of +personal feeling, became more widely practised, more subtle and +more sincere, in prose the letter, the journal, and the +autobiography formed themselves to meet the new and growing demand +for analysis of the feelings and the intimate thoughts and +sensations of real men and women. A minor form of literature which +had a brief but popular vogue ministered less directly to the same +need. The "Character," a brief descriptive essay on a contemporary +type—a tobacco seller, an old college butler or the +like—was popular because in its own way it matched the newly +awakened taste for realism and fact. The drama which in the hands +of Ben Jonson had attacked folly and wickedness proper to no place +or time, descended to the drawing-rooms of the day, and Congreve +occupied himself with the portrayal of the social frauds and +foolishnesses perpetrated by actual living men and women of fashion +in contemporary London. Satire ceased to be a mere expression of a +vague discontent, and became a weapon against opposing men and +policies. The new generation of readers were nothing if not +critical. They were for testing directly institutions whether they +were literary, social, or political. They wanted facts, and they +wanted to take a side.</p> +<p>In the distinct and separate realm of poetry a revolution no +less remarkable took place. Spenser had been both a poet and a +Puritan: he had designed to show by his great poem the training and +fashioning of a Puritan English gentleman. But the alliance between +poetry and Puritanism which he typified failed to survive his +death. The essentially pagan spirit of the Renaissance which caused +him no doubts nor difficulties proved too strong for his readers +and his followers, and the emancipated artistic enthusiasm in which +it worked alienated from secular poetry men with deep and strong +religious convictions. Religion and morality and poetry, which in +Sidney and Spenser had gone hand in hand, separated from each +other. Poems like <cite>Venus and Adonis</cite> or like +Shakespeare's sonnets could hardly be squared with the sterner +temper which persecution began to breed. Even within orthodox +Anglicanism poetry and religion began to be deemed no fit company +for each other. When George Herbert left off courtier and took +orders he burnt his earlier love poetry, and only the persuasion of +his friends prevented Donne from following the same course. Pure +poetry became more and more an exotic. All Milton's belongs to his +earlier youth; his middle age was occupied with controversy and +propaganda in prose; when he returned to poetry in blindness and +old age it was "to justify the ways of God to man"—to use +poetry, that is, for a spiritual and moral rather than an artistic +end.</p> +<p>Though the age was curious and inquiring, though poetry and +prose tended more and more to be enlisted in the service of +non-artistic enthusiasms and to be made the vehicle of deeper +emotions and interests than perhaps a northern people could ever +find in art, pure and simple, it was not like the time that +followed it, a "prosaic" age. Enthusiasm burned fierce and clear, +displaying itself in the passionate polemic of Milton, in the +fanaticism of Bunyan and Fox, hardly more than in the gentle, +steadfast search for knowledge in Burton, and the wide and vigilant +curiousness of Bacon. Its eager experimentalism tried the +impossible; wrote poems and then gave them a weight of meaning they +could not carry, as when Fletcher in <cite>The Purple Island</cite> +designed to allegorize all that the physiology of his day knew of +the human body, or Donne sought to convey abstruse scientific fact +in a lyric. It gave men a passion for pure learning, set Jonson to +turn himself from a bricklayer into the best equipped scholar of +his day, and Fuller and Camden grubbing among English records and +gathering for the first time materials of scientific value for +English history. Enthusiasm gave us poetry that was at once full of +learning and of imagination, poetry that was harsh and brutal in +its roughness and at the same time impassioned. And it set up a +school of prose that combined colloquial readiness and fluency, +pregnancy and high sentiment with a cumbrous pedantry of learning +which was the fruit of its own excess.</p> +<p>The form in which enthusiasm manifested itself most fiercely was +as we have seen not favourable to literature. Puritanism drove +itself like a wedge into the art of the time, broadening as it +went. Had there been no more in it than the moral earnestness and +religiousness of Sidney and Spenser, Cavalier would not have +differed from Roundhead, and there might have been no civil war; +each party was endowed deeply with the religious sense and Charles +I. was a sincerely pious man. But while Spenser and Sidney held +that life as a preparation for eternity must be ordered and +strenuous and devout but that care for the hereafter was not +incompatible with a frank and full enjoyment of life as it is +lived, Puritanism as it developed in the middle classes became a +sterner and darker creed. The doctrine of original sin, face to +face with the fact that art, like other pleasures, was naturally +and readily entered into and enjoyed, forced them to the plain +conclusion that art was an evil thing. As early as Shakespeare's +youth they had been strong enough to keep the theatres outside +London walls; at the time of the Civil War they closed them +altogether, and the feud which had lasted for over a generation +between them and the dramatists ended in the destruction of the +literary drama. In the brief years of their ascendancy they +produced no literature, for Milton is much too large to be tied +down to their negative creed, and, indeed, in many of his +qualities, his love of music and his sensuousness for instance, he +is antagonistic to the temper of his day. With the Restoration +their earnest and strenuous spirit fled to America. It is +noteworthy that it had no literary manifestation there till two +centuries after the time of its passage. Hawthorne's novels are the +fruit—the one ripe fruit in art—of the Puritan +imagination.</p> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>If the reader adopts the seventeenth century habit himself and +takes stock of what the Elizabethans accomplished in poetry, he +will recognize speedily that their work reached various stages of +completeness. They perfected the poetic drama and its instrument, +blank verse; they perfected, though not in the severer Italian +form, the sonnet; they wrote with extraordinary delicacy and finish +short lyrics in which a simple and freer manner drawn from the +classics took the place of the mediaeval intricacies of the ballad +and the rondeau. And in the forms which they failed to bring to +perfection they did beautiful and noble work. The splendour of +<cite>The Fairy Queen</cite> is in separate passages; as a whole it +is over tortuous and slow; its affectations, its sensuousness, the +mere difficulty of reading it, makes us feel it a collection of +great passages, strung it is true on a large conception, rather +than a great work. The Elizabethans, that is, had not discovered +the secret of the long poem; the abstract idea of the "heroic" epic +which was in all their minds had to wait for embodiment till +<cite>Paradise Lost</cite>. In a way their treatment of the +pastoral or eclogue form was imperfect too. They used it well but +not so well as their models, Vergil and Theocritus; they had not +quite mastered the convention on which it is built.</p> +<p>The seventeenth century, taking stock in some such fashion of +its artistic possessions, found some things it were vain to try to +do. It could add nothing to the accomplishment of the English +sonnet, so it hardly tried; with the exception of a few sonnets in +the Italian form of Milton, the century can show us nothing in this +mode of verse. The literary drama was brought to perfection in the +early years of it by the surviving Elizabethans; later decades +could add nothing to it but licence, and as we saw, the licences +they added hastened its destruction. But in other forms the poets +of the new time experimented eagerly, and in the stress of +experiment, poetry which under Elizabeth had been integral and +coherent split into different schools. As the period of the +Renaissance was also that of the Reformation it was only natural a +determined effort should sooner or later be made to use poetry for +religious purposes. The earliest English hymn writing, our first +devotional verse in the vernacular, belongs to this time, and a +Catholic and religious school of lyricism grew and flourished +beside the pagan neo-classical writers. From the tumult of +experiment three schools disengage themselves, the school of +Spenser, the school of Jonson, and the school of Donne.</p> +<p>At the outset of the century Spenser's influence was triumphant +and predominant; his was the main stream with which the other +poetic influences of the time merely mingled. His popularity is +referable to qualities other than those which belonged peculiarly +to his talent as a poet. Puritans loved his religious ardour, and +in those Puritan households where the stricter conception of the +diabolical nature of all poetry had not penetrated, his works were +read—standing on a shelf, may be, between the new translation +of the Bible and Sylvester's translation of the French poet Du +Bartas' work on the creation, that had a large popularity at that +time as family reading. Probably the Puritans were as blind to the +sensuousness of Spenser's language and imagery as they were (and +are) to the same qualities in the Bible itself. <cite>The Fairy +Queen</cite> would easily achieve innocuousness amongst those who +can find nothing but an allegory of the Church in the "Song of +Songs." His followers made their allegory a great deal plainer than +he had done his. In his poem called <cite>The Purple Island</cite>, +Phineas Fletcher, a Puritan imitator of Spenser in Cambridge, +essayed to set forth the struggle of the soul at grip with evil, a +battle in which the body—the "Purple Island"—is the +field. To a modern reader it is a desolating and at times a mildly +amusing book, in which everything from the liver to the seven +deadly sins is personified; in which after four books of +allegorized contemporary anatomy and physiology, the will (Voletta) +engages in a struggle with Satan and conquers by the help of Christ +and King James! The allegory is clever—too clever—and +the author can paint a pleasant picture, but on the whole he was +happier in his pastoral work. His brother Giles made a better +attempt at the Spenserian manner. His long poem, <cite>Christ's +Victory and Death</cite>, shows for all its carefully Protestant +tone high qualities of mysticism; across it Spenser and Milton join +hands.</p> +<p>It was, however, in pastoral poetry that Spenser's influence +found its pleasantest outlet. One might hesitate to advise a reader +to embark on either of the Fletchers. There is no reason why any +modern should not read and enjoy Browne or Wither, in whose softly +flowing verse the sweetness and contentment of the countryside, +that "merry England" which was the background of all sectarian and +intellectual strife and labour, finds as in a placid stream a calm +reflection and picture of itself. The seventeenth century gave +birth to many things that only came to maturity in the nineteenth; +if you care for that kind of literary study which searches out +origins and digs for hints and models of accented styles, you will +find in Browne that which influenced more than any other single +thing the early work of Keats. Browne has another claim to +immortality; if it be true as is now thought that he was the author +of the epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke:</p> +<div class="poem">"Underneath this sable hearse<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Lies the subject of all +verse,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Sidney's sister, Pembroke's +mother.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Death, ere thou hast slain +another</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Fair and learned and good as +she,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Time shall throw a dart at +thee."</span></div> +<br> +then he achieved the miracle of a quintessential statement of the +spirit of the English Renaissance. For the breath of it stirs in +these slow quiet moving lines, and its few and simple words +implicate the soul of a period.<br> +<br> +<p>By the end of the first quarter of the century the influence of +Spenser and the school which worked under it had died out. Its +place was taken by the twin schools of Jonson and Donne. Jonson's +poetic method is something like his dramatic; he formed himself as +exactly as possible on classical models. Horace had written satires +and elegies, and epistles and complimentary verses, and Jonson +quite consciously and deliberately followed where Horace led. He +wrote elegies on the great, letters and courtly compliments and +love-lyrics to his friends, satires with an air of general censure. +But though he was classical, his style was never latinized. In all +of them he strove to pour into an ancient form language that was as +intense and vigorous and as purely English as the earliest +trumpeters of the Renaissance in England could have wished. The +result is not entirely successful. He seldom fails to reproduce +classic dignity and good sense; on the other hand he seldom +succeeds in achieving classic grace and ease. Occasionally, as in +his best known lyric, he is perfect and achieves an air of +spontaneity little short of marvellous, when we know that his +images and even his words in the song are all plagiarized from +other men. His expression is always clear and vigorous and his +sense good and noble. The native earnestness and sincerity of the +man shines through as it does in his dramas and his prose. In an +age of fantastic and meaningless eulogy—eulogy so amazing in +its unexpectedness and abstruseness that the wonder is not so much +that it should have been written as that it could have been thought +of—Jonson maintains his personal dignity and his good sense. +You feel his compliments are such as the best should be, not +necessarily understood and properly valued by the public, but of a +discriminating sort that by their very comprehending sincerity +would be most warmly appreciated by the people to whom they were +addressed. His verses to Shakespeare and his prose commentaries on +him too, are models of what self-respecting admiration should be, +generous in its praise of excellence, candid in its statement of +defects. They are the kind of compliments that Shakespeare himself, +if he had grace enough, must have loved to receive.</p> +<p>Very different from his direct and dignified manner is the +closely packed style of Donne, who, Milton apart, is the greatest +English writer of the century, though his obscurity has kept him +out of general reading. No poetry in English, not even Browning, is +more difficult to understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning +proceed from such similar causes that they are worth examining +together. In both, as in the obscure passages in Shakespeare's +later plays, obscurity arises not because the poet says too little +but because he attempts to say too much. He huddles a new thought +on the one before it, before the first has had time to express +itself; he sees things or analyses emotions so swiftly and subtly +himself that he forgets the slower comprehensions of his readers; +he is for analysing things far deeper than the ordinary mind +commonly can. His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and +likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things +from a dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each +separate vision in a heap out on to the page; his restless +intellect finds new and subtler shades of emotion and thought +invisible to other pairs of eyes, and cannot, because speech is +modelled on the average of our intelligences, find words to express +them; he is always trembling on the brink of the inarticulate. All +this applies to both Donne and Browning, and the comparison could +be pushed further still. Both draw the knowledge which is the main +cause of their obscurity from the same source, the bypaths of +mediaevalism. Browning's <cite>Sordello</cite> is obscure because +he knows too much about mediaeval Italian history; Donne's +<cite>Anniversary</cite> because he is too deeply read in mediaeval +scholasticism and speculation. Both make themselves more difficult +to the reader who is familiar with the poetry of their +contemporaries by the disconcerting freshness of their point of +view. Seventeenth century love poetry was idyllic and idealist; +Donne's is passionate and realistic to the point of cynicism. To +read him after reading Browne or Jonson is to have the same shock +as reading Browning after Tennyson. Both poets are salutary in the +strong and biting antidote they bring to sentimentalism in thought +and melodious facility in writing. They are the corrective of lazy +thinking and lazy composition.</p> +<p>Elizabethan love poetry was written on a convention which though +it was used with manliness and entire sincerity by Sidney did not +escape the fate of its kind. Dante's love for Beatrice, Petrarch's +for Laura, the gallant and passionate adoration of Sidney for his +Stella became the models for a dismal succession of imaginary woes. +They were all figments of the mind, perhaps hardly that; they all +use the same terms and write in fixed strains, epicurean and +sensuous like Ronsard, ideal and intellectualized like Dante, +sentimental and adoring like Petrarch. Into this enclosed garden of +sentiment and illusion Donne burst passionately and rudely, pulling +up the gay-coloured tangled weeds that choked thoughts, planting, +as one of his followers said, the seeds of fresh invention. Where +his forerunners had been idealist, epicurean, or adoring, he was +brutal, cynical and immitigably realist. He could begin a poem, +"For God's sake hold your tongue and let me live"; he could be as +resolutely free from illusion as Shakespeare when he addressed his +Dark Lady—</p> +<div class="poem">"Hope not for mind in women; at their best,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Sweetness and wit they're but +mummy possest."</span></div> +<p>And where the sonneteers pretended to a sincerity which was none +of theirs, he was, like Browning, unaffectedly a dramatic lyrist. +"I did best," he said, "when I had least truth for my subject."</p> +<p>His love poetry was written in his turbulent and brilliant +youth, and the poetic talent which made it turned in his later +years to express itself in hymns and religious poetry. But there is +no essential distinction between the two halves of his work. It is +all of a piece. The same swift and subtle spirit which analyses +experiences of passion, analyses, in his later poetry, those of +religion. His devotional poems, though they probe and question, are +none the less never sermons, but rather confessions or prayers. His +intense individuality, eager always, as his best critic has said, +"to find a North-West passage of his own,"[<a href="#note-2">2</a>] +pressed its curious and sceptical questioning into every corner of +love and life and religion, explored unsuspected depths, exploited +new discovered paradoxes, and turned its discoveries always into +poetry of the closely-packed artificial style which was all its own. +Simplicity indeed would have been for him an affectation; his +elaborateness is not like that of his followers, constructed +painfully in a vicious desire to compass the unexpected, but the +natural overflow of an amazingly fertile and ingenious mind. The +curiosity, the desire for truth, the search after minute and +detailed knowledge of his age is all in his verse. He bears the +spirit of his time not less markedly than Bacon does, or Newton, or +Descartes.</p> +<p>The work of the followers of Donne and Jonson leads straight to +the new school, Jonson's by giving that school a model on which to +work, Donne's by producing an era of extravagance and absurdity +which made a literary revolution imperative. The school of +Donne—the "fantastics" as they have been called (Dr. Johnson +called them the metaphysical poets), produced in Herbert and +Vaughan, our two noblest writers of religious verse, the flower of +a mode of writing which ended in the somewhat exotic religiousness +of Crashaw. In the hands of Cowley the use of far-sought and +intricate imagery became a trick, and the fantastic school, the +soul of sincerity gone out of it, died when he died. To the +followers of Jonson we owe that delightful and simple lyric poetry +which fills our anthologies, their courtly lyricism receiving a new +impulse in the intenser loyalty of troubled times. The most +finished of them is perhaps Carew; the best, because of the +freshness and varity of his subject-matter and his easy grace, +Herrick. At the end of them came Waller and gave to the +five-accented rhymed verse (the heroic couplet) that trick of +regularity and balance which gave us the classical school.</p> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>The prose literature of the seventeenth century is +extraordinarily rich and varied, and a study of it would cover a +wide field of human knowledge. The new and unsuspected harmonies +discovered by the Elizabethans were applied indeed to all the tasks +of which prose is capable, from telling stories to setting down the +results of speculation which was revolutionizing science and +philosophy. For the first time the vernacular and not Latin became +the language of scientific research, and though Bacon in his +<cite>Novum Organum</cite> adhered to the older mode its +disappearance was rapid. English was proving itself too flexible an +instrument for conveying ideas to be longer neglected. It was +applied too to preaching of a more formal and grandiose kind than +the plain and homely Latimer ever dreamed of. The preachers, though +their golden-mouthed oratory, which blended in its combination of +vigour and cadence the euphuistic and colloquial styles of the +Elizabethans, is in itself a glory of English literature, belong by +their matter too exclusively to the province of Church history to +be dealt with here. The men of science and philosophy, Newton, +Hobbes, and Locke, are in a like way outside our province. For the +purpose of the literary student the achievement of the seventeenth +century can be judged in four separate men or books—in the +Bible, in Francis Bacon, and in Burton and Browne.</p> +<p>In a way the Bible, like the preachers, lies outside the domain +of literary study in the narrow sense; but its sheer literary +magnitude, the abiding significance of it in our subsequent +history, social, political, and artistic as well as religious, +compel us to turn aside to examine the causes that have produced +such great results. The Authorized Version is not, of course, a +purely seventeenth century work. Though the scholars[<a href= +"#note-3">3</a>] who wrote and compiled it had before them all the +previous vernacular texts and chose the best readings where they +found them or devised new ones in accordance with the original, the +basis is undoubtedly the Tudor version of Tindall. It has, none the +less, the qualities of the time of its publication. It could hardly +have been done earlier; had it been so, it would not have been done +half so well. In it English has lost both its roughness and its +affectation and retained its strength; the Bible is the supreme +example of early English prose style. The reason is not far to +seek. Of all recipes for good or noble writing that which enjoins +the writer to be careful about the matter and never mind the +manner, is the most sure. The translators had the handling of +matter of the gravest dignity and momentousness, and their sense of +reverence kept them right in their treatment of it. They cared +passionately for the truth; they were virtually anonymous and not +ambitious of originality or literary fame; they had no desire to +stand between the book and its readers. It followed that they +cultivated that naked plainness and spareness which makes their +work supreme. The Authorized Version is the last and greatest of +those English translations which were the fruit of Renaissance +scholarship and pioneering. It is the first and greatest piece of +English prose.</p> +<p>Its influence is one of those things on which it is profitless +to comment or enlarge simply because they are an understood part of +every man's experience. In its own time it helped to weld England, +for where before one Bible was read at home and another in +churches, all now read the new version. Its supremacy was +instantaneous and unchallenged, and it quickly coloured speech and +literature; it could produce a Bunyan in the century of its birth. +To it belongs the native dignity and eloquence of peasant speech. +It runs like a golden thread through all our writing subsequent to +its coming; men so diverse as Huxley and Carlyle have paid their +tribute to its power; Ruskin counted it the one essential part of +its education. It will be a bad day for the mere quality of our +language when it ceases to be read.</p> +<p>At the time the translators were sitting, Francis Bacon was at +the height of his fame. By profession a lawyer—time-serving +and over-compliant to wealth and influence—he gives +singularly little evidence of it in the style of his books. +Lawyers, from the necessity they are under of exerting persuasion, +of planting an unfamiliar argument in the minds of hearers of whose +favour they are doubtful, but whose sympathy they must gain, are +usually of purpose diffuse. They cultivate the gift, possessed by +Edmund Burke above all other English authors, of putting the same +thing freshly and in different forms a great many times in +succession. They value copiousness and fertility of illustration. +Nothing could be more unlike this normal legal manner than the +style of Bacon. "No man," says Ben Jonson, speaking in one of those +vivid little notes of his, of his oratorical method, "no man ever +coughed or turned aside from him without loss." He is a master of +the aphoristic style. He compresses his wisdom into the +quintessential form of an epigram; so complete and concentrated is +his form of statement, so shortly is everything put, that the mere +transition from one thought to another gives his prose a curious +air of disjointedness as if he flitted arbitrarily from one thing +to another, and jotted down anything that came into his head. His +writing has clarity and lucidity, it abounds in terseness of +expression and in exact and discriminating phraseology, and in the +minor arts of composition—in the use of quotations for +instance—it can be extraordinarily felicitous. But it lacks +spaciousness and ease and rhythm; it makes too inexorable a demand +on the attention, and the harassed reader soon finds himself +longing for those breathing spaces which consideration or perhaps +looseness of thought has implanted in the prose of other +writers.</p> +<p>His <cite>Essays</cite>, the work by which he is best known, +were in their origin merely jottings gradually cohered and enlarged +into the series we know. In them he had the advantage of a subject +which he had studied closely through life. He counted himself a +master in the art of managing men, and "Human Nature and how to +manage it" would be a good title for his book. Men are studied in +the spirit of Machiavelli, whose philosophy of government appealed +so powerfully to the Elizabethan mind. Taken together the essays +which deal with public matters are in effect a kind of manual for +statesmen and princes, instructing them how to acquire power and +how to keep it, deliberating how far they may go safely in the +direction of self-interest, and to what degree the principle of +self-interest must be subordinated to the wider interests of the +people who are ruled. Democracy, which in England was to make its +splendid beginnings in the seventeenth century, finds little to +foretell it in the works of Bacon. Though he never advocates +cruelty or oppression and is wise enough to see that no statesman +can entirely set aside moral considerations, his ethical tone is +hardly elevating; the moral obliquity of his public life is to a +certain extent explained, in all but its grosser elements, in his +published writings. The essays, of course, contain much more than +this; the spirit of curious and restless enquiry which animated +Bacon finds expression in those on "Health," or "Gardens" and +"Plantations" and others of the kind; and a deeper vein of +earnestness runs through some of them—those for instance on +"Friendship," or "Truth" and on "Death."</p> +<p>The <cite>Essays</cite> sum up in a condensed form the +intellectual interests which find larger treatment in his other +works. His <cite>Henry VII.</cite>, the first piece of scientific +history in the English language (indeed in the modern world) is +concerned with a king whose practice was the outcome of a political +theory identical with Bacon's own. The <cite>Advancement of +Learning</cite> is a brilliant popular exposition of the cause of +scientific enquiry and of the inductive or investigatory method of +research. The <cite>New Atlantis</cite> is the picture of an ideal +community whose common purpose is scientific investigation. Bacon's +name is not upon the roll of those who have enlarged by brilliant +conjectures or discoveries the store of human knowledge; his own +investigations so far as they are recorded are all of a trivial +nature. The truth about him is that he was a brilliantly clever +populariser of the cause of science, a kind of seventeenth century +Huxley, concerned rather to lay down large general principles for +the guidance of the work of others, than to be a serious worker +himself. The superstition of later times, acting on and refracting +his amazing intellectual gifts, has raised him to a godlike +eminence which is by right none of his; it has even credited him +with the authorship of Shakespeare, and in its wilder moments with +the composition of all that is of supreme worth in Elizabethan +literature. It is not necessary to take these delusions seriously. +The ignorance of mediaevalism was in the habit of crediting Vergil +with the construction of the Roman aqueducts and temples whose +ruins are scattered over Europe. The modern Baconians reach much +the same intellectual level.</p> +<p>A similar enthusiasm for knowledge and at any rate a pretence to +science belong to the author of the <cite>Anatomy of +Melancholy</cite>, Robert Burton. His one book is surely the most +amazing in English prose. Its professed object was simple and +comprehensive; it was to analyze human melancholy, to describe its +effects, and prescribe for its removal. But as his task grew, +melancholy came to mean to Burton all the ills that flesh is heir +to. He tracked it in obscure and unsuspected forms; drew +illustrations from a range of authors so much wider than the +compass of the reading of even the most learned since, that he is +generally credited with the invention of a large part of his +quotations. Ancients and moderns, poets and prose writers, +schoolmen and dramatists are all drawn upon for the copious store +of his examples; they are always cited with an air of quietly +humorous shrewdness in the comments and enclosed in a prose that is +straightforward, simple and vigorous, and can on occasion command +both rhythm and beauty of phrase. It is a mistake to regard Burton +from the point of view (due largely to Charles Lamb) of tolerant or +loving delight in quaintness for quaintness' sake. His book is +anything but scientific in form, but it is far from being the work +of a recluse or a fool. Behind his lack of system, he takes a broad +and psychologically an essentially just view of human ills, and +modern medicine has gone far in its admiration of what is at bottom +a most comprehensive and subtle treatise in diagnosis.</p> +<p>A writer of a very different quality is Sir Thomas Browne. Of +all the men of his time, he is the only one of whom one can say for +certain that he held the manner of saying a thing more important +than the thing said. He is our first deliberate and conscious +stylist, the forerunner of Charles Lamb, of Stevenson (whose +<cite>Virginibus Puerisque</cite> is modelled on his method of +treatment) and of the stylistic school of our own day. His +eloquence is too studied to rise to the greatest heights, and his +speculation, though curious and discursive, never really results in +deep thinking. He is content to embroider his pattern out of the +stray fancies of an imaginative nature. His best known work, the +<cite>Religio Medici</cite>, is a random confession of belief and +thoughts, full of the inconsequent speculations of a man with some +knowledge of science but not deeply or earnestly interested about +it, content rather to follow the wayward imaginations of a mind +naturally gifted with a certain poetic quality, than to engage in +serious intellectual exercise. Such work could never maintain its +hold on taste if it were not carefully finished and constructed +with elaborate care. Browne, if he was not a great writer, was a +literary artist of a high quality. He exploits a quaint and lovable +egoism with extraordinary skill; and though his delicately figured +and latinized sentences commonly sound platitudinous and trivial +when they are translated into rough Saxon prose, as they stand they +are rich and melodious enough.</p> +<br> +<h4>(4)</h4> +<p>In a century of surpassing richness in prose and poetry, one +author stands by himself. John Milton refuses to be classed with +any of the schools. Though Dryden tells us Milton confessed to him +that Spenser was his "original," he has no connection—other +than a general similarity of purpose, moral and +religious—with Spenser's followers. To the fantastics he paid +in his youth the doubtful compliment of one or two +half-contemptuous imitations and never touched them again. He had +no turn for the love lyrics or the courtliness of the school of +Jonson. In everything he did he was himself and his own master; he +devised his own subjects and wrote his own style. He stands alone +and must be judged alone.</p> +<p>No author, however, can ever escape from the influences of his +time, and, just as much as his lesser contemporaries, Milton has +his place in literary history and derives from the great original +impulse which set in motion all the enterprises of the century. He +is the last and greatest figure in the English Renaissance. The new +passion for art and letters which in its earnest fumbling +beginnings gave us the prose of Cheke and Ascham and the poetry of +Surrey and Sackville, comes to a full and splendid and perfect end +in his work. In it the Renaissance and the Reformation, imperfectly +fused by Sidney and Spenser, blend in their just proportions. The +transplantation into English of classical forms which had been the +aim of Sidney and the endeavour of Jonson he finally accomplished; +in his work the dream of all the poets of the Renaissance—the +heroic poem—finds its fulfilment. There was no poet of the +time but wanted to do for his country what Vergil had planned to do +for Rome, to sing its origins, and to celebrate its morality and +its citizenship in the epic form. Spenser had tried it in <cite>The +Fairy Queen</cite> and failed splendidly. Where he failed, Milton +succeeded, though his poem is not on the origins of England but on +the ultimate subject of the origins of mankind. We know from his +notebooks that he turned over in his mind a national subject and +that the Arthurian legend for a while appealed to him. But to +Milton's earnest temper nothing that was not true was a fit subject +for poetry. It was inevitable he should lay it aside. The Arthurian +story he knew to be a myth and a myth was a lie; the story of the +Fall, on the other hand, he accepted in common with his time for +literal fact. It is to be noted as characteristic of his confident +and assured egotism that he accepted no less sincerely and +literally the imaginative structure which he himself reared on it. +However that may be, the solid fact about him is that in this +"adventurous song" with its pursuit of</p> +<div class="poem">"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,"</div> +<br> +he succeeded in his attempt, that alone among the moderns he +contrived to write an epic which stands on the same eminence as the +ancient writings of the kind, and that he found time in a life, +which hardly extended to old age as we know it, to write, besides +noble lyrics and a series of fiercely argumentative prose +treatises, two other masterpieces in the grand style, a tragedy +modelled on the Greeks and a second epic on the "compact" style of +the book of Job. No English poet can compare with him in majesty or +completeness.<br> +<br> +<p>An adequate study of his achievement is impossible within the +limits of the few pages that are all a book like this can spare to +a single author. Readers who desire it will find it in the work of +his two best critics, Mark Pattison and Sir Walter +Raleigh.[<a href="#note-4">4</a>] All that can be done here is to +call attention to some of his most striking qualities. Foremost, of +course, is the temper of the man. From the beginning he was sure of +himself and sure of his mission; he had his purpose plain and +clear. There is no mental development, hardly, visible in his work, +only training, undertaken anxiously and prayerfully and with a +clearly conceived end. He designed to write a masterpiece and he +would not start till he was ready. The first twenty years of his +life were spent in assiduous reading; for twenty more he was +immersed in the dust and toil of political conflict, using his pen +and his extraordinary equipment of learning and eloquence to defend +the cause of liberty, civil and religious, and to attack its +enemies; not till he was past middle age had he reached the leisure +and the preparedness necessary to accomplish his self-imposed work. +But all the time, as we know, he had it in his mind. In +<cite>Lycidas</cite>, written in his Cambridge days, he apologizes +to his readers for plucking the fruit of his poetry before it is +ripe. In passage after passage in his prose works he begs for his +reader's patience for a little while longer till his preparation be +complete. When the time came at last for beginning he was in no +doubt; in his very opening lines he intends, he says, to soar no +"middle flight." This self-assured unrelenting certainty of his, +carried into his prose essays in argument, produces sometimes +strange results. One is peculiarly interesting to us now in view of +current controversy. He was unhappily married, and because he was +unhappy the law of divorce must be changed. A modern—George +Eliot for instance—would have pleaded the artistic +temperament and been content to remain outside the law. Milton +always argued from himself to mankind at large.</p> +<p>In everything he did, he put forth all his strength. Each of his +poems, long or short, is by itself a perfect whole, wrought +complete. The reader always must feel that the planning of each is +the work of conscious, deliberate, and selecting art. Milton never +digresses; he never violates harmony of sound or sense; his poems +have all their regular movement from quiet beginning through a +rising and breaking wave of passion and splendour to quiet close. +His art is nowhere better seen than in his endings.</p> +<p>Is it <cite>Lycidas</cite>? After the thunder of approaching +vengeance on the hireling shepherds of the Church, comes sunset and +quiet:</p> +<div class="poem">"And now the sun had stretch'd out all the +hills,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And now was dropt into the +western bay;</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">At last he rose, and twitched his +mantle blue:</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">To-morrow to fresh woods and +pastures new."</span></div> +<p>Is it <cite>Paradise Lost</cite>? After the agonies of expulsion +and the flaming sword—</p> +<div class="poem">"Some natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them +soon;<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The world was all before them +where to choose</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Their place of rest, and +Providence their guide;</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">They hand in hand with wandering +steps and slow,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Through Eden took their solitary +way."</span></div> +<p>Is it finally <cite>Samson Agonistes</cite>?</p> +<div class="poem">"His servants he with new acquist,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Of true experience from this +great event,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">With peace and consolation hath +dismist,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And calm of mind all passion +spent."</span></div> +<p>"Calm of mind, all passion spent," it is the essence of Milton's +art.</p> +<p>He worked in large ideas and painted splendid canvases; it was +necessary for him to invent a style which should be capable of +sustained and lofty dignity, which should be ornate enough to +maintain the interest of the reader and charm him and at the same +time not so ornate as to give an air of meretricious decoration to +what was largely and simply conceived. Particularly it was +necessary for him to avoid those incursions of vulgar associations +which words carelessly used will bring in their train. He succeeded +brilliantly in this difficult task. The unit of the Miltonic style +is not the phrase but the word, each word fastidiously chosen, +commonly with some air of an original and lost meaning about it, +and all set in a verse in which he contrived by an artful variation +of pause and stress to give the variety which other writers had +from rhyme. In this as in his structure he accomplished what the +Renaissance had only dreamed. Though he had imitators (the poetic +diction of the age following is modelled on him) he had no +followers. No one has been big enough to find his secret since.</p> +<h4>Footnotes</h4> +<p><a name="note-2"><!-- Note Anchor 2 --></a>[Footnote 2: Prof. +Grierson in <cite>Cambridge History of English +Literature</cite>.]</p> +<p><a name="note-3"><!-- Note Anchor 3 --></a>[Footnote 3: There is +a graphic little pen-picture of their method in Selden's "Table +Talk."]</p> +<p><a name="note-4"><!-- Note Anchor 2 --></a>[Footnote 4: +"Milton," E.M.L., and "Milton" (Edward Arnold).]</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_V"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER V</h2> +<br> +<h3>THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE</h3> +<p>The student of literature, when he passes in his reading from +the age of Shakespeare and Milton to that of Dryden and Pope, will +be conscious of certain sharply defined differences between the +temper and styles of the writers of the two periods. If besides +being a student of literature he is also (for this is a different +thing) a student of literary criticism he will find that these +differences have led to the affixing of certain labels—that +the school to which writers of the former period belong is called +"Romantic" and that of the latter "Classic," this "Classic" school +being again overthrown towards the end of the eighteenth century by +a set of writers who unlike the Elizabethans gave the name +"Romantic" to themselves. What is he to understand by these two +labels; what are the characteristics of "Classicism" and how far is +it opposite to and conflicting with "Romanticism"? The question is +difficult because the names are used vaguely and they do not +adequately cover everything that is commonly put under them. It +would be difficult, for instance, to find anything in Ben Jonson +which proclaims him as belonging to a different school from Dryden, +and perhaps the same could be said in the second and self-styled +period of Romanticism of the work of Crabbe. But in the main the +differences are real and easily visible, even though they hardly +convince us that the names chosen are the happiest that could be +found by way of description.</p> +<p>This period of Dryden and Pope on which we are now entering +sometimes styled itself the Augustan Age of English poetry. It +grounded its claim to classicism on a fancied resemblance to the +Roman poets of the golden age of Latin poetry, the reign of the +Emperor Augustus. Its authors saw themselves each as a second +Vergil, a second Ovid, most of all a second Horace, and they +believed that their relation to the big world, their assured +position in society, heightened the resemblances. They endeavoured +to form their poetry on the lines laid down in the critical writing +of the original Augustan age as elaborated and interpreted in +Renaissance criticism. It was tacitly assumed—some of them +openly asserted it—that the kinds, modes of treatment and all +the minor details of literature, figures of speech, use of epithets +and the rest, had been settled by the ancients once and for all. +What the Greeks began the critics and authors of the time of +Augustus had settled in its completed form, and the scholars of the +Renaissance had only interpreted their findings for modern use. +There was the tragedy, which had certain proper parts and a certain +fixed order of treatment laid down for it; there was the heroic +poem, which had a story or "fable," which must be treated in a +certain fixed manner, and so on. The authors of the "Classic" +period so christened themselves because they observed these rules. +And they fancied that they had the temper of the Augustan +time—the temper displayed in the works of Horace more than in +those of any one else—its urbanity, its love of good sense +and moderation, its instinctive distrust of emotion, and its +invincible good breeding. If you had asked them to state as simply +and broadly as possible their purpose they would have said it was +to follow nature, and if you had enquired what they meant by nature +it would turn out that they thought of it mainly as the opposite of +art and the negation of what was fantastic, tortured, or far sought +in thinking or writing. The later "Romantic" Revival, when it +called itself a return to nature, was only claiming the intention +which the classical school itself had proclaimed as its main +endeavour. The explanation of that paradox we shall see presently; +in the meantime it is worth looking at some of the characteristics +of classicism as they appear in the work of the "Classic" +authors.</p> +<p>In the first place the "Classic" writers aimed at simplicity of +style, at a normal standard of writing. They were intolerant of +individual eccentricities; they endeavoured, and with success, to +infuse into English letters something of the academic spirit that +was already controlling their fellow-craftsmen in France. For this +end amongst others they and the men of science founded the Royal +Society, an academic committee which has been restricted since to +the physical and natural sciences and been supplemented by similar +bodies representing literature and learning only in our own day. +Clearness, plainness, conversational ease and directness were the +aims the society set before its members where their writing was +concerned. "The Royal Society," wrote the Bishop of Rochester, its +first historian, "have exacted from all their members a close, +naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear sense, +a native easiness, bringing all things as near the mathematical +plainness as they can; and preferring the language of artisans, +countrymen, and merchants before that of wits and scholars." +Artisans, countrymen, and merchants—the ideal had been +already accepted in France, Malesherbes striving to use no word +that was not in the vocabulary of the day labourers of Paris, +Molière making his washerwoman first critic of his comedies. +It meant for England the disuse of the turgidities and involutions +which had marked the prose of the preachers and moralists of the +times of James and Charles I.; scholars and men of letters were +arising who would have taken John Bunyan, the unlettered tinker of +Bedford, for their model rather than the learned physician Sir +Thomas Browne.</p> +<p>But genius like Bunyan's apart, there is nothing in the world +more difficult than to write with the easy and forthright +simplicity of talk, as any one may see who tries for +himself—or even compares the letter-writing with the +conversation of his friends. So that this desire of simplicity, of +clarity, of lucidity led at once to a more deliberate art. Dryden +and Swift and Addison were assiduous in their labour with the file; +they excel all their predecessors in polish as much as the writers +of the first Augustan age excelled theirs in the same quality. Not +that it was all the result of deliberate art; in a way it was in +the air, and quite unlearned people—journalists and +pamphleteers and the like who wrote unconsciously and hurriedly to +buy their supper—partook of it as well as leisured people and +conscious artists. Defoe is as plain and easy and polished as +Swift, yet it is certain his amazing activity and productiveness +never permitted him to look back over a sentence he had written. +Something had happened, that is, to the English language. The +assimilation of latinisms and the revival of obsolete terms of +speech had ceased; it had become finally a more or less fixed form, +shedding so much of its imports as it had failed to make part of +itself and acquiring a grammatical and syntactical fixity which it +had not possessed in Elizabethan times. When Shakespeare wrote</p> +<div class="poem">"What cares these roarers for the name of +king,"</div> +<br> +he was using, as students of his language never tire of pointing +out to us, a perfectly correct local grammatical form. Fifty years +after that line was written, at the Restoration, local forms had +dropped out of written English. We had acquired a normal standard +of language, and either genius or labour was polishing it for +literary uses.<br> +<br> +<p>What they did for prose these "Classic" writers did even more +exactly—and less happily—for verse. Fashions often +become exaggerated before their disappearance, and the decadence of +Elizabethan romanticism had produced poetry the wildness and +extravagance of whose images was well-nigh unbounded. The passion +for intricate and far-sought metaphor which had possessed Donne was +accompanied in his work and even more in that of his followers with +a passion for what was elusive and recondite in thought and emotion +and with an increasing habit of rudeness and wilful difficultness +in language and versification. Against these ultimate licences of a +great artistic period, the classical writers invoked the qualities +of smoothness and lucidity, in the same way, so they fancied, as +Vergil might have invoked them against Lucretius. In the treatment +of thought and feeling they wanted clearness, they wanted ideas +which the mass of men would readily apprehend and assent to, and +they wanted not hints or half-spoken suggestions but complete +statement. In the place of the logical subtleties which Donne and +his school had sought in the scholastic writers of the Middle Ages, +they brought back the typically Renaissance study of rhetoric; the +characteristic of all the poetry of the period is that it has a +rhetorical quality. It is never intimate and never profound, but it +has point and wit, and it appeals with confidence to the balanced +judgment which men who distrust emotion and have no patience with +subtleties intellectual, emotional, or merely verbal, have in +common. Alongside of this lucidity, this air of complete statement +in substance they strove for and achieved smoothness in form. To +the poet Waller, the immediate predecessor of Dryden, the classical +writers themselves ascribed the honour of the innovation. In fact +Waller was only carrying out the ideals counselled and followed by +Ben Jonson. It was in the school of Waller and Dryden and not in +that of the minor writers who called themselves his followers that +he came to his own.</p> +<p>What then are the main differences between classicism of the +best period—the classicism whose characteristics we have been +describing—and the Romanticism which came before and after? +In the first place we must put the quality we have described as +that of complete statement. Classical poetry is, so to speak, "all +there." Its meaning is all of it on the surface; it conveys nothing +but what it says, and what it says, it says completely. It is +always vigorous and direct, often pointed and aphoristic, never +merely suggestive, never given to half statement, and never +obscure. You feel that as an instrument of expression it is sharp +and polished and shining; it is always bright and defined in +detail. The Great Romantics go to work in other ways. Their poetry +is a thing of half lights and half spoken suggestions, of hints +that imagination will piece together, of words that are charged +with an added meaning of sound over sense, a thing that stirs the +vague and impalpable restlessness of memory or terror or desire +that lies down beneath in the minds of men. It rouses what a +philosopher has called the "Transcendental feeling," the solemn +sense of the immediate presence of "that which was and is and ever +shall be," to induce which is the property of the highest poetry. +You will find nothing in classical poetry so poignant or highly +wrought as Webster's</p> +<div class="poem">"Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died +young,"</div> +<br> +and the answer,<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"I think not so: her infelicity<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Seemed to have years too +many,"</span></div> +<br> +or so subtle in its suggestion, sense echoing back to primeval +terrors and despairs, as this from <cite>Macbeth</cite>:<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Stones have been known to move and trees to +speak;<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Augurs and understood relations +have</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">By magot-pies, and choughs, and +rooks brought forth</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The secret'st man of +blood."</span></div> +<br> +or so intoxicating to the imagination and the senses as an ode of +Keats or a sonnet by Rossetti. But you will find eloquent and +pointed statements of thoughts and feelings that are common to most +of us—the expression of ordinary human nature—<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"What oft was thought but ne'er so well +exprest,"</div> +<p>"Wit and fine writing" consisting, as Addison put it in a review +of Pope's first published poem, not so much "in advancing things +that are new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable +turn."</p> +<p>Though in this largest sense the "classic" writers eschewed the +vagueness of romanticism, in another and more restricted way they +cultivated it. They were not realists as all good romanticists have +to be. They had no love for oddities or idiosyncrasies or +exceptions. They loved uniformity, they had no use for truth in +detail. They liked the broad generalised, descriptive style of +Milton, for instance, better than the closely packed style of +Shakespeare, which gets its effects from a series of minute +observations huddled one after the other and giving the reader, so +to speak, the materials for his own impression, rather than +rendering, as does Milton, the expression itself.</p> +<p>Every literary discovery hardens ultimately into a convention; +it has its day and then its work is done, and it has to be +destroyed so that the ascending spirit of humanity can find a +better means of self-expression. Out of the writing which aimed at +simplicity and truth to nature grew "Poetic Diction," a special +treasury of words and phrases deemed suitable for poetry, providing +poets with a common stock of imagery, removing from them the +necessity of seeing life and nature each one for himself. The +poetry which Dryden and Pope wrought out of their mental vigour, +their followers wrote to pattern. Poetry became reduced, as it +never was before and has never been since, to a formula. The +Elizabethan sonneteers, as we saw, used a vocabulary and +phraseology in common with their fellows in Italy and France, and +none the less produced fine poetry. But they used it to express +things they really felt. The truth is it is not the fact of a +poetic diction which matters so much as its quality—whether +it squares with sincerity, whether it is capable of expressing +powerfully and directly one's deepest feelings. The history of +literature can show poetic dictions—special vocabularies and +forms for poetry—that have these qualities; the diction, for +instance, of the Greek choruses, or of the Scottish poets who +followed Chaucer, or of the troubadours. That of the classic +writers of an Augustan age was not of such a kind. Words clothe +thought; poetic diction had the artifice of the crinoline; it would +stand by itself. The Romantics in their return to nature had +necessarily to abolish it.</p> +<p>But when all is said in criticism the poetry of the earlier half +of the eighteenth century excels all other English poetry in two +respects. Two qualities belong to it by virtue of the metre in +which it is most of it written—rapidity and antithesis. Its +antithesis made it an incomparable vehicle for satire, its rapidity +for narrative. Outside its limits we have hardly any even passable +satirical verse; within them there are half-a-dozen works of the +highest excellence in this kind. And if we except Chaucer, there is +no one else in the whole range of English poetry who have the +narrative gift so completely as the classic poets. Bentleys will +always exist who will assure us with civility that Pope's +<cite>Homer</cite>, though "very pretty," bears little relation to +the Greek, and that Dryden's <cite>Vergil</cite>, though vigorous +and virile, is a poor representation of its original. The truth +remains that for a reader who knows no ancient languages either of +those translations will probably give a better idea of their +originals than any other rendering in English that we possess. The +foundation of their method has been vindicated in the best modern +translations from the Greek.</p> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>The term "eighteenth century" in the vocabulary of the literary +historian is commonly as vaguely used as the term Elizabethan. It +borrows as much as forty years from the seventeenth and gives away +ten to the nineteenth. The whole of the work of Dryden, whom we +must count as the first of the "classic" school, was accomplished +before chronologically it had begun. As a man and as an author he +was very intimately related to his changing times; he adapted +himself to them with a versatility as remarkable as that of the +Vicar of Bray, and, it may be added, as simple-minded. He mourned +in verse the death of Cromwell and the death of his successor, +successively defended the theological positions of the Church of +England and the Church of Rome, changed his religion and became +Poet Laureate to James II., and acquiesced with perfect equanimity +in the Revolution which brought in his successor. This instability +of conviction, though it gave a handle to his opponents in +controversy, does not appear to have caused any serious scandal or +disgust among his contemporaries, and it has certainly had little +effect on the judgment of later times. It has raised none of the +reproaches which have been cast at the suspected apostasy of +Wordsworth. Dryden had little interest in political or religious +questions; his instinct, one must conceive, was to conform to the +prevailing mode and to trouble himself no further about the matter. +Defoe told the truth about him when he wrote that "Dryden might +have been told his fate that, having his extraordinary genius slung +and pitched upon a swivel, it would certainly turn round as fast as +the times, and instruct him how to write elegies to Oliver Cromwell +and King Charles the Second with all the coherence imaginable; how +to write <cite>Religio Laici</cite> and the <cite>Hind and the +Panther</cite> and yet be the same man, every day to change his +principle, change his religion, change his coat, change his master, +and yet never change his nature." He never changed his nature, he +was as free from cynicism as a barrister who represents +successively opposing parties in suits or politics; and when he +wrote polemics in prose or verse he lent his talents as a barrister +lends his for a fee. His one intellectual interest was in his art, +and it is in his comments on his art—the essays and prefaces +in the composition of which he amused the leisure left in the busy +life of a dramatist and a poet of officialdom—that his most +charming and delicate work is to be found. In a way they begin +modern English prose; earlier writing furnishes no equal to their +colloquial ease and the grace of their expression. And they contain +some of the most acute criticism in our language—"classical" +in its tone (<em>i.e.</em>, with a preference for conformity) but +with its respect for order and tradition always tempered by good +sense and wit, and informed and guided throughout by a taste whose +catholicity and sureness was unmatched in the England of his time. +The preface to his <cite>Fables</cite> contains some excellent +notes on Chaucer. They may be read as a sample of the breadth and +perspicuity of his critical perceptions.</p> +<p>His chief poetical works were most of them +occasional—designed either to celebrate some remarkable event +or to take a side and interpret a policy in the conflict, political +or religious, of the time. <cite>Absalom and Achitophel</cite> and +<cite>The Medal</cite> were levelled at the Shaftesbury-Monmouth +intrigues in the closing years of Charles II. <cite>Religio +Laici</cite> celebrated the excellence of the Church of England in +its character of <em>via media</em> between the opposite +extravagances of Papacy and Presbyterianism. <cite>The Hind and the +Panther</cite> found this perfection spotted. The Church of England +has become the Panther, whose coat is a varied pattern of heresy +and truth beside the spotless purity of the Hind, the Church of +Rome. <cite>Astrea Reddux</cite> welcomed the returning Charles; +<cite>Annus Mirabilis</cite> commemorated a year of fire and +victories, Besides these he wrote many dramas in verse, a number of +translations, and some shorter poems, of which the odes are the +most remarkable.</p> +<p>His qualities as a poet fitted very exactly the work he set +himself to do. His work is always plain and easily understood; he +had a fine faculty for narration, and the vigorous rapidity and +point of his style enabled him to sketch a character or sum up a +dialectical position very surely and effectively. His writing has a +kind of spare and masculine force about it. It is this vigour and +the impression which he gives of intellectual strength and of a +logical grasp of his subject, that beyond question has kept alive +work which, if ever poetry was, was ephemeral in its origin. The +careers of the unscrupulous Caroline peers would have been closed +for us were they not visible in the reflected light of his +denunciation of them. Though Buckingham is forgotten and +Shaftesbury's name swallowed up in that of his more philanthropic +descendant, we can read of Achitophel and Zimri still, and feel +something of the strength and heat which he caught from a fiercely +fought conflict and transmitted with his own gravity and +purposefulness into verse. The Thirty-nine Articles are not a +proper subject for poetry, but the sustained and serious allegory +which Dryden weaves round theological discussion preserves his +treatment of them from the fate of the controversialists who +opposed him. His work has wit and vitality enough to keep it +sweet.</p> +<p>Strength and wit enter in different proportions into the work of +his successor, Alexander Pope—a poet whom admirers in his own +age held to be the greatest in our language. No one would think of +making such a claim now, but the detraction which he suffered at +the hands of Wordsworth and the Romantics, ought not to make us +forget that Pope, though not our greatest, not even perhaps a +great, poet is incomparably our most brilliant versifier. Dryden's +strength turns in his work into something more fragile and +delicate, polished with infinite care like lacquer, and wrought +like filigree work to the last point of conscious and perfected +art. He was not a great thinker; the thoughts which he embodies in +his philosophical poems—the <cite>Essay on Man</cite> and the +rest, are almost ludicrously out of proportion to the solemnity of +the titles which introduce them, nor does he except very rarely get +beyond the conceptions common to the average man when he attempts +introspection or meditates on his own destiny. The reader in search +of philosophy will find little to stimulate him and in the facile +Deism of the time probably something to smile at. Pope has no +message to us now. But he will find views current in his time or +borrowed from other authors put with perfect felicity and wit, and +he will recognize the justice of Addison's comment that Pope's wit +and fine writing consist "not so much in advancing things that are +new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable turn." And he +will not fall into the error of dubbing the author a minor poet +because he is neither subtle nor imaginative nor profound. A great +poet would not have written like Pope—one must grant it; but +a minor poet could not.</p> +<p>It is characteristic of Pope's type of mind and kind of art that +there is no development visible in his work. Other poets, +Shakespeare, for instance, and Keats, have written work of the +highest quality when they were young, but they have had crudenesses +to shed—things to get rid of as their strength and +perceptions grew. But Pope, like Minerva, was full grown and full +armed from the beginning. If we did not know that his <cite>Essay +on Criticism</cite> was his first poem it would be impossible to +place it in the canon of his work; it might come in anywhere and so +might everything else that he wrote. From the beginning his +craftsmanship was perfect; from the beginning he took his +subject-matter from others as he found it and worked it up into +aphorism and epigram till each line shone like a cut jewel and the +essential commonplaceness and poverty of his material was obscured +by the glitter the craftsmanship lent to it. Subject apart, +however, he was quite sure of his medium from the beginning; it was +not long before he found the way to use it to most brilliant +purpose. <cite>The Rape of the Lock</cite> and the satirical poems +come later in his career.</p> +<p>As a satirist Pope, though he did not hit so hard as Dryden, +struck more deftly and probed deeper. He wielded a rapier where the +other used a broadsword, and though both used their weapons with +the highest skill and the metaphor must not be imagined to impute +clumsiness to Dryden, the rapier made the cleaner cut. Both +employed a method in satire which their successors (a poor set) in +England have not been intelligent enough to use. They allow every +possible good point to the object of their attack. They appear to +deal him an even and regretful justice. His good points, they put +it in effect, being so many, how much blacker and more deplorable +his meannesses and faults! They do not do this out of charity; +there was very little of the milk of human kindness in Pope. +Deformity in his case, as in so many in truth and fiction, seemed +to bring envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness in its +train. The method is employed simply because it gives the maximum +satirical effect. That is why Pope's epistle to Arbuthnot, with its +characterisation of Addison, is the most damning piece of invective +in our language.</p> +<p><cite>The Rape of the Lock</cite> is an exquisite piece of +workmanship, breathing the very spirit of the time. You can fancy +it like some clock made by one of the Louis XIV. craftsmen, +encrusted with a heap of ormulu mock-heroics and impertinences and +set perfectly to the time of day. From no other poem could you +gather so fully and perfectly the temper of the society in which +our "classic" poetry was brought to perfection, its elegant +assiduity in trifles, its brilliant artifice, its paint and powder +and patches and high-heeled shoes, its measured strutting walk in +life as well as in verse. <cite>The Rape of the Lock</cite> is a +mock-heroic poem; that is to say it applies the form and treatment +which the "classic" critics of the seventeenth century had laid +down as belonging to the "heroic" or "epic" style to a trifling +circumstance—the loss by a young lady of fashion of a lock of +hair. And it is the one instance in which this "recipe" for a +heroic poem which the French critics handed on to Dryden, and +Dryden left to his descendants, has been used well-enough to keep +the work done with it in memory. In a way it condemns the poetical +theory of the time; when forms are fixed, new writing is less +likely to be creative and more likely to exhaust itself in the +ingenious but trifling exercises of parody and burlesque. <cite>The +Rape of the Lock</cite> is brilliant but it is only play.</p> +<p>The accepted theory which assumed that the forms of poetry had +been settled in the past and existed to be applied, though it +concerned itself mainly with the ancient writers, included also two +moderns in its scope. You were orthodox if you wrote tragedy and +epic as Horace told you and satire as he had shown you; you were +also orthodox if you wrote in the styles of Spenser or Milton. +Spenser, though his predecessors were counted barbaric and his +followers tortured and obscure, never fell out of admiration; +indeed in every age of English poetry after him the greatest poet +in it is always to be found copying him or expressing their love +for him—Milton declaring to Dryden that Spenser was his +"original," Pope reading and praising him, Keats writing his +earliest work in close imitation. His characteristic style and +stanza were recognised by the classic school as a distinct "kind" +of poetry which might be used where the theme fitted instead of the +heroic manner, and Spenserian imitations abound. Sometimes they are +serious; sometimes, like Shenstone's <cite>Schoolmistress</cite>, +they are mocking and another illustration of the dangerous ease +with which a conscious and sustained effort to write in a fixed and +acquired style runs to seed in burlesque. Milton's fame never +passed through the period of obscurity that sometimes has been +imagined for him. He had the discerning admiration of Dryden and +others before his death. But to Addison belongs the credit of +introducing him to the writers of this time; his papers in the +<cite>Spectator</cite> on <cite>Paradise Lost</cite>, with their +eulogy of its author's sublimity, spurred the interest of the poets +among his readers. From Milton the eighteenth century got the chief +and most ponderous part of its poetic diction, high-sounding +periphrases and borrowings from Latin used without the gravity and +sincerity and fullness of thought of the master who brought them +in. When they wrote blank verse, the classic poets wrote it in the +Milton manner.</p> +<p>The use of these two styles may be studied in the writings of +one man, James Thomson. For besides acquiring a kind of anonymous +immortality with patriots as the author of "Rule, Britannia," +Thomson wrote two poems respectively in the Spenserian and the +Miltonic manner, the former <cite>The Castle of Indolence</cite>, +the latter <cite>The Seasons</cite>. The Spenserian manner is +caught very effectively, but the adoption of the style of +<cite>Paradise Lost</cite>, with its allusiveness, circumlocution +and weight, removes any freshness the <cite>Seasons</cite> might +have had, had the circumstances in them been put down as they were +observed. As it is, hardly anything is directly named; birds are +always the "feathered tribe" and everything else has a similar +polite generality for its title. Thomson was a simple-minded man, +with a faculty for watching and enjoying nature which belonged to +few in his sophisticated age; it is unfortunate he should have +spent his working hours in rendering the fruit of country rambles +freshly observed into a cold and stilted diction. It suited the +eighteenth century reader well, for not understanding nature +herself he was naturally obliged to read her in translations.</p> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>The chief merits of "classic" poetry—its clearness, its +vigour, its direct statement—are such as belong theoretically +rather to prose than to poetry. In fact, it was in prose that the +most vigorous intellect of the time found itself. We have seen how +Dryden, reversing the habit of other poets, succeeded in expressing +his personality not in poetry which was his vocation, but in prose +which was the amusement of his leisure hours. Spenser had put his +politics into prose and his ideals into verse; Dryden wrote his +politics—to order—in verse, and in prose set down the +thoughts and fancies which were the deepest part of him because +they were about his art. The metaphor of parentage, though honoured +by use, fits badly on to literary history; none the less the +tradition which describes him as the father of modern English prose +is very near the truth. He puts into practice for the first time +the ideals, described in the first chapter of this book, which were +set up by the scholars who let into English the light of the +Renaissance. With the exception of the dialogue on Dramatic Poesy, +his work is almost all of it occasional, the fruit of the mood of a +moment, and written rather in the form of a <em>causerie</em>, a +kind of informal talk, than of a considered essay. And it is all +couched in clear, flowing, rather loosely jointed English, +carefully avoiding rhetoric and eloquence and striving always to +reproduce the ease and flow of cultured conversation, rather than +the tighter, more closely knit style of consciously "literary" +prose. His methods were the methods of the four great prose-writers +who followed him—Defoe, Addison, Steele, and Swift.</p> +<p>Of these Defoe was the eldest and in some ways the most +remarkable. He has been called the earliest professional author in +our language, and if that is not strictly true, he is at any rate +the earliest literary journalist. His output of work was enormous; +he wrote on any and every subject; there was no event whether in +politics or letters or discovery but he was not ready with +something pat on it before the public interest faded. It followed +that at a time when imprisonment, mutilation, and the pillory took +the place of our modern libel actions he had an adventurous career. +In politics he followed the Whig cause and served the Government +with his pen, notably by his writings in support of the union with +Scotland, in which he won over the Scots by his description of the +commercial advantage which would follow the abolition of the +border. This line of argument, taken at a time when the governing +of political tendencies by commercial interests was by no means the +accepted commonplace it is now, proves him a man of an active and +original mind. His originality, indeed, sometimes over-reached the +comprehension both of the public and his superiors; he was +imprisoned for an attack on the Hanoverian succession, which was +intended ironically; apparently he was ignorant of what every +journalist ought to know that irony is at once the most dangerous +and the most ineffectual weapon in the whole armoury of the press. +The fertility and ingenuity of his intellect may be best gauged by +the number of modern enterprises and contrivances that are +foreshadowed in his work. Here are a few, all utterly unknown in +his own day, collected by a student of his works; a Board of Trade +register for seamen; factories for goods: agricultural credit +banks; a commission of enquiry into bankruptcy; and a system of +national poor relief. They show him to have been an independent and +courageous thinker where social questions were concerned.</p> +<p>He was nearly sixty before he had published his first novel, +<cite>Robinson Crusoe</cite>, the book by which he is universally +known, and on which with the seven other novels which followed it +the foundation of his literary fame rests. But his earlier +works—they are reputed to number over two +hundred—possess no less remarkable literary qualities. It is +not too much to say that all the gifts which are habitually +recommended for cultivation by those who aspire to journalistic +success are to be found in his prose. He has in the first place the +gift of perfect lucidity no matter how complicated the subject he +is expounding; such a book as his <cite>Complete English +Tradesman</cite> is full of passages in which complex and difficult +subject-matter is set forth so plainly and clearly that the least +literate of his readers could have no doubt of his understanding +it. He has also an amazingly exact acquaintance with the +technicalities of all kinds of trades and professions; none of our +writers, not even Shakespeare, shows half such a knowledge of the +circumstances of life among different ranks and conditions of men; +none of them has realized with such fidelity how so many different +persons lived and moved. His gift of narrative and description is +masterly, as readers of his novels know (we shall have to come back +to it in discussing the growth of the English novel); several of +his works show him to have been endowed with a fine faculty of +psychological observation. Without the least consciousness of the +value of what he was writing, nor indeed with any deliberate +artistic intention, he made himself one of the masters of English +prose.</p> +<p>Defoe had been the champion of the Whigs; on the Tory side the +ablest pen was that of Jonathan Swift. His works proclaim him to +have had an intellect less wide in its range than that of his +antagonist but more vigorous and powerful. He wrote, too, more +carefully. In his youth he had been private secretary to Sir +William Temple, a writer now as good as forgotten because of the +triviality of his matter, but in his day esteemed because of the +easy urbanity and polish of his prose. From him Swift learned the +labour of the file, and he declared in later life that it was +"generally believed that this author has advanced our English +tongue to as great a perfection as it can well bear." In fact he +added to the ease and cadences he had learned from Temple qualities +of vigour and directness of his own which put his work far above +his master's. And he dealt with more important subject-matter than +the academic exercises on which Temple exercised his fastidious and +meticulous powers of revision.</p> +<p>In temperament he is opposed to all the writers of his time. +There is no doubt but there was some radical disorder in his +system; brain disease clouded his intellect in his old age, and his +last years were death in life; right through his life he was a +savagely irritable, sardonic, dark and violent man, impatient of +the slightest contradiction or thwarting, and given to explosive +and instantaneous rage. He delighted in flouting convention, +gloried in outraging decency. The rage, which, as he said himself, +tore his heart out, carried him to strange excesses. There is +something ironical (he would himself have appreciated it) in the +popularity of <cite>Gulliver's Travels</cite> as a children's +book—that ascending wave of savagery and satire which +overwhelms policy and learning to break against the ultimate +citadel of humanity itself. In none of his contemporaries (except +perhaps in the sentimentalities of Steele) can one detect the +traces of emotion; to read Swift is to be conscious of intense +feeling on almost every page. The surface of his style may be +smooth and equable but the central fires of passion are never far +beneath, and through cracks and fissures come intermittent bursts +of flame. Defoe's irony is so measured and studiously commonplace +that perhaps those who imprisoned him because they believed him to +be serious are hardly to be blamed; Swift's quivers and reddens +with anger in every line.</p> +<p>But his pen seldom slips from the strong grasp of his +controlling art. The extraordinary skill and closeness of his +allegorical writings—unmatched in their kind—is witness +to the care and sustained labour which went to their making. He is +content with no general correspondences; his allegory does not fade +away into a story in which only the main characters have a +secondary significance; the minutest circumstances have a bearing +in the satire and the moral. In <cite>The Tale of a Tub</cite> and +in <cite>Gulliver's Travels</cite>—particularly in the +former—the multitude as well as the aptness of the parallels +between the imaginary narrative and the facts it is meant to +represent is unrivalled in works of the kind. Only the highest +mental powers, working with intense fervour and concentration, +could have achieved the sustained brilliancy of the result. "What a +genius I had when I wrote that book!" Swift is said to have +exclaimed in his old age when he re-read <cite>The Tale of a +Tub</cite>, and certainly the book is a marvel of constructive +skill, all the more striking because it makes allegory out of +history and consequently is denied that freedom of narrative so +brilliantly employed in the <cite>Travels</cite>.</p> +<p>Informing all his writings too, besides intense feeling and an +omnipresent and controlling art, is strong common sense. His +aphorisms, both those collected under the heading of <cite>Thoughts +on Various Subjects</cite>, and countless others scattered up and +down his pages, are a treasury of sound, if a little sardonic, +practical wisdom. His most insistent prejudices foreshadow in their +essential sanity and justness those of that great master of life, +Dr. Johnson. He could not endure over-politeness, a vice which must +have been very oppressive in society of his day. He savagely +resented and condemned a display of affection—particularly +marital affection—in public. In an age when it was the normal +social system of settling quarrels, he condemned duelling; and he +said some very wise things—things that might still be +said—on modern education. In economics he was as +right-hearted as Ruskin and as wrong-headed. Carlyle, who was in so +many respects an echo of him, found in a passage in his works a +"dim anticipation" of his philosophy of clothes.</p> +<p>The leading literary invention of the period—after that of +the heroic couplet for verse—was the prose periodical essay. +Defoe, it is hardly necessary to say, began it; it was his nature +to be first with any new thing: but its establishment as a +prevailing literary mode is due to two authors, Joseph Addison and +Richard Steele. Of the two famous series—the +<cite>Tatler</cite> and the <cite>Spectator</cite>—for which +they were both responsible, Steele must take the first credit; he +began them, and though Addison came in and by the deftness and +lightness of his writing took the lion's share of their popularity, +both the plan and the characters round whom the bulk of the essays +in the <cite>Spectator</cite> came to revolve was the creation of +his collaborator. Steele we know very intimately from his own +writings and from Thackeray's portrait of him. He was an emotional, +full-blooded kind of man, reckless and dissipated but fundamentally +honest and good-hearted—a type very common in his day as the +novels show, but not otherwise to be found in the ranks of its +writers. What there is of pathos and sentiment, and most of what +there is of humour in the <cite>Tatler</cite> and the +<cite>Spectator</cite> are his. And he created the <em>dramatis +personae</em> out of whose adventures the slender thread of +continuity which binds the essays together is woven. Addison, +though less open to the onslaughts of the conventional moralist, +was a less lovable personality. Constitutionally endowed with +little vitality, he suffered mentally as well as bodily from +languor and lassitude. His lack of enthusiasm, his cold-blooded +formalism, caused comment even in an age which prided itself in +self-command and decorum.</p> +<p>His very malevolence proceeded from a flaccidity which meanly +envied the activities and enthusiasms of other men. As a writer he +was superficial; he had not the requisite energy for forming a +clear or profound judgment on any question of difficulty; Johnson's +comment, "He thinks justly but he thinks faintly" sums up the truth +about him. His good qualities were of a slighter kind than Swift's; +he was a quiet and accurate observer of manners and fashions in +life and conversation, and he had the gift of a style—what +Johnson calls "The Middle Style"—very exactly suited to the +kind of work on which he was habitually engaged, "always equable, +always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences" but +polished, lucid, and urbane.</p> +<p>Steele and Addison were conscious moralists as well as literary +men. They desired to purge society from Restoration licences; to +their efforts we must credit the alteration in morality which +<cite>The School for Scandal</cite> shows over <cite>The Way of the +World</cite>. Their professed object as they stated themselves was +"to banish vice and ignorance out of the territories of Great +Britain, (nothing less!) and to bring philosophy out of closets and +libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, +at tea-tables and coffee-houses." In fact their satires were +politically nearer home, and the chief objects of their aversion +were the Tory squires whom it was their business as Whigs to +deride. On the Coverley papers in the <cite>Spectator</cite> rests +the chief part of their literary fame; these belong rather to the +special history of the novel than to that of the periodical +essay.</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_VI"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2> +<br> +<h3>DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME</h3> +<p>By 1730 the authors whose work made the "classic" school in +England were dead or had ceased writing; by the same date Samuel +Johnson had begun his career as a man of letters. The difference +between the period of his maturity and the period we have been +examining is not perhaps easy to define; but it exists and it can +be felt unmistakably in reading. For one thing "Classicism" had +become completely naturalized; it had ceased to regard the French +as arbiters of elegance and literary taste; indeed Johnson himself +never spoke of them without disdain and hated them as much as he +hated Scotsmen. Writing, like dress and the common way of life, +became plainer and graver and thought stronger and deeper. In +manners and speech something of the brutalism which was at the root +of the English character at the time began to colour the refinement +of the preceding age. Dilettantism gave way to learning and +speculation; in the place of Bolingbroke came Adam Smith; in the +place of Addison, Johnson. In a way it is the solidest and sanest +time in English letters. Yet in the midst of its urbanity and order +forces were gathering for its destruction. The ballad-mongers were +busy; Blake was drawing and rhyming; Burns was giving songs and +lays to his country-side. In the distance—Johnson could not +hear them—sounded, like the horns of elf-land faintly +blowing, the trumpet calls of romance.</p> +<p>If the whole story of Dr. Johnson's life were the story of his +published books it would be very difficult to understand his +pre-eminent and symbolic position in literary history. His best +known work—it still remains so—was his dictionary, and +dictionaries, for all the licence they give and Johnson took for +the expression of a personality, are the business of purely +mechanical talents. A lesser man than he might have cheated us of +such delights as the definitions of "oats," or "net" or "pension," +but his book would certainly have been no worse as a book. In his +early years he wrote two satires in verse in imitation of Juvenal; +they were followed later by two series of periodical essays on the +model of the <cite>Spectator</cite>; neither of them—the +<cite>Rambler</cite> nor the <cite>Idler</cite>—were at all +successful. <cite>Rasselas</cite>, a tale with a purpose, is +melancholy reading; the <cite>Journey to the Western +Hebrides</cite> has been utterly eclipsed by Boswell's livelier and +more human chronicle of the same events. The <cite>Lives of the +Poets</cite>, his greatest work, was composed with pain and +difficulty when he was seventy years old; even it is but a quarry +from which a reader may dig the ore of a sound critical judgment +summing up a life's reflection, out of the grit and dust of +perfunctory biographical compilations. There was hardly one of the +literary coterie over which he presided that was not doing better +and more lasting work. Nothing that Johnson wrote is to be +compared, for excellence in its own manner, with <cite>Tom +Jones</cite> or the <cite>Vicar of Wakefield</cite> or the +<cite>Citizen of the World</cite>. He produced nothing in writing +approaching the magnitude of Gibbon's <cite>Decline and Fall of the +Roman Empire</cite>, or the profundity of Burke's philosophy of +politics. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose main business was +painting and not the pen, was almost as good an author as he; his +<cite>Discourses</cite> have little to fear when they are set +beside Johnson's essays. Yet all these men recognised him as their +guide and leader; the spontaneous selection of such a democratic +assembly as men of genius in a tavern fixed upon him as chairman, +and we in these later days, who are safe from the overpowering +force of personality and presence—or at least can only know +of it reflected in books—instinctively recognize him as the +greatest man of his age. What is the reason?</p> +<p>Johnson's pre-eminence is the pre-eminence of character. He was +a great moralist; he summed up in himself the tendencies of thought +and literature of his time and excelled all others in his grasp of +them; and he was perhaps more completely than any one else in the +whole history of English literature, the typical Englishman. He was +one of those to whom is applicable the commonplace that he was +greater than his books. It is the fashion nowadays among some +critics to speak of his biographer Boswell as if he were a novelist +or a playwright and to classify the Johnson we know with Hamlet and +Don Quixote as the product of creative or imaginative art, working +on a "lost original." No exercise of critical ingenuity could be +more futile or impertinent. The impression of the solidity and +magnitude of Johnson's character which is to be gathered from +Boswell is enforced from other sources; from his essays and his +prayers and meditations, from the half-dozen or so lives and +reminiscences which were published in the years following his death +(their very number establishing the reverence with which he was +regarded), from the homage of other men whose genius their books +leave indisputable. Indeed the Johnson we know from Boswell, though +it is the broadest and most masterly portrait in the whole range of +biography, gives less than the whole magnitude of the man. When +Boswell first met him at the age of twenty-two, Johnson was +fifty-four. His long period of poverty and struggle was past. His +<cite>Dictionary</cite> and all his works except the <cite>Lives of +the Poets</cite> were behind him; a pension from the Crown had +established him in security for his remaining years; his position +was universally acknowledged. So that though the portrait in the +<cite>Life</cite> is a full-length study of Johnson the +conversationalist and literary dictator, the proportion it +preserves is faulty and its study of the early years—the +years of poverty, of the <cite>Vanity of Human Wishes</cite> and +<cite>London</cite>, of <cite>Rasselas</cite>, which he wrote to +pay the expenses of his mother's funeral, is slight.</p> +<p>It was, however, out of the bitterness and struggle of these +early years that the strength and sincerity of character which +carried Johnson surely and tranquilly through the time of his +triumph were derived. From the beginning he made no compromise with +the world and no concession to fashion. The world had to take him +at his own valuation or not at all. He never deviated one hair's +breadth from the way he had chosen. Judged by the standards of +journalistic success, the <cite>Rambler</cite> could not well be +worse than he made it. Compared with the lightness and gaiety and +the mere lip-service to morality of Addison its edification is +ponderous. Both authors state the commonplaces of conduct, but +Addison achieves lightness in the doing of it, and his manner by +means of which platitudes are stated lightly and pointedly and with +an air of novelty, is the classic manner of journalism. Johnson +goes heavily and directly to the point, handling well worn moral +themes in general and dogmatic language without any attempt to +enliven them with an air of discovery or surprise. Yet they were, +in a sense, discoveries to him; not one of them but was deeply and +sincerely felt; not one but is not a direct and to us a +pathetically dispassionate statement of the reflection of thirty +years of grinding poverty and a soul's anguish. Viewed in the light +of his life, the <cite>Rambler</cite> is one of the most moving of +books. If its literary value is slight it is a document in +character.</p> +<p>So that when he came to his own, when gradually the public whom +he despised and neglected raised him into a pontifical position +matched by none before him in England and none since save Carlyle, +he was sure of himself; success did not spoil him. His judgment was +unwarped by flattery. The almost passionate tenderness and humanity +which lay beneath his gruffness was undimmed. His personality +triumphed in all the fullness and richness which had carried it in +integrity through his years of struggle. For over twenty years from +his chair in taverns in the Strand and Fleet Street he ruled +literary London, imposed his critical principles on the great body +of English letters, and by his talk and his friendships became the +embodiment of the literary temperament of his age.</p> +<p>His talk as it is set down by Boswell is his best monument. It +was the happiest possible fate that threw those two men together, +for Boswell besides being an admirer and reporter sedulously +chronicling all his master said and did, fortunately influenced +both the saying and the doing. Most of us have some one in whose +company we best shine, who puts our wits on their mettle and spurs +us to our greatest readiness and vivacity. There is no doubt that +Boswell, for all his assumed humility and for all Johnson's +affected disdain, was just such a companion for Johnson. Johnson +was at his best when Boswell was present, and Boswell not only drew +Johnson out on subjects in which his robust common sense and +readiness of judgment were fitted to shine but actually suggested +and conducted that tour in Scotland which gave Johnson an +opportunity for displaying himself at his best. The recorded talk +is extraordinarily varied and entertaining. It is a mistake to +conceive Johnson as a monster of bear-like rudeness, shouting down +opposition, hectoring his companions, and habitually a blustering +verbal bully. We are too easily hypnotized by Macaulay's flashy +caricature. He could be merciless in argument and often wrongheaded +and he was always acute, uncomfortably acute, in his perception of +a fallacy, and a little disconcerting in his unmasking of pretence. +But he could be gay and tender too and in his heart he was a +shrinking and sensitive man.</p> +<p>As a critic (his criticism is the only side of his literary work +that need be considered), Johnson must be allowed a high place. His +natural indolence in production had prevented him from exhausting +his faculties in the more exacting labours of creative work, and it +had left him time for omnivorous if desultory reading, the fruits +of which he stored in a wonderfully retentive memory against an +occasion for their use. To a very fully equipped mind he brought +the service of a robust and acute judgment. Moreover when he +applied his mind to a subject he had a faculty of intense, if +fitful concentration; he could seize with great force on the heart +of a matter; he had the power in a wonderfully short time of +extracting the kernel and leaving the husk. His judgments in +writing are like those recorded by Boswell from his conversation; +that is to say he does not, as a critic whose medium was normally +the pen rather than the tongue would tend to do, search for fine +shades of distinction, subdivide subtleties, or be careful to admit +<em>caveats</em> or exceptions; he passes, on the contrary, rapid +and forcible verdicts, not seldom in their assertions untenably +sweeping, and always decided and dogmatic. He never affects +diffidence or defers to the judgments of others. His power of +concentration, of seizing on essentials, has given us his best +critical work—nothing could be better, for instance, than his +characterisation of the poets whom he calls the metaphysical school +(Donne, Crashaw, and the rest) which is the most valuable part of +his life of Cowley. Even where he is most prejudiced—for +instance in his attack on Milton's <cite>Lycidas</cite>—there +is usually something to be said for his point of view. And after +this concentration, his excellence depends on his basic common +sense. His classicism is always tempered, like Dryden's, by a +humane and sensible dislike of pedantry; he sets no store by the +unities; in his preface to Shakespeare he allows more than a +"classic" could have been expected to admit, writing in it, in +truth, some of the manliest and wisest things in Shakespearean +literature. Of course, he had his failings—the greatest of +them what Lamb called imperfect sympathy. He could see no good in +republicans or agnostics, and none in Scotland or France. Not that +the phrase "imperfect sympathy," which expresses by implication the +romantic critic's point of view, would have appealed to him. When +Dr. Johnson did not like people the fault was in them, not in him; +a ruthless objectivity is part of the classic equipment. He failed, +too, because he could neither understand nor appreciate poetry +which concerned itself with the sensations that come from external +nature. Nature was to him a closed book, very likely for a purely +physical reason. He was short-sighted to the point of myopia, and a +landscape meant nothing to him; when he tried to describe one as he +did in the chapter on the "happy valley" in <cite>Rasselas</cite> +he failed. What he did not see he could not appreciate; perhaps it +is too much to ask of his self-contained and unbending intellect +that he should appreciate the report of it by other men.</p> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>As we have seen, Johnson was not only great in himself, he was +great in his friends. Round him, meeting him as an equal, gathered +the greatest and most prolific writers of the time. There is no +better way to study the central and accepted men of letters of the +period than to take some full evening at the club from Boswell, +read a page or two, watch what the talkers said, and then trace +each back to his own works for a complete picture of his +personality. The lie of the literary landscape in this wonderful +time will become apparent to you as you read. You will find Johnson +enthroned, Boswell at his ear, round him men like Reynolds and +Burke, Richardson and Fielding and Goldsmith, Robertson and Gibbon, +and occasionally drawn to the circle minnows like Beattie and a +genius like Adam Smith. Gray, studious in his college at Cambridge, +is exercising his fastidious talent; Collins' sequestered, +carefully nurtured muse is silent; a host of minor poets are riding +Pope's poetic diction, and heroic couplet to death. Outside +scattered about is the van of Romance—Percy collecting his +ballads; Burns making songs and verses in Scotland; the "mad" +people, Smart and Chatterton, and above all Blake, obscurely +beginning the work that was to finish in Wordsworth and Coleridge +and Keats.</p> +<p>Of Johnson's set the most remarkable figure was Edmund +Burke—"the supreme writer," as De Quincey called him, "of his +century." His writings belong more to the history of politics than +to that of literature, and a close examination of them would be out +of place here. His political theory strikes a middle course which +offends—and in his own day offended—both parties in the +common strife of political thinking. He believed the best +government to consist in a patriotic aristocracy, ruling for the +good of the people. By birth an Irishman, he had the innate +practicality which commonly lies beneath the flash and colour of +Irish forcefulness and rhetoric. That, and his historical training, +which influenced him in the direction of conceiving every +institution as the culmination of an evolutionary development, sent +him directly counter to the newest and most enthusiastically urged +political philosophy of his day—the philosophy stated by +Rousseau, and put in action by the French Revolution. He disliked +and distrusted "metaphysical theories," when they left the field of +speculation for that of practice, had no patience with "natural +rights" (which as an Irishman he conceived as the product of +sentimentalism) and applied what would nowadays be called a +"pragmatic" test to political affairs. Practice was the touchstone; +a theory was useless unless you could prove that it had worked. It +followed that he was not a democrat, opposed parliamentary reform, +and held that the true remedy for corruption and venality was not +to increase the size of the electorate, but to reduce it so as to +obtain electors of greater weight and independence. For him a +member of Parliament was a representative and not a delegate, and +must act not on his elector's wishes but on his own judgment. These +opinions are little in fashion in our own day, but it is well to +remember that in Burke's case they were the outcome not of +prejudice but of thought, and that even democracy may admit they +present a case that must be met and answered.</p> +<p>Burke's reputation as a thinker has suffered somewhat unjustly +as a result of his refusal to square his tenets either with +democracy or with its opposite. It has been said that ideas were +only of use to him so far as they were of polemical service, that +the amazing fertility and acuteness of his mind worked only in a +not too scrupulous determination to overwhelm his antagonists in +the several arguments—on India, or America, on Ireland or on +France—which made up his political career. He was, said +Carlyle, "vehement rather than earnest; a resplendent far-sighted +rhetorician, rather than a deep and earnest thinker." The words as +they stand would be a good description of a certain type of +politician; they would fit, for instance, very well on Mr. +Gladstone; but they do Burke less than justice. He was an innovator +in modern political thought, and his application of the historical +method to the study of institutions is in its way a not less +epoch-making achievement than Bacon's application of the inductive +method to science. At a time when current political thought, led by +Rousseau, was drawing its theories from the abstract conception of +"natural rights" Burke was laying down that sounder and deeper +notion of politics which has governed thinking in that department +of knowledge since. Besides this, he had face to face with the +affairs of his own day, a far-sightedness and sagacity which kept +him right where other men went wrong. In a nation of the blind he +saw the truth about the American colonies; he predicted with +exactitude the culmination of the revolution in Napoleon. Mere +rhetorical vehemence cannot explain the earnestness with which in a +day of diplomatic cynicism he preached the doctrine of an +international morality as strict and as binding as the morality +which exists between man and man. Surest of all, we have the +testimony, uninfluenced by the magic of language, of the men he +met. You could not, said Dr. Johnson, shelter with him in a shed +for a few moments from the rain without saying, "This is an +extraordinary man."</p> +<p>His literary position depends chiefly on his amazing gift of +expression, on a command of language unapproached by any writer of +his time. His eloquence (in writing not in speaking; he is said to +have had a monotonous delivery) was no doubt at bottom a matter of +race, but to his Irish readiness and flash and colour he added the +strength of a full mind, fortified by a wonderful store of reading +which a retentive and exact memory enabled him to bring instantly +to bear on the subject in hand. No writer before him, except Defoe, +had such a wide knowledge of the technicalities of different men's +occupations, and of all sorts of the processes of daily business, +nor could enlighten an abstract matter with such a wealth of +luminous analogy. It is this characteristic of his style which has +led to the common comparison of his writing with Shakespeare's; +both seem to be preternaturally endowed with more information, to +have a wider sweep of interest than ordinary men. Both were not +only, as Matthew Arnold said of Burke, "saturated with ideas," but +saturated too in the details of the business and desire of ordinary +men's lives; nothing human was alien from them. Burke's language +is, therefore, always interesting and always appropriate to his +thought; it is also on occasion very beautiful. He had a wonderful +command of clear and ringing utterance and could appeal when he +liked very powerfully to the sensibilities of his readers. +Rhetoricians are seldom free from occasional extravagance, and +Burke fell under the common danger of his kind. He had his moments +of falsity, could heap coarse and outrageous abuse on Warren +Hastings, illustrate the horrors of the Revolution by casting a +dagger on the floor of the House of Commons, and nourish hatred +beyond the bounds of justice or measure. But these things do not +affect his position, nor take from the solid greatness of his +work.</p> +<p>Boswell we have seen; after Burke and Boswell, Goldsmith was the +most brilliant member of the Johnson circle. If part of Burke's +genius is referable to his nationality, Goldsmith's is wholly so. +The beginning and the end of him was Irish; every quality he +possessed as a man and as a writer belongs to his race. He had the +Irish carelessness, the Irish generosity, the Irish quick temper, +the Irish humour. This latter gift, displayed constantly in a +company which had little knowledge of the peculiar quality of Irish +wit and no faculty of sympathy or imagination, is at the bottom of +the constant depreciation of him on the part of Boswell and others +of his set. His mock self-importance they thought ill-breeding; his +humorous self-depreciation and keen sense of his own +ridiculousness, mere lack of dignity and folly. It is curious to +read Boswell and watch how often Goldsmith, without Boswell's +knowing it, got the best of the joke. In writing he had what we can +now recognise as peculiarly Irish gifts. All our modern writers of +light half-farcical comedy are Irish. Goldsmith's <cite>She Stoops +to Conquer</cite>, is only the first of a series which includes +<cite>The School for Scandal, The Importance of being +Earnest</cite>, and <cite>You Never can Tell</cite>. And his +essays—particularly those of the <cite>Citizen of the +World</cite> with its Chinese vision of England and English +life—are the first fruit of that Irish detachment, that +ability to see "normally" English habits and institutions and +foibles which in our own day has given us the prefaces of Mr. Shaw. +As a writer Goldsmith has a lightness and delicate ease which +belongs rather to the school of the earlier eighteenth century than +to his own day; the enthusiasm of Addison for French literature +which he retained gave him a more graceful model than the +"Johnsonian" school, to which he professed himself to belong, could +afford.</p> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>The eighteenth century novel demands separate treatment, and of +the other prose authors the most eminent, Edward Gibbon, belongs to +historical rather than to literary studies. It is time to turn to +poetry.</p> +<p>There orthodox classicism still held sway; the manner and metre +of Pope or Thomson ruled the roost of singing fowl. In the main it +had done its work, and the bulk of fresh things conceived in it +were dull and imitative, even though occasionally, as in the poems +of Johnson himself and of Goldsmith, an author arose who was able +to infuse sincerity and emotion into a now moribund convention. The +classic manner—now more that of Thomson than of +Pope—persisted till it overlapped romanticism; Cowper and +Crabbe each owe a doubtful allegiance, leaning by their formal +metre and level monotony of thought to the one and by their realism +to the other. In the meantime its popularity and its assured +position were beginning to be assailed in the coteries by the work +of two new poets.</p> +<p>The output of Thomas Gray and William Collins is small; you +might almost read the complete poetical works of either in an +evening. But for all that they mark a period; they are the first +definite break with the classic convention which had been +triumphant for upwards of seventy years when their prime came. It +is a break, however, in style rather than in essentials, and a +reader who seeks in them the inspiriting freshness which came later +with Wordsworth and Coleridge will be disappointed. Their carefully +drawn still wine tastes insipidly after the "beaded bubbles winking +at the brim" of romance. They are fastidious and academic; they +lack the authentic fire; their poetry is "made" poetry like +Tennyson's and Matthew Arnold's. On their comparative merits a deal +of critical ink has been spilt, Arnold's characterisation of Gray +is well known—"he never spoke out." Sterility fell upon him +because he lived in an age of prose just as it fell upon Arnold +himself because he lived too much immersed in business and routine. +But in what he wrote he had the genuine poetic gift—the gift +of insight and feeling. Against this, Swinburne with characteristic +vehemence raised the standard of Collins, the latchet of whose shoe +Gray, as a lyric poet, was not worthy to unloose. "The muse gave +birth to Collins, she did but give suck to Gray." It is more to our +point to observe that neither, though their work abounds in +felicities and in touches of a genuine poetic sense, was fitted to +raise the standard of revolt. Revolution is for another and braver +kind of genius than theirs. Romanticism had to wait for Burns and +Blake.</p> +<p>In every country at any one time there are in all probability +not one but several literatures flourishing. The main stream +flowing through the publishers and booksellers, conned by critics +and coteries, recognized as the national literature, is commonly +only the largest of several channels of thought. There are besides +the national literature local literatures—books, that is, are +published which enjoy popularity and critical esteem in their own +county or parish and are utterly unknown outside; there may even be +(indeed, there are in several parts of the country) distinct local +schools of writing and dynasties of local authors. These localized +literatures rarely become known to the outside world; the national +literature takes little account of them, though their existence and +probably some special knowledge of one or other of them is within +the experience of most of us. But every now and again some one of +their authors transcends his local importance, gives evidence of a +genius which is not to be denied even by those who normally have +not the knowledge to appreciate the particular flavour of locality +which his writings impart, and becomes a national figure. While he +lives and works the national and his local stream turn and flow +together.</p> +<p>This was the case of Robert Burns. All his life long he was the +singer of a parish—the last of a long line of "forbears" who +had used the Scottish lowland vernacular to rhyme in about their +neighbours and their scandals, their loves and their church. +Himself at the confluence of the two streams, the national and the +local, he pays his tribute to two sets of originals, talks with +equal reverence of names known to us like Pope and Gray and +Shenstone and names unknown which belonged to local "bards," as he +would have called them, who wrote their poems for an Ayrshire +public. If he came upon England as an innovator it was simply +because he brought with him the highly individualized style of +Scottish local vernacular verse; to his own people he was no +innovator but a fulfilment; as his best critic[<a href= +"#note-5">5</a>] says he brought nothing to the literature he +became a part of but himself. His daring and splendid genius made +the local universal, raised out of rough and cynical satirizing a +style as rich and humorous and astringent as that of Rabelais, lent +inevitableness and pathos and romance to lyric and song. But he was +content to better the work of other men. He made hardly anything +new.</p> +<p>Stevenson in his essay on Burns remarks his readiness to use up +the work of others or take a large hint from it "as if he had some +difficulty in commencing." He omits to observe that the very same +trait applies to other great artists. There seem to be two orders +of creative writers. On the one hand are the innovators, the new +men like Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, and later Browning. +These men owe little to their predecessors; they work on their own +devices and construct their medium afresh for themselves. Commonly +their fame and acceptance is slow, for they speak in an unfamiliar +tongue and they have to educate a generation to understand their +work. The other order of artists have to be shown the way. They +have little fertility in construction or invention. You have to say +to them "Here is something that you could do too; go and do it +better," or "Here is a story to work on, or a refrain of a song; +take it and give it your subtlety, your music." The villainy you +teach them they will use and it will go hard with them if they do +not better the invention; but they do not invent for themselves. To +this order of artists Burns like Shakespeare, and among the lesser +men Tennyson, belongs. In all his plays Shakespeare is known to +have invented only one plot; in many he is using not only the +structure but in many places the words devised by an older author; +his mode of treatment depends on the conventions common in his day, +on the tragedy of blood, and madness and revenge, on the comedy of +intrigue and disguises, on the romance with its strange happenings +and its reuniting of long parted friends. Burns goes the same way +to work; scarcely a page of his but shows traces of some original +in the Scottish vernacular school. The elegy, the verse epistle, +the satirical form of <cite>Holy Willie's Prayer</cite>, the song +and recitative of <cite>The Jolly Beggars</cite>, are all to be +found in his predecessors, in Fergusson, Ramsay, and the local +poets of the south-west of Scotland. In the songs often whole +verses, nearly always the refrains, are from older folk poetry. +What he did was to pour into these forms the incomparable richness +of a personality whose fire and brilliance and humour transcended +all locality and all tradition, a personality which strode like a +colossus over the formalism and correctness of his time. His use of +familiar forms explains, more than anything else, his immediate +fame. His countrymen were ready for him; they could hail him on the +instant (just as an Elizabethan audience could hail Shakespeare) as +something familiar and at the same time more splendid than anything +they knew. He spoke in a tongue they could understand.</p> +<p>It is impossible to judge Burns from his purely English verse; +though he did it as well as any of the minor followers of the +school of Pope he did it no better. Only the weakest side of his +character—his sentimentalism—finds expression in it; he +had not the sense of tradition nor the intimate knowledge necessary +to use English to the highest poetic effect; it was indeed a +foreign tongue to him. In the vernacular he wrote the language he +spoke, a language whose natural force and colour had become +enriched by three centuries of literary use, which was capable, +too, of effects of humour and realism impossible in any tongue +spoken out of reach of the soil. It held within it an unmatched +faculty for pathos, a capacity for expressing a lambent and kindly +humour, a power of pungency in satire and a descriptive vividness +that English could not give. How express in the language of Pope or +even of Wordsworth an effect like this:—</p> +<div class="poem">"They reeled, they set, they cross'd, they +cleekit,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Till ilka carlin swat and +reekit,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And coost her duddies to the +wark,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And linket at it in her +sark."</span></div> +<br> +or this—<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Yestreen when to the trembling string,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The dance gaed thro' the lighted +ha'</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">To thee my fancy took its +wing—</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">I sat but neither heard nor +saw:</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Tho' this was fair, and that was +braw,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And yon the toast of a' the +toun,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">I sigh'd and said amang them +a',</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">You are na Mary +Morison."</span></div> +<p>It may be objected that in all this there is only one word, and +but two or three forms of words that are not English. But the +accent, the rhythm, the air of it are all Scots, and it was a Burns +thinking in his native tongue who wrote it, not the Burns of</p> +<div class="poem">"Anticipation forward points the view ";</div> +<br> +or<br> +<div class="poem">"Pleasures are like poppies spread,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">You grasp the flower, the bloom +is shed."</span></div> +<br> +or any other of the exercises in the school of Thomson and +Pope.<br> +<br> +<p>It is easy to see that though Burns admired unaffectedly the +"classic" writers, his native realism and his melody made him a +potent agent in the cause of naturalism and romance. In his ideas, +even more than in his style, he belongs to the oncoming school. The +French Revolution, which broke upon Europe when he was at the +height of his career, found him already converted to its +principles. As a peasant, particularly a Scotch peasant, he +believed passionately in the native worth of man as man and gave +ringing expression to it in his verse. In his youth his +liberal-mindedness made him a Jacobite out of mere antagonism to +the existing régime; the Revolution only discovered for him +the more logical Republican creed. As the leader of a loose-living, +hard drinking set, such as was to be found in every parish, he was +a determined and free-spoken enemy of the kirk, whose tyranny he +several times encountered. In his writing he is as vehement an +anti-clerical as Shelley and much more practical. The political +side of romanticism, in fact, which in England had to wait for +Byron and Shelley, is already full-grown in his work. He +anticipates and gives complete expression to one half of the +Romantic movement.</p> +<p>What Burns did for the idea of liberty, Blake did for that and +every other idea current among Wordsworth and his successors. There +is nothing stranger in the history of English literature than the +miracle by which this poet and artist, working in obscurity, +utterly unknown to the literary world that existed outside him, +summed up in himself all the thoughts and tendencies which were the +fruit of anxious discussion and propaganda on the part of the +authors—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb—who believed +themselves to be the discoverers of fresh truth unknown to their +generation. The contemporary and independent discovery by Wallace +and Darwin of the principle of natural selection furnishes, +perhaps, a rough parallel, but the fact serves to show how +impalpable and universal is the spread of ideas, how impossible it +is to settle literary indebtedness or construct literary genealogy +with any hope of accuracy. Blake, by himself, held and expressed +quite calmly that condemnation of the "classic" school that +Wordsworth and Coleridge proclaimed against the opposition of a +deriding world. As was his habit he compressed it into a rude +epigram,</p> +<div class="poem">"Great things are done when men and mountains +meet;<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">This is not done by jostling in +the street."</span></div> +<p>The case for nature against urbanity could not be more tersely +nor better put. The German metaphysical doctrine which was the +deepest part of the teaching of Wordsworth and Coleridge and their +main discovery, he expresses as curtly and off-handedly,</p> +<div class="poem">"The sun's light when he unfolds it,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Depends on the organ that beholds +it."</span></div> +<p>In the realm of childhood and innocence, which Wordsworth +entered fearfully and pathetically as an alien traveller, he moves +with the simple and assured ease of one native. He knows the +mystical wonder and horror that Coleridge set forth in <cite>The +Ancient Mariner</cite>. As for the beliefs of Shelley, they are +already fully developed in his poems. "The king and the priest are +types of the oppressor; humanity is crippled by "mind-forg'd +manacles"; love is enslaved to the moral law, which is broken by +the Saviour of mankind; and, even more subtly than by Shelley, life +is pictured by Blake as a deceit and a disguise veiling from us the +beams of the Eternal."[<a href="#note-6">6</a>]</p> +<p>In truth, Blake, despite the imputation of insanity which was +his contemporaries' and has later been his commentators' refuge +from assenting to his conclusions, is as bold a thinker in his own +way as Neitzsche and as consistent. An absolute unity of belief +inspires all his utterances, cryptic and plain. That he never +succeeded in founding a school nor gathering followers must be put +down in the first place to the form in which his work was issued +(it never reached the public of his own day) and the dark and +mysterious mythology in which the prophetic books which are the +full and extended statement of his philosophy, are couched, and in +the second place to the inherent difficulty of the philosophy +itself. As he himself says, where we read black, he reads white. +For the common distinction between good and evil, Blake substitutes +the distinction between imagination and reason; and reason, the +rationalizing, measuring, comparing faculty by which we come to +impute praise or blame is the only evil in his eyes. "There is +nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so;" to rid the +world of thinking, to substitute for reason, imagination, and for +thought, vision, was the object of all that he wrote or drew. The +implications of this philosophy carry far, and Blake was not afraid +to follow where they led him. Fortunately for those who hesitate to +embark on that dark and adventurous journey, his work contains +delightful and simpler things. He wrote lyrics of extraordinary +freshness and delicacy and spontaneity; he could speak in a child's +voice of innocent joys and sorrows and the simple elemental things. +His odes to "Spring" and "Autumn" are the harbingers of Keats. Not +since Shakespeare and Campion died could English show songs like +his</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"My silks and fine array."</div> +<br> +and the others which carry the Elizabethan accent. He could write +these things as well as the Elizabethans. In others he was +unique.<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Tiger! Tiger! burning bright<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">In the forests of the +night,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">What immortal hand or +eye</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Could frame thy fearful +symmetry."</span></div> +<p>In all the English lyric there is no voice so clear, so separate +or distinctive as his.</p> +<h4>Footnotes</h4> +<p><a name="note-5"><!-- Note Anchor 5 --></a>[Footnote 5: W.E. +Henley, "Essay on Burns." Works, David Nutt.]</p> +<p><a name="note-6"><!-- Note Anchor 6 --></a>[Footnote 6: Prof. +Raleigh.]</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_VII"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2> +<br> +<h3>THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL</h3> +<h4>(1)</h4> +<p>There are two ways of approaching the periods of change and new +birth in literature. The commonest and, for all the study which it +entails, the easiest, is that summed up in the phrase, literature +begets literature. Following it, you discover and weigh literary +influences, the influence of poet on poet, and book on book. You +find one man harking back to earlier models in his own tongue, +which an intervening age misunderstood or despised; another, +turning to the contemporary literatures of neighbouring countries; +another, perhaps, to the splendour and exoticism of the east. In +the matter of form and style, such a study carries you far. You can +trace types of poetry and metres back to curious and unsuspected +originals, find the well-known verse of Burns' epistles turning up +in Provençal; Tennyson's <cite>In Memoriam</cite> stanza in +use by Ben Jonson; the metre of <cite>Christabel</cite> in minor +Elizabethan poetry; the peculiar form of Fitzgerald's translation +of <cite>Omar Khayyam</cite> followed by so many imitators since, +itself to be the actual reflection of the rough metrical scheme of +his Persian original. But such a study, though it is profitable and +interesting, can never lead to the whole truth. As we saw in the +beginning of this book, in the matter of the Renaissance, every age +of discovery and re-birth has its double aspect. It is a revolution +in style and language, an age of literary experiment and +achievement, but its experiments are dictated by the excitement of +a new subject-matter, and that subject-matter is so much in the +air, so impalpable and universal that it eludes analysis. Only you +can be sure that it is this weltering contagion of new ideas, and +new thought—the "Zeitgeist," the spirit of the age, or +whatever you may call it—that is the essential and +controlling force. Literary loans and imports give the forms into +which it can be moulded, but without them it would still exist, and +they are only the means by which a spirit which is in life itself, +and which expresses itself in action, and in concrete human +achievement, gets itself into the written word. The romantic +revival numbers Napoleon amongst its leaders as well as Byron, +Wellington, Pitt and Wilberforce, as well as Keats and Wordsworth. +Only the literary manifestations of the time concern us here, but +it is important to remember that the passion for simplification and +for a return to nature as a refuge from the artificial complexities +of society, which inspired the <cite>Lyrical Ballads</cite>, +inspired no less the course of the Revolution in France, and later, +the destruction by Napoleon of the smaller feudal states of +Germany, which made possible German nationality and a national +spirit.</p> +<p>In this romantic revival, however, the revolution in form and +style matters more than in most. The classicism of the previous age +had been so fixed and immutable; it had been enthroned in high +places, enjoyed the esteem of society, arrogated to itself the +acceptance which good breeding and good manners demanded. Dryden +had been a Court poet, careful to change his allegiance with the +changing monarchy. Pope had been the equal and intimate of the +great people of his day, and his followers, if they did not enjoy +the equality, enjoyed at any rate the patronage of many noble +lords. The effect of this was to give the prestige of social usage +to the verse in which they wrote and the language they used. "There +was," said Dr. Johnson, "before the time of Dryden no poetical +diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of +domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to +particular arts. Words too familiar or too remote to defeat the +purpose of a poet." This poetic diction, refined from the grossness +of domestic use, was the standard poetic speech of the eighteenth +century. The heroic couplet in which it was cast was the standard +metre. So that the first object of the revolt of the romantics was +the purely literary object of getting rid of the vice of an unreal +and artificial manner of writing. They desired simplicity of +style.</p> +<p>When the <cite>Lyrical Ballads</cite> of Wordsworth and +Coleridge were published in 1798, the preface which Wordsworth +wrote as their manifesto hardly touched at all on the poetic +imagination or the attitude of the poet to life and nature. The +only question is that of diction. "The majority of the following +poems," he writes, "are to be considered as experiments. They were +written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of +conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted +to the purposes of poetic pleasure." And in the longer preface to +the second edition, in which the theories of the new school on the +nature and methods of the poetic imagination are set forth at +length, he returns to the same point. "The language too, of these +men (that is those in humble and rustic life) has been adopted ... +because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from +which the best part of language is originally derived, and because +from their rank in society, and the sameness and narrow circle of +their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity, +they convey their feelings and notions in simple unelaborated +expressions." Social vanity—the armour which we wear to +conceal our deepest thoughts and feelings—that was what +Wordsworth wished to be rid of, and he chose the language of the +common people, not because it fitted, as an earlier school of poets +who used the common speech had asserted, the utterance of habitual +feeling and common sense, but because it is the most sincere +expression of the deepest and rarest passion. His object was the +object attained by Shakespeare in some of his supremest moments; +the bare intolerable force of the speeches after the murder of +Macbeth, or of King Lear's</p> +<div class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">"Do not laugh +at me,</span><br> +For as I am a man, I think this lady<br> +To be my child Cordelia."</div> +<p>Here, then, was one avenue of revolt from the tyranny of +artificiality, the getting back of common speech into poetry. But +there was another, earlier and more potent in its effect. The +eighteenth century, weary of its own good sense and sanity, turned +to the Middle Ages for picturesqueness and relief. Romance of +course, had not been dead in all these years, when Pope and Addison +made wit and good sense the fashionable temper for writing. There +was a strong romantic tradition in the eighteenth century, though +it does not give its character to the writing of the time. Dr. +Johnson was fond of old romances. When he was in Skye he amused +himself by thinking of his Scottish tour as the journey of a +knight-errant. "These fictions of the Gothic romances," he said, +"are not so remote from credibility as is commonly supposed." It is +a mistake to suppose that the passion for mediaevalism began with +either Coleridge or Scott. Horace Walpole was as enthusiastic as +either of them; good eighteenth century prelates like Hurd and +Percy, found in what they called the Gothic an inexhaustible source +of delight. As was natural, what attracted them in the Middle Ages +was not their resemblances to the time they lived in, but the +points in which the two differed. None of them had knowledge +enough, or insight enough, to conceive or sympathize with the +humanity of the thirteenth century, to shudder at its cruelties and +hardnesses and persecutions, or to comprehend the spiritual +elevation and insight of its rarest minds. "It was art," said +William Morris, "art in which all men shared, that made life +romantic as people called it in those days. That and not robber +barons, and inaccessible kings, with their hierarchy of serving +nobles, and other rubbish." Morris belonged to a time which knew +its middle ages better. To the eighteenth century the robber barons +and the "other rubbish" were the essence of romance. For Percy and +his followers, medievalism was a collection of what actors call +"properties" gargoyles, and odds and ends of armour and castle +keeps with secret passages, banners and gay colours, and gay +shimmering obsolete words. Mistaking what was on its surface at any +rate a subtle and complex civilization, for rudeness and +quaintness, they seemed to themselves to pass back into a freer +air, where any extravagance was possible, and good breeding and +mere circumspection and restraint vanished like the wind.</p> +<p>A similar longing to be rid of the precision and order of +everyday life drove them to the mountains, and to the literature of +Wales and the Highlands, to Celtic, or pseudo-Celtic romance. To +the fashion of the time mountains were still frowning and horrid +steeps; in Gray's Journal of his tour in the Lakes, a new +understanding and appreciation of nature is only struggling +through; and when mountains became fashionable, it was at first and +remained in part at least, till the time of Byron, for those very +theatrical qualities which had hitherto put them in abhorrence. +Wordsworth, in his <cite>Lines written above Tintern Abbey</cite>, +in which he sets forth the succeeding stages of his mental +development, refers to this love of the mountains for their +spectacular qualities, as the first step in the progress of his +mind to poetic maturity:</p> +<div class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">"The sounding +cataract</span><br> +Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,<br> +The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood,<br> +Their colours and their forms were then to me<br> +An appetite."</div> +<p>This same passion for the "sounding cataract" and the "tall +rock," this appetite for the deep and gloomy wood, gave its vogue +in Wordsworth's boyhood to Macpherson's <cite>Ossian</cite>, a book +which whether it be completely fraudulent or not, was of capital +importance in the beginnings of the romantic movement.</p> +<p>The love of mediaeval quaintness and obsolete words, however, +led to a more important literary event—the publication of +Bishop Percy's edition of the ballads in the Percy folio—the +<cite>Reliques of Ancient Poetry</cite>. Percy to his own mind knew +the Middle Ages better than they knew themselves, and he took care +to dress to advantage the rudeness and plainness of his originals. +Perhaps we should not blame him. Sir Walter Scott did the same with +better tact and skill in his Border minstrelsy, and how many +distinguished editors are there, who have tamed and smoothed down +the natural wildness and irregularity of Blake? But it is more +important to observe that when Percy's reliques came to have their +influence on writing his additions were imitated as much as the +poems on which he grafted them. Chatterton's <cite>Rowley +Poems</cite>, which in many places seem almost inconceivably banal +and artificial to us to-day, caught their accent from the episcopal +editor as much as from the ballads themselves. None the less, +whatever its fault, Percy's collection gave its impetus to one half +of the romantic movement; it was eagerly read in Germany, and when +it came to influence Scott and Coleridge it did so not only +directly, but through Burger's imitation of it; it began the modern +study and love of the ballad which has given us <cite>Sister +Helen</cite>, the <cite>White Ship</cite> and the <cite>Lady of +Shalott</cite>.</p> +<p>But the romantic revival goes deeper than any change, however +momentous of fashion or style. It meant certain fundamental changes +in human outlook. In the first place, one notices in the authors of +the time an extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility; +the mind at its countless points of contact with the sensuous world +and the world of thought, seems to become more alive and alert. It +is more sensitive to fine impressions, to finely graded shades of +difference. Outward objects and philosophical ideas seem to +increase in their content and their meaning, and acquire a new +power to enrich the intensest life of the human spirit. Mountains +and lakes, the dignity of the peasant, the terror of the +supernatural, scenes of history, mediaeval architecture and armour, +and mediaeval thought and poetry, the arts and mythology of +Greece—all became springs of poetic inspiration and poetic +joy. The impressions of all these things were unfamiliar and +ministered to a sense of wonder, and by that very fact they were +classed as romantic, as modes of escape from a settled way of life. +But they were also in a sense familiar too. The mountains made +their appeal to a deep implanted feeling in man, to his native +sense of his own worth and dignity and splendour as a part of +nature, and his recognition of natural scenery as necessary, and in +its fullest meaning as sufficient for his spiritual needs. They +called him back from the artificiality and complexity of the cities +he had built for himself, and the society he had weaved round him, +to the natural world in which Providence had planted him of old, +and which was full of significance for his soul. The greatest poets +of the romantic revival strove to capture and convey the influence +of nature on the mind, and of the mind on nature interpenetrating +one another. They were none the less artists because they +approached nature in a state of passive receptivity. They believed +in the autocracy of the individual imagination none the less +because their mission was to divine nature and to understand her, +rather than to correct her profusions in the name of art.</p> +<p>In the second place the romantic revival meant a development of +the historical sense. Thinkers like Burke and Montesquieu helped +students of politics to acquire perspective; to conceive modern +institutions not as things separate, and separately created, but as +conditioned by, and evolved from, the institutions of an earlier +day. Even the revolutionary spirit of the time looked both before +and after, and took history as well as the human perfectibility +imagined by philosophers into its purview. In France the reformers +appealed in the first instance for a States General—a +mediaeval institution—as the corrective of their wrongs, and +later when they could not, like their neighbours in Belgium, demand +reform by way of the restoration of their historical rights, they +were driven to go a step further back still, beyond history to what +they conceived to be primitive society, and demand the rights of +man. This development of the historical sense, which had such a +widespread influence on politics, got itself into literature in the +creation of the historical novel. Scott and Chateaubriand revived +the old romance in which by a peculiar ingenuity of form, the +adventures of a typical hero of fiction are cast in a historical +setting and set about with portraits of real personages. The +historical sense affected, too, novels dealing with contemporary +life. Scott's best work, his novels of Scottish character, catch +more than half their excellence from the richness of colour and +proportion which the portraiture of the living people acquires when +it is aided by historical knowledge and imagination.</p> +<p>Lastly, besides this awakened historical sense, and this +quickening of imaginative sensibility to the message of nature, the +Romantic revival brought to literature a revival of the sense of +the connection between the visible world and another world which is +unseen. The supernatural which in all but the crudest of mechanisms +had been out of English literature since <cite>Macbeth</cite>, took +hold on the imaginations of authors, and brought with it a new +subtlety and a new and nameless horror and fascination. There is +nothing in earlier English literature to set beside the strange and +terrible indefiniteness of the <cite>Ancient Mariner</cite>, and +though much in this kind has been written since, we have not got +far beyond the skill and imagination with which Coleridge and Scott +worked on the instinctive fears that lie buried in the human +mind.</p> +<p>Of all these aspects of the revival, however, the new +sensitiveness and accessibility to the influences of external +nature was the most pervasive and the most important. Wordsworth +speaks for the love that is in homes where poor men lie, the daily +teaching that is in</p> +<div class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 5.5em;">"Woods and +rills;</span><br> +The silence that is in the starry sky,<br> +The peace that is among the lonely hills."</div> +<br> +Shelley for the wildness of the west wind, and the ubiquitous +spiritual emotion which speaks equally in the song of a skylark or +a political revolution. Byron for the swing and roar of the sea. +Keats for verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. Scott and +Coleridge, though like Byron they are less with nature than with +romance, share the same communion.<br> +<br> +<p>This imaginative sensibility of the romantics not only deepened +their communion with nature, it brought them into a truer relation +with what had before been created in literature and art. The +romantic revival is the Golden Age of English criticism; all the +poets were critics of one sort or another—either formally in +essays and prefaces, or in passing and desultory flashes of +illumination in their correspondence. Wordsworth, in his prefaces, +in his letter to a friend of Burns which contains such a breadth +and clarity of wisdom on things that seem alien to his sympathies, +even in some of his poems; Coleridge, in his <cite>Biographia +Literaria</cite>, in his notes on Shakespeare, in those rhapsodies +at Highgate which were the basis for his recorded table talk; Keats +in his letters; Shelley in his <cite>Defence of Poetry</cite>; +Byron in his satires and journals; Scott in those lives of the +novelists which contain so much truth and insight into the works of +fellow craftsmen—they are all to be found turning the new +acuteness of impression which was in the air they breathed, to the +study of literature, as well as to the study of nature. Alongside +of them were two authors, Lamb and Hazlitt, whose bent was rather +critical than creative, and the best part of whose intelligence and +sympathy was spent on the sensitive and loving divination of our +earlier literature. With these two men began the criticism of +acting and of pictorial art that have developed since into two of +the main kinds of modern critical writing.</p> +<p>Romantic criticism, both in its end and its method, differs +widely from that of Dr. Johnson and his school. Wordsworth and +Coleridge were concerned with deep-seated qualities and +temperamental differences. Their critical work revolved round their +conception of the fancy and the imagination, the one dealing with +nature on the surface and decorating it with imagery, the other +penetrating to its deeper significances. Hazlitt and Lamb applied +their analogous conception of wit as a lower quality than humour, +in the same fashion. Dr. Johnson looked on the other hand for +correctness of form, for the subordination of the parts to the +whole, for the self-restraint and good sense which common manners +would demand in society, and wisdom in practical life. His school +cared more for large general outlines than for truth in detail. +They would not permit the idiosyncrasy of a personal or individual +point of view: hence they were incapable of understanding lyricism, +and they preferred those forms of writing which set themselves to +express the ideas and feelings that most men may be supposed to +have in common. Dr. Johnson thought a bombastic and rhetorical +passage in Congreve's <cite>Mourning Bride</cite> better than the +famous description of Dover cliff in <cite>King Lear</cite>. "The +crows, sir," he said of the latter, "impede your fall." Their town +breeding, and possibly, as we saw in the case of Dr. Johnson, an +actual physical disability, made them distrust any clear and +sympathetic rendering of the sense impressions which nature +creates. One cannot imagine Dr. Johnson caring much for the minute +observations of Tennyson's nature poems, or delighting in the +verdurous and mossy alleys of Keats. His test in such a case would +be simple; he would not have liked to have been in such places, nor +reluctantly compelled to go there would he in all likelihood have +had much to say about them beyond that they were damp. For the +poetry—such as Shelley's—which worked by means of +impalpable and indefinite suggestion, he would, one may conceive, +have cared even less. New modes of poetry asked of critics new +sympathies and a new way of approach. But it is time to turn to the +authors themselves.</p> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>The case of Wordsworth is peculiar. In his own day he was +vilified and misunderstood; poets like Byron, whom most of us would +now regard simply as depending from the school he created, sneered +at him. Shelley and Keats failed to understand him or his motives; +he was suspected of apostasy, and when he became poet laureate he +was written off as a turn-coat who had played false to the ideals +of his youth. Now common opinion regards him as a poet above all +the others of his age, and amongst all the English poets standing +beside Milton, but a step below Shakespeare himself—and we +know more about him, more about the processes by which his soul +moved from doubts to certainties, from troubles to triumph, than we +do about any other author we have. This knowledge we have from the +poem called, <cite>The Prelude</cite>, which was published after +his death. It was designed to be only the opening and explanatory +section of a philosophical poem, which was never completed. Had it +been published earlier it would have saved Wordsworth from the +coldness and neglect he suffered at the hands of younger men like +Shelley; it might even have made their work different from what it +is. It has made Wordsworth very clear to us now.</p> +<p>Wordsworth is that rarest thing amongst poets, a complete +innovator. He looked at things in a new way. He found his subjects +in new places; and he put them into a new poetic form. At the +turning point of his life, in his early manhood, he made one great +discovery, had one great vision. By the light of that vision and to +communicate that discovery he wrote his greatest work. By and by +the vision faded, the world fell back into the light of common day, +his philosophy passed from discovery to acceptance, and all unknown +to him his pen fell into a common way of writing. The faculty of +reading which has added fuel to the fire of so many waning +inspirations was denied him. He was much too self-centred to lose +himself in the works of others. Only the shock of a change of +environment—a tour in Scotland, or abroad—shook him +into his old thrill of imagination, so that a few fine things +fitfully illumine the enormous and dreary bulk of his later work. +If we lost all but the <cite>Lyrical Ballads</cite>, the poems of +1804, and the <cite>Prelude</cite>, and the <cite>Excursion</cite>, +Wordsworth's position as a poet would be no lower than it is now, +and he would be more readily accepted by those who still find +themselves uncertain about him.</p> +<p>The determining factor in his career was the French +Revolution—that great movement which besides re-making France +and Europe, made our very modes of thinking anew. While an +undergraduate in Cambridge Wordsworth made several vacation visits +to France. The first peaceful phase of the Revolution was at its +height; France and the assembly were dominated by the little group +of revolutionary orators who took their name from the south-western +province from which most of them came, and with this +group—the Girondists—Wordsworth threw in his lot. Had +he remained he would probably have gone with them to the +guillotine. As it was, the commands of his guardian brought him +back to England, and he was forced to contemplate from a distance +the struggle in which he burned to take an active part. One is +accustomed to think of Wordsworth as a mild old man, but such a +picture if it is thrown back as a presentment of the Wordsworth of +the nineties is a far way from the truth. This darkly passionate +man tortured himself with his longings and his horror. War came and +the prayers for victory in churches found him in his heart praying +for defeat; then came the execution of the king; then the plot +which slew the Gironde. Before all this Wordsworth trembled as +Hamlet did when he learned the ghost's story. His faith in the +world was shaken. First his own country had taken up arms against +what he believed to be the cause of liberty. Then faction had +destroyed his friends whom he believed to be its standard bearers. +What was in the world, in religion, in morality that such things +could be? In the face of this tremendous problem, Wordsworth, +unlike Hamlet, was resolute and determined. It was, perhaps, +characteristic of him that in his desire to get his feet on firm +rock again he fled for a time to the exactest of sciences—to +mathematics. But though he got certainties there, they must have +been, one judges, certainties too arid for his thirsting mind. Then +he made his great discovery—helped to it, perhaps, by his +sister Dorothy and his friend Coleridge—he found nature, and +in nature, peace.</p> +<p>Not a very wonderful discovery, you will say, but though the +cleansing and healing force of natural surroundings on the mind is +a familiar enough idea in our own day, that is only because +Wordsworth found it. When he gave his message to the world it was a +new message. It is worth while remembering that it is still an +unaccepted one. Most of his critics still consider it only +Wordsworth's fun when he wrote:</p> +<div class="poem">"One impulse from the vernal wood<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Can teach us more of +man,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Of moral evil and of +good,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Than all the sages +can."</span></div> +<br> +Yet Wordsworth really believed that moral lessons and ideas were to +be gathered from trees and stones. It was the main part of his +teaching. He claimed that his own morality had been so furnished +him, and he wrote his poetry to convince other people that what had +been true for him could be true for them too.<br> +<br> +<p>For him life was a series of impressions, and the poet's duty +was to recapture those impressions, to isolate them and brood over +them, till gradually as a result of his contemplation emotion +stirred again—an emotion akin to the authentic thrill that +had excited him when the impression was first born in experience. +Then poetry is made; this emotion "recollected" as Wordsworth said +(we may add, recreated) "in tranquillity" passes into enduring +verse. He treasured numberless experiences of this kind in his own +life. Some of them are set forth in the <cite>Prelude</cite>, that +for instance on which the poem <cite>The Thorn</cite> in the +<cite>Lyrical Ballads</cite> is based; they were one or other of +them the occasion of most of his poems; the best of them produced +his finest work—such a poem for instance as <cite>Resolution +and Independence</cite> or <cite>Gipsies</cite>, where some chance +sight met with in one of the poet's walks is brooded over till it +becomes charged with a tremendous significance for him and for all +the world. If we ask how he differentiated his experiences, which +had most value for him, we shall find something deficient. That is +to say, things which were unique and precious to him do not always +appear so to his readers. He counted as gold much that we regard as +dross. But though we may differ from his judgments, the test which +he applied to his recollected impressions is clear. He attached +most value to those which brought with them the sense of an +indwelling spirit, transfusing and interpenetrating all nature, +transfiguring with its radiance, rocks and fields and trees and the +men and women who lived close enough to them to partake of their +strength—the sense, as he calls it in his <cite>Lines above +Tintern Abbey</cite> of something "more deeply interfused" by which +all nature is made one. Sometimes, as in the hymn to Duty, it is +conceived as law. Duty before whom the flowers laugh, is the +daughter of the voice of God, through whom the most ancient heavens +are fresh and strong. But in most of his poems its ends do not +trouble; it is omnipresent; it penetrates everything and +transfigures everything; it is God. It was Wordsworth's belief that +the perception of this indwelling spirit weakened as age grew. For +a few precious and glorious years he had the vision</p> +<div class="poem">"When meadow, grove, and stream,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The earth, and every common +sight</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">To me did seem</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Apparelled in celestial +light,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">The glory and the freshness of a +dream."</span></div> +<br> +Then as childhood, when "these intimations of immortality," this +perception of the infinite are most strong, passed further and +further away, the vision faded and he was left gazing in the light +of common day. He had his memories and that was all.<br> +<br> +<p>There is, of course, more in the matter than this, and +Wordsworth's beliefs were inextricably entangled with the +conception which Coleridge borrowed from German philosophy.</p> +<div class="poem">"We receive but what we give"</div> +<br> +wrote Coleridge to his friend,<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"And in our life alone doth Nature live."</div> +<br> +And Wordsworth came to know that the light he had imagined to be +bestowed, was a light reflected from his own mind. It is easy to +pass from criticism to metaphysics where Coleridge leads, and wise +not to follow.<br> +<br> +<p>If Wordsworth represents that side of the Romantic Revival which +is best described as the return to Nature, Coleridge has +justification for the phrase "Renascence of Wonder." He revived the +supernatural as a literary force, emancipated it from the crude +mechanism which had been applied to it by dilettantes like Horace +Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe, and invested it instead with that air +of suggestion and indefiniteness which gives the highest potency to +it in its effect on the imagination. But Coleridge is more +noteworthy for what he suggested to others than for what he did in +himself. His poetry is, even more than Wordsworth's, unequal; he is +capable of large tracts of dreariness and flatness; he seldom +finished what he began. The <cite>Ancient Mariner</cite>, indeed, +which was the fruit of his close companionship with Wordsworth, is +the only completed thing of the highest quality in the whole of his +work. <cite>Christabel</cite> is a splendid fragment; for years the +first part lay uncompleted and when the odd accident of an +evening's intoxication led him to commence the second, the +inspiration had fled. For the second part, by giving to the fairy +atmosphere of the first a local habitation and a name, robbed it of +its most precious quality; what it gave in exchange was something +the public could get better from Scott. <cite>Kubla Khan</cite> +went unfinished because the call of a friend broke the thread of +the reverie in which it was composed. In the end came opium and +oceans of talk at Highgate and fouled the springs of poetry. +Coleridge never fulfilled the promise of his early days with +Wordsworth. "He never spoke out." But it is on the lines laid down +by his share in the pioneer work rather than on the lines of +Wordsworth's that the second generation of Romantic +poets—that of Shelley and Keats—developed.</p> +<p>The work of Wordsworth was conditioned by the French Revolution +but it hardly embodied the revolutionary spirit. What he conceived +to be its excesses revolted him, and though he sought and sang +freedom, he found it rather in the later revolt of the +nationalities against the Revolution as manifested in Napoleon +himself. The spirit of the revolution, as it was understood in +France and in Europe, had to wait for Shelley for its complete +expression. Freedom is the breath of his work—freedom not +only from the tyranny of earthly powers, but from the tyranny of +religion, expressing itself in republicanism, in atheism, and in +complete emancipation from the current moral code both in conduct +and in writing. The reaction which had followed the overthrow of +Napoleon at Waterloo, sent a wave of absolutism and repression all +over Europe, Italy returned under the heel of Austria; the Bourbons +were restored in France; in England came the days of Castlereagh +and Peterloo. The poetry of Shelley is the expression of what the +children of the revolution—men and women who were brought up +in and believed the revolutionary gospel—thought about these +things.</p> +<p>But it is more than that. Of no poet in English, nor perhaps in +any other tongue, could it be said with more surety, that the +pursuit of the spirit of beauty dominates all his work. For Shelley +it interfused all nature and to possess it was the goal of all +endeavour. The visible world and the world of thought mingle +themselves inextricably in his contemplation of it. For him there +is no boundary-line between the two, the one is as real and actual +as the other. In his hands that old trick of the poets, the simile, +takes on a new and surprising form. He does not enforce the +creations of his imagination by the analogy of natural appearances; +his instinct is just the opposite—to describe and illumine +nature by a reference to the creatures of thought. Other poets, +Keats for instance, or Tennyson, or the older poets like Dante and +Homer, might compare ghosts flying from an enchanter like leaves +flying before the wind. They might describe a poet wrapped up in +his dreams as being like a bird singing invisible in the brightness +of the sky. But Shelley can write of the west wind as</p> +<div class="poem">"Before whose unseen presence the leaves, +dead,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Are driven like ghosts from an +enchanter fleeing,"</span></div> +<br> +and he can describe a skylark in the heavens as<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Like a poet hidden<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">In the light of +thought."</span></div> +<p>Of all English poets he is the most completely lyrical. Nothing +that he wrote but is wrought out of the anguish or joy of his own +heart.</p> +<div class="poem">"Most wretched souls,"</div> +<br> +he writes<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Are cradled into poetry by wrong<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">They learn in suffering what they +teach in song."</span></div> +<br> +Perhaps his work is too impalpable and moves in an air too +rarefied. It sometimes lacks strength. It fails to take grip enough +of life. Had he lived he might have given it these things; there +are signs in his last poems that he would have given it. But he +could hardly have bettered the sheer and triumphant lyricism of +<cite>The Skylark</cite>, of some of his choruses, and of the +<cite>Ode to Dejection</cite>, and of the <cite>Lines written on +the Eugenoen hills</cite>.<br> +<br> +<p>If the Romantic sense of the one-ness of nature found its +highest exponent in Shelley, the Romantic sensibility to outward +impressions reached its climax in Keats. For him life is a series +of sensations, felt with almost febrile acuteness. Records of sight +and touch and smell crowd every line of his work; the scenery of a +garden in Hampstead becomes like a landscape in the tropics, so +extraordinary vivid and detailed is his apprehension and enjoyment +of what it has to give him. The luxuriance of his sensations is +matched by the luxuriance of his powers of expression. Adjectives +heavily charged with messages for the senses, crowd every line of +his work, and in his earlier poems overlay so heavily the thought +they are meant to convey that all sense of sequence and structure +is apt to be smothered under their weight. Not that consecutive +thought claims a place in his conception of his poetry. His ideal +was passive contemplation rather than active mental exertion. "O +for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts," he exclaims in +one of his letters; and in another, "It is more noble to sit like +Jove than to fly like Mercury." His work has one message and one +only, the lastingness of beauty and its supreme truth. It is stated +in <cite>Endymion</cite> in lines that are worn bare with +quotation. It is stated again, at the height of his work in his +greatest ode,</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Beauty is truth, truth beauty: that is all<br> +We know on earth and all we need to know."</div> +<br> +His work has its defects; he died at twenty-six so it would be a +miracle if it were not so. He lacks taste and measure; he offends +by an over-luxuriousness and sensuousness; he fails when he is +concerned with flesh and blood; he is apt, as Mr. Robert Bridges +has said, "to class women with roses and sweetmeats." But in his +short life he attained with surprising rapidity and completeness to +poetic maturity, and perhaps from no other poet could we find +things to match his greatest—<cite>Hyperion, Isabella</cite>, +the <cite>Eve of St. Agnes</cite> and the <cite>Odes</cite>.<br> +<br> +<p>There remains a poet over whom opinion is more sharply divided +than it is about any other writer in English. In his day Lord Byron +was the idol, not only of his countrymen, but of Europe. Of all the +poets of the time he was, if we except Scott, whose vogue he +eclipsed, the only one whose work was universally known and +popular. Everybody read him; he was admired not only by the +multitude and by his equals, but by at least one who was his +superior, the German poet Goethe, who did not hesitate to say of +him that he was the greatest talent of the century Though this +exalted opinion still persists on the Continent, hardly anyone +could be found in England to subscribe to it now. Without +insularity, we may claim to be better judges of authors in our own +tongue than foreign critics, however distinguished and +comprehending. How then shall be explained Lord Byron's instant +popularity and the position he won? What were the qualities which +gave him the power he enjoyed?</p> +<p>In the first place he appealed by virtue of his +subject-matter—the desultory wanderings of <cite>Childe +Harold</cite> traversed ground every mile of which was memorable to +men who had watched the struggle which had been going on in Europe +with scarcely a pause for twenty years. Descriptive journalism was +then and for nearly half a century afterwards unknown, and the poem +by its descriptiveness, by its appeal to the curiosity of its +readers, made the same kind of success that vividly written special +correspondence would to-day, the charm of metre super-added. Lord +Byron gave his readers something more, too, than mere description. +He added to it the charm of a personality, and when that +personality was enforced by a title, when it proclaimed its sorrows +as the age's sorrows, endowed itself with an air of symbolism and +set itself up as a kind of scapegoat for the nation's sins, its +triumph was complete. Most men have from time to time to resist the +temptation to pose to themselves; many do not even resist it. For +all those who chose to believe themselves blighted by pessimism, +and for all the others who would have loved to believe it, Byron +and his poetry came as an echo of themselves. Shallow called to +shallow. Men found in him, as their sons found more reputably in +Tennyson, a picture of what they conceived to be the state of their +own minds.</p> +<p>But he was not altogether a man of pretence. He really and +passionately loved freedom; no one can question his sincerity in +that. He could be a fine and scathing satirist; and though he was +careless, he had great poetic gifts.</p> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>The age of the Romantic Revival was one of poetry rather than of +prose; it was in poetry that the best minds of the time found their +means of expression. But it produced prose of rare quality too, and +there is delightful reading in the works of its essayists and +occasional writers. In its form the periodical essay had changed +little since it was first made popular by Addison and Steele. It +remained, primarily, a vehicle for the expression of a personality, +and it continued to seek the interests of its readers by creating +or suggesting an individuality strong enough to carry off any +desultory adventure by the mere force of its own attractiveness. +Yet there is all the difference in the world between Hazlitt and +Addison, or Lamb and Steele. The <cite>Tatler</cite> and the +<cite>Spectator</cite> leave you with a sense of artifice; Hazlitt +and Lamb leave you with a grip of a real personality—in the +one case very vigorous and combative, in the other set about with a +rare plaintiveness and gentleness, but in both absolutely sincere. +Addison is gay and witty and delightful but he only plays at being +human; Lamb's essays—the translation into print of a heap of +idiosyncrasies and oddities, and likes and dislikes, and strange +humours—come straight and lovably from a human soul.</p> +<p>The prose writers of the romantic movement brought back two +things into writing which had been out of it since the seventeenth +century. They brought back egotism and they brought back +enthusiasm. They had the confidence that their own tastes and +experiences were enough to interest their readers; they mastered +the gift of putting themselves on paper. But there is one wide +difference between them and their predecessors. Robert Burton was +an egotist but he was an unconscious one; the same is, perhaps, +true though much less certainly of Sir Thomas Browne. In Lamb and +Hazlitt and De Quincey egotism was deliberate, consciously assumed, +the result of a compelling and shaping art. If one reads Lamb's +earlier essays and prose pieces one can see the process at +work—watch him consciously imitating Fuller, or Burton, or +Browne, mirroring their idiosyncrasies, making their quaintnesses +and graces his own. By the time he came to write the <cite>Essays +of Elia</cite>, he had mastered the personal style so completely +that his essays seem simply the overflow of talk. They are so +desultory; they move from one subject to another so +waywardly—such an essay as a <cite>Chapter on Ears</cite>, +for instance, passing with the easy inconsequence of conversation +from anatomy through organ music to beer—when they quote, as +they do constantly, it is incorrectly, as in the random +reminiscences of talk. Here one would say is the cream risen to the +surface of a full mind and skimmed at one taking. How far all this +is from the truth we know—know, too, how for months he +polished and rewrote these magazine articles, rubbing away +roughnesses and corners, taking off the traces of logical sequences +and argument, till in the finished work of art he mimicked +inconsequence so perfectly that his friends might have been +deceived. And the personality he put on paper was partly an +artistic creation, too. In life Lamb was a nervous, easily +excitable and emotional man; his years were worn with the memory of +a great tragedy and the constantly impending fear of a repetition +of it. One must assume him in his way to have been a good man of +business—he was a clerk in the India House, then a throbbing +centre of trade, and the largest commercial concern in England, and +when he retired his employers gave him a very handsome pension. In +the early portrait by Hazlitt there is a dark and gleaming look of +fire and decision. But you would never guess it from his books. +There he is the gentle recluse, dreaming over old books, old +furniture, old prints, old plays and play-bills; living always in +the past, loving in the town secluded byways like the Temple, or +the libraries of Oxford Colleges, and in the country quiet and +shaded lanes, none of the age's enthusiasm for mountains in his +soul. When he turned critic it was not to discern and praise the +power and beauty in the works of his contemporaries but to +rediscover and interpret the Elizabethan and Jacobean romantic +plays.</p> +<p>This quality of egotism Lamb shares with other writers of the +time, with De Quincey, for instance, who left buried in work which +is extensive and unequal, much that lives by virtue of the singular +elaborateness and loftiness of the style which he could on occasion +command. For the revival of enthusiasm one must turn to Hazlitt, +who brought his passionate and combative disposition to the service +of criticism, and produced a series of studies remarkable for their +earnestness and their vigour, and for the essential justness which +they display despite the prejudice on which each of them was +confessedly based.</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_VIII"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2> +<br> +<h3>THE VICTORIAN AGE</h3> +<h4>(1)</h4> +<p>Had it not been that with two exceptions all the poets of the +Romantic Revival died early, it might be more difficult to draw a +line between their school and that of their successors than it is. +As it happened, the only poet who survived and wrote was +Wordsworth, the oldest of them all. For long before his death he +did nothing that had one touch of the fire and beauty of his +earlier work. The respect he began, after a lifetime of neglect, to +receive in the years immediately before his death, was paid not to +the conservative laureate of 1848, but to the revolutionary in art +and politics of fifty years before. He had lived on long after his +work was done</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">That blamed the living +man."</span></div> +<br> +All the others, Keats, Shelley, Byron were dead before 1830, and +the problem which might have confronted us had they lived, of adult +work running counter to the tendencies and ideals of youth, does +not exist for us. Keats or Shelley might have lived as long as +Carlyle, with whom they were almost exactly contemporary; had they +done so, the age of the Romantic Revival and the Victorian age +would have been united in the lives of authors who were working in +both. We should conceive that is, the whole period as one, just as +we conceive of the Renaissance in England, from Surrey to Shirley, +as one. As it is, we have accustomed ourselves to a strongly marked +line of division. A man must be on either one side or the other; +Wordsworth, though he wrote on till 1850, is on the further side, +Carlyle, though he was born in the same year as Keats, on the +hither side. Still the accident of length of days must not blind us +to the fact that the Victorian period, though in many respects its +ideals and modes of thinking differed from those of the period +which preceded it, is essentially an extension of the Romantic +Revival and not a fresh start. The coherent inspiration of +romanticism disintegrated into separate lines of development, just +as in the seventeenth century the single inspiration of the +Renaissance broke into different schools. Along these separate +lines represented by such men as Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, +Arnold, and Meredith, literature enriched and elaborated itself +into fresh forms. None the less, every author in each of these +lines of literary activity invites his readers to understand his +direct relations to the romantic movement. Rossetti touches it +through his original, Keats; Arnold through Goethe and Byron; +Browning first through Shelley and then in item after item of his +varied subject-matter.<br> +<br> +<p>In one direction the Victorian age achieved a salient and +momentous advance. The Romantic Revival had been interested in +nature, in the past, and in a lesser degree in art, but it had not +been interested in men and women. To Wordsworth the dalesmen of the +lakes were part of the scenery they moved in; he saw men as trees +walking, and when he writes about them as in such great poems as +<cite>Resolution and Independence</cite>, the +<cite>Brothers</cite>, or <cite>Michael</cite>, it is as natural +objects he treats them, invested with the lonely remoteness that +separates them from the complexities and passions of life as it is +lived. They are there, you feel, to teach the same lesson as the +landscape teaches in which they are set. The passing of the old +Cumberland beggar through villages and past farmsteads, brings to +those who see him the same kind of consolation as the impulses from +a vernal wood that Wordsworth celebrated in his purely nature +poetry. Compare with Wordsworth, Browning, and note the fundamental +change in the attitude of the poet that his work reveals. +<cite>Pippa Passes</cite> is a poem on exactly the same scheme as +the <cite>Old Cumberland Beggar</cite>, but in treatment no two +things could be further apart. The intervention of Pippa is +dramatic, and though her song is in the same key as the wordless +message of Wordsworth's beggar she is a world apart from him, +because she is something not out of natural history, but out of +life. The Victorian age extended the imaginative sensibility which +its predecessor had brought to bear on nature and history, to the +complexities of human life. It searched for individuality in +character, studied it with a loving minuteness, and built up out of +its discoveries amongst men and women a body of literature which in +its very mode of conception was more closely related to life, and +thus the object of greater interest and excitement to its readers, +than anything which had been written in the previous ages. It is +the direct result of this extension of romanticism that the novel +became the characteristic means of literary expression of the time, +and that Browning, the poet who more than all others represents the +essential spirit of his age, should have been as it were, a +novelist in verse. Only one other literary form, indeed, could have +ministered adequately to this awakened interest, but by some luck +not easy to understand, the drama, which might have done with +greater economy and directness the work the novel had to do, +remained outside the main stream of literary activity. To the drama +at last it would seem that we are returning, and it may be that in +the future the direct representation of the clash of human life +which is still mainly in the hands of our novelists, may come back +to its own domain.</p> +<p>The Victorian age then added humanity to nature and art as the +subject-matter of literature. But it went further than that. For +the first time since the Renaissance, came an era which was +conscious of itself as an epoch in the history of mankind, and +confident of its mission. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries +revolutionized cosmography, and altered the face of the physical +world. The nineteenth century, by the discoveries of its men of +science, and by the remarkable and rapid succession of inventions +which revolutionized the outward face of life, made hardly less +alteration in accepted ways of thinking. The evolutionary theory, +which had been in the air since Goethe, and to which Darwin was +able to give an incontrovertible basis of scientific fact, +profoundly influenced man's attitude to nature and to religion. +Physical as apart from natural science made scarcely less advance, +and instead of a world created in some fixed moment of time, on +which had been placed by some outward agency all the forms and +shapes of nature that we know, came the conception of a planet +congealing out of a nebula, and of some lower, simpler and primeval +form of life multiplying and diversifying itself through succeeding +stages of development to form both the animal and the vegetable +world. This conception not only enormously excited and stimulated +thought, but it gave thinkers a strange sense of confidence and +certainty not possessed by the age before. Everything seemed plain +to them; they were heirs of all the ages. Their doubts were as +certain as their faith.</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"There lives more faith in honest doubt<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Believe me than in half the +creeds."</span></div> +<br> +said Tennyson; "honest doubt," hugged with all the certainty of a +revelation, is the creed of most of his philosophical poetry, and +what is more to the point was the creed of the masses that were +beginning to think for themselves, to whose awakening interest his +work so strongly appealed. There were no doubt, literary +side-currents. Disraeli survived to show that there were still +young men who thought Byronically. Rossetti and his school held +themselves proudly aloof from the rationalistic and scientific +tendencies of the time, and found in the Middle ages, better +understood than they had been either by Coleridge or Scott, a +refuge from a time of factories and fact. The Oxford movement +ministered to the same tendencies in religion and philosophy; but +it is the scientific spirit, and all that the scientific spirit +implied, its certain doubt, its care for minuteness, and truth of +observation, its growing interest in social processes, and the +conditions under which life is lived, that is the central fact in +Victorian literature.<br> +<br> +<p>Tennyson represents more fully than any other poet this +essential spirit of the age. If it be true, as has been often +asserted, that the spirit of an age is to be found best in the work +of lesser men, his complete identity with the thought of his time +is in itself evidence of his inferiority to his contemporary, +Browning. Comparison between the two men seem inevitable; they were +made by readers when <cite>In Memoriam</cite> and <cite>Men and +Women</cite> came hot from the press, and they have been made ever +since. There could, of course, scarcely be two men more dissimilar, +Tennyson elaborating and decorating the obvious; Browning delving +into the esoteric and the obscure, and bringing up strange and +unfamiliar finds; Tennyson in faultless verse registering current +newly accepted ways of thought; Browning in advance thinking afresh +for himself, occupied ceaselessly in the arduous labour of creating +an audience fit to judge him. The age justified the accuracy with +which Tennyson mirrored it, by accepting him and rejecting +Browning. It is this very accuracy that almost forces us at this +time to minimise and dispraise Tennyson's work. We have passed from +Victorian certainties, and so he is apt when he writes in the mood +of <cite>Locksley Hall</cite> and the rest, to appear to us a +little shallow, a little empty, and a little pretentious.</p> +<p>His earlier poetry, before he took upon himself the burden of +the age, is his best work, and it bears strongly marked upon it the +influence of Keats. Such a poem for instance as <cite>Oenone</cite> +shows an extraordinarily fine sense of language and melody, and the +capacity caught from Keats of conveying a rich and highly coloured +pictorial effect. No other poet, save Keats, has had a sense of +colour so highly developed as Tennyson's. From his boyhood he was +an exceedingly close and sympathetic observer of the outward forms +of nature, and he makes a splendid use of what his eyes had taught +him in these earlier poems. Later his interest in insects and birds +and flowers outran the legitimate opportunity he possessed of using +it in poetry. It was his habit, his son tells us, to keep notebooks +of things he had observed in his garden or in his walks, and to +work them up afterwards into similes for the <cite>Princess</cite> +and the <cite>Idylls of the King</cite>. Read in the books written +by admirers, in which they have been studied and collected (there +are several of them) these similes are pleasing enough; in the text +where they stand they are apt to have the air of impertinences, +beautiful and extravagant impertinences no doubt, but alien to +their setting. In one of the <cite>Idylls of the King</cite> the +fall of a drunken knight from his horse is compared to the fall of +a jutting edge of cliff and with it a lance-like fir-tree, which +Tennyson had observed near his home, and one cannot resist the +feeling that the comparison is a thought too great for the thing it +was meant to illustrate. So, too, in the <cite>Princess</cite> when +he describes a handwriting,</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"In such a hand as when a field of corn<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Bows all its ears before the +roaring East."</span></div> +<br> +he is using up a sight noted in his walks and transmuted into +poetry on a trivial and frivolous occasion. You do not feel, in +fact, that the handwriting visualized spontaneously called up the +comparison; you are as good as certain that the simile existed +waiting for use before the handwriting was thought of.<br> +<br> +<p>The accuracy of his observation of nature, his love of birds and +larvae is matched by the carefulness with which he embodies, as +soon as ever they were made, the discoveries of natural and +physical science. Nowadays, possibly because these things have +become commonplace to us, we may find him a little school-boy-like +in his pride of knowledge. He knows that</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"This world was once a fluid haze of light,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Till toward the centre set the +starry tides</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And eddied wild suns that +wheeling cast</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The planets."</span></div> +<br> +just as he knows what the catkins on the willows are like, or the +names of the butterflies: but he is capable, on occasion of +"dragging it in," as in<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"The nebulous star we call the sun,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">If that hypothesis of theirs be +sound."</span></div> +<br> +from the mere pride in his familiarity with the last new thing. His +dealings with science, that is, no more than his dealings with +nature, have that inevitableness, that spontaneous appropriateness +that we feel we have a right to ask from great poetry.<br> +<br> +<p>Had Edgar Allan Poe wanted an example for his theory of the +impossibility of writing, in modern times, a long poem, he might +have found it in Tennyson. His strength is in his shorter pieces; +even where as in <cite>In Memoriam</cite> he has conceived and +written something at once extended and beautiful, the beauty lies +rather in the separate parts; the thing is more in the nature of a +sonnet sequence than a continuous poem. Of his other larger works, +the <cite>Princess</cite>, a scarcely happy blend between burlesque +in the manner of the <cite>Rape of the Lock</cite>, and a serious +apostleship of the liberation of women, is solely redeemed by these +lyrics. Tennyson's innate conservatism hardly squared with the +liberalising tendencies he caught from the more advanced thought of +his age, in writing it. Something of the same kind is true of +<cite>Maud</cite>, which is a novel told in dramatically varied +verse. The hero is morbid, his social satire peevish, and a story +which could have been completely redeemed by the ending (the death +of the hero), which artistic fitness demands, is of value for us +now through its three amazing songs, in which the lyric genius of +Tennyson reached its finest flower. It cannot be denied, either, +that he failed—though magnificently—in the <cite>Idylls +of the King</cite>. The odds were heavily against him in the choice +of a subject. Arthur is at once too legendary and too shadowy for +an epic hero, and nothing but the treatment that Milton gave to +Satan (i.e. flat substitution of the legendary person by a newly +created character) could fit him for the place. Even if Arthur had +been more promising than he is, Tennyson's sympathies were +fundamentally alien from the moral and religious atmosphere of +Arthurian romance. His robust Protestantism left no room for +mysticism; he could neither appreciate nor render the mystical +fervour and exultation which is in the old history of the Holy +Grail. Nor could he comprehend the morality of a society where +courage, sympathy for the oppressed, loyalty and courtesy were the +only essential virtues, and love took the way of freedom and the +heart rather than the way of law. In his heart Tennyson's attitude +to the ideals of chivalry and the old stories in which they are +embodied differed probably very little from that of Roger Ascham, +or of any other Protestant Englishman; when he endeavoured to make +an epic of them and to fasten to it an allegory in which Arthur +should typify the war of soul against sense, what happened was only +what might have been expected. The heroic enterprise failed, and +left us with a series of mid-Victorian novels in verse in which the +knights figure as heroes of the generic mid-Victorian type.</p> +<p>But if he failed in his larger poems, he had a genius little +short of perfect in his handling of shorter forms. The Arthurian +story which produced only middling moralizing in the +<cite>Idylls</cite>, gave us as well the supremely written Homeric +episode of the <cite>Morte d'Arthur</cite>, and the sharp and +defined beauty of <cite>Sir Galahad</cite> and the <cite>Lady of +Shallott</cite>. Tennyson had a touch of the pre-Raphaelite faculty +of minute painting in words, and the writing of these poems is as +clear and naïve as in the best things of Rossetti. He had also +what neither Rossetti nor any of his contemporaries in verse, +except Browning, had, a fine gift of understanding humanity. The +peasants of his English idylls are conceived with as much breadth +of sympathy and richness of humour, as purely and as surely, as the +peasants of Chaucer or Burns. A note of passionate humanity is +indeed in all his work. It makes vivid and intense his scholarly +handling of Greek myth; always the unchanging human aspect of it +attracts him most, in Oenone's grief, in the indomitableness of +Ulysses, the weariness and disillusionment in Tithonus. It has been +the cause of the comfort he has brought to sorrow; none of his +generation takes such a human attitude to death. Shelley could +yearn for the infinite, Browning treat it as the last and greatest +adventure, Arnold meet it clear eyed and resigned. To Wordsworth it +is the mere return of man the transient to Nature the eternal.</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"No motion has she now; no force,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">She neither hears nor +sees,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Roiled round in earth's diurnal +course</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">With rocks and stones and +trees."</span></div> +<br> +To Tennyson it brings the fundamental human home-sickness for +familiar things.<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"Ah, sad and strange as on dark summer dawns,<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The earliest pipe of +half-awakened birds</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">To dying ears when unto dying +eyes</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">The casement slowly grows a +glimmering square."</span></div> +<br> +It is an accent which wakes an echo in a thousand hearts.<br> +<br> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>While Tennyson, in his own special way and, so to speak, in +collaboration with the spirit of the age, was carrying on the work +of Romanticism on its normal lines, Browning was finding a new +style and a new subject matter. In his youth he had begun as an +imitator of Shelley, and <cite>Pauline</cite> and +<cite>Paracelsus</cite> remain to show what the influence of the +"sun-treader" was on his poetry. But as early as his second +publication, <cite>Bells and Pomegranates</cite>, he had begun to +speak for himself, and with <cite>Men and Women</cite>, a series of +poems of amazing variety and brilliance, he placed himself +unassailably in the first rank. Like Tennyson's, his genius +continued high and undimmed while life was left him. <cite>Men and +Women</cite> was followed by an extraordinary narrative poem, +<cite>The Ring and the Book</cite>, and it by several volumes of +scarcely less brilliance, the last of which appeared on the very +day of his death.</p> +<p>Of the two classes into which, as we saw when we were studying +Burns, creative artists can be divided, Browning belongs to that +one which makes everything new for itself, and has in consequence +to educate the readers by whom its work can alone be judged. He was +an innovator in nearly everything he did; he thought for himself; +he wrote for himself, and in his own way. And because he refused to +follow ordinary modes of writing, he was and is still widely +credited with being tortured and obscure.[<a href="#note-7">7</a>] +The charge of obscurity is unfortunate because it tends to shut off +from him a large class of readers for whom he has a sane and +special and splendid message.</p> +<p>His most important innovation in form was his device of the +dramatic lyric. What interested him in life was men and women, and +in them, not their actions, but the motives which governed their +actions. To lay bare fully the working of motive in a narrative +form with himself as narrator was obviously impossible; the strict +dramatic form, though he attained some success in it, does not seem +to have attracted him, probably because in it the ultimate stress +must be on the thing done rather than the thing thought; there +remained, therefore, of the ancient forms of poetry, the lyric. The +lyric had of course been used before to express emotions imagined +and not real to the poet himself; Browning was the first to project +it to express imagined emotions of men and women, whether typical +or individual, whom he himself had created. Alongside this +perversion of the lyric, he created a looser and freer form, the +dramatic monologue, in which most of his most famous poems, +<cite>Cleon, Sludge the Medium, Bishop Blougram's Apology</cite>, +etc., are cast. In the convention which Browning established in it, +all kinds of people are endowed with a miraculous articulation, a +new gift of tongues; they explain themselves, their motives, the +springs of those motives (for in Browning's view every thought and +act of a man's life is part of an interdependent whole), and their +author's peculiar and robust philosophy of life. Out of the +dramatic monologues he devised the scheme of <cite>The Ring and the +Book</cite>, a narrative poem in which the episodes, and not the +plot, are the basis of the structure, and the story of a trifling +and sordid crime is set forth as it appeared to the minds of the +chief actors in succession. To these new forms he added the +originality of an extraordinary realism in style. Few poets have +the power by a word, a phrase, a flash of observation in detail to +make you see the event as Browning makes you see it.</p> +<p>Many books have been written on the philosophy of Browning's +poetry. Stated briefly its message is that of an optimism which +depends on a recognition of the strenuousness of life. The base of +his creed, as of Carlyle's, is the gospel of labour; he believes in +the supreme moral worth of effort. Life is a "training school" for +a future existence, and our place in it depends on the courage and +strenuousness with which we have laboured here. Evil is in the +world only as an instrument in the process of development; by +conquering it we exercise our spiritual faculties the more. Only +torpor is the supreme sin, even as in <cite>The Statue and the +Bust</cite> where effort would have been to a criminal end.</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"The counter our lovers staked was lost<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">As surely as if it were lawful +coin:</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And the sin I impute to each +frustrate ghost</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Was, the unlit lamp and the +ungirt loin,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Though the end in sight was a +crime, I say."</span></div> +<br> +All the other main ideas of his poetry fit with perfect consistency +on to his scheme. Love, the manifestation of a man's or a woman's +nature, is the highest and most intimate relationship possible, for +it is an opportunity—the highest opportunity—for +spiritual growth. It can reach this end though an actual and +earthly union is impossible.<br> +<br> +<div class="poem">"She has lost me, I have gained her;<br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Her soul's mine and thus grown +perfect,</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">I shall pass my life's +remainder.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Life will just hold out the +proving</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Both our powers, alone and +blended:</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">And then come the next life +quickly!</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">This world's use will have been +ended."</span></div> +<br> +It follows that the reward of effort is the promise of immortality, +and that for each man, just because his thoughts and motives taken +together count, and not one alone, there is infinite hope.<br> +<br> +<p>The contemporaries of Tennyson and Browning in poetry divide +themselves into three separate schools. Nearest to them in temper +is the school of Matthew Arnold and Clough; they have the same +quick sensitiveness to the intellectual tendencies of the age, but +their foothold in a time of shifting and dissolving creeds is a +stoical resignation very different from the buoyant optimism of +Browning, or Tennyson's mixture of science and doubt and faith. +Very remote from them on the other hand is the backward-gazing +mediaevalism of Rossetti and his circle, who revived (Rossetti from +Italian sources, Morris from Norman) a Middle age which neither +Scott nor Coleridge had more than partially and brokenly +understood. The last school, that to which Swinburne and Meredith +with all their differences unite in belonging, gave up Christianity +with scarcely so much as a regret,</p> +<br> +<div class="poem">"We have said to the dream that caress'd and the +dread that smote us,<br> +Good-night and good-bye."</div> +<br> +and turned with a new hope and exultation to the worship of our +immemorial mother the earth. In both of them, the note of +enthusiasm for political liberty which had been lost in Wordsworth +after 1815, and was too early extinguished with Shelley, was +revived by the Italian Revolution in splendour and fire.<br> +<br> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>As one gets nearer one's own time, a certain change comes +insensibly over one's literary studies. Literature comes more and +more to mean imaginative literature or writing about imaginative +literature. The mass of writing comes to be taken not as +literature, but as argument or information; we consider it purely +from the point of view of its subject matter. A comparison will +make this at once clear. When a man reads Bacon, he commonly +regards himself as engaged in the study of English literature; when +he reads Darwin he is occupied in the study of natural science. A +reader of Bacon's time would have looked on him as we look on +Darwin now.</p> +<p>The distinction is obviously illogical, but a writer on English +literature within brief limits is forced to bow to it if he wishes +his book to avoid the dreariness of a summary, and he can plead in +extenuation the increased literary output of the later age, and the +incompleteness with which time so far has done its work in sifting +the memorable from the forgettable, the ephemeral from what is +going to last. The main body of imaginative prose +literature—the novel—is treated of in the next chapter +and here no attempt will be made to deal with any but the +admittedly greatest names. Nothing can be said, for instance, of +that fluent journalist and biased historian Macaulay, nor of the +mellifluousness of Newman, nor of the vigour of Kingsley or +Maurice; nor of the writings, admirable in their literary qualities +of purity and terseness, of Darwin or Huxley; nor of the culture +and apostleship of Matthew Arnold. These authors, one and all, +interpose no barrier, so to speak, between their subject-matter and +their readers; you are not when you read them conscious of a +literary intention, but of some utilitarian one, and as an essay on +English literature is by no means a handbook to serious reading +they will be no more mentioned here.</p> +<p>In the case of one nineteenth century writer in prose, this +method of exclusion cannot apply. Both Carlyle and Ruskin were +professional men of letters; both in the voluminous compass of +their works touched on a large variety of subjects; both wrote +highly individual and peculiar styles; and both without being +either professional philosophers or professional preachers, were as +every good man of letters, whether he denies it or not, is and must +be, lay moralists and prophets. Of the two Ruskin is plain and +easily read, and he derives his message; Carlyle, his original, is +apt to be tortured and obscure. Inside the body of his work the +student of nineteenth century literature is probably in need of +some guidance; outside so far as prose is concerned he can fend for +himself.</p> +<p>As we saw, Carlyle was the oldest of the Victorians; he was over +forty when the Queen came to the throne. Already his years of +preparation in Scotland, town and country, were over, and he had +settled in that famous little house in Chelsea which for nearly +half a century to come was to be one of the central hearths of +literary London. More than that, he had already fully formed his +mode of thought and his peculiar style. <cite>Sartor +Resartus</cite> was written and published serially before the Queen +came to the throne; the <cite>French Revolution</cite> came in the +year of her accession at the very time that Carlyle's lectures were +making him a fashionable sensation; most of his miscellaneous +essays had already appeared in the reviews. But with the strict +Victorian era, as if to justify the usually arbitrary division of +literary history by dynastic periods, there came a new spirit into +his work. For the first time he applied his peculiar system of +ideas to contemporary politics. <cite>Chartism</cite> appeared in +1839; <cite>Past and Present</cite>, which does the same thing as +<cite>Chartism</cite> in an artistic form, three years later. They +were followed by one other book—<cite>Latter Day +Pamphlets</cite>—addressed particularly to contemporary +conditions, and by two remarkable and voluminous historical works. +Then came the death of his wife, and for the last fifteen years of +his life silence, broken only briefly and at rare intervals.</p> +<p>The reader who comes to Carlyle with preconceived notions based +on what he has heard of the subject-matter of his books is certain +to be surprised by what he finds. There are histories in the canon +of his works and pamphlets on contemporary problems, but they are +composed on a plan that no other historian and no other social +reformer would own. A reader will find in them no argument, next to +no reasoning, and little practical judgment. Carlyle was not a +great "thinker" in the strictest sense of that term. He was under +the control, not of his reason, but of his emotions; deep feeling, +a volcanic intensity of temperament flaming into the light and heat +of prophecy, invective, derision, or a simple splendour of +eloquence, is the characteristic of his work. Against cold-blooded +argument his passionate nature rose in fierce rebellion; he had no +patience with the formalist or the doctrinaire. Nor had he the +faculty of analysis; his historical works are a series of pictures +or tableaux, splendidly and vividly conceived, and with enormous +colour and a fine illusion of reality, but one-sided as regards the +truth. In his essays on hero-worship he contents himself with a +noisy reiteration of the general predicate of heroism; there is +very little except their names and the titles to differentiate one +sort of hero from another. His picture of contemporary conditions +is not so much a reasoned indictment as a wild and fantastic orgy +of epithets: "dark simmering pit of Tophet," "bottomless universal +hypocrisies," and all the rest. In it all he left no practical +scheme. His works are fundamentally not about politics or history +or literature, but about himself. They are the exposition of a +splendid egotism, fiercely enthusiastic about one or two deeply +held convictions; their strength does not lie in their matter of +fact.</p> +<p>This is, perhaps, a condemnation of him in the minds of those +people who ask of a social reformer an actuarially accurate scheme +for the abolition of poverty, or from a prophet a correct forecast +of the result of the next general election. Carlyle has little help +for these and no message save the disconcerting one of their own +futility. His message is at once larger and simpler, for though his +form was prose, his soul was a poet's soul, and what he has to say +is a poet's word. In a way, it is partly Wordsworth's own. The +chief end of life, his message is, is the performance of duty, +chiefly the duty of work. "Do thy little stroke of work; this is +Nature's voice, and the sum of all the commandments, to each man." +All true work is religion, all true work is worship; to labour is +to pray. And after work, obedience the best discipline, so he says +in <cite>Past and Present</cite>, for governing, and "our universal +duty and destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break." Carlyle +asked of every man, action and obedience and to bow to duty; he +also required of him sincerity and veracity, the duty of being a +real and not a sham, a strenuous warfare against cant. The +historical facts with which he had to deal he grouped under these +embracing categories, and in the <cite>French Revolution</cite>, +which is as much a treasure-house of his philosophy as a history, +there is hardly a page on which they do not appear. "Quack-ridden," +he says, "in that one word lies all misery whatsoever."</p> +<p>These bare elemental precepts he clothes in a garment of amazing +and bizarre richness. There is nothing else in English faintly +resembling the astonishing eccentricity and individuality of his +style. Gifted with an extraordinarily excitable and vivid +imagination; seeing things with sudden and tremendous vividness, as +in a searchlight or a lightning flash, he contrived to convey to +his readers his impressions full charged with the original emotion +that produced them, and thus with the highest poetic effect. There +is nothing in all descriptive writing to match the vividness of +some of the scenes in the <cite>French Revolution</cite> or in the +narrative part of <cite>Cromwell's Letters and Speeches</cite>, or +more than perhaps in any of his books, because in it he was setting +down deep-seated impressions of his boyhood rather than those got +from brooding over documents, in <cite>Sartor Resartus</cite>. +Alongside this unmatched pictorial vividness and a quite amazing +richness and rhythm of language, more surprising and original than +anything out of Shakespeare, there are of course, striking +defects—a wearisome reiteration of emphasis, a clumsiness of +construction, a saddening fondness for solecisms and hybrid +inventions of his own. The reader who is interested in these (and +every one who reads him is forced to become so) will find them +faithfully dealt with in John Sterling's remarkable letter (quoted +in Carlyle's <cite>Life of Sterling</cite>) on <cite>Sartor +Resartus</cite>. But gross as they are, and frequently as they +provide matter for serious offence, these eccentricities of +language link themselves up in a strange indissoluble way with +Carlyle's individuality and his power as an artist. They are not to +be imitated, but he would be much less than he is without them, and +they act by their very strength and pungency as a preservative of +his work. That of all the political pamphlets which the new era of +reform occasioned, his, which were the least in sympathy with it +and are the furthest off the main stream of our political thinking +now, alone continue to be read, must be laid down not only to the +prophetic fervour and fire of their inspiration but to the dark and +violent magic of their style.</p> +<h4>Footnotes</h4> +<p><a name="note-7"><!-- Note Anchor 7 --></a>[Footnote 7: The +deeper causes of Browning's obscurity have been detailed in Chapter +iv. of this book. It may be added for the benefit of the reader who +fights shy on the report of it, that in nine cases out of ten, it +arises simply from his colloquial method; we go to him expecting +the smoothness and completeness of Tennyson; we find in him the +irregularities, the suppressions, the quick changes of +talk—the clipped, clever talk of much idea'd people who hurry +breathlessly from one aspect to another of a subject.]</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_IX"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2> +<br> +<h3>THE NOVEL</h3> +<h4>(1)</h4> +<p>The faculty for telling stories is the oldest artistic faculty +in the world, and the deepest implanted in the heart of man. Before +the rudest cave-pictures were scratched on the stone, the +story-teller, it is not unreasonable to suppose, was plying his +trade. All early poetry is simply story-telling in verse. Stories +are the first literary interest of the awakening mind of a child. +As that is so, it is strange that the novel, which of all literary +ways of story-telling seems closest to the unstudied tale-spinning +of talk, should be the late discovery that it is. Of all the main +forms into which the literary impulse moulds the stuff of +imagination, the novel is the last to be devised. The drama dates +from prehistoric times, so does the epic, the ballad and the lyric. +The novel, as we know it, dates practically speaking from 1740. +What is the reason it is so late in appearing?</p> +<p>The answer is simply that there seems no room for good drama and +good fiction at the same time in literature; drama and novels +cannot exist side by side, and the novel had to wait for the +decadence of the drama before it could appear and triumph. If one +were to make a table of succession for the various kinds of +literature as they have been used naturally and spontaneously (not +academically), the order would be the epic, the drama, the novel; +and it would be obvious at once that the order stood for something +more than chronological succession, and that literature in its +function as a representation and criticism of life passed from form +to form in the search of greater freedom, greater subtlety, and +greater power. At present we seem to be at the climax of the third +stage in this development; there are signs that the fourth is on +the way, and that it will be a return to drama, not to the old, +formal, ordered kind, but, something new and freer, ready to gather +up and interpret what there is of newness and freedom in the spirit +of man and the society in which he lives.</p> +<p>The novel, then, had to wait for the drama's decline, but there +was literary story-telling long before that. There were mediaeval +romances in prose and verse; Renaissance pastoral tales, and +stories of adventure; collections, plenty of them, of short stories +like Boccaccio's, and those in Painter's <cite>Palace of +Pleasure</cite>. But none of these, not even romances which deal in +moral and sententious advice like <cite>Euphues</cite>, approach +the essence of the novel as we know it. They are all (except +<cite>Euphues</cite>, which is simply a framework of travel for a +book of aphorisms) simple and objective; they set forth incidents +or series of incidents; long or short they are anecdotes +only—they take no account of character. It was impossible we +should have the novel as distinct from the tale, till stories +acquired a subjective interest for us; till we began to think about +character and to look at actions not only outwardly, but within at +their springs.</p> +<p>As has been stated early in this book, it was in the seventeenth +century that this interest in character was first wakened. +Shakespeare had brought to the drama, which before him was +concerned with actions viewed outwardly, a psychological interest; +he had taught that "character is destiny," and that men's actions +and fates spring not from outward agencies, but from within in +their own souls. The age began to take a deep and curious interest +in men's lives; biography was written for the first time and +autobiography; it is the great period of memoir-writing both in +England and France; authors like Robert Burton came, whose delight +it was to dig down into human nature in search for oddities and +individualities of disposition; humanity as the great subject of +enquiry for all men, came to its own. All this has a direct bearing +on the birth of the novel. One transient form of literature in the +seventeenth century—the Character—is an ancestor in the +direct line. The collections of them—Earle's +<cite>Microcosmography</cite> is the best—are not very +exciting reading, and they never perhaps quite succeeded in +naturalizing a form borrowed from the later age of Greece, but +their importance in the history of the novel to come is clear. Take +them and add them to the story of adventure—<em>i.e.</em>, +introduce each fresh person in your plot with a description in the +character form, and the step you have made towards the novel is +enormous; you have given to plot which was already there, the added +interest of character.</p> +<p>That, however, was not quite how the thing worked in actual +fact. At the heels of the "Character" came the periodical essay of +Addison and Steele. Their interest in contemporary types was of the +same quality as Earle's or Hall's, but they went a different way to +work. Where these compressed and cultivated a style which was +staccato and epigrammatic, huddling all the traits of their subject +in short sharp sentences that follow each other with all the +brevity and curtness of items in a prescription, Addison and Steele +observed a more artistic plan. They made, as it were, the +prescription up, adding one ingredient after another slowly as the +mixture dissolved. You are introduced to Sir Roger de Coverley, and +to a number of other typical people, and then in a series of essays +which if they were disengaged from their setting would be to all +intents a novel and a fine one, you are made aware one by one of +different traits in his character and those of his friends, each +trait generally enshrined in an incident which illustrates it; you +get to know them, that is, gradually, as you would in real life, +and not all in a breath, in a series of compressed statements, as +is the way of the character writers. With the Coverley essays in +the <cite>Spectator</cite>, the novel in one of its +forms—that in which an invisible and all knowing narrator +tells a story in which some one else whose character he lays bare +for us is the hero—is as good as achieved.</p> +<p>Another manner of fiction—the autobiographical—had +already been invented. It grew directly out of the public interest +in autobiography, and particularly in the tales of their voyages +which the discoverers wrote and published on their return from +their adventures. Its establishment in literature was the work of +two authors, Bunyan and Defoe. The books of Bunyan, whether they +are told in the first person or no, are and were meant to be +autobiographical; their interest is a subjective interest. Here is +a man who endeavours to interest you, not in the character of some +other person he has imagined or observed, but in himself. His +treatment of it is characteristic of the awakening talent for +fiction of his time. <cite>The Pilgrim's Progress</cite> is begun +as an allegory, and so continues for a little space till the story +takes hold of the author. When it does, whether he knew it or not, +allegory goes to the winds. But the autobiographical form of +fiction in its highest art is the creation of Defoe. He told +stories of adventure, incidents modelled on real life as many +tellers of tales had done before him, but to the form as he found +it he super-added a psychological interest—the interest of +the character of the narrator. He contrived to observe in his +writing a scrupulous and realistic fidelity and appropriateness to +the conditions in which the story was to be told. We learn about +Crusoe's island, for instance, gradually just as Crusoe learns of +it himself, though the author is careful by taking his narrator up +to a high point of vantage the day after his arrival, that we shall +learn the essentials of it, as long as verisimilitude is not +sacrificed, as soon as possible. It is the paradox of the English +novel that these our earliest efforts in fiction were meant, unlike +the romances which preceded them, to pass for truth. Defoe's +<cite>Journal of the Plague Year</cite> was widely taken as literal +fact, and it is still quoted as such occasionally by rash though +reputable historians. So that in England the novel began with +realism as it has culminated, and across two centuries Defoe and +the "naturalists" join hands. Defoe, it is proper also in this +place to notice, fixed the peculiar form of the historical novel. +In his <cite>Memoirs of a Cavalier</cite>, the narrative of an +imaginary person's adventures in a historical setting is +interspersed with the entrance of actual historical personages, +exactly the method of historical romancing which was brought to +perfection by Sir Walter Scott.</p> +<br> +<h4>(2)</h4> +<p>In the eighteenth century came the decline of the drama for +which the novel had been waiting. By 1660 the romantic drama of +Elizabeth's time was dead; the comedy of the Restoration which +followed, witty and brilliant though it was, reflected a society +too licentious and artificial to secure it permanence; by the time +of Addison play-writing had fallen to journey-work, and the theatre +to openly expressed contempt. When Richardson and Fielding +published their novels there was nothing to compete with fiction in +the popular taste. It would seem as though the novel had been +waiting for this favourable circumstance. In a sudden burst of +prolific inventiveness, which can be paralleled in all letters only +by the period of Marlowe and Shakespeare, masterpiece after +masterpiece poured from the press. Within two generations, besides +Richardson and Fielding came Sterne and Goldsmith and Smollett and +Fanny Burney in naturalism, and Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe +in the new way of romance. Novels by minor authors were published +in thousands as well. The novel, in fact, besides being the +occasion of literature of the highest class, attracted by its +lucrativeness that under-current of journey-work authorship which +had hitherto busied itself in poetry or plays. Fiction has been its +chief occupation ever since.</p> +<p>Anything like a detailed criticism or even a bare narrative of +this voluminous literature is plainly impossible without the limits +of a single chapter. Readers must go for it to books on the +subject. It is possible here merely to draw attention to those +authors to whom the English novel as a more or less fixed form is +indebted for its peculiar characteristics. Foremost amongst these +are Richardson and Fielding; after them there is Walter Scott. +After him, in the nineteenth century, Dickens and Meredith and Mr. +Hardy; last of all the French realists and the new school of +romance. To one or other of these originals all the great authors +in the long list of English novelists owe their method and their +choice of subject-matter.</p> +<p>With Defoe fiction gained verisimilitude, it ceased to deal with +the incredible; it aimed at exhibiting, though in strange and +memorable circumstances, the workings of the ordinary mind. It is +Richardson's main claim to fame that he contrived a form of novel +which exhibited an ordinary mind working in normal circumstances, +and that he did this with a minuteness which till then had never +been thought of and has not since been surpassed. His talent is +very exactly a microscopical talent; under it the common stuff of +life separated from its surroundings and magnified beyond previous +knowledge, yields strange and new and deeply interesting sights. He +carried into the study of character which had begun in Addison with +an eye to externals and eccentricities, a minute faculty of +inspection which watched and recorded unconscious mental and +emotional processes.</p> +<p>To do this he employed a method which was, in effect, a +compromise between that of the autobiography, and that of the tale +told by an invisible narrator. The weakness of the autobiography is +that it can write only of events within the knowledge of the +supposed speaker, and that consequently the presentation of all but +one of the characters of the book is an external presentation. We +know, that is, of Man Friday only what Crusoe could, according to +realistic appropriateness, tell us about him. We do not know what +he thought or felt within himself. On the other hand the method of +invisible narration had not at his time acquired the faculty which +it possesses now of doing Friday's thinking aloud or exposing fully +the workings of his mind. So that Richardson, whose interests were +psychological, whose strength and talent lay in the presentation of +the states of mind appropriate to situations of passion or +intrigue, had to look about him for a new form, and that form he +found in the novel of letters. In a way, if the end of a novel be +the presentation not of action, but of the springs of action; if +the external event is in it always of less importance than the +emotions which conditioned it, and the emotions which it set +working, the novel of letters is the supreme manner for fiction. +Consider the possibilities of it; there is a series of events in +which A, B, and C are concerned. Not only can the outward events be +narrated as they appeared to all three separately by means of +letters from each to another, or to a fourth party, but the motives +of each and the emotions which each experiences as a result of the +actions of the others or them all, can be laid bare. No other +method can wind itself so completely into the psychological +intricacies and recesses which lie behind every event. Yet the +form, as everybody knows, has not been popular; even an expert +novel-reader could hardly name off-hand more than two or three +examples of it since Richardson's day. Why is this? Well, chiefly +it is because the mass of novelists have not had Richardson's +knowledge of, or interest in, the psychological under side of life, +and those who have, as, amongst the moderns, Henry James, have +devised out of the convention of the invisible narrator a method by +which they can with greater economy attain in practice fairly good +results. For the mere narration of action in which the study of +character plays a subsidiary part, it was, of course, from the +beginning impossible. Scott turned aside at the height of his power +to try it in "Redgauntlet"; he never made a second attempt.</p> +<p>For Richardson's purpose, it answered admirably, and he used it +with supreme effect. Particularly he excelled in that side of the +novelist's craft which has ever since (whether because he started +it or not) proved the subtlest and most attractive, the +presentation of women. Richardson was one of those men who are not +at their ease in other men's society, and whom other men, to put it +plainly, are apt to regard as coxcombs and fools. But he had a +genius for the friendship and confidence of women. In his youth he +wrote love-letters for them. His first novel grew out of a plan to +exhibit in a series of letters the quality of feminine virtue, and +in its essence (though with a ludicrous, and so to speak +"kitchen-maidish" misunderstanding of his own sex) adheres to the +plan. His second novel, which designs to set up a model man against +the monster of iniquity in <cite>Pamela</cite>, is successful only +so far as it exhibits the thoughts and feelings of the heroine whom +he ultimately marries. His last, <cite>Clarissa Harlowe</cite> is a +masterpiece of sympathetic divination into the feminine mind. +<cite>Clarissa</cite> is, as has been well said, the "Eve of +fiction, the prototype of the modern heroine"; feminine psychology +as good as unknown before (Shakespeare's women being the "Fridays" +of a highly intelligent Crusoe) has hardly been brought further +since. But <cite>Clarissa</cite> is more than mere psychology; +whether she represents a contemporary tendency or whether +Richardson made her so, she starts a new epoch. "This," says +Henley, "is perhaps her finest virtue as it is certainly her +greatest charm; that until she set the example, woman in literature +as a self-suffering individuality, as an existence endowed with +equal rights to independence—of choice, volition, +action—with man had not begun to be." She had not begun to be +it in life either.</p> +<p>What Richardson did for the subtlest part of a novelist's +business, his dealings with psychology, Fielding did for the most +necessary part of it, the telling of the story. Before him hardly +any story had been told well; even if it had been plain and clear +as in Bunyan and Defoe it had lacked the emphasis, the light and +shade of skilful grouping. On the "picaresque" (so the +autobiographical form was called abroad) convention of a journey he +grafted a structure based in its outline on the form of the ancient +epic. It proved extraordinarily suitable for his purpose. Not only +did it make it easy for him to lighten his narrative with +excursions in a heightened style, burlesquing his origins, but it +gave him at once the right attitude to his material. He told his +story as one who knew everything; could tell conversations and +incidents as he conceived them happening, with no violation of +credibility, nor any strain on his reader's imagination, and +without any impropriety could interpose in his own person, pointing +things to the reader which might have escaped his attention, +pointing at parallels he might have missed, laying bare the irony +or humour beneath a situation. He allowed himself digressions and +episodes, told separate tales in the middle of the action, +introduced, as in Partridge's visit to the theatre, the added +piquancy of topical allusion; in fact he did anything he chose. And +he laid down that free form of the novel which is +characteristically English, and from which, in its essence, no one +till the modern realists has made a serious departure.</p> +<p>In the matter of his novels, he excels by reason of a +Shakespearean sense of character and by the richness and rightness +of his faculty of humour. He had a quick eye for contemporary +types, and an amazing power of building out of them men and women +whose individuality is full and rounded. You do not feel as you do +with Richardson that his fabric is spun silk-worm-wise out of +himself; on the contrary you know it to be the fruit of a gentle +and observant nature, and a stock of fundamental human sympathy. +His gallery of portraits, Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams, Parson +Trulliber, Jones, Blifil, Partridge, Sophia and her father and all +the rest are each of them minute studies of separate people; they +live and move according to their proper natures; they are conceived +not from without but from within. Both Richardson and Fielding were +conscious of a moral intention; but where Richardson is +sentimental, vulgar, and moral only so far as it is moral (as in +<cite>Pamela</cite>), to inculcate selling at the highest price or +(as in <cite>Grandison</cite>) to avoid temptations which never +come in your way, Fielding's morality is fresh and healthy, and +(though not quite free from the sentimentality of scoundrelism) at +bottom sane and true. His knowledge of the world kept him right. +His acquaintance with life is wide, and his insight is keen and +deep. His taste is almost as catholic as Shakespeare's own, and the +life he knew, and which other men knew, he handles for the first +time with the freedom and imagination of an artist.</p> +<p>Each of the two—Fielding and Richardson—had his host +of followers. Abroad Richardson won immediate recognition; in +France Diderot went so far as to compare him with Homer and Moses! +He gave the first impulse to modern French fiction. At home, less +happily, he set going the sentimental school, and it was only when +that had passed away that—in the delicate and subtle +character-study of Miss Austen—his influence comes to its +own. Miss Austen carried a step further, and with an observation +which was first hand and seconded by intuitive knowledge, +Richardson's analysis of the feminine mind, adding to it a delicate +and finely humorous feeling for character in both sexes which was +all her own. Fielding's imitators (they number each in his own way, +and with his own graces or talent added his rival Smollett, Sterne, +and Goldsmith) kept the way which leads to Thackeray and +Dickens—the main road of the English Novel.</p> +<p>That road was widened two ways by Sir Walter Scott. The +historical novel, which had been before his day either an essay in +anachronism with nothing historical in it but the date, or a +laborious and uninspired compilation of antiquarian research, took +form and life under his hands. His wide reading, stored as it was +in a marvellously retentive memory, gave him all the background he +needed to achieve a historical setting, and allowed him to +concentrate his attention on the actual telling of his story; to +which his genial and sympathetic humanity and his quick eye for +character gave a humorous depth and richness that was all his own. +It is not surprising that he made the historical novel a literary +vogue all over Europe. In the second place, he began in his novels +of Scottish character a sympathetic study of nationality. He is +not, perhaps, a fair guide to contemporary conditions; his +interests were too romantic and too much in the past to catch the +rattle of the looms that caught the ear of Galt, and if we want a +picture of the great fact of modern Scotland, its +industrialisation, it is to Galt we must go. But in his +comprehension of the essential character of the people he has no +rival; in it his historical sense seconded his observation, and the +two mingling gave us the pictures whose depth of colour and truth +make his Scottish novels, <cite>Old Mortality, The Antiquary, +Redgauntlet</cite>, the greatest things of their kind in +literature.</p> +<br> +<h4>(3)</h4> +<p>The peculiarly national style of fiction founded by Fielding and +carried on by his followers reached its culminating point in +<cite>Vanity Fair</cite>. In it the reader does not seem to be +simply present at the unfolding of a plot the end of which is +constantly present to the mind of the author and to which he is +always consciously working, every incident having a bearing on the +course of the action; rather he feels himself to be the spectator +of a piece of life which is too large and complex to be under the +control of a creator, which moves to its close not under the +impulsion of a directing hand, but independently impelled by causes +evolved in the course of its happening. With this added complexity +goes a more frequent interposition of the author in his own +person—one of the conventions as we have seen of this +national style. Thackeray is present to his readers, indeed, not as +the manager who pulls the strings and sets the puppets in motion, +but as an interpreter who directs the reader's attention to the +events on which he lays stress, and makes them a starting-point for +his own moralising. This persistent moralizing—sham cynical, +real sentimental—this thumping of death-bed pillows as in the +dreadful case of Miss Crawley, makes Thackeray's use of the +personal interposition almost less effective than that of any other +novelist. Already while he was doing it, Dickens had conquered the +public; and the English novel was making its second fresh +start.</p> +<p>He is an innovator in more ways than one. In the first place he +is the earliest novelist to practise a conscious artistry of plot. +<cite>The Mystery of Edwin Drood</cite> remains mysterious, but +those who essay to conjecture the end of that unfinished story have +at last the surety that its end, full worked out in all its +details, had been in its author's mind before he set pen to paper. +His imagination was as diligent and as disciplined as his pen, +Dickens' practice in this matter could not be better put than in +his own words, when he describes himself as "in the first stage of +a new book, which consists in going round and round the idea, as +you see a bird in his cage go about and about his sugar before he +touches it." That his plots are always highly elaborated is the +fruit of this preliminary disciplined exercise of thought. The +method is familiar to many novelists now; Dickens was the first to +put it into practice. In the second place he made a new departure +by his frankly admitted didacticism and by the skill with which in +all but two or three of his books—<cite>Bleak House</cite>, +perhaps, and <cite>Little Dorrit</cite>—he squared his +purpose with his art. Lastly he made the discovery which has made +him immortal. In him for the first time the English novel produced +an author who dug down into the masses of the people for his +subjects; apprehended them in all their inexhaustible character and +humour and pathos, and reproduced them with a lively and loving +artistic skill.</p> +<p>Dickens has, of course, serious faults. In particular, readers +emancipated by lapse of time from the enslavement of the first +enthusiasm, have quarrelled with the mawkishness and sentimentality +of his pathos, and with the exaggeration of his studies of +character. It has been said of him, as it has of Thackeray, that he +could not draw a "good woman" and that Agnes Copperfield, like +Amelia Sedley, is a very doll-like type of person. To critics of +this kind it may be retorted that though "good" and "bad" are +categories relevant to melodrama, they apply very ill to serious +fiction, and that indeed to the characters of any of the +novelists—the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell or the +like—who lay bare character with fullness and intimacy, they +could not well be applied at all. The faultiness of them in Dickens +is less than in Thackeray, for in Dickens they are only incident to +the scheme, which lies in the hero (his heroes are excellent) and +in the grotesque characters, whereas in his rival they are in the +theme itself. For his pathos, not even his warmest admirer could +perhaps offer a satisfactory case. The charge of exaggeration +however is another matter. To the person who complains that he has +never met Dick Swiveller or Micawber or Mrs. Gamp the answer is +simply Turner's to the sceptical critic of his sunset, "Don't you +wish you could?" To the other, who objects more plausibly to +Dickens's habit of attaching to each of his characters some label +which is either so much flaunted all through that you cannot see +the character at all or else mysteriously and unaccountably +disappears when the story begins to grip the author, Dickens has +himself offered an amusing and convincing defence. In the preface +to <cite>Pickwick</cite> he answers those who criticised the novel +on the ground that Pickwick began by being purely ludicrous and +developed into a serious and sympathetic individuality, by pointing +to the analogous process which commonly takes place in actual human +relationships. You begin a new acquaintanceship with perhaps not +very charitable prepossessions; these later a deeper and better +knowledge removes, and where you have before seen an idiosyncrasy +you come to love a character. It is ingenious and it helps to +explain Mrs. Nickleby, the Pecksniff daughters, and many another. +Whether it is true or not (and it does not explain the faultiness +of such pictures as Carker and his kind) there can be no doubt that +this trick in Dickens of beginning with a salient impression and +working outward to a fuller conception of character is part at +least of the reason of his enormous hold upon his readers. No man +leads you into the mazes of his invention so easily and with such a +persuasive hand.</p> +<p>The great novelists who were writing contemporarily with +him—the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot—it is +impossible to deal with here, except to say that the last is +indisputably, because of her inability to fuse completely art and +ethics, inferior to Mrs. Gaskell or to either of the Brontë +sisters. Nor of the later Victorians who added fresh variety to the +national style can the greatest, Meredith, be more than mentioned +for the exquisiteness of his comic spirit and the brave gallery of +English men and women he has given us in what is, perhaps, +fundamentally the most English thing in fiction since Fielding +wrote. For our purpose Mr. Hardy, though he is a less brilliant +artist, is more to the point. His novels brought into England the +contemporary pessimism of Schopenhaur and the Russians, and found a +home for it among the English peasantry. Convinced that in the +upper classes character could be studied and portrayed only +subjectively because of the artificiality of a society which +prevented its outlet in action, he turned to the peasantry because +with them conduct is the direct expression of the inner life. +Character could be shown working, therefore, not subjectively but +in the act, if you chose a peasant subject. His philosophy, +expressed in this medium, is sombre. In his novels you can trace a +gradual realization of the defects of natural laws and the quandary +men are put to by their operation. Chance, an irritating and +trifling series of coincidences, plays the part of fate. Nature +seems to enter with the hopelessness of man's mood. Finally the +novelist turns against life itself. "Birth," he says, speaking of +Tess, "seemed to her an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion +whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify and at +best could only palliate." It is strange to find pessimism in a +romantic setting; strange, too, to find a paganism which is so +little capable of light or joy.</p> +<br> +<h4>(4)</h4> +<p>The characteristic form of English fiction, that in which the +requisite illusion of the complexity and variety of life is +rendered by discursiveness, by an author's licence to digress, to +double back on himself, to start may be in the middle of a story +and work subsequently to the beginning and the end; in short by his +power to do whatever is most expressive of his individuality, found +a rival in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century in the +French Naturalistic or Realist school, in which the illusion of +life is got by a studied and sober veracity of statement, and by +the minute accumulation of detail. To the French Naturalists a +novel approached in importance the work of a man of science, and +they believed it ought to be based on documentary evidence, as a +scientific work would be. Above all it ought not to allow itself to +be coloured by the least gloss of imagination or idealism; it ought +never to shrink from a confrontation of the naked fact. On the +contrary it was its business to carry it to the dissecting table +and there minutely examine everything that lay beneath its +surface.</p> +<p>The school first became an English possession in the early +translations of the work of Zola; its methods were transplanted +into English fiction by Mr. George Moore. From his novels, both in +passages of direct statement and in the light of his practice, it +is possible to gather together the materials of a manifesto of the +English Naturalistic school. The naturalists complained that +English fiction lacked construction in the strictest sense; they +found in the English novel a remarkable absence of organic +wholeness; it did not fulfil their first and broadest canon of +subject-matter—by which a novel has to deal in the first +place with a single and rhythmical series of events; it was too +discursive. They made this charge against English fiction; they +also retorted the charge brought by native writers and their +readers against the French of foulness, sordidness and pessimism in +their view of life. "We do not," says a novelist in one of Mr. +Moore's books, "we do not always choose what you call unpleasant +subjects, but we do try to get to the roots of things; and the +basis of life being material and not spiritual, the analyst sooner +or later finds himself invariably handling what this sentimental +age calls coarse." "The novel," says the same character, "if it be +anything is contemporary history, an exact and complete +reproduction of the social surroundings of the age we live in." +That succinctly is the naturalistic theory of the novel as a work +of science—that as the history of a nation lies hidden often +in social wrongs and in domestic grief as much as in the movements +of parties or dynasties, the novelist must do for the former what +the historian does for the latter. It is his business in the scheme +of knowledge of his time.</p> +<p>But the naturalists believed quite as profoundly in the novel as +a work of art. They claimed for their careful pictures of the grey +and sad and sordid an artistic worth, varying in proportion to the +intensity of the emotion in which the picture was composed and +according to the picture's truth, but in its essence just as real +and permanent as the artistic worth of romance. "Seen from afar," +writes Mr. Moore, "all things in nature are of equal worth; and the +meanest things, when viewed with the eyes of God, are raised to +heights of tragic awe which conventionality would limit to the +deaths of kings and patriots." On such a lofty theory they built +their treatment and their style. It is a mistake to suppose that +the realist school deliberately cultivates the sordid or shocking. +Examine in this connection Mr. Moore's <cite>Mummer's Wife</cite>, +our greatest English realist novel, and for the matter of that one +of the supreme things in English fiction, and you will see that the +scrupulous fidelity of the author's method, though it denies him +those concessions to a sentimentalist or romantic view of life +which are the common implements of fiction, denies him no less the +extremities of horror or loathsomeness. The heroine sinks into the +miserable squalor of a dipsomaniac and dies from a drunkard's +disease, but her end is shown as the ineluctable consequence of her +life, its early greyness and monotony, the sudden shock of a new +and strange environment and the resultant weakness of will which a +morbid excitability inevitably brought about. The novel, that is to +say, deals with a "rhythmical series of events and follows them to +their conclusion"; it gets at the roots of things; it tells us of +something which we know to be true in life whether we care to read +it in fiction or not. There is nothing in it of sordidness for +sordidness' sake nor have the realists any philosophy of an unhappy +ending. In this case the ending is unhappy because the sequence of +events admitted of no other solution; in others the ending is happy +or merely neutral as the preceding story decides. If what one may +call neutral endings predominate, it is because they +also—notoriously—predominate in life. But the question +of unhappiness or its opposite has nothing whatever to do with the +larger matter of beauty; it is the triumph of the realists that at +their best they discovered a new beauty in things, the loveliness +that lies in obscure places, the splendour of sordidness, humility, +and pain. They have taught us that beauty, like the Spirit, blows +where it lists and we know from them that the antithesis between +realism and idealism is only on their lower levels; at their +summits they unite and are one. No true realist but is an idealist +too.</p> +<p>Most of what is best in English fiction since has been directly +occasioned by their work; Gissing and Mr. Arnold Bennett may be +mentioned as two authors who are fundamentally realist in their +conception of the art of the novel, and the realist ideal partakes +in a greater or less degree in the work of nearly all our eminent +novelists to-day. But realism is not and cannot be interesting to +the great public; it portrays people as they are, not as they would +like to be, and where they are, not where they would like to be. It +gives no background for day-dreaming. Now literature (to repeat +what has been than more once stated earlier in this book) is a way +of escape from life as well as an echo or mirror of it, and the +novel as the form of literature which more than any other men read +for pleasure, is the main avenue for this escape. So that alongside +this invasion of realism it is not strange that there grew a +revival in romance.</p> +<p>The main agent of it, Robert Louis Stevenson, had the romantic +strain in him intensified by the conditions under which he worked; +a weak and anaemic man, he loved bloodshed as a cripple loves +athletics—passionately and with the intimate enthusiasm of +make-believe which an imaginative man can bring to bear on the +contemplation of what can never be his. His natural attraction for +"redness and juice" in life was seconded by a delightful and +fantastic sense of the boundless possibilities of romance in +every-day things. To a realist a hansom-cab driver is a man who +makes twenty-five shillings a week, lives in a back street in +Pimlico, has a wife who drinks and children who grow up with an +alcoholic taint; the realist will compare his lot with other +cab-drivers, and find what part of his life is the product of the +cab-driving environment, and on that basis he will write his book. +To Stevenson and to the romanticist generally, a hansom cab-driver +is a mystery behind whose apparent commonplaceness lie magic +possibilities beyond all telling; not one but may be the agent of +the Prince of Bohemia, ready to drive you off to some mad and magic +adventure in a street which is just as commonplace to the outward +eye as the cab-driver himself, but which implicates by its very +deceitful commonness whole volumes of romance. The novel-reader to +whom <cite>Demos</cite> was the repetition of what he had seen and +known, and what had planted sickness in his soul, found the +<cite>New Arabian Nights</cite> a refreshing miracle. Stevenson had +discovered that modern London had its possibilities of romance. To +these two elements of his romantic equipment must be added a +third—travel. Defoe never left England, and other early +romanticists less gifted with invention than he wrote from the +mind's eye and from books. To Stevenson, and to his successor Mr. +Kipling, whose "discovery" of India is one of the salient facts of +modern English letters, and to Mr. Conrad belongs the credit of +teaching novelists to draw on experience for the scenes they seek +to present. A fourth element in the equipment of modern +romanticism—that which draws its effects from the "miracles" +of modern science, has been added since by Mr. H. G. Wells, in +whose latest work the realistic and romantic schools seem to have +united.</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="CHAPTER_X"></a> +<h2>CHAPTER X</h2> +<br> +<h3>THE PRESENT AGE</h3> +<p>We have carried our study down to the death of Ruskin and +included in it authors like Swinburne and Meredith who survived +till recently; and in discussing the novel we have included men +like Kipling and Hardy—living authors. It would be possible +and perhaps safer to stop there and make no attempt to bring +writers later than these into our survey. To do so is to court an +easily and quickly stated objection. One is anticipating the +verdict of posterity. How can we who are contemporaries tell +whether an author's work is permanent or no?</p> +<p>Of course, in a sense the point of view expressed by these +questions is true enough. It is always idle to anticipate the +verdict of posterity. Remember Matthew Arnold's prophecy that at +the end of the nineteenth century Wordsworth and Byron would be the +two great names in Romantic poetry. We are ten years and more past +that date now, and so far as Byron is concerned, at any rate, there +is no sign that Arnold's prediction has come true. But the obvious +fact that we cannot do our grandchildren's thinking for them, is no +reason why we should refuse to think for ourselves. No notion is so +destructive to the formation of a sound literary taste as the +notion that books become literature only when their authors are +dead. Round us men and women are putting into plays and poetry and +novels the best that they can or know. They are writing not for a +dim and uncertain future but for us, and on our recognition and +welcome they depend, sometimes for their livelihood, always for the +courage which carries them on to fresh endeavour. Literature is an +ever-living and continuous thing, and we do it less than its due +service if we are so occupied reading Shakespeare and Milton and +Scott that we have no time to read Mr. Yeats, Mr. Shaw or Mr. +Wells. Students of literature must remember that classics are being +manufactured daily under their eyes, and that on their sympathy and +comprehension depends whether an author receives the success he +merits when he is alive to enjoy it.</p> +<p>The purpose of this chapter, then, is to draw a rough picture of +some of the lines or schools of contemporary writing—of the +writing mainly, though not altogether, of living authors. It is +intended to indicate some characteristics of the general trend or +drift of literary effort as a whole. The most remarkable feature of +the age, as far as writing is concerned, is without doubt its +inattention to poetry. Tennyson was a popular author; his books +sold in thousands; his lines passed into that common conversational +currency of unconscious quotation which is the surest testimony to +the permeation of a poet's influence. Even Browning, though his +popularity came late, found himself carried into all the nooks and +corners of the reading public. His robust and masculine morality, +understood at last, or expounded by a semi-priestly class of +interpreters, made him popular with those readers—and they +are the majority—who love their reading to convey a moral +lesson, just as Tennyson's reflection of his time's distraction +between science and religion endeared them to those who found in +him an answer or at least an echo to their own perplexities. A work +widely different from either of these, Fitzgerald's <cite>Rubaiyat +of Omar Khayyam</cite>, shared and has probably exceeded their +popularity for similar reasons. Its easy pessimism and cult of +pleasure, its delightful freedom from any demand for continuous +thought from its readers, its appeal to the indolence and moral +flaccidity which is implicit in all men, all contributed to its +immense vogue; and among people who perhaps did not fully +understand it but were merely lulled by its sonorousness, a +knowledge of it has passed for the insignia of a love of literature +and the possession of literary taste. But after +Fitzgerald—who? What poet has commanded the ear of the +reading public or even a fraction of it? Not Swinburne certainly, +partly because of his undoubted difficulty, partly because of a +suspicion held of his moral and religious tenets, largely from +material reasons quite unconnected with the quality of his work; +not Morris, nor his followers; none of the so-called minor poets +whom we shall notice presently—poets who have drawn the moods +that have nourished their work from the decadents of France. +Probably the only writer of verse who is at the same time a poet +and has acquired a large popularity and public influence is Mr. +Kipling. His work as a novelist we mentioned in the last chapter. +It remains to say something of his achievements in verse.</p> +<p>Let us grant at once his faults. He can be violent, and +over-rhetorical; he belabours you with sense impressions, and with +the polysyllabic rhetoric he learned from Swinburne—and +(though this is not the place for a discussion of political ideas) +he can offend by the sentimental brutalism which too often passes +for patriotism in his poetry. Not that this last represents the +total impression of his attitude as an Englishman. His later work +in poetry and prose, devoted to the reconstruction of English +history, is remarkable for the justness and saneness of its temper. +There are other faults—a lack of sureness in taste is +one—that could be mentioned but they do not affect the main +greatness of his work. He is great because he discovered a new +subject-matter, and because of the white heat of imagination which +in his best things he brought to bear on it and by which he +transposed it into poetry. It is Mr. Kipling's special distinction +that the apparatus of modern civilization—steam engines, and +steamships, and telegraph lines, and the art of flight—take +on in his hands a poetic quality as authentic and inspiring as any +that ever was cast over the implements of other and what the mass +of men believe to have been more picturesque days. Romance is in +the present, so he teaches us, not in the past, and we do it wrong +to leave it only the territory we have ourselves discarded in the +advance of the race. That and the great discovery of India—an +India misunderstood for his own purposes no doubt, but still the +first presentiment of an essential fact in our modern history as a +people—give him the hold that he has, and rightly, over the +minds of his readers.</p> +<p>It is in a territory poles apart from Mr. Kipling's that the +main stream of romantic poetry flows. Apart from the gravely +delicate and scholarly work of Mr. Bridges, and the poetry of some +others who work separately away from their fellows, English +romantic poetry has concentrated itself into one chief +school—the school of the "Celtic Revival" of which the leader +is Mr. W.B. Yeats. Two sources went to its making. In its +inception, it arose out of a group of young poets who worked in a +conscious imitation of the methods of the French decadents; chiefly +of Baudelaire and Verlaine. As a whole their work was merely +imitative and not very profound, but each of them—Ernest +Dowson and Lionel Johnson, who are both now dead, and others who +are still living—produced enough to show that they had at +their command a vein of poetry that might have deepened and proved +more rich had they gone on working it. One of them, Mr. W.B. Yeats, +by his birth and his reading in Irish legend and folklore, became +possessed of a subject-matter denied to his fellows, and it is from +the combination of the mood of the decadents with the dreaminess +and mystery of Celtic tradition and romance—a combination +which came to pass in his poetry—that the Celtic school has +sprung. In a sense it has added to the territory explored by +Coleridge and Scott and Morris a new province. Only nothing could +be further from the objectivity of these men, than the way in which +the Celtic school approaches its material. Its stories are clear to +itself, it may be, but not to its readers. Deirdre and Conchubar, +and Angus and Maeve and Dectora and all the shadowy figures in them +scarcely become embodied. Their lives and deaths and loves and +hates are only a scheme on which they weave a delicate and dim +embroidery of pure poetry—of love and death and old age and +the passing of beauty and all the sorrows that have been since the +world began and will be till the world ends. If Mr. Kipling is of +the earth earthy, if the clangour and rush of the world is in +everything he writes, Mr. Yeats and his school live consciously +sequestered and withdrawn, and the world never breaks in on their +ghostly troubles or their peace. Poetry never fails to relate +itself to its age; if it is not with it, it is against it; it is +never merely indifferent. The poetry of these men is the denial, +passionately made, of everything the world prizes. While such a +denial is sincere, as in the best of them, then the verses they +make are true and fine. But when it is assumed, as in some of their +imitators, then the work they did is not true poetry.</p> +<p>But the literary characteristic of the present age—the one +which is most likely to differentiate it from its predecessor, is +the revival of the drama. When we left it before the Commonwealth +the great English literary school of playwriting—the romantic +drama—was already dead. It has had since no second birth. +There followed after it the heroic tragedy of Dryden and +Shadwell—a turgid, declamatory form of art without +importance—and two brilliant comic periods, the earlier and +greater that of Congreve and Wycherley, the later more sentimental +with less art and vivacity, that of Goldsmith and Sheridan. With +Sheridan the drama as a literary force died a second time. It has +been born again only in our own day. It is, of course, unnecessary +to point out that the writing of plays did not cease in the +interval; it never does cease. The production of dramatic +journey-work has been continuous since the re-opening of the +theatres in 1660, and it is carried on as plentifully as ever at +this present time. Only side by side with it there has grown up a +new literary drama, and gradually the main stream of artistic +endeavour which for nearly a century has preoccupied itself with +the novel almost to the exclusion of other forms of art, has turned +back to the stage as its channel to articulation and an audience. +An influence from abroad set it in motion. The plays of +Ibsen—produced, the best of them, in the eighties of last +century—came to England in the nineties. In a way, perhaps, +they were misunderstood by their worshippers hardly less than by +their enemies, but all excrescences of enthusiasm apart they taught +men a new and freer approach to moral questions, and a new and +freer dramatic technique. Where plays had been constructed on a +journeyman plan evolved by Labiche and Sardou—mid-nineteenth +century writers in France—a plan delighting in symmetry, +close-jointedness, false correspondences, an impossible use of +coincidence, and a quite unreal complexity and elaboration, they +become bolder and less artificial, more close to the likelihoods of +real life. The gravity of the problems with which they set +themselves to deal heightened their influence. In England men began +to ask themselves whether the theatre here too could not be made an +avenue towards the discussion of living difficulties, and then +arose the new school of dramatists—of whom the first and most +remarkable is Mr. George Bernard Shaw. In his earlier plays he set +himself boldly to attack established conventions, and to ask his +audiences to think for themselves. <cite>Arms and the Man</cite> +dealt a blow at the cheap romanticism with which a peace-living +public invests the profession of arms; <cite>The Devil's +Disciple</cite> was a shrewd criticism of the preposterous +self-sacrifice on which melodrama, which is the most popular +non-literary form of play-writing, is commonly based; <cite>Mrs. +Warren's Profession</cite> made a brave and plain-spoken attempt to +drag the public face to face with the nauseous realities of +prostitution; <cite>Widowers' Houses</cite> laid bare the +sordidness of a Society which bases itself on the exploitation of +the poor for the luxuries of the rich. It took Mr. Shaw close on +ten years to persuade even the moderate number of men and women who +make up a theatre audience that his plays were worth listening to. +But before his final success came he had attained a substantial +popularity with the public which reads. Possibly his early failure +on the stage—mainly due to the obstinacy of playgoers +immersed in a stock tradition—was partly due also to his +failure in constructive power. He is an adept at tying knots and +impatient of unravelling them; his third acts are apt either to +evaporate in talk or to find some unreal and unsatisfactory +solution for the complexity he has created. But constructive +weakness apart, his amazing brilliance and fecundity of dialogue +ought to have given him an immediate and lasting grip of the stage. +There has probably never been a dramatist who could invest +conversation with the same vivacity and point, the same combination +of surprise and inevitableness that distinguishes his best +work.</p> +<p>Alongside of Mr. Shaw more immediately successful, and not +traceable to any obvious influence, English or foreign, came the +comedies of Oscar Wilde. For a parallel to their pure delight and +high spirits, and to the exquisite wit and artifice with which they +were constructed, one would have to go back to the dramatists of +the Restoration. To Congreve and his school, indeed, Wilde belongs +rather than to any later period. With his own age he had little in +common; he was without interest in its social and moral problems; +when he approved of socialism it was because in a socialist state +the artist might be absolved from the necessity of carrying a +living, and be free to follow his art undisturbed. He loved to +think of himself as symbolic, but all he symbolized was a fantasy +of his own creating; his attitude to his age was decorative and +withdrawn rather than representative. He was the licensed jester to +society, and in that capacity he gave us his plays. Mr. Shaw may be +said to have founded a school; at any rate he gave the start to Mr. +Galsworthy and some lesser dramatists. Wilde founded nothing, and +his works remain as complete and separate as those of the earlier +artificial dramatists of two centuries before.</p> +<p>Another school of drama, homogeneous and quite apart from the +rest, remains. We have seen how the "Celtic Revival," as the Irish +literary movement has been called by its admirers, gave us a new +kind of romantic poetry. As an offshoot from it there came into +being some ten years ago an Irish school of drama, drawing its +inspiration from two sources—the body of the old Irish +legends and the highly individualized and richly-coloured life of +the Irish peasants in the mountains of Wicklow and of the West, a +life, so the dramatists believed, still unspoiled by the deepening +influences of a false system of education and the wear and tear of +a civilization whose values are commercial and not spiritual or +artistic. The school founded its own theatre, trained its own +actors, fashioned its own modes of speech (the chief of which was a +frank restoration of rhythm in the speaking of verse and of cadence +in prose), and having all these things it produced a series of +plays all directed to its special ends, and all composed and +written with a special fidelity to country life as it has been +preserved, or to what it conceived to be the spirit of Irish +folk-legend. It reached its zenith quickly, and as far as the +production of plays is concerned, it would seem to be already in +its decline. That is to say, what in the beginning was a fresh and +vivid inspiration caught direct from life has become a pattern +whose colours and shape can be repeated or varied by lesser writers +who take their teaching from the original discoverers. But in the +course of its brief and striking course it produced one great +dramatist—a writer whom already not three years after his +death, men instinctively class with the masters of his art.</p> +<p>J.M. Synge, in the earlier years of his manhood, lived entirely +abroad, leading the life of a wandering scholar from city to city +and country to country till he was persuaded to give up the +Continent and the criticism and imitation of French literature, to +return to England, and to go and live on the Aran Islands. From +that time till his death—some ten years—he spent a +large part of each year amongst the peasantry of the desolate +Atlantic coast and wrote the plays by which his name is known. His +literary output was not large, but he supplied the Irish dramatic +movement with exactly what it needed—a vivid contact with the +realities of life. Not that he was a mere student or transcriber of +manners. His wandering life among many peoples and his study of +classical French and German literature had equipped him as perhaps +no other modern dramatist has been equipped with an imaginative +insight and a reach of perception which enabled him to give +universality and depth to his pourtrayal of the peasant types +around him. He got down to the great elemental forces which throb +and pulse beneath the common crises of everyday life and laid them +bare, not as ugly and horrible, but with a sense of their terror, +their beauty and their strength. His earliest play, <cite>The Well +of the Saints</cite>, treats of a sorrow that is as old as Helen of +the vanishing of beauty and the irony of fulfilled desire. The +great realities of death pass through the <cite>Riders to the +Sea</cite>, till the language takes on a kind of simplicity as of +written words shrivelling up in a flame. <cite>The Playboy of the +Western World</cite> is a study of character, terrible in its +clarity, but never losing the savour of imagination and of the +astringency and saltness that was characteristic of his temper. He +had at his command an instrument of incomparable fineness and range +in the language which he fashioned out the speech of the common +people amongst whom he lived. In his dramatic writings this +language took on a kind of rhythm which had the effect of producing +a certain remoteness of the highest possible artistic value. The +people of his imagination appear a little disembodied. They talk +with that straightforward and simple kind of innocency which makes +strange and impressive the dialogue of Maeterlinck's earlier plays. +Through it, as Mr. Yeats has said, he saw the subject-matter of his +art "with wise, clear-seeing, unreflecting eyes—and he +preserved the innocence of good art in an age of reasons and +purposes." He had no theory except of his art; no "ideas" and no +"problems"; he did not wish to change anything or to reform +anything; but he saw all his people pass by as before a window, and +he heard their words. This resolute refusal to be interested in or +to take account of current modes of thought has been considered by +some to detract from his eminence. Certainly if by "ideas" we mean +current views on society or morality, he is deficient in them; only +his very deficiency brings him nearer to the great masters of +drama—to Ben Johnson, to Cervantes, to +Molière—even to Shakespeare himself. Probably in no +single case amongst our contemporaries could a high and permanent +place in literature be prophesied with more confidence than in +his.</p> +<p>In the past it has seemed impossible for fiction and the drama, +i.e. serious drama of high literary quality, to flourish, side by +side. It seems as though the best creative minds in any age could +find strength for any one of these two great outlets for the +activity of the creative imagination. In the reign of Elizabeth the +drama outshone fiction; in the reign of Victoria the novel crowded +out the drama. There are signs that a literary era is commencing, +in which the drama will again regain to the full its position as a +literature. More and more the bigger creative artists will turn to +a form which by its economy of means to ends, and the chance it +gives not merely of observing but of creating and displaying +character in action, has a more vigorous principle of life in it +than its rival.</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="BIBLIOGRAPHY"></a> +<h2>BIBLIOGRAPHY</h2> +<p>It is best to study English literature one period, or, even in +the case of the greatest, one author at a time. In every case the +student should see to it that he knows the <em>text</em> of his +authors; a knowledge of what critics have said about our poets is a +poor substitute for a knowledge of what they have said themselves. +Poetry ought to be read slowly and carefully, and the reader ought +to pay his author the compliment of crediting him with ideas as +important and, on occasion, as abstruse as any in a work of +philosophy or abstract science. When the meaning is mastered, the +poem ought to be read a second time aloud to catch the magic of the +language and the verse. The reading of prose presents less +difficulty, but there again the rule is, never allow yourself to be +lulled by sound. Reading is an intellectual and not an hypnotic +exercise.</p> +<p>The following short bibliography is divided to correspond with +the chapters in this book. Prices and publishers are mentioned only +when there is no more than one cheap edition of a book known to the +author. For the subject as a whole, Chamber's <cite>Cyclopaedia of +English Literature</cite> (3 vols., 10s. 6d. net each), which +contains biographical and critical articles on all authors, +arranged chronologically and furnished very copiously with specimen +passages, may be consulted at any library.</p> +<p>* The books with an asterisk are suggested as those on which +reading should be begun. The reader can then proceed to the others +and after them to the many authors—great authors—who +are not included in this short list.</p> +<p>Chapter I.—*More's <cite>Utopia</cite>; <cite>Haklyut's +Voyages</cite> (Ed. J. Masefield, Everyman's Library, 8 vols., 1s. +net each). North's <cite>Translation of Plutarch's Lives</cite> +(Temple Classics).</p> +<p>Chapter II.—Surrey's and Wyatt's Poems (Aldine Edition. G. +Bells & Sons); *Spenser's Works, Sidney's Poems. A good idea of +the atmosphere in which poetry was written is to be obtained from +Scott's <cite>Kenilworth</cite>. It is full of inaccuracy in +detail.</p> +<p>Chapter III.—*The dramatists in the Mermaid Series (T. +Fisher Unwin); *<cite>Everyman and other Plays</cite>; ed. by A.W. +Pollard (Everyman's Library).</p> +<p>Chapter IV.—*Bacon's Essays; Sir Thomas Browne's Works; +*Milton's Works; *Poems of John Donne (Muses Library, Routledge); +Poems of Robert Herrick.</p> +<p>Chapter V.—*Poems of Dryden; *Poems of Pope; Poems of +Thomson; *<cite>The Spectator</cite> (Routledge's Universal Library +or Everyman's); *Swift's <cite>Gulliver's Travels</cite>; Defoe's +Novels.</p> +<p>Chapter VI.—*Boswell's <cite>Life of Johnson</cite>; +*Burke (in selections); Goldsmith's <cite>Citizen of the +World</cite> (Temple Classics); *Burns' Poetical Works; *Poems of +Blake (Clarendon Press).</p> +<p>Chapter VII.—*Wordsworth (Golden Treasury Series); +*Wordsworth's Prelude (Temple Classics); Coleridge's Poems; +*Keats's Poems; *Shelley's Poems; *Byron (Golden Treasury Series); +*Lamb, <cite>Essays of Elia</cite>; Hazlitt (volumes of Essays in +World's Classics Series).</p> +<p>Chapter VIII.—*Tennyson's Works; *Browning's Works; +Rossetti's Works; *Carlyle's <cite>Sartor Resartus, Past and +Present</cite>, and <cite>French Revolution</cite>; Ruskin's +<cite>Unto this Last, Seven Lamps of Architecture</cite>; Arnold's +Poems; Swinburne (Selections).</p> +<p>Chapter IX.--*Fielding's <cite>Tom Jones</cite>; Smollett, +<cite>Roderick Random</cite>; *Jane Austen's <cite>Persuasion, +Pride and Prejudice,</cite> and <cite>Northanger Abbey</cite> (as a +parody of the Radcliffe School); *Scott's <cite>Waverley, +Antiquary, Ivanhoe, Old Mortality, Bride of Lammermoor</cite>. It +seems hardly necessary to give a selection of later novels.</p> +<p>Chapter X.—W.B. Yeats' Poems; Wilde, <cite>Importance of +Being Earnest</cite>; *Synge, Dramatic Works.</p> +<p>And every new work of the best contemporary authors.</p> +<p>G.H.M.</p> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="LIST_OF_THE_CHIEF_WORKS_AND_AUTHORS_MENTIONED"></a> +<h2>LIST OF THE CHIEF WORKS AND AUTHORS MENTIONED</h2> +<p>The dates attached to the authors are those of birth and death; +those with the books, of publication.</p> +<br> +CHAPTER I<br> +<br> +Sir Thomas More, 1480-1535.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Utopia</cite>. 1516 (in +Latin).</span><br> +William Tindall, 1484-1536.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Translation of the New +Testament</cite>, 1526.</span><br> +Sir John Cheke, 1514-1557.<br> +Roger Ascham, 1515-1568.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Toxophilus</cite>, +1545.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Schoolmaster</cite>, +1570.</span><br> +Richard Hakluyt, 1553-1616.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His <cite>Voyages</cite>, +1598.</span><br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER II<br> +<br> +Sir Thomas Wyatt, 1503-1542.<br> +The Earl of Surrey, 1517-1547.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Tottel's Miscellany</cite> +(containing their poems), 1557.</span><br> +Sir Philip Sidney. 1554-1586.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Arcadia</cite>, +1590.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Astrophel and Stella</cite>, +1591.</span><br> +Edmund Spenser, 1552-1599.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Shepherd's Calendar</cite>, +1579.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Fairy Queen</cite>, 1589, +1596.</span><br> +John Lyly, 1554-1606.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Euphues</cite>, +1579.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Euphues and his +England</cite>, 1580.</span><br> +Richard Hooker, 1553-1600.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Ecclesiastical Polity</cite>, +1594.</span><br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER III<br> +<br> +Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Tamburlaine</cite>, 1587 +(date of performance).</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Dr. Faustus</cite>, 1588 +(date of performance).</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Edward II.</cite>, +1593.</span><br> +Thomas Kyd, 1557(?)-1595(?).<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The Spanish Tragedy</cite>, +1594 (published).</span><br> +John Webster, 1580(?)-1625(?).<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The White Devil</cite>, 1608 +(date of performance).</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Duchess of Malfi</cite>, 1616 +(date of performance).</span><br> +Ben Jonson, 1573-1637.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Every Man in his +Humour</cite>, 1598.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Volpone</cite>, +1605.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Poems</cite>, +1616.</span><br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER IV<br> +<br> +John Donne, 1573-1631.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Poems</cite>, 1633 (first +published, but known, like those of all Elizabethan poets, in +manuscript long before).</span><br> +William Browne, 1591-1643.<br> +George Herbert, 1593-1633.<br> +Robert Herrick, 1593-1674.<br> +Richard Crashaw, 1613-1649.<br> +Francis Bacon, 1561-1626.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Advancement of +Learning</cite>, 1605.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Essays</cite>, +1625.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The Bible, <cite>Authorised +Version</cite>, 1611.</span><br> +Robert Burton, 1577-1640.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Anatomy of Melancholy</cite>, +1621.</span><br> +Sir Thomas Browne, 1605-1682.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Religio Medici</cite>, +1642.</span><br> +John Bunyan, 1628-1688.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Pilgrim's Progress</cite>, +1678.</span><br> +John Milton, 1608-1674.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Paradise Lost</cite>, +1667.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Paradise Regained</cite> and +<cite>Samson Agonistes</cite>, 1671.</span><br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER V<br> +<br> +John Dryden, 1631-1700.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Absalom and Achitophel</cite> +and <cite>Religio Laici</cite>, 1682.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The Hind and the +Panther</cite>, 1687.</span><br> +Alexander Pope, 1688-1744.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Essay on Criticism</cite>, +1711.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Rape of the Lock</cite>, +1714.</span><br> +James Thomson, 1700-1748.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The Seasons</cite>, +1730.</span><br> +Daniel Defoe, 1661-1731.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Robinson Crusoe</cite>, +1719.</span><br> +Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The Tale of a Tub</cite>, +1704.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Gulliver's Travels</cite>, +1726.</span><br> +Joseph Addison, 1672-1719.<br> +Richard Steele, 1675-1729.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The Tatler</cite>, +1709-1711.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The Spectator</cite>, +1711-1712.</span><br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER VI<br> +<br> +Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784.<br> +Edmund Burke, 1728-1797.<br> +Oliver Goldsmith, 1728-1774.<br> +Thomas Gray, 1716-1771.<br> +William Collins, 1721-1759.<br> +Robert Burns, 1759-1796.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Poems</cite>, +1786.</span><br> +William Blake, 1757-1827.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Songs of Innocence</cite>, +1789.</span><br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER VII<br> +<br> +William Wordsworth, 1770-1850.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Lyrical Ballads</cite>, +1798.</span><br> +Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1772-1834.<br> +Sir Walter Scott, 1771-1832.<br> +Lord Byron, 1788-1824.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Child Harold's +Pilgrimage</cite>, 1812-1817.</span><br> +Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822.<br> +John Keats, 1796-1821.<br> +Charles Lamb, 1775-1884.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Essays of Elia</cite>, +1823.</span><br> +William Hazlitt, 1778-1830.<br> +Thomas de Quincey, 1785-1859.<br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER VIII<br> +<br> +Lord Tennyson, 1809-1892.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Poems</cite>, +1842.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Idylls of the King</cite>, +1859.</span><br> +Robert Browning, 1812-1889.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Men and Women</cite>, +1855.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>The Ring and the Book</cite>, +1868.</span><br> +D. G. Rossetti, 1828-1882.<br> +William Morris, 1834-1896.<br> +A. C. Swinburne, 1836-1909.<br> +Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1880.<br> +John Ruskin, 1819-1900.<br> +<br> +<br> +CHAPTER IX<br> +<br> +Samuel Richardson, 1689-1761.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Pamela</cite>, +1740.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Clarissa Harlowe</cite>, +1750.</span><br> +Henry Fielding, 1707-1754.<br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Joseph Andrews</cite>, +1742.</span><br> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><cite>Tom Jones</cite>, +1749.</span><br> +Jane Austen, 1775-1817.<br> +William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863.<br> +Charles Dickens, 1812-1870.<br> +George Meredith, 1832-1909.<br> +<hr style="width: 65%;"> +<a name="INDEX"></a> +<h2>INDEX</h2> +ADDISON, JOSEPH,<br> +<cite>Advancement of Learning, The</cite>,<br> +<cite>Anatomy of Melancholy, The</cite>,<br> +<cite>Antonio and Mellida</cite>,<br> +<cite>Arcadia</cite>, the Countess of Pembroke's,<br> +Arnold, Matthew,<br> +Ascham, Roger,<br> +<cite>Astrophel and Stella</cite>,<br> +<cite>Atheist's Tragedy, The</cite>,<br> +Augustan Age,<br> +Austen, Jane,<br> +Autobiography,<br> +<br> +Bacon, Francis,<br> +Ballad, the,<br> +Beaumont and Fletcher,<br> +Bennett, Arnold,<br> +Bible, the,<br> +Biography,<br> +Blake, William,<br> +Blank Verse,<br> +Boswell, James,<br> +Brontës, the,<br> +Browne, Sir Thomas,<br> +Browne, William,<br> +Browning, Robert,<br> +Bunyan, John,<br> +Burke, Edmund,<br> +Burns, Robert,<br> +Burton, Robert,<br> +Byron, Lord,<br> +<br> +Carew, Thomas,<br> +Carlyle, Thomas,<br> +Celtic Revival,<br> +Character-writing,<br> +Chatterton, Thomas,<br> +Cheke, Sir John,<br> +<cite>Christ's Victory and Death</cite>,<br> +Classicism,<br> +Clough, Thomas,<br> +Coleridge, Samuel Taylor,<br> +Collins, William,<br> +Conrad, Joseph,<br> +Cowley, Abraham,<br> +Cowper, William,<br> +Crabbe, George,<br> +Crashaw, Richard,<br> +Criticism,<br> +<br> +Decadence,<br> +Defoe, Daniel,<br> +De Quincey, Thomas,<br> +Dekker, Thomas,<br> +Dickens, Charles,<br> +Discovery, Voyages of,<br> +Disraeli, Benjamin,<br> +<cite>Dr. Faustus</cite>,<br> +Donne, John,<br> +Drama, the,<br> +Dryden, John,<br> +<cite>Duchess of Malfi, The</cite>,<br> +<br> +Earle, John,<br> +<cite>Edward II.</cite>,<br> +<cite>Elia, Essays of</cite>,<br> +Elizabethan Poetry,<br> +Elizabethan Prose,<br> +<cite>Essays, Civil and Moral</cite>,<br> +<cite>Euphues</cite>,<br> +<cite>Everyman</cite>,<br> +<br> +<cite>Fairy Queen, The</cite>,<br> +Fantastics, the,<br> +Fielding, Henry,<br> +Fitzgerald, Edward,<br> +Fletcher, Giles,<br> +Fletcher, Phineas,<br> +Ford, John,<br> +French Revolution, the,<br> +<br> +Gaskell, Mrs.,<br> +George Eliot,<br> +Gibbon, Edward,<br> +Gissing, George,<br> +Goldsmith, Oliver,<br> +<cite>Gorboduc</cite>,<br> +Gray, Thomas,<br> +Greene, Robert,<br> +Greville, Sir Fulke,<br> +<cite>Gulliver's Travels</cite>,<br> +<br> +<cite>Hakluyt's Voyages</cite>,<br> +Hardy, Thomas,<br> +Hazlitt, William,<br> +Hawthorne, Nathaniel,<br> +<cite>Henry VII., History of</cite>,<br> +Herbert, George,<br> +Herrick, Robert,<br> +Hobbes, Thomas,<br> +Hooper, Richard,<br> +<br> +Italy, influence of,<br> +<br> +<cite>Jew of Malta</cite>,<br> +Johnson, Samuel,<br> +Jonson, Ben,<br> +<br> +Keats, John,<br> +Kipling, Rudyard,<br> +Kyd, Thomas,<br> +<br> +Lamb, Charles,<br> +Locke, John,<br> +Lodge, Thomas,<br> +Lyly, John,<br> +Lyric, the,<br> +Lyrical Ballads,<br> +<br> +Marlowe, Christopher,<br> +Marston, John,<br> +Massinger, Philip,<br> +Meredith, George,<br> +Middleton, Thomas,<br> +Milton, John,<br> +Miracle Play, the,<br> +Moore, George,<br> +Morality, the,<br> +More, Sir Thomas,<br> +Morris, William,<br> +<br> +<cite>New Atlantis, The</cite>,<br> +Novel, the,<br> +<br> +Obscurity in Poetry,<br> +<cite>Omar Khayyam</cite>,<br> +<cite>Ossian</cite>,<br> +Oxford Movement, the,<br> +<br> +<cite>Paradise Lost</cite>,<br> +Pastoral Prose and Poetry,<br> +Peele, George,<br> +Percy, William,<br> +<cite>Pilgrim's Progress</cite>,<br> +Platonism,<br> +Poetic Diction,<br> +Pope, Alexander,<br> +Puritanism,<br> +<cite>Purple Island, The</cite>,<br> +<br> +Raleigh, Sir Walter,<br> +<cite>Rape of the Lock</cite>,<br> +Realism,<br> +<cite>Religio Medici</cite>,<br> +Renaissance, the,<br> +Reynolds, Sir Joshua,<br> +Rhetoric, study of,<br> +Richardson, Samuel,<br> +<cite>Robinson Crusoe</cite>,<br> +Romanticism,<br> +Romantic Revival, the,<br> +Rossetti, D. G.,<br> +Ruskin, John,<br> +<br> +Sackville, Thomas,<br> +Satire,<br> +Scott, Sir Walter,<br> +Senecan Tragedy,<br> +Seventeenth Century, the,<br> +Shaw, G. Bernard,<br> +Shelley, P. B.,<br> +Shenstone, Thomas,<br> +Sheridan, R. B.,<br> +Shirley, John,<br> +Sidney, Sir Philip,<br> +Smollett, T.,<br> +Sonnet, the,<br> +Sonneteers, the,<br> +<cite>Spanish Tragedy, The</cite>,<br> +<cite>Spectator, The</cite>,<br> +Spenser, Edmund,<br> +Spenserians, the,<br> +Steele, Richard,<br> +Sterne, Lawrence,<br> +Stevenson, R. L.,<br> +Supernatural, the,<br> +Surrey, the Earl of,<br> +Swift, Jonathan,<br> +Swinburne, A. C.,<br> +Synge, J. M.,<br> +<br> +<cite>Tale of a Tub, The</cite>,<br> +<cite>Tamburlaine</cite>,<br> +<cite>Tatler, The</cite>,<br> +<cite>Temple, Sir William</cite>,<br> +Tennyson, Alfred,<br> +Thackeray, W. M.,<br> +Theatre, the Elizabethan,<br> +Thomson, James,<br> +<cite>Tottel's Miscellany</cite>,<br> +<br> +<cite>Utopia</cite>,<br> +<br> +<cite>Vaughan, Henry</cite>,<br> +Victorian Age, the,<br> +<cite>View of the State of Ireland</cite>,<br> +<br> +Waller, Edmund,<br> +Walton, Isaac,<br> +Webster, John,<br> +Wells, H. G.,<br> +<cite>White Devil, The</cite>,<br> +Wilde, Oscar,<br> +Wilson, Thomas,<br> +Wither, George,<br> +Wordsworth, William,<br> +Wyatt, Thomas,<br> +<br> +Yeats, W. B.,<br> + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's English Literature: Modern, by G. H. 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For +example an eBook of filename 10234 would be found at: + + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/0/2/3/10234 + +or filename 24689 would be found at: + https://www.gutenberg.org/2/4/6/8/24689 + +An alternative method of locating eBooks: + https://www.gutenberg.org/GUTINDEX.ALL + + + + +</pre> + +</body> +</html> diff --git a/old/11327.txt b/old/11327.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0fea7e3 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/11327.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6940 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of English Literature: Modern, by G. H. Mair + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: English Literature: Modern + Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge + +Author: G. H. Mair + +Release Date: February 27, 2004 [EBook #11327] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN *** + + + + +Produced by Cera Kruger and PG Distributed Proofreaders + + + + +HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE + +ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN + +BY G. H. MAIR, M.A. SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF CHRIST CHURCH + +First Printed, October, 1911 Revised & Printed February, 1914 + + + +PREFACE + + +The intention of this book is to lay stress on ideas and tendencies that +have to be understood and appreciated, rather than on facts that have to +be learned by heart. Many authors are not mentioned and others receive +scanty treatment, because of the necessities of this method of approach. +The book aims at dealing with the matter of authors more than with their +lives; consequently it contains few dates. All that the reader need +require to help him have been included in a short chronological table at +the end. + +To have attempted a severely ordered and analytic treatment of the +subject would have been, for the author at least, impossible within the +limits imposed, and, in any case, would have been foreign to the purpose +indicated by the editors of the Home University Library. The book +pretends no more than to be a general introduction to a very great +subject, and it will have fulfilled all that is intended for it if it +stimulates those who read it to set about reading for themselves the +books of which it treats. + +Its debts are many, its chief creditors two teachers, Professor +Grierson at Aberdeen University and Sir Walter Raleigh at Oxford, to the +stimulation of whose books and teaching my pleasure in English +literature and any understanding I have of it are due. To them and to +the other writers (chief of them Professor Herford) whose ideas I have +wittingly or unwittingly incorporated in it, as well as to the kindness +and patience of Professor Gilbert Murray, I wish here to express my +indebtedness. + +G.H.M. +MANCHESTER, +_August_, 1911. + + + + +CONTENTS + + +CHAPTER + + PREFACE + +I THE RENAISSANCE + +II ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE + +III THE DRAMA + +IV THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY + +V THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE + +VI DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME + +VII THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL + +VIII THE VICTORIAN AGE + +IX THE NOVEL + +X THE PRESENT AGE + + BIBLIOGRAPHY + + CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE + + INDEX + + + + +ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN + + + + +CHAPTER I + + +THE RENAISSANCE + +(1) + +There are times in every man's experience when some sudden widening of +the boundaries of his knowledge, some vision of hitherto untried and +unrealized possibilities, has come and seemed to bring with it new life +and the inspiration of fresh and splendid endeavour. It may be some +great book read for the first time not as a book, but as a revelation; +it may be the first realization of the extent and moment of what +physical science has to teach us; it may be, like Carlyle's "Everlasting +Yea," an ethical illumination, or spiritual like Augustine's or John +Wesley's. But whatever it is, it brings with it new eyes, new powers of +comprehension, and seems to reveal a treasury of latent and unsuspected +talents in the mind and heart. The history of mankind has its parallels +to these moments of illumination in the life of the individual. There +are times when the boundaries of human experience, always narrow, and +fluctuating but little between age and age, suddenly widen themselves, +and the spirit of man leaps forward to possess and explore its new +domain. These are the great ages of the world. They could be counted, +perhaps, on one hand. The age of Pericles in Athens; the less defined +age, when Europe passed, spiritually and artistically, from what we call +the Dark, to what we call the Middle Ages; the Renaissance; the period +of the French Revolution. Two of them, so far as English literature is +concerned, fall within the compass of this book, and it is with one of +them--the Renaissance--that it begins. + +It is as difficult to find a comprehensive formula for what the +Renaissance meant as to tie it down to a date. The year 1453 A.D., when +the Eastern Empire--the last relic of the continuous spirit of +Rome--fell before the Turks, used to be given as the date, and perhaps +the word "Renaissance" itself--"a new birth"--is as much as can be +accomplished shortly by way of definition. Michelet's resonant +"discovery by mankind of himself and of the world" rather expresses what +a man of the Renaissance himself must have thought it, than what we in +this age can declare it to be. But both endeavours to date and to define +are alike impossible. One cannot fix a term to day or night, and the +theory of the Renaissance as a kind of tropical dawn--a sudden passage +to light from darkness--is not to be considered. The Renaissance was, +and was the result of, a numerous and various series of events which +followed and accompanied one another from the fourteenth to the +beginning of the sixteenth centuries. First and most immediate in its +influence on art and literature and thought, was the rediscovery of the +ancient literatures. In the Middle Ages knowledge of Greek and Latin +literatures had withdrawn itself into monasteries, and there narrowed +till of secular Latin writing scarcely any knowledge remained save of +Vergil (because of his supposed Messianic prophecy) and Statius, and of +Greek, except Aristotle, none at all. What had been lost in the Western +Empire, however, subsisted in the East, and the continual advance of the +Turk on the territories of the Emperors of Constantinople drove westward +to the shelter of Italy and the Church, and to the patronage of the +Medicis, a crowd of scholars who brought with them their manuscripts of +Homer and the dramatists, of Thucydides and Herodotus, and most +momentous perhaps for the age to come, of Plato and Demosthenes and of +the New Testament in its original Greek. The quick and vivid intellect +of Italy, which had been torpid in the decadence of mediaevalism and its +mysticism and piety, seized with avidity the revelation of the classical +world which the scholars and their manuscripts brought. Human life, +which the mediaeval Church had taught them to regard but as a threshold +and stepping-stone to eternity, acquired suddenly a new momentousness +and value; the promises of the Church paled like its lamps at sunrise; +and a new paganism, which had Plato for its high priest, and Demosthenes +and Pericles for its archetypes and examples, ran like wild-fire through +Italy. The Greek spirit seized on art, and produced Raphael, Leonardo, +and Michel Angelo; on literature and philosophy and gave us Pico della +Mirandula, on life and gave us the Medicis and Castiglione and +Machiavelli. Then--the invention not of Italy but of Germany--came the +art of printing, and made this revival of Greek literature quickly +portable into other lands. + +Even more momentous was the new knowledge the age brought of the +physical world. The brilliant conjectures of Copernicus paved the way +for Galileo, and the warped and narrow cosmology which conceived the +earth as the centre of the universe, suffered a blow that in shaking it +shook also religion. And while the conjectures of the men of science +were adding regions undreamt of to the physical universe, the +discoverers were enlarging the territories of the earth itself. The +Portuguese, with the aid of sailors trained in the great Mediterranean +ports of Genoa and Venice, pushed the track of exploration down the +western coast of Africa; the Cape was circumnavigated by Vasco da Gama, +and India reached for the first time by Western men by way of the sea. +Columbus reached Trinidad and discovered the "New" World; his successors +pushed past him and touched the Continent. Spanish colonies grew up +along the coasts of North and Central America and in Peru, and the +Portuguese reached Brazil. Cabot and the English voyagers reached +Newfoundland and Labrador; the French made their way up the St. +Lawrence. The discovery of the gold mines brought new and unimagined +possibilities of wealth to the Old World, while the imagination of +Europe, bounded since the beginning of recorded time by the Western +ocean, and with the Mediterranean as its centre, shot out to the romance +and mystery of untried seas. + +It is difficult for us in these later days to conceive the profound and +stirring influence of such an alteration on thought and literature. To +the men at the end of the fifteenth century scarcely a year but brought +another bit of received and recognized thinking to the scrap-heap; +scarcely a year but some new discovery found itself surpassed and in its +turn discarded, or lessened in significance by something still more new. +Columbus sailed westward to find a new sea route, and as he imagined, a +more expeditious one to "the Indies"; the name West Indies still +survives to show the theory on which the early discoverers worked. The +rapidity with which knowledge widened can be gathered by a comparison of +the maps of the day. In the earlier of them the mythical Brazil, a relic +perhaps of the lost Atlantis, lay a regularly and mystically blue island +off the west coast of Ireland; then the Azores were discovered and the +name fastened on to one of the islands of that archipelago. Then Amerigo +reached South America and the name became finally fixed to the country +that we know. There is nothing nowadays that can give us a parallel to +the stirring and exaltation of the imagination which intoxicated the men +of the Renaissance, and gave a new birth to thought and art. The great +scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century came to men more +prepared for the shock of new surprises, and they carried evidence less +tangible and indisputable to the senses. Perhaps if the strivings of +science should succeed in proving as evident and comprehensible the +existences which spiritualist and psychical research is striving to +establish, we should know the thrill that the great twin discoverers, +Copernicus and Columbus, brought to Europe. + + +(2) + +This rough sketch of the Renaissance has been set down because it is +only by realizing the period in its largest and broadest sense that we +can understand the beginnings of our own modern literature. The +Renaissance reached England late. By the time that the impulse was at +its height with Spenser and Shakespeare, it had died out in Italy, and +in France to which in its turn Italy had passed the torch, it was +already a waning fire. When it came to England it came in a special form +shaped by political and social conditions, and by the accidents of +temperament and inclination in the men who began the movement. But the +essence of the inspiration remained the same as it had been on the +Continent, and the twin threads of its two main impulses, the impulse +from the study of the classics, and the impulse given to men's minds by +the voyages of discovery, runs through all the texture of our +Renaissance literature. + +Literature as it developed in the reign of Elizabeth ran counter to the +hopes and desires of the men who began the movement; the common usage +which extends the term Elizabethan backwards outside the limits of the +reign itself, has nothing but its carelessness to recommend it. The men +of the early renaissance in the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, belonged +to a graver school than their successors. They were no splendid +courtiers, nor daring and hardy adventurers, still less swashbucklers, +exquisites, or literary dandies. Their names--Sir John Cheke, Roger +Ascham, Nicholas Udall, Thomas Wilson, Walter Haddon, belong rather to +the universities and to the coteries of learning, than to the court. To +the nobility, from whose essays and _belles lettres_ Elizabethan poetry +was to develop, they stood in the relation of tutors rather than of +companions, suspecting the extravagances of their pupils rather than +sympathising with their ideals. They were a band of serious and +dignified scholars, men preoccupied with morality and good-citizenship, +and holding those as worth more than the lighter interests of learning +and style. It is perhaps characteristic of the English temper that the +revival of the classical tongues, which in Italy made for paganism, and +the pursuit of pleasure in life and art, in England brought with it in +the first place a new seriousness and gravity of life, and in religion +the Reformation. But in a way the scholars fought against tendencies in +their age, which were both too fast and too strong for them. At a time +when young men were writing poetry modelled on the delicate and +extravagant verse of Italy, were reading Italian novels, and affecting +Italian fashions in speech and dress, they were fighting for sound +education, for good classical scholarship, for the purity of native +English, and behind all these for the native strength and worth of the +English character, which they felt to be endangered by orgies of +reckless assimilation from abroad. The revival of the classics at Oxford +and Cambridge could not produce an Erasmus or a Scaliger; we have no +fine critical scholarship of this age to put beside that of Holland or +France. Sir John Cheke and his followers felt they had a public and +national duty to perform, and their knowledge of the classics only +served them for examples of high living and morality, on which +education, in its sense of the formation of character, could be based. + +The literary influence of the revival of letters in England, apart from +its moral influence, took two contradictory and opposing forms. In the +curricula of schools, logic, which in the Middle Ages had been the +groundwork of thought and letters, gave place to rhetoric. The reading +of the ancients awakened new delight in the melody and beauty of +language: men became intoxicated with words. The practice of rhetoric +was universal and it quickly coloured all literature. It was the habit +of the rhetoricians to choose some subject for declamation and round it +to encourage their pupils to set embellishments and decorations, which +commonly proceeded rather from a delight in language for language's +sake, than from any effect in enforcing an argument. Their models for +these exercises can be traced in their influence on later writers. One +of the most popular of them, Erasmus's "Discourse Persuading a Young Man +to Marriage," which was translated in an English text-book of rhetoric, +reminds one of the first part of Shakespeare's sonnets. The literary +affectation called euphuism was directly based on the precepts of the +handbooks on rhetoric; its author, John Lyly, only elaborated and made +more precise tricks of phrase and writing, which had been used as +exercises in the schools of his youth. The prose of his school, with its +fantastic delight in exuberance of figure and sound, owed its +inspiration, in its form ultimately to Cicero, and in the decorations +with which it was embellished, to the elder Pliny and later writers of +his kind. The long declamatory speeches and the sententiousness of the +early drama were directly modelled on Seneca, through whom was faintly +reflected the tragedy of Greece, unknown directly or almost unknown to +English readers. Latinism, like every new craze, became a passion, and +ran through the less intelligent kinds of writing in a wild excess. Not +much of the literature of this time remains in common knowledge, and for +examples of these affectations one must turn over the black letter pages +of forgotten books. There high-sounding and familiar words are handled +and bandied about with delight, and you can see in volume after volume +these minor and forgotten authors gloating over the new found treasure +which placed them in their time in the van of literary success. That +they are obsolete now, and indeed were obsolete before they were dead, +is a warning to authors who intend similar extravagances. Strangeness +and exoticism are not lasting wares. By the time of "Love's Labour Lost" +they had become nothing more than matter for laughter, and it is only +through their reflection and distortion in Shakespeare's pages that we +know them now. + +Had not a restraining influence, anxiously and even acrimoniously urged, +broken in on their endeavours the English language to-day might have +been almost as completely latinized as Spanish or Italian. That the +essential Saxon purity of our tongue has been preserved is to the credit +not of sensible unlettered people eschewing new fashions they could not +comprehend, but to the scholars themselves. The chief service that Cheke +and Ascham and their fellows rendered to English literature was their +crusade against the exaggerated latinity that they had themselves helped +to make possible, the crusade against what they called "inkhorn terms." +"I am of this opinion," said Cheke in a prefatory letter to a book +translated by a friend of his, "that our own tongue should be written +clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with the borrowing of other +tongues, wherein if we take not heed by time, ever borrowing and never +paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt." Writings in +the Saxon vernacular like the sermons of Latimer, who was careful to use +nothing not familiar to the common people, did much to help the scholars +to save our prose from the extravagances which they dreaded. Their +attack was directed no less against the revival of really obsolete +words. It is a paradox worth noting for its strangeness that the first +revival of mediaevalism in modern English literature was in the +Renaissance itself. Talking in studious archaism seems to have been a +fashionable practice in society and court circles. "The fine courtier," +says Thomas Wilson in his _Art of Rhetoric_, "will talk nothing but +Chaucer." The scholars of the English Renaissance fought not only +against the ignorant adoption of their importations, but against the +renewal of forgotten habits of speech. + +Their efforts failed, and their ideals had to wait for their acceptance +till the age of Dryden, when Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, all of +them authors who consistently violated the standards of Cheke, had done +their work. The fine courtier who would talk nothing but Chaucer was in +Elizabeth's reign the saving of English verse. The beauty and richness +of Spenser is based directly on words he got from _Troilus and Cressida_ +and the _Canterbury Tales_. Some of the most sonorous and beautiful +lines in Shakespeare break every canon laid down by the humanists. + +"Th' extravagant and erring spirit hies + To his confine" + +is a line, three of the chief words of which are Latin importations that +come unfamiliarly, bearing their original interpretation with them. +Milton is packed with similar things: he will talk of a crowded meeting +as "frequent" and use constructions which are unintelligible to anyone +who does not possess a knowledge--and a good knowledge--of Latin syntax. +Yet the effect is a good poetic effect. In attacking latinisms in the +language borrowed from older poets Cheke and his companions were +attacking the two chief sources of Elizabethan poetic vocabulary. All +the sonorousness, beauty and dignity of the poetry and the drama which +followed them would have been lost had they succeeded in their object, +and their verse would have been constrained into the warped and ugly +forms of Sternhold and Hopkins, and those with them who composed the +first and worst metrical version of the Psalms. When their idea +reappeared for its fulfilment phantasy and imagery had temporarily worn +themselves out, and the richer language made simplicity possible and +adequate for poetry. + +There are other directions in which the classical revival influenced +writing that need not detain us here. The attempt to transplant +classical metres into English verse which was the concern of a little +group of authors who called themselves the Areopagus came to no more +success than a similar and contemporary attempt did in France. An +earlier and more lasting result of the influence of the classics on new +ways of thinking is the _Utopia_ of Sir Thomas More, based on Plato's +_Republic_, and followed by similar attempts on the part of other +authors, of which the most notable are Harrington's _Oceana_ and Bacon's +_New Atlantis_. In one way or another the rediscovery of Plato proved +the most valuable part of the Renaissance's gift from Greece. The +doctrines of the Symposium coloured in Italy the writings of Castiglione +and Mirandula. In England they gave us Spenser's "Hymn to Intellectual +Beauty," and they affected, each in his own way, Sir Philip Sidney, and +others of the circle of court writers of his time. More's book was +written in Latin, though there is an English translation almost +contemporary. He combines in himself the two strains that we found +working in the Renaissance, for besides its origin in Plato, _Utopia_ +owes not a little to the influence of the voyages of discovery. In 1507 +there was published a little book called an _Introduction to +Cosmography_, which gave an account of the four voyages of Amerigo. In +the story of the fourth voyage it is narrated that twenty-four men were +left in a fort near Cape Bahia. More used this detail as a +starting-point, and one of the men whom Amerigo left tells the story of +this "Nowhere," a republic partly resembling England but most of all the +ideal world of Plato. Partly resembling England, because no man can +escape from the influences of his own time, whatever road he takes, +whether the road of imagination or any other. His imagination can only +build out of the materials afforded him by his own experience: he can +alter, he can rearrange, but he cannot in the strictest sense of the +word create, and every city of dreams is only the scheme of things as +they are remoulded nearer to the desire of a man's heart. In a way More +has less invention than some of his subtler followers, but his book is +interesting because it is the first example of a kind of writing which +has been attractive to many men since his time, and particularly to +writers of our own day. + +There remains one circumstance in the revival of the classics which had +a marked and continuous influence on the literary age that followed. To +get the classics English scholars had as we have seen to go to Italy. +Cheke went there and so did Wilson, and the path of travel across France +and through Lombardy to Florence and Rome was worn hard by the feet of +their followers for over a hundred years after. On the heels of the men +of learning went the men of fashion, eager to learn and copy the new +manners of a society whose moral teacher was Machiavelli, and whose +patterns of splendour were the courts of Florence and Ferrara, and to +learn the trick of verse that in the hands of Petrarch and his followers +had fashioned the sonnet and other new lyric forms. This could not be +without its influence on the manners of the nation, and the scholars who +had been the first to show the way were the first to deplore the +pell-mell assimilation of Italian manners and vices, which was the +unintended result of the inroad on insularity which had already begun. +They saw the danger ahead, and they laboured to meet it as it came. +Ascham in his _Schoolmaster_ railed against the translation of Italian +books, and the corrupt manners of living and false ideas which they +seemed to him to breed. The Italianate Englishman became the chief part +of the stock-in-trade of the satirists and moralists of the day. Stubbs, +a Puritan chronicler, whose book _The Anatomy of Abuses_ is a valuable +aid to the study of Tudor social history, and Harrison, whose +description of England prefaces Holinshed's Chronicles, both deal in +detail with the Italian menace, and condemn in good set terms the +costliness in dress and the looseness in morals which they laid to its +charge. Indeed, the effect on England was profound, and it lasted for +more than two generations. The romantic traveller, Coryat, writing well +within the seventeenth century in praise of the luxuries of Italy (among +which he numbers forks for table use), is as enthusiastic as the authors +who began the imitation of Italian metres in Tottel's _Miscellany_, and +Donne and Hall in their satires written under James wield the rod of +censure as sternly as had Ascham a good half century before. No doubt +there was something in the danger they dreaded, but the evil was not +unmixed with good, for insularity will always be an enemy of good +literature. The Elizabethans learned much more than their plots from +Italian models, and the worst effects dreaded by the patriots never +reached our shores. Italian vice stopped short of real life; poisoning +and hired ruffianism flourished only on the stage. + + +(3) + +The influence of the spirit of discovery and adventure, though it is +less quickly marked, more pervasive, and less easy to define, is perhaps +more universal than that of the classics or of the Italian fashions +which came in their train. It runs right through the literature of +Elizabeth's age and after it, affecting, each in their special way, all +the dramatists, authors who were also adventurers like Raleigh, scholars +like Milton, and philosophers like Hobbes and Locke. It reappears in the +Romantic revival with Coleridge, whose "Ancient Mariner" owes much to +reminiscences of his favourite reading--_Purchas, his Pilgrimes_, and +other old books of voyages. The matter of this too-little noticed strain +in English literature would suffice to fill a whole book; only a few of +the main lines of its influence can be noted here. + +For the English Renaissance--for Elizabeth's England, action and +imagination went hand in hand; the dramatists and poets held up the +mirror to the voyagers. In a sense, the cult of the sea is the oldest +note in English literature. There is not a poem in Anglo-Saxon but +breathes the saltness and the bitterness of the sea-air. To the old +English the sea was something inexpressibly melancholy and desolate, +mist-shrouded, and lonely, terrible in its grey and shivering spaces; +and their tone about it is always elegiac and plaintive, as a place of +dreary spiritless wandering and unmarked graves. When the English +settled they lost the sense of the sea; they became a little parochial +people, tilling fields and tending cattle, wool-gathering and +wool-bartering, their shipping confined to cross-Channel merchandise, +and coastwise sailing from port to port. Chaucer's shipman, almost the +sole representative of the sea in mediaeval English literature, plied a +coastwise trade. But with the Cabots and their followers, Frobisher and +Gilbert and Drake and Hawkins, all this was changed; once more the ocean +became the highway of our national progress and adventure, and by virtue +of our shipping we became competitors for the dominion of the earth. The +rising tide of national enthusiasm and exaltation that this occasioned +flooded popular literature. The voyagers themselves wrote down the +stories of their adventures; and collections of these--Hakluyt's and +Purchas's--were among the most popular books of the age. To them, +indeed, we must look for the first beginnings of our modern English +prose, and some of its noblest passages. The writers, as often as not, +were otherwise utterly unknown--ship's pursers, super-cargoes, and the +like--men without much literary craft or training, whose style is great +because of the greatness of their subject, because they had no literary +artifices to stand between them and the plain and direct telling of a +stirring tale. But the ferment worked outside the actual doings of the +voyagers themselves, and it can be traced beyond definite allusions to +them. Allusions, indeed, are surprisingly few; Drake is scarcely as much +as mentioned among the greater writers of the age. None the less there +is not one of them that is not deeply touched by his spirit and that of +the movement which he led. New lands had been discovered, new +territories opened up, wonders exposed which were perhaps only the first +fruits of greater wonders to come. Spenser makes the voyagers his +warrant for his excursion into fairyland. Some, he says, have condemned +his fairy world as an idle fiction, + +"But let that man with better sense advise; + That of the world least part to us is red; + And daily how through hardy enterprise + Many great regions are discovered, + Which to late age were never mentioned. + Who ever heard of the 'Indian Peru'? + Or who in venturous vessel measured + The Amazon, huge river, now found true? + Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view? + +"Yet all these were, when no man did them know, + Yet have from wiser ages hidden been; + And later times things more unknown shall show." + +It is in the drama that this spirit of adventure caught from the +voyagers gets its full play. "Without the voyagers," says Professor +Walter Raleigh,[1] "Marlowe is inconceivable." His imagination in every +one of his plays is preoccupied with the lust of adventure, and the +wealth and power adventure brings. Tamburlaine, Eastern conqueror though +he is, is at heart an Englishman of the school of Hawkins and Drake. +Indeed the comparison must have occurred to his own age, for a historian +of the day, the antiquary Stow, declares Drake to have been "as famous +in Europe and America as Tamburlaine was in Asia and Africa." The +high-sounding names and quests which seem to us to give the play an air +of unreality and romance were to the Elizabethans real and actual; +things as strange and foreign were to be heard any day amongst the +motley crowd in the Bankside outside the theatre door. Tamburlaine's +last speech, when he calls for a map and points the way to unrealised +conquests, is the very epitome of the age of discovery. + +"Lo, here my sons, are all the golden mines, + Inestimable wares and precious stones, + More worth than Asia and all the world beside; + And from the Antarctic Pole eastward behold + As much more land, which never was descried. + Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright + As all the lamps that beautify the sky." + + +[Footnote 1: To whose terminal essay in "Hakluyt's Voyages" (Maclehose) +I am indebted for much of the matter in this section.] + +It is the same in his other plays. Dr. Faustus assigns to his +serviceable spirits tasks that might have been studied from the books of +Hakluyt + +"I'll have them fly to India for gold, + Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, + And search all corners of the new round world + For pleasant fruits and princely delicates." + +When there is no actual expression of the spirit of adventure, the air +of the sea which it carried with it still blows. Shakespeare, save for +his scenes in _The Tempest_ and in _Pericles_, which seize in all its +dramatic poignancy the terror of storm and shipwreck, has nothing +dealing directly with the sea or with travel; but it comes out, none the +less, in figure and metaphor, and plays like the _Merchant of Venice_ +and _Othello_ testify to his accessibility to its spirit. Milton, a +scholar whose mind was occupied by other and more ultimate matters, is +full of allusions to it. Satan's journey through Chaos in _Paradise +Lost_ is the occasion for a whole series of metaphors drawn from +seafaring. In _Samson Agonistes_ Dalila comes in, + + "Like a stately ship ... +With all her bravery on and tackle trim +Sails frilled and streamers waving +Courted by all the winds that hold them play." + +and Samson speaks of himself as one who, + + "Like a foolish pilot have shipwracked +My vessel trusted to me from above +Gloriously rigged." + +The influence of the voyages of discovery persisted long after the first +bloom of the Renaissance had flowered and withered. On the reports +brought home by the voyagers were founded in part those conceptions of +the condition of the "natural" man which form such a large part of the +philosophic discussions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, +Hobbes's description of the life of nature as "nasty, solitary, brutish, +and short," Locke's theories of civil government, and eighteenth century +speculators like Monboddo all took as the basis of their theory the +observations of the men of travel. Abroad this connection of travellers +and philosophers was no less intimate. Both Montesquieu and Rousseau +owed much to the tales of the Iroquois, the North American Indian allies +of France. Locke himself is the best example of the closeness of this +alliance. He was a diligent student of the texts of the voyagers, and +himself edited out of Hakluyt and Purchas the best collection of them +current in his day. The purely literary influence of the age of +discovery persisted down to _Robinson Crusoe_; in that book by a +refinement of satire a return to travel itself (it must be remembered +Defoe posed not as a novelist but as an actual traveller) is used to +make play with the deductions founded on it. Crusoe's conversation with +the man Friday will be found to be a satire of Locke's famous +controversy with the Bishop of Worcester. With _Robinson Crusoe_ the +influence of the age of discovery finally perishes. An inspiration +hardens into the mere subject matter of books of adventure. We need not +follow it further. + + + + +CHAPTER II + + +ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE + +(1) + +To understand Elizabethan literature it is necessary to remember that +the social status it enjoyed was far different from that of literature +in our own day. The splendours of the Medicis in Italy had set up an +ideal of courtliness, in which letters formed an integral and +indispensable part. For the Renaissance, the man of letters was only one +aspect of the gentleman, and the true gentleman, as books so early and +late respectively as Castiglione's _Courtier_ and Peacham's _Complete +Gentleman_ show, numbered poetry as a necessary part of his +accomplishments. In England special circumstances intensified this +tendency of the time. The queen was unmarried: she was the first single +woman to wear the English crown, and her vanity made her value the +devotion of the men about her as something more intimate than mere +loyalty or patriotism. She loved personal homage, particularly the +homage of half-amatory eulogy in prose and verse. It followed that the +ambition of every courtier was to be an author, and of every author to +be a courtier; in fact, outside the drama, which was almost the only +popular writing at the time, every author was in a greater or less +degree attached to the court. If they were not enjoying its favours they +were pleading for them, mingling high and fantastic compliment with +bitter reproaches and a tale of misery. And consequently both the poetry +and the prose of the time are restricted in their scope and temper to +the artificial and romantic, to high-flown eloquence, to the celebration +of love and devotion, or to the inculcation of those courtly virtues and +accomplishments which composed the perfect pattern of a gentleman. Not +that there was not both poetry and prose written outside this charmed +circle. The pamphleteers and chroniclers, Dekker and Nash, Holinshed and +Harrison and Stow, were setting down their histories and descriptions, +and penning those detailed and realistic indictments of the follies and +extravagances of fashion, which together with the comedies have enabled +us to picture accurately the England and especially the London of +Elizabeth's reign. There was fine poetry written by Marlowe and Chapman +as well as by Sidney and Spenser, but the court was still the main +centre of literary endeavour, and the main incitement to literary fame +and success. + +But whether an author was a courtier or a Londoner living by his wits, +writing was never the main business of his life: all the writers of the +time were in one way or another men of action and affairs. As late as +Milton it is probably true to say that writing was in the case even of +the greatest an avocation, something indulged in at leisure outside a +man's main business. All the Elizabethan authors had crowded and various +careers. Of Sir Philip Sidney his earliest biographer says, "The truth +is his end was not writing, even while he wrote, but both his wit and +understanding bent upon his heart to make himself and others not in +words or opinion but in life and action good and great." Ben Jonson was +in turn a soldier, a poet, a bricklayer, an actor, and ultimately the +first poet laureate. Lodge, after leaving Oxford, passed through the +various professions of soldiering, medicine, playwriting, and fiction, +and he wrote his novel _Rosalind_, on which Shakespeare based _As You +Like It_ while he was sailing on a piratical venture on the Spanish +Main. This connection between life and action affected as we have seen +the tone and quality of Elizabethan writing. "All the distinguished +writers of the period," says Thoreau, "possess a greater vigour and +naturalness than the more modern ... you have constantly the warrant of +life and experience in what you read. The little that is said is eked +out by implication of the much that was done." In another passage the +same writer explains the strength and fineness of the writings of Sir +Walter Raleigh by this very test of action, "The word which is best said +came nearest to not being spoken at all, for it is cousin to a deed +which the speaker could have better done. Nay almost it must have taken +the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, +so that the truest writer will be some captive knight after all." This +bond between literature and action explains more than the writings of +the voyagers or the pamphlets of men who lived in London by what they +could make of their fellows. Literature has always a two-fold relation +to life as it is lived. It is both a mirror and an escape: in our own +day the stirring romances of Stevenson, the full-blooded and vigorous +life which beats through the pages of Mr. Kipling, the conscious +brutalism of such writers as Mr. Conrad and Mr. Hewlett, the plays of +J.M. Synge, occupied with the vigorous and coarse-grained life of +tinkers and peasants, are all in their separate ways a reaction against +an age in which the overwhelming majority of men and women have +sedentary pursuits. Just in the same way the Elizabethan who passed his +commonly short and crowded life in an atmosphere of throat-cutting and +powder and shot, and in a time when affairs of state were more momentous +for the future of the nation than they have ever been since, needed his +escape from the things which pressed in upon him every day. So grew the +vogue and popularity of pastoral poetry and of pastoral romance. + + + +(2) + +It is with two courtiers that modern English poetry begins. The lives of +Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey both ended early and unhappily, +and it was not until ten years after the death of the second of them +that their poems appeared in print. The book that contained them, +Tottel's _Miscellany of Songs and Sonnets_, is one of the landmarks of +English literature. It begins lyrical love poetry in our language. It +begins, too, the imitation and adaptation of foreign and chiefly Italian +metrical forms, many of which have since become characteristic forms of +English verse: so characteristic, that we scarcely think of them as +other than native in origin. To Wyatt belongs the honour of introducing +the sonnet, and to Surrey the more momentous credit of writing, for the +first time in English, blank verse. Wyatt fills the most important place +in the _Miscellany_, and his work, experimental in tone and quality, +formed the example which Surrey and minor writers in the same volume and +all the later poets of the age copied. He tries his hand at +everything--songs, madrigals, elegies, complaints, and sonnets--and he +takes his models from both ancient Rome and modern Italy. Indeed there +is scarcely anything in the volume for which with some trouble and +research one might not find an original in Petrarch, or in the poets of +Italy who followed him. But imitation, universal though it is in his +work, does not altogether crowd out originality of feeling and poetic +temper. At times, he sounds a personal note, his joy on leaving Spain +for England, his feelings in the Tower, his life at the Court amongst +his books, and as a country gentleman enjoying hunting and other outdoor +sports. + +"This maketh me at home to hunt and hawk, + And in foul weather at my book to sit, + In frost and snow, then with my bow to stalk, + No man does mark whereas I ride or go: + In lusty leas at liberty I walk." + +It is easy to see that poetry as a melodious and enriched expression of +a man's own feelings is in its infancy here. The new poets had to find +their own language, to enrich with borrowings from other tongues the +stock of words suitable for poetry which the dropping of inflection had +left to English. Wyatt was at the beginning of the process, and apart +from a gracious and courtly temper, his work has, it must be confessed, +hardly more than an antiquarian interest. Surrey, it is possible to say +on reading his work, went one step further. He allows himself oftener +the luxury of a reference to personal feelings, and his poetry contains +from place to place a fairly full record of the vicissitudes of his +life. A prisoner at Windsor, he recalls his childhood there + +"The large green courts where we were wont to hove, + The palme-play, where, despoiled for the game. + With dazzled eyes oft we by gleams of love + Have missed the ball, and got sight of our dame." + +Like Wyatt's, his verses are poor stuff, but a sympathetic ear can catch +in them something of the accent that distinguishes the verse of Sidney +and Spenser. He is greater than Wyatt, not so much for greater skill as +for more boldness in experiment. Wyatt in his sonnets had used the +Petrarchan or Italian form, the form used later in England by Milton and +in the nineteenth century by Rossetti. He built up each poem, that is, +in two parts, the octave, a two-rhymed section of eight lines at the +beginning, followed by the sestet, a six line close with three rhymes. +The form fits itself very well to the double mood which commonly +inspires a poet using the sonnet form; the second section as it were +both echoing and answering the first, following doubt with hope, or +sadness with resignation, or resolving a problem set itself by the +heart. Surrey tried another manner, the manner which by its use in +Shakespeare's sonnets has come to be regarded as the English form of +this kind of lyric. His sonnets are virtually three-stanza poems with a +couplet for close, and he allows himself as many rhymes as he chooses. +The structure is obviously easier, and it gives a better chance to an +inferior workman, but in the hands of a master its harmonies are no less +delicate, and its capacity to represent changing modes of thought no +less complete than those of the true form of Petrarch. Blank verse, +which was Surrey's other gift to English poetry, was in a way a +compromise between the two sources from which the English Renaissance +drew its inspiration. Latin and Greek verse is quantitative and +rhymeless; Italian verse, built up on the metres of the troubadours and +the degeneration of Latin which gave the world the Romance languages, +used many elaborate forms of rhyme. Blank verse took from Latin its +rhymelessness, but it retained accent instead of quantity as the basis +of its line. The line Surrey used is the five-foot or ten-syllable line +of what is called "heroic verse"--the line used by Chaucer in his +Prologue and most of his tales. Like Milton he deplored rhyme as the +invention of a barbarous age, and no doubt he would have rejoiced to go +further and banish accent as well as rhymed endings. That, however, was +not to be, though in the best blank verse of later time accent and +quantity both have their share in the effect. The instrument he forged +passed into the hands of the dramatists: Marlowe perfected its rhythm, +Shakespeare broke its monotony and varied its cadences by altering the +spacing of the accents, and occasionally by adding an extra unaccented +syllable. It came back from the drama to poetry with Milton. His +blindness and the necessity under which it laid him of keeping in his +head long stretches of verse at one time, because he could not look back +to see what he had written, probably helped his naturally quick and +delicate sense of cadence to vary the pauses, so that a variety of +accent and interval might replace the valuable aid to memory which he +put aside in putting aside rhyme. Perhaps it is to two accidents, the +accident by which blank verse as the medium of the actor had to be +retained easily in the memory, and the accident of Milton's blindness, +that must be laid the credit of more than a little of the richness of +rhythm of this, the chief and greatest instrument of English verse. + +The imitation of Italian and French forms which Wyatt and Surrey began, +was continued by a host of younger amateurs of poetry. Laborious +research has indeed found a Continental original for almost every great +poem of the time, and for very many forgotten ones as well. It is easy +for the student engaged in this kind of literary exploration to +exaggerate the importance of what he finds, and of late years criticism, +written mainly by these explorers, has tended to assume that since it +can be found that Sidney, and Daniel, and Watson, and all the other +writers of mythological poetry and sonnet sequences took their ideas and +their phrases from foreign poetry, their work is therefore to be classed +merely as imitative literary exercise, that it is frigid, that it +contains or conveys no real feeling, and that except in the secondary +and derived sense, it is not really lyrical at all. Petrarch, they will +tell you, may have felt deeply and sincerely about Laura, but when +Sidney uses Petrarch's imagery and even translates his words in order to +express his feelings for Stella, he is only a plagiarist and not a +lover, and the passion for Lady Rich which is supposed to have inspired +his sonnets, nothing more than a not too seriously intended trick to add +the excitement of a transcript of real emotion to what was really an +academic exercise. If that were indeed so, then Elizabethan poetry is a +very much lesser and meaner thing than later ages have thought it. But +is it so? Let us look into the matter a little more closely. The unit of +all ordinary kinds of writing is the word, and one is not commonly +quarrelled with for using words that have belonged to other people. But +the unit of the lyric, like the unit of spoken conversation, is not the +word but the phrase. Now in daily human intercourse the use, which is +universal and habitual, of set forms and phrases of talk is not commonly +supposed to detract from, or destroy sincerity. In the crises indeed of +emotion it must be most people's experience that the natural speech that +rises unbidden and easiest to the lips is something quite familiar and +commonplace, some form which the accumulated experience of many +generations of separate people has found best for such circumstances or +such an occasion. The lyric is just in the position of conversation, at +such a heightened and emotional moment. It is the speech of deep +feeling, that must be articulate or choke, and it falls naturally and +inevitably into some form which accumulated passionate moments have +created and fixed. The course of emotional experiences differs very +little from age to age, and from individual to individual, and so the +same phrases may be used quite sincerely and naturally as the direct +expression of feeling at its highest point by men apart in country, +circumstances, or time. This is not to say that there is no such thing +as originality; a poet is a poet first and most of all because he +discovers truths that have been known for ages, as things that are fresh +and new and vital for himself. He must speak of them in language that +has been used by other men just because they are known truths, but he +will use that language in a new way, and with a new significance, and +it is just in proportion to the freshness, and the air of personal +conviction and sincerity which he imparts to it, that he is great. + +The point at issue bears very directly on the work of Sir Philip Sidney. +In the course of the history of English letters certain authors +disengage themselves who have more than a merely literary position: they +are symbolic of the whole age in which they live, its life and action, +its thoughts and ideals, as well as its mere modes of writing. There are +not many of them and they could be easily numbered; Addison, perhaps, +certainly Dr. Johnson, certainly Byron, and in the later age probably +Tennyson. But the greatest of them all is Sir Philip Sidney: his +symbolical relation to the time in which he lived was realized by his +contemporaries, and it has been a commonplace of history and criticism +ever since. Elizabeth called him one of the jewels of her crown, and at +the age of twenty-three, so fast did genius ripen in that summer time of +the Renaissance, William the Silent could speak of him as "one of the +ripest statesmen of the age." He travelled widely in Europe, knew many +languages, and dreamed of adventure in America and on the high seas. In +a court of brilliant figures, his was the most dazzling, and his death +at Zutphen only served to intensify the halo of romance which had +gathered round his name. His literary exercises were various: in prose +he wrote the _Arcadia_ and the _Apology for Poetry_, the one the +beginning of a new kind of imaginative writing, and the other the first +of the series of those rare and precious commentaries on their own art +which some of our English poets have left us. To the _Arcadia_ we shall +have to return later in this chapter. It is his other great work, the +sequence of sonnets entitled _Astrophel and Stella_, which concerns us +here. They celebrate the history of his love for Penelope Devereux, +sister of the Earl of Essex, a love brought to disaster by the +intervention of Queen Elizabeth with whom he had quarrelled. As poetry +they mark an epoch. They are the first direct expression of an intimate +and personal experience in English literature, struck off in the white +heat of passion, and though they are coloured at times with that +over-fantastic imagery which is at once a characteristic fault and +excellence of the writing of the time, they never lose the one merit +above all others of lyric poetry, the merit of sincerity. The note is +struck with certainty and power in the first sonnet of the series:-- + +"Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, + That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,-- + Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,-- + Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,-- + I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, + Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain; + Oft turning others' leaves to see if thence would flow + Some fresh and fruitful flower upon my sunburned brain. + But words came halting forth ... + Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, + 'Fool,' said my muse to me, 'look in thy heart and write.'" + +And though he turned others' leaves it was quite literally looking in +his heart that he wrote. He analyses the sequence of his feelings with a +vividness and minuteness which assure us of their truth. All that he +tells is the fruit of experience, dearly bought: + +"Desire! desire! I have too dearly bought + With price of mangled mind thy worthless ware. + Too long, too long! asleep thou hast me brought, + Who shouldst my mind to higher things prepare." + +and earlier in the sequence-- + +"I now have learned love right and learned even so + As those that being poisoned poison know." + +In the last two sonnets, with crowning truth and pathos he renounces +earthly love which reaches but to dust, and which because it fades +brings but fading pleasure: + +"Then farewell, world! Thy uttermost I see. + Eternal love, maintain thy life in me." + +The sonnets were published after Sidney's death, and it is certain that +like Shakespeare's they were never intended for publication at all. The +point is important because it helps to vindicate Sidney's sincerity, but +were any vindication needed another more certain might be found. The +_Arcadia_ is strewn with love songs and sonnets, the exercises solely of +the literary imagination. Let any one who wishes to gauge the sincerity +of the impulse of the Stella sequence compare any of the poems in it +with those in the romance. + +With Sir Philip Sidney literature was an avocation, constantly indulged +in, but outside the main business of his life; with Edmund Spenser +public life and affairs were subservient to an overmastering poetic +impulse. He did his best to carve out a career for himself like other +young men of his time, followed the fortunes of the Earl of Leicester, +sought desperately and unavailingly the favour of the Queen, and +ultimately accepted a place in her service in Ireland, which meant +banishment as virtually as a place in India would to-day. Henceforward +his visits to London and the Court were few; sometimes a lover of travel +would visit him in his house in Ireland as Raleigh did, but for the most +he was left alone. It was in this atmosphere of loneliness and +separation, hostile tribes pinning him in on every side, murder lurking +in the woods and marshes round him, that he composed his greatest work. +In it at last he died, on the heels of a sudden rising in which his +house was burnt and his lands over-run by the wild Irish whom the +tyranny of the English planters had driven to vengeance. Spenser was not +without interest in his public duties; his _View of the State of +Ireland_ shows that. But it shows, too, that he brought to them +singularly little sympathy or imagination. Throughout his tone is that +of the worst kind of English officialdom; rigid subjection and in the +last resort massacre are the remedies he would apply to Irish +discontent. He would be a fine text--which might be enforced by modern +examples--for a discourse on the evil effects of immersion in the +government of a subject race upon men of letters. No man of action can +be so consistently and cynically an advocate of brutalism as your man of +letters, Spenser, of course, had his excuses; the problem of Ireland +was new and it was something remote and difficult; in all but the mere +distance for travel, Dublin was as far from London as Bombay is to-day. +But to him and his like we must lay down partly the fact that to-day we +have still an Irish problem. + +But though fate and the necessity of a livelihood drove him to Ireland +and the life of a colonist, poetry was his main business. He had been +the centre of a brilliant set at Cambridge, one of those coteries whose +fame, if they are brilliant and vivacious enough and have enough +self-confidence, penetrates to the outer world before they leave the +University. The thing happens in our own day, as the case of Oscar Wilde +is witness; it happened in the case of Spenser; and when he and his +friends Gabriel Harvey and Edward Kirke came "down" it was to immediate +fame amongst amateurs of the arts. They corresponded with each other +about literary matters, and Harvey published his part of the +correspondence; they played like Du Bellay in France, with the idea of +writing English verse in the quantitative measures of classical poetry; +Spenser had a love affair in Yorkshire and wrote poetry about it, +letting just enough be known to stimulate the imagination of the public. +They tried their hands at everything, imitated everything, and in all +were brilliant, sparkling, and decorative; they got a kind of entrance +to the circle of the Court. Then Spenser published his _Shepherd's +Calendar_, a series of pastoral eclogues for every month of the year, +after a manner taken from French and Italian pastoral writers, but +coming ultimately from Vergil, and Edward Kirke furnished it with an +elaborate prose commentary. Spenser took the same liberties with the +pastoral form as did Vergil himself; that is to say he used it as a +vehicle for satire and allegory, made it carry political and social +allusions, and planted in it references to his friends. By its +publication Spenser became the first poet of the day. It was followed by +some of his finest and most beautiful things--by the Platonic hymns, by +the _Amoretti_, a series of sonnets inspired by his love for his wife; +by the _Epithalamium_, on the occasion of his marriage to her; by +_Mother Hubbard's Tale_, a satire written when despair at the coldness +of the Queen and the enmity of Burleigh was beginning to take hold on +the poet and endowed with a plainness and vigour foreign to most of his +other work--and then by _The Fairy Queen_. + +The poets of the Renaissance were not afraid of big things; every one of +them had in his mind as the goal of poetic endeavour the idea of the +heroic poem, aimed at doing for his own country what Vergil had intended +to do for Rome in the _Aeneid_, to celebrate it--its origin, its +prowess, its greatness, and the causes of it, in epic verse. Milton, +three-quarters of a century later, turned over in his mind the plan of +an English epic on the wars of Arthur, and when he left it was only to +forsake the singing of English origins for the more ultimate theme of +the origins of mankind. Spenser designed to celebrate the character, the +qualities and the training of the English gentleman. And because poetry, +unlike philosophy, cannot deal with abstractions but must be vivid and +concrete, he was forced to embody his virtues and foes to virtue and to +use the way of allegory. His outward plan, with its knights and dragons +and desperate adventures, he procured from Ariosto. As for the use of +allegory, it was one of the discoveries of the Middle Ages which the +Renaissance condescended to retain. Spenser elaborated it beyond the +wildest dreams of those students of Holy Writ who had first conceived +it. His stories were to be interesting in themselves as tales of +adventure, but within them they were to conceal an intricate treatment +of the conflict of truth and falsehood in morals and religion. A +character might typify at once Protestantism and England and Elizabeth +and chastity and half the cardinal virtues, and it would have all the +while the objective interest attaching to it as part of a story of +adventure. All this must have made the poem difficult enough. Spenser's +manner of writing it made it worse still. One is familiar with the type +of novel which only explains itself when the last chapter is +reached--Stevenson's _Wrecker_ is an example. _The Fairy Queen_ was +designed on somewhat the same plan. The last section was to relate and +explain the unrelated and unexplained books which made up the poem, and +at the court to which the separate knights of the separate books--the +Red Cross Knight and the rest--were to bring the fruit of their +adventures, everything was to be made clear. Spenser did not live to +finish his work; _The Fairy Queen_, like the _Aeneid_, is an uncompleted +poem, and it is only from a prefatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh +issued with the second published section that we know what the poem was +intended to be. Had Spenser not published this explanation, it is +impossible that anybody, even the acutest minded German professor, could +have guessed. + +The poem, as we have seen, was composed in Ireland, in the solitude of a +colonists' plantation, and the author was shut off from his fellows +while he wrote. The influence of his surroundings is visible in the +writing. The elaboration of the theme would have been impossible or at +least very unlikely if its author had not been thrown in on himself +during its composition. Its intricacy and involution is the product of +an over-concentration born of empty surroundings. It lacks vigour and +rapidity; it winds itself into itself. The influence of Ireland, too, is +visible in its landscapes, in its description of bogs and desolation, of +dark forests in which lurk savages ready to spring out on those who are +rash enough to wander within their confines. All the scenery in it which +is not imaginary is Irish and not English scenery. + +Its reception in England and at the Court was enthusiastic. Men and +women read it eagerly and longed for the next section as our +grandfathers longed for the next section of _Pickwick_. They really +liked it, really loved the intricacy and luxuriousness of it, the heavy +exotic language, the thickly painted descriptions, the languorous melody +of the verse. Mainly, perhaps, that was so because they were all either +in wish or in deed poets themselves. Spenser has always been "the +poets' poet." Milton loved him; so did Dryden, who said that Milton +confessed to him that Spenser was "his original," a statement which has +been pronounced incredible, but is, in truth, perfectly comprehensible, +and most likely true. Pope admired him; Keats learned from him the best +part of his music. You can trace echoes of him in Mr. Yeats. What is it +that gives him this hold on his peers? Well, in the first place his +defects do not detract from his purely poetic qualities. The story is +impossibly told, but that will only worry those who are looking for a +story. The allegory is hopelessly difficult; but as Hazlitt said "the +allegory will not bite you"; you can let it alone. The crudeness and +bigotry of Spenser's dealings with Catholicism, which are ridiculous +when he pictures the monster Error vomiting books and pamphlets, and +disgusting when he draws Mary Queen of Scots, do not hinder the pleasure +of those who read him for his language and his art. He is great for +other reasons than these. First because of the extraordinary smoothness +and melody of his verse and the richness of his language--a golden +diction that he drew from every source--new words, old words, obsolete +words--such a mixture that the purist Ben Jonson remarked acidly that he +wrote no language at all. Secondly because of the profusion of his +imagery, and the extraordinarily keen sense for beauty and sweetness +that went to its making. In an age of golden language and gallant +imagery his was the most golden and the most gallant. And the language +of poetry in England is richer and more varied than that in any other +country in Europe to-day, because of what he did. + + +(3) + +Elizabethan prose brings us face to face with a difficulty which has to +be met by every student of literature. Does the word "literature" cover +every kind of writing? Ought we to include in it writing that aims +merely at instruction or is merely journey-work, as well as writing that +has an artistic intention, or writing that, whether its author knew it +or no, is artistic in its result? Of course such a question causes us no +sort of difficulty when it concerns itself only with what is being +published to-day. We know very well that some things are literature and +some merely journalism; that of novels, for instance, some deliberately +intend to be works of art and others only to meet a passing desire for +amusement or mental occupation. We know that most books serve or attempt +to serve only a useful and not a literary purpose. But in reading the +books of three centuries ago, unconsciously one's point of view shifts. +Antiquity gilds journey-work; remoteness and quaintness of phrasing lend +a kind of distinction to what are simply pamphlets or text-books that +have been preserved by accident from the ephemeralness which was the +common lot of hundreds of their fellows. One comes to regard as +literature things that had no kind of literary value for their first +audiences; to apply the same seriousness of judgment and the same tests +to the pamphlets of Nash and Dekker as to the prose of Sidney and +Bacon. One loses, in fact, that power to distinguish the important from +the trivial which is one of the functions of a sound literary taste. +Now, a study of the minor writing of the past is, of course, well worth +a reader's pains. Pamphlets, chronicle histories, text-books and the +like have an historical importance; they give us glimpses of the manners +and habits and modes of thought of the day. They tell us more about the +outward show of life than do the greater books. If you are interested in +social history, they are the very thing. But the student of literature +ought to beware of them, nor ought he to touch them till he is familiar +with the big and lasting things. A man does not possess English +literature if he knows what Dekker tells of the seven deadly sins of +London and does not know the _Fairy Queen_. Though the wide and curious +interest of the Romantic critics of the nineteenth century found and +illumined the byways of Elizabethan writing, the safest method of +approach is the method of their predecessors--to keep hold on common +sense, to look at literature, not historically as through the wrong end +of a telescope, but closely and without a sense of intervening time, to +know the best--the "classic"--and study it before the minor things. + +In Elizabeth's reign, prose became for the first time, with cheapened +printing, the common vehicle of amusement and information, and the books +that remain to us cover many departments of writing. There are the +historians who set down for us for the first time what they knew of the +earlier history of England. There are the writers, like Harrison and +Stubbs, who described the England of their own day, and there are many +authors, mainly anonymous, who wrote down the accounts of the voyages of +the discoverers in the Western Seas. There are the novelists who +translated stories mainly from Italian sources. But of authors as +conscious of a literary intention as the poets were, there are only two, +Sidney and Lyly, and of authors who, though their first aim was hardly +an artistic one, achieved an artistic result, only Hooker and the +translators of the Bible. The Authorized Version of the Bible belongs +strictly not to the reign of Elizabeth but to that of James, and we +shall have to look at it when we come to discuss the seventeenth +century. Hooker, in his book on Ecclesiastical Polity (an endeavour to +set forth the grounds of orthodox Anglicanism) employed a generous, +flowing, melodious style which has influenced many writers since and is +familiar to us to-day in the copy of it used by Ruskin in his earlier +works. Lyly and Sidney are worth looking at more closely. + +The age was intoxicated with language. It went mad of a mere delight in +words. Its writers were using a new tongue, for English was enriched +beyond all recognition with borrowings from the ancient authors; and +like all artists who become possessed of a new medium, they used it to +excess. The early Elizabethans' use of the new prose was very like the +use that educated Indians make of English to-day. It is not that these +write it incorrectly, but only that they write too richly. And just as +fuller use and knowledge teaches them spareness and economy and gives +their writing simplicity and vigour, so seventeenth century practice +taught Englishmen to write a more direct and undecorated style and gave +us the smooth, simple, and vigorous writing of Dryden--the first really +modern English prose. But the Elizabethans loved gaudier methods; they +liked highly decorative modes of expression, in prose no less than in +verse. The first author to give them these things was John Lyly, whose +book _Euphues_ was for the five or six years following its publication a +fashionable craze that infected all society and gave its name to a +peculiar and highly artificial style of writing that coloured the work +of hosts of obscure and forgotten followers. Lyly wrote other things; +his comedies may have taught Shakespeare the trick of _Love's Labour +Lost_; he attempted a sequel of his most famous work with better success +than commonly attends sequels, but for us and for his own generation he +is the author of one book. Everybody read it, everybody copied it. The +maxims and sentences of advice for gentlemen which it contained were +quoted and admired in the Court, where the author, though he never +attained the lucrative position he hoped for, did what flattery could do +to make a name for himself. The name "Euphuism" became a current +description of an artificial way of using words that overflowed out of +writing into speech and was in the mouths, while the vogue lasted, of +everybody who was anybody in the circle that fluttered round the Queen. + +The style of _Euphues_ was parodied by Shakespeare and many attempts +have been made to imitate it since. Most of them are inaccurate--Sir +Walter Scott's wild attempt the most inaccurate of all. They fail +because their authors have imagined that "Euphuism" is simply a highly +artificial and "flowery" way of talking. As a matter of fact it is made +up of a very exact and very definite series of parts. The writing is +done on a plan which has three main characteristics as follows. First, +the structure of the sentence is based on antithesis and alliteration; +that is to say, it falls into equal parts similar in sound but with a +different sense; for example, Euphues is described as a young gallant +"of more wit than wealth, yet of more wealth than wisdom." All the +characters in the book, which is roughly in the form of a novel, speak +in this way, sometimes in sentences long drawn out which are +oppressively monotonous and tedious, and sometimes shortly with a +certain approach to epigram. The second characteristic of the style is +the reference of every stated fact to some classical authority, that is +to say, the author cannot mention friendship without quoting David and +Jonathan, nor can lovers in his book accuse each other of faithlessness +without quoting the instance of Cressida or Aeneas. This appeal to +classical authority and wealth of classical allusion is used to decorate +pages which deal with matters of every-day experience. Seneca, for +instance, is quoted as reporting "that too much bending breaketh the +bow," a fact which might reasonably have been supposed to be known to +the author himself. This particular form of writing perhaps influenced +those who copied Lyly more than anything else in his book. It is a +fashion of the more artificial kind of Elizabethan writing in all +schools to employ a wealth of classical allusion. Even the simple +narratives in _Hakluyt's Voyages_ are not free from it, and one may +hardly hope to read an account of a voyage to the Indies without +stumbling on a preliminary reference to the opinions of Aristotle and +Plato. Lastly, _Euphues_ is characterised by an extraordinary wealth of +allusion to natural history, mostly of a fabulous kind. "I have read +that the bull being tied to the fig tree loseth his tail; that the whole +herd of deer stand at gaze if they smell a sweet apple; that the dolphin +after the sound of music is brought to the shore," and so on. His book +is full of these things, and the style weakens and loses its force +because of them. + +Of course there is much more in his book than this outward decoration. +He wrote with the avowed purpose of instructing courtiers and gentlemen +how to live. _Euphues_ is full of grave reflections and weighty morals, +and is indeed a collection of essays on education, on friendship, on +religion and philosophy, and on the favourite occupation and curriculum +of Elizabethan youth--foreign travel. The fashions and customs of his +countrymen which he condemns in the course of his teaching are the same +as those inveighed against by Stubbs and other contemporaries. He +disliked manners and fashions copied from Italy; particularly he +disliked the extravagant fashions of women. One woman only escapes his +censure, and she, of course, is the Queen, whom Euphues and his +companion in the book come to England to see. In the main the teaching +of Euphues inculcates a humane and liberal, if not very profound creed, +and the book shares with _The Fairy Queen_ the honour of the earlier +Puritanism--the Puritanism that besides the New Testament had the +_Republic_. + +But Euphues, though he was in his time the popular idol, was not long in +finding a successful rival. Seven years before his death Sir Philip +Sidney, in a period of retirement from the Court wrote "_The Countess of +Pembroke's Arcadia_"; it was published ten years after it had been +composed. The _Arcadia_ is the first English example of the prose +pastoral romance, as the _Shepherd's Calendar_ is of our pastoral verse. +Imitative essays in its style kept appearing for two hundred years after +it, till Wordsworth and other poets who knew the country drove its +unrealities out of literature. The aim of it and of the school to which +it belonged abroad was to find a setting for a story which should leave +the author perfectly free to plant in it any improbability he liked, and +to do what he liked with the relations of his characters. In the shade +of beech trees, the coils of elaborated and intricate love-making wind +and unravel themselves through an endless afternoon. In that art nothing +is too far-fetched, nothing too sentimental, no sorrow too unreal. The +pastoral romance was used, too, to cover other things besides a +sentimental and decorative treatment of love. Authors wrapped up as +shepherds their political friends and enemies, and the pastoral eclogues +in verse which Spenser and others composed are full of personal and +political allusion. Sidney's story carries no politics and he depends +for its interest solely on the wealth of differing episodes and the +stories and arguments of love which it contains. The story would furnish +plot enough for twenty ordinary novels, but probably those who read it +when it was published were attracted by other things than the march of +its incidents. Certainly no one could read it for the plot now. Its +attraction is mainly one of style. It goes, you feel, one degree beyond +_Euphues_ in the direction of freedom and poetry. And just because of +this greater freedom, its characteristics are much less easy to fix than +those of _Euphues_. Perhaps its chief quality is best described as that +of exhaustiveness. Sidney will take a word and toss it to and fro in a +page till its meaning is sucked dry and more than sucked dry. On page +after page the same trick is employed, often in some new and charming +way, but with the inevitable effect of wearying the reader, who tries to +do the unwisest of all things with a book of this kind--to read on. This +trick of bandying words is, of course, common in Shakespeare. Other +marks of Sidney's style belong similarly to poetry rather than to prose. +Chief of them is what Ruskin christened the "pathetic fallacy"--the +assumption (not common in his day) which connects the appearance of +nature with the moods of the artist who looks at it, or demands such a +connection. In its day the _Arcadia_ was hailed as a reformation by men +nauseated by the rhythmical patterns of Lyly. A modern reader finds +himself confronting it in something of the spirit that he would confront +the prose romances, say, of William Morris, finding it charming as a +poet's essay in prose but no more: not to be ranked with the highest. + + + + +CHAPTER III + + +THE DRAMA + +(1) + +Biologists tell us that the hybrid--the product of a variety of +ancestral stocks--is more fertile than an organism with a direct and +unmixed ancestry; perhaps the analogy is not too fanciful as the +starting-point of a study of Elizabethan drama, which owed its strength +and vitality, more than to anything else, to the variety of the +discordant and contradictory elements of which it was made up. The drama +was the form into which were moulded the thoughts and desires of the +best spirits of the time. It was the flower of the age. To appreciate +its many-sided significances and achievements it is necessary to +disentangle carefully its roots, in religion, in the revival of the +classics, in popular entertainments, in imports from abroad, in the air +of enterprise and adventure which belonged to the time. + +As in Greece, drama in England was in its beginning a religious thing. +Its oldest continuous tradition was from the mediaeval Church. Early in +the Middle Ages the clergy and their parishioners began the habit, at +Christmas, Easter and other holy days, of playing some part of the story +of Christ's life suitable to the festival of the day. These plays were +liturgical, and originally, no doubt, overshadowed by a choral element. +But gradually the inherent human capacity for mimicry and drama took the +upper hand; from ceremonies they developed into performances; they +passed from the stage in the church porch to the stage in the street. A +waggon, the natural human platform for mimicry or oratory, became in +England as it was in Greece, the cradle of the drama. This momentous +change in the history of the miracle play, which made it in all but its +occasion and its subject a secular thing, took place about the end of +the twelfth century. The rise of the town guilds gave the plays a new +character; the friendly rivalry of leagued craftsmen elaborated their +production; and at length elaborate cycles were founded which were +performed at Whitsuntide, beginning at sunrise and lasting all through +the day right on to dusk. Each town had its own cycle, and of these the +cycles of York, Wakefield, Chester and Coventry still remain. So too, +does an eye-witness's account of a Chester performance where the plays +took place yearly on three days, beginning with Whit Monday. "The +manner of these plays were, every company had his pageant or part, a +high scaffold with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels. In +the lower they apparelled themselves and in the higher room they played, +being all open on the top that all beholders might hear and see them. +They began first at the abbey gates, and when the first pageant was +played, it was wheeled to the high cross before the mayor and so to +every street. So every street had a pageant playing upon it at one time, +till all the pageants for the day appointed were played." The +"companies" were the town guilds and the several "pageants" different +scenes in Old or New Testament story. As far as was possible each +company took for its pageant some Bible story fitting to its trade; in +York the goldsmiths played the three Kings of the East bringing precious +gifts, the fishmongers the flood, and the shipwrights the building of +Noah's ark. The tone of these plays was not reverent; reverence after +all implies near at hand its opposite in unbelief. But they were +realistic and they contained within them the seeds of later drama in the +aptitude with which they grafted into the sacred story pastoral and city +manners taken straight from life. The shepherds who watched by night at +Bethlehem were real English shepherds furnished with boisterous and +realistic comic relief. Noah was a real shipwright. + +"It shall be clinched each ilk and deal. + With nails that are both noble and new + Thus shall I fix it to the keel, + Take here a rivet and there a screw, + With there bow there now, work I well, + This work, I warrant, both good and true." + +Cain and Abel were English farmers just as truly as Bottom and his +fellows were English craftsmen. But then Julius Caesar has a doublet and +in Dutch pictures the apostles wear broad-brimmed hats. Squeamishness +about historical accuracy is of a later date, and when it came we gained +in correctness less than we lost in art. + +The miracle plays, then, are the oldest antecedent of Elizabethan drama, +but it must not be supposed they were over and done with before the +great age began. The description of the Chester performances, part of +which has been quoted, was written in 1594. Shakespeare must, one would +think, have seen the Coventry cycle; at any rate he was familiar, as +every one of the time must have been, with the performances; +"Out-heroding Herod" bears witness to that. One must conceive the +development of the Elizabethan age as something so rapid in its +accessibility to new impressions and new manners and learning and modes +of thought that for years the old and new subsisted side by side. Think +of modern Japan, a welter of old faiths and crafts and ideals and +inrushing Western civilization all mixed up and side by side in the +strangest contrasts and you will understand what it was. The miracle +plays stayed on beside Marlowe and Shakespeare till Puritanism frowned +upon them. But when the end came it came quickly. The last recorded +performance took place in London when King James entertained Gondomar, +the Spanish ambassador. And perhaps we should regard that as a "command" +performance, reviving as command performances commonly do, something +dead for a generation--in this case, purely out of compliment to the +faith and inclination of a distinguished guest. + +Next in order of development after the miracle or mystery plays, though +contemporary in their popularity, came what we called "moralities" or +"moral interludes"--pieces designed to enforce a religious or ethical +lesson and perhaps to get back into drama something of the edification +which realism had ousted from the miracles. They dealt in allegorical +and figurative personages, expounded wise saws and moral lessons, and +squared rather with the careful self-concern of the newly established +Protestantism than with the frank and joyous jest in life which was more +characteristic of the time. _Everyman_, the oftenest revived and best +known of them, if not the best, is very typical of the class. They had +their influences, less profound than that of the miracles, on the full +drama. It is said the "Vice"--unregeneracy commonly degenerated into +comic relief--is the ancestor of the fool in Shakespeare, but more +likely both are successive creations of a dynasty of actors who +practised the unchanging and immemorial art of the clown. The general +structure of _Everyman_ and some of its fellows, heightened and made +more dramatic, gave us Marlowe's _Faustus_. There perhaps the influence +ends. + +The rise of a professional class of actors brought one step nearer the +full growth of drama. Companies of strolling players formed themselves +and passed from town to town, seeking like the industrious amateurs of +the guilds, civic patronage, and performing in town-halls, market-place +booths, or inn yards, whichever served them best. The structure of the +Elizabethan inn yard (you may see some survivals still, and there are +the pictures in _Pickwick_) was very favourable for their purpose. The +galleries round it made seats like our boxes and circle for the more +privileged spectators; in the centre on the floor of the yard stood the +crowd or sat, if they had stools with them. The stage was a platform set +on this floor space with its back against one side of the yard, where +perhaps one of the inn-rooms served as a dressing room. So suitable was +this "fit-up" as actors call it, that when theatres came to be built in +London they were built on the inn-yard pattern. All the playhouses of +the Bankside from the "Curtain" to the "Globe" were square or circular +places with galleries rising above one another three parts round, a +floor space of beaten earth open to the sky in the middle, and jutting +out on to it a platform stage with a tiring room capped by a gallery +behind it. + +The entertainment given by these companies of players (who usually got +the patronage and took the title of some lord) was various. They played +moralities and interludes, they played formless chronicle history plays +like the _Troublesome Reign of King John_, on which Shakespeare worked +for his _King John_; but above and before all they were each a company +of specialists, every one of whom had his own talent and performance for +which he was admired. The Elizabethan stage was the ancestor of our +music-hall, and to the modern music-hall rather than to the theatre it +bears its affinity. If you wish to realize the aspect of the Globe or +the Blackfriars it is to a lower class music-hall you must go. The +quality of the audience is a point of agreement. The Globe was +frequented by young "bloods" and by the more disreputable portions of +the community, racing men (or their equivalents of that day) "coney +catchers" and the like; commonly the only women present were women of +the town. The similarity extends from the auditorium to the stage. The +Elizabethan playgoer delighted in virtuosity; in exhibitions of strength +or skill from his actors; the broad sword combat in _Macbeth_, and the +wrestling in _As You Like It_, were real trials of skill. The bear in +the _Winter's Tale_ was no doubt a real bear got from a bear pit, near +by in the Bankside. The comic actors especially were the very +grandfathers of our music-hall stars; Tarleton and Kemp and Cowley, the +chief of them, were as much popular favourites and esteemed as separate +from the plays they played in as is Harry Lauder. Their songs and tunes +were printed and sold in hundreds as broadsheets, just as pirated +music-hall songs are sold to-day. This is to be noted because it +explains a great deal in the subsequent evolution of the drama. It +explains the delight in having everything represented actually on the +stage, all murders, battles, duels. It explains the magnificent largesse +given by Shakespeare to the professional fool. Work had to be found for +him, and Shakespeare, whose difficulties were stepping-stones to his +triumphs, gave him Touchstone and Feste, the Porter in _Macbeth_ and the +Fool in _Lear_. Others met the problem in an attitude of frank despair. +Not all great tragic writers can easily or gracefully wield the pen of +comedy, and Marlowe in _Dr. Faustus_ took the course of leaving the low +comedy which the audience loved and a high salaried actor demanded, to +an inferior collaborator. + +Alongside this drama of street platforms and inn-yards and public +theatres, there grew another which, blending with it, produced the +Elizabethan drama which we know. The public theatres were not the only +places at which plays were produced. At the University, at the Inns of +Court (which then more than now, were besides centres of study rather +exclusive and expensive clubs), and at the Court they were an important +part of almost every festival. At these places were produced academic +compositions, either allegorical like the masques, copies of which we +find in Shakespeare and by Ben Jonson, or comedies modelled on Plautus +or Terence, or tragedies modelled on Seneca. The last were incomparably +the most important. The Elizabethan age, which always thought of +literature as a guide or handmaid to life, was naturally attracted to a +poet who dealt in maxims and "sentences"; his rhetoric appealed to men +for whom words and great passages of verse were an intoxication that +only a few to-day can understand or sympathize with; his +bloodthirstiness and gloom to an age so full-blooded as not to shrink +from horrors. Tragedies early began to be written on the strictly +Senecan model, and generally, like Seneca's, with some ulterior +intention. Sackville's _Gorboduc_, the first tragedy in English, +produced at a great festival at the Inner Temple, aimed at inducing +Elizabeth to marry and save the miseries of a disputed succession. To be +put to such a use argues the importance and dignity of this classical +tragedy of the learned societies and the court. None of the pieces +composed in this style were written for the popular theatre, and indeed +they could not have been a success on it. The Elizabethan audience, as +we have seen, loved action, and in these Senecan tragedies the action +took place "off." But they had a strong and abiding influence on the +popular stage; they gave it its ghosts, its supernatural warnings, its +conception of nemesis and revenge, they gave it its love of +introspection and the long passages in which introspection, description +or reflection, either in soliloquy or dialogue, holds up the action; +contradictorily enough they gave it something at least of its melodrama. +Perhaps they helped to enforce the lesson of the miracle plays that a +dramatist's proper business was elaboration rather than invention. None +of the Elizabethan dramatists except Ben Jonson habitually constructed +their own plots. Their method was to take something ready at their hands +and overlay it with realism or poetry or romance. The stories of their +plays, like that of Hamlet's Mousetrap, were "extant and writ in choice +Italian," and very often their methods of preparation were very like +his. + +Something of the way in which the spirit of adventure of the time +affected and finished the drama we have already seen. It is time now to +turn to the dramatists themselves. + + +(2) + +Of Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, and Peele, the "University Wits" who fused the +academic and the popular drama, and by giving the latter a sense of +literature and learning to mould it to finer issues, gave us +Shakespeare, only Marlowe can be treated here. Greene and Peele, the +former by his comedies, the latter by his historical plays, and Kyd by +his tragedies, have their places in the text-books, but they belong to a +secondary order of dramatic talent. Marlowe ranks amongst the greatest. +It is not merely that historically he is the head and fount of the whole +movement, that he changed blank verse, which had been a lumbering +instrument before him, into something rich and ringing and rapid and +made it the vehicle for the greatest English poetry after him. +Historical relations apart, he is great in himself. More than any other +English writer of any age, except Byron, he symbolizes the youth of his +time; its hot-bloodedness, its lust after knowledge and power and life +inspires all his pages. The teaching of Machiavelli, misunderstood for +their own purposes by would-be imitators, furnished the reign of +Elizabeth with the only political ideals it possessed. The simple +brutalism of the creed, with means justified by ends and the unbridled +self-regarding pursuit of power, attracted men for whom the Spanish +monarchy and the struggle to overthrow it were the main factors and +politics. Marlowe took it and turned it to his own uses. There is in his +writings a lust of power, "a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness," a +glow of the imagination unhallowed by anything but its own energy which +is in the spirit of the time. In _Tamburlaine_ it is the power of +conquest, stirred by and reflecting, as we have seen, the great deeds of +his day. In _Dr. Faustus_ it is the pride of will and eagerness of +curiosity. Faustus is devoured by a tormenting desire to enlarge his +knowledge to the utmost bounds of nature and art and to extend his power +with his knowledge. His is the spirit of Renaissance scholarship +heightened to a passionate excess. The play gleams with the pride of +learning and a knowledge which learning brings, and with the nemesis +that comes after it. "Oh! gentlemen! hear me with patience and tremble +not at my speeches. Though my heart pant and quiver to remember that I +have been a student here these thirty years; oh! I would I had never +seen Wittemburg, never read book!" And after the agonizing struggle in +which Faustus's soul is torn from him to hell, learning comes in at the +quiet close. + +"Yet, for he was a scholar once admired, +For wondrous knowledge in our German Schools; +We'll give his mangled limbs due burial; +And all the students, clothed in mourning black +Shall wait upon his heavy funeral." + +Some one character is a centre of over-mastering pride and ambition in +every play. In the _Jew of Malta_ it is the hero Barabbas. In _Edward +II_. it is Piers Gaveston. In _Edward II_. indeed, two elements are +mixed--the element of Machiavelli and Tamburlaine in Gaveston, and the +purely tragic element which evolves from within itself the style in +which it shall be treated, in the King. "The reluctant pangs of +abdicating Royalty," wrote Charles Lamb in a famous passage, "furnished +hints which Shakespeare scarcely improved in his _Richard II_; and the +death scene of Marlowe's King moves pity and terror beyond any scene, +ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted." Perhaps the play gives +the hint of what Marlowe might have become had not the dagger of a groom +in a tavern cut short at thirty his burning career. + +Even in that time of romance and daring speculation he went further than +his fellows. He was said to have been tainted with atheism, to have +denied God and the Trinity; had he lived he might have had trouble with +the Star Chamber. The free-voyaging intellect of the age found this one +way of outlet, but if literary evidences are to be trusted sixteenth and +seventeenth century atheism was a very crude business. The _Atheist's +Tragedy_ of Tourneur (a dramatist who need not otherwise detain us) +gives some measure of its intelligence and depth. Says the villain to +the heroine, + + "No? Then invoke +Your great supposed Protector. I will do't." + +to which she: + +"Supposed Protector! Are you an atheist, then + I know my fears and prayers are spent in vain." + +Marlowe's very faults and extravagances, and they are many, are only the +obverse of his greatness. Magnitude and splendour of language when the +thought is too shrunken to fill it out, becomes mere inflation. He was a +butt of the parodists of the day. And Shakespeare, though he honoured +him "on this side idolatry," did his share of ridicule. Ancient Pistol +is fed and stuffed with relic and rags of Marlowesque affectation-- + +"Holla! ye pampered jades of Asia, + Can ye not draw but twenty miles a day." + +is a quotation taken straight from _Tamburlaine_. + + +(3) + +A study of Shakespeare, who refuses to be crushed within the limits of a +general essay is no part of the plan of this book. We must take up the +story of the drama with the reign of James and with the contemporaries +of his later period, though of course, a treatment which is conditioned +by the order of development is not strictly chronological, and some of +the plays we shall have to refer to belong to the close of the sixteenth +century. We are apt to forget that alongside Shakespeare and at his +heels other dramatists were supplying material for the theatre. The +influence of Marlowe and particularly of Kyd, whose _Spanish Tragedy_ +with its crude mechanism of ghosts and madness and revenge caught the +popular taste, worked itself out in a score of journeymen dramatists, +mere hack writers, who turned their hand to plays as the hacks of to-day +turn their hand to novels, and with no more literary merit than that +caught as an echo from better men than themselves. One of the worst of +these--he is also one of the most typical--was John Marston, a purveyor +of tragic gloom and sardonic satire, and an impostor in both, whose +tragedy _Antonio and Mellida_ was published in the same year as +Shakespeare's _Hamlet_. Both plays owed their style and plot to the same +tradition--the tradition created by Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_--in which +ghostly promptings to revenge, terrible crime, and a feigned madman +waiting his opportunity are the elements of tragedy. Nothing could be +more fruitful in an understanding of the relations of Shakespeare to his +age than a comparison of the two. The style of _Antonio and Mellida_ is +the style of _The Murder of Gonzago_. There is no subtlety nor +introspection, the pale cast of thought falls with no shadow over its +scenes. And it is typical of a score of plays of the kind we have and +beyond doubt of hundreds that have perished. Shakespeare stands alone. + +Beside this journey-work tragedy of revenge and murder which had its +root through Kyd and Marlowe in Seneca and in Italian romance, there was +a journey-work comedy of low life made up of loosely constructed strings +of incidents, buffoonery and romance, that had its roots in a joyous and +fantastic study of the common people. These plays are happy and +high-spirited and, compared with the ordinary run of the tragedies, of +better workmanship. They deal in the familiar situations of low +comedy--the clown, the thrifty citizen and his frivolous wife, the +gallant, the bawd, the good apprentice and the bad portrayed vigorously +and tersely and with a careless kindly gaiety that still charms in the +reading. The best writers in this kind were Middleton and Dekker--and +the best play to read as a sample of it _Eastward Ho!_ in which Marston +put off his affectation of sardonical melancholy and joined with Jonson +and Dekker to produce what is the masterpiece of the non-Shakespearean +comedy of the time. + +For all our habit of grouping their works together it is a far cry in +spirit and temperament from the dramatists whose heyday was under +Elizabeth and those who reached their prime under her successor. Quickly +though insensibly the temper of the nation suffered eclipse. The high +hopes and the ardency of the reign of Elizabeth saddened into a profound +pessimism and gloom in that of James. This apparition of unsought +melancholy has been widely noted and generally assumed to be +inexplicable. In broad outline its causes are clear enough, "To travel +hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." The Elizabethans were, if +ever any were, hopeful travellers. The winds blew them to the four +quarters of the world; they navigated all seas; they sacked rich cities. +They beat off the great Armada, and harried the very coasts of Spain. +They pushed discovery to the ends of the world and amassed great wealth. +Under James all these things were over. Peace was made with Spain: +national pride was wounded by the solicitous anxiety of the King for a +Spanish marriage for the heir to the throne. Sir Walter Raleigh, a +romantic adventurer lingering beyond his time, was beheaded out of hand +by the ungenerous timidity of the monarch to whom had been transferred +devotion and loyalty he was unfitted to receive. The Court which had +been a centre of flashing and gleaming brilliance degenerated into a +knot of sycophants humouring the pragmatic and self-important folly of a +king in whom had implanted themselves all the vices of the Scots and +none of their virtues. Nothing seemed left remarkable beneath the +visiting moon. The bright day was done and they were for the dark. The +uprising of Puritanism and the shadow of impending religious strife +darkened the temper of the time. + +The change affected all literature and particularly the drama, which +because it appeals to what all men have in common, commonly reflects +soonest a change in the outlook or spirits of a people. The onslaughts +of the dramatists on the Puritans, always implacable enemies of the +theatre, became more virulent and envenomed. What a difference between +the sunny satire of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and the dark animosity of _The +Atheists' Tragedy_ with its Languebeau Snuffe ready to carry out any +villainy proposed to him! "I speak sir," says a lady in the same play to +a courtier who played with her in an attempt to carry on a quick witted, +"conceited" love passage in the vein of _Much Ado_, "I speak, sir, as +the fashion now: is, in earnest." The quick-witted, light-hearted age +was gone. It is natural that tragedy reflected this melancholy in its +deepest form. Gloom deepened and had no light to relieve it, men supped +full of horrors--there was no slackening of the tension, no concession +to overwrought nerves, no resting-place for the overwrought soul. It is +in the dramatist John Webster that this new spirit has its most powerful +exponent. + +The influence of Machiavelli, which had given Marlowe tragic figures +that were bright and splendid and burning, smouldered in Webster into a +duskier and intenser heat. His fame rests on two tragedies, _The White +Devil_ and _The Duchess of Malf_. Both are stories of lust and crime, +full of hate and hideous vengeances, and through each runs a vein of +bitter and ironical comment on men and women. In them chance plays the +part of fate. "Blind accident and blundering mishap--'such a mistake,' +says one of the criminals, 'as I have often seen in a play' are the +steersmen of their fortunes and the doomsmen of their deeds." His +characters are gloomy; meditative and philosophic murderers, cynical +informers, sad and loving women, and they are all themselves in every +phrase that they utter. But they are studied in earnestness and +sincerity. Unquestionably he is the greatest of Shakespeare's successors +in the romantic drama, perhaps his only direct imitator. He has single +lines worthy to set beside those in _Othello_ or _King Lear_. His dirge +in the _Duchess of Malfi_, Charles Lamb thought worthy to be set beside +the ditty in _The Tempest_, which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned +father. "As that is of the water, watery, so this is of the earth, +earthy." He has earned his place among the greatest of our dramatists by +his two plays, the theme of which matched his sombre genius and the +sombreness of the season in which it flowered. + +But the drama could not survive long the altered times, and the +voluminous plays of Beaumont and Fletcher mark the beginning of the end. +They are the decadence of Elizabethan drama. Decadence is a term often +used loosely and therefore hard to define, but we may say broadly that +an art is decadent when any particular one of the elements which go to +its making occurs in excess and disturbs the balance of forces which +keeps the work a coherent and intact whole. Poetry is decadent when the +sound is allowed to outrun the sense or when the suggestions, say, of +colour, which it contains are allowed to crowd out its deeper +implications. Thus we can call such a poem as this one well-known of +O'Shaughnessy's + +"We are the music-makers, + We are the dreamers of dreams," + +decadent because it conveys nothing but the mere delight in an obvious +rhythm of words, or such a poem as Morris's "Two red roses across the +moon;" because a meaningless refrain, merely pleasing in its word +texture, breaks in at intervals on the reader. The drama of Beaumont and +Fletcher is decadent in two ways. In the first place those variations +and licences with which Shakespeare in his later plays diversified the +blank verse handed on to him by Marlowe, they use without any restraint +or measure. "Weak" endings and "double" endings, _i.e._ lines which end +either on a conjunction or proposition or some other unstressed word, or +lines in which there is a syllable too many--abound in their plays. They +destroyed blank verse as a musical and resonant poetic instrument by +letting this element of variety outrun the sparing and skilful use which +alone could justify it. But they were decadent in other and deeper ways +than that. Sentiment in their plays usurps the place of character. +Eloquent and moving speeches and fine figures are no longer subservient +to the presentation of character in action, but are set down for their +own sake, "What strange self-trumpeters and tongue-bullies all the brave +soldiers of Beaumont and Fletcher are," said Coleridge. When they die +they die to the music of their own virtue. When dreadful deeds are done +they are described not with that authentic and lurid vividness which +throws light on the working of the human heart in Shakespeare or Webster +but in tedious rhetoric. Resignation, not fortitude, is the authors' +forte and they play upon it amazingly. The sterner tones of their +predecessors melt into the long drawn broken accent of pathos and woe. +This delight not in action or in emotion arising from action but in +passivity of suffering is only one aspect of a certain mental flaccidity +in grain. Shakespeare may be free and even coarse. Beaumont and Fletcher +cultivate indecency. They made their subject not their master but their +plaything, or an occasion for the convenient exercise of their own +powers of figure and rhetoric. + +Of their followers, Massinger, Ford and Shirley, no more need be said +than they carried one step further the faults of their masters. Emotion +and tragic passion give way to wire-drawn sentiment. Tragedy takes on +the air of a masquerade. With them romantic drama died a natural death +and the Puritans' closing of the theatre only gave it a _coup de grace_. +In England it has had no second birth. + + +(4) + +Outside the direct romantic succession there worked another author whose +lack of sympathy with it, as well as his close connection with the age +which followed, justifies his separate treatment. Ben Jonson shows a +marked contrast to Shakespeare in his character, his accomplishments, +and his attitude to letters, while his career was more varied than +Shakespeare's own. The first "classic" in English writing, he was a +"romantic" in action. In his adventurous youth he was by turns scholar, +soldier, bricklayer, actor. He trailed a pike with Leicester in the Low +Countries; on his return to England fought a duel and killed his man, +only escaping hanging by benefit of clergy; at the end of his life he +was Poet Laureate. Such a career is sufficiently diversified, and it +forms a striking contrast to the plainness and severity of his work. But +it must not lead us to forget or under-estimate his learning and +knowledge. Not Gray nor Tennyson, nor Swinburne--perhaps not even +Milton--was a better scholar. He is one of the earliest of English +writers to hold and express different theories about literature. He +consciously appointed himself a teacher; was a missionary of literature +with a definite creed. + +But though in a general way his dramatic principles are opposed to the +romantic tendencies of his age, he is by no means blindly classical. He +never consented to be bound by the "Unities"--that conception of +dramatic construction evolved out of Aristotle and Horace and elaborated +in the Renaissance till, in its strictest form, it laid down that the +whole scene of a play should be in one place, its whole action deal with +one single series of events, and the time it represented as elapsing be +no greater than the time it took in playing. He was always pre-eminently +an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather than a poet's +temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, and only limited +because in ruling out these things he ruled out much else that was +essential to the spirit of the time. As a craftsman he was +uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes of the public and never +veiled his scorn of those--Shakespeare among them--whom he conceived to +do so; but he knew and valued his own work, as his famous last word to +an audience who might be unsympathetic stands to witness, + +"By God 'tis good, and if you like it you may." + +Compare the temper it reveals with the titles of the two contemporary +comedies of his gentler and greater brother, the one _As You Like It_, +the other _What You Will_. Of the two attitudes towards the public, and +they might stand as typical of two kinds of artists, neither perhaps can +claim complete sincerity. A truculent and noisy disclaimer of their +favours is not a bad tone to assume towards an audience; in the end it +is apt to succeed as well as the sub-ironical compliance which is its +opposite. + +Jonson's theory of comedy and the consciousness with which he set it +against the practice of his contemporaries and particularly of +Shakespeare receive explicit statement in the prologue to _Every Man Out +of His Humour_--one of his earlier plays. "I travail with another +objection, Signor, which I fear will be enforced against the author ere +I can be delivered of it," says Mitis. "What's that, sir?" replies +Cordatus. Mitis:--"That the argument of his comedy might have been of +some other nature, as of a duke to be in love with a countess, and that +countess to be in love with the duke's son, and the son to love the +lady's waiting maid; some such cross-wooing, better than to be thus near +and familiarly allied to the times." Cordatus: "You say well, but I +would fain hear one of these autumn-judgments define _Quin sit +comoedia_? If he cannot, let him concern himself with Cicero's +definition, till he have strength to propose to himself a better, who +would have a comedy to be _invitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, +imago veritatis_; a thing throughout pleasant and ridiculous and +accommodated to the correction of manners." That was what he meant his +comedy to be, and so he conceived the popular comedy of the day, +_Twelfth Night_ and _Much Ado_. Shakespeare might play with dukes and +countesses, serving-women and pages, clowns and disguises; he would come +down more near and ally himself familiarly with the times. So comedy was +to be medicinal, to purge contemporary London of its follies and its +sins; and it was to be constructed with regularity and elaboration, +respectful to the Unities if not ruled by them, and built up of +characters each the embodiment of some "humour" or eccentricity, and +each when his eccentricity is displaying itself at its fullest, +outwitted and exposed. This conception of "humours," based on a +physiology which was already obsolescent, takes heavily from the realism +of Jonson's methods, nor does his use of a careful vocabulary of +contemporary colloquialism and slang save him from a certain dryness and +tediousness to modern readers. The truth is he was less a satirist of +contemporary manners than a satirist in the abstract who followed the +models of classical writers in this style, and he found the vices and +follies of his own day hardly adequate to the intricacy and +elaborateness of the plots which he constructed for their exposure. At +the first glance his people are contemporary types, at the second they +betray themselves for what they are really--cock-shies set up by the new +comedy of Greece that every "classical" satirist in Rome or France or +England has had his shot at since. One wonders whether Ben Jonson, for +all his satirical intention, had as much observation--as much of an eye +for contemporary types--as Shakespeare's rustics and roysterers prove +him to have had. It follows that all but one or two of his plays, when +they are put on the stage to-day are apt to come to one with a sense of +remoteness and other-worldliness which we hardly feel with Shakespeare +or Moliere. His muse moves along the high-road of comedy which is the +Roman road, and she carries in her train types that have done service to +many since the ancients fashioned them years ago. Jealous husbands, +foolish pragmatic fathers, a dissolute son, a boastful soldier, a +cunning slave--they all are merely counters by which the game of comedy +used to be played. In England, since Shakespeare took his hold on the +stage, that road has been stopped for us, that game has ceased to amuse. + +Ben Jonson, then, in a certain degree failed in his intention. Had he +kept closer to contemporary life, instead of merely grafting on to it +types he had learned from books, he might have made himself an English +Moliere--without Moliere's breadth and clarity--but with a corresponding +vigour and strength which would have kept his work sweet. And he might +have founded a school of comedy that would have got its roots deeper +into our national life than the trivial and licentious Restoration +comedy ever succeeded in doing. As it is, his importance is mostly +historical. One must credit him with being the first of the English +classics--of the age which gave us Dryden and Swift and Pope. Perhaps +that is enough in his praise. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + + +THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY + +(1) + +With the seventeenth century the great school of imaginative writers +that made glorious the last years of Elizabeth's reign, had passed away. +Spenser was dead before 1600, Sir Philip Sidney a dozen years earlier, +and though Shakespeare and Drayton and many other men whom we class +roughly as Elizabethan lived on to work under James, their temper and +their ideals belong to the earlier day. The seventeenth century, not in +England only but in Europe, brought a new way of thinking with it, and +gave a new direction to human interest and to human affairs. It is not +perhaps easy to define nor is it visible in the greater writers of the +time. Milton, for instance, and Sir Thomas Browne are both of them too +big, and in their genius too far separated from their fellows to give us +much clue to altered conditions. It is commonly in the work of lesser +and forgotten writers that the spirit of an age has its fullest +expression. Genius is a law to itself; it moves in another dimension; it +is out of time. To define this seventeenth century spirit, then, one +must look at the literature of the age as a whole. What is there that +one finds in it which marks a change in temperament and outlook from the +Renaissance, and the time which immediately followed it? + +Putting it very broadly one may say that literature in the seventeenth +century becomes for the first time essentially modern in spirit. We +began our survey of modern English literature at the Renaissance because +the discovery of the New World, and the widening of human experience and +knowledge, which that and the revival of classical learning implied, +mark a definite break from a way of thought which had been continuous +since the break up of the Roman Empire. The men of the Renaissance felt +themselves to be modern. They started afresh, owing nothing to their +immediate forbears, and when they talked, say, of Chaucer, they did so +in very much the same accent as we do to-day. He was mediaeval and +obsolete; the interest which he possessed was a purely literary +interest; his readers did not meet him easily on the same plane of +thought, or forget the lapse of time which separated him from them. And +in another way too, the Renaissance began modern writing. Inflections +had been dropped. The revival of the classics had enriched our +vocabulary, and the English language, after a gradual impoverishment +which followed the obsolescence one after another of the local dialects, +attained a fairly fixed form. There is more difference between the +language of the English writings of Sir Thomas More and that of the +prose of Chaucer than there is between that of More and of Ruskin. But +it is not till the seventeenth century that the modern spirit, in the +fullest sense of the word, comes into being. Defined it means a spirit +of observation, of preoccupation with detail, of stress laid on matter +of fact, of analysis of feelings and mental processes, of free argument +upon institutions and government. In relation to knowledge, it is the +spirit of science, and the study of science, which is the essential +intellectual fact in modern history, dates from just this time, from +Bacon and Newton and Descartes. In relation to literature, it is the +spirit of criticism, and criticism in England is the creation of the +seventeenth century. The positive temper, the attitude of realism, is +everywhere in the ascendant. The sixteenth century made voyages of +discovery; the seventeenth sat down to take stock of the riches it had +gathered. For the first time in English literature writing becomes a +vehicle for storing and conveying facts. + +It would be easy to give instances: one must suffice here. Biography, +which is one of the most characteristic kinds of English writing, was +unknown to the moderns as late as the sixteenth century. Partly the +awakened interest in the careers of the ancient statesmen and soldiers +which the study of Plutarch had excited, and partly the general interest +in, and craving for, facts set men writing down the lives of their +fellows. The earliest English biographies date from this time. In the +beginning they were concerned, like Plutarch, with men of action, and +when Sir Fulke Greville wrote a brief account of his friend Sir Philip +Sidney it was the courtier and the soldier, and not the author, that he +designed to celebrate. But soon men of letters came within their scope, +and though the interest in the lives of authors came too late to give us +the contemporary life of Shakespeare we so much long for, it was early +enough to make possible those masterpieces of condensed biography in +which Isaak Walton celebrates Herbert and Donne. Fuller and Aubrey, to +name only two authors, spent lives of laborious industry in hunting down +and chronicling the smallest facts about the worthies of their day and +the time immediately before them. Autobiography followed where biography +led. Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, as well +as less reputable persons, followed the new mode. By the time of the +Restoration Pepys and Evelyn were keeping their diaries, and Fox his +journal. Just as in poetry the lyric, that is the expression of personal +feeling, became more widely practised, more subtle and more sincere, in +prose the letter, the journal, and the autobiography formed themselves +to meet the new and growing demand for analysis of the feelings and the +intimate thoughts and sensations of real men and women. A minor form of +literature which had a brief but popular vogue ministered less directly +to the same need. The "Character," a brief descriptive essay on a +contemporary type--a tobacco seller, an old college butler or the +like--was popular because in its own way it matched the newly awakened +taste for realism and fact. The drama which in the hands of Ben Jonson +had attacked folly and wickedness proper to no place or time, descended +to the drawing-rooms of the day, and Congreve occupied himself with the +portrayal of the social frauds and foolishnesses perpetrated by actual +living men and women of fashion in contemporary London. Satire ceased +to be a mere expression of a vague discontent, and became a weapon +against opposing men and policies. The new generation of readers were +nothing if not critical. They were for testing directly institutions +whether they were literary, social, or political. They wanted facts, and +they wanted to take a side. + +In the distinct and separate realm of poetry a revolution no less +remarkable took place. Spenser had been both a poet and a Puritan: he +had designed to show by his great poem the training and fashioning of a +Puritan English gentleman. But the alliance between poetry and +Puritanism which he typified failed to survive his death. The +essentially pagan spirit of the Renaissance which caused him no doubts +nor difficulties proved too strong for his readers and his followers, +and the emancipated artistic enthusiasm in which it worked alienated +from secular poetry men with deep and strong religious convictions. +Religion and morality and poetry, which in Sidney and Spenser had gone +hand in hand, separated from each other. Poems like _Venus and Adonis_ +or like Shakespeare's sonnets could hardly be squared with the sterner +temper which persecution began to breed. Even within orthodox +Anglicanism poetry and religion began to be deemed no fit company for +each other. When George Herbert left off courtier and took orders he +burnt his earlier love poetry, and only the persuasion of his friends +prevented Donne from following the same course. Pure poetry became more +and more an exotic. All Milton's belongs to his earlier youth; his +middle age was occupied with controversy and propaganda in prose; when +he returned to poetry in blindness and old age it was "to justify the +ways of God to man"--to use poetry, that is, for a spiritual and moral +rather than an artistic end. + +Though the age was curious and inquiring, though poetry and prose tended +more and more to be enlisted in the service of non-artistic enthusiasms +and to be made the vehicle of deeper emotions and interests than perhaps +a northern people could ever find in art, pure and simple, it was not +like the time that followed it, a "prosaic" age. Enthusiasm burned +fierce and clear, displaying itself in the passionate polemic of Milton, +in the fanaticism of Bunyan and Fox, hardly more than in the gentle, +steadfast search for knowledge in Burton, and the wide and vigilant +curiousness of Bacon. Its eager experimentalism tried the impossible; +wrote poems and then gave them a weight of meaning they could not carry, +as when Fletcher in _The Purple Island_ designed to allegorize all that +the physiology of his day knew of the human body, or Donne sought to +convey abstruse scientific fact in a lyric. It gave men a passion for +pure learning, set Jonson to turn himself from a bricklayer into the +best equipped scholar of his day, and Fuller and Camden grubbing among +English records and gathering for the first time materials of scientific +value for English history. Enthusiasm gave us poetry that was at once +full of learning and of imagination, poetry that was harsh and brutal +in its roughness and at the same time impassioned. And it set up a +school of prose that combined colloquial readiness and fluency, +pregnancy and high sentiment with a cumbrous pedantry of learning which +was the fruit of its own excess. + +The form in which enthusiasm manifested itself most fiercely was as we +have seen not favourable to literature. Puritanism drove itself like a +wedge into the art of the time, broadening as it went. Had there been no +more in it than the moral earnestness and religiousness of Sidney and +Spenser, Cavalier would not have differed from Roundhead, and there +might have been no civil war; each party was endowed deeply with the +religious sense and Charles I. was a sincerely pious man. But while +Spenser and Sidney held that life as a preparation for eternity must be +ordered and strenuous and devout but that care for the hereafter was not +incompatible with a frank and full enjoyment of life as it is lived, +Puritanism as it developed in the middle classes became a sterner and +darker creed. The doctrine of original sin, face to face with the fact +that art, like other pleasures, was naturally and readily entered into +and enjoyed, forced them to the plain conclusion that art was an evil +thing. As early as Shakespeare's youth they had been strong enough to +keep the theatres outside London walls; at the time of the Civil War +they closed them altogether, and the feud which had lasted for over a +generation between them and the dramatists ended in the destruction of +the literary drama. In the brief years of their ascendancy they produced +no literature, for Milton is much too large to be tied down to their +negative creed, and, indeed, in many of his qualities, his love of music +and his sensuousness for instance, he is antagonistic to the temper of +his day. With the Restoration their earnest and strenuous spirit fled to +America. It is noteworthy that it had no literary manifestation there +till two centuries after the time of its passage. Hawthorne's novels are +the fruit--the one ripe fruit in art--of the Puritan imagination. + + +(2) + +If the reader adopts the seventeenth century habit himself and takes +stock of what the Elizabethans accomplished in poetry, he will recognize +speedily that their work reached various stages of completeness. They +perfected the poetic drama and its instrument, blank verse; they +perfected, though not in the severer Italian form, the sonnet; they +wrote with extraordinary delicacy and finish short lyrics in which a +simple and freer manner drawn from the classics took the place of the +mediaeval intricacies of the ballad and the rondeau. And in the forms +which they failed to bring to perfection they did beautiful and noble +work. The splendour of _The Fairy Queen_ is in separate passages; as a +whole it is over tortuous and slow; its affectations, its sensuousness, +the mere difficulty of reading it, makes us feel it a collection of +great passages, strung it is true on a large conception, rather than a +great work. The Elizabethans, that is, had not discovered the secret of +the long poem; the abstract idea of the "heroic" epic which was in all +their minds had to wait for embodiment till _Paradise Lost_. In a way +their treatment of the pastoral or eclogue form was imperfect too. They +used it well but not so well as their models, Vergil and Theocritus; +they had not quite mastered the convention on which it is built. + +The seventeenth century, taking stock in some such fashion of its +artistic possessions, found some things it were vain to try to do. It +could add nothing to the accomplishment of the English sonnet, so it +hardly tried; with the exception of a few sonnets in the Italian form of +Milton, the century can show us nothing in this mode of verse. The +literary drama was brought to perfection in the early years of it by the +surviving Elizabethans; later decades could add nothing to it but +licence, and as we saw, the licences they added hastened its +destruction. But in other forms the poets of the new time experimented +eagerly, and in the stress of experiment, poetry which under Elizabeth +had been integral and coherent split into different schools. As the +period of the Renaissance was also that of the Reformation it was only +natural a determined effort should sooner or later be made to use poetry +for religious purposes. The earliest English hymn writing, our first +devotional verse in the vernacular, belongs to this time, and a Catholic +and religious school of lyricism grew and flourished beside the pagan +neo-classical writers. From the tumult of experiment three schools +disengage themselves, the school of Spenser, the school of Jonson, and +the school of Donne. + +At the outset of the century Spenser's influence was triumphant and +predominant; his was the main stream with which the other poetic +influences of the time merely mingled. His popularity is referable to +qualities other than those which belonged peculiarly to his talent as a +poet. Puritans loved his religious ardour, and in those Puritan +households where the stricter conception of the diabolical nature of all +poetry had not penetrated, his works were read--standing on a shelf, may +be, between the new translation of the Bible and Sylvester's translation +of the French poet Du Bartas' work on the creation, that had a large +popularity at that time as family reading. Probably the Puritans were as +blind to the sensuousness of Spenser's language and imagery as they were +(and are) to the same qualities in the Bible itself. _The Fairy Queen_ +would easily achieve innocuousness amongst those who can find nothing +but an allegory of the Church in the "Song of Songs." His followers made +their allegory a great deal plainer than he had done his. In his poem +called _The Purple Island_, Phineas Fletcher, a Puritan imitator of +Spenser in Cambridge, essayed to set forth the struggle of the soul at +grip with evil, a battle in which the body--the "Purple Island"--is the +field. To a modern reader it is a desolating and at times a mildly +amusing book, in which everything from the liver to the seven deadly +sins is personified; in which after four books of allegorized +contemporary anatomy and physiology, the will (Voletta) engages in a +struggle with Satan and conquers by the help of Christ and King James! +The allegory is clever--too clever--and the author can paint a pleasant +picture, but on the whole he was happier in his pastoral work. His +brother Giles made a better attempt at the Spenserian manner. His long +poem, _Christ's Victory and Death_, shows for all its carefully +Protestant tone high qualities of mysticism; across it Spenser and +Milton join hands. + +It was, however, in pastoral poetry that Spenser's influence found its +pleasantest outlet. One might hesitate to advise a reader to embark on +either of the Fletchers. There is no reason why any modern should not +read and enjoy Browne or Wither, in whose softly flowing verse the +sweetness and contentment of the countryside, that "merry England" which +was the background of all sectarian and intellectual strife and labour, +finds as in a placid stream a calm reflection and picture of itself. The +seventeenth century gave birth to many things that only came to maturity +in the nineteenth; if you care for that kind of literary study which +searches out origins and digs for hints and models of accented styles, +you will find in Browne that which influenced more than any other single +thing the early work of Keats. Browne has another claim to immortality; +if it be true as is now thought that he was the author of the epitaph on +the Countess of Pembroke: + +"Underneath this sable hearse + Lies the subject of all verse, + Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother. + Death, ere thou hast slain another + Fair and learned and good as she, + Time shall throw a dart at thee." + +then he achieved the miracle of a quintessential statement of the spirit +of the English Renaissance. For the breath of it stirs in these slow +quiet moving lines, and its few and simple words implicate the soul of a +period. + +By the end of the first quarter of the century the influence of Spenser +and the school which worked under it had died out. Its place was taken +by the twin schools of Jonson and Donne. Jonson's poetic method is +something like his dramatic; he formed himself as exactly as possible on +classical models. Horace had written satires and elegies, and epistles +and complimentary verses, and Jonson quite consciously and deliberately +followed where Horace led. He wrote elegies on the great, letters and +courtly compliments and love-lyrics to his friends, satires with an air +of general censure. But though he was classical, his style was never +latinized. In all of them he strove to pour into an ancient form +language that was as intense and vigorous and as purely English as the +earliest trumpeters of the Renaissance in England could have wished. The +result is not entirely successful. He seldom fails to reproduce classic +dignity and good sense; on the other hand he seldom succeeds in +achieving classic grace and ease. Occasionally, as in his best known +lyric, he is perfect and achieves an air of spontaneity little short of +marvellous, when we know that his images and even his words in the song +are all plagiarized from other men. His expression is always clear and +vigorous and his sense good and noble. The native earnestness and +sincerity of the man shines through as it does in his dramas and his +prose. In an age of fantastic and meaningless eulogy--eulogy so amazing +in its unexpectedness and abstruseness that the wonder is not so much +that it should have been written as that it could have been thought +of--Jonson maintains his personal dignity and his good sense. You feel +his compliments are such as the best should be, not necessarily +understood and properly valued by the public, but of a discriminating +sort that by their very comprehending sincerity would be most warmly +appreciated by the people to whom they were addressed. His verses to +Shakespeare and his prose commentaries on him too, are models of what +self-respecting admiration should be, generous in its praise of +excellence, candid in its statement of defects. They are the kind of +compliments that Shakespeare himself, if he had grace enough, must have +loved to receive. + +Very different from his direct and dignified manner is the closely +packed style of Donne, who, Milton apart, is the greatest English writer +of the century, though his obscurity has kept him out of general +reading. No poetry in English, not even Browning, is more difficult to +understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning proceed from such +similar causes that they are worth examining together. In both, as in +the obscure passages in Shakespeare's later plays, obscurity arises not +because the poet says too little but because he attempts to say too +much. He huddles a new thought on the one before it, before the first +has had time to express itself; he sees things or analyses emotions so +swiftly and subtly himself that he forgets the slower comprehensions of +his readers; he is for analysing things far deeper than the ordinary +mind commonly can. His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and +likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things from a +dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each separate vision +in a heap out on to the page; his restless intellect finds new and +subtler shades of emotion and thought invisible to other pairs of eyes, +and cannot, because speech is modelled on the average of our +intelligences, find words to express them; he is always trembling on the +brink of the inarticulate. All this applies to both Donne and Browning, +and the comparison could be pushed further still. Both draw the +knowledge which is the main cause of their obscurity from the same +source, the bypaths of mediaevalism. Browning's _Sordello_ is obscure +because he knows too much about mediaeval Italian history; Donne's +_Anniversary_ because he is too deeply read in mediaeval scholasticism +and speculation. Both make themselves more difficult to the reader who +is familiar with the poetry of their contemporaries by the disconcerting +freshness of their point of view. Seventeenth century love poetry was +idyllic and idealist; Donne's is passionate and realistic to the point +of cynicism. To read him after reading Browne or Jonson is to have the +same shock as reading Browning after Tennyson. Both poets are salutary +in the strong and biting antidote they bring to sentimentalism in +thought and melodious facility in writing. They are the corrective of +lazy thinking and lazy composition. + +Elizabethan love poetry was written on a convention which though it was +used with manliness and entire sincerity by Sidney did not escape the +fate of its kind. Dante's love for Beatrice, Petrarch's for Laura, the +gallant and passionate adoration of Sidney for his Stella became the +models for a dismal succession of imaginary woes. They were all figments +of the mind, perhaps hardly that; they all use the same terms and write +in fixed strains, epicurean and sensuous like Ronsard, ideal and +intellectualized like Dante, sentimental and adoring like Petrarch. Into +this enclosed garden of sentiment and illusion Donne burst passionately +and rudely, pulling up the gay-coloured tangled weeds that choked +thoughts, planting, as one of his followers said, the seeds of fresh +invention. Where his forerunners had been idealist, epicurean, or +adoring, he was brutal, cynical and immitigably realist. He could begin +a poem, "For God's sake hold your tongue and let me live"; he could be +as resolutely free from illusion as Shakespeare when he addressed his +Dark Lady-- + +"Hope not for mind in women; at their best, + Sweetness and wit they're but mummy possest." + +And where the sonneteers pretended to a sincerity which was none of +theirs, he was, like Browning, unaffectedly a dramatic lyrist. "I did +best," he said, "when I had least truth for my subject." + +His love poetry was written in his turbulent and brilliant youth, and +the poetic talent which made it turned in his later years to express +itself in hymns and religious poetry. But there is no essential +distinction between the two halves of his work. It is all of a piece. +The same swift and subtle spirit which analyses experiences of passion, +analyses, in his later poetry, those of religion. His devotional poems, +though they probe and question, are none the less never sermons, but +rather confessions or prayers. His intense individuality, eager always, +as his best critic has said, "to find a North-West passage of his +own,"[2] pressed its curious and sceptical questioning into every corner +of love and life and religion, explored unsuspected depths, exploited +new discovered paradoxes, and turned its discoveries always into poetry +of the closely-packed artificial style which was all its own. Simplicity +indeed would have been for him an affectation; his elaborateness is not +like that of his followers, constructed painfully in a vicious desire to +compass the unexpected, but the natural overflow of an amazingly fertile +and ingenious mind. The curiosity, the desire for truth, the search +after minute and detailed knowledge of his age is all in his verse. He +bears the spirit of his time not less markedly than Bacon does, or +Newton, or Descartes. + +[Footnote 2: Prof. Grierson in _Cambridge History of English +Literature_.] + +The work of the followers of Donne and Jonson leads straight to the new +school, Jonson's by giving that school a model on which to work, Donne's +by producing an era of extravagance and absurdity which made a literary +revolution imperative. The school of Donne--the "fantastics" as they +have been called (Dr. Johnson called them the metaphysical poets), +produced in Herbert and Vaughan, our two noblest writers of religious +verse, the flower of a mode of writing which ended in the somewhat +exotic religiousness of Crashaw. In the hands of Cowley the use of +far-sought and intricate imagery became a trick, and the fantastic +school, the soul of sincerity gone out of it, died when he died. To the +followers of Jonson we owe that delightful and simple lyric poetry which +fills our anthologies, their courtly lyricism receiving a new impulse in +the intenser loyalty of troubled times. The most finished of them is +perhaps Carew; the best, because of the freshness and varity of his +subject-matter and his easy grace, Herrick. At the end of them came +Waller and gave to the five-accented rhymed verse (the heroic couplet) +that trick of regularity and balance which gave us the classical school. + + +(3) + +The prose literature of the seventeenth century is extraordinarily rich +and varied, and a study of it would cover a wide field of human +knowledge. The new and unsuspected harmonies discovered by the +Elizabethans were applied indeed to all the tasks of which prose is +capable, from telling stories to setting down the results of speculation +which was revolutionizing science and philosophy. For the first time +the vernacular and not Latin became the language of scientific research, +and though Bacon in his _Novum Organum_ adhered to the older mode its +disappearance was rapid. English was proving itself too flexible an +instrument for conveying ideas to be longer neglected. It was applied +too to preaching of a more formal and grandiose kind than the plain and +homely Latimer ever dreamed of. The preachers, though their +golden-mouthed oratory, which blended in its combination of vigour and +cadence the euphuistic and colloquial styles of the Elizabethans, is in +itself a glory of English literature, belong by their matter too +exclusively to the province of Church history to be dealt with here. The +men of science and philosophy, Newton, Hobbes, and Locke, are in a like +way outside our province. For the purpose of the literary student the +achievement of the seventeenth century can be judged in four separate +men or books--in the Bible, in Francis Bacon, and in Burton and Browne. + +In a way the Bible, like the preachers, lies outside the domain of +literary study in the narrow sense; but its sheer literary magnitude, +the abiding significance of it in our subsequent history, social, +political, and artistic as well as religious, compel us to turn aside to +examine the causes that have produced such great results. The Authorized +Version is not, of course, a purely seventeenth century work. Though the +scholars[3] who wrote and compiled it had before them all the previous +vernacular texts and chose the best readings where they found them or +devised new ones in accordance with the original, the basis is +undoubtedly the Tudor version of Tindall. It has, none the less, the +qualities of the time of its publication. It could hardly have been done +earlier; had it been so, it would not have been done half so well. In it +English has lost both its roughness and its affectation and retained its +strength; the Bible is the supreme example of early English prose style. +The reason is not far to seek. Of all recipes for good or noble writing +that which enjoins the writer to be careful about the matter and never +mind the manner, is the most sure. The translators had the handling of +matter of the gravest dignity and momentousness, and their sense of +reverence kept them right in their treatment of it. They cared +passionately for the truth; they were virtually anonymous and not +ambitious of originality or literary fame; they had no desire to stand +between the book and its readers. It followed that they cultivated that +naked plainness and spareness which makes their work supreme. The +Authorized Version is the last and greatest of those English +translations which were the fruit of Renaissance scholarship and +pioneering. It is the first and greatest piece of English prose. + +[Footnote 3: There is a graphic little pen-picture of their method in +Selden's "Table Talk."] + +Its influence is one of those things on which it is profitless to +comment or enlarge simply because they are an understood part of every +man's experience. In its own time it helped to weld England, for where +before one Bible was read at home and another in churches, all now read +the new version. Its supremacy was instantaneous and unchallenged, and +it quickly coloured speech and literature; it could produce a Bunyan in +the century of its birth. To it belongs the native dignity and eloquence +of peasant speech. It runs like a golden thread through all our writing +subsequent to its coming; men so diverse as Huxley and Carlyle have paid +their tribute to its power; Ruskin counted it the one essential part of +its education. It will be a bad day for the mere quality of our language +when it ceases to be read. + +At the time the translators were sitting, Francis Bacon was at the +height of his fame. By profession a lawyer--time-serving and +over-compliant to wealth and influence--he gives singularly little +evidence of it in the style of his books. Lawyers, from the necessity +they are under of exerting persuasion, of planting an unfamiliar +argument in the minds of hearers of whose favour they are doubtful, but +whose sympathy they must gain, are usually of purpose diffuse. They +cultivate the gift, possessed by Edmund Burke above all other English +authors, of putting the same thing freshly and in different forms a +great many times in succession. They value copiousness and fertility of +illustration. Nothing could be more unlike this normal legal manner than +the style of Bacon. "No man," says Ben Jonson, speaking in one of those +vivid little notes of his, of his oratorical method, "no man ever +coughed or turned aside from him without loss." He is a master of the +aphoristic style. He compresses his wisdom into the quintessential form +of an epigram; so complete and concentrated is his form of statement, so +shortly is everything put, that the mere transition from one thought to +another gives his prose a curious air of disjointedness as if he flitted +arbitrarily from one thing to another, and jotted down anything that +came into his head. His writing has clarity and lucidity, it abounds in +terseness of expression and in exact and discriminating phraseology, and +in the minor arts of composition--in the use of quotations for +instance--it can be extraordinarily felicitous. But it lacks +spaciousness and ease and rhythm; it makes too inexorable a demand on +the attention, and the harassed reader soon finds himself longing for +those breathing spaces which consideration or perhaps looseness of +thought has implanted in the prose of other writers. + +His _Essays_, the work by which he is best known, were in their origin +merely jottings gradually cohered and enlarged into the series we know. +In them he had the advantage of a subject which he had studied closely +through life. He counted himself a master in the art of managing men, +and "Human Nature and how to manage it" would be a good title for his +book. Men are studied in the spirit of Machiavelli, whose philosophy of +government appealed so powerfully to the Elizabethan mind. Taken +together the essays which deal with public matters are in effect a kind +of manual for statesmen and princes, instructing them how to acquire +power and how to keep it, deliberating how far they may go safely in +the direction of self-interest, and to what degree the principle of +self-interest must be subordinated to the wider interests of the people +who are ruled. Democracy, which in England was to make its splendid +beginnings in the seventeenth century, finds little to foretell it in +the works of Bacon. Though he never advocates cruelty or oppression and +is wise enough to see that no statesman can entirely set aside moral +considerations, his ethical tone is hardly elevating; the moral +obliquity of his public life is to a certain extent explained, in all +but its grosser elements, in his published writings. The essays, of +course, contain much more than this; the spirit of curious and restless +enquiry which animated Bacon finds expression in those on "Health," or +"Gardens" and "Plantations" and others of the kind; and a deeper vein of +earnestness runs through some of them--those for instance on +"Friendship," or "Truth" and on "Death." + +The _Essays_ sum up in a condensed form the intellectual interests which +find larger treatment in his other works. His _Henry VII._, the first +piece of scientific history in the English language (indeed in the +modern world) is concerned with a king whose practice was the outcome of +a political theory identical with Bacon's own. The _Advancement of +Learning_ is a brilliant popular exposition of the cause of scientific +enquiry and of the inductive or investigatory method of research. The +_New Atlantis_ is the picture of an ideal community whose common purpose +is scientific investigation. Bacon's name is not upon the roll of those +who have enlarged by brilliant conjectures or discoveries the store of +human knowledge; his own investigations so far as they are recorded are +all of a trivial nature. The truth about him is that he was a +brilliantly clever populariser of the cause of science, a kind of +seventeenth century Huxley, concerned rather to lay down large general +principles for the guidance of the work of others, than to be a serious +worker himself. The superstition of later times, acting on and +refracting his amazing intellectual gifts, has raised him to a godlike +eminence which is by right none of his; it has even credited him with +the authorship of Shakespeare, and in its wilder moments with the +composition of all that is of supreme worth in Elizabethan literature. +It is not necessary to take these delusions seriously. The ignorance of +mediaevalism was in the habit of crediting Vergil with the construction +of the Roman aqueducts and temples whose ruins are scattered over +Europe. The modern Baconians reach much the same intellectual level. + +A similar enthusiasm for knowledge and at any rate a pretence to science +belong to the author of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Robert Burton. His +one book is surely the most amazing in English prose. Its professed +object was simple and comprehensive; it was to analyze human melancholy, +to describe its effects, and prescribe for its removal. But as his task +grew, melancholy came to mean to Burton all the ills that flesh is heir +to. He tracked it in obscure and unsuspected forms; drew illustrations +from a range of authors so much wider than the compass of the reading +of even the most learned since, that he is generally credited with the +invention of a large part of his quotations. Ancients and moderns, poets +and prose writers, schoolmen and dramatists are all drawn upon for the +copious store of his examples; they are always cited with an air of +quietly humorous shrewdness in the comments and enclosed in a prose that +is straightforward, simple and vigorous, and can on occasion command +both rhythm and beauty of phrase. It is a mistake to regard Burton from +the point of view (due largely to Charles Lamb) of tolerant or loving +delight in quaintness for quaintness' sake. His book is anything but +scientific in form, but it is far from being the work of a recluse or a +fool. Behind his lack of system, he takes a broad and psychologically an +essentially just view of human ills, and modern medicine has gone far in +its admiration of what is at bottom a most comprehensive and subtle +treatise in diagnosis. + +A writer of a very different quality is Sir Thomas Browne. Of all the +men of his time, he is the only one of whom one can say for certain that +he held the manner of saying a thing more important than the thing said. +He is our first deliberate and conscious stylist, the forerunner of +Charles Lamb, of Stevenson (whose _Virginibus Puerisque_ is modelled on +his method of treatment) and of the stylistic school of our own day. His +eloquence is too studied to rise to the greatest heights, and his +speculation, though curious and discursive, never really results in deep +thinking. He is content to embroider his pattern out of the stray +fancies of an imaginative nature. His best known work, the _Religio +Medici_, is a random confession of belief and thoughts, full of the +inconsequent speculations of a man with some knowledge of science but +not deeply or earnestly interested about it, content rather to follow +the wayward imaginations of a mind naturally gifted with a certain +poetic quality, than to engage in serious intellectual exercise. Such +work could never maintain its hold on taste if it were not carefully +finished and constructed with elaborate care. Browne, if he was not a +great writer, was a literary artist of a high quality. He exploits a +quaint and lovable egoism with extraordinary skill; and though his +delicately figured and latinized sentences commonly sound platitudinous +and trivial when they are translated into rough Saxon prose, as they +stand they are rich and melodious enough. + + +(4) + +In a century of surpassing richness in prose and poetry, one author +stands by himself. John Milton refuses to be classed with any of the +schools. Though Dryden tells us Milton confessed to him that Spenser was +his "original," he has no connection--other than a general similarity of +purpose, moral and religious--with Spenser's followers. To the +fantastics he paid in his youth the doubtful compliment of one or two +half-contemptuous imitations and never touched them again. He had no +turn for the love lyrics or the courtliness of the school of Jonson. In +everything he did he was himself and his own master; he devised his own +subjects and wrote his own style. He stands alone and must be judged +alone. + +No author, however, can ever escape from the influences of his time, +and, just as much as his lesser contemporaries, Milton has his place in +literary history and derives from the great original impulse which set +in motion all the enterprises of the century. He is the last and +greatest figure in the English Renaissance. The new passion for art and +letters which in its earnest fumbling beginnings gave us the prose of +Cheke and Ascham and the poetry of Surrey and Sackville, comes to a full +and splendid and perfect end in his work. In it the Renaissance and the +Reformation, imperfectly fused by Sidney and Spenser, blend in their +just proportions. The transplantation into English of classical forms +which had been the aim of Sidney and the endeavour of Jonson he finally +accomplished; in his work the dream of all the poets of the +Renaissance--the heroic poem--finds its fulfilment. There was no poet of +the time but wanted to do for his country what Vergil had planned to do +for Rome, to sing its origins, and to celebrate its morality and its +citizenship in the epic form. Spenser had tried it in _The Fairy Queen_ +and failed splendidly. Where he failed, Milton succeeded, though his +poem is not on the origins of England but on the ultimate subject of the +origins of mankind. We know from his notebooks that he turned over in +his mind a national subject and that the Arthurian legend for a while +appealed to him. But to Milton's earnest temper nothing that was not +true was a fit subject for poetry. It was inevitable he should lay it +aside. The Arthurian story he knew to be a myth and a myth was a lie; +the story of the Fall, on the other hand, he accepted in common with his +time for literal fact. It is to be noted as characteristic of his +confident and assured egotism that he accepted no less sincerely and +literally the imaginative structure which he himself reared on it. +However that may be, the solid fact about him is that in this +"adventurous song" with its pursuit of + +"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," + +he succeeded in his attempt, that alone among the moderns he contrived +to write an epic which stands on the same eminence as the ancient +writings of the kind, and that he found time in a life, which hardly +extended to old age as we know it, to write, besides noble lyrics and a +series of fiercely argumentative prose treatises, two other masterpieces +in the grand style, a tragedy modelled on the Greeks and a second epic +on the "compact" style of the book of Job. No English poet can compare +with him in majesty or completeness. + +An adequate study of his achievement is impossible within the limits of +the few pages that are all a book like this can spare to a single +author. Readers who desire it will find it in the work of his two best +critics, Mark Pattison and Sir Walter Raleigh.[4] All that can be done +here is to call attention to some of his most striking qualities. +Foremost, of course, is the temper of the man. From the beginning he +was sure of himself and sure of his mission; he had his purpose plain +and clear. There is no mental development, hardly, visible in his work, +only training, undertaken anxiously and prayerfully and with a clearly +conceived end. He designed to write a masterpiece and he would not start +till he was ready. The first twenty years of his life were spent in +assiduous reading; for twenty more he was immersed in the dust and toil +of political conflict, using his pen and his extraordinary equipment of +learning and eloquence to defend the cause of liberty, civil and +religious, and to attack its enemies; not till he was past middle age +had he reached the leisure and the preparedness necessary to accomplish +his self-imposed work. But all the time, as we know, he had it in his +mind. In _Lycidas_, written in his Cambridge days, he apologizes to his +readers for plucking the fruit of his poetry before it is ripe. In +passage after passage in his prose works he begs for his reader's +patience for a little while longer till his preparation be complete. +When the time came at last for beginning he was in no doubt; in his very +opening lines he intends, he says, to soar no "middle flight." This +self-assured unrelenting certainty of his, carried into his prose essays +in argument, produces sometimes strange results. One is peculiarly +interesting to us now in view of current controversy. He was unhappily +married, and because he was unhappy the law of divorce must be changed. +A modern--George Eliot for instance--would have pleaded the artistic +temperament and been content to remain outside the law. Milton always +argued from himself to mankind at large. + +[Footnote 4: "Milton," E.M.L., and "Milton" (Edward Arnold).] + +In everything he did, he put forth all his strength. Each of his poems, +long or short, is by itself a perfect whole, wrought complete. The +reader always must feel that the planning of each is the work of +conscious, deliberate, and selecting art. Milton never digresses; he +never violates harmony of sound or sense; his poems have all their +regular movement from quiet beginning through a rising and breaking wave +of passion and splendour to quiet close. His art is nowhere better seen +than in his endings. + +Is it _Lycidas_? After the thunder of approaching vengeance on the +hireling shepherds of the Church, comes sunset and quiet: + +"And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills, + And now was dropt into the western bay; + At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: + To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." + +Is it _Paradise Lost_? After the agonies of expulsion and the flaming +sword-- + +"Some natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon; + The world was all before them where to choose + Their place of rest, and Providence their guide; + They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, + Through Eden took their solitary way." + +Is it finally _Samson Agonistes_? + +"His servants he with new acquist, + Of true experience from this great event, + With peace and consolation hath dismist, + And calm of mind all passion spent." + +"Calm of mind, all passion spent," it is the essence of Milton's art. + +He worked in large ideas and painted splendid canvases; it was +necessary for him to invent a style which should be capable of sustained +and lofty dignity, which should be ornate enough to maintain the +interest of the reader and charm him and at the same time not so ornate +as to give an air of meretricious decoration to what was largely and +simply conceived. Particularly it was necessary for him to avoid those +incursions of vulgar associations which words carelessly used will bring +in their train. He succeeded brilliantly in this difficult task. The +unit of the Miltonic style is not the phrase but the word, each word +fastidiously chosen, commonly with some air of an original and lost +meaning about it, and all set in a verse in which he contrived by an +artful variation of pause and stress to give the variety which other +writers had from rhyme. In this as in his structure he accomplished what +the Renaissance had only dreamed. Though he had imitators (the poetic +diction of the age following is modelled on him) he had no followers. No +one has been big enough to find his secret since. + + + + +CHAPTER V + + +THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE + +The student of literature, when he passes in his reading from the age of +Shakespeare and Milton to that of Dryden and Pope, will be conscious of +certain sharply defined differences between the temper and styles of +the writers of the two periods. If besides being a student of literature +he is also (for this is a different thing) a student of literary +criticism he will find that these differences have led to the affixing +of certain labels--that the school to which writers of the former period +belong is called "Romantic" and that of the latter "Classic," this +"Classic" school being again overthrown towards the end of the +eighteenth century by a set of writers who unlike the Elizabethans gave +the name "Romantic" to themselves. What is he to understand by these two +labels; what are the characteristics of "Classicism" and how far is it +opposite to and conflicting with "Romanticism"? The question is +difficult because the names are used vaguely and they do not adequately +cover everything that is commonly put under them. It would be difficult, +for instance, to find anything in Ben Jonson which proclaims him as +belonging to a different school from Dryden, and perhaps the same could +be said in the second and self-styled period of Romanticism of the work +of Crabbe. But in the main the differences are real and easily visible, +even though they hardly convince us that the names chosen are the +happiest that could be found by way of description. + +This period of Dryden and Pope on which we are now entering sometimes +styled itself the Augustan Age of English poetry. It grounded its claim +to classicism on a fancied resemblance to the Roman poets of the golden +age of Latin poetry, the reign of the Emperor Augustus. Its authors saw +themselves each as a second Vergil, a second Ovid, most of all a second +Horace, and they believed that their relation to the big world, their +assured position in society, heightened the resemblances. They +endeavoured to form their poetry on the lines laid down in the critical +writing of the original Augustan age as elaborated and interpreted in +Renaissance criticism. It was tacitly assumed--some of them openly +asserted it--that the kinds, modes of treatment and all the minor +details of literature, figures of speech, use of epithets and the rest, +had been settled by the ancients once and for all. What the Greeks began +the critics and authors of the time of Augustus had settled in its +completed form, and the scholars of the Renaissance had only interpreted +their findings for modern use. There was the tragedy, which had certain +proper parts and a certain fixed order of treatment laid down for it; +there was the heroic poem, which had a story or "fable," which must be +treated in a certain fixed manner, and so on. The authors of the +"Classic" period so christened themselves because they observed these +rules. And they fancied that they had the temper of the Augustan +time--the temper displayed in the works of Horace more than in those of +any one else--its urbanity, its love of good sense and moderation, its +instinctive distrust of emotion, and its invincible good breeding. If +you had asked them to state as simply and broadly as possible their +purpose they would have said it was to follow nature, and if you had +enquired what they meant by nature it would turn out that they thought +of it mainly as the opposite of art and the negation of what was +fantastic, tortured, or far sought in thinking or writing. The later +"Romantic" Revival, when it called itself a return to nature, was only +claiming the intention which the classical school itself had proclaimed +as its main endeavour. The explanation of that paradox we shall see +presently; in the meantime it is worth looking at some of the +characteristics of classicism as they appear in the work of the +"Classic" authors. + +In the first place the "Classic" writers aimed at simplicity of style, +at a normal standard of writing. They were intolerant of individual +eccentricities; they endeavoured, and with success, to infuse into +English letters something of the academic spirit that was already +controlling their fellow-craftsmen in France. For this end amongst +others they and the men of science founded the Royal Society, an +academic committee which has been restricted since to the physical and +natural sciences and been supplemented by similar bodies representing +literature and learning only in our own day. Clearness, plainness, +conversational ease and directness were the aims the society set before +its members where their writing was concerned. "The Royal Society," +wrote the Bishop of Rochester, its first historian, "have exacted from +all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive +expressions, clear sense, a native easiness, bringing all things as near +the mathematical plainness as they can; and preferring the language of +artisans, countrymen, and merchants before that of wits and scholars." +Artisans, countrymen, and merchants--the ideal had been already accepted +in France, Malesherbes striving to use no word that was not in the +vocabulary of the day labourers of Paris, Moliere making his washerwoman +first critic of his comedies. It meant for England the disuse of the +turgidities and involutions which had marked the prose of the preachers +and moralists of the times of James and Charles I.; scholars and men of +letters were arising who would have taken John Bunyan, the unlettered +tinker of Bedford, for their model rather than the learned physician Sir +Thomas Browne. + +But genius like Bunyan's apart, there is nothing in the world more +difficult than to write with the easy and forthright simplicity of talk, +as any one may see who tries for himself--or even compares the +letter-writing with the conversation of his friends. So that this desire +of simplicity, of clarity, of lucidity led at once to a more deliberate +art. Dryden and Swift and Addison were assiduous in their labour with +the file; they excel all their predecessors in polish as much as the +writers of the first Augustan age excelled theirs in the same quality. +Not that it was all the result of deliberate art; in a way it was in the +air, and quite unlearned people--journalists and pamphleteers and the +like who wrote unconsciously and hurriedly to buy their supper--partook +of it as well as leisured people and conscious artists. Defoe is as +plain and easy and polished as Swift, yet it is certain his amazing +activity and productiveness never permitted him to look back over a +sentence he had written. Something had happened, that is, to the English +language. The assimilation of latinisms and the revival of obsolete +terms of speech had ceased; it had become finally a more or less fixed +form, shedding so much of its imports as it had failed to make part of +itself and acquiring a grammatical and syntactical fixity which it had +not possessed in Elizabethan times. When Shakespeare wrote + +"What cares these roarers for the name of king," + +he was using, as students of his language never tire of pointing out to +us, a perfectly correct local grammatical form. Fifty years after that +line was written, at the Restoration, local forms had dropped out of +written English. We had acquired a normal standard of language, and +either genius or labour was polishing it for literary uses. + +What they did for prose these "Classic" writers did even more +exactly--and less happily--for verse. Fashions often become exaggerated +before their disappearance, and the decadence of Elizabethan romanticism +had produced poetry the wildness and extravagance of whose images was +well-nigh unbounded. The passion for intricate and far-sought metaphor +which had possessed Donne was accompanied in his work and even more in +that of his followers with a passion for what was elusive and recondite +in thought and emotion and with an increasing habit of rudeness and +wilful difficultness in language and versification. Against these +ultimate licences of a great artistic period, the classical writers +invoked the qualities of smoothness and lucidity, in the same way, so +they fancied, as Vergil might have invoked them against Lucretius. In +the treatment of thought and feeling they wanted clearness, they wanted +ideas which the mass of men would readily apprehend and assent to, and +they wanted not hints or half-spoken suggestions but complete statement. +In the place of the logical subtleties which Donne and his school had +sought in the scholastic writers of the Middle Ages, they brought back +the typically Renaissance study of rhetoric; the characteristic of all +the poetry of the period is that it has a rhetorical quality. It is +never intimate and never profound, but it has point and wit, and it +appeals with confidence to the balanced judgment which men who distrust +emotion and have no patience with subtleties intellectual, emotional, or +merely verbal, have in common. Alongside of this lucidity, this air of +complete statement in substance they strove for and achieved smoothness +in form. To the poet Waller, the immediate predecessor of Dryden, the +classical writers themselves ascribed the honour of the innovation. In +fact Waller was only carrying out the ideals counselled and followed by +Ben Jonson. It was in the school of Waller and Dryden and not in that of +the minor writers who called themselves his followers that he came to +his own. + +What then are the main differences between classicism of the best +period--the classicism whose characteristics we have been +describing--and the Romanticism which came before and after? In the +first place we must put the quality we have described as that of +complete statement. Classical poetry is, so to speak, "all there." Its +meaning is all of it on the surface; it conveys nothing but what it +says, and what it says, it says completely. It is always vigorous and +direct, often pointed and aphoristic, never merely suggestive, never +given to half statement, and never obscure. You feel that as an +instrument of expression it is sharp and polished and shining; it is +always bright and defined in detail. The Great Romantics go to work in +other ways. Their poetry is a thing of half lights and half spoken +suggestions, of hints that imagination will piece together, of words +that are charged with an added meaning of sound over sense, a thing that +stirs the vague and impalpable restlessness of memory or terror or +desire that lies down beneath in the minds of men. It rouses what a +philosopher has called the "Transcendental feeling," the solemn sense of +the immediate presence of "that which was and is and ever shall be," to +induce which is the property of the highest poetry. You will find +nothing in classical poetry so poignant or highly wrought as Webster's + +"Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young," + +and the answer, + +"I think not so: her infelicity + Seemed to have years too many," + +or so subtle in its suggestion, sense echoing back to primeval terrors +and despairs, as this from _Macbeth_: + +"Stones have been known to move and trees to speak; + Augurs and understood relations have + By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks brought forth + The secret'st man of blood." + +or so intoxicating to the imagination and the senses as an ode of Keats +or a sonnet by Rossetti. But you will find eloquent and pointed +statements of thoughts and feelings that are common to most of us--the +expression of ordinary human nature-- + +"What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest," + +"Wit and fine writing" consisting, as Addison put it in a review of +Pope's first published poem, not so much "in advancing things that are +new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable turn." + +Though in this largest sense the "classic" writers eschewed the +vagueness of romanticism, in another and more restricted way they +cultivated it. They were not realists as all good romanticists have to +be. They had no love for oddities or idiosyncrasies or exceptions. They +loved uniformity, they had no use for truth in detail. They liked the +broad generalised, descriptive style of Milton, for instance, better +than the closely packed style of Shakespeare, which gets its effects +from a series of minute observations huddled one after the other and +giving the reader, so to speak, the materials for his own impression, +rather than rendering, as does Milton, the expression itself. + +Every literary discovery hardens ultimately into a convention; it has +its day and then its work is done, and it has to be destroyed so that +the ascending spirit of humanity can find a better means of +self-expression. Out of the writing which aimed at simplicity and truth +to nature grew "Poetic Diction," a special treasury of words and phrases +deemed suitable for poetry, providing poets with a common stock of +imagery, removing from them the necessity of seeing life and nature each +one for himself. The poetry which Dryden and Pope wrought out of their +mental vigour, their followers wrote to pattern. Poetry became reduced, +as it never was before and has never been since, to a formula. The +Elizabethan sonneteers, as we saw, used a vocabulary and phraseology in +common with their fellows in Italy and France, and none the less +produced fine poetry. But they used it to express things they really +felt. The truth is it is not the fact of a poetic diction which matters +so much as its quality--whether it squares with sincerity, whether it is +capable of expressing powerfully and directly one's deepest feelings. +The history of literature can show poetic dictions--special vocabularies +and forms for poetry--that have these qualities; the diction, for +instance, of the Greek choruses, or of the Scottish poets who followed +Chaucer, or of the troubadours. That of the classic writers of an +Augustan age was not of such a kind. Words clothe thought; poetic +diction had the artifice of the crinoline; it would stand by itself. The +Romantics in their return to nature had necessarily to abolish it. + +But when all is said in criticism the poetry of the earlier half of the +eighteenth century excels all other English poetry in two respects. Two +qualities belong to it by virtue of the metre in which it is most of it +written--rapidity and antithesis. Its antithesis made it an incomparable +vehicle for satire, its rapidity for narrative. Outside its limits we +have hardly any even passable satirical verse; within them there are +half-a-dozen works of the highest excellence in this kind. And if we +except Chaucer, there is no one else in the whole range of English +poetry who have the narrative gift so completely as the classic poets. +Bentleys will always exist who will assure us with civility that Pope's +_Homer_, though "very pretty," bears little relation to the Greek, and +that Dryden's _Vergil_, though vigorous and virile, is a poor +representation of its original. The truth remains that for a reader who +knows no ancient languages either of those translations will probably +give a better idea of their originals than any other rendering in +English that we possess. The foundation of their method has been +vindicated in the best modern translations from the Greek. + + +(2) + +The term "eighteenth century" in the vocabulary of the literary +historian is commonly as vaguely used as the term Elizabethan. It +borrows as much as forty years from the seventeenth and gives away ten +to the nineteenth. The whole of the work of Dryden, whom we must count +as the first of the "classic" school, was accomplished before +chronologically it had begun. As a man and as an author he was very +intimately related to his changing times; he adapted himself to them +with a versatility as remarkable as that of the Vicar of Bray, and, it +may be added, as simple-minded. He mourned in verse the death of +Cromwell and the death of his successor, successively defended the +theological positions of the Church of England and the Church of Rome, +changed his religion and became Poet Laureate to James II., and +acquiesced with perfect equanimity in the Revolution which brought in +his successor. This instability of conviction, though it gave a handle +to his opponents in controversy, does not appear to have caused any +serious scandal or disgust among his contemporaries, and it has +certainly had little effect on the judgment of later times. It has +raised none of the reproaches which have been cast at the suspected +apostasy of Wordsworth. Dryden had little interest in political or +religious questions; his instinct, one must conceive, was to conform to +the prevailing mode and to trouble himself no further about the matter. +Defoe told the truth about him when he wrote that "Dryden might have +been told his fate that, having his extraordinary genius slung and +pitched upon a swivel, it would certainly turn round as fast as the +times, and instruct him how to write elegies to Oliver Cromwell and King +Charles the Second with all the coherence imaginable; how to write +_Religio Laici_ and the _Hind and the Panther_ and yet be the same man, +every day to change his principle, change his religion, change his coat, +change his master, and yet never change his nature." He never changed +his nature, he was as free from cynicism as a barrister who represents +successively opposing parties in suits or politics; and when he wrote +polemics in prose or verse he lent his talents as a barrister lends his +for a fee. His one intellectual interest was in his art, and it is in +his comments on his art--the essays and prefaces in the composition of +which he amused the leisure left in the busy life of a dramatist and a +poet of officialdom--that his most charming and delicate work is to be +found. In a way they begin modern English prose; earlier writing +furnishes no equal to their colloquial ease and the grace of their +expression. And they contain some of the most acute criticism in our +language--"classical" in its tone (_i.e._, with a preference for +conformity) but with its respect for order and tradition always tempered +by good sense and wit, and informed and guided throughout by a taste +whose catholicity and sureness was unmatched in the England of his time. +The preface to his _Fables_ contains some excellent notes on Chaucer. +They may be read as a sample of the breadth and perspicuity of his +critical perceptions. + +His chief poetical works were most of them occasional--designed either +to celebrate some remarkable event or to take a side and interpret a +policy in the conflict, political or religious, of the time. +_Absalom and Achitophel_ and _The Medal_ were levelled at the +Shaftesbury-Monmouth intrigues in the closing years of Charles II. +_Religio Laici_ celebrated the excellence of the Church of England in +its character of _via media_ between the opposite extravagances of +Papacy and Presbyterianism. _The Hind and the Panther_ found this +perfection spotted. The Church of England has become the Panther, whose +coat is a varied pattern of heresy and truth beside the spotless purity +of the Hind, the Church of Rome. _Astrea Reddux_ welcomed the returning +Charles; _Annus Mirabilis_ commemorated a year of fire and victories, +Besides these he wrote many dramas in verse, a number of translations, +and some shorter poems, of which the odes are the most remarkable. + +His qualities as a poet fitted very exactly the work he set himself to +do. His work is always plain and easily understood; he had a fine +faculty for narration, and the vigorous rapidity and point of his style +enabled him to sketch a character or sum up a dialectical position very +surely and effectively. His writing has a kind of spare and masculine +force about it. It is this vigour and the impression which he gives of +intellectual strength and of a logical grasp of his subject, that beyond +question has kept alive work which, if ever poetry was, was ephemeral in +its origin. The careers of the unscrupulous Caroline peers would have +been closed for us were they not visible in the reflected light of his +denunciation of them. Though Buckingham is forgotten and Shaftesbury's +name swallowed up in that of his more philanthropic descendant, we can +read of Achitophel and Zimri still, and feel something of the strength +and heat which he caught from a fiercely fought conflict and transmitted +with his own gravity and purposefulness into verse. The Thirty-nine +Articles are not a proper subject for poetry, but the sustained and +serious allegory which Dryden weaves round theological discussion +preserves his treatment of them from the fate of the controversialists +who opposed him. His work has wit and vitality enough to keep it sweet. + +Strength and wit enter in different proportions into the work of his +successor, Alexander Pope--a poet whom admirers in his own age held to +be the greatest in our language. No one would think of making such a +claim now, but the detraction which he suffered at the hands of +Wordsworth and the Romantics, ought not to make us forget that Pope, +though not our greatest, not even perhaps a great, poet is incomparably +our most brilliant versifier. Dryden's strength turns in his work into +something more fragile and delicate, polished with infinite care like +lacquer, and wrought like filigree work to the last point of conscious +and perfected art. He was not a great thinker; the thoughts which he +embodies in his philosophical poems--the _Essay on Man_ and the rest, +are almost ludicrously out of proportion to the solemnity of the titles +which introduce them, nor does he except very rarely get beyond the +conceptions common to the average man when he attempts introspection or +meditates on his own destiny. The reader in search of philosophy will +find little to stimulate him and in the facile Deism of the time +probably something to smile at. Pope has no message to us now. But he +will find views current in his time or borrowed from other authors put +with perfect felicity and wit, and he will recognize the justice of +Addison's comment that Pope's wit and fine writing consist "not so much +in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that are known an +agreeable turn." And he will not fall into the error of dubbing the +author a minor poet because he is neither subtle nor imaginative nor +profound. A great poet would not have written like Pope--one must grant +it; but a minor poet could not. + +It is characteristic of Pope's type of mind and kind of art that there +is no development visible in his work. Other poets, Shakespeare, for +instance, and Keats, have written work of the highest quality when they +were young, but they have had crudenesses to shed--things to get rid of +as their strength and perceptions grew. But Pope, like Minerva, was full +grown and full armed from the beginning. If we did not know that his +_Essay on Criticism_ was his first poem it would be impossible to place +it in the canon of his work; it might come in anywhere and so might +everything else that he wrote. From the beginning his craftsmanship was +perfect; from the beginning he took his subject-matter from others as he +found it and worked it up into aphorism and epigram till each line shone +like a cut jewel and the essential commonplaceness and poverty of his +material was obscured by the glitter the craftsmanship lent to it. +Subject apart, however, he was quite sure of his medium from the +beginning; it was not long before he found the way to use it to most +brilliant purpose. _The Rape of the Lock_ and the satirical poems come +later in his career. + +As a satirist Pope, though he did not hit so hard as Dryden, struck more +deftly and probed deeper. He wielded a rapier where the other used a +broadsword, and though both used their weapons with the highest skill +and the metaphor must not be imagined to impute clumsiness to Dryden, +the rapier made the cleaner cut. Both employed a method in satire which +their successors (a poor set) in England have not been intelligent +enough to use. They allow every possible good point to the object of +their attack. They appear to deal him an even and regretful justice. His +good points, they put it in effect, being so many, how much blacker and +more deplorable his meannesses and faults! They do not do this out of +charity; there was very little of the milk of human kindness in Pope. +Deformity in his case, as in so many in truth and fiction, seemed to +bring envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness in its train. The +method is employed simply because it gives the maximum satirical effect. +That is why Pope's epistle to Arbuthnot, with its characterisation of +Addison, is the most damning piece of invective in our language. + +_The Rape of the Lock_ is an exquisite piece of workmanship, breathing +the very spirit of the time. You can fancy it like some clock made by +one of the Louis XIV. craftsmen, encrusted with a heap of ormulu +mock-heroics and impertinences and set perfectly to the time of day. +From no other poem could you gather so fully and perfectly the temper +of the society in which our "classic" poetry was brought to perfection, +its elegant assiduity in trifles, its brilliant artifice, its paint and +powder and patches and high-heeled shoes, its measured strutting walk in +life as well as in verse. _The Rape of the Lock_ is a mock-heroic poem; +that is to say it applies the form and treatment which the "classic" +critics of the seventeenth century had laid down as belonging to the +"heroic" or "epic" style to a trifling circumstance--the loss by a young +lady of fashion of a lock of hair. And it is the one instance in which +this "recipe" for a heroic poem which the French critics handed on to +Dryden, and Dryden left to his descendants, has been used well-enough to +keep the work done with it in memory. In a way it condemns the poetical +theory of the time; when forms are fixed, new writing is less likely to +be creative and more likely to exhaust itself in the ingenious but +trifling exercises of parody and burlesque. _The Rape of the Lock_ is +brilliant but it is only play. + +The accepted theory which assumed that the forms of poetry had been +settled in the past and existed to be applied, though it concerned +itself mainly with the ancient writers, included also two moderns in its +scope. You were orthodox if you wrote tragedy and epic as Horace told +you and satire as he had shown you; you were also orthodox if you wrote +in the styles of Spenser or Milton. Spenser, though his predecessors +were counted barbaric and his followers tortured and obscure, never fell +out of admiration; indeed in every age of English poetry after him the +greatest poet in it is always to be found copying him or expressing +their love for him--Milton declaring to Dryden that Spenser was his +"original," Pope reading and praising him, Keats writing his earliest +work in close imitation. His characteristic style and stanza were +recognised by the classic school as a distinct "kind" of poetry which +might be used where the theme fitted instead of the heroic manner, and +Spenserian imitations abound. Sometimes they are serious; sometimes, +like Shenstone's _Schoolmistress_, they are mocking and another +illustration of the dangerous ease with which a conscious and sustained +effort to write in a fixed and acquired style runs to seed in burlesque. +Milton's fame never passed through the period of obscurity that +sometimes has been imagined for him. He had the discerning admiration of +Dryden and others before his death. But to Addison belongs the credit of +introducing him to the writers of this time; his papers in the +_Spectator_ on _Paradise Lost_, with their eulogy of its author's +sublimity, spurred the interest of the poets among his readers. From +Milton the eighteenth century got the chief and most ponderous part of +its poetic diction, high-sounding periphrases and borrowings from Latin +used without the gravity and sincerity and fullness of thought of the +master who brought them in. When they wrote blank verse, the classic +poets wrote it in the Milton manner. + +The use of these two styles may be studied in the writings of one man, +James Thomson. For besides acquiring a kind of anonymous immortality +with patriots as the author of "Rule, Britannia," Thomson wrote two +poems respectively in the Spenserian and the Miltonic manner, the former +_The Castle of Indolence_, the latter _The Seasons_. The Spenserian +manner is caught very effectively, but the adoption of the style of +_Paradise Lost_, with its allusiveness, circumlocution and weight, +removes any freshness the _Seasons_ might have had, had the +circumstances in them been put down as they were observed. As it is, +hardly anything is directly named; birds are always the "feathered +tribe" and everything else has a similar polite generality for its +title. Thomson was a simple-minded man, with a faculty for watching and +enjoying nature which belonged to few in his sophisticated age; it is +unfortunate he should have spent his working hours in rendering the +fruit of country rambles freshly observed into a cold and stilted +diction. It suited the eighteenth century reader well, for not +understanding nature herself he was naturally obliged to read her in +translations. + + +(3) + +The chief merits of "classic" poetry--its clearness, its vigour, its +direct statement--are such as belong theoretically rather to prose than +to poetry. In fact, it was in prose that the most vigorous intellect of +the time found itself. We have seen how Dryden, reversing the habit of +other poets, succeeded in expressing his personality not in poetry which +was his vocation, but in prose which was the amusement of his leisure +hours. Spenser had put his politics into prose and his ideals into +verse; Dryden wrote his politics--to order--in verse, and in prose set +down the thoughts and fancies which were the deepest part of him because +they were about his art. The metaphor of parentage, though honoured by +use, fits badly on to literary history; none the less the tradition +which describes him as the father of modern English prose is very near +the truth. He puts into practice for the first time the ideals, +described in the first chapter of this book, which were set up by the +scholars who let into English the light of the Renaissance. With the +exception of the dialogue on Dramatic Poesy, his work is almost all of +it occasional, the fruit of the mood of a moment, and written rather in +the form of a _causerie_, a kind of informal talk, than of a considered +essay. And it is all couched in clear, flowing, rather loosely jointed +English, carefully avoiding rhetoric and eloquence and striving always +to reproduce the ease and flow of cultured conversation, rather than the +tighter, more closely knit style of consciously "literary" prose. His +methods were the methods of the four great prose-writers who followed +him--Defoe, Addison, Steele, and Swift. + +Of these Defoe was the eldest and in some ways the most remarkable. He +has been called the earliest professional author in our language, and if +that is not strictly true, he is at any rate the earliest literary +journalist. His output of work was enormous; he wrote on any and every +subject; there was no event whether in politics or letters or discovery +but he was not ready with something pat on it before the public interest +faded. It followed that at a time when imprisonment, mutilation, and the +pillory took the place of our modern libel actions he had an adventurous +career. In politics he followed the Whig cause and served the Government +with his pen, notably by his writings in support of the union with +Scotland, in which he won over the Scots by his description of the +commercial advantage which would follow the abolition of the border. +This line of argument, taken at a time when the governing of political +tendencies by commercial interests was by no means the accepted +commonplace it is now, proves him a man of an active and original mind. +His originality, indeed, sometimes over-reached the comprehension both +of the public and his superiors; he was imprisoned for an attack on the +Hanoverian succession, which was intended ironically; apparently he was +ignorant of what every journalist ought to know that irony is at once +the most dangerous and the most ineffectual weapon in the whole armoury +of the press. The fertility and ingenuity of his intellect may be best +gauged by the number of modern enterprises and contrivances that are +foreshadowed in his work. Here are a few, all utterly unknown in his own +day, collected by a student of his works; a Board of Trade register for +seamen; factories for goods: agricultural credit banks; a commission of +enquiry into bankruptcy; and a system of national poor relief. They show +him to have been an independent and courageous thinker where social +questions were concerned. + +He was nearly sixty before he had published his first novel, _Robinson +Crusoe_, the book by which he is universally known, and on which with +the seven other novels which followed it the foundation of his literary +fame rests. But his earlier works--they are reputed to number over two +hundred--possess no less remarkable literary qualities. It is not too +much to say that all the gifts which are habitually recommended for +cultivation by those who aspire to journalistic success are to be found +in his prose. He has in the first place the gift of perfect lucidity no +matter how complicated the subject he is expounding; such a book as his +_Complete English Tradesman_ is full of passages in which complex and +difficult subject-matter is set forth so plainly and clearly that the +least literate of his readers could have no doubt of his understanding +it. He has also an amazingly exact acquaintance with the technicalities +of all kinds of trades and professions; none of our writers, not even +Shakespeare, shows half such a knowledge of the circumstances of life +among different ranks and conditions of men; none of them has realized +with such fidelity how so many different persons lived and moved. His +gift of narrative and description is masterly, as readers of his novels +know (we shall have to come back to it in discussing the growth of the +English novel); several of his works show him to have been endowed with +a fine faculty of psychological observation. Without the least +consciousness of the value of what he was writing, nor indeed with any +deliberate artistic intention, he made himself one of the masters of +English prose. + +Defoe had been the champion of the Whigs; on the Tory side the ablest +pen was that of Jonathan Swift. His works proclaim him to have had an +intellect less wide in its range than that of his antagonist but more +vigorous and powerful. He wrote, too, more carefully. In his youth he +had been private secretary to Sir William Temple, a writer now as good +as forgotten because of the triviality of his matter, but in his day +esteemed because of the easy urbanity and polish of his prose. From him +Swift learned the labour of the file, and he declared in later life that +it was "generally believed that this author has advanced our English +tongue to as great a perfection as it can well bear." In fact he added +to the ease and cadences he had learned from Temple qualities of vigour +and directness of his own which put his work far above his master's. And +he dealt with more important subject-matter than the academic exercises +on which Temple exercised his fastidious and meticulous powers of +revision. + +In temperament he is opposed to all the writers of his time. There is no +doubt but there was some radical disorder in his system; brain disease +clouded his intellect in his old age, and his last years were death in +life; right through his life he was a savagely irritable, sardonic, dark +and violent man, impatient of the slightest contradiction or thwarting, +and given to explosive and instantaneous rage. He delighted in flouting +convention, gloried in outraging decency. The rage, which, as he said +himself, tore his heart out, carried him to strange excesses. There is +something ironical (he would himself have appreciated it) in the +popularity of _Gulliver's Travels_ as a children's book--that ascending +wave of savagery and satire which overwhelms policy and learning to +break against the ultimate citadel of humanity itself. In none of his +contemporaries (except perhaps in the sentimentalities of Steele) can +one detect the traces of emotion; to read Swift is to be conscious of +intense feeling on almost every page. The surface of his style may be +smooth and equable but the central fires of passion are never far +beneath, and through cracks and fissures come intermittent bursts of +flame. Defoe's irony is so measured and studiously commonplace that +perhaps those who imprisoned him because they believed him to be serious +are hardly to be blamed; Swift's quivers and reddens with anger in every +line. + +But his pen seldom slips from the strong grasp of his controlling art. +The extraordinary skill and closeness of his allegorical +writings--unmatched in their kind--is witness to the care and sustained +labour which went to their making. He is content with no general +correspondences; his allegory does not fade away into a story in which +only the main characters have a secondary significance; the minutest +circumstances have a bearing in the satire and the moral. In _The Tale +of a Tub_ and in _Gulliver's Travels_--particularly in the former--the +multitude as well as the aptness of the parallels between the imaginary +narrative and the facts it is meant to represent is unrivalled in works +of the kind. Only the highest mental powers, working with intense +fervour and concentration, could have achieved the sustained brilliancy +of the result. "What a genius I had when I wrote that book!" Swift is +said to have exclaimed in his old age when he re-read _The Tale of a +Tub_, and certainly the book is a marvel of constructive skill, all the +more striking because it makes allegory out of history and consequently +is denied that freedom of narrative so brilliantly employed in the +_Travels_. + +Informing all his writings too, besides intense feeling and an +omnipresent and controlling art, is strong common sense. His aphorisms, +both those collected under the heading of _Thoughts on Various +Subjects_, and countless others scattered up and down his pages, are a +treasury of sound, if a little sardonic, practical wisdom. His most +insistent prejudices foreshadow in their essential sanity and justness +those of that great master of life, Dr. Johnson. He could not endure +over-politeness, a vice which must have been very oppressive in society +of his day. He savagely resented and condemned a display of +affection--particularly marital affection--in public. In an age when it +was the normal social system of settling quarrels, he condemned +duelling; and he said some very wise things--things that might still be +said--on modern education. In economics he was as right-hearted as +Ruskin and as wrong-headed. Carlyle, who was in so many respects an echo +of him, found in a passage in his works a "dim anticipation" of his +philosophy of clothes. + +The leading literary invention of the period--after that of the heroic +couplet for verse--was the prose periodical essay. Defoe, it is hardly +necessary to say, began it; it was his nature to be first with any new +thing: but its establishment as a prevailing literary mode is due to two +authors, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Of the two famous +series--the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_--for which they were both +responsible, Steele must take the first credit; he began them, and +though Addison came in and by the deftness and lightness of his writing +took the lion's share of their popularity, both the plan and the +characters round whom the bulk of the essays in the _Spectator_ came to +revolve was the creation of his collaborator. Steele we know very +intimately from his own writings and from Thackeray's portrait of him. +He was an emotional, full-blooded kind of man, reckless and dissipated +but fundamentally honest and good-hearted--a type very common in his day +as the novels show, but not otherwise to be found in the ranks of its +writers. What there is of pathos and sentiment, and most of what there +is of humour in the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_ are his. And he created +the _dramatis personae_ out of whose adventures the slender thread of +continuity which binds the essays together is woven. Addison, though +less open to the onslaughts of the conventional moralist, was a less +lovable personality. Constitutionally endowed with little vitality, he +suffered mentally as well as bodily from languor and lassitude. His +lack of enthusiasm, his cold-blooded formalism, caused comment even in +an age which prided itself in self-command and decorum. + +His very malevolence proceeded from a flaccidity which meanly envied the +activities and enthusiasms of other men. As a writer he was superficial; +he had not the requisite energy for forming a clear or profound judgment +on any question of difficulty; Johnson's comment, "He thinks justly but +he thinks faintly" sums up the truth about him. His good qualities were +of a slighter kind than Swift's; he was a quiet and accurate observer of +manners and fashions in life and conversation, and he had the gift of a +style--what Johnson calls "The Middle Style"--very exactly suited to the +kind of work on which he was habitually engaged, "always equable, always +easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences" but polished, lucid, +and urbane. + +Steele and Addison were conscious moralists as well as literary men. +They desired to purge society from Restoration licences; to their +efforts we must credit the alteration in morality which _The School for +Scandal_ shows over _The Way of the World_. Their professed object as +they stated themselves was "to banish vice and ignorance out of the +territories of Great Britain, (nothing less!) and to bring philosophy +out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs +and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee-houses." In fact their satires +were politically nearer home, and the chief objects of their aversion +were the Tory squires whom it was their business as Whigs to deride. On +the Coverley papers in the _Spectator_ rests the chief part of their +literary fame; these belong rather to the special history of the novel +than to that of the periodical essay. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + + +DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME + +By 1730 the authors whose work made the "classic" school in England were +dead or had ceased writing; by the same date Samuel Johnson had begun +his career as a man of letters. The difference between the period of his +maturity and the period we have been examining is not perhaps easy to +define; but it exists and it can be felt unmistakably in reading. For +one thing "Classicism" had become completely naturalized; it had ceased +to regard the French as arbiters of elegance and literary taste; indeed +Johnson himself never spoke of them without disdain and hated them as +much as he hated Scotsmen. Writing, like dress and the common way of +life, became plainer and graver and thought stronger and deeper. In +manners and speech something of the brutalism which was at the root of +the English character at the time began to colour the refinement of the +preceding age. Dilettantism gave way to learning and speculation; in the +place of Bolingbroke came Adam Smith; in the place of Addison, Johnson. +In a way it is the solidest and sanest time in English letters. Yet in +the midst of its urbanity and order forces were gathering for its +destruction. The ballad-mongers were busy; Blake was drawing and +rhyming; Burns was giving songs and lays to his country-side. In the +distance--Johnson could not hear them--sounded, like the horns of +elf-land faintly blowing, the trumpet calls of romance. + +If the whole story of Dr. Johnson's life were the story of his published +books it would be very difficult to understand his pre-eminent and +symbolic position in literary history. His best known work--it still +remains so--was his dictionary, and dictionaries, for all the licence +they give and Johnson took for the expression of a personality, are the +business of purely mechanical talents. A lesser man than he might have +cheated us of such delights as the definitions of "oats," or "net" or +"pension," but his book would certainly have been no worse as a book. In +his early years he wrote two satires in verse in imitation of Juvenal; +they were followed later by two series of periodical essays on the model +of the _Spectator_; neither of them--the _Rambler_ nor the _Idler_--were +at all successful. _Rasselas_, a tale with a purpose, is melancholy +reading; the _Journey to the Western Hebrides_ has been utterly eclipsed +by Boswell's livelier and more human chronicle of the same events. The +_Lives of the Poets_, his greatest work, was composed with pain and +difficulty when he was seventy years old; even it is but a quarry from +which a reader may dig the ore of a sound critical judgment summing up +a life's reflection, out of the grit and dust of perfunctory +biographical compilations. There was hardly one of the literary coterie +over which he presided that was not doing better and more lasting work. +Nothing that Johnson wrote is to be compared, for excellence in its own +manner, with _Tom Jones_ or the _Vicar of Wakefield_ or the _Citizen of +the World_. He produced nothing in writing approaching the magnitude of +Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, or the profundity of +Burke's philosophy of politics. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose main +business was painting and not the pen, was almost as good an author as +he; his _Discourses_ have little to fear when they are set beside +Johnson's essays. Yet all these men recognised him as their guide and +leader; the spontaneous selection of such a democratic assembly as men +of genius in a tavern fixed upon him as chairman, and we in these later +days, who are safe from the overpowering force of personality +and presence--or at least can only know of it reflected in +books--instinctively recognize him as the greatest man of his age. What +is the reason? + +Johnson's pre-eminence is the pre-eminence of character. He was a great +moralist; he summed up in himself the tendencies of thought and +literature of his time and excelled all others in his grasp of them; and +he was perhaps more completely than any one else in the whole history of +English literature, the typical Englishman. He was one of those to whom +is applicable the commonplace that he was greater than his books. It is +the fashion nowadays among some critics to speak of his biographer +Boswell as if he were a novelist or a playwright and to classify the +Johnson we know with Hamlet and Don Quixote as the product of creative +or imaginative art, working on a "lost original." No exercise of +critical ingenuity could be more futile or impertinent. The impression +of the solidity and magnitude of Johnson's character which is to be +gathered from Boswell is enforced from other sources; from his essays +and his prayers and meditations, from the half-dozen or so lives and +reminiscences which were published in the years following his death +(their very number establishing the reverence with which he was +regarded), from the homage of other men whose genius their books leave +indisputable. Indeed the Johnson we know from Boswell, though it is the +broadest and most masterly portrait in the whole range of biography, +gives less than the whole magnitude of the man. When Boswell first met +him at the age of twenty-two, Johnson was fifty-four. His long period of +poverty and struggle was past. His _Dictionary_ and all his works except +the _Lives of the Poets_ were behind him; a pension from the Crown had +established him in security for his remaining years; his position was +universally acknowledged. So that though the portrait in the _Life_ is a +full-length study of Johnson the conversationalist and literary +dictator, the proportion it preserves is faulty and its study of the +early years--the years of poverty, of the _Vanity of Human Wishes_ and +_London_, of _Rasselas_, which he wrote to pay the expenses of his +mother's funeral, is slight. + +It was, however, out of the bitterness and struggle of these early +years that the strength and sincerity of character which carried Johnson +surely and tranquilly through the time of his triumph were derived. From +the beginning he made no compromise with the world and no concession to +fashion. The world had to take him at his own valuation or not at all. +He never deviated one hair's breadth from the way he had chosen. Judged +by the standards of journalistic success, the _Rambler_ could not well +be worse than he made it. Compared with the lightness and gaiety and the +mere lip-service to morality of Addison its edification is ponderous. +Both authors state the commonplaces of conduct, but Addison achieves +lightness in the doing of it, and his manner by means of which +platitudes are stated lightly and pointedly and with an air of novelty, +is the classic manner of journalism. Johnson goes heavily and directly +to the point, handling well worn moral themes in general and dogmatic +language without any attempt to enliven them with an air of discovery or +surprise. Yet they were, in a sense, discoveries to him; not one of them +but was deeply and sincerely felt; not one but is not a direct and to us +a pathetically dispassionate statement of the reflection of thirty years +of grinding poverty and a soul's anguish. Viewed in the light of his +life, the _Rambler_ is one of the most moving of books. If its literary +value is slight it is a document in character. + +So that when he came to his own, when gradually the public whom he +despised and neglected raised him into a pontifical position matched by +none before him in England and none since save Carlyle, he was sure of +himself; success did not spoil him. His judgment was unwarped by +flattery. The almost passionate tenderness and humanity which lay +beneath his gruffness was undimmed. His personality triumphed in all the +fullness and richness which had carried it in integrity through his +years of struggle. For over twenty years from his chair in taverns in +the Strand and Fleet Street he ruled literary London, imposed his +critical principles on the great body of English letters, and by his +talk and his friendships became the embodiment of the literary +temperament of his age. + +His talk as it is set down by Boswell is his best monument. It was the +happiest possible fate that threw those two men together, for Boswell +besides being an admirer and reporter sedulously chronicling all his +master said and did, fortunately influenced both the saying and the +doing. Most of us have some one in whose company we best shine, who puts +our wits on their mettle and spurs us to our greatest readiness and +vivacity. There is no doubt that Boswell, for all his assumed humility +and for all Johnson's affected disdain, was just such a companion for +Johnson. Johnson was at his best when Boswell was present, and Boswell +not only drew Johnson out on subjects in which his robust common sense +and readiness of judgment were fitted to shine but actually suggested +and conducted that tour in Scotland which gave Johnson an opportunity +for displaying himself at his best. The recorded talk is +extraordinarily varied and entertaining. It is a mistake to conceive +Johnson as a monster of bear-like rudeness, shouting down opposition, +hectoring his companions, and habitually a blustering verbal bully. We +are too easily hypnotized by Macaulay's flashy caricature. He could be +merciless in argument and often wrongheaded and he was always acute, +uncomfortably acute, in his perception of a fallacy, and a little +disconcerting in his unmasking of pretence. But he could be gay and +tender too and in his heart he was a shrinking and sensitive man. + +As a critic (his criticism is the only side of his literary work that +need be considered), Johnson must be allowed a high place. His natural +indolence in production had prevented him from exhausting his faculties +in the more exacting labours of creative work, and it had left him time +for omnivorous if desultory reading, the fruits of which he stored in a +wonderfully retentive memory against an occasion for their use. To a +very fully equipped mind he brought the service of a robust and acute +judgment. Moreover when he applied his mind to a subject he had a +faculty of intense, if fitful concentration; he could seize with great +force on the heart of a matter; he had the power in a wonderfully short +time of extracting the kernel and leaving the husk. His judgments in +writing are like those recorded by Boswell from his conversation; that +is to say he does not, as a critic whose medium was normally the pen +rather than the tongue would tend to do, search for fine shades of +distinction, subdivide subtleties, or be careful to admit _caveats_ or +exceptions; he passes, on the contrary, rapid and forcible verdicts, +not seldom in their assertions untenably sweeping, and always decided +and dogmatic. He never affects diffidence or defers to the judgments of +others. His power of concentration, of seizing on essentials, has given +us his best critical work--nothing could be better, for instance, than +his characterisation of the poets whom he calls the metaphysical school +(Donne, Crashaw, and the rest) which is the most valuable part of his +life of Cowley. Even where he is most prejudiced--for instance in his +attack on Milton's _Lycidas_--there is usually something to be said for +his point of view. And after this concentration, his excellence depends +on his basic common sense. His classicism is always tempered, like +Dryden's, by a humane and sensible dislike of pedantry; he sets no store +by the unities; in his preface to Shakespeare he allows more than a +"classic" could have been expected to admit, writing in it, in truth, +some of the manliest and wisest things in Shakespearean literature. Of +course, he had his failings--the greatest of them what Lamb called +imperfect sympathy. He could see no good in republicans or agnostics, +and none in Scotland or France. Not that the phrase "imperfect +sympathy," which expresses by implication the romantic critic's point of +view, would have appealed to him. When Dr. Johnson did not like people +the fault was in them, not in him; a ruthless objectivity is part of the +classic equipment. He failed, too, because he could neither understand +nor appreciate poetry which concerned itself with the sensations that +come from external nature. Nature was to him a closed book, very likely +for a purely physical reason. He was short-sighted to the point of +myopia, and a landscape meant nothing to him; when he tried to describe +one as he did in the chapter on the "happy valley" in _Rasselas_ he +failed. What he did not see he could not appreciate; perhaps it is too +much to ask of his self-contained and unbending intellect that he should +appreciate the report of it by other men. + + +(2) + +As we have seen, Johnson was not only great in himself, he was great in +his friends. Round him, meeting him as an equal, gathered the greatest +and most prolific writers of the time. There is no better way to study +the central and accepted men of letters of the period than to take some +full evening at the club from Boswell, read a page or two, watch what +the talkers said, and then trace each back to his own works for a +complete picture of his personality. The lie of the literary landscape +in this wonderful time will become apparent to you as you read. You will +find Johnson enthroned, Boswell at his ear, round him men like Reynolds +and Burke, Richardson and Fielding and Goldsmith, Robertson and Gibbon, +and occasionally drawn to the circle minnows like Beattie and a genius +like Adam Smith. Gray, studious in his college at Cambridge, is +exercising his fastidious talent; Collins' sequestered, carefully +nurtured muse is silent; a host of minor poets are riding Pope's poetic +diction, and heroic couplet to death. Outside scattered about is the +van of Romance--Percy collecting his ballads; Burns making songs and +verses in Scotland; the "mad" people, Smart and Chatterton, and above +all Blake, obscurely beginning the work that was to finish in Wordsworth +and Coleridge and Keats. + +Of Johnson's set the most remarkable figure was Edmund Burke--"the +supreme writer," as De Quincey called him, "of his century." His +writings belong more to the history of politics than to that of +literature, and a close examination of them would be out of place here. +His political theory strikes a middle course which offends--and in his +own day offended--both parties in the common strife of political +thinking. He believed the best government to consist in a patriotic +aristocracy, ruling for the good of the people. By birth an Irishman, he +had the innate practicality which commonly lies beneath the flash and +colour of Irish forcefulness and rhetoric. That, and his historical +training, which influenced him in the direction of conceiving every +institution as the culmination of an evolutionary development, sent him +directly counter to the newest and most enthusiastically urged political +philosophy of his day--the philosophy stated by Rousseau, and put in +action by the French Revolution. He disliked and distrusted +"metaphysical theories," when they left the field of speculation for +that of practice, had no patience with "natural rights" (which as an +Irishman he conceived as the product of sentimentalism) and applied what +would nowadays be called a "pragmatic" test to political affairs. +Practice was the touchstone; a theory was useless unless you could prove +that it had worked. It followed that he was not a democrat, opposed +parliamentary reform, and held that the true remedy for corruption and +venality was not to increase the size of the electorate, but to reduce +it so as to obtain electors of greater weight and independence. For him +a member of Parliament was a representative and not a delegate, and must +act not on his elector's wishes but on his own judgment. These opinions +are little in fashion in our own day, but it is well to remember that in +Burke's case they were the outcome not of prejudice but of thought, and +that even democracy may admit they present a case that must be met and +answered. + +Burke's reputation as a thinker has suffered somewhat unjustly as a +result of his refusal to square his tenets either with democracy or with +its opposite. It has been said that ideas were only of use to him so far +as they were of polemical service, that the amazing fertility and +acuteness of his mind worked only in a not too scrupulous determination +to overwhelm his antagonists in the several arguments--on India, or +America, on Ireland or on France--which made up his political career. He +was, said Carlyle, "vehement rather than earnest; a resplendent +far-sighted rhetorician, rather than a deep and earnest thinker." The +words as they stand would be a good description of a certain type of +politician; they would fit, for instance, very well on Mr. Gladstone; +but they do Burke less than justice. He was an innovator in modern +political thought, and his application of the historical method to the +study of institutions is in its way a not less epoch-making achievement +than Bacon's application of the inductive method to science. At a time +when current political thought, led by Rousseau, was drawing its +theories from the abstract conception of "natural rights" Burke was +laying down that sounder and deeper notion of politics which has +governed thinking in that department of knowledge since. Besides this, +he had face to face with the affairs of his own day, a far-sightedness +and sagacity which kept him right where other men went wrong. In a +nation of the blind he saw the truth about the American colonies; he +predicted with exactitude the culmination of the revolution in Napoleon. +Mere rhetorical vehemence cannot explain the earnestness with which in a +day of diplomatic cynicism he preached the doctrine of an international +morality as strict and as binding as the morality which exists between +man and man. Surest of all, we have the testimony, uninfluenced by the +magic of language, of the men he met. You could not, said Dr. Johnson, +shelter with him in a shed for a few moments from the rain without +saying, "This is an extraordinary man." + +His literary position depends chiefly on his amazing gift of expression, +on a command of language unapproached by any writer of his time. His +eloquence (in writing not in speaking; he is said to have had a +monotonous delivery) was no doubt at bottom a matter of race, but to his +Irish readiness and flash and colour he added the strength of a full +mind, fortified by a wonderful store of reading which a retentive and +exact memory enabled him to bring instantly to bear on the subject in +hand. No writer before him, except Defoe, had such a wide knowledge of +the technicalities of different men's occupations, and of all sorts of +the processes of daily business, nor could enlighten an abstract matter +with such a wealth of luminous analogy. It is this characteristic of his +style which has led to the common comparison of his writing with +Shakespeare's; both seem to be preternaturally endowed with more +information, to have a wider sweep of interest than ordinary men. Both +were not only, as Matthew Arnold said of Burke, "saturated with ideas," +but saturated too in the details of the business and desire of ordinary +men's lives; nothing human was alien from them. Burke's language is, +therefore, always interesting and always appropriate to his thought; it +is also on occasion very beautiful. He had a wonderful command of clear +and ringing utterance and could appeal when he liked very powerfully to +the sensibilities of his readers. Rhetoricians are seldom free from +occasional extravagance, and Burke fell under the common danger of his +kind. He had his moments of falsity, could heap coarse and outrageous +abuse on Warren Hastings, illustrate the horrors of the Revolution by +casting a dagger on the floor of the House of Commons, and nourish +hatred beyond the bounds of justice or measure. But these things do not +affect his position, nor take from the solid greatness of his work. + +Boswell we have seen; after Burke and Boswell, Goldsmith was the most +brilliant member of the Johnson circle. If part of Burke's genius is +referable to his nationality, Goldsmith's is wholly so. The beginning +and the end of him was Irish; every quality he possessed as a man and as +a writer belongs to his race. He had the Irish carelessness, the Irish +generosity, the Irish quick temper, the Irish humour. This latter gift, +displayed constantly in a company which had little knowledge of the +peculiar quality of Irish wit and no faculty of sympathy or imagination, +is at the bottom of the constant depreciation of him on the part of +Boswell and others of his set. His mock self-importance they thought +ill-breeding; his humorous self-depreciation and keen sense of his own +ridiculousness, mere lack of dignity and folly. It is curious to read +Boswell and watch how often Goldsmith, without Boswell's knowing it, got +the best of the joke. In writing he had what we can now recognise as +peculiarly Irish gifts. All our modern writers of light half-farcical +comedy are Irish. Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_, is only the first +of a series which includes _The School for Scandal, The Importance of +being Earnest_, and _You Never can Tell_. And his essays--particularly +those of the _Citizen of the World_ with its Chinese vision of England +and English life--are the first fruit of that Irish detachment, that +ability to see "normally" English habits and institutions and foibles +which in our own day has given us the prefaces of Mr. Shaw. As a writer +Goldsmith has a lightness and delicate ease which belongs rather to the +school of the earlier eighteenth century than to his own day; the +enthusiasm of Addison for French literature which he retained gave him a +more graceful model than the "Johnsonian" school, to which he professed +himself to belong, could afford. + + +(3) + +The eighteenth century novel demands separate treatment, and of the +other prose authors the most eminent, Edward Gibbon, belongs to +historical rather than to literary studies. It is time to turn to +poetry. + +There orthodox classicism still held sway; the manner and metre of Pope +or Thomson ruled the roost of singing fowl. In the main it had done its +work, and the bulk of fresh things conceived in it were dull and +imitative, even though occasionally, as in the poems of Johnson himself +and of Goldsmith, an author arose who was able to infuse sincerity and +emotion into a now moribund convention. The classic manner--now more +that of Thomson than of Pope--persisted till it overlapped romanticism; +Cowper and Crabbe each owe a doubtful allegiance, leaning by their +formal metre and level monotony of thought to the one and by their +realism to the other. In the meantime its popularity and its assured +position were beginning to be assailed in the coteries by the work of +two new poets. + +The output of Thomas Gray and William Collins is small; you might almost +read the complete poetical works of either in an evening. But for all +that they mark a period; they are the first definite break with the +classic convention which had been triumphant for upwards of seventy +years when their prime came. It is a break, however, in style rather +than in essentials, and a reader who seeks in them the inspiriting +freshness which came later with Wordsworth and Coleridge will be +disappointed. Their carefully drawn still wine tastes insipidly after +the "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" of romance. They are fastidious +and academic; they lack the authentic fire; their poetry is "made" +poetry like Tennyson's and Matthew Arnold's. On their comparative merits +a deal of critical ink has been spilt, Arnold's characterisation of Gray +is well known--"he never spoke out." Sterility fell upon him because he +lived in an age of prose just as it fell upon Arnold himself because he +lived too much immersed in business and routine. But in what he wrote he +had the genuine poetic gift--the gift of insight and feeling. Against +this, Swinburne with characteristic vehemence raised the standard of +Collins, the latchet of whose shoe Gray, as a lyric poet, was not worthy +to unloose. "The muse gave birth to Collins, she did but give suck to +Gray." It is more to our point to observe that neither, though their +work abounds in felicities and in touches of a genuine poetic sense, was +fitted to raise the standard of revolt. Revolution is for another and +braver kind of genius than theirs. Romanticism had to wait for Burns and +Blake. + +In every country at any one time there are in all probability not one +but several literatures flourishing. The main stream flowing through +the publishers and booksellers, conned by critics and coteries, +recognized as the national literature, is commonly only the largest of +several channels of thought. There are besides the national literature +local literatures--books, that is, are published which enjoy popularity +and critical esteem in their own county or parish and are utterly +unknown outside; there may even be (indeed, there are in several parts +of the country) distinct local schools of writing and dynasties of local +authors. These localized literatures rarely become known to the outside +world; the national literature takes little account of them, though +their existence and probably some special knowledge of one or other of +them is within the experience of most of us. But every now and again +some one of their authors transcends his local importance, gives +evidence of a genius which is not to be denied even by those who +normally have not the knowledge to appreciate the particular flavour of +locality which his writings impart, and becomes a national figure. While +he lives and works the national and his local stream turn and flow +together. + +This was the case of Robert Burns. All his life long he was the singer +of a parish--the last of a long line of "forbears" who had used the +Scottish lowland vernacular to rhyme in about their neighbours and their +scandals, their loves and their church. Himself at the confluence of the +two streams, the national and the local, he pays his tribute to two sets +of originals, talks with equal reverence of names known to us like Pope +and Gray and Shenstone and names unknown which belonged to local +"bards," as he would have called them, who wrote their poems for an +Ayrshire public. If he came upon England as an innovator it was simply +because he brought with him the highly individualized style of Scottish +local vernacular verse; to his own people he was no innovator but a +fulfilment; as his best critic[5] says he brought nothing to the +literature he became a part of but himself. His daring and splendid +genius made the local universal, raised out of rough and cynical +satirizing a style as rich and humorous and astringent as that of +Rabelais, lent inevitableness and pathos and romance to lyric and song. +But he was content to better the work of other men. He made hardly +anything new. + +[Footnote 5: W.E. Henley, "Essay on Burns." Works, David Nutt.] + +Stevenson in his essay on Burns remarks his readiness to use up the work +of others or take a large hint from it "as if he had some difficulty in +commencing." He omits to observe that the very same trait applies to +other great artists. There seem to be two orders of creative writers. On +the one hand are the innovators, the new men like Blake, Wordsworth, +Byron and Shelley, and later Browning. These men owe little to their +predecessors; they work on their own devices and construct their medium +afresh for themselves. Commonly their fame and acceptance is slow, for +they speak in an unfamiliar tongue and they have to educate a generation +to understand their work. The other order of artists have to be shown +the way. They have little fertility in construction or invention. You +have to say to them "Here is something that you could do too; go and do +it better," or "Here is a story to work on, or a refrain of a song; take +it and give it your subtlety, your music." The villainy you teach them +they will use and it will go hard with them if they do not better the +invention; but they do not invent for themselves. To this order of +artists Burns like Shakespeare, and among the lesser men Tennyson, +belongs. In all his plays Shakespeare is known to have invented only one +plot; in many he is using not only the structure but in many places the +words devised by an older author; his mode of treatment depends on the +conventions common in his day, on the tragedy of blood, and madness and +revenge, on the comedy of intrigue and disguises, on the romance with +its strange happenings and its reuniting of long parted friends. Burns +goes the same way to work; scarcely a page of his but shows traces of +some original in the Scottish vernacular school. The elegy, the verse +epistle, the satirical form of _Holy Willie's Prayer_, the song and +recitative of _The Jolly Beggars_, are all to be found in his +predecessors, in Fergusson, Ramsay, and the local poets of the +south-west of Scotland. In the songs often whole verses, nearly always +the refrains, are from older folk poetry. What he did was to pour into +these forms the incomparable richness of a personality whose fire and +brilliance and humour transcended all locality and all tradition, a +personality which strode like a colossus over the formalism and +correctness of his time. His use of familiar forms explains, more than +anything else, his immediate fame. His countrymen were ready for him; +they could hail him on the instant (just as an Elizabethan audience +could hail Shakespeare) as something familiar and at the same time more +splendid than anything they knew. He spoke in a tongue they could +understand. + +It is impossible to judge Burns from his purely English verse; though he +did it as well as any of the minor followers of the school of Pope he +did it no better. Only the weakest side of his character--his +sentimentalism--finds expression in it; he had not the sense of +tradition nor the intimate knowledge necessary to use English to the +highest poetic effect; it was indeed a foreign tongue to him. In the +vernacular he wrote the language he spoke, a language whose natural +force and colour had become enriched by three centuries of literary use, +which was capable, too, of effects of humour and realism impossible in +any tongue spoken out of reach of the soil. It held within it an +unmatched faculty for pathos, a capacity for expressing a lambent and +kindly humour, a power of pungency in satire and a descriptive vividness +that English could not give. How express in the language of Pope or even +of Wordsworth an effect like this:-- + +"They reeled, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit, + Till ilka carlin swat and reekit, + And coost her duddies to the wark, + And linket at it in her sark." + +or this-- + +"Yestreen when to the trembling string, + The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha' + To thee my fancy took its wing-- + I sat but neither heard nor saw: + Tho' this was fair, and that was braw, + And yon the toast of a' the toun, + I sigh'd and said amang them a', + You are na Mary Morison." + +It may be objected that in all this there is only one word, and but two +or three forms of words that are not English. But the accent, the +rhythm, the air of it are all Scots, and it was a Burns thinking in his +native tongue who wrote it, not the Burns of + +"Anticipation forward points the view "; + +or + +"Pleasures are like poppies spread, + You grasp the flower, the bloom is shed." + +or any other of the exercises in the school of Thomson and Pope. + +It is easy to see that though Burns admired unaffectedly the "classic" +writers, his native realism and his melody made him a potent agent in +the cause of naturalism and romance. In his ideas, even more than in his +style, he belongs to the oncoming school. The French Revolution, which +broke upon Europe when he was at the height of his career, found him +already converted to its principles. As a peasant, particularly a Scotch +peasant, he believed passionately in the native worth of man as man and +gave ringing expression to it in his verse. In his youth his +liberal-mindedness made him a Jacobite out of mere antagonism to the +existing regime; the Revolution only discovered for him the more +logical Republican creed. As the leader of a loose-living, hard drinking +set, such as was to be found in every parish, he was a determined and +free-spoken enemy of the kirk, whose tyranny he several times +encountered. In his writing he is as vehement an anti-clerical as +Shelley and much more practical. The political side of romanticism, in +fact, which in England had to wait for Byron and Shelley, is already +full-grown in his work. He anticipates and gives complete expression to +one half of the Romantic movement. + +What Burns did for the idea of liberty, Blake did for that and every +other idea current among Wordsworth and his successors. There is nothing +stranger in the history of English literature than the miracle by which +this poet and artist, working in obscurity, utterly unknown to the +literary world that existed outside him, summed up in himself all the +thoughts and tendencies which were the fruit of anxious discussion and +propaganda on the part of the authors--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb--who +believed themselves to be the discoverers of fresh truth unknown to +their generation. The contemporary and independent discovery by Wallace +and Darwin of the principle of natural selection furnishes, perhaps, a +rough parallel, but the fact serves to show how impalpable and universal +is the spread of ideas, how impossible it is to settle literary +indebtedness or construct literary genealogy with any hope of accuracy. +Blake, by himself, held and expressed quite calmly that condemnation of +the "classic" school that Wordsworth and Coleridge proclaimed against +the opposition of a deriding world. As was his habit he compressed it +into a rude epigram, + +"Great things are done when men and mountains meet; + This is not done by jostling in the street." + +The case for nature against urbanity could not be more tersely nor +better put. The German metaphysical doctrine which was the deepest part +of the teaching of Wordsworth and Coleridge and their main discovery, he +expresses as curtly and off-handedly, + +"The sun's light when he unfolds it, + Depends on the organ that beholds it." + +In the realm of childhood and innocence, which Wordsworth entered +fearfully and pathetically as an alien traveller, he moves with the +simple and assured ease of one native. He knows the mystical wonder and +horror that Coleridge set forth in _The Ancient Mariner_. As for the +beliefs of Shelley, they are already fully developed in his poems. "The +king and the priest are types of the oppressor; humanity is crippled by +"mind-forg'd manacles"; love is enslaved to the moral law, which is +broken by the Saviour of mankind; and, even more subtly than by Shelley, +life is pictured by Blake as a deceit and a disguise veiling from us the +beams of the Eternal."[6] + +[Footnote 6: Prof. Raleigh.] + +In truth, Blake, despite the imputation of insanity which was his +contemporaries' and has later been his commentators' refuge from +assenting to his conclusions, is as bold a thinker in his own way as +Neitzsche and as consistent. An absolute unity of belief inspires all +his utterances, cryptic and plain. That he never succeeded in founding a +school nor gathering followers must be put down in the first place to +the form in which his work was issued (it never reached the public of +his own day) and the dark and mysterious mythology in which the +prophetic books which are the full and extended statement of his +philosophy, are couched, and in the second place to the inherent +difficulty of the philosophy itself. As he himself says, where we read +black, he reads white. For the common distinction between good and evil, +Blake substitutes the distinction between imagination and reason; and +reason, the rationalizing, measuring, comparing faculty by which we come +to impute praise or blame is the only evil in his eyes. "There is +nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so;" to rid the world +of thinking, to substitute for reason, imagination, and for thought, +vision, was the object of all that he wrote or drew. The implications of +this philosophy carry far, and Blake was not afraid to follow where they +led him. Fortunately for those who hesitate to embark on that dark and +adventurous journey, his work contains delightful and simpler things. He +wrote lyrics of extraordinary freshness and delicacy and spontaneity; he +could speak in a child's voice of innocent joys and sorrows and the +simple elemental things. His odes to "Spring" and "Autumn" are the +harbingers of Keats. Not since Shakespeare and Campion died could +English show songs like his + +"My silks and fine array." + +and the others which carry the Elizabethan accent. He could write these +things as well as the Elizabethans. In others he was unique. + +"Tiger! Tiger! burning bright + In the forests of the night, + What immortal hand or eye + Could frame thy fearful symmetry." + +In all the English lyric there is no voice so clear, so separate or +distinctive as his. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + + +THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL + +(1) + +There are two ways of approaching the periods of change and new birth in +literature. The commonest and, for all the study which it entails, the +easiest, is that summed up in the phrase, literature begets literature. +Following it, you discover and weigh literary influences, the influence +of poet on poet, and book on book. You find one man harking back to +earlier models in his own tongue, which an intervening age misunderstood +or despised; another, turning to the contemporary literatures of +neighbouring countries; another, perhaps, to the splendour and exoticism +of the east. In the matter of form and style, such a study carries you +far. You can trace types of poetry and metres back to curious and +unsuspected originals, find the well-known verse of Burns' epistles +turning up in Provencal; Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ stanza in use by Ben +Jonson; the metre of _Christabel_ in minor Elizabethan poetry; the +peculiar form of Fitzgerald's translation of _Omar Khayyam_ followed by +so many imitators since, itself to be the actual reflection of the rough +metrical scheme of his Persian original. But such a study, though it is +profitable and interesting, can never lead to the whole truth. As we saw +in the beginning of this book, in the matter of the Renaissance, every +age of discovery and re-birth has its double aspect. It is a revolution +in style and language, an age of literary experiment and achievement, +but its experiments are dictated by the excitement of a new +subject-matter, and that subject-matter is so much in the air, so +impalpable and universal that it eludes analysis. Only you can be sure +that it is this weltering contagion of new ideas, and new thought--the +"Zeitgeist," the spirit of the age, or whatever you may call it--that is +the essential and controlling force. Literary loans and imports give the +forms into which it can be moulded, but without them it would still +exist, and they are only the means by which a spirit which is in life +itself, and which expresses itself in action, and in concrete human +achievement, gets itself into the written word. The romantic revival +numbers Napoleon amongst its leaders as well as Byron, Wellington, Pitt +and Wilberforce, as well as Keats and Wordsworth. Only the literary +manifestations of the time concern us here, but it is important to +remember that the passion for simplification and for a return to nature +as a refuge from the artificial complexities of society, which inspired +the _Lyrical Ballads_, inspired no less the course of the Revolution in +France, and later, the destruction by Napoleon of the smaller feudal +states of Germany, which made possible German nationality and a national +spirit. + +In this romantic revival, however, the revolution in form and style +matters more than in most. The classicism of the previous age had been +so fixed and immutable; it had been enthroned in high places, enjoyed +the esteem of society, arrogated to itself the acceptance which good +breeding and good manners demanded. Dryden had been a Court poet, +careful to change his allegiance with the changing monarchy. Pope had +been the equal and intimate of the great people of his day, and his +followers, if they did not enjoy the equality, enjoyed at any rate the +patronage of many noble lords. The effect of this was to give the +prestige of social usage to the verse in which they wrote and the +language they used. "There was," said Dr. Johnson, "before the time of +Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the +grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms +appropriated to particular arts. Words too familiar or too remote to +defeat the purpose of a poet." This poetic diction, refined from the +grossness of domestic use, was the standard poetic speech of the +eighteenth century. The heroic couplet in which it was cast was the +standard metre. So that the first object of the revolt of the romantics +was the purely literary object of getting rid of the vice of an unreal +and artificial manner of writing. They desired simplicity of style. + +When the _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge were published in +1798, the preface which Wordsworth wrote as their manifesto hardly +touched at all on the poetic imagination or the attitude of the poet to +life and nature. The only question is that of diction. "The majority of +the following poems," he writes, "are to be considered as experiments. +They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language +of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to +the purposes of poetic pleasure." And in the longer preface to the +second edition, in which the theories of the new school on the nature +and methods of the poetic imagination are set forth at length, he +returns to the same point. "The language too, of these men (that is +those in humble and rustic life) has been adopted ... because such men +hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of +language is originally derived, and because from their rank in society, +and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less +under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and +notions in simple unelaborated expressions." Social vanity--the armour +which we wear to conceal our deepest thoughts and feelings--that was +what Wordsworth wished to be rid of, and he chose the language of the +common people, not because it fitted, as an earlier school of poets who +used the common speech had asserted, the utterance of habitual feeling +and common sense, but because it is the most sincere expression of the +deepest and rarest passion. His object was the object attained by +Shakespeare in some of his supremest moments; the bare intolerable force +of the speeches after the murder of Macbeth, or of King Lear's + + "Do not laugh at me, +For as I am a man, I think this lady +To be my child Cordelia." + +Here, then, was one avenue of revolt from the tyranny of artificiality, +the getting back of common speech into poetry. But there was another, +earlier and more potent in its effect. The eighteenth century, weary of +its own good sense and sanity, turned to the Middle Ages for +picturesqueness and relief. Romance of course, had not been dead in all +these years, when Pope and Addison made wit and good sense the +fashionable temper for writing. There was a strong romantic tradition in +the eighteenth century, though it does not give its character to the +writing of the time. Dr. Johnson was fond of old romances. When he was +in Skye he amused himself by thinking of his Scottish tour as the +journey of a knight-errant. "These fictions of the Gothic romances," he +said, "are not so remote from credibility as is commonly supposed." It +is a mistake to suppose that the passion for mediaevalism began with +either Coleridge or Scott. Horace Walpole was as enthusiastic as either +of them; good eighteenth century prelates like Hurd and Percy, found in +what they called the Gothic an inexhaustible source of delight. As was +natural, what attracted them in the Middle Ages was not their +resemblances to the time they lived in, but the points in which the two +differed. None of them had knowledge enough, or insight enough, to +conceive or sympathize with the humanity of the thirteenth century, to +shudder at its cruelties and hardnesses and persecutions, or to +comprehend the spiritual elevation and insight of its rarest minds. "It +was art," said William Morris, "art in which all men shared, that made +life romantic as people called it in those days. That and not robber +barons, and inaccessible kings, with their hierarchy of serving nobles, +and other rubbish." Morris belonged to a time which knew its middle ages +better. To the eighteenth century the robber barons and the "other +rubbish" were the essence of romance. For Percy and his followers, +medievalism was a collection of what actors call "properties" gargoyles, +and odds and ends of armour and castle keeps with secret passages, +banners and gay colours, and gay shimmering obsolete words. Mistaking +what was on its surface at any rate a subtle and complex civilization, +for rudeness and quaintness, they seemed to themselves to pass back into +a freer air, where any extravagance was possible, and good breeding and +mere circumspection and restraint vanished like the wind. + +A similar longing to be rid of the precision and order of everyday life +drove them to the mountains, and to the literature of Wales and the +Highlands, to Celtic, or pseudo-Celtic romance. To the fashion of the +time mountains were still frowning and horrid steeps; in Gray's Journal +of his tour in the Lakes, a new understanding and appreciation of nature +is only struggling through; and when mountains became fashionable, it +was at first and remained in part at least, till the time of Byron, for +those very theatrical qualities which had hitherto put them in +abhorrence. Wordsworth, in his _Lines written above Tintern Abbey_, in +which he sets forth the succeeding stages of his mental development, +refers to this love of the mountains for their spectacular qualities, as +the first step in the progress of his mind to poetic maturity: + + "The sounding cataract +Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock, +The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood, +Their colours and their forms were then to me +An appetite." + +This same passion for the "sounding cataract" and the "tall rock," this +appetite for the deep and gloomy wood, gave its vogue in Wordsworth's +boyhood to Macpherson's _Ossian_, a book which whether it be completely +fraudulent or not, was of capital importance in the beginnings of the +romantic movement. + +The love of mediaeval quaintness and obsolete words, however, led to a +more important literary event--the publication of Bishop Percy's edition +of the ballads in the Percy folio--the _Reliques of Ancient Poetry_. +Percy to his own mind knew the Middle Ages better than they knew +themselves, and he took care to dress to advantage the rudeness and +plainness of his originals. Perhaps we should not blame him. Sir Walter +Scott did the same with better tact and skill in his Border minstrelsy, +and how many distinguished editors are there, who have tamed and +smoothed down the natural wildness and irregularity of Blake? But it is +more important to observe that when Percy's reliques came to have their +influence on writing his additions were imitated as much as the poems on +which he grafted them. Chatterton's _Rowley Poems_, which in many places +seem almost inconceivably banal and artificial to us to-day, caught +their accent from the episcopal editor as much as from the ballads +themselves. None the less, whatever its fault, Percy's collection gave +its impetus to one half of the romantic movement; it was eagerly read in +Germany, and when it came to influence Scott and Coleridge it did so not +only directly, but through Burger's imitation of it; it began the modern +study and love of the ballad which has given us _Sister Helen_, the +_White Ship_ and the _Lady of Shalott_. + +But the romantic revival goes deeper than any change, however momentous +of fashion or style. It meant certain fundamental changes in human +outlook. In the first place, one notices in the authors of the time an +extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility; the mind at its +countless points of contact with the sensuous world and the world of +thought, seems to become more alive and alert. It is more sensitive to +fine impressions, to finely graded shades of difference. Outward +objects and philosophical ideas seem to increase in their content and +their meaning, and acquire a new power to enrich the intensest life of +the human spirit. Mountains and lakes, the dignity of the peasant, the +terror of the supernatural, scenes of history, mediaeval architecture +and armour, and mediaeval thought and poetry, the arts and mythology of +Greece--all became springs of poetic inspiration and poetic joy. The +impressions of all these things were unfamiliar and ministered to a +sense of wonder, and by that very fact they were classed as romantic, as +modes of escape from a settled way of life. But they were also in a +sense familiar too. The mountains made their appeal to a deep implanted +feeling in man, to his native sense of his own worth and dignity and +splendour as a part of nature, and his recognition of natural scenery as +necessary, and in its fullest meaning as sufficient for his spiritual +needs. They called him back from the artificiality and complexity of the +cities he had built for himself, and the society he had weaved round +him, to the natural world in which Providence had planted him of old, +and which was full of significance for his soul. The greatest poets of +the romantic revival strove to capture and convey the influence of +nature on the mind, and of the mind on nature interpenetrating one +another. They were none the less artists because they approached nature +in a state of passive receptivity. They believed in the autocracy of the +individual imagination none the less because their mission was to +divine nature and to understand her, rather than to correct her +profusions in the name of art. + +In the second place the romantic revival meant a development of the +historical sense. Thinkers like Burke and Montesquieu helped students of +politics to acquire perspective; to conceive modern institutions not as +things separate, and separately created, but as conditioned by, and +evolved from, the institutions of an earlier day. Even the revolutionary +spirit of the time looked both before and after, and took history as +well as the human perfectibility imagined by philosophers into its +purview. In France the reformers appealed in the first instance for a +States General--a mediaeval institution--as the corrective of their +wrongs, and later when they could not, like their neighbours in Belgium, +demand reform by way of the restoration of their historical rights, they +were driven to go a step further back still, beyond history to what they +conceived to be primitive society, and demand the rights of man. This +development of the historical sense, which had such a widespread +influence on politics, got itself into literature in the creation of the +historical novel. Scott and Chateaubriand revived the old romance in +which by a peculiar ingenuity of form, the adventures of a typical hero +of fiction are cast in a historical setting and set about with portraits +of real personages. The historical sense affected, too, novels dealing +with contemporary life. Scott's best work, his novels of Scottish +character, catch more than half their excellence from the richness of +colour and proportion which the portraiture of the living people +acquires when it is aided by historical knowledge and imagination. + +Lastly, besides this awakened historical sense, and this quickening of +imaginative sensibility to the message of nature, the Romantic revival +brought to literature a revival of the sense of the connection between +the visible world and another world which is unseen. The supernatural +which in all but the crudest of mechanisms had been out of English +literature since _Macbeth_, took hold on the imaginations of authors, +and brought with it a new subtlety and a new and nameless horror and +fascination. There is nothing in earlier English literature to set +beside the strange and terrible indefiniteness of the _Ancient Mariner_, +and though much in this kind has been written since, we have not got far +beyond the skill and imagination with which Coleridge and Scott worked +on the instinctive fears that lie buried in the human mind. + +Of all these aspects of the revival, however, the new sensitiveness and +accessibility to the influences of external nature was the most +pervasive and the most important. Wordsworth speaks for the love that is +in homes where poor men lie, the daily teaching that is in + + "Woods and rills; +The silence that is in the starry sky, +The peace that is among the lonely hills." + +Shelley for the wildness of the west wind, and the ubiquitous spiritual +emotion which speaks equally in the song of a skylark or a political +revolution. Byron for the swing and roar of the sea. Keats for verdurous +glooms and winding mossy ways. Scott and Coleridge, though like Byron +they are less with nature than with romance, share the same communion. + +This imaginative sensibility of the romantics not only deepened their +communion with nature, it brought them into a truer relation with what +had before been created in literature and art. The romantic revival is +the Golden Age of English criticism; all the poets were critics of one +sort or another--either formally in essays and prefaces, or in passing +and desultory flashes of illumination in their correspondence. +Wordsworth, in his prefaces, in his letter to a friend of Burns which +contains such a breadth and clarity of wisdom on things that seem alien +to his sympathies, even in some of his poems; Coleridge, in his +_Biographia Literaria_, in his notes on Shakespeare, in those rhapsodies +at Highgate which were the basis for his recorded table talk; Keats in +his letters; Shelley in his _Defence of Poetry_; Byron in his satires +and journals; Scott in those lives of the novelists which contain so +much truth and insight into the works of fellow craftsmen--they are all +to be found turning the new acuteness of impression which was in the air +they breathed, to the study of literature, as well as to the study of +nature. Alongside of them were two authors, Lamb and Hazlitt, whose bent +was rather critical than creative, and the best part of whose +intelligence and sympathy was spent on the sensitive and loving +divination of our earlier literature. With these two men began the +criticism of acting and of pictorial art that have developed since into +two of the main kinds of modern critical writing. + +Romantic criticism, both in its end and its method, differs widely from +that of Dr. Johnson and his school. Wordsworth and Coleridge were +concerned with deep-seated qualities and temperamental differences. +Their critical work revolved round their conception of the fancy and the +imagination, the one dealing with nature on the surface and decorating +it with imagery, the other penetrating to its deeper significances. +Hazlitt and Lamb applied their analogous conception of wit as a lower +quality than humour, in the same fashion. Dr. Johnson looked on the +other hand for correctness of form, for the subordination of the parts +to the whole, for the self-restraint and good sense which common manners +would demand in society, and wisdom in practical life. His school cared +more for large general outlines than for truth in detail. They would not +permit the idiosyncrasy of a personal or individual point of view: hence +they were incapable of understanding lyricism, and they preferred those +forms of writing which set themselves to express the ideas and feelings +that most men may be supposed to have in common. Dr. Johnson thought a +bombastic and rhetorical passage in Congreve's _Mourning Bride_ better +than the famous description of Dover cliff in _King Lear_. "The crows, +sir," he said of the latter, "impede your fall." Their town breeding, +and possibly, as we saw in the case of Dr. Johnson, an actual physical +disability, made them distrust any clear and sympathetic rendering of +the sense impressions which nature creates. One cannot imagine Dr. +Johnson caring much for the minute observations of Tennyson's nature +poems, or delighting in the verdurous and mossy alleys of Keats. His +test in such a case would be simple; he would not have liked to have +been in such places, nor reluctantly compelled to go there would he in +all likelihood have had much to say about them beyond that they were +damp. For the poetry--such as Shelley's--which worked by means of +impalpable and indefinite suggestion, he would, one may conceive, have +cared even less. New modes of poetry asked of critics new sympathies and +a new way of approach. But it is time to turn to the authors themselves. + + +(2) + +The case of Wordsworth is peculiar. In his own day he was vilified and +misunderstood; poets like Byron, whom most of us would now regard simply +as depending from the school he created, sneered at him. Shelley and +Keats failed to understand him or his motives; he was suspected of +apostasy, and when he became poet laureate he was written off as a +turn-coat who had played false to the ideals of his youth. Now common +opinion regards him as a poet above all the others of his age, and +amongst all the English poets standing beside Milton, but a step below +Shakespeare himself--and we know more about him, more about the +processes by which his soul moved from doubts to certainties, from +troubles to triumph, than we do about any other author we have. This +knowledge we have from the poem called, _The Prelude_, which was +published after his death. It was designed to be only the opening and +explanatory section of a philosophical poem, which was never completed. +Had it been published earlier it would have saved Wordsworth from the +coldness and neglect he suffered at the hands of younger men like +Shelley; it might even have made their work different from what it is. +It has made Wordsworth very clear to us now. + +Wordsworth is that rarest thing amongst poets, a complete innovator. He +looked at things in a new way. He found his subjects in new places; and +he put them into a new poetic form. At the turning point of his life, in +his early manhood, he made one great discovery, had one great vision. By +the light of that vision and to communicate that discovery he wrote his +greatest work. By and by the vision faded, the world fell back into the +light of common day, his philosophy passed from discovery to acceptance, +and all unknown to him his pen fell into a common way of writing. The +faculty of reading which has added fuel to the fire of so many waning +inspirations was denied him. He was much too self-centred to lose +himself in the works of others. Only the shock of a change of +environment--a tour in Scotland, or abroad--shook him into his old +thrill of imagination, so that a few fine things fitfully illumine the +enormous and dreary bulk of his later work. If we lost all but the +_Lyrical Ballads_, the poems of 1804, and the _Prelude_, and the +_Excursion_, Wordsworth's position as a poet would be no lower than it +is now, and he would be more readily accepted by those who still find +themselves uncertain about him. + +The determining factor in his career was the French Revolution--that +great movement which besides re-making France and Europe, made our very +modes of thinking anew. While an undergraduate in Cambridge Wordsworth +made several vacation visits to France. The first peaceful phase of the +Revolution was at its height; France and the assembly were dominated by +the little group of revolutionary orators who took their name from the +south-western province from which most of them came, and with this +group--the Girondists--Wordsworth threw in his lot. Had he remained he +would probably have gone with them to the guillotine. As it was, the +commands of his guardian brought him back to England, and he was forced +to contemplate from a distance the struggle in which he burned to take +an active part. One is accustomed to think of Wordsworth as a mild old +man, but such a picture if it is thrown back as a presentment of the +Wordsworth of the nineties is a far way from the truth. This darkly +passionate man tortured himself with his longings and his horror. War +came and the prayers for victory in churches found him in his heart +praying for defeat; then came the execution of the king; then the plot +which slew the Gironde. Before all this Wordsworth trembled as Hamlet +did when he learned the ghost's story. His faith in the world was +shaken. First his own country had taken up arms against what he believed +to be the cause of liberty. Then faction had destroyed his friends whom +he believed to be its standard bearers. What was in the world, in +religion, in morality that such things could be? In the face of this +tremendous problem, Wordsworth, unlike Hamlet, was resolute and +determined. It was, perhaps, characteristic of him that in his desire to +get his feet on firm rock again he fled for a time to the exactest of +sciences--to mathematics. But though he got certainties there, they must +have been, one judges, certainties too arid for his thirsting mind. Then +he made his great discovery--helped to it, perhaps, by his sister +Dorothy and his friend Coleridge--he found nature, and in nature, peace. + +Not a very wonderful discovery, you will say, but though the cleansing +and healing force of natural surroundings on the mind is a familiar +enough idea in our own day, that is only because Wordsworth found it. +When he gave his message to the world it was a new message. It is worth +while remembering that it is still an unaccepted one. Most of his +critics still consider it only Wordsworth's fun when he wrote: + +"One impulse from the vernal wood + Can teach us more of man, + Of moral evil and of good, + Than all the sages can." + +Yet Wordsworth really believed that moral lessons and ideas were to be +gathered from trees and stones. It was the main part of his teaching. He +claimed that his own morality had been so furnished him, and he wrote +his poetry to convince other people that what had been true for him +could be true for them too. + +For him life was a series of impressions, and the poet's duty was to +recapture those impressions, to isolate them and brood over them, till +gradually as a result of his contemplation emotion stirred again--an +emotion akin to the authentic thrill that had excited him when the +impression was first born in experience. Then poetry is made; this +emotion "recollected" as Wordsworth said (we may add, recreated) "in +tranquillity" passes into enduring verse. He treasured numberless +experiences of this kind in his own life. Some of them are set forth in +the _Prelude_, that for instance on which the poem _The Thorn_ in the +_Lyrical Ballads_ is based; they were one or other of them the occasion +of most of his poems; the best of them produced his finest work--such a +poem for instance as _Resolution and Independence_ or _Gipsies_, where +some chance sight met with in one of the poet's walks is brooded over +till it becomes charged with a tremendous significance for him and for +all the world. If we ask how he differentiated his experiences, which +had most value for him, we shall find something deficient. That is to +say, things which were unique and precious to him do not always appear +so to his readers. He counted as gold much that we regard as dross. But +though we may differ from his judgments, the test which he applied to +his recollected impressions is clear. He attached most value to those +which brought with them the sense of an indwelling spirit, transfusing +and interpenetrating all nature, transfiguring with its radiance, rocks +and fields and trees and the men and women who lived close enough to +them to partake of their strength--the sense, as he calls it in his +_Lines above Tintern Abbey_ of something "more deeply interfused" by +which all nature is made one. Sometimes, as in the hymn to Duty, it is +conceived as law. Duty before whom the flowers laugh, is the daughter of +the voice of God, through whom the most ancient heavens are fresh and +strong. But in most of his poems its ends do not trouble; it is +omnipresent; it penetrates everything and transfigures everything; it is +God. It was Wordsworth's belief that the perception of this indwelling +spirit weakened as age grew. For a few precious and glorious years he +had the vision + +"When meadow, grove, and stream, + The earth, and every common sight + To me did seem + Apparelled in celestial light, + The glory and the freshness of a dream." + +Then as childhood, when "these intimations of immortality," this +perception of the infinite are most strong, passed further and further +away, the vision faded and he was left gazing in the light of common +day. He had his memories and that was all. + +There is, of course, more in the matter than this, and Wordsworth's +beliefs were inextricably entangled with the conception which Coleridge +borrowed from German philosophy. + +"We receive but what we give" + +wrote Coleridge to his friend, + +"And in our life alone doth Nature live." + +And Wordsworth came to know that the light he had imagined to be +bestowed, was a light reflected from his own mind. It is easy to pass +from criticism to metaphysics where Coleridge leads, and wise not to +follow. + +If Wordsworth represents that side of the Romantic Revival which is best +described as the return to Nature, Coleridge has justification for the +phrase "Renascence of Wonder." He revived the supernatural as a literary +force, emancipated it from the crude mechanism which had been applied to +it by dilettantes like Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe, and invested +it instead with that air of suggestion and indefiniteness which gives +the highest potency to it in its effect on the imagination. But +Coleridge is more noteworthy for what he suggested to others than for +what he did in himself. His poetry is, even more than Wordsworth's, +unequal; he is capable of large tracts of dreariness and flatness; he +seldom finished what he began. The _Ancient Mariner_, indeed, which was +the fruit of his close companionship with Wordsworth, is the only +completed thing of the highest quality in the whole of his work. +_Christabel_ is a splendid fragment; for years the first part lay +uncompleted and when the odd accident of an evening's intoxication led +him to commence the second, the inspiration had fled. For the second +part, by giving to the fairy atmosphere of the first a local habitation +and a name, robbed it of its most precious quality; what it gave in +exchange was something the public could get better from Scott. _Kubla +Khan_ went unfinished because the call of a friend broke the thread of +the reverie in which it was composed. In the end came opium and oceans +of talk at Highgate and fouled the springs of poetry. Coleridge never +fulfilled the promise of his early days with Wordsworth. "He never spoke +out." But it is on the lines laid down by his share in the pioneer work +rather than on the lines of Wordsworth's that the second generation of +Romantic poets--that of Shelley and Keats--developed. + +The work of Wordsworth was conditioned by the French Revolution but it +hardly embodied the revolutionary spirit. What he conceived to be its +excesses revolted him, and though he sought and sang freedom, he found +it rather in the later revolt of the nationalities against the +Revolution as manifested in Napoleon himself. The spirit of the +revolution, as it was understood in France and in Europe, had to wait +for Shelley for its complete expression. Freedom is the breath of his +work--freedom not only from the tyranny of earthly powers, but from the +tyranny of religion, expressing itself in republicanism, in atheism, and +in complete emancipation from the current moral code both in conduct and +in writing. The reaction which had followed the overthrow of Napoleon at +Waterloo, sent a wave of absolutism and repression all over Europe, +Italy returned under the heel of Austria; the Bourbons were restored in +France; in England came the days of Castlereagh and Peterloo. The poetry +of Shelley is the expression of what the children of the revolution--men +and women who were brought up in and believed the revolutionary +gospel--thought about these things. + +But it is more than that. Of no poet in English, nor perhaps in any +other tongue, could it be said with more surety, that the pursuit of the +spirit of beauty dominates all his work. For Shelley it interfused all +nature and to possess it was the goal of all endeavour. The visible +world and the world of thought mingle themselves inextricably in his +contemplation of it. For him there is no boundary-line between the two, +the one is as real and actual as the other. In his hands that old trick +of the poets, the simile, takes on a new and surprising form. He does +not enforce the creations of his imagination by the analogy of natural +appearances; his instinct is just the opposite--to describe and illumine +nature by a reference to the creatures of thought. Other poets, Keats +for instance, or Tennyson, or the older poets like Dante and Homer, +might compare ghosts flying from an enchanter like leaves flying before +the wind. They might describe a poet wrapped up in his dreams as being +like a bird singing invisible in the brightness of the sky. But Shelley +can write of the west wind as + +"Before whose unseen presence the leaves, dead, + Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing," + +and he can describe a skylark in the heavens as + +"Like a poet hidden + In the light of thought." + +Of all English poets he is the most completely lyrical. Nothing that he +wrote but is wrought out of the anguish or joy of his own heart. + +"Most wretched souls," + +he writes + +"Are cradled into poetry by wrong + They learn in suffering what they teach in song." + +Perhaps his work is too impalpable and moves in an air too rarefied. It +sometimes lacks strength. It fails to take grip enough of life. Had he +lived he might have given it these things; there are signs in his last +poems that he would have given it. But he could hardly have bettered the +sheer and triumphant lyricism of _The Skylark_, of some of his choruses, +and of the _Ode to Dejection_, and of the _Lines written on the Eugenoen +hills_. + +If the Romantic sense of the one-ness of nature found its highest +exponent in Shelley, the Romantic sensibility to outward impressions +reached its climax in Keats. For him life is a series of sensations, +felt with almost febrile acuteness. Records of sight and touch and smell +crowd every line of his work; the scenery of a garden in Hampstead +becomes like a landscape in the tropics, so extraordinary vivid and +detailed is his apprehension and enjoyment of what it has to give him. +The luxuriance of his sensations is matched by the luxuriance of his +powers of expression. Adjectives heavily charged with messages for the +senses, crowd every line of his work, and in his earlier poems overlay +so heavily the thought they are meant to convey that all sense of +sequence and structure is apt to be smothered under their weight. Not +that consecutive thought claims a place in his conception of his poetry. +His ideal was passive contemplation rather than active mental exertion. +"O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts," he exclaims in one +of his letters; and in another, "It is more noble to sit like Jove than +to fly like Mercury." His work has one message and one only, the +lastingness of beauty and its supreme truth. It is stated in _Endymion_ +in lines that are worn bare with quotation. It is stated again, at the +height of his work in his greatest ode, + +"Beauty is truth, truth beauty: that is all +We know on earth and all we need to know." + +His work has its defects; he died at twenty-six so it would be a miracle +if it were not so. He lacks taste and measure; he offends by an +over-luxuriousness and sensuousness; he fails when he is concerned with +flesh and blood; he is apt, as Mr. Robert Bridges has said, "to class +women with roses and sweetmeats." But in his short life he attained with +surprising rapidity and completeness to poetic maturity, and +perhaps from no other poet could we find things to match his +greatest--_Hyperion, Isabella_, the _Eve of St. Agnes_ and +the _Odes_. + +There remains a poet over whom opinion is more sharply divided than it +is about any other writer in English. In his day Lord Byron was the +idol, not only of his countrymen, but of Europe. Of all the poets of +the time he was, if we except Scott, whose vogue he eclipsed, the only +one whose work was universally known and popular. Everybody read him; he +was admired not only by the multitude and by his equals, but by at least +one who was his superior, the German poet Goethe, who did not hesitate +to say of him that he was the greatest talent of the century Though this +exalted opinion still persists on the Continent, hardly anyone could be +found in England to subscribe to it now. Without insularity, we may +claim to be better judges of authors in our own tongue than foreign +critics, however distinguished and comprehending. How then shall be +explained Lord Byron's instant popularity and the position he won? What +were the qualities which gave him the power he enjoyed? + +In the first place he appealed by virtue of his subject-matter--the +desultory wanderings of _Childe Harold_ traversed ground every mile of +which was memorable to men who had watched the struggle which had been +going on in Europe with scarcely a pause for twenty years. Descriptive +journalism was then and for nearly half a century afterwards unknown, +and the poem by its descriptiveness, by its appeal to the curiosity of +its readers, made the same kind of success that vividly written special +correspondence would to-day, the charm of metre super-added. Lord Byron +gave his readers something more, too, than mere description. He added to +it the charm of a personality, and when that personality was enforced by +a title, when it proclaimed its sorrows as the age's sorrows, endowed +itself with an air of symbolism and set itself up as a kind of scapegoat +for the nation's sins, its triumph was complete. Most men have from time +to time to resist the temptation to pose to themselves; many do not even +resist it. For all those who chose to believe themselves blighted by +pessimism, and for all the others who would have loved to believe it, +Byron and his poetry came as an echo of themselves. Shallow called to +shallow. Men found in him, as their sons found more reputably in +Tennyson, a picture of what they conceived to be the state of their own +minds. + +But he was not altogether a man of pretence. He really and passionately +loved freedom; no one can question his sincerity in that. He could be a +fine and scathing satirist; and though he was careless, he had great +poetic gifts. + + +(3) + +The age of the Romantic Revival was one of poetry rather than of prose; +it was in poetry that the best minds of the time found their means of +expression. But it produced prose of rare quality too, and there is +delightful reading in the works of its essayists and occasional writers. +In its form the periodical essay had changed little since it was first +made popular by Addison and Steele. It remained, primarily, a vehicle +for the expression of a personality, and it continued to seek the +interests of its readers by creating or suggesting an individuality +strong enough to carry off any desultory adventure by the mere force of +its own attractiveness. Yet there is all the difference in the world +between Hazlitt and Addison, or Lamb and Steele. The _Tatler_ and the +_Spectator_ leave you with a sense of artifice; Hazlitt and Lamb leave +you with a grip of a real personality--in the one case very vigorous and +combative, in the other set about with a rare plaintiveness and +gentleness, but in both absolutely sincere. Addison is gay and witty and +delightful but he only plays at being human; Lamb's essays--the +translation into print of a heap of idiosyncrasies and oddities, and +likes and dislikes, and strange humours--come straight and lovably from +a human soul. + +The prose writers of the romantic movement brought back two things into +writing which had been out of it since the seventeenth century. They +brought back egotism and they brought back enthusiasm. They had the +confidence that their own tastes and experiences were enough to interest +their readers; they mastered the gift of putting themselves on paper. +But there is one wide difference between them and their predecessors. +Robert Burton was an egotist but he was an unconscious one; the same is, +perhaps, true though much less certainly of Sir Thomas Browne. In Lamb +and Hazlitt and De Quincey egotism was deliberate, consciously assumed, +the result of a compelling and shaping art. If one reads Lamb's earlier +essays and prose pieces one can see the process at work--watch him +consciously imitating Fuller, or Burton, or Browne, mirroring their +idiosyncrasies, making their quaintnesses and graces his own. By the +time he came to write the _Essays of Elia_, he had mastered the personal +style so completely that his essays seem simply the overflow of talk. +They are so desultory; they move from one subject to another so +waywardly--such an essay as a _Chapter on Ears_, for instance, passing +with the easy inconsequence of conversation from anatomy through organ +music to beer--when they quote, as they do constantly, it is +incorrectly, as in the random reminiscences of talk. Here one would say +is the cream risen to the surface of a full mind and skimmed at one +taking. How far all this is from the truth we know--know, too, how for +months he polished and rewrote these magazine articles, rubbing away +roughnesses and corners, taking off the traces of logical sequences and +argument, till in the finished work of art he mimicked inconsequence so +perfectly that his friends might have been deceived. And the personality +he put on paper was partly an artistic creation, too. In life Lamb was a +nervous, easily excitable and emotional man; his years were worn with +the memory of a great tragedy and the constantly impending fear of a +repetition of it. One must assume him in his way to have been a good man +of business--he was a clerk in the India House, then a throbbing centre +of trade, and the largest commercial concern in England, and when he +retired his employers gave him a very handsome pension. In the early +portrait by Hazlitt there is a dark and gleaming look of fire and +decision. But you would never guess it from his books. There he is the +gentle recluse, dreaming over old books, old furniture, old prints, old +plays and play-bills; living always in the past, loving in the town +secluded byways like the Temple, or the libraries of Oxford Colleges, +and in the country quiet and shaded lanes, none of the age's enthusiasm +for mountains in his soul. When he turned critic it was not to discern +and praise the power and beauty in the works of his contemporaries but +to rediscover and interpret the Elizabethan and Jacobean romantic plays. + +This quality of egotism Lamb shares with other writers of the time, with +De Quincey, for instance, who left buried in work which is extensive and +unequal, much that lives by virtue of the singular elaborateness and +loftiness of the style which he could on occasion command. For the +revival of enthusiasm one must turn to Hazlitt, who brought his +passionate and combative disposition to the service of criticism, and +produced a series of studies remarkable for their earnestness and their +vigour, and for the essential justness which they display despite the +prejudice on which each of them was confessedly based. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + + +THE VICTORIAN AGE + +(1) + +Had it not been that with two exceptions all the poets of the Romantic +Revival died early, it might be more difficult to draw a line between +their school and that of their successors than it is. As it happened, +the only poet who survived and wrote was Wordsworth, the oldest of them +all. For long before his death he did nothing that had one touch of the +fire and beauty of his earlier work. The respect he began, after a +lifetime of neglect, to receive in the years immediately before his +death, was paid not to the conservative laureate of 1848, but to the +revolutionary in art and politics of fifty years before. He had lived on +long after his work was done + +"To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost + That blamed the living man." + +All the others, Keats, Shelley, Byron were dead before 1830, and the +problem which might have confronted us had they lived, of adult work +running counter to the tendencies and ideals of youth, does not exist +for us. Keats or Shelley might have lived as long as Carlyle, with whom +they were almost exactly contemporary; had they done so, the age of the +Romantic Revival and the Victorian age would have been united in the +lives of authors who were working in both. We should conceive that is, +the whole period as one, just as we conceive of the Renaissance in +England, from Surrey to Shirley, as one. As it is, we have accustomed +ourselves to a strongly marked line of division. A man must be on either +one side or the other; Wordsworth, though he wrote on till 1850, is on +the further side, Carlyle, though he was born in the same year as Keats, +on the hither side. Still the accident of length of days must not blind +us to the fact that the Victorian period, though in many respects its +ideals and modes of thinking differed from those of the period which +preceded it, is essentially an extension of the Romantic Revival and not +a fresh start. The coherent inspiration of romanticism disintegrated +into separate lines of development, just as in the seventeenth century +the single inspiration of the Renaissance broke into different schools. +Along these separate lines represented by such men as Browning, the +Pre-Raphaelites, Arnold, and Meredith, literature enriched and +elaborated itself into fresh forms. None the less, every author in each +of these lines of literary activity invites his readers to understand +his direct relations to the romantic movement. Rossetti touches it +through his original, Keats; Arnold through Goethe and Byron; Browning +first through Shelley and then in item after item of his varied +subject-matter. + +In one direction the Victorian age achieved a salient and momentous +advance. The Romantic Revival had been interested in nature, in the +past, and in a lesser degree in art, but it had not been interested in +men and women. To Wordsworth the dalesmen of the lakes were part of the +scenery they moved in; he saw men as trees walking, and when he writes +about them as in such great poems as _Resolution and Independence_, the +_Brothers_, or _Michael_, it is as natural objects he treats them, +invested with the lonely remoteness that separates them from the +complexities and passions of life as it is lived. They are there, you +feel, to teach the same lesson as the landscape teaches in which they +are set. The passing of the old Cumberland beggar through villages and +past farmsteads, brings to those who see him the same kind of +consolation as the impulses from a vernal wood that Wordsworth +celebrated in his purely nature poetry. Compare with Wordsworth, +Browning, and note the fundamental change in the attitude of the poet +that his work reveals. _Pippa Passes_ is a poem on exactly the same +scheme as the _Old Cumberland Beggar_, but in treatment no two things +could be further apart. The intervention of Pippa is dramatic, and +though her song is in the same key as the wordless message of +Wordsworth's beggar she is a world apart from him, because she is +something not out of natural history, but out of life. The Victorian age +extended the imaginative sensibility which its predecessor had brought +to bear on nature and history, to the complexities of human life. It +searched for individuality in character, studied it with a loving +minuteness, and built up out of its discoveries amongst men and women a +body of literature which in its very mode of conception was more closely +related to life, and thus the object of greater interest and excitement +to its readers, than anything which had been written in the previous +ages. It is the direct result of this extension of romanticism that the +novel became the characteristic means of literary expression of the +time, and that Browning, the poet who more than all others represents +the essential spirit of his age, should have been as it were, a novelist +in verse. Only one other literary form, indeed, could have ministered +adequately to this awakened interest, but by some luck not easy to +understand, the drama, which might have done with greater economy and +directness the work the novel had to do, remained outside the main +stream of literary activity. To the drama at last it would seem that we +are returning, and it may be that in the future the direct +representation of the clash of human life which is still mainly in the +hands of our novelists, may come back to its own domain. + +The Victorian age then added humanity to nature and art as the +subject-matter of literature. But it went further than that. For the +first time since the Renaissance, came an era which was conscious of +itself as an epoch in the history of mankind, and confident of its +mission. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries revolutionized +cosmography, and altered the face of the physical world. The nineteenth +century, by the discoveries of its men of science, and by the remarkable +and rapid succession of inventions which revolutionized the outward face +of life, made hardly less alteration in accepted ways of thinking. The +evolutionary theory, which had been in the air since Goethe, and to +which Darwin was able to give an incontrovertible basis of scientific +fact, profoundly influenced man's attitude to nature and to religion. +Physical as apart from natural science made scarcely less advance, and +instead of a world created in some fixed moment of time, on which had +been placed by some outward agency all the forms and shapes of nature +that we know, came the conception of a planet congealing out of a +nebula, and of some lower, simpler and primeval form of life multiplying +and diversifying itself through succeeding stages of development to form +both the animal and the vegetable world. This conception not only +enormously excited and stimulated thought, but it gave thinkers a +strange sense of confidence and certainty not possessed by the age +before. Everything seemed plain to them; they were heirs of all the +ages. Their doubts were as certain as their faith. + +"There lives more faith in honest doubt + Believe me than in half the creeds." + +said Tennyson; "honest doubt," hugged with all the certainty of a +revelation, is the creed of most of his philosophical poetry, and what +is more to the point was the creed of the masses that were beginning to +think for themselves, to whose awakening interest his work so strongly +appealed. There were no doubt, literary side-currents. Disraeli survived +to show that there were still young men who thought Byronically. +Rossetti and his school held themselves proudly aloof from the +rationalistic and scientific tendencies of the time, and found in the +Middle ages, better understood than they had been either by Coleridge or +Scott, a refuge from a time of factories and fact. The Oxford movement +ministered to the same tendencies in religion and philosophy; but it is +the scientific spirit, and all that the scientific spirit implied, its +certain doubt, its care for minuteness, and truth of observation, its +growing interest in social processes, and the conditions under which +life is lived, that is the central fact in Victorian literature. + +Tennyson represents more fully than any other poet this essential spirit +of the age. If it be true, as has been often asserted, that the spirit +of an age is to be found best in the work of lesser men, his complete +identity with the thought of his time is in itself evidence of his +inferiority to his contemporary, Browning. Comparison between the two +men seem inevitable; they were made by readers when _In Memoriam_ and +_Men and Women_ came hot from the press, and they have been made ever +since. There could, of course, scarcely be two men more dissimilar, +Tennyson elaborating and decorating the obvious; Browning delving into +the esoteric and the obscure, and bringing up strange and unfamiliar +finds; Tennyson in faultless verse registering current newly accepted +ways of thought; Browning in advance thinking afresh for himself, +occupied ceaselessly in the arduous labour of creating an audience fit +to judge him. The age justified the accuracy with which Tennyson +mirrored it, by accepting him and rejecting Browning. It is this very +accuracy that almost forces us at this time to minimise and dispraise +Tennyson's work. We have passed from Victorian certainties, and so he is +apt when he writes in the mood of _Locksley Hall_ and the rest, to +appear to us a little shallow, a little empty, and a little pretentious. + +His earlier poetry, before he took upon himself the burden of the age, +is his best work, and it bears strongly marked upon it the influence of +Keats. Such a poem for instance as _Oenone_ shows an extraordinarily +fine sense of language and melody, and the capacity caught from Keats of +conveying a rich and highly coloured pictorial effect. No other poet, +save Keats, has had a sense of colour so highly developed as Tennyson's. +From his boyhood he was an exceedingly close and sympathetic observer of +the outward forms of nature, and he makes a splendid use of what his +eyes had taught him in these earlier poems. Later his interest in +insects and birds and flowers outran the legitimate opportunity he +possessed of using it in poetry. It was his habit, his son tells us, to +keep notebooks of things he had observed in his garden or in his walks, +and to work them up afterwards into similes for the _Princess_ and the +_Idylls of the King_. Read in the books written by admirers, in which +they have been studied and collected (there are several of them) these +similes are pleasing enough; in the text where they stand they are apt +to have the air of impertinences, beautiful and extravagant +impertinences no doubt, but alien to their setting. In one of the +_Idylls of the King_ the fall of a drunken knight from his horse is +compared to the fall of a jutting edge of cliff and with it a lance-like +fir-tree, which Tennyson had observed near his home, and one cannot +resist the feeling that the comparison is a thought too great for the +thing it was meant to illustrate. So, too, in the _Princess_ when he +describes a handwriting, + +"In such a hand as when a field of corn + Bows all its ears before the roaring East." + +he is using up a sight noted in his walks and transmuted into poetry on +a trivial and frivolous occasion. You do not feel, in fact, that the +handwriting visualized spontaneously called up the comparison; you are +as good as certain that the simile existed waiting for use before the +handwriting was thought of. + +The accuracy of his observation of nature, his love of birds and larvae +is matched by the carefulness with which he embodies, as soon as ever +they were made, the discoveries of natural and physical science. +Nowadays, possibly because these things have become commonplace to us, +we may find him a little school-boy-like in his pride of knowledge. He +knows that + +"This world was once a fluid haze of light, + Till toward the centre set the starry tides + And eddied wild suns that wheeling cast + The planets." + +just as he knows what the catkins on the willows are like, or the names +of the butterflies: but he is capable, on occasion of "dragging it in," +as in + +"The nebulous star we call the sun, + If that hypothesis of theirs be sound." + +from the mere pride in his familiarity with the last new thing. His +dealings with science, that is, no more than his dealings with nature, +have that inevitableness, that spontaneous appropriateness that we feel +we have a right to ask from great poetry. + +Had Edgar Allan Poe wanted an example for his theory of the +impossibility of writing, in modern times, a long poem, he might have +found it in Tennyson. His strength is in his shorter pieces; even where +as in _In Memoriam_ he has conceived and written something at once +extended and beautiful, the beauty lies rather in the separate parts; +the thing is more in the nature of a sonnet sequence than a continuous +poem. Of his other larger works, the _Princess_, a scarcely happy blend +between burlesque in the manner of the _Rape of the Lock_, and a serious +apostleship of the liberation of women, is solely redeemed by these +lyrics. Tennyson's innate conservatism hardly squared with the +liberalising tendencies he caught from the more advanced thought of his +age, in writing it. Something of the same kind is true of _Maud_, which +is a novel told in dramatically varied verse. The hero is morbid, his +social satire peevish, and a story which could have been completely +redeemed by the ending (the death of the hero), which artistic fitness +demands, is of value for us now through its three amazing songs, in +which the lyric genius of Tennyson reached its finest flower. It cannot +be denied, either, that he failed--though magnificently--in the _Idylls +of the King_. The odds were heavily against him in the choice of a +subject. Arthur is at once too legendary and too shadowy for an epic +hero, and nothing but the treatment that Milton gave to Satan (i.e. flat +substitution of the legendary person by a newly created character) could +fit him for the place. Even if Arthur had been more promising than he +is, Tennyson's sympathies were fundamentally alien from the moral and +religious atmosphere of Arthurian romance. His robust Protestantism left +no room for mysticism; he could neither appreciate nor render the +mystical fervour and exultation which is in the old history of the Holy +Grail. Nor could he comprehend the morality of a society where courage, +sympathy for the oppressed, loyalty and courtesy were the only essential +virtues, and love took the way of freedom and the heart rather than the +way of law. In his heart Tennyson's attitude to the ideals of chivalry +and the old stories in which they are embodied differed probably very +little from that of Roger Ascham, or of any other Protestant Englishman; +when he endeavoured to make an epic of them and to fasten to it an +allegory in which Arthur should typify the war of soul against sense, +what happened was only what might have been expected. The heroic +enterprise failed, and left us with a series of mid-Victorian novels in +verse in which the knights figure as heroes of the generic mid-Victorian +type. + +But if he failed in his larger poems, he had a genius little short of +perfect in his handling of shorter forms. The Arthurian story which +produced only middling moralizing in the _Idylls_, gave us as well the +supremely written Homeric episode of the _Morte d'Arthur_, and the sharp +and defined beauty of _Sir Galahad_ and the _Lady of Shallott_. Tennyson +had a touch of the pre-Raphaelite faculty of minute painting in words, +and the writing of these poems is as clear and naive as in the best +things of Rossetti. He had also what neither Rossetti nor any of his +contemporaries in verse, except Browning, had, a fine gift of +understanding humanity. The peasants of his English idylls are conceived +with as much breadth of sympathy and richness of humour, as purely and +as surely, as the peasants of Chaucer or Burns. A note of passionate +humanity is indeed in all his work. It makes vivid and intense his +scholarly handling of Greek myth; always the unchanging human aspect of +it attracts him most, in Oenone's grief, in the indomitableness of +Ulysses, the weariness and disillusionment in Tithonus. It has been the +cause of the comfort he has brought to sorrow; none of his generation +takes such a human attitude to death. Shelley could yearn for the +infinite, Browning treat it as the last and greatest adventure, Arnold +meet it clear eyed and resigned. To Wordsworth it is the mere return of +man the transient to Nature the eternal. + +"No motion has she now; no force, + She neither hears nor sees, + Roiled round in earth's diurnal course + With rocks and stones and trees." + +To Tennyson it brings the fundamental human home-sickness for familiar +things. + +"Ah, sad and strange as on dark summer dawns, + The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds + To dying ears when unto dying eyes + The casement slowly grows a glimmering square." + +It is an accent which wakes an echo in a thousand hearts. + + +(2) + +While Tennyson, in his own special way and, so to speak, in +collaboration with the spirit of the age, was carrying on the work of +Romanticism on its normal lines, Browning was finding a new style and a +new subject matter. In his youth he had begun as an imitator of Shelley, +and _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_ remain to show what the influence of the +"sun-treader" was on his poetry. But as early as his second publication, +_Bells and Pomegranates_, he had begun to speak for himself, and with +_Men and Women_, a series of poems of amazing variety and brilliance, he +placed himself unassailably in the first rank. Like Tennyson's, his +genius continued high and undimmed while life was left him. _Men and +Women_ was followed by an extraordinary narrative poem, _The Ring and +the Book_, and it by several volumes of scarcely less brilliance, the +last of which appeared on the very day of his death. + +Of the two classes into which, as we saw when we were studying Burns, +creative artists can be divided, Browning belongs to that one which +makes everything new for itself, and has in consequence to educate the +readers by whom its work can alone be judged. He was an innovator in +nearly everything he did; he thought for himself; he wrote for himself, +and in his own way. And because he refused to follow ordinary modes of +writing, he was and is still widely credited with being tortured and +obscure.[7] The charge of obscurity is unfortunate because it tends to +shut off from him a large class of readers for whom he has a sane and +special and splendid message. + +[Footnote 7: The deeper causes of Browning's obscurity have been +detailed in Chapter iv. of this book. It may be added for the benefit of +the reader who fights shy on the report of it, that in nine cases out of +ten, it arises simply from his colloquial method; we go to him expecting +the smoothness and completeness of Tennyson; we find in him the +irregularities, the suppressions, the quick changes of talk--the +clipped, clever talk of much idea'd people who hurry breathlessly from +one aspect to another of a subject.] + +His most important innovation in form was his device of the dramatic +lyric. What interested him in life was men and women, and in them, not +their actions, but the motives which governed their actions. To lay bare +fully the working of motive in a narrative form with himself as narrator +was obviously impossible; the strict dramatic form, though he attained +some success in it, does not seem to have attracted him, probably +because in it the ultimate stress must be on the thing done rather than +the thing thought; there remained, therefore, of the ancient forms of +poetry, the lyric. The lyric had of course been used before to express +emotions imagined and not real to the poet himself; Browning was the +first to project it to express imagined emotions of men and women, +whether typical or individual, whom he himself had created. Alongside +this perversion of the lyric, he created a looser and freer form, the +dramatic monologue, in which most of his most famous poems, _Cleon, +Sludge the Medium, Bishop Blougram's Apology_, etc., are cast. In the +convention which Browning established in it, all kinds of people are +endowed with a miraculous articulation, a new gift of tongues; they +explain themselves, their motives, the springs of those motives (for in +Browning's view every thought and act of a man's life is part of an +interdependent whole), and their author's peculiar and robust philosophy +of life. Out of the dramatic monologues he devised the scheme of _The +Ring and the Book_, a narrative poem in which the episodes, and not the +plot, are the basis of the structure, and the story of a trifling and +sordid crime is set forth as it appeared to the minds of the chief +actors in succession. To these new forms he added the originality of an +extraordinary realism in style. Few poets have the power by a word, a +phrase, a flash of observation in detail to make you see the event as +Browning makes you see it. + +Many books have been written on the philosophy of Browning's poetry. +Stated briefly its message is that of an optimism which depends on a +recognition of the strenuousness of life. The base of his creed, as of +Carlyle's, is the gospel of labour; he believes in the supreme moral +worth of effort. Life is a "training school" for a future existence, +and our place in it depends on the courage and strenuousness with which +we have laboured here. Evil is in the world only as an instrument in the +process of development; by conquering it we exercise our spiritual +faculties the more. Only torpor is the supreme sin, even as in _The +Statue and the Bust_ where effort would have been to a criminal end. + +"The counter our lovers staked was lost + As surely as if it were lawful coin: + And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost + Was, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, + Though the end in sight was a crime, I say." + +All the other main ideas of his poetry fit with perfect consistency on +to his scheme. Love, the manifestation of a man's or a woman's nature, +is the highest and most intimate relationship possible, for it is an +opportunity--the highest opportunity--for spiritual growth. It can reach +this end though an actual and earthly union is impossible. + +"She has lost me, I have gained her; + Her soul's mine and thus grown perfect, + I shall pass my life's remainder. + Life will just hold out the proving + Both our powers, alone and blended: + And then come the next life quickly! + This world's use will have been ended." + +It follows that the reward of effort is the promise of immortality, and +that for each man, just because his thoughts and motives taken together +count, and not one alone, there is infinite hope. + +The contemporaries of Tennyson and Browning in poetry divide themselves +into three separate schools. Nearest to them in temper is the school of +Matthew Arnold and Clough; they have the same quick sensitiveness to the +intellectual tendencies of the age, but their foothold in a time of +shifting and dissolving creeds is a stoical resignation very different +from the buoyant optimism of Browning, or Tennyson's mixture of science +and doubt and faith. Very remote from them on the other hand is the +backward-gazing mediaevalism of Rossetti and his circle, who revived +(Rossetti from Italian sources, Morris from Norman) a Middle age which +neither Scott nor Coleridge had more than partially and brokenly +understood. The last school, that to which Swinburne and Meredith with +all their differences unite in belonging, gave up Christianity with +scarcely so much as a regret, + +"We have said to the dream that caress'd and the dread that smote us, +Good-night and good-bye." + +and turned with a new hope and exultation to the worship of our +immemorial mother the earth. In both of them, the note of enthusiasm for +political liberty which had been lost in Wordsworth after 1815, and was +too early extinguished with Shelley, was revived by the Italian +Revolution in splendour and fire. + + +(3) + +As one gets nearer one's own time, a certain change comes insensibly +over one's literary studies. Literature comes more and more to mean +imaginative literature or writing about imaginative literature. The mass +of writing comes to be taken not as literature, but as argument or +information; we consider it purely from the point of view of its subject +matter. A comparison will make this at once clear. When a man reads +Bacon, he commonly regards himself as engaged in the study of English +literature; when he reads Darwin he is occupied in the study of natural +science. A reader of Bacon's time would have looked on him as we look on +Darwin now. + +The distinction is obviously illogical, but a writer on English +literature within brief limits is forced to bow to it if he wishes his +book to avoid the dreariness of a summary, and he can plead in +extenuation the increased literary output of the later age, and the +incompleteness with which time so far has done its work in sifting the +memorable from the forgettable, the ephemeral from what is going to +last. The main body of imaginative prose literature--the novel--is +treated of in the next chapter and here no attempt will be made to deal +with any but the admittedly greatest names. Nothing can be said, for +instance, of that fluent journalist and biased historian Macaulay, nor +of the mellifluousness of Newman, nor of the vigour of Kingsley or +Maurice; nor of the writings, admirable in their literary qualities of +purity and terseness, of Darwin or Huxley; nor of the culture and +apostleship of Matthew Arnold. These authors, one and all, interpose no +barrier, so to speak, between their subject-matter and their readers; +you are not when you read them conscious of a literary intention, but of +some utilitarian one, and as an essay on English literature is by no +means a handbook to serious reading they will be no more mentioned here. + +In the case of one nineteenth century writer in prose, this method of +exclusion cannot apply. Both Carlyle and Ruskin were professional men of +letters; both in the voluminous compass of their works touched on a +large variety of subjects; both wrote highly individual and peculiar +styles; and both without being either professional philosophers or +professional preachers, were as every good man of letters, whether he +denies it or not, is and must be, lay moralists and prophets. Of the two +Ruskin is plain and easily read, and he derives his message; Carlyle, +his original, is apt to be tortured and obscure. Inside the body of his +work the student of nineteenth century literature is probably in need of +some guidance; outside so far as prose is concerned he can fend for +himself. + +As we saw, Carlyle was the oldest of the Victorians; he was over forty +when the Queen came to the throne. Already his years of preparation in +Scotland, town and country, were over, and he had settled in that famous +little house in Chelsea which for nearly half a century to come was to +be one of the central hearths of literary London. More than that, he had +already fully formed his mode of thought and his peculiar style. _Sartor +Resartus_ was written and published serially before the Queen came to +the throne; the _French Revolution_ came in the year of her accession at +the very time that Carlyle's lectures were making him a fashionable +sensation; most of his miscellaneous essays had already appeared in the +reviews. But with the strict Victorian era, as if to justify the usually +arbitrary division of literary history by dynastic periods, there came a +new spirit into his work. For the first time he applied his peculiar +system of ideas to contemporary politics. _Chartism_ appeared in 1839; +_Past and Present_, which does the same thing as _Chartism_ in an +artistic form, three years later. They were followed by one other +book--_Latter Day Pamphlets_--addressed particularly to contemporary +conditions, and by two remarkable and voluminous historical works. Then +came the death of his wife, and for the last fifteen years of his life +silence, broken only briefly and at rare intervals. + +The reader who comes to Carlyle with preconceived notions based on what +he has heard of the subject-matter of his books is certain to be +surprised by what he finds. There are histories in the canon of his +works and pamphlets on contemporary problems, but they are composed on a +plan that no other historian and no other social reformer would own. A +reader will find in them no argument, next to no reasoning, and little +practical judgment. Carlyle was not a great "thinker" in the strictest +sense of that term. He was under the control, not of his reason, but of +his emotions; deep feeling, a volcanic intensity of temperament flaming +into the light and heat of prophecy, invective, derision, or a simple +splendour of eloquence, is the characteristic of his work. Against +cold-blooded argument his passionate nature rose in fierce rebellion; +he had no patience with the formalist or the doctrinaire. Nor had he the +faculty of analysis; his historical works are a series of pictures or +tableaux, splendidly and vividly conceived, and with enormous colour and +a fine illusion of reality, but one-sided as regards the truth. In his +essays on hero-worship he contents himself with a noisy reiteration of +the general predicate of heroism; there is very little except their +names and the titles to differentiate one sort of hero from another. His +picture of contemporary conditions is not so much a reasoned indictment +as a wild and fantastic orgy of epithets: "dark simmering pit of +Tophet," "bottomless universal hypocrisies," and all the rest. In it all +he left no practical scheme. His works are fundamentally not about +politics or history or literature, but about himself. They are the +exposition of a splendid egotism, fiercely enthusiastic about one or two +deeply held convictions; their strength does not lie in their matter of +fact. + +This is, perhaps, a condemnation of him in the minds of those people who +ask of a social reformer an actuarially accurate scheme for the +abolition of poverty, or from a prophet a correct forecast of the result +of the next general election. Carlyle has little help for these and no +message save the disconcerting one of their own futility. His message is +at once larger and simpler, for though his form was prose, his soul was +a poet's soul, and what he has to say is a poet's word. In a way, it is +partly Wordsworth's own. The chief end of life, his message is, is the +performance of duty, chiefly the duty of work. "Do thy little stroke of +work; this is Nature's voice, and the sum of all the commandments, to +each man." All true work is religion, all true work is worship; to +labour is to pray. And after work, obedience the best discipline, so he +says in _Past and Present_, for governing, and "our universal duty and +destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break." Carlyle asked of every +man, action and obedience and to bow to duty; he also required of him +sincerity and veracity, the duty of being a real and not a sham, a +strenuous warfare against cant. The historical facts with which he had +to deal he grouped under these embracing categories, and in the _French +Revolution_, which is as much a treasure-house of his philosophy as a +history, there is hardly a page on which they do not appear. +"Quack-ridden," he says, "in that one word lies all misery whatsoever." + +These bare elemental precepts he clothes in a garment of amazing and +bizarre richness. There is nothing else in English faintly resembling +the astonishing eccentricity and individuality of his style. Gifted with +an extraordinarily excitable and vivid imagination; seeing things with +sudden and tremendous vividness, as in a searchlight or a lightning +flash, he contrived to convey to his readers his impressions full +charged with the original emotion that produced them, and thus with the +highest poetic effect. There is nothing in all descriptive writing to +match the vividness of some of the scenes in the _French Revolution_ or +in the narrative part of _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_, or more +than perhaps in any of his books, because in it he was setting down +deep-seated impressions of his boyhood rather than those got from +brooding over documents, in _Sartor Resartus_. Alongside this unmatched +pictorial vividness and a quite amazing richness and rhythm of language, +more surprising and original than anything out of Shakespeare, there are +of course, striking defects--a wearisome reiteration of emphasis, a +clumsiness of construction, a saddening fondness for solecisms and +hybrid inventions of his own. The reader who is interested in these (and +every one who reads him is forced to become so) will find them +faithfully dealt with in John Sterling's remarkable letter (quoted in +Carlyle's _Life of Sterling_) on _Sartor Resartus_. But gross as they +are, and frequently as they provide matter for serious offence, these +eccentricities of language link themselves up in a strange indissoluble +way with Carlyle's individuality and his power as an artist. They are +not to be imitated, but he would be much less than he is without them, +and they act by their very strength and pungency as a preservative of +his work. That of all the political pamphlets which the new era of +reform occasioned, his, which were the least in sympathy with it and are +the furthest off the main stream of our political thinking now, alone +continue to be read, must be laid down not only to the prophetic fervour +and fire of their inspiration but to the dark and violent magic of their +style. + + + + +CHAPTER IX + + +THE NOVEL + +(1) + +The faculty for telling stories is the oldest artistic faculty in the +world, and the deepest implanted in the heart of man. Before the rudest +cave-pictures were scratched on the stone, the story-teller, it is not +unreasonable to suppose, was plying his trade. All early poetry is +simply story-telling in verse. Stories are the first literary interest +of the awakening mind of a child. As that is so, it is strange that the +novel, which of all literary ways of story-telling seems closest to the +unstudied tale-spinning of talk, should be the late discovery that it +is. Of all the main forms into which the literary impulse moulds the +stuff of imagination, the novel is the last to be devised. The drama +dates from prehistoric times, so does the epic, the ballad and the +lyric. The novel, as we know it, dates practically speaking from 1740. +What is the reason it is so late in appearing? + +The answer is simply that there seems no room for good drama and good +fiction at the same time in literature; drama and novels cannot exist +side by side, and the novel had to wait for the decadence of the drama +before it could appear and triumph. If one were to make a table of +succession for the various kinds of literature as they have been used +naturally and spontaneously (not academically), the order would be the +epic, the drama, the novel; and it would be obvious at once that the +order stood for something more than chronological succession, and that +literature in its function as a representation and criticism of life +passed from form to form in the search of greater freedom, greater +subtlety, and greater power. At present we seem to be at the climax of +the third stage in this development; there are signs that the fourth is +on the way, and that it will be a return to drama, not to the old, +formal, ordered kind, but, something new and freer, ready to gather up +and interpret what there is of newness and freedom in the spirit of man +and the society in which he lives. + +The novel, then, had to wait for the drama's decline, but there was +literary story-telling long before that. There were mediaeval romances +in prose and verse; Renaissance pastoral tales, and stories of +adventure; collections, plenty of them, of short stories like +Boccaccio's, and those in Painter's _Palace of Pleasure_. But none of +these, not even romances which deal in moral and sententious advice like +_Euphues_, approach the essence of the novel as we know it. They are all +(except _Euphues_, which is simply a framework of travel for a book of +aphorisms) simple and objective; they set forth incidents or series of +incidents; long or short they are anecdotes only--they take no account +of character. It was impossible we should have the novel as distinct +from the tale, till stories acquired a subjective interest for us; till +we began to think about character and to look at actions not only +outwardly, but within at their springs. + +As has been stated early in this book, it was in the seventeenth century +that this interest in character was first wakened. Shakespeare had +brought to the drama, which before him was concerned with actions viewed +outwardly, a psychological interest; he had taught that "character is +destiny," and that men's actions and fates spring not from outward +agencies, but from within in their own souls. The age began to take a +deep and curious interest in men's lives; biography was written for the +first time and autobiography; it is the great period of memoir-writing +both in England and France; authors like Robert Burton came, whose +delight it was to dig down into human nature in search for oddities and +individualities of disposition; humanity as the great subject of enquiry +for all men, came to its own. All this has a direct bearing on the birth +of the novel. One transient form of literature in the seventeenth +century--the Character--is an ancestor in the direct line. The +collections of them--Earle's _Microcosmography_ is the best--are not +very exciting reading, and they never perhaps quite succeeded in +naturalizing a form borrowed from the later age of Greece, but their +importance in the history of the novel to come is clear. Take them and +add them to the story of adventure--_i.e._, introduce each fresh person +in your plot with a description in the character form, and the step you +have made towards the novel is enormous; you have given to plot which +was already there, the added interest of character. + +That, however, was not quite how the thing worked in actual fact. At the +heels of the "Character" came the periodical essay of Addison and +Steele. Their interest in contemporary types was of the same quality as +Earle's or Hall's, but they went a different way to work. Where these +compressed and cultivated a style which was staccato and epigrammatic, +huddling all the traits of their subject in short sharp sentences that +follow each other with all the brevity and curtness of items in a +prescription, Addison and Steele observed a more artistic plan. They +made, as it were, the prescription up, adding one ingredient after +another slowly as the mixture dissolved. You are introduced to Sir Roger +de Coverley, and to a number of other typical people, and then in a +series of essays which if they were disengaged from their setting would +be to all intents a novel and a fine one, you are made aware one by one +of different traits in his character and those of his friends, each +trait generally enshrined in an incident which illustrates it; you get +to know them, that is, gradually, as you would in real life, and not all +in a breath, in a series of compressed statements, as is the way of the +character writers. With the Coverley essays in the _Spectator_, the +novel in one of its forms--that in which an invisible and all knowing +narrator tells a story in which some one else whose character he lays +bare for us is the hero--is as good as achieved. + +Another manner of fiction--the autobiographical--had already been +invented. It grew directly out of the public interest in autobiography, +and particularly in the tales of their voyages which the discoverers +wrote and published on their return from their adventures. Its +establishment in literature was the work of two authors, Bunyan and +Defoe. The books of Bunyan, whether they are told in the first person or +no, are and were meant to be autobiographical; their interest is a +subjective interest. Here is a man who endeavours to interest you, not +in the character of some other person he has imagined or observed, but +in himself. His treatment of it is characteristic of the awakening +talent for fiction of his time. _The Pilgrim's Progress_ is begun as an +allegory, and so continues for a little space till the story takes hold +of the author. When it does, whether he knew it or not, allegory goes to +the winds. But the autobiographical form of fiction in its highest art +is the creation of Defoe. He told stories of adventure, incidents +modelled on real life as many tellers of tales had done before him, but +to the form as he found it he super-added a psychological interest--the +interest of the character of the narrator. He contrived to observe in +his writing a scrupulous and realistic fidelity and appropriateness to +the conditions in which the story was to be told. We learn about +Crusoe's island, for instance, gradually just as Crusoe learns of it +himself, though the author is careful by taking his narrator up to a +high point of vantage the day after his arrival, that we shall learn +the essentials of it, as long as verisimilitude is not sacrificed, as +soon as possible. It is the paradox of the English novel that these our +earliest efforts in fiction were meant, unlike the romances which +preceded them, to pass for truth. Defoe's _Journal of the Plague Year_ +was widely taken as literal fact, and it is still quoted as such +occasionally by rash though reputable historians. So that in England the +novel began with realism as it has culminated, and across two centuries +Defoe and the "naturalists" join hands. Defoe, it is proper also in this +place to notice, fixed the peculiar form of the historical novel. In his +_Memoirs of a Cavalier_, the narrative of an imaginary person's +adventures in a historical setting is interspersed with the entrance of +actual historical personages, exactly the method of historical romancing +which was brought to perfection by Sir Walter Scott. + + +(2) + +In the eighteenth century came the decline of the drama for which the +novel had been waiting. By 1660 the romantic drama of Elizabeth's time +was dead; the comedy of the Restoration which followed, witty and +brilliant though it was, reflected a society too licentious and +artificial to secure it permanence; by the time of Addison play-writing +had fallen to journey-work, and the theatre to openly expressed +contempt. When Richardson and Fielding published their novels there was +nothing to compete with fiction in the popular taste. It would seem as +though the novel had been waiting for this favourable circumstance. In a +sudden burst of prolific inventiveness, which can be paralleled in all +letters only by the period of Marlowe and Shakespeare, masterpiece after +masterpiece poured from the press. Within two generations, besides +Richardson and Fielding came Sterne and Goldsmith and Smollett and Fanny +Burney in naturalism, and Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe in the new +way of romance. Novels by minor authors were published in thousands as +well. The novel, in fact, besides being the occasion of literature of +the highest class, attracted by its lucrativeness that under-current of +journey-work authorship which had hitherto busied itself in poetry or +plays. Fiction has been its chief occupation ever since. + +Anything like a detailed criticism or even a bare narrative of this +voluminous literature is plainly impossible without the limits of a +single chapter. Readers must go for it to books on the subject. It is +possible here merely to draw attention to those authors to whom the +English novel as a more or less fixed form is indebted for its peculiar +characteristics. Foremost amongst these are Richardson and Fielding; +after them there is Walter Scott. After him, in the nineteenth century, +Dickens and Meredith and Mr. Hardy; last of all the French realists and +the new school of romance. To one or other of these originals all the +great authors in the long list of English novelists owe their method +and their choice of subject-matter. + +With Defoe fiction gained verisimilitude, it ceased to deal with the +incredible; it aimed at exhibiting, though in strange and memorable +circumstances, the workings of the ordinary mind. It is Richardson's +main claim to fame that he contrived a form of novel which exhibited an +ordinary mind working in normal circumstances, and that he did this with +a minuteness which till then had never been thought of and has not since +been surpassed. His talent is very exactly a microscopical talent; under +it the common stuff of life separated from its surroundings and +magnified beyond previous knowledge, yields strange and new and deeply +interesting sights. He carried into the study of character which had +begun in Addison with an eye to externals and eccentricities, a minute +faculty of inspection which watched and recorded unconscious mental and +emotional processes. + +To do this he employed a method which was, in effect, a compromise +between that of the autobiography, and that of the tale told by an +invisible narrator. The weakness of the autobiography is that it can +write only of events within the knowledge of the supposed speaker, and +that consequently the presentation of all but one of the characters of +the book is an external presentation. We know, that is, of Man Friday +only what Crusoe could, according to realistic appropriateness, tell us +about him. We do not know what he thought or felt within himself. On +the other hand the method of invisible narration had not at his time +acquired the faculty which it possesses now of doing Friday's thinking +aloud or exposing fully the workings of his mind. So that Richardson, +whose interests were psychological, whose strength and talent lay in the +presentation of the states of mind appropriate to situations of passion +or intrigue, had to look about him for a new form, and that form he +found in the novel of letters. In a way, if the end of a novel be the +presentation not of action, but of the springs of action; if the +external event is in it always of less importance than the emotions +which conditioned it, and the emotions which it set working, the novel +of letters is the supreme manner for fiction. Consider the possibilities +of it; there is a series of events in which A, B, and C are concerned. +Not only can the outward events be narrated as they appeared to all +three separately by means of letters from each to another, or to a +fourth party, but the motives of each and the emotions which each +experiences as a result of the actions of the others or them all, can be +laid bare. No other method can wind itself so completely into the +psychological intricacies and recesses which lie behind every event. Yet +the form, as everybody knows, has not been popular; even an expert +novel-reader could hardly name off-hand more than two or three examples +of it since Richardson's day. Why is this? Well, chiefly it is because +the mass of novelists have not had Richardson's knowledge of, or +interest in, the psychological under side of life, and those who have, +as, amongst the moderns, Henry James, have devised out of the convention +of the invisible narrator a method by which they can with greater +economy attain in practice fairly good results. For the mere narration +of action in which the study of character plays a subsidiary part, it +was, of course, from the beginning impossible. Scott turned aside at the +height of his power to try it in "Redgauntlet"; he never made a second +attempt. + +For Richardson's purpose, it answered admirably, and he used it with +supreme effect. Particularly he excelled in that side of the novelist's +craft which has ever since (whether because he started it or not) proved +the subtlest and most attractive, the presentation of women. Richardson +was one of those men who are not at their ease in other men's society, +and whom other men, to put it plainly, are apt to regard as coxcombs and +fools. But he had a genius for the friendship and confidence of women. +In his youth he wrote love-letters for them. His first novel grew out of +a plan to exhibit in a series of letters the quality of feminine virtue, +and in its essence (though with a ludicrous, and so to speak +"kitchen-maidish" misunderstanding of his own sex) adheres to the plan. +His second novel, which designs to set up a model man against the +monster of iniquity in _Pamela_, is successful only so far as it +exhibits the thoughts and feelings of the heroine whom he ultimately +marries. His last, _Clarissa Harlowe_ is a masterpiece of sympathetic +divination into the feminine mind. _Clarissa_ is, as has been well said, +the "Eve of fiction, the prototype of the modern heroine"; feminine +psychology as good as unknown before (Shakespeare's women being the +"Fridays" of a highly intelligent Crusoe) has hardly been brought +further since. But _Clarissa_ is more than mere psychology; whether she +represents a contemporary tendency or whether Richardson made her so, +she starts a new epoch. "This," says Henley, "is perhaps her finest +virtue as it is certainly her greatest charm; that until she set the +example, woman in literature as a self-suffering individuality, as an +existence endowed with equal rights to independence--of choice, +volition, action--with man had not begun to be." She had not begun to be +it in life either. + +What Richardson did for the subtlest part of a novelist's business, his +dealings with psychology, Fielding did for the most necessary part of +it, the telling of the story. Before him hardly any story had been told +well; even if it had been plain and clear as in Bunyan and Defoe it had +lacked the emphasis, the light and shade of skilful grouping. On the +"picaresque" (so the autobiographical form was called abroad) convention +of a journey he grafted a structure based in its outline on the form of +the ancient epic. It proved extraordinarily suitable for his purpose. +Not only did it make it easy for him to lighten his narrative with +excursions in a heightened style, burlesquing his origins, but it gave +him at once the right attitude to his material. He told his story as +one who knew everything; could tell conversations and incidents as he +conceived them happening, with no violation of credibility, nor any +strain on his reader's imagination, and without any impropriety could +interpose in his own person, pointing things to the reader which might +have escaped his attention, pointing at parallels he might have missed, +laying bare the irony or humour beneath a situation. He allowed himself +digressions and episodes, told separate tales in the middle of the +action, introduced, as in Partridge's visit to the theatre, the added +piquancy of topical allusion; in fact he did anything he chose. And he +laid down that free form of the novel which is characteristically +English, and from which, in its essence, no one till the modern realists +has made a serious departure. + +In the matter of his novels, he excels by reason of a Shakespearean +sense of character and by the richness and rightness of his faculty of +humour. He had a quick eye for contemporary types, and an amazing power +of building out of them men and women whose individuality is full and +rounded. You do not feel as you do with Richardson that his fabric is +spun silk-worm-wise out of himself; on the contrary you know it to be +the fruit of a gentle and observant nature, and a stock of fundamental +human sympathy. His gallery of portraits, Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams, +Parson Trulliber, Jones, Blifil, Partridge, Sophia and her father and +all the rest are each of them minute studies of separate people; they +live and move according to their proper natures; they are conceived not +from without but from within. Both Richardson and Fielding were +conscious of a moral intention; but where Richardson is sentimental, +vulgar, and moral only so far as it is moral (as in _Pamela_), to +inculcate selling at the highest price or (as in _Grandison_) to avoid +temptations which never come in your way, Fielding's morality is fresh +and healthy, and (though not quite free from the sentimentality of +scoundrelism) at bottom sane and true. His knowledge of the world kept +him right. His acquaintance with life is wide, and his insight is keen +and deep. His taste is almost as catholic as Shakespeare's own, and the +life he knew, and which other men knew, he handles for the first time +with the freedom and imagination of an artist. + +Each of the two--Fielding and Richardson--had his host of followers. +Abroad Richardson won immediate recognition; in France Diderot went so +far as to compare him with Homer and Moses! He gave the first impulse to +modern French fiction. At home, less happily, he set going the +sentimental school, and it was only when that had passed away that--in +the delicate and subtle character-study of Miss Austen--his influence +comes to its own. Miss Austen carried a step further, and with an +observation which was first hand and seconded by intuitive knowledge, +Richardson's analysis of the feminine mind, adding to it a delicate and +finely humorous feeling for character in both sexes which was all her +own. Fielding's imitators (they number each in his own way, and with his +own graces or talent added his rival Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith) +kept the way which leads to Thackeray and Dickens--the main road of the +English Novel. + +That road was widened two ways by Sir Walter Scott. The historical +novel, which had been before his day either an essay in anachronism with +nothing historical in it but the date, or a laborious and uninspired +compilation of antiquarian research, took form and life under his hands. +His wide reading, stored as it was in a marvellously retentive memory, +gave him all the background he needed to achieve a historical setting, +and allowed him to concentrate his attention on the actual telling of +his story; to which his genial and sympathetic humanity and his quick +eye for character gave a humorous depth and richness that was all his +own. It is not surprising that he made the historical novel a literary +vogue all over Europe. In the second place, he began in his novels of +Scottish character a sympathetic study of nationality. He is not, +perhaps, a fair guide to contemporary conditions; his interests were too +romantic and too much in the past to catch the rattle of the looms that +caught the ear of Galt, and if we want a picture of the great fact of +modern Scotland, its industrialisation, it is to Galt we must go. But in +his comprehension of the essential character of the people he has no +rival; in it his historical sense seconded his observation, and the two +mingling gave us the pictures whose depth of colour and truth make his +Scottish novels, _Old Mortality, The Antiquary, Redgauntlet_, the +greatest things of their kind in literature. + + +(3) + +The peculiarly national style of fiction founded by Fielding and carried +on by his followers reached its culminating point in _Vanity Fair_. In +it the reader does not seem to be simply present at the unfolding of a +plot the end of which is constantly present to the mind of the author +and to which he is always consciously working, every incident having a +bearing on the course of the action; rather he feels himself to be the +spectator of a piece of life which is too large and complex to be under +the control of a creator, which moves to its close not under the +impulsion of a directing hand, but independently impelled by causes +evolved in the course of its happening. With this added complexity goes +a more frequent interposition of the author in his own person--one of +the conventions as we have seen of this national style. Thackeray is +present to his readers, indeed, not as the manager who pulls the strings +and sets the puppets in motion, but as an interpreter who directs the +reader's attention to the events on which he lays stress, and makes them +a starting-point for his own moralising. This persistent +moralizing--sham cynical, real sentimental--this thumping of death-bed +pillows as in the dreadful case of Miss Crawley, makes Thackeray's use +of the personal interposition almost less effective than that of any +other novelist. Already while he was doing it, Dickens had conquered the +public; and the English novel was making its second fresh start. + +He is an innovator in more ways than one. In the first place he is the +earliest novelist to practise a conscious artistry of plot. _The Mystery +of Edwin Drood_ remains mysterious, but those who essay to conjecture +the end of that unfinished story have at last the surety that its end, +full worked out in all its details, had been in its author's mind before +he set pen to paper. His imagination was as diligent and as disciplined +as his pen, Dickens' practice in this matter could not be better put +than in his own words, when he describes himself as "in the first stage +of a new book, which consists in going round and round the idea, as you +see a bird in his cage go about and about his sugar before he touches +it." That his plots are always highly elaborated is the fruit of this +preliminary disciplined exercise of thought. The method is familiar to +many novelists now; Dickens was the first to put it into practice. In +the second place he made a new departure by his frankly admitted +didacticism and by the skill with which in all but two or three of his +books--_Bleak House_, perhaps, and _Little Dorrit_--he squared his +purpose with his art. Lastly he made the discovery which has made him +immortal. In him for the first time the English novel produced an +author who dug down into the masses of the people for his subjects; +apprehended them in all their inexhaustible character and humour and +pathos, and reproduced them with a lively and loving artistic skill. + +Dickens has, of course, serious faults. In particular, readers +emancipated by lapse of time from the enslavement of the first +enthusiasm, have quarrelled with the mawkishness and sentimentality of +his pathos, and with the exaggeration of his studies of character. It +has been said of him, as it has of Thackeray, that he could not draw a +"good woman" and that Agnes Copperfield, like Amelia Sedley, is a very +doll-like type of person. To critics of this kind it may be retorted +that though "good" and "bad" are categories relevant to melodrama, they +apply very ill to serious fiction, and that indeed to the characters of +any of the novelists--the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell or the like--who lay +bare character with fullness and intimacy, they could not well be +applied at all. The faultiness of them in Dickens is less than in +Thackeray, for in Dickens they are only incident to the scheme, which +lies in the hero (his heroes are excellent) and in the grotesque +characters, whereas in his rival they are in the theme itself. For his +pathos, not even his warmest admirer could perhaps offer a satisfactory +case. The charge of exaggeration however is another matter. To the +person who complains that he has never met Dick Swiveller or Micawber or +Mrs. Gamp the answer is simply Turner's to the sceptical critic of his +sunset, "Don't you wish you could?" To the other, who objects more +plausibly to Dickens's habit of attaching to each of his characters some +label which is either so much flaunted all through that you cannot see +the character at all or else mysteriously and unaccountably disappears +when the story begins to grip the author, Dickens has himself offered an +amusing and convincing defence. In the preface to _Pickwick_ he answers +those who criticised the novel on the ground that Pickwick began by +being purely ludicrous and developed into a serious and sympathetic +individuality, by pointing to the analogous process which commonly takes +place in actual human relationships. You begin a new acquaintanceship +with perhaps not very charitable prepossessions; these later a deeper +and better knowledge removes, and where you have before seen an +idiosyncrasy you come to love a character. It is ingenious and it helps +to explain Mrs. Nickleby, the Pecksniff daughters, and many another. +Whether it is true or not (and it does not explain the faultiness of +such pictures as Carker and his kind) there can be no doubt that this +trick in Dickens of beginning with a salient impression and working +outward to a fuller conception of character is part at least of the +reason of his enormous hold upon his readers. No man leads you into the +mazes of his invention so easily and with such a persuasive hand. + +The great novelists who were writing contemporarily with him--the +Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot--it is impossible to deal with +here, except to say that the last is indisputably, because of her +inability to fuse completely art and ethics, inferior to Mrs. Gaskell or +to either of the Bronte sisters. Nor of the later Victorians who added +fresh variety to the national style can the greatest, Meredith, be more +than mentioned for the exquisiteness of his comic spirit and the brave +gallery of English men and women he has given us in what is, perhaps, +fundamentally the most English thing in fiction since Fielding wrote. +For our purpose Mr. Hardy, though he is a less brilliant artist, is more +to the point. His novels brought into England the contemporary pessimism +of Schopenhaur and the Russians, and found a home for it among the +English peasantry. Convinced that in the upper classes character could +be studied and portrayed only subjectively because of the artificiality +of a society which prevented its outlet in action, he turned to the +peasantry because with them conduct is the direct expression of the +inner life. Character could be shown working, therefore, not +subjectively but in the act, if you chose a peasant subject. His +philosophy, expressed in this medium, is sombre. In his novels you can +trace a gradual realization of the defects of natural laws and the +quandary men are put to by their operation. Chance, an irritating and +trifling series of coincidences, plays the part of fate. Nature seems to +enter with the hopelessness of man's mood. Finally the novelist turns +against life itself. "Birth," he says, speaking of Tess, "seemed to her +an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion whose gratuitousness nothing +in the result seemed to justify and at best could only palliate." It is +strange to find pessimism in a romantic setting; strange, too, to find a +paganism which is so little capable of light or joy. + + +(4) + +The characteristic form of English fiction, that in which the requisite +illusion of the complexity and variety of life is rendered by +discursiveness, by an author's licence to digress, to double back on +himself, to start may be in the middle of a story and work subsequently +to the beginning and the end; in short by his power to do whatever is +most expressive of his individuality, found a rival in the last twenty +years of the nineteenth century in the French Naturalistic or Realist +school, in which the illusion of life is got by a studied and sober +veracity of statement, and by the minute accumulation of detail. To the +French Naturalists a novel approached in importance the work of a man of +science, and they believed it ought to be based on documentary evidence, +as a scientific work would be. Above all it ought not to allow itself to +be coloured by the least gloss of imagination or idealism; it ought +never to shrink from a confrontation of the naked fact. On the contrary +it was its business to carry it to the dissecting table and there +minutely examine everything that lay beneath its surface. + +The school first became an English possession in the early translations +of the work of Zola; its methods were transplanted into English fiction +by Mr. George Moore. From his novels, both in passages of direct +statement and in the light of his practice, it is possible to gather +together the materials of a manifesto of the English Naturalistic +school. The naturalists complained that English fiction lacked +construction in the strictest sense; they found in the English novel a +remarkable absence of organic wholeness; it did not fulfil their first +and broadest canon of subject-matter--by which a novel has to deal in +the first place with a single and rhythmical series of events; it was +too discursive. They made this charge against English fiction; they also +retorted the charge brought by native writers and their readers against +the French of foulness, sordidness and pessimism in their view of life. +"We do not," says a novelist in one of Mr. Moore's books, "we do not +always choose what you call unpleasant subjects, but we do try to get to +the roots of things; and the basis of life being material and not +spiritual, the analyst sooner or later finds himself invariably handling +what this sentimental age calls coarse." "The novel," says the same +character, "if it be anything is contemporary history, an exact and +complete reproduction of the social surroundings of the age we live in." +That succinctly is the naturalistic theory of the novel as a work of +science--that as the history of a nation lies hidden often in social +wrongs and in domestic grief as much as in the movements of parties or +dynasties, the novelist must do for the former what the historian does +for the latter. It is his business in the scheme of knowledge of his +time. + +But the naturalists believed quite as profoundly in the novel as a work +of art. They claimed for their careful pictures of the grey and sad and +sordid an artistic worth, varying in proportion to the intensity of the +emotion in which the picture was composed and according to the picture's +truth, but in its essence just as real and permanent as the artistic +worth of romance. "Seen from afar," writes Mr. Moore, "all things in +nature are of equal worth; and the meanest things, when viewed with the +eyes of God, are raised to heights of tragic awe which conventionality +would limit to the deaths of kings and patriots." On such a lofty theory +they built their treatment and their style. It is a mistake to suppose +that the realist school deliberately cultivates the sordid or shocking. +Examine in this connection Mr. Moore's _Mummer's Wife_, our greatest +English realist novel, and for the matter of that one of the supreme +things in English fiction, and you will see that the scrupulous fidelity +of the author's method, though it denies him those concessions to a +sentimentalist or romantic view of life which are the common implements +of fiction, denies him no less the extremities of horror or +loathsomeness. The heroine sinks into the miserable squalor of a +dipsomaniac and dies from a drunkard's disease, but her end is shown as +the ineluctable consequence of her life, its early greyness and +monotony, the sudden shock of a new and strange environment and the +resultant weakness of will which a morbid excitability inevitably +brought about. The novel, that is to say, deals with a "rhythmical +series of events and follows them to their conclusion"; it gets at the +roots of things; it tells us of something which we know to be true in +life whether we care to read it in fiction or not. There is nothing in +it of sordidness for sordidness' sake nor have the realists any +philosophy of an unhappy ending. In this case the ending is unhappy +because the sequence of events admitted of no other solution; in others +the ending is happy or merely neutral as the preceding story decides. If +what one may call neutral endings predominate, it is because they +also--notoriously--predominate in life. But the question of unhappiness +or its opposite has nothing whatever to do with the larger matter of +beauty; it is the triumph of the realists that at their best they +discovered a new beauty in things, the loveliness that lies in obscure +places, the splendour of sordidness, humility, and pain. They have +taught us that beauty, like the Spirit, blows where it lists and we know +from them that the antithesis between realism and idealism is only on +their lower levels; at their summits they unite and are one. No true +realist but is an idealist too. + +Most of what is best in English fiction since has been directly +occasioned by their work; Gissing and Mr. Arnold Bennett may be +mentioned as two authors who are fundamentally realist in their +conception of the art of the novel, and the realist ideal partakes in a +greater or less degree in the work of nearly all our eminent novelists +to-day. But realism is not and cannot be interesting to the great +public; it portrays people as they are, not as they would like to be, +and where they are, not where they would like to be. It gives no +background for day-dreaming. Now literature (to repeat what has been +than more once stated earlier in this book) is a way of escape from life +as well as an echo or mirror of it, and the novel as the form of +literature which more than any other men read for pleasure, is the main +avenue for this escape. So that alongside this invasion of realism it is +not strange that there grew a revival in romance. + +The main agent of it, Robert Louis Stevenson, had the romantic strain in +him intensified by the conditions under which he worked; a +weak and anaemic man, he loved bloodshed as a cripple loves +athletics--passionately and with the intimate enthusiasm of make-believe +which an imaginative man can bring to bear on the contemplation of what +can never be his. His natural attraction for "redness and juice" in life +was seconded by a delightful and fantastic sense of the boundless +possibilities of romance in every-day things. To a realist a hansom-cab +driver is a man who makes twenty-five shillings a week, lives in a back +street in Pimlico, has a wife who drinks and children who grow up with +an alcoholic taint; the realist will compare his lot with other +cab-drivers, and find what part of his life is the product of the +cab-driving environment, and on that basis he will write his book. To +Stevenson and to the romanticist generally, a hansom cab-driver is a +mystery behind whose apparent commonplaceness lie magic possibilities +beyond all telling; not one but may be the agent of the Prince of +Bohemia, ready to drive you off to some mad and magic adventure in a +street which is just as commonplace to the outward eye as the cab-driver +himself, but which implicates by its very deceitful commonness whole +volumes of romance. The novel-reader to whom _Demos_ was the repetition +of what he had seen and known, and what had planted sickness in his +soul, found the _New Arabian Nights_ a refreshing miracle. Stevenson had +discovered that modern London had its possibilities of romance. To these +two elements of his romantic equipment must be added a third--travel. +Defoe never left England, and other early romanticists less gifted with +invention than he wrote from the mind's eye and from books. To +Stevenson, and to his successor Mr. Kipling, whose "discovery" of India +is one of the salient facts of modern English letters, and to Mr. Conrad +belongs the credit of teaching novelists to draw on experience for the +scenes they seek to present. A fourth element in the equipment of modern +romanticism--that which draws its effects from the "miracles" of modern +science, has been added since by Mr. H. G. Wells, in whose latest work +the realistic and romantic schools seem to have united. + + + + +CHAPTER X + + +THE PRESENT AGE + +We have carried our study down to the death of Ruskin and included in it +authors like Swinburne and Meredith who survived till recently; and in +discussing the novel we have included men like Kipling and Hardy--living +authors. It would be possible and perhaps safer to stop there and make +no attempt to bring writers later than these into our survey. To do so +is to court an easily and quickly stated objection. One is anticipating +the verdict of posterity. How can we who are contemporaries tell whether +an author's work is permanent or no? + +Of course, in a sense the point of view expressed by these questions is +true enough. It is always idle to anticipate the verdict of posterity. +Remember Matthew Arnold's prophecy that at the end of the nineteenth +century Wordsworth and Byron would be the two great names in Romantic +poetry. We are ten years and more past that date now, and so far as +Byron is concerned, at any rate, there is no sign that Arnold's +prediction has come true. But the obvious fact that we cannot do our +grandchildren's thinking for them, is no reason why we should refuse to +think for ourselves. No notion is so destructive to the formation of a +sound literary taste as the notion that books become literature only +when their authors are dead. Round us men and women are putting into +plays and poetry and novels the best that they can or know. They are +writing not for a dim and uncertain future but for us, and on our +recognition and welcome they depend, sometimes for their livelihood, +always for the courage which carries them on to fresh endeavour. +Literature is an ever-living and continuous thing, and we do it less +than its due service if we are so occupied reading Shakespeare and +Milton and Scott that we have no time to read Mr. Yeats, Mr. Shaw or Mr. +Wells. Students of literature must remember that classics are being +manufactured daily under their eyes, and that on their sympathy and +comprehension depends whether an author receives the success he merits +when he is alive to enjoy it. + +The purpose of this chapter, then, is to draw a rough picture of some of +the lines or schools of contemporary writing--of the writing mainly, +though not altogether, of living authors. It is intended to indicate +some characteristics of the general trend or drift of literary effort as +a whole. The most remarkable feature of the age, as far as writing is +concerned, is without doubt its inattention to poetry. Tennyson was a +popular author; his books sold in thousands; his lines passed into that +common conversational currency of unconscious quotation which is the +surest testimony to the permeation of a poet's influence. Even Browning, +though his popularity came late, found himself carried into all the +nooks and corners of the reading public. His robust and masculine +morality, understood at last, or expounded by a semi-priestly class of +interpreters, made him popular with those readers--and they are the +majority--who love their reading to convey a moral lesson, just as +Tennyson's reflection of his time's distraction between science and +religion endeared them to those who found in him an answer or at least +an echo to their own perplexities. A work widely different from either +of these, Fitzgerald's _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_, shared and has +probably exceeded their popularity for similar reasons. Its easy +pessimism and cult of pleasure, its delightful freedom from any demand +for continuous thought from its readers, its appeal to the indolence and +moral flaccidity which is implicit in all men, all contributed to its +immense vogue; and among people who perhaps did not fully understand it +but were merely lulled by its sonorousness, a knowledge of it has passed +for the insignia of a love of literature and the possession of literary +taste. But after Fitzgerald--who? What poet has commanded the ear of the +reading public or even a fraction of it? Not Swinburne certainly, partly +because of his undoubted difficulty, partly because of a suspicion held +of his moral and religious tenets, largely from material reasons quite +unconnected with the quality of his work; not Morris, nor his +followers; none of the so-called minor poets whom we shall notice +presently--poets who have drawn the moods that have nourished their work +from the decadents of France. Probably the only writer of verse who is +at the same time a poet and has acquired a large popularity and public +influence is Mr. Kipling. His work as a novelist we mentioned in the +last chapter. It remains to say something of his achievements in verse. + +Let us grant at once his faults. He can be violent, and over-rhetorical; +he belabours you with sense impressions, and with the polysyllabic +rhetoric he learned from Swinburne--and (though this is not the place +for a discussion of political ideas) he can offend by the sentimental +brutalism which too often passes for patriotism in his poetry. Not that +this last represents the total impression of his attitude as an +Englishman. His later work in poetry and prose, devoted to the +reconstruction of English history, is remarkable for the justness and +saneness of its temper. There are other faults--a lack of sureness in +taste is one--that could be mentioned but they do not affect the main +greatness of his work. He is great because he discovered a new +subject-matter, and because of the white heat of imagination which in +his best things he brought to bear on it and by which he transposed it +into poetry. It is Mr. Kipling's special distinction that the apparatus +of modern civilization--steam engines, and steamships, and telegraph +lines, and the art of flight--take on in his hands a poetic quality as +authentic and inspiring as any that ever was cast over the implements of +other and what the mass of men believe to have been more picturesque +days. Romance is in the present, so he teaches us, not in the past, and +we do it wrong to leave it only the territory we have ourselves +discarded in the advance of the race. That and the great discovery of +India--an India misunderstood for his own purposes no doubt, but still +the first presentiment of an essential fact in our modern history as a +people--give him the hold that he has, and rightly, over the minds of +his readers. + +It is in a territory poles apart from Mr. Kipling's that the main stream +of romantic poetry flows. Apart from the gravely delicate and scholarly +work of Mr. Bridges, and the poetry of some others who work separately +away from their fellows, English romantic poetry has concentrated itself +into one chief school--the school of the "Celtic Revival" of which the +leader is Mr. W.B. Yeats. Two sources went to its making. In its +inception, it arose out of a group of young poets who worked in a +conscious imitation of the methods of the French decadents; chiefly of +Baudelaire and Verlaine. As a whole their work was merely imitative and +not very profound, but each of them--Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson, +who are both now dead, and others who are still living--produced enough +to show that they had at their command a vein of poetry that might have +deepened and proved more rich had they gone on working it. One of them, +Mr. W.B. Yeats, by his birth and his reading in Irish legend and +folklore, became possessed of a subject-matter denied to his fellows, +and it is from the combination of the mood of the decadents with the +dreaminess and mystery of Celtic tradition and romance--a combination +which came to pass in his poetry--that the Celtic school has sprung. In +a sense it has added to the territory explored by Coleridge and Scott +and Morris a new province. Only nothing could be further from the +objectivity of these men, than the way in which the Celtic school +approaches its material. Its stories are clear to itself, it may be, but +not to its readers. Deirdre and Conchubar, and Angus and Maeve and +Dectora and all the shadowy figures in them scarcely become embodied. +Their lives and deaths and loves and hates are only a scheme on which +they weave a delicate and dim embroidery of pure poetry--of love and +death and old age and the passing of beauty and all the sorrows that +have been since the world began and will be till the world ends. If Mr. +Kipling is of the earth earthy, if the clangour and rush of the world is +in everything he writes, Mr. Yeats and his school live consciously +sequestered and withdrawn, and the world never breaks in on their +ghostly troubles or their peace. Poetry never fails to relate itself to +its age; if it is not with it, it is against it; it is never merely +indifferent. The poetry of these men is the denial, passionately made, +of everything the world prizes. While such a denial is sincere, as in +the best of them, then the verses they make are true and fine. But when +it is assumed, as in some of their imitators, then the work they did is +not true poetry. + +But the literary characteristic of the present age--the one which is +most likely to differentiate it from its predecessor, is the revival of +the drama. When we left it before the Commonwealth the great English +literary school of playwriting--the romantic drama--was already dead. It +has had since no second birth. There followed after it the heroic +tragedy of Dryden and Shadwell--a turgid, declamatory form of art +without importance--and two brilliant comic periods, the earlier and +greater that of Congreve and Wycherley, the later more sentimental with +less art and vivacity, that of Goldsmith and Sheridan. With Sheridan the +drama as a literary force died a second time. It has been born again +only in our own day. It is, of course, unnecessary to point out that the +writing of plays did not cease in the interval; it never does cease. The +production of dramatic journey-work has been continuous since the +re-opening of the theatres in 1660, and it is carried on as plentifully +as ever at this present time. Only side by side with it there has grown +up a new literary drama, and gradually the main stream of artistic +endeavour which for nearly a century has preoccupied itself with the +novel almost to the exclusion of other forms of art, has turned back to +the stage as its channel to articulation and an audience. An influence +from abroad set it in motion. The plays of Ibsen--produced, the best of +them, in the eighties of last century--came to England in the nineties. +In a way, perhaps, they were misunderstood by their worshippers hardly +less than by their enemies, but all excrescences of enthusiasm apart +they taught men a new and freer approach to moral questions, and a new +and freer dramatic technique. Where plays had been constructed on a +journeyman plan evolved by Labiche and Sardou--mid-nineteenth century +writers in France--a plan delighting in symmetry, close-jointedness, +false correspondences, an impossible use of coincidence, and a quite +unreal complexity and elaboration, they become bolder and less +artificial, more close to the likelihoods of real life. The gravity of +the problems with which they set themselves to deal heightened their +influence. In England men began to ask themselves whether the theatre +here too could not be made an avenue towards the discussion of living +difficulties, and then arose the new school of dramatists--of whom the +first and most remarkable is Mr. George Bernard Shaw. In his earlier +plays he set himself boldly to attack established conventions, and to +ask his audiences to think for themselves. _Arms and the Man_ dealt a +blow at the cheap romanticism with which a peace-living public invests +the profession of arms; _The Devil's Disciple_ was a shrewd criticism of +the preposterous self-sacrifice on which melodrama, which is the most +popular non-literary form of play-writing, is commonly based; _Mrs. +Warren's Profession_ made a brave and plain-spoken attempt to drag the +public face to face with the nauseous realities of prostitution; +_Widowers' Houses_ laid bare the sordidness of a Society which bases +itself on the exploitation of the poor for the luxuries of the rich. It +took Mr. Shaw close on ten years to persuade even the moderate number of +men and women who make up a theatre audience that his plays were worth +listening to. But before his final success came he had attained a +substantial popularity with the public which reads. Possibly his early +failure on the stage--mainly due to the obstinacy of playgoers immersed +in a stock tradition--was partly due also to his failure in constructive +power. He is an adept at tying knots and impatient of unravelling them; +his third acts are apt either to evaporate in talk or to find some +unreal and unsatisfactory solution for the complexity he has created. +But constructive weakness apart, his amazing brilliance and fecundity of +dialogue ought to have given him an immediate and lasting grip of the +stage. There has probably never been a dramatist who could invest +conversation with the same vivacity and point, the same combination of +surprise and inevitableness that distinguishes his best work. + +Alongside of Mr. Shaw more immediately successful, and not traceable to +any obvious influence, English or foreign, came the comedies of Oscar +Wilde. For a parallel to their pure delight and high spirits, and to the +exquisite wit and artifice with which they were constructed, one would +have to go back to the dramatists of the Restoration. To Congreve and +his school, indeed, Wilde belongs rather than to any later period. With +his own age he had little in common; he was without interest in its +social and moral problems; when he approved of socialism it was because +in a socialist state the artist might be absolved from the necessity of +carrying a living, and be free to follow his art undisturbed. He loved +to think of himself as symbolic, but all he symbolized was a fantasy of +his own creating; his attitude to his age was decorative and withdrawn +rather than representative. He was the licensed jester to society, and +in that capacity he gave us his plays. Mr. Shaw may be said to have +founded a school; at any rate he gave the start to Mr. Galsworthy and +some lesser dramatists. Wilde founded nothing, and his works remain as +complete and separate as those of the earlier artificial dramatists of +two centuries before. + +Another school of drama, homogeneous and quite apart from the rest, +remains. We have seen how the "Celtic Revival," as the Irish literary +movement has been called by its admirers, gave us a new kind of romantic +poetry. As an offshoot from it there came into being some ten years ago +an Irish school of drama, drawing its inspiration from two sources--the +body of the old Irish legends and the highly individualized and +richly-coloured life of the Irish peasants in the mountains of Wicklow +and of the West, a life, so the dramatists believed, still unspoiled by +the deepening influences of a false system of education and the wear +and tear of a civilization whose values are commercial and not spiritual +or artistic. The school founded its own theatre, trained its own actors, +fashioned its own modes of speech (the chief of which was a frank +restoration of rhythm in the speaking of verse and of cadence in prose), +and having all these things it produced a series of plays all directed +to its special ends, and all composed and written with a special +fidelity to country life as it has been preserved, or to what it +conceived to be the spirit of Irish folk-legend. It reached its zenith +quickly, and as far as the production of plays is concerned, it would +seem to be already in its decline. That is to say, what in the beginning +was a fresh and vivid inspiration caught direct from life has become a +pattern whose colours and shape can be repeated or varied by lesser +writers who take their teaching from the original discoverers. But in +the course of its brief and striking course it produced one great +dramatist--a writer whom already not three years after his death, men +instinctively class with the masters of his art. + +J.M. Synge, in the earlier years of his manhood, lived entirely abroad, +leading the life of a wandering scholar from city to city and country to +country till he was persuaded to give up the Continent and the criticism +and imitation of French literature, to return to England, and to go and +live on the Aran Islands. From that time till his death--some ten +years--he spent a large part of each year amongst the peasantry of the +desolate Atlantic coast and wrote the plays by which his name is known. +His literary output was not large, but he supplied the Irish dramatic +movement with exactly what it needed--a vivid contact with the realities +of life. Not that he was a mere student or transcriber of manners. His +wandering life among many peoples and his study of classical French and +German literature had equipped him as perhaps no other modern dramatist +has been equipped with an imaginative insight and a reach of perception +which enabled him to give universality and depth to his pourtrayal of +the peasant types around him. He got down to the great elemental forces +which throb and pulse beneath the common crises of everyday life and +laid them bare, not as ugly and horrible, but with a sense of their +terror, their beauty and their strength. His earliest play, _The Well of +the Saints_, treats of a sorrow that is as old as Helen of the vanishing +of beauty and the irony of fulfilled desire. The great realities of +death pass through the _Riders to the Sea_, till the language takes on a +kind of simplicity as of written words shrivelling up in a flame. _The +Playboy of the Western World_ is a study of character, terrible in its +clarity, but never losing the savour of imagination and of the +astringency and saltness that was characteristic of his temper. He had +at his command an instrument of incomparable fineness and range in the +language which he fashioned out the speech of the common people amongst +whom he lived. In his dramatic writings this language took on a kind of +rhythm which had the effect of producing a certain remoteness of the +highest possible artistic value. The people of his imagination appear a +little disembodied. They talk with that straightforward and simple kind +of innocency which makes strange and impressive the dialogue of +Maeterlinck's earlier plays. Through it, as Mr. Yeats has said, he saw +the subject-matter of his art "with wise, clear-seeing, unreflecting +eyes--and he preserved the innocence of good art in an age of reasons +and purposes." He had no theory except of his art; no "ideas" and no +"problems"; he did not wish to change anything or to reform anything; +but he saw all his people pass by as before a window, and he heard their +words. This resolute refusal to be interested in or to take account of +current modes of thought has been considered by some to detract from his +eminence. Certainly if by "ideas" we mean current views on society or +morality, he is deficient in them; only his very deficiency brings him +nearer to the great masters of drama--to Ben Johnson, to Cervantes, to +Moliere--even to Shakespeare himself. Probably in no single case amongst +our contemporaries could a high and permanent place in literature be +prophesied with more confidence than in his. + +In the past it has seemed impossible for fiction and the drama, i.e. +serious drama of high literary quality, to flourish, side by side. It +seems as though the best creative minds in any age could find strength +for any one of these two great outlets for the activity of the creative +imagination. In the reign of Elizabeth the drama outshone fiction; in +the reign of Victoria the novel crowded out the drama. There are signs +that a literary era is commencing, in which the drama will again regain +to the full its position as a literature. More and more the bigger +creative artists will turn to a form which by its economy of means to +ends, and the chance it gives not merely of observing but of creating +and displaying character in action, has a more vigorous principle of +life in it than its rival. + + + + +BIBLIOGRAPHY + +It is best to study English literature one period, or, even in the case +of the greatest, one author at a time. In every case the student should +see to it that he knows the _text_ of his authors; a knowledge of what +critics have said about our poets is a poor substitute for a knowledge +of what they have said themselves. Poetry ought to be read slowly and +carefully, and the reader ought to pay his author the compliment of +crediting him with ideas as important and, on occasion, as abstruse as +any in a work of philosophy or abstract science. When the meaning is +mastered, the poem ought to be read a second time aloud to catch the +magic of the language and the verse. The reading of prose presents less +difficulty, but there again the rule is, never allow yourself to be +lulled by sound. Reading is an intellectual and not an hypnotic +exercise. + +The following short bibliography is divided to correspond with the +chapters in this book. Prices and publishers are mentioned only when +there is no more than one cheap edition of a book known to the author. +For the subject as a whole, Chamber's _Cyclopaedia of English +Literature_ (3 vols., 10s. 6d. net each), which contains biographical +and critical articles on all authors, arranged chronologically and +furnished very copiously with specimen passages, may be consulted at any +library. + +* The books with an asterisk are suggested as those on which reading +should be begun. The reader can then proceed to the others and after +them to the many authors--great authors--who are not included in this +short list. + +Chapter I.--*More's _Utopia_; _Haklyut's Voyages_ (Ed. J. Masefield, +Everyman's Library, 8 vols., 1s. net each). North's _Translation of +Plutarch's Lives_ (Temple Classics). + +Chapter II.--Surrey's and Wyatt's Poems (Aldine Edition. G. Bells & +Sons); *Spenser's Works, Sidney's Poems. A good idea of the atmosphere +in which poetry was written is to be obtained from Scott's _Kenilworth_. +It is full of inaccuracy in detail. + +Chapter III.--*The dramatists in the Mermaid Series (T. Fisher Unwin); +*_Everyman and other Plays_; ed. by A.W. Pollard (Everyman's Library). + +Chapter IV.--*Bacon's Essays; Sir Thomas Browne's Works; *Milton's +Works; *Poems of John Donne (Muses Library, Routledge); Poems of Robert +Herrick. + +Chapter V.--*Poems of Dryden; *Poems of Pope; Poems of Thomson; *_The +Spectator_ (Routledge's Universal Library or Everyman's); *Swift's +_Gulliver's Travels_; Defoe's Novels. + +Chapter VI.--*Boswell's _Life of Johnson_; *Burke (in selections); +Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_ (Temple Classics); *Burns' Poetical +Works; *Poems of Blake (Clarendon Press). + +Chapter VII.--*Wordsworth (Golden Treasury Series); *Wordsworth's +Prelude (Temple Classics); Coleridge's Poems; *Keats's Poems; *Shelley's +Poems; *Byron (Golden Treasury Series); *Lamb, _Essays of Elia_; Hazlitt +(volumes of Essays in World's Classics Series). + +Chapter VIII.--*Tennyson's Works; *Browning's Works; Rossetti's Works; +*Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus, Past and Present_, and _French Revolution_; +Ruskin's _Unto this Last, Seven Lamps of Architecture_; Arnold's Poems; +Swinburne (Selections). + +Chapter IX.--*Fielding's _Tom Jones_; Smollett, _Roderick Random_; +*Jane Austen's _Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice,_ and _Northanger Abbey_ +(as a parody of the Radcliffe School); *Scott's _Waverley, Antiquary, +Ivanhoe, Old Mortality, Bride of Lammermoor_. It seems hardly necessary +to give a selection of later novels. + +Chapter X.--W.B. Yeats' Poems; Wilde, _Importance of Being Earnest_; +*Synge, Dramatic Works. + +And every new work of the best contemporary authors. + +G.H.M. + + + + +LIST OF THE CHIEF WORKS AND AUTHORS MENTIONED + +The dates attached to the authors are those of birth and death; those +with the books, of publication. + + +CHAPTER I + +Sir Thomas More, 1480-1535. + _Utopia_. 1516 (in Latin). +William Tindall, 1484-1536. + _Translation of the New Testament_, 1526. +Sir John Cheke, 1514-1557. +Roger Ascham, 1515-1568. + _Toxophilus_, 1545. + _Schoolmaster_, 1570. +Richard Hakluyt, 1553-1616. + His _Voyages_, 1598. + + +CHAPTER II + +Sir Thomas Wyatt, 1503-1542. +The Earl of Surrey, 1517-1547. + _Tottel's Miscellany_ (containing their poems), 1557. +Sir Philip Sidney. 1554-1586. + _Arcadia_, 1590. + _Astrophel and Stella_, 1591. +Edmund Spenser, 1552-1599. + _Shepherd's Calendar_, 1579. + _Fairy Queen_, 1589, 1596. +John Lyly, 1554-1606. + _Euphues_, 1579. + _Euphues and his England_, 1580. +Richard Hooker, 1553-1600. + _Ecclesiastical Polity_, 1594. + + +CHAPTER III + +Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593. + _Tamburlaine_, 1587 (date of performance). + _Dr. Faustus_, 1588 (date of performance). + _Edward II._, 1593. +Thomas Kyd, 1557(?)-1595(?). + _The Spanish Tragedy_, 1594 (published). +John Webster, 1580(?)-1625(?). + _The White Devil_, 1608 (date of performance). + _Duchess of Malfi_, 1616 (date of performance). +Ben Jonson, 1573-1637. + _Every Man in his Humour_, 1598. + _Volpone_, 1605. + _Poems_, 1616. + + +CHAPTER IV + +John Donne, 1573-1631. + _Poems_, 1633 (first published, but known, like those of all +Elizabethan poets, in manuscript long before). +William Browne, 1591-1643. +George Herbert, 1593-1633. +Robert Herrick, 1593-1674. +Richard Crashaw, 1613-1649. +Francis Bacon, 1561-1626. + _Advancement of Learning_, 1605. + _Essays_, 1625. + The Bible, _Authorised Version_, 1611. +Robert Burton, 1577-1640. + _Anatomy of Melancholy_, 1621. +Sir Thomas Browne, 1605-1682. + _Religio Medici_, 1642. +John Bunyan, 1628-1688. + _Pilgrim's Progress_, 1678. +John Milton, 1608-1674. + _Paradise Lost_, 1667. + _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_, 1671. + + +CHAPTER V + +John Dryden, 1631-1700. + _Absalom and Achitophel_ and _Religio Laici_, 1682. + _The Hind and the Panther_, 1687. +Alexander Pope, 1688-1744. + _Essay on Criticism_, 1711. + _Rape of the Lock_, 1714. +James Thomson, 1700-1748. + _The Seasons_, 1730. +Daniel Defoe, 1661-1731. + _Robinson Crusoe_, 1719. +Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745. + _The Tale of a Tub_, 1704. + _Gulliver's Travels_, 1726. +Joseph Addison, 1672-1719. +Richard Steele, 1675-1729. + _The Tatler_, 1709-1711. + _The Spectator_, 1711-1712. + + +CHAPTER VI + +Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784. +Edmund Burke, 1728-1797. +Oliver Goldsmith, 1728-1774. +Thomas Gray, 1716-1771. +William Collins, 1721-1759. +Robert Burns, 1759-1796. + _Poems_, 1786. +William Blake, 1757-1827. + _Songs of Innocence_, 1789. + + +CHAPTER VII + +William Wordsworth, 1770-1850. + _Lyrical Ballads_, 1798. +Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1772-1834. +Sir Walter Scott, 1771-1832. +Lord Byron, 1788-1824. + _Child Harold's Pilgrimage_, 1812-1817. +Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822. +John Keats, 1796-1821. +Charles Lamb, 1775-1884. + _Essays of Elia_, 1823. +William Hazlitt, 1778-1830. +Thomas de Quincey, 1785-1859. + + +CHAPTER VIII + +Lord Tennyson, 1809-1892. + _Poems_, 1842. + _Idylls of the King_, 1859. +Robert Browning, 1812-1889. + _Men and Women_, 1855. + _The Ring and the Book_, 1868. +D. G. Rossetti, 1828-1882. +William Morris, 1834-1896. +A. C. Swinburne, 1836-1909. +Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1880. +John Ruskin, 1819-1900. + + +CHAPTER IX + +Samuel Richardson, 1689-1761. + _Pamela_, 1740. + _Clarissa Harlowe_, 1750. +Henry Fielding, 1707-1754. + _Joseph Andrews_, 1742. + _Tom Jones_, 1749. +Jane Austen, 1775-1817. +William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863. +Charles Dickens, 1812-1870. +George Meredith, 1832-1909. + + + + + +INDEX + + +ADDISON, JOSEPH, +_Advancement of Learning, The_, +_Anatomy of Melancholy, The_, +_Antonio and Mellida_, +_Arcadia_, the Countess of Pembroke's, +Arnold, Matthew, +Ascham, Roger, +_Astrophel and Stella_, +_Atheist's Tragedy, The_, +Augustan Age, +Austen, Jane, +Autobiography, + +Bacon, Francis, +Ballad, the, +Beaumont and Fletcher, +Bennett, Arnold, +Bible, the, +Biography, +Blake, William, +Blank Verse, +Boswell, James, +Brontes, the, +Browne, Sir Thomas, +Browne, William, +Browning, Robert, +Bunyan, John, +Burke, Edmund, +Burns, Robert, +Burton, Robert, +Byron, Lord, + +Carew, Thomas, +Carlyle, Thomas, +Celtic Revival, +Character-writing, +Chatterton, Thomas, +Cheke, Sir John, +_Christ's Victory and Death_, +Classicism, +Clough, Thomas, +Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, +Collins, William, +Conrad, Joseph, +Cowley, Abraham, +Cowper, William, +Crabbe, George, +Crashaw, Richard, +Criticism, + +Decadence, +Defoe, Daniel, +De Quincey, Thomas, +Dekker, Thomas, +Dickens, Charles, +Discovery, Voyages of, +Disraeli, Benjamin, +_Dr. Faustus_, +Donne, John, +Drama, the, +Dryden, John, +_Duchess of Malfi, The_, + +Earle, John, +_Edward II._, +_Elia, Essays of_, +Elizabethan Poetry, +Elizabethan Prose, +_Essays, Civil and Moral_, +_Euphues_, +_Everyman_, + +_Fairy Queen, The_, +Fantastics, the, +Fielding, Henry, +Fitzgerald, Edward, +Fletcher, Giles, +Fletcher, Phineas, +Ford, John, +French Revolution, the, + +Gaskell, Mrs., +George Eliot, +Gibbon, Edward, +Gissing, George, +Goldsmith, Oliver, +_Gorboduc_, +Gray, Thomas, +Greene, Robert, +Greville, Sir Fulke, +_Gulliver's Travels_, + +_Hakluyt's Voyages_, +Hardy, Thomas, +Hazlitt, William, +Hawthorne, Nathaniel, +_Henry VII., History of_, +Herbert, George, +Herrick, Robert, +Hobbes, Thomas, +Hooper, Richard, + +Italy, influence of, + +_Jew of Malta_, +Johnson, Samuel, +Jonson, Ben, + +Keats, John, +Kipling, Rudyard, +Kyd, Thomas, + +Lamb, Charles, +Locke, John, +Lodge, Thomas, +Lyly, John, +Lyric, the, +Lyrical Ballads, + +Marlowe, Christopher, +Marston, John, +Massinger, Philip, +Meredith, George, +Middleton, Thomas, +Milton, John, +Miracle Play, the, +Moore, George, +Morality, the, +More, Sir Thomas, +Morris, William, + +_New Atlantis, The_, +Novel, the, + +Obscurity in Poetry, +_Omar Khayyam_, +_Ossian_, +Oxford Movement, the, + +_Paradise Lost_, +Pastoral Prose and Poetry, +Peele, George, +Percy, William, +_Pilgrim's Progress_, +Platonism, +Poetic Diction, +Pope, Alexander, +Puritanism, +_Purple Island, The_, + +Raleigh, Sir Walter, +_Rape of the Lock_, +Realism, +_Religio Medici_, +Renaissance, the, +Reynolds, Sir Joshua, +Rhetoric, study of, +Richardson, Samuel, +_Robinson Crusoe_, +Romanticism, +Romantic Revival, the, +Rossetti, D. G., +Ruskin, John, + +Sackville, Thomas, +Satire, +Scott, Sir Walter, +Senecan Tragedy, +Seventeenth Century, the, +Shaw, G. Bernard, +Shelley, P. B., +Shenstone, Thomas, +Sheridan, R. B., +Shirley, John, +Sidney, Sir Philip, +Smollett, T., +Sonnet, the, +Sonneteers, the, +_Spanish Tragedy, The_, +_Spectator, The_, +Spenser, Edmund, +Spenserians, the, +Steele, Richard, +Sterne, Lawrence, +Stevenson, R. L., +Supernatural, the, +Surrey, the Earl of, +Swift, Jonathan, +Swinburne, A. C., +Synge, J. M., + +_Tale of a Tub, The_, +_Tamburlaine_, +_Tatler, The_, +_Temple, Sir William_, +Tennyson, Alfred, +Thackeray, W. M., +Theatre, the Elizabethan, +Thomson, James, +_Tottel's Miscellany_, + +_Utopia_, + +_Vaughan, Henry_, +Victorian Age, the, +_View of the State of Ireland_, + +Waller, Edmund, +Walton, Isaac, +Webster, John, +Wells, H. G., +_White Devil, The_, +Wilde, Oscar, +Wilson, Thomas, +Wither, George, +Wordsworth, William, +Wyatt, Thomas, + +Yeats, W. 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