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r

HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

No. 27

Bditont

HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, Litt.D.,

LL.D.; F.B.A.
Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
Prof. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.

THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

VOLUMES NOW READY

HZBXOBT OT WAK ASD PBAOB . G. H.Fami

POLAB XZFLORATIOV Db.W.B.Bbiici,LL.D.,F.&BJL

THE FBENOH BBYOLUTIOV . . . HiLAiil BuLOO, ILA.
THE BTOGK SXOHANOB: ▲ Bnon

8i'ui>i ov ijFn&aaan aid BfwnniAxnni V. W* E^BMn?

IBI8H NAnOVAIJXT Alui Btow wd Oianr

THE BOOIAUBT MOYEICEHT ... J. Kahiat ILuiDobakd, ILP.
PABLIAMSNT : In Hbsobt, OonxErv-

nOH, ASD F1U0X1DB Bb OorasEBBAT ItHW, K.O.B.|

K.O.B.L

MODERN OBOaRAFHT ICaiiov L Nawaranr, D.Ba

WILLIAM SHAKE8PEABE .... Jomr Maovblik
THE EYOLTTTION OV PLAHTB . • D. H. BoOfn,M.A.,LL.D.,F.B.B.
THE QPENHia-ITP OF AVBIOA . . 8b H. H. JoBmnw, G.G.M.O.,

K.O.B., D.8a, V.2.B.

MBDIETAL EUBOPB H. W. 0. Datis, M.A.

THE BCIEirGE OF WEALTH ... J. A. Hobmw, M.A.
XNTB0DX7CTI0E TO MATHEMATI08 A. E. Whikihiad, 8o.D. F.B.B.

THE ANIMAL WOBLD F. W. Oauu, D.So^ F.B.B.

EVOLUTION J. AxtHDB TtaoiBKW, MA., and

LIBEBALIBM .• •••IbT. HoBBOoaa, M JL

CBIME AED INBANIT7 Dl. 0. A. Mbmim, F.B.O.P.,

F.B.O.B.

THE OITIL WAB Fusntio L. Pazsov, P&D.

THE CIVILIZATION OF CHINA . . H. A. Oduh, M.A., LLJ>.

HI8T0BT OF OUB TDOE, 188&-19U . G. P. Gooes, M.A.

ENGLISH LETEBATUBE : MODEBN . Giomb Maib, M.A.

PSTCmOAL BE8EAB0H W. F. Baxsktt, F.BB.

THE DAWN OF HIBTOBT .... J. L. Mtbh, MA., F.&A.

BliKMKNTB OF ENGUBH LAW . . W. M. Gbldabx, MA., B.G.L.

ASTRONOMT A. B. Hum, M.A.

INTB0DX70TI0N TO BCIENOE ... J. Akhub Thokmh

THE PAPACY AND MODEBN TIMEB Bar. Db. Whuam Bau*

THE EV0LT7TI0N OF INDU8TBT . D. H. MiOBWWOB, M.A.

*•* OUmt 'votoBiM in Mttve pnptntioB. IM on veqiMit

ENGLISH LITERATURE

MODERN

BY

G. H. MAIR, M.A.

SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF CHRIST CHURCH

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

LONDON
WILUAMS AND NORGATE

iqii

COPTKIGBT, I9II,

BT

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

THB UNIYBltSITy F11B88, CAMHUDQB, U.SJk.

\

^ PREFACE

Q^ Thb intention of this book is to lay stress on ideas

and tendencies that have to be understood and appre-
ciated> 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 leasts impossible within the limits imposed^
and, in any case, would have been foreign to the
purpose indicated by the editors of the Home Uni-
versity 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

V

vi PREFACE

whose books and teaching my pleasure hi English
Hteratore 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 wit-
tingly 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.

MANCHE8TER9

Augury 1911.

I

CONTENTS

Pagx

Preface y

Chap.

I The Rekai88akge 9

II BUZABETHAV PoEIRT AND PE08E 39

III The Dbaica 56

IV The Seventeemth Cektuat 80

V The Age of Gtood Sekse 109

VI Dr. Johksok and His Time 137

VII The RoscAimc REviyAL 161

VIII The Viciorxak Age 190

IX The Novel 319

X The Present Age 336

BiBIJOGRAPHT 351

Chrokological Table 353

IimEX 355

ENGLISH LITEEATUEE:

MODERN

CHAPTER I

THE BEaiTAISSANCIi
(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 "Ever-
lasting 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 fluctu-
ating but little between age and age, suddenly

10 ENGLISH LITERATUBE— MODERN

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 le& 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 for-
mula 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 con-
tinuous 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 "discov-
ery 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 begin-
ning of the sixteenth centiuies. First and most

THE RENAISSANCE 11

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 Statins, 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 Con-
stantinople 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 fheir 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 Testa-
ment in its original Greek. The quick and vivid
intellect of Italy, which had been torpid in the
decadence of medisevalism 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,

12 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

and Michel Angelo; on literature and pliilosophy
and gave us Pico della Mirandula; on life and
gave us the Medicis and Castiglione and Machi-
avelli. 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 knowl-
edge 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 cen-
tre 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 un-
dreamt of to the physical universe, the discov-
erers 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 explor-
ation 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 New-
foundland and Labrador; tiiie 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 RENAISSANCE IS

tbe 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 re-
ceived 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 expe-
ditious one to *'the Indies"; the name West
Indies still survives to show the theory on which
the early discoverers worked. The rapidity with
which Imowledge widened can be gathered by a
comparison of the maps of the day. In the
earlier of them the mythical Brazil, a relic per-
haps of the lost Atlantis, lay a regularly and
mystically blue island off the west coast of Ire-
land; then the Azores were discovered and the
name fastened on to one of the islands of that
archipelago. Then Amerigo reached South Amer-
ica and the name became finally fixed to the
country that we know. There is nothing now-
adays that can give us a parallel to the stirring
and exaltation of the imagination which intoxi-
cated the men of the Renaissance, and gave
a new birth to thought and art. The great
scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century

14 ENGLISH LTTERATUBE— MODEKN

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.

(«)

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
imderstand the beginnings of our own modem
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 Eng-
land it came in a special form shaped by poUt-
ical 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 impulsejxo^^ the
study of the classics, and T£he impulse given to
men's minds by the voyages of discovery,
run through all the textiure of our Renaissance
literature.

THE RENAISSANCE 15

Literature as it developed in the reign of
Elizabeth ran counter to the hopes and desires
of the men who began the movement; the com-
mon 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 adven-
turers, still less swashbuclders, exquisites, or
literary dandies. Their names — Sir John Cheke,
Roger Ascham, Nicholas Udall, Thomas Wilson,
WiJter Haddon, belong rather to the imiversi-
ties 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 pur-
suit 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 tenden-
cies 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

16 ENGLISH UTERATURE— MODERN

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 Eng-
lish character, which they felt to be endangered
by orgies of reckless assimilation from abroad.
The revival of the classics at Oxford and Cam-
bridge could not produce an Erasmus or a Scali-
ger; 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 Uving and morality, on which
education, in its sense of the formation of diar-
acter, could be based.

The Uterary 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 read-
ing of the ancients awakened new delight in
the melody and beauty of language: men be-
came intoxicated with words. The practice
of rhetoric was universal and it quickly coloured
all literature. It was the habit of the rhetori-
cians to choose some subject for declamation
and round it to encourage their pupils to set
embeUishments and decorations, which com^
monly proceeded rather from a delight in language
for language's sake, than from any effect in en-

THE RENAISSANCE 17

forcing 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 rhet-
oric; 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 ulti-
mately 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 imknown 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 mudbi of
the literature of this time remains in common
knowledge, and for examples of these affecta-
tions 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 volmne after
volume these minor and forgotten authors gloat-
ing over the new found treasure which placed
them in their time in the van of literary success.

18 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

That they axe 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 " tiiey had
become nothing more than matter for laughter,
and it is only through their reflection and dis-
tortion 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 es-
chewing new fashions they could not comprehend,
but to the scholars themselves. The chief ser-
vice 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 tiiey called "inkhom 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 tinle, ever borrowing and never pay-
ing, she shall be fain to keep her house as bank-
rupt." Writings in the Saxon vernacular like the
sermons of Latimer, who was careful to use noth-
ing not familiar to the common people, did much
to help the scholars to save our prose from the

THE RENAISSANCE 19

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 medi-
sevalism in modem English literature was in
the Renaissance itself. Talking in studious
archaism seems to have been a fashionable prac-
tice 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 im-
portations, 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 IVGlton,
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 TroUua
and Cressida and the Canterbury Tales. Some
of the most sonorous and beautiful lines in
Shakespeare break every canon laid down by
the humanists.

''When the extravagant and erring spirit hies to his confine"

is a line, three of the chief words of which are
Latin importations that come imf amiliarly, bear-
ing their original interpretation with them.
Milton is packed with similar things: he will
talk of a crowded meeting as "frequent" and use

80 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

such a construction as "this way and that revolv-
ing the swift mind," a form of words which is unin-
teUigible except on a knowledge of Latin syntax.
Yet the effect is a good poetic effect. In attack-
ing latinisms in tiiie 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 Stemhold 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.
Slid the richer language made simpUcity pos-
sible and adequate for poetry.

There are other directions in which the clas-
sical 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 earher 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

THE RENAISSANCE «1

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 Spen-
ser'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 EngUsh translation almost contempo-
rary. 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 Uttle 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 idl 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 im-
agination 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

«« ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 con-
tinuous influence on the literary age that fol-
lowed. 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 man-
ners of a society whose moral teadier was Machia-
velli, ahd 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 with-
out 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 Ital-
ianate Englishman became the chief part of the
stock-in-trade of the satirists and moralists of

THE RENAISSANCE 23

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 Holin-
shed's Chronicles, both deal in detail with the
ItaUan 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 un-
mixed with good, for ijjaulftrij^ will always Jie-
an enemy of good Uterature. "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.

(8)

The influence of the spirit of discovery and
adventure, though it is less quickly marked,
more pervasive, and less easy to define, is per-

24 ENGLISH LTTERATUBE— MODERN

«

haps more universal tban that of the classics
or of the Italian fashions which came in their
train. It nms 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 favoiuite reading
^-PuTchaSy his PUgrimes, 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 inex-
pressibly 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 spiritiess
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 RENAISSANCE 25

tli^ sole representative of the sea in medieval
English literiature, plied a coastwise trade. But
wiii 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 com-
petitors 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 —
HaJduyt's Aud Purchases — ^were among the most
popular books of the age. To them, indeed,
we must look for the first beginnings of our
modem 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. Allu-
sions, 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.

86 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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,
Whidi 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,^ "Marlowe is inconceivable." His im-
agination 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 English-
man 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

^ To whose terminal essay in "Hakluyt's Voyages" (Macle-
hose) I am indebted for much of the matter in this section.

THE RENAISSANCE 27

and foreign were to be heard any day amongst
the motley crowd in the Bankside outside Uie
theatre door. Tambnrlaine's last speech, when
he calls for a map and points the way to un-
realised 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."

It is the same in his other plays. Dr«. Eaustus / ^
assigns to his serviceable spirits tasks that might
have' been studied from the books of Hakluyt. /

"1 11 have them fly to India for gold.
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl.
And search all comers of the new round world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates."

When there is no actual expression of the f I
. spirit of adventure, the air of the sea which it N^ ^ *"
carried with it still blows. Shakespeare, save j^
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 scholsur whose mind was occupied by
other and more ultimate matters, is full of allu-
sions to it. Satan's journey through Chaos in
Paradise Lost is the occasion for a whole series of

7

98 ENGLISH LTTERATUKB-MODERN

metaphors drawn from* seafaring. In Samson
Agonistes Dalila comes in,

"Like a stately ship . . .
With all her braveiy 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 aKer the first bloom of the Re-
naissance had flowered and withered. On the
reports brought home by the voyagers were
founded in part those conceptions of the con-
dition of the "natural" man which form such
a large part of the philosophic discussions of the
seventeenth and eighteentii centiuies. Hobbes's
description of the life of nature as "nasty,
soUtary, brutish, and short," Locke.'^ 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 Mon-
tesquieu 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

ELIZABETHAN POETRY & PROSE ^

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 contro-
versy with the Bishop of Worcester. With iioftin-
son Crusoe the influence of the age oT discovery
"fiially perishes. An inspiration hardens into the
mere subject matter of books of adventure. We
need not follow it further.

CHAPTER n

ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND FBOSE

(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 indispen-
sable 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 Peach-
am's Complete Gentleman show, numbered poetry
as a necessary part of his accomplishments. In
England specif circumstances intensified this

80 ENGLISH UTERATUBE— MODERN

tendency of the time. The queen was unmarried:
she was the first smgle woman to wear the English
crown» and her vanity made her value the de-
votion 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 at-
tached to the court. If they were not enjoying
its favours they were pleading for them, mingling
high and fantastic compliment with bitter re-
proaches and a tale of misery. And consequently
both the poetry and the prosie of the time are re-
stricted in their scope and temper to the artificial
and romantic, to high-flown eloquence, to the cel-
ebration of love and devotion, or to the inculca-
tion of those courtly virtues and accomplishments
which composed, the perfect pattern of a gentle-
man. 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 pen-
ning 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

1 . .

ELIZABETHAN POETRY & PROSE 81

was still the main centre of literary endeayoiir»
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 biog-
rapher says, "The truth is his end was not writing,
even while he wrote, but both his wit and under-
standing 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 lU while
he was sailing on a piratical venture on the Span-
ish Main. This connection between life and
action affected as we have seen the tone and
quality of Elizabethan writing. "All the dis-
tinguished writers of the period," says Thoreau,
^"possess a greater vigour and naturalness than
the more modem . . . 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." Li another passage

82 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

the same writer explains the strength and fine-
ness 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*^c5t 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.
Jt i§.Jb2th a mirror and an escape: in our own
day the sHrrlng 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 re-
action 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 na-
tion 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 the pastoral
romance.

ELIZABETHAN POETRY & PROSE 88

(2)

J_ It is with two courtiers that modem English
poetry begins. The lives of Sir Thomas Wyatt
and the Earl of Surrey both ^en3ed'"efiriy" and"
unhappily7*1and 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 oT the landmarks of English Hteratiire.
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

^ t origin. To Wyatt bdongs the honour of intro-

/^\ ducing the sonnet, and to Surrey the more momen-

* tons credit of writing, for tte first time in English,
blank verse. Wyatt fills the most important
place in the Miscellany y and his work, experimen-
tal 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 modem
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

84 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 hmit and hawk.
And in foul weather at my book to sit.
In frost and snow, then with my bow to stalls ,
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 whidi 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 con-
fessed, 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»

ELIZABETHAN POETRY & PROSE 85

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 thigestanza^poenis with a
couplet for close, and heallows himself as many
rhymes as he diooses. The structure is obviously
easier, and it gives a better chance to an inferior
workioaan, but in the hands of a master its har-
monies are no less deUcate, 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 Eng-
lish Renaissance drew its inspiration. Latin
and Greek verse is quantitative and rhymeless;
Italian verse, built up on the metres of the trouba-
dours and the degeneration of Latin which gave
the world the Romance languages, used many
elaborate forms of rhyme. Blank verse took

86 ENGLISH UTERATUKB— MODERN

from Latin its rhymelessness, but it retained a$'
J^o^ instead of quantity as the basis of its line.
TTie line Surrey used is the five-foot or ten-syl-
lable line of what is called "heroic verse" — \h&
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, how-
ever, 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 drama-
tists: Marlowe perfected its rhythm, Shakespeare
broke its monotony and varied its cadences by
altering the spacing of the accents, and occa-
sionally 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 deUcate 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

ELIZABETHAN POETRY & PROSE S7

which Wyatt and Surrey began, was continued
by a host of younger amateurs of poetry. Labo-
rious 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
hterary 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 ptf^ry and sonnet sequences
took their ideas ana 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 excite-
ment 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

S8 ENGLISH LTTERATUKB-MODERN

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
conunonly 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 origi-
nality; a poet is a poet first and most of all because
he (fiscovers 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 lan-
guage in a new way, and with a new significance,
and it is just in proportion to the freshness, and

ELIZABETHAN POETRY & PROSE 89

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 dis-
engage 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, certaiiily Byron, and in
the later age probably Tennyson. But the
greatest of tiiem 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 adven-
ture in America and on the high seas. In a
court of brilliant figures, his was the most daz-
zling, and his death at Zutphen only served to
intensify the halo of romance which had gath-
ered round his name. His literary exercises were
various: in prose he wrote the Arcadia and the
Apology for Poetry y the one the beginning of a
new land of imaginative writing, and the other
the first of the series of those rare and precious
conunentaries of their own art which some of

40 ENGLISH LITERATUBE— MODERN

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 per-
sonal 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 charfteteristitrlault
and exi^Uence 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 pleasm^ of my pain,^ —
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might miJce 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 br^.
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

ELIZABETHAN POETRY & PROSE 41

their truth. All that he tells is the fruit of ex-
perience, deariy 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.
Etenial love, maintain thy life in me."

The sonnets were published after Sidney*g
death, and it is certain that like Shakespeare's
they were never intended for pubUcation at all.
The point is important because it helps to vindi-
cate Sidney's sincerity, but were any vindication
needed another more certain might be found.
The Arcadia is strewn with love songs and son-
nets, the exercises solely of the literary imagin-
ation. Let any one who wishes to gauge the
sincerity of the impulse of i the Stella sequence
compare any of the poems in it with those in the
romance.

With Sir Philip Sidney literature was an avo-
cation, constantly indulged in, but outside the
main business of his life; with Edmimd Spenser
public life and affairs were subservient to an
overmastering poetic impulse. He did his best
to carve out a career for nimself like oilier young

42 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

men of his time, followed the fortmies 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, mur-
der 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 Eng-
lish 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
litUe sympathy or imagination. Throughout his
itone is that of the worst kind of English offi-
Jcialdom; rigid subjection and in the last re-
i sort 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 eflfects of immer-
sion in the government of a subject race upon
men of letters. No man of action can be so
consistently and cynically an advocate of brutal-
ism 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

ELIZABETHAN POETRY & PROSE 48

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 Lrish problem.
But though fate and the necessity of a liveli-
hood drove him to Ireland and the life of a colon-
ist, poetry was his main business. He had been
the centre of a briUiant 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 Ga briel_ Harvey
and Edw ard K irke came " down *^t waTtiTim-
mediateTSST^SSiongst amateurs of the arts.
They corresponded with each other about lit-
erary 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
I poetry about it, letting just enough be known
to stimulate the imagination of the public. They
tried their hands at everything, imitated every-
thing, and in all were brilliant, sparkling, and
decorative; they got a kind of entrance to the
circle of the Court. Then Spenser pubUshed
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 Ku-ke furnished it with an elaborate
prose commentary. Spenser took the same lib-

44 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

ferties with the pastoral fonn as did Vergil himself;

(that is to say he used.it a^i 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 AmoreUi, a series of son-
nets inspired by his love for his wife; by the
Epithalamiumf on the occasion of his marriage
to her; by Mother HubbartTa 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

f as the goal of poetic endeavour the idea of the
I heroic poem, aimed at doing for his own country
what Vergil had intended to do for Rome in the
JSneid, 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;

Sthe <|ualities and the training of the English;
gentl^ani And because poetry, unlike philos-
ophy, 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

ELIZABETHAN POETRY & PROSE 45

of allegory. His outward plan, with its knights

and dragons and desperate adventures, he pro-

^ cured from Aripstp. As for the use of allegory,

it was one of the discoveries of the Middle Ages

which the Renaissance condescended to retain.

Spenser dabarated4t-45cyi5nd"ttLe 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

jthem they were to conceal an intricate treatment

I of the conflict of truth and falsehood in morals

I 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 Qtteen 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

I which the separate knights of the separate books

I — ^the Red Cross Knight and the rest — ^were to

bring th^ fruit of their j^dventures, everything

was to be made clear. Spenser did not five to

finish his work; The Fairy Queen^ like the Mneidy

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

/

46 ENGLISH LITERATUREi-MODERN

published this explanation, it is impossible that
anybody, even the acutest minded German pro-
fessor, 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 intri-
cacy and involution is the product of an over-
concentration bom 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 grand-
fathers longed for the next section of Pickwick.
They really liked it, really loved the intricacy
and luxuriousness of it, the hi^avy exotic language,
the tiUckly painted descriptioi the langSq^us
melody of the v6rse. 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 Dry-
den, who said that Milton confessed to him that
Spenser was "his original," a statement which

ELIZABETHAN POETRY & PROSE 47

has been pronounced incredible, but is, in truth,

gerfectly comprehensible, and most likely true,
ope 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 Haz- ^
i litt 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 hin-
der 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
^ smoothnes s and me lody of_his verse and the
richness oFEs language — a golden diction that
he drew from every source — new words, old
words, obsolete words — such a mixture that the j
purist Ben Jonson remarked acidly that he !
wrote no language at all. Secondly because of
thg^ profusion of his imagery, and the extraordi-
narily 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.

48 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

(8)

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 diffi-
culty 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 centime^ ago, unconsciously one's point of
view shifts, kutiquity gilds joumey-work;\ re-
moteness 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 conmion
lot of hundreds of their fellows. One comes to
regard as Uterature 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

ELIZABETHAN POETRY & PROSE 49

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 im-
portance; 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 famiUar
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 iUu-
mined 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 com-
' mon vehicle of amusement and information, and
• the books that remain to us cover many depart-
ments 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 tiie England^oTtheir own day, and

50 ENGLISH LITERATUBE— MODERN

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 I<yly, and of authors who,
though their first aim was hardly an artistic one,
achieved an artistic result, only !E[q(Qkfii: and
the translators of the Bible. The Authorized
Version of the Bible belongs strictly not to the
reign of Elizabeth but to iiiat 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 f amiUar 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 en-
riched beyond all recognition with borrowings
from the ancient authors; and like all artists
who became 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 IncUans 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 simpUcity and

ELIZABETHAN POETRY & PROSE 51

ivigour, so seventeenth century practice taught
JEnglishmen to write a more direct and undec«
(orated style and gave us the smooth, simple,
Wnd vigorous writing of Dryden— the first really
vnodem English prose. But the Elizabethans
loved gaudier methods; they liked highly deco-
rative modes of expression, in prose no less than
in verse. The first author to give them these
things was John Lyly» whose book E]f^^lme£ 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
x-it, everybody copied it. The maxims and sen-
/ tences of advice for gentlemen which it contained
V were quoted and admired in the Court, where
the author, though he never attained the lucra-
tive 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 Qie circle that fluttered roimd the
Queen.

The style of Euphues was parodied by Shake-
speare and many attempts have been nuule to

62 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

imitate it since. Most of them are inaccurate
— Sir Walter Scott's wild attempt the most inl
accurate of all. They fail because their authon^
have imagined that *' Euphuism" is simply sL
highly artificial and ^'flowery" way of talkmg.
(Tts a matter of fact it is made up of a very exact
Wd very definite series of parts. The writing
^done on a plan which has three main charac-
teristics as follows. First, the structure of th<
sentence is based on antitiiesis and alliteration
that is to say, it falls into equal parts similar m
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 r^
to epigram^ The second characteristic of the \ C )
style is the referen ce of every stated fact to
some classical autfibrity, fhar is to say, the
author cannor^Seiition friendship without quot-
ing David and Jonathan, nor can lovers in his
book accuse each other of faithlessness without
quoting the instance of Cressida or ^neas.
This appeal to classical authority and wealth
of classical allusion is used to decorate pages
which deal with matters of every-day experi-
ence. Seneca, for instance, is quoted as report-
ing "that too much bending breaketh the bow,'*
a fact which might reasonably have been sup-
posed to be known to the author himself. This
particular form of writing perhaps influenced

ELIZABETHAN POETRY & PROSE 58

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 HahluyCs Voyages are
not free from it, and one may hardly hope to
read an account of a voyage to the Indies with-
out stumbling on a preliminary reference to
the opinions of Aristotle and Plato. Lastly,
^.~., Euphues is characterised by an extraordinary
'S^ wealth of allusion to natural history, mostly
.y 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 avow ed pujpo gfi— jjl^iostructing courtiers
and gentlemen howto live. EuphiLes is full of
grave reflections and weighty morals, and is

Imdeed 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 fash-
ions and customs of his countrymen which he
condemns in the course of his teaching are the
same as those inveighed against by Stubbs
rand other contemporaries. He disliked manners
land fashions copied from Italy; particularly he
\ disliked the extravagant famous of women.

54 ENGLISH LITERATURE-MODERN

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 Qiteen the
honour of the earlier Puritanism — ^tiie Puritan-
ism 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 pastor gl r omance, as the

Skepherd*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 im«

probability 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 in-

^ tricate love-making wind and unravel them-

; selves through an endless afternoon. In that

j art nothing is too far-fetched, nothing too senti-

l mental, no sorrow too unreal. The pastoral

romance was used, too, to cover other things

besides a sentimental and decorative treatment

ELIZABETHAN POETRY & PROSE 55

of love. Authors wrapped up as shepherds
their political friends and enemies, and the pas-
toral eclogues in verse which Spenser and otliers
composed are full of personal and political allu-
sion. 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 stbry would fur-
nish plot enough for twenty ordinary novels, but
probably those who read it when it was pub-
lished 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 ea^ to fix than
/{ahose of Euphues. Perhaps its chief quality is
X /best described as that of exhaustiveness. Sidney
will take a word and toss it to~and~fr5 in a page
till its meaning is sucked dry and more than
sucked dry. Chi 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 aU
things witii a book of this kind — ^to read on.
This trick of bandying words is, of course, com-
mon in Shakespeare. Other marks of Sidney's
style belong similarly to^ poetry rather than
/' • to prose. Chief of th^oi is what Ruskin chris-
/y tened 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 con«

66 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

nection. In its day the Arcadia was hailed as
a reformation by men nauseated by the rhyth-
mical pattens for 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 m

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 fanci-
ful as the starting-point of a study of Elizabethan
drama, which owed its strengUi 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 sig-
nificances and achievements it is necessary to
disentangle carefully its roots, in religion, in
the revival of the classics, in popular enter-
tainments, in imports from abroad, in the air
of enterprise and adventure which belonged to
the time.

\

THE DRAMA 57

As in Greece, drama in England was in its
beginning a reUgious thing. Its oldest continu-
ous 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 per-
formances; they passed from the stage in the
church porch to the stage in the street. A wag-
gon, the natural human platform for mimicry
or oratory, became in Engknd 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.

/

68 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 ap-
pointed were played." Tlie "companies" were
the town guilds and the several "pageants" dif-
ferent 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 fish-
mongers 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 pas-
toral 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 ked^
Take here a rivet and there a screw.
With there bow there now, work I well.
This work, I warsant. both good and true." ^

THE DRAMA 69

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 m correctness less than we lost m art.

The miracle plays, then, are the oldest ante-
cedent 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 cyde;
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
aocessibihtv to new impressions and new man-
ners and learning and modes of thought that
for years the ola and new subsisted side by
side. Think of modem Japan, a welter of old
faiths and crafts and ideals and inrushing West-
em 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 per-
haps we should regard that as a '^command" per-
formance, reviving as command performances

60 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 mira-
cle or mystery plays, though contemporary in
their popularity, came what we called "moral-
ities" or "moral interludes" — ^pieces designed to
enfoYce a religious or ethical lesson and per-
haps to get back into drama something of the
edification which realism had ousted from the
miracles. They dealt in allegorical and figurative

Crsonages, expounded wise saws and moral
isons, and squared rather with the careful
self-concern of the newly established Protes-
tantism than with the frank and joyous jest
in life which was more characteristic of the
time. Everymarty 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 Fatistus. There perhaps the influence
ends.

The rise of a professional class of actors brought
one step nearer the full growth of drama. Com-
panies of strolling players formed themselves
and passed from town to town, seeking like the

THE DRAMA 61

industrious amateurs of the guilds, civic pat-
ronage, and performing in town-halls, market-
place booths, or inn yards, whichever served
them best. The structure of the Elizabethan
Jmi.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 plat-
form 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 suit-
able 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 tie tide of some lord) was various. They
played moralities and interludes, they played
formless chronicle history plays like the Trouble-
some Reign of King John, on which Shakespeare
worked for his King John; but above and be-
fore all they were each a company of specialists,
every one of whom had his own talent and per-
formance for which he was admired. The Eliza-

est ENGLISH UTERATDBE— MODERN

bethan stage was the ancestor of our music-hall,
and to the modem music-hall rather than to the
theatre it bears its aflSnity. 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 yoimg "bloods'*
and by the more disreputable portions of the
conununity, 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 play-
goer 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 Ity were real trials of skill. The bear
in the Winter* a 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 oiu* 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 hun-
dreds 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 evo-
lution 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

THE DRiiMA 68

stepping-stones to his triumphs, gave him Touch-
stone 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. Fausttuf took the
course of leaving the low comedy which the
audience loved and a high salaried actor de-
manded, to an inferior collaborator.

Alongside this drama of street platforms and ^
inn-yai^ds 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 Shakei^)eare and^by Ben Jonson, or com-
edies modelled on Plautus or Terence, or tragedies
modelled on Seneca. The last were incompara-
bly 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 sympa-
thize 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

V

64 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

Senecan model, and generally, like Seneca's,
with some ulterior intention. Sackyllle's Gor-
bodiiCf the first tragedy in English, produced at
N>^ a great festival at the Inner Temple, aimed at
inducing Elizabeth to many 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
^^ I 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 melod^una. 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 con-
structed 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

THE DRAMA 65

adventure of the time affected and finished the
drama we have ah*eady seen. It is time now to
turn to the dramatists themselves.

(«) ^.

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 c^wged blank verse, which had been a
lumbering msl&umeht before him, into some-
thing rich and ringing and rapid and made it the
vehicle for the jp*eatest 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 knowl-
edge and power and life inspires all his pages.
The teaching of Machiavelli, misunderstood for
their own purposes by would-be imitators, fur-
nished the reign of Elizabeth with the only po-
litical ideals it possessed. The simple brutalism
of the creed, with means justified by ends and
the unbridled self -regarding pursuit of power, at-

86 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

tracted 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 any-
thing 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. Faustiu
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 witib 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 heU, learning comes m at the
quiet close.

"Yet, for he was a scholar once admired.
For wondrous knowledge in our German Schools;

We 'U give his mangled limbs due burial;
And all tne students, clothed in mourning black

Shall wait upon his heavy funeral."

Some one character is a centre of overmas-
tering pride and ambition in every play. In

THE DHAMA 67

the Jew (^ Malta it is the hero Barabbas. In
Edward 11. 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 Shake-
speare scarcely improved in his Richard II,;
and the death scene of Marlowe's King moves
pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or
modem, with which I am acquainted." Per-
haps 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 burn-
ing 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 Grod 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 liter-
ary evidences are to be trusted sixteenth and
seventeenth century atheism was a very crude
business. The Atheist's Tragedy of Toumeur
(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 I*rotector. I will do*t."

to which she: .

•s

68 ENGLISH LTTEBATURE— MODEBN

"Supposed Protector! Are you an atheist^ then
I Imow my fears and prayers are spent in vain."

Marlowe's very faults and extravagances, and
they are many, are only the obverse of his great-
ness. Magnitude and splendour of language
when the thought is too shrunken to fill it out,
becomes mere inflation. He was a butt of the

Earodists of the day. And Shakespeare, though
e honoured him ''on this side idolatry/' did Us
share of ridicule. Ancient Pistol is fed and stuffed
with relics and rags of Marlowesque affectation —

"HoUa! ye pampered jades of Asia,
Can ye not draw but twenty miles a day."

is a quotation taken straight from Tamburlaine,

(?)

A study of Shakespeare, who refuses to be
crushed within the lunits 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 develop-
ment 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 Mar-
lowe and particularly of Kyd, whose Spanish
Tragedy with its crude mechanism of ghosts and

THE DRAMA 69

madness and revenge caught the popular taste,
worked itself out in a score of journeymen dram-
atists, 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
themsdves. 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 Antonia
and MelMda was published in the same year
as Shakespeare's Hamlet. Both plays owed their
style and plot to the same tradition — ^the tra-
dition created by Kyd's Spanish Tragedy — ^in
which ghostly promptings to revenge, terrible
crime, and a feigned madman waiting his oppor-
tunity 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
MeUida 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.

70 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

compared with the ordinary run of the tragedies,
of better workmanship. They deal in the familiar
situations of low comedy — ^the down, 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-ShaJkespearean comedy
of the time.

For all our habit of grouping their works to-
gether 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 Eliza-
beth saddened into a profound pessimism and
gloom in that of James. This apparition of un-
sought 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;
tttey 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

THE DRAMA 71

these things were over. Peace was made with
Spain: national pride was wounded by the solici-
tous 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 trans-
ferred 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 impend-
ing religious strife darkened the temper of the time.
The change affected all literature and par-
ticularly 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 Miich Ado, **I speak,
sir, as the fashion now is, in earnest," The

72 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

quick-witted, Kght-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 con-
cession 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 splen-
did and burning, smouldered in Webster into a
duskier and intenser heat. His fame rests on

'two tragedies. The White Devil and The DuchesB
of Mcdfi. 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 crim-
inals, 'as I have often seen in a play' are the
steersmen of their fortimes and the doomsmen
of their deeds." His characters are gloomy;
meditative and philosophic murderers, cynical
informers, sad and lovmg 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 Dvchess of Malfi^
Charles Lamb thought worthy to be set beside
the ditty in The Tempest, which reminds Ferdi-

THE DRAMA 7S

nand 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 sombre-
ness of the season in which it flowered.

But the drama could not survive long the
altered times, and the voluminous plays of Beau-
mont and Fletcher mark the beginning of the
end. They are the decadence of Elizabethaii
drama. Decadence is a term often used loosely^
and therefore hard to define, but we may sa^
broadly that an art is decadent when any par-
ticular 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 sug-
gestions, 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 inter-
vals 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

74 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 conjimction or preposition
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 pres-
entation of character in action, but are set down
for their own sake, "What strange self-trumpet-
ers and tongue-buUies 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 for-
titude, is the authors' forte and they play upon
it amazingly.^ The sterner tones of their prede-
cessors melt into the long drawn broken accent
of pathos and woe. This delight not in action
or in emotion arising from action but in pas-
sivity 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 occa*

THE DRAMA 75

sion f or» 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 sym-
pathy with it, as well as his close connection
with the age which foUowed, justifies his sepa-
rate treatment. Ben Jonson shows a marked
contrast to Shakespeare in his character, his ac-
complishments, 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 adventur-
ous youth he was by turns scholar, soldier, brick-
layer, 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

76 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 diflPerent 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 tenden-
cies of his age, he is by no means blindly clas-
sical. He never consented to be bound by the
"Unities'* — ^that conception of dramatic con-
struction 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 un-
compromising; 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

THE DRAMA 77

and greater brother, the one As You Like lU
tJie other What You Witt. 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 conscious-
ness with which he set it against the practice
of his contemporaries and particularly of Shake-
speare receive explicit statement in the prologue
to Every Man Out of His Humour — one of his
earlier plays. "I travail with another objec-
tion, Signor, which I fear wiU be enforced against
the autiior 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 comoediaf 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 vitcB, speculum consuetvdiniSi imago
veritatis; a thing throughout pleasant and ridicu-
lous and accommodated to the correction of
manners." That was what he meant his comedy

78 ENGLISH LITERATDRE— MODERN

to be, and so he conceived the popular comedy
of the day, Twelfth Night and Much Ado. Shake-
speare might play with dukes and countesses,
serving-women and pages, clowns and disguises;
he would come down more near and ally Umself
familiarly with the times. So comedy was to
be medicinal, to purge contemporary London
of its foUies and its sins; and it was to be con-
structed with regularity and elaboration, respect-
ful 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 collo-
qmalism and slang save him from a certain
dryness and tediousness to modem readers.
The truth is he was less a satirist of contem-
porary 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 con-
structed for their exposure. At the first glance
his people are contemporary types, at the sec-
ond 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 aU his
satirical intention, had as much observation —

THE DRAMA 79

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 MoliSre. 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 cimning 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 con-
temporary life, instead of merely grafting on to
it types he had learned from books, he might
have made himself an Ehiglish Molidre — ^without
Molifere's breadth and clarity — ^but with a cor-
responding 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.

80 ENGLISH LITERATURE-MODERN

CHAPTER IV

THB SEVENTEENTH CENTUBT

(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 Shdcespeare
and Drayton and many other men whom we
class roughly as Elizabethan lived on to work
under James, their temper and their ideals be-
long 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 tiie time which imme-
diately followed it?

Putting it very broadly one may say that

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 81

Kterature in the seventeenth century becomes
for the first time essentially modem inspirit^.
We began our survey of modem EngtisET litera-
ture at the Renaissance because the discovery of
the New World, and the widening of himian
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 them-
selves to be modem. 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 modem writing. In-
flections had been dropped. The revival of the
classics had enriched our vocabulary, and the
English language, after a gradual impoverish-
ment which followed the obsolescence *one after
another of the local dialects, attained a fairly
fixed form. There is more diflPerence 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
modem spirit, in the fullest sense of the word,
comes into being. Defined it me ans a spiri t
of jobserva tion. of preoccupation with detail,
stress laid on matter of fact, of analysis of

82 ENGLISH LITERATUBE— MODERN

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 intellec-
tual fact in modem history, dates from just this
time, from Bacon and Newton and Descartes.
In relation to literature, it is the spirit of criti-
cism, and criticism in England is the creation of
the seventeenth century. The positive temper,
the attitude of realism, is everywhere in the
ascendant. The sixteentii 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 modems 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 ac-
count 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 Shake-

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 8S

speare we so much long for, it was early enough
to make possible those masterpieces of con-
densed biography in which Isaak Walton cele-
brates Herbert and Donne. Puller and Aubrey,
to name only two authors, spent lives of labori-
ous 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 Res-
toration Pepys and Evelyn were keeping their
diaries, and Fox his journal. Just as in poetry
tiie 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 them-
selves to meet the new and growing demand for
analysis of the feelings and the intimate thoughts
and sensations of n»l men and women. A mmor
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 foUy
and wickedness proper to no place or time,
descended to the drawing-rooms of the day,
and Congreve occupied himself with the por-
trayal of the social frauds and foolishnesses
perpetrated by actual living men and women

84 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 test-
ing directly institutions whether they were liter-
ary, 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 sur-
vive 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 en-
thusiasm in which it worked alienated from secular
poetry men with deep and strong religious con-
victions. 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 tem-
per which persecution began to breed. Even
within orthodox Anglicanism poetry and religion
began to be deem^ no fit company for each
other. When George Herbert left oflF 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

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 86

Milton's belongs to his earlier youth; his middle
age was occupied with controversy and propa-
ganda 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 inqmring,
though poetry and prose tended more and more
to be enlisted in the service of non-artistic en-
thusiasms 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 "pro-
saic" 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 tJie wide and vig-
ilant curiousness of Bacon. Its eager experi-
mentalism 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 aU that the physi-
ology of his day knew of the himian 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 brick-
layer into the best equipped scholar of his day,
and Fuller and Camden grubbing among Eng-
lish 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

86 ENGLISH LITERATDRE— MODERN

was harsh and brutal in its roughness and at
the same time impassioned. And it set up a
school of prose that combined colloqmal readi-
ness and nuenQy> 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 it-
self like a wedge into the art of the time» broad-
ening 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
mto^ and enjoyed, forced them to the plain con-
clusion 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 tl^e destruction of the literary

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 87

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 centu-
ries after the time of its passage. Hawthorne's
novels are the fruit — ^the one ripe fruit in art — of
the Puritan imagination.

(«)

If the reader adopts the seventeenth century
habit himself and takes stock of what the Eliza-
bethans accompUshed 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 bal-
lad and the rondeau. And in the forms which
they failed to bring to perfection they did beauti-
ful and noble woric. 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,
make us feel it a collection of great passages^

88 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 artii^c 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 per-
fection 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 tiiey
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 co-
herent split into different schools. As the period of
the Renaissance was also that of the Reforma-
tion it was only natural a determined effort should
sooner or later be made to use poetry for religious
purposes. The earUest English hymn writing,
our first devotional verse in the vernacular, be-
longs to this time, and a Catholic and religious
school of lyricism grew and flourished beside the

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 89

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 influen-
ces of the time merely mingled. His popularity
is referable to qualities other than those which
belonged peculiarly to his talent as a poet. Puri-
tans loved his religious ardour, and in those
Puritan households where the stncter conception
of the diabolical nature of all poetry had not pene-
trated, 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. Prob-
ably 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 innocuous-
ness 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 whidi the body — ^the "Purple Island'*
— is the field. To a modem reader it is a deso-
lating and at times a mildly amusing book, in
which everything from the liver to the seven
deadly sin.« b personified; in which after four

90 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

books of allegorized contemporary anatomy and
physiology, the will (Voletta) engages in a strug-
gle with Satan and conquers by tiie 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^ 8 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 Spen-
ser'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 modem should not read and enjoy Browne
or Wither, in whose softly flowing verse the sweet-
ness 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
Uterary study which searches out origins and digs
for hints and models of accepted 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 ^ is now thought that he was the author
of the epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke:

*' Underneath this sable hearse
Ides the sabject of all verse^

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 91

Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother.
Death, ere thou hast slam another
Fair and learned and good as she.
Time shall throw a ds^ at thee."

then he achieved the miracle of a quintessential
statement of the spirit of the English Renais-
sance. 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 whid^
», worked under it had died out. Its place was
^taken by the twin schools of Jonson and Donne.
iJonson's poetic method is something like his
dramatic; he formed himself as exacUy as pos-
sible on classical models. Horace had written
satires and elegies, and epistles and complimentary
rverses, and Jonson quite consciously and de-
'Uberately followed where Horace led. He wrote
elegies on the great, letters and courtly com-
pliments 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 trumpet-
eis of the Renaissance in England could have
^ wished. The result is not entirdy successful. He
\ seldom fails to reproduce classic dignity and good
^^ sense; on the other hand he sddom 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

92 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 unexpected-
ness 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 compre-
hending sincerity would be most warmly ap-
preciated by the people to whom they were
addressed. His verses to Shakespeare and his
prose conunentaries on him too, are models of
what self-respecting admiration should be, gen-
erous in its (praise of excellence, candid in its
statement of defects. They are the kind of com-
pliments that Shakespeare himself, if he had grace
enough, must have loved to receive.

Very diflFerent 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 under-
jStand. 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.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 9S

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 analys^jeiaQtijpns so swiftly and
subtly himself that he forgets tihe slower compre-
hension 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 shs^es 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 inar-
ticulate. 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 medisevalism. Browning's
Sordello is obscure because he knows too much
about mediaeval Italian history; Donne's Anni-
versary because he is too deeply read in mediseval
scholasticism and speculation. Both make them-
selves more difficult to the reader who is familiar
with the poetry of their contemporaries by the
disconcerting freshness of their point of view,
f Seventeenth century love poetry was idyllic
I and idealist; Donne's is passionate and realistic
!to the point of cyQicism. To read him after
reading Browne or Jonson is to have the same

94 ENGLISH LITERATUIIE— MODERN

sihock as reading Browning after Tennyson. Both
poets are salutary in the strong and biting anti-
. dote they bring to sentimentalism in thought and
I melodious facifity in writing. They are Qie cor-
* rective of lazy thinking and lazy composition.
Elizabethan love poetry was written on a
convention which though it was used with man-
liness 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 tibat; 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.
Lito this enclosed garden of sentiment and illusion
Donne burst passionately and rudely, pulling up
the gay-coloured tangled weeds that choked
thou^ts, planting, as one of his followers said,
j the seeds of fresh invention. Where his fore-
l runners had been idealist, epicurean, or adoring,
Xhe was brutal, cynical and immitigably realist.
He could begin a poem, "For Grod's sake hold
yoiur 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
j sincerity which was none of theirs, he was, like
\ Browning, unaffectedly a dramatic lyrist. ''I

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 06

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 poetiy, those of
religion. His devotional poems, though they
probe and question, are none the less never ser-
mons, 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," pressed its curious and sceptical ques-
tioning into every comer of love and life and
religion, explored unsuspected depths, exploited
j new discovered paradoxes, and turned its dis-
I coveries always into poetry of the closely-packed
\ artificial style which was all its own. Sim-
plicity indeed would have been for him an aff ecta-
.tion; 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.

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.

96 ENGLISH LITERATUIIE— MODERN

Donne's by producing an era of extravagance and
absurdity which made a literary revolution im-
perative. The school of Donne — ^the " f antastics " i
as they have been called (Dr. Johnson called them \
the metaphysical poets), produced in Herber t |
and Vau^iianj^our two noblest writers of reEgious/
verse, theilower of a mode of writing which
ended m the somewhat exotic reUgiousness of
Qrashaw. In the hands of Cowlgy the use of far-
sought and intricate imagery oecame 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 impure in tihe intenser j
loyalty of troubled times. The most finished of/
them is perhaps Carew; the best, because of the
freshness and variety of his subject-matter and
liis 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.

(8)

The prose literature of the seventeenth cen-
tury is extraordinarily rich and varied, and a
study of it would cover a wide field of human
knowledge. The new and unsuspected harmo-
nies 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

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 97

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 m its combination of vigour and
cadence the euphuistic and colloquial styles of
tlie EUzabethans, 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 seven-
teenth 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 magni-
tude, the abiding significance of it in our sub-
sequent history, social, political, and artistic as
well as religious, compel us to turn aside to ex-
amine the causes that have produced such great
results. The Authorized Version is not, of course,
a purely seventeenth century work. Though the
scholars^ who wrote and compiled it had before

^ There is a graphic little pen-picture of their method in
Sdden's "Table Talk."

98 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

them all the previous vernacular texts and chose
the best readings where they found them or de-
vised new ones in accordance with the original,
the basis is undoubtedly the Tudor version of
Tindall. It has, none the less, the quaUties 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
"y^ English prose style. The reason is not far to seek.
iOi 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 treat-
ment of it. They cared passionately for the truth;
they were virtually anonymous and not ambitious
of originality or Uterary fame; they had no desire
to stand between the book and its readers. It
followed that they cultivated that naked plain-
ness and spareness which makes their work su-
preme. The Authorized Version is the last and
greatest of those English translations which were
the fruit of Renaissance scholarship and pioneer-
ing. \ It is the first and greatest piece of English
pros^i

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

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 99

read the new version. Its supremacy was instan-
taneous 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 writ-
ing 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 his 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 pro-
fession 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
m the minds of hearers of whose favour they
are doubtful, but whose sympathy* they must
gain, are usually of purpose diffuse. They cul-
tivate the gift, possessed by Edmund Burke •
above all other English authors, of putting the A
same thing freshly and in different forms a great j
many times in succession. They value copious-/
ness and fertility of illustration. Nothing couldf
be more unlike this normal legal manner than
the style of Bacon. "No man," says Ben Jon-
son, 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 quintessen-

100 ENGLISH LrrERATURE— MODERN

tial form of an epigram; so complete and con-
centrated is his form of statement, so shortly
is everything put, that the mere transition
from one thought to another ^ves his prose a
curious air of dLsgointedness as if he flitted arbi-
trarily 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 dis-
criminating phraseology, and in the minor
arts of composition — ^in the use of (]^uotations
for instance — ^it can be extraordinarily felici-
tous. But it lacks spaciousness and ease and
rhythm; it makes too inexorable a demand on
the attention, and the harassed reader soon
finds hunself lon^g for those breathing spaces
which consideration or perhaps looseness of
thought has implanted in the prose of other
writers.

I His EssaySy 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

rw

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 101

far th^ may go safely in the diiectioii of sdf-
interest, and to what d^ree the principle of
self-interest must be subordinated to the wider
interests of the people who are raled. Democ-
racy, which in England was to make its splendid
beginnings in the seventeenth century, finds
litde 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 eth-
ical 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 rest-
less enquiry which animated Bacon finds expres-
sion 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 VIL^ 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 sci-
entific investigation. Bacon's name is not upon

102 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 intel-
lectual 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 liter-
ature. It is not necessary to take these delu-
sions seriously. The ignorance of medisevalism
was in the habit of crediting Vergil with the
construction of the Roman aqueducts and tem-
ples whose ruins are scattered over Europe.
The modem Baconians reach much the same
intellectual level. i

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 com-
prehensive; it was to analyse 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

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY lOS

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 modems, poets
and prose writers, schoohnen and dramatists
are all drawn upon for the copious store of his
examples; they are always cited with an air of
quietly hiunorous shrewdness in the comments
and enclosed in a prose that is straightforward,
simple and vigorous, and can on occasion com-
mand 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 del^ht 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 psychologicadly an essentially just
view of human ills, and modem 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
dehberate and conscious stylist, the forerunner
of Charles Lamb, of Stevenson (whose Virginibua
Pueriaque 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.

104 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

He is content to embroider his pattern out of the
stray fancies of an imaginative nature. His best
known work» the Religio Mediciy 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
witib 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 lat-
inized sentences commonly soimd platitudinous
and trivial when they are translated into rough
Saxon prose, as they stand they are rich and melo-
dious 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 Diyden tells us Milton
confessed to him that Spenser was his *' origi-
nal," he has no connection — other than a gen-
eral^ 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

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 105

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 aU 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 Asdiam and tiie poetry of Surrey and Sack-
ville, 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 endeav-
our 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 fsuled, 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 note-
books that he turned over in his mind a national
subject and that the Arthurian legend for a while

106 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

appealed to him. But to Milton's earnest tem-
per nothing that was not true was a fit sub-
ject 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 conmion
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 him-
self 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 modems 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.^ All that

» "MUton," E. M. L., and "Mflton" (Edward Arnold).

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 107

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, imdertaken anxiously
and prayerfully and with a clearly conceived end.
He designed to write a masterpiece and he would
not start tiU 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 extraorcUnary 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 Lyddas, 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; m his very opening lines he mtends,
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 modem —

108 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

George Eliot for instance — ^would have pleaded
the artistic temperament and been content to
remain outside ^e law. Milton always argued
from himself to mankind at large.

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 dose. His art is nowhere
better seen than in his endings.

Is it Lycidas f After the thimder of approach-
ing 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.'

9»

Is it Paradise Lost f After the agonies of ex-
pulsion 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 cdow.
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Is it finally Samson Agonistes f

«

His servants he with new acquist.
Of true experience from this great event.
With peace and consolation hisith dismist,
And calm of mind all passion spent."

THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 109

"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 dbarm
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 necessaiy for him to avoid those incur-
sions of vulgar associations which words carelessly
used will bring in their train. He succeeded bril-
liantly 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 enou^ 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

9»

110 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 cer-
tain 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 "Ro-
mantic " to themselves. \^at is he to imderstand
by these two labels; what are the characteristics
of "Classicism" and how far is it opposite to
aad conflicting with "Romanticism"? The ques-
tion is difficult because the names are used vaguely
and they do not adequately cover everything that
is commonly put imder them. It would be diffi-
cult, 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

THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 111

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, height-
ened the resemblances. They endeavoured to
form their poetry on the lines laid down m the
critical writing of the original Augustan age as
elaborated and interpreted in Renaissance criti-
cism. It was tacitly assumed — some of them
openly asserted it — ^that the kinds, modes of
treatment and aU 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 modem 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 mod-
eration, 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

112 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 clas-
sical school itself had proclaimed as its main en-
deavour. 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 ec-
centricities; tibey endeavoured, and with suc-
cess, to infuse into English letters something of
the academic spirit that was already control-
ling their fellow-craftsmen in France. For«.this
end amongst others they and the men of science
founded tibe Royal Society, an academic com-
mittee which has been restricted since to the
physical and natural sciences and been supple-
mented 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 mem-
bers where their writing was concerned. "The
Royal Society," wrote Qie Bishop of Rochester,
its first historian, "have exacted from all their
members a close, naked, natural way of speak-
ing; positive expressions, clear sense, a native
easiness, bringing aU things as neax the math-
ematical plainness as they can; and preferring
the language of artisans, countrymen, and mer-

THE AGE OP GOOD SENSE US

chants before that of wits and scholars." Arti-
sans, countrymen, and merchants — ^the ideal had
been abeady accepted in France, Malesherbes
striving to use no word that was not in the
vocabidary of the day labourers of Paris, Moliere
making his washerwoman first critic of his come-
dies. 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 Bimyan, the unlettered tinker of
Bedford, for their model rather than the learned
physician Sir Thomas Browne.

But genius like Bimyan'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 ddiberate 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

114 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

Eennitted him to look back over a sentence he
ad written. Something had happened, that is, to
the English language. The assimilation of latin-
isms 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 nor-
mal 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 poetiy
the wildness and extravagance of whose images
was weU-nigh unbounded. The passion for intri-
cate and far-sought metaphor which had pos-
sessed Donne was accompanied in his work and
even more in that of his followers with a passion
for what was elusive and recondite in l^ought
and emotion and with an increasing habit of
rudeness and wilful dijBScultness in language
and versification. Against these ultimate licences
of a great artistic period, the classical writers

THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 115

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 lunts or half-spoken sug-
gestions 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 typi-
cally Renaissance study of rhetoric; the charac-
teristic 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

116 ENGLISH LITERATURE-MODERN

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 con-
veys 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 soimd over sense, a
thing that stirs the vague and impalpable rest-
lessness of memory or terror or desire that lies
down beneath in the minds of men. It rouses
what a philosopher has called the ''Transcen-
dental feeling,'' the solemn sense of the imme-
diate presence of "that which was and is and
ever shall be," to induce which is the property of
the highest poetiy. You will find nothing in
dassicd poetiy so poignant or highly wrought as
Webster's

''Cover her faoe; mine eyes dassde; 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:

THE AGE OP GOOD SENSE 117

*' Stones have been known to move and trees to speak;
Augurs and understood relations have
By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks brought forth.
Tie 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 state-
ments 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 ezprest,'*

"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 culti-
vated it. They were not realists as all good roman-
ticists have to be. They had no love for oddities
or idiosyncrasies or exceptions. They loved uni-
formity, 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

99

118 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 vocab-
ulary 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. TTie 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

THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 119

in which it is most of it written — ^rapidity and
antithesis. Its antithesis made it an incompar-
able vehicle for satire, its rapidity for narrative.
Outside its limits we have hardly any even
passable satirical verse; within them there are
nalf-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 has 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 tiiat 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 modem translations
from the Greek.

(2)

The term "eighteenth century** in the vocabu-
lary of the literary historian is conmionly as
vaguely used as the term Elizabethan. It bor-
rows 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

120 ENGLISH LITERATUBE— MODERN

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, succes-
sively defended the theological positions of the
Church of England and the Church of Rome,
changed his religion and became Poet Laureate
to James H., and acquiesced with perfect equanim-
ity in the Revolution which brought in his suc-
cessor. 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 gen-
ius slung and pitched upon a swivel, it would
certainly turn round as fast as the times, and
instruct hiTTi how to write elegies to Oliver
Cromwell and King Charles the Second with
all the coherence imaginable; how to write
Religio Laid 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 chimged his nature, he
was as free from pynicism as a barrister who

THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 121

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 modem English prose;
earlier writing furnishes no equal to their collo-
quial ease and the grace of their expression.
And they contain some of the most acute criticism
in our hmguage — "classical" in its tone (i. e,,
with a preference for conformity) but with its
respect for order and tradition sdways 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 re-
markable 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-Mon-
mouth intrigues in the closing years of Charles
II. Religio Laid celebrated the excellence of
the Church of England in its character of via
media between the opposite extravagances of
Papacy and Fresbyteiianism. The Bind and

122 ENGLISH LITERATUBE— MODERN

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; AnniM Mirabilis commemo-
rated a year of fire and victories. Besides
these he wrote many dramas in verse, a num-
ber 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 posi-
tion very surely and eflPectively. 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

frasp of his subject, that beyond question has
ept 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 phil-
anthropic descendant, we can read of Achito-
phel 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 sub-*

THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 123

ject for poetry, but the sustained and serious
allegory which Dryden weaves round theo-
logical 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 diflPerent propor-
tions 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 claun 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 in-
comparably our most brilliant versifier. Dry-
den'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 ludi-
crously out of proportion to the solemnity of
the titles which introduce them, nor does he
except very rarely get beyond the conceptions
conmion 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.

124 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

and he will recognize the justice of Addison's
comment that Pope's wit and fine writing con-
sist ''not so much in advancing things that are
new, as in giving things that are known an agree-
able turn." And he will not fall into the error
of dubbing the author a minor poet because
he is neitiber subtle nor imaginative nor pro-
found. 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 vis-
ible 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 every-
thing else that he wrote. From the beginning his
craftsmanship was perfect; from the beginning he
took his subject-matter from others as he foimd
it and worked it up into aphorism and epigram
till each line shone like a cut jewel and the essen-
tial commonplaceness and poverty of his material
was obscured by the gUtter 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 (rf^ the Lock
and the satirical poems come later in his career.

THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 125

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 suc-
cessors (a poor set) in England have not been
intelligent enou^ to use. They allow every
possible good pomt to the object of their attack.
They appear to deal him an even and regretful
justice. His good pcnnts, 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 Loch 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 ormolu mock-heroics and im-
pertinences and set perfectly to tiie time of day.
From no other poem could you gather so fully
and perfectly the temper of the society in whidi
our ''classic" poetry was brought to perfection^

126 ENGLISH LrTERATURE— MODERN

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 ike 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 belong-
ing to the "heroic" or "epic" style to a trifling
circumstance — ^the loss by a yoimg lady of fash-
ion of a lock of hair. And it is the one in-
stance 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. Ths
Rape of ike 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, incliided
also two modems 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 Spen-
ser or Milton. Spenser, though his predecessors
were coimted barbaric and his followers tor-
tiured and obscure, never fell out of admiration;
indeed in every age of JBnglish poetry after him
the greatest poet in it is always to be foimd
copying him or expressing their love for him —

THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE U7

Milton declaring to Dryden that Spenser was
his '* original/' Pope reading and praising him,
Keats writing his earliest work in close imi-
tation. His characteristic style and stanza
were recognised by the classic school as a dis-
tinct "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 ad-
miration 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 Losty 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-soimd-
ing periphrases and borrowings from Latin used
without the gravity and sincerity and fullness
of thought of the master who brought them in.
When tihey 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

128 ENGLISH LTTERATURE^-MODERN

respectively in the Spenserian and the Miltonic
manner, the former The CasUe of Indolence^ the
latter The Seasons. The Spenserian manner is
caught very eflPectively, but the adoption of
the st^rle of Paradise Lost, with its allusive-
ness, drcimilocution and weight, removes any
/freshness the Seasons might have had, had the
( circumstances in them l^een put down as they
^w;ere 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
soplusticated age; it is unfortunate he should
have spent his working hours in rendering the
fruit of coimtry rambles freshly observed into a
cold and stilted diction. It suited the eighteenth
centiuy reader well, for not understanding
nature herself he was naturally obliged to read
her in translations.

(8)

The chief merits of "classic" poetry — ^its clear-
ness, 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.

THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 129

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 Uterary history; none
the less the tradition which describes him as the
father of modem English prose is very near the
truth. He puts into practice for the first time
the ideals, aescribed in the first chapter of this
book, which were set up by the sdiolars 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 caiLseriet a kind of in-
formal 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 con-
sciously "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 whetiier in
politics or letters or discovery but he was not

ISO ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 modem libel actions he had
an adventurous career. In politics he followed
the Whig cause and served the Grovemment with
his pen, notably by his writing 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 ac-
cepted commonplace it is now, proves him a man
of an active and original mind. His originality,
indeed, sometimes over-reached the comprehen-
sion both of the public and his superiors; he
was imprisoned for an attack on the Hanoverian
succession which was intended ironically; ap-
parently 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 modem enterprises and con-
trivances 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 com-
mission 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.

THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 131

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 Uterary fame rests. But
his earUer 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 recom-
mended 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 under-
standing 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 knowl-
edge of the circumstances of life among different
ranks and conditions of men; none of them
has realized with such fideUty 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*

132 ENGLISH LTTEBATURE— MODERN

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 S^t 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 quali-
ties 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, sar-
donic, dark and violent man, impatient of the
slightest contradiction or thwarting, and given
to explosive and instantaneous rage. He de-
lighted in flouting convention, gloried in out-
raging decency. The rage, which, as he said

THE AGE OP GOOD SENSE ISS

liimself , tore his heart out, carried him to strange
excesses. There is something ironical (he would
himself have appreciated it) in the popularity
of GttUiver*8 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 con<*
scious 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 conunon-
place 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 graro
of his controlling art. The extraordinary skill
and closeness of his allegorical writings — ^un«
matched 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 sec-
ondary significance; the minutest circimistances
have a bearing in the satire and the moral. In
The Tale of a Tvb and in GvUiver^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

184 ENGLISH LTTERATUBE— MODERN

represent is unrivaned 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 Tvb^ and certainly the book
is a marvel of constructive skill, all the more
striking because it makes aUegory out of history
and consequently is denied that freedom of nar-
rative so brilliantly employed in the Traoels.

Informing all his writings too, besides intense
feeling and an onmipresent and controlling art,
is strong common sense. His aphorisms, both
those collected under the heading of Thoughts on
Various SubjectSy and countless others scattered
up and down his pages, are a treasury of sound,
if a Uttle 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 sav-
agely resented and condemned a display of af-
fection — ^particularly marital affection — ^in public.
In an age when it was the normal social sys-
tem of settling quarrels, he condemned duelling;
and he said some very wise things — ^things that
might still be said — on modem 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 pas-
sage in lus works a "dim anticipation" of his
philosophy of clothes.

THE AGE OP GOOD SENSE 135

The leading literary invention of the period
— ^af ter 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 Uterary mode is due to two authors,
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Of the two
famous series — ^the Toiler 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 Ughtness of his writing took the lion's share
of their popularity, both tiie plan and the char-
acters round whom the bulk of the essays in the
Spectator came to revolve were 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 Toiler and the Spectator are his. And
he created the dramatis persoruB out of whose
adventures the slender thread of continuity
which binds the essays together is woven. Addi-
son, though less open to the onslaughts of the
conventional moralist, was a less lovable person-
ality. Constitutionally endowed with little vital-
ity he suffered menteJly as well as bodily from
languor and lassitude. His lack of enthusiasm,
his cold-blooded formalism, caused comment even

136 EN6USH LTTERATmiE-MODERN

in an age which prided itself in self-command
and decorum.

His very malevolence proceeded from a flac-
cidity 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 dear 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 ef-
forts we must credit the alteration in morality
which Ths 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 SpecMof rests tiie

DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 1S7

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

DB. 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 John-
son 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
himseS never spoke of them without disdain
and hated them as much as he hated Scots-
men. 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 specu-
lation; in the place of Bolingbroke came Adam
Smith; in the place of Adcfison, Johnson. In
a way it is the solidest and sanest time in English
letters. Yet in the midst of its urbanity and

1S8 ENGLISH LITERATURE-MODERN

order forces were gathering for its destruction.
The ballad-mongers were busy; Blake was draw-
ing and rhyming; Bums was giving songs and
lays to his country-side. In the distance---John-
son 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
symboUc position in literaiy history. His best
kaown work — ^it still remains so — ^was his dic-
tionary, and dictionaries, for all the licence they
give and Johnson took for the expression of a
personality, are the business of purely mechan-
ical 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 — was at all successful.
Rassdas, 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 PoetSy 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 biography

DR. JOHNSON AND mS TIME 139

ical compilations. There was hardly one of the
literary coterie over which he presided that was
not doing better and more lasting work. Noth-
ing 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 ap-
proaching the magnitude of Gibbon's Decline
and Fall of the Roman EmpirCy 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 over-
powering 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 his-
tory 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

140 ENGLISH LITERATDRE-MODERN

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 imper-
tinent. The impression of the solidity and magni-
tude 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 Dictonary
and all his works except the Idves of the Poeta
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 f uU-
length study of Johnson the conversationalist
and literary dictator, the proportion it preserves
is faulty and its study of iiie early years — ^the
years of poverty, of the Vanity of Human Wishes
and London^ of RasselaSf 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

DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 141

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 con-
cession 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 jour-
nalistic 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 ponder-
ous. 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 tiiem but was deeply and sin-
cerely felt; not one but is^mt 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 docu-
ment in character.

So that when he came to his own, when grad-'
ually the public whom he despised and neglected
raised him iiito a pontifical position matched
by none before him in England and none since

142 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 Ins 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 Bos-
well besides being an admirer and reporter sedu-
lously chronicUng all his master said and did,
fortunately influenced both the saying and the
doing. Most of us have some one in whose com-
pany 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 oppor-
tunity for displaying himself at his best. The
recorded talk is extraordinarily varied and enter-
taining. It is a mistake to conceive Johnson as

DR. JOHNSON AND mS TIME 14S

a monster of bear-like rudeness, shouting down
opposition, hectoring his companions, and habit-
ually a blustering verbal bully. We are too easily
hypnotized by Macaulay's flashy caricature. He
could be merciless in argument and often wrong-
headed 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
Uterary work that need be considered), Johnson
must be allowed a high place. His natural in-
dolence 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 reten-
tive memory against an occasion for their use.
To a very fully equipped mind he brought the
service of a robust and acute judgment. More-
over 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 sel-

144 ENGLISH LITERATUBE— MODERN

dom m 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 essen-
tials, has given us his best critical work — ^nothing
could be better, for instance, than his char-
acterisation 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 preju-
diced — ^for instance in his attack on Milton's
Lycidas — ^there is usually something to be said
for his point of view. And after tlus concentra-
tion, his excellence depends on his basic conunon
sense. His classicism is always tempered, like
Dryden's, by a humane and sensible dUUke
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

DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 145

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 appre-
ciate; 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*

(«)

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, Rich-
ardson 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

146 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

poetic diction and heroic couplet to death.
Outside scattered about is the van of Romance
— ^Percy collecting his ballads; Bums making
songs and verses in Scotland; the "mad" people.
Smart and Chatterton, and above all Blake,
obscurely beginning the work that was to fin-
ish 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 examina-
tion of them would be out of place here. His
political theory strikes a middle course which
offends — ^and in his own day offended — both par-
ties in the common strife of political thinking.
He believed the best government to consist in a
patriotic aristocracy, ruling for the good of the
peopI^^By hbftii an Irishman, he had the innate
practicality which commonly lies beneath the j
flash and colour of Irish f9rcefulness and rhetoric. /
That, and his historical training, which influenced^
him in the direction of conceiving every institu-
tion as the culmination of an evolutionary devel-
opment, sent him directly counter to the newest
and most enthusiastically urged political phi-
losophy of his day — ^the philosophy stated by
Rousseau, and put in action by the French Revo-
lution. 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

DR. JOHNSON AND fflS TIME 147

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
venahty was not to increase the size of the elec-
torate, but to reduce it so 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 thinkar 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, "vehe-
ment 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 poli-
tician; they would fit, for instance, very well
on Mr. Gladstone; but they do Burke less
than justice* He was an innovator in modem

148 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

<i^political thought, and his application of the
J historical method to the study of institution* is
in its way a not less epoch-making achievenifent
than Bacon's application of the inductive method
to science. At a time when current political
thought, led by Rousseau, was drawing its the-
ories 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. Jn 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 moraUty which exists between
man and man. Surest of all, we have the testi-
mony, 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

DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 149

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 occupa-
tions, 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 pretematurally
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 Uves; 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 sensibiUties 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
Conmions, and nourish hatred beyond the bounds
of justice or measure. But these things do not
affect his position, nor take from the solid great-
ness of his work.

150 ENGLISH LITERATDRE— MODERN

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, Goldsmitii'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 himiour. This latter
gift, displayed constantly m a company which
had little knowledge of the peculiar quality of
Irish wit and no faculty of sympathy or imagina-
tion, 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 Bos-
well and watch how often Groldsmith, 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 modem writers
of light haJf-farcical comedy are Irish. Gold-
smith'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 lus essays — ^particularly those of
the Citizen of the World witib 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

DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 151

rather to the school of the earlier eighteenth
century than to his own day; the enthusiasm
of Addison for French literature which he re-
tained gave him a more graceful model than the
'"Johnsonian" school, to which he professed
himself to belong, could afford.

(8)

The eighteenth century .novel demands sepa*
rate treatment, and of tiie 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 tibe bulk of fresh things conceived
in it were dull and imitative, even tiiough occa-
sionally, 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 over-
lapped 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

162 ENGLISH LITERATURB-MODERN

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 conven-
tion which had been triumphant for upwards of
seventy years when their prime came. It is a
break, however, in style rather than m essentiak,
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 msipidly after the ''beaded
bubbles winking at the brmi" of romance. They
are fastidious and academic; they lack the au-
thentic 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." Stenlity 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 rou-
tine. But in what he wrote he had the gen-
uine poetic gift — ^the gift of insight and feeling.
Against this, Swinburne with characteristic vehe-
mence 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 Bums and Blake.
In every country at any one time there are

DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 15S

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 litera-
ture, is conmionly 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 crit-
ical 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 lliem, though
their existence and probably some special knowl-
edge of one or other of them is within the expe-
rience 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 par-
ticular 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 Bums. 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

154 ENGLISH LITER^TUBE— MODERN

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^ says he brought nothing to
the literature he became a part of but himself.
His daring and splendid genius made the local
imiversal» raised out of rough and cynical satir*
izing a style as rich and humorous and astrin-
gent 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.

Stevenson in his essay on Bums 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 medimn afresh
for themselves. Commonly their fame and
acceptance is slow, for they speak in an unfamil-
iar tongue and they have to educate a genera-
tion to understand their work. The other order

^ W. E. Henley, " Essay on Bums." Works, David Nutt

DR. JOHNSON AND fflS TIME 15S

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 Bums like
Shakespeare, and among the lesser men Tenny-
son, 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; h^
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
happenmgs and its reunitmg of long parted
friends. Bums 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
Hdy Willie* s Prayer ^ the song and recitative of
The JoUy Beggars, are all to be found in his prede*
cessors, in Fergusson, Ramsay, and th^ 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 imcomparable richness
of a personality whose fire and brilliance and
humour transcended all locality and all tradition,
a personality which strode like a colossus over

166 ENGLISH LTTERATURB-MODERN

the fonnalism and correctness of his time. His
use of familiar forms explains, more than any-
thing 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 under-
stand.

It is impossible to judge Bums from his purely
English verse; though he did it as well as any
of tiie minor followers of the school of Pope he did
it no better. Only the weakest side of his character
— ^his sentimentidism — ^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 wi^in
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 ex-
press in the language of Pope or even of Words-
worth an effect like this: —

«

They reded, they set, they cross'd, they deekit.
Till ilka carlin swat and reekit.
And ooost her duddies to the waik.
And linket at it in her sark."

or this: —

«iV.-

ti

DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 167

"Yestreen when to the trembling string.
The dance gaed thro' the lighteid 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 Bums
thinking in his native tongue who wrote it, not
the Bums 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 Bums 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

• * e - -J
^ • • ^ -

168 ENGLISH LITERA.TURE— MODERN

«(.

logical Bepubfican 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 roman-
ticism, in fact, which in England had to wait
for Byron and Shelley, is already full-grown in
his work. He anticipates and gives complete ex-
pression to one half of the Romantic movement.
What Bums 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, work-
ing in obscurity, utterly unknown to the Uterary
world that existed outside him, summed up in
himself all the thoughts and tendencies which
were the fruit of anxious discussion and propa-
ganda 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 inde-
pendent discovery by Wallace and Darwin of
the principle of natural selection furnishes, per-
haps, 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 tJiat condem-
nation of the ''classic" school that Wordsworth
and Coleridge proclaimed against the opposition

DR. JOHNSON AND fflS TIME 169

of a deriding worid. As was his habit he com-
pressed 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 Cole-
ridge 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; himianity is crippled by *mind-
forg'd manacles'; love is enslaved to the moral
law, which is broken by the Saviour of man-
kind; and, even more subtly than by Shelley,
life is pictured by Blake as a deceit and a dis-
guise veiling from us the beams of the Eternal." ^

In truth, Blake, despite the imputation of
insanity which was his contemporaries' and
has later been his conmientators' refuge from
assenting to his conclusions, is as bold a thinker
in his own way as Neitzsdie and as consistent.

1 Prof. Baleigh.

leo ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

An absolute unity of belief inspires all his utter-
ances, cryptic and plain. That he never succeeded
in founding a school nor gathering followers must
be put down in the first place to l£e 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 I

are the full and extended statement of his phi- I

losophy, are couched, and in the second place i

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, com-
paring facility by which we come to impute
praise or bhime is the only evil m his ejes. ''There
IS nothing either good or bad but thmking makes
it so"; to rid the world of thinking, to substitute
for reason, imagination, and for tibought, vision,
was the object of all that he wrote or drew.
The implications of this philosophy carry far,
and BlsJce 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 Uke his

"My silks and fine array."

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 161

and the others which carry the Elizabethan ac-
cent. He could write these things as well as the
Elizabethans. In others he was unique.

''Tiger I Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night.
What immortal hand or eye
G>uld frame thy fearful symmetry.*'

In all the English lyric there is no voice so
dear, 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 com-
monest 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 influ-
'ence of poet on poet, and book on hookl You
find one man har king bft ck tp^ajrUer models in
his own tongue, wEchSi intervening age mis-
understood or despised; another, tumi|2g.tQ.the
contemporaiy literatures of neighbouring coun-
tries; 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

162 ENGLISH LITERATUBE— MODERN

unsuspected originals, find the well-known verse
of Bums' epistles turning up in Provencal;
Tennyson's In Memoriam stanza in use by
Ben Jonson; the metre of Christabd in minor
Elizabethan poetry; the peculiar form of Fitz-
gerald'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 excite-
ment 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 con-
cern us here,_but it is important to remember

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 1(B

that the passi( ^ for sim gHfeation and for a
return to nature as a reluge trom the artificial
complexities of society, which inspired the
Lyrical BaUadSy inspired no less the course of
the Revolution in France, and later, the de-
struction by Napoleon of the smaller feudal
states of Grermany, which made possible German
nationality and a national spirit.

In this romantic revival, however, the revolu-
tion in form and style matters more than in
most. The classicism of the previous age had been
so fixed and unmutable; it had been enthroned
in high places, enjoyed the esteem of society,
arrogated to itself the acceptance which good^^
breeding and good manners demanded. Dry- >
den had been a Court poet, careful to change /
his allegiance with the changing monarchy^
Pope hs^ been the equal and intimate of the
great people of his day, and his foUowers, if
Qiey did not enjoy the equality, enjoyed at
any rate the patronage of many noble lords.
The effect of this was to give tibe 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 poetica l dictio n, no system of jSEiQsds at once
IrefineSTTfom the grossness dT domestic use,
and free from the harshness of terms appro-
priated to particular arts. Words too familiar
or too remote to defeat the purpose of a poet."
This poetic diction, refined from the gross-
ness of domestic use, was the standard poetic
speech of the eighteenth century. The heroic
couplet in which it was cast was the standard

164 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 imreal and arti-
ficial manner of writing. They desired simplicity
of style.

When the Lyrical BaUads 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 ^at of dictji pn. "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 de-
rived, and because from Qieir rank in society,
and the sameness and narrow circle of their inter-
course, 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 ojE^the-^conmion-people, not because it

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 165

fitted, as an earlier school of poets who used the
common speech had asserted, the utterance of
habitual feeling and conmion sense, but because
it is the most si ncere expre ssion of thf? df^pffft
and rare^t.^Missiom 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 thcL
tyranny of artificiality, the getting back of com-^
mon speech into poetry. But there was another,
earKer and more potent in its effect. The eight-
eenth century, weary of its own good sense and
sanity, turned to the Middle Ages for picturesque-
ness 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 tra- V
dition 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 thin k ing
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 sup-
pose that the passion for medisevalism began with
either Coleridge or Scott. Horace Walpole was
as enthusiastic as either of them; good eighteenth

166 ENGLISH LTTERATURE— MODERN

century prelates like Hurd and Percy, found in
what they called the Got hic an inexhaustible
source of delightl As was natural, what at-
tracted them in the Middle Ages was not their
resemblances to the time they lived in, but the
points in which the two di£Fered. 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 otiber 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 fol-
lowers, medievalism was a coUection of wh at
actors call properties" gargoyles, and odds and
ends*" cSfaimblir'TaXd 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 com-
plex 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 ROMANTIC REVIVAL 167

the Highlands, to Celtic, or pseudo-Celtic ro-
mance. To the fashion of the time momitains
were still frowning and horrid steeps; in Gray's
Jomnal of his tour in the Lakes, a new under-
standing and appreciation of nature is only sto ug-
glingJJbsQ^gh; and when mountains beSSEXhe
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 lAnes toritten
above Tintem Abbey ^ in which he sets forth the
succeeding stages of his mentQldevd[opment»
refers to this love of the mounEams^or their
spectaculftr^gualities, 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,
Hieir colours and their forms were then to me
An appetite."

This same passion for the ** sounding cata-
ract" and the "tall rock," this appetite for the*
deep and gloomy wood, gave its vogue in Words-
worth'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 mediseval quaintness and obsolete
words, however, led to a moreJim^prtant liter-
ary event — ^the publication of Bishop Percy's
edition of the ballads in the Percy folio — ^Uie
Reliques of Ancient Poetry\ Percy to his own
mind knew the Middle Agek better than they

168 ENGLISH UTER/LTURE— MODERN

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^
whidi 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 impfitug^to
one half of the romantic movement; it was
eagerly read m 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 modem study and love of
the ballad which has given us Sistet^den, 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 tiie first place, "^crfiotices
in the authors of the time an extraordinary
development of imaginative sensibiUty; \he
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

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 169

graded shades of difiference. 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
tiie 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 unfa-
miliar 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 suffi-
cient 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 interpene-
trating one another. They were none the less
iirtists because they approached nature in a
state of passive receptivity. They beUeved in
the autocracy of the individual imagination
none the less because their mission was to divine

170 ENGLISH LITERATUEE— MODERN

nature and to understand h^r, 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 MontesqifietT^elped
students of politics to acquire perspective; to
conceive modem institutions not as things sepa-
rate, 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 Bel-
gium, 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 develop-
ment 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 con-
temporary life. Scott's best work, his novels
of Scottish character, catch more than half
their exceUg2Ce_firon]u^Jji&--ri(^nes»~4)^^

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 171

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 super-
natural which in all but the crudest of mechan-
isms 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 hBS 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 hmnan
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. Words-
worth 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 aky.
The peace that is among the lonely hills.'*

Shelley for the wildness of ihe west wind, and
the ubiquitous spiritual emotion which speaks

172 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 wind-
ing 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 Eng-
lish criticism; all tiie poets were critigs^o f one
sort or another — either formally in essays and
prefaces, or in passing and desultory flashes of
illumination in their correspondence. Words-
worth, in his prefaces, in his letter to a friend of
Bums which contains such a breadth and clarity
of wisdom on things that seem alien to his sym-
pathies, even in some of his poems; Coleridge,
m his Biographia LUeraria^ 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 con-
tain so much truth and insight into the works
of fellow craftsmen — ^they are all to be found
turning \he new acuteness of impression which
was in the air they breathed, to the studv^f
ijtexa ture. as well as to the study of nature.
Alongside of them were two authors. Lamb
and Hazlitt, whose bent was ra;yifiE»_critical
than creative, and the best part of whose mtelli-
gencelQld sympathy was spent on the sensitive

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 17S

and loving divination of our earlier literature.
With these two men began the criticism of act-
ing and of pictorial art that have developed since
into two of the main kinds of modem critical
writing.

Romantic criticism, both in its end and its
method, differs widely from that of Dr. John-
son and his school. Wordsworth and Coleridge
were concerned with d^^jvsfiatM qMfl1it]^° and
temperamentaL^USerences. Their critical work
revolved round their conception of the fancy
and the imagination, \he one dealing with nature
on the surface and decorating it with imagery,
the other penetrating to it& deeper significances.
Hazlitt and Lamb applied ^eir analogous con-
ception of wit as a lawec-quality than humour,
in the same fashion. Dr. Johnson looked on the
other hand for correctness of form, for the sub-
ordination of the parts to the whole, for the self-
restraint and good sense which conmion 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 inca-
pable of understanding lyricism, and they pre-
ferred those forms of writing which set themselves
to express the ideas and feelings that most men
may be supposed to have in conunon. 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

174 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 lor 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. jNew modes of poetry asked of critics new^
symffathies 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,

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 175

but a step below Shakespeare himself — ^and we
know more about him, more about the processes
by which his soul moved from doubts to cer-
tainties, from troubles to triumph, than we do
about any other author we have. This knowl-
I edge we have from the poem called. The Preltide,

I which was published after his death. It was

' designed to be only the opening and explana-

tory section of a philosophical poem, which was
never completed. Had it been published earlier
it would have saved Wordsworth from the cold-
ness 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 man-
hood, he made one great discovery, had on^
great vision. By the Ught of that vision and to ^^
communicate that discovery he wrote his great-yf
est work. By and by the vision faded, the world
fell back into the light of common day, his phi-
losophy passed from discovery to acceptance, and
L all unknown to him his pen fell into a common

; way of writing. The faculty of reading which

I 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
ol otEarar. "Only the shock of a change of envi-
ronment — a tour in Scotland, or abroad — shook

176 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 Prelvdcy and the Excursion, Words-
worth'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 un-
certain about him.

The determining factor in his career wbs the
French Revolution — ^that great movement which
besides re-making France and Europe, made
our very modes of thinking anew. WMle 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 yGipandiaJs —Wordsworth threw in
his lot. Hadne 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 contem-
plate from a distance the struggle in which he
burned to take an active part. One is accus-
tomed to think of Wordsworth as a mild old
man, but such a picture if it is thrown back as a
presentment of tlie Wordsworth of the nineties
is a far way from the truth. This darkly pas-
sionate man tortured himself with his longings
and his horror. War came and the prayers for
victory in churches found him in his heart pray-

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 177

ing 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 de-
stroyed 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, Words-
worth, unlike Hamlet, was resolute and deter-
mined. 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, certain-
ties too arid for his thirsting mind. Then he
made his great discovery — Whelped 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. WTien he gave his mes-
sage to the world it was a new message. It is
worth while remembering that it is stiU an un-
accepted 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."

178 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

Yet Wordsworth really believed that moral les-
sons 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 con-
vince 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 duly was to recapture those impres-
sions, 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 bom in experience. Then poetry is
made; this emotion "recollected" as Words-
worth said (we may add, re-created) "in tranquil-
lity" passes into enduring verse. He treasured
numberless experiences of this kind m 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 Independ--
ence or Oipsies, where some chance sight met
with in one of the poet's walks is brooded over
till it becomes charged with a tremendous signifi-
cance 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

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 179

differ from. Us judgments, the test which he ap-
plied 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 Tintem 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 trans-
figures everything; it is God. It was Words-
worth'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 Ught,

The glory and the freSmess 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

180 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

this, and Wordsworth's beliefs were inextricably
entangled with the conception which Coleridge
borrowed from German philosophy.

"We receive here 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 criti-
^cism to metaphysics where Coleridge leads, and
wise not to follow.

If Wordsworth represents that side of the Ro-
mantic Revival which is best described as the
return to Nature, Coleridge has justification for
the phrase "Renascencejot 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
thati/air of sug ge stion and indefin itene ss Jwhich
gives the highest potency to it in itTeffect on the
imagination. (But Coleridge is more noteworthy
for what hd 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 compan-
ionship 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

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 181

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 at-
mosphere 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.
I 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 Words-
worth'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
tibe 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 Umself . The spirit of
the revolution, as it was understood in France
and in Europe, had to wait for Shelley for its
complete expression. ^"^/^"^, ^? ^^^ Krp^tli 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

182 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 Eng-
lish, nor perhaps in any other tongue, could it
be said with more surety, that the pursuit of the
spirit pf^beauty dominates all his work. For
SheDey itinterfused 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 de-
scribe a poet wrapped up in his dreams as being
Uke 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.*'

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 183

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 mos t comp letely
lyrical. Nothing that he wrote but is wrought
oiirof 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 rareiSed. It sometimes lacksstren^th.
It fails to take grip enough of life. Had he Uved
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 Skylarky of some of
his choruses, and of the Ode to DejectioUy and
of the Lines written on the Euganean Hills,

If the Romantic sense of the one-ness of nature
found its highest exponent in Shelley, the Roman-
tic sensibility to outward impressions reached
its climax in Keats. For him lif e 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 Hamp-
stead becomes like a landscape in the tropics, so
extraordinary vivid and detaUed is his appre-
hension 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

184 ENGLISH LTTERATCRE— MODERN

senses, crowd eveiy line of his work, and in his
earlier poems overiay 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 lasting-
ness 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 aD
We know on ei^th 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 complete-
ness 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
moro sharply divided than it is about any other
writer in English. In his day Lord Byron was

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 185

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 per-
sists on the Continent, hardly anyone could be
found in England to subscribe to it now. With-
out 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 pop-
ularity and the position he won? What were the
qualities which gave him the power he enjoyed?

In the jSrst 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. Descr^i-^^
tive jouinaUsm 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 per-
sonality, and when that personality was enforced
by a title» when it proclaimed its sorrows as

186 ENGLISH LTTERATUKB-MODERN

the age's sorrows, endowed itself with an air of
symbolism and set itself up as a kind of scape-
goat for the nation's sins, its triumph was com-
plete. 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
ban question his sincerity in that. He could be
ia fine and scathing satirist; and though he was
jcareless, he had great poetic gifts.

(S)

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 peiiodical 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

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 187

enough to carry off any desultory adventure
by the mere force of its own attractiveness.
Yet there is all the difference in the world be-
tween Hazlitt and Addison, or Lamb and Steele.
The Tader and the Spectator leave you with a
sense of artifice; Hazlitt and Lamb leave you
with a grip of a reaTgejrsonality — ^in the one case
very vigorous anJcombative, 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 pla^s at
being^uman; Lamb's essays — ^the translation
into print of a heap of idiosyncrasies and oddi-
ties, 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 centiuy.
/ They brought back egotism and'^fhey brought
back enthusiasm. They had the confidence t^iat
their own tastes and experiences were enough
to interest their readers; they mastered the gJTt
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 deliberaite, consciously
assumed, the result of a compelling and shap-
ing 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,

188 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

or Browne, mirroring their idiosyncrasies, flak-
ing their quaintness and graces his own. By
the time he came to write the Essays of Eliay
he had mastered the personal style so com-
pletely 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
incorrecUy, 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 comers, taking off the
traces of logical sequences and argument, till
in the finished work of art he mimicked in-
consequence 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 excit-
able 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 hmi 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 por-
trait by Hazlitt there is a dark and gleaming

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 189

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 playbills; living always
in the past, loving in the town secluded byways
like the Temple, or the libraries of Oxford Col-
leges, 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 ro- ;
mantic 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 exten-
sive 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 Haz-
litt, who brought his passionate and combative
disposition to the service of criticism, and pro-
duced a series of studies remarkable for tlieir
earnestness and their vigour, and for the essential
justness which they display despite the prejudice
on which each of them was confessedly based.

100 ENGLISH LITEBATUBE— MODERN

CHAPTER Vm

THB VICTOBIAN AGB
(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 fiie years im-
mediately before his death, was paid not to the
conservative laureate of 1848, but to the revolu-
tionary in art and politics of ^ fifty years before.
He had lived on long after his work was done

'*To hear the world applaud the hoUow ghost
That blamed the living man."

All the others, l^eats, Shelley, Byronl were dead
before 1830, and the problem wluch 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

THE VICTORIAN AGE 191

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 ac-
customed 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
bom 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 smgle inspiration of
the Renaissance broke into different schools.
Along these separate lines represented by such
men as Brownmg, 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 activ-
ity invites his readers to understand his direct
relations to the romantic movement. Rossetti
touches it through his original, Keats; Arnold
through Groethe 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 Roman-
tic 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.

192 ENGLISH LTTERATUBE— MODERN

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 Reaohdion 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 Cumber-
land beggar through villages and past farm-
steads, brings to those who see him the same
kind of consolation as the impulses from a ver-
nal wood that Wordsworth celebrated in his
purely nature poetry. Compare with Words-
worth, 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 furUier
apart. The intervention of Pippa is dramatic, and
though her song is in the same key as the word-
less message of Wordsworth's beggar she is a
world apart from him, because she is some-
thing not out of natiu'al history, but out of life.
V The Victorian age extended the imaginative
yfeensibflity which its predecessor had brought
Wio bear on nature and history, to the com-
f plexities of human life. It searched for indi-
viduality 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

THE VICTORIAN AGE 193

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 return-
ing, 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 discov-
eries of its men of science, and by the remark-
able and rapid succession of inventions which
revolutionized the outward face of life, made
hardly less alteration in accepted ways of think-

194 ENGLISH LITERATUBE-MODERN

ing. The evolutionary theory, which had been in
the air since Goethe, and to which Darwin was
able to give an incontrovertible basis of scien-
tific 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 multi-
plying 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 se nse of confidence
and cei ::tain ty not possessed by tEe^Ttge'ljefore.
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-ciurents.
/ Disra eli survived to show that there were still
•young men who thought Byronically. Bosgg.tti
and lus school held themselves proudly aloof from

THE VICTORIAN AGE 195

the rationalistic and scientific tendencies of the
time, and found in the Middle ages, better under-
stood 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 scien-
tific spirit implied, its certain doubt, its care for
minuteness, and truth of observation, its growmg
interest in social processes, and the conditions
under which life is lived, that b the central
fact in Victorian literature.

Tennyson represents more fully than any
other poet this essential spirit of the age. U
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 mferiority to his contemporary. Browning.
Comparisons between the two men seem inevit-
able; they were miade by readers when In Me-
moriam 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 brin^g up strange and
unfamiliar finds; Tennyson m faultless verse reg-
istering current newly accepted ways of thought;
Browning in advance thinking afresh for him-
self, occupied ceaselessly in the arduous labour
of creating an audience fit to judge him. The
age justified the accuracy with which Tenny-
son mirrored it, by accepting him and rejecting

196 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 Uttle
pretentious.

His earlier poetry, before he took upon him-
self 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 (Enone
shows an extraordinarily fine sense of language
and melody, and the capacity caught from
Keats of conveying a rich and highly coloured

Eictorial effect. No other poet, save Keats,
as had a sense of colour so highly developed
as Tennyson's. From his boyhood he was an
exceedingly close and sympatiietic 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 legiti-
mate 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 im-
pertinences, beautiful and extravagant imperti-
nences no doubt, but alien to their setting. In

THE VICTORIAN AGE 197

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 cliflf 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 com
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 wil«
lows are like, or the names of the butterflies;

198 ENGLISH LITERATDRE— MODEBN

but he is capable, on occasion of '' dragging it

in," as in

*'The nebulous star we call the sun»
If that hypothesis of theiis 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 appropriate-
ness 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
modem times, a long poem, he might have
found it in Tennyson. His strength is in his
shorter pieces; even where as in Zn 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 biu*lesque in
the manner of the Rape of the Locky and a serious
apostleship of the liberation of women, is solely
redeemed by these lyrics. Tennyson's innate
conservatism hardly squared with the liberalis-
ing tendencies he caught from the more advanced
thought of his age, in writing it. Something of
the same kind is true of Mtrnd^ 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

THE VICTORIAN AGE 199

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 hun 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 fimdamentally
alien from the moral and religious atmosphere
of Arthurian romance. \ His robust Protestant-
ism left no room for mysticism; he could neither
appreciate nor render the myistical 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 lie 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.

800 ENGLISH LTTERATUEE^-MODERN

But if he failed in his kirger 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 MorU d* Arthur^ and the sharp
and defined beauty of Sir Galahad and the Lady
of ShaloU, 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 contem-
poraries 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 Bums. A note of passionate humanity is in-
deed in all his work. It maked^-VTVid and intense
his scholarly handling of Greek myth; always
the ' unchanging human aspect of it attracts
him most, in (Enone's grief, in the indomitable-
ness of Ulysses, the weariness and disillusion-
ment in Tithonus. It has been the cause of the
comfort he has brought to sorrow; none of his
generation takes such a himian attitude to death.
Shelley could yearn for the iofinite. 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 foioe^
She neither hears nor sees.
Rolled round in earth's unending course
With rocks and fields and trees.

THE VICTORIAN AGE 201

To Tennyson it brings the fundamental human
home-sickness for fanuliar 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 Unes, 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 nar-
rative 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 Bums, creative artists can
be divided. Browning belongs to that one which

802 ENGLISH LITERATTJBE-MODERN

makes everything new for Itself, and has in con-
sequence to educate the readers by whom its
work can alone be judged. He was an innovator
in nearly everything he did; he thought for him-
self; 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.^ 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.

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 cu;tions. 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, prob-
ably 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

^ 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 com-
pleteness of Tennyson; we find in him the irregularities, the
suppressions, the quick changes of talk — ^the cUpped, clever
talk of much idea'd people who huny breathlessly from one
aspect to another of a subject.

THE VICTORIAN AGE 203

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 BUmgram^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 ap-
peared to the minds of the chief actors in succes-
sion. To these new forms he added the originaUty
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 phi-
losophy 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 m oral worth
of fiflEort. Life is a "training school" for a future
existence, and our place in it depends on the

204 ENGLISH LTTERATUBE— MODEBN

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 spiritiml faculties
the more. Only torpor is the supreme sin, even
as in The Statue and the Btui 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 g^ost
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 tiiough an actual and earthly union
is impossible.

"She has lost me, I have gained her;
Her soul's mine and thus grown pofect,
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 be^ 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

THE VICTORIAN AGE 905

schools. Nearest to them in temper is the school
of Matthew Arnold and Clough; they have the
same quick sensitiveness to the intellectual tend-
encies of the age, but their foothold in a time
of shifting and dissolving creeds is a stoical resig-
nation 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 medisevalism
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 imite in be-
longing, gave up Christianity with scarcely so
much as a regret,

*' We have said to tlie dream tliat caiess'd and tlie dread tliat
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 Words-
worth after 1815, and was too early extinguished
with Shelley, was revived by the Italian Revolu-
tion 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

206 ENGLISH UTERATUBE— MODERN

mean imaginative literature or writing about
imaginative literature. The mass of writing
comes to be taken not as literature, but as ar-
gument 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 him-
self as engaged in the study of English literature;
when he reads Darwin he is occup^ 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 smnmaiy, and he can
plead in extenuation the increased literary out-
put of the later age, and the incompleteness
with which time so far has done its work m sifting
the memorable from the forgettable, the ephem-
eral 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 joiunalist and biassed
historian Macaulay, nor of the mellifluousness
of Newman, nor of the vigour of Kingsley or
Maurice; nor of the writings, adnurable in their
literary qualities of purity and terseness, of Dar-
win or Huxley; nor of the culture and apostleship
of Matthew Arnold. These authors, one and aU,
interpose no barrier, so to speak, between their
subject-matter and their readers; you are not

THE VICTORIAN AGE 207

when you read them conscious of a literary inten-
tion, but of some utilitarian one, and as an essay
on English literature is by no means a hand-
book to serious reading they wiU 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 phi-
losophers or professionid 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 cen-
tury literature is probably in need of some guid-
ance; 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 prep-
aration in Scotland, town and country, were
over, and he had settled in that famous Uttle
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 Revoltdion came in the year of her

808 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 Uteraiy history by dynastic periods, there came
a new spirit into his work. For the first time he
applied his peculiar system of ideas to contempo-
rary politics. Chartism appeared in 1889; Pcui
and Present, which does the same thing as Char-
tism in an artistic form, three years later. They
were followed by one other book — Latter Day
Pamphlets — addressed particularly to contempo-
rary conditions, and by two remarkable and volu-
minous 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 pre-
conceived 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 his-
tories in the canon of his works and pamphlets
on contemporary problems, but they are com-
posed 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 rea-
soning, 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

4

THE VICTORIAN AGE 209

the characteristic of his work. Against cold-
blooded argument his passionate nature rose
in fierce rebellion; he had no patience with
the formalist, or iiie 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 diflferentiate one sort of hero from
another. His picture of contemporary condi-
tions 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 residt 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.

1

210 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

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 PcLst 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 stren-
uous 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 f ainUy resembUng the
astonishing eccentricity and individuality of his
style. Gifted with an extraordinarily excitable
and vivid imagination; seeing things with sud-
den and tremendous vividness, as in a search-
light or a lightning flash, he contrived to convey
to his readers his impressions fuU charged with
the original emotion that produced them, and thus
with the highest poetic eflfect. There is nothing
in all descriptive writing to match the vividness

THE VICTORIAN AGE 211

of some of the scenes in the French Revoltdion or
in the narrative part of CromwelVs 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 docimients, in
Sartor Resartits. Alongside this immatched pic-
torial 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 — & wearisome re-
iteration of emphasis, a clumsiness of construc-
tion, 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 lAfe of Sterling) on Sartor
Resartvs. But gross as they are, and frequently
as they provide matter for serious oflFence, these
eccentricities of language link themselves up in
a strange indissoluble way with Carlyle's indi-
viduality 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 pre-
servative of his work. That of all the political
pamphlets which the new era of reform occa-
sioned, 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.

S12 ENGLISH LITEBATUBE— MODERN

CHAPTER IX

THE NOVEL
(1)

The faculty for telling stories is the oldest artis-
tic 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 tiade. 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 do 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

THE NOVEL 213

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 succes-
sion, 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 EuphueSy approach
the essence of the novel as we know it. They
are all (except Euphuesj which is simply a frame-
work 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

214 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

^ character and to look at actions not only out-
^ wardly, 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 psy-
chological interest; he had taught that '"char-
acter is destiny," and that men's actiona and
fates spring not from outward agencies, but
from within in their own souls. The a^ began
to take a deep and curious interest m men's
lives; biography was written for the first time
and autobiography; it is the great period of
memoir-writing hotb. 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 tran-
sient form of literature in the seventeenth cen-
tury — ^the Character — ^is an ancestor in the
direct line. The collections of them — ^Earle's
Microcosmogrwphy is the best — are not very
exciting reading, and they never perhaps quite
succeed 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

THE NOVEL 215

which was abeady there, the added interest of
character.

That, however, was not quite how the thing
worked in actual fact. At the heels of the " Char-
acter" 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 sen-
tences that follow eiax^h 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 iUus-
trates it; you get to know them, that is, gradu-
ally, 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 maimer of fiction — ^the autobiograph-

816 ENGLISH LrrERATUEB-MODERN

ical — ^had already been invented. It grew directly
out of the public interest in autobiography, and
particularly in the tales of their voyages whidh
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 charac-
ter 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 PUgrim^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, alle-
gory goes to the winds. But the autobiographical
form of fiction in its highest art is the creation
of Defoe. He told stories of adventure, inci-
dents 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 Qie narrator.
He contrived to observe in his writing a scrup-
ulous 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 caref id by taking
his narrator up to a high point of vantage the
day after his arrival, tiiat we shall learn the
essentials of it» as long as verisimilitude is not

THE NOVEL 217

sacrificed, as soon as possible. It is the para-
dox of the English novel that these our earUest
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 occa-
sionally 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 imagi-
nary person's adventures in a historical setting is
interspersed with the entrance of actual histor-
ical 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, re-
flected 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 FielcUng published llieir novels
there was nothing to compete with fiction in
the popular taste. It would seem as though

818 ENGLISH LTTERATDRE— MODERN

the novel had been waiting for this favourable
circumstance. In a sudden burst of prolific in-
ventiveness» 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 Richard-
son and Fielding came Sterne and Goldsmith
and Smollett and Fanny Bumey 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 within the limits of a single
chapter. Readers must go for it to books on the
subject. It is possible here merely to draw atten-
tion 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 ail the French realists and the new school
of romance. To one or other of these originab
all the great authors in the long list of English
novelists owe their methodand their choice of
subject-matter.

With Defoe fiction gained verisimilitude, it

THE NOVEL 219

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 circum-
stances, and that he did this with a minute-
ness 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 kaowledge of the supposed speaker,
and that consequently the presentation of all
but one of the characters of the book is an ex-
ternal presentation. We know, that is, of Man
Friday only what Crusoe coiild, 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 in-
visible narration had not at his time acquired
the faculty which it possesses now of doing
Friday's thinking aloud or exposing fully the

220 ENGLISH IJTERATURE— MODERN

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 presenta-
tion not of action, but of the springs of action;
if the external event is in it always of less im-
portance 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 behmd every event. Yet the
form, as everybody knows, has not been popu-
lar; even an expert novel-reader coidd 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 modems,
Heniy James, have devised out of the convention
of the invisible narrator a method by which they
can with greater economy attain in practice

THE NOVEL «21

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 admir-
ably, and he used it with supreme effect. Partic-
ularly 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. Richard-
son 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 cox-
combs 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
ess^ice (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 successfid
only so far as it exhibits the thoughts and f eel-
mgs 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 modem heroine";
feminine psychology as good as unknown before
(Shakespeare's women being the "Fridays" of
a highly intelligent Crusoe) has hardly been

222 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

brought further sinoe. But Clariasa is more than
mere psychology; whether she represents a con-
temporaiy tendency or whether Richardson made
her so, ^e starts a new epoch. ''This," says
Henl^, ''is perhaps her finest virtue as it is
certainly her greatest charm; that until she set
the example, woman in literature as a self-suffer-
ing 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 psy-
chology. 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 Ught and
shade of skilful grouping. On the "picaresque"
(so the autobiographical form was caUed abroad)
convention of a journey he grafted a structure
based in its outlme 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 Ms material.
He told his story as one who knew everything;
could tell conversations and incidents as he con-
ceived them happening, with no violation of
credibility, nor any strain on his reader's imag-
ination; and without any impropriety could
interpose in his own person, pointmg things to
the reader which might have escaped his atten-

■<«

!

\

THE NOVEL 223

tion, 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 anyiliing he chose. And he laid
down that free form of the novel which is char-
acteristically English, and from which, in its
essence, no one till the modem 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 contem-
porary types, and an amazing power of building
out of them men and women whose individu-
ality 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 ob-
servant nature, and a stock of fundamental
human sympathy. His gallery of portraits,
Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams, Parson Trulli-
ber, 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, vulvar, and moral only so far as
it is moral (as m Pamela) ^ to inculcate selling
at the highest price or (as in Grandison) to

9M ENGLISH LITERATURE-MODERN

avoid temptations which never come in your
way, Fielding's morality is fresh and healthy,
and (though not quite free from the sentimen-
tality 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 Prance Diderot
went so far as to compare him with Homer and
Moses! He gave the first impulse to modem
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 Thack-
eray and Dickens — the main road of the English
Novel.

That road was widened two ways by Sir
Walter Scott. The historical novel, which had

THE NOVEL 225

been before his day either an essay in anach-
ronism 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 at-
tention 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 char-
acter a sympathetic study of nationality. He is
not, perhaps, a fair guide to contemporary condi-
tions; his interests were too romantic and too
much in the past to catch the rattle of the looms
that caught the ear of Gait, and if we want a
picture of the great fact of modem Scotland, its
industrialisation, it is to Gait 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 min-
gling gave us the pictures whose depth of colour
and truth make his Scottish novels. Old Mortality ^
The Antiquary^ RedgaunUet^ the greatest things
of their kind in literature.

(S)

The peculiarly national style of fiction founded
by Fielding and carried on by his followers

««6 ENGLISH LITERATURE-MODERN

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

Eulls the strings and sets the puppets in motion,
ut 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 moralising — 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 Mys-
tery of Edwin Drood remains mysterious, but those
who essay to conjecture the end of that unfin-

THE NOVEL 227

ished 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 elabo-
rated is the fruit of this preliminary disciplined
exercise of thought. The method is fanuliar
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 ad-
mitted didacticism and by the skill with which
in all but two or three of his books — Bleak
Hotise, perhaps, and LitUe DorrU — ^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

i)athos, and reproduced them with a lively and
oving artistic skill.

Dickens has, of course, serious faults. In
particular, readers emancipated by lapse of
time from the enslavement of the first enthu-
siasm, 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

««8 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

could not draw a ''good woman" and that Agnes
Copperfieldy like Ajmelia 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 charac-
ter 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 char-
acters 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 Pick-
toick 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 NOVEL 229

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 PecksniflP daugh-
ters, 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 begin-
ning with a salient impression and working out-
ward 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 per-
suasive hand.

The great novelists who were writing con-
temporarily with him — ^the Brontes, Mrs. Gas-
kell, 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 Victo-
rians 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, funda-
mentally 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

830 ENGLISH LITERATnRE>-MODERN

contemporaiy pessiiiiism of Schopenhauer 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 artificiaUty 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, there-
fore, 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 hopeless-
ness 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 ^^tuitousness noth-
mg in the result seemed to justify and at best
could only palliate." It is strange to find pessi-
mism 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 com-
plexity and variety of life is rendered by discur-
siveness, by an author's licence to digress, to
double bac^ on himself, to start may be in the

THE NOVEL 231

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 state-
ment, 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 tiiat lay be-
neath its surface.

The school first became an English possession
in the early translations of the work of Zola;
its methods were transplanted into English fic-
tion 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

888 ENGLISH LITERATURE-MODERN

this charge against English fiction; they also
retorted 3ie charge brought by native writers
and their readers against the Fiench of foulness,
sordidAess 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 natural-
istic theory of the novel as a work of science
— ^that as the histoiy of a nation lies hidden
often in social wrongs and in domestic grief
as much as in the movements of parties or dynas-
ties, the novelist must do for the former what
the historian does for the latter. It is his busi-
ness 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 eq«i4l worth; and the meanest
things, when viewed with the eyes of God, are
raised to heights of tragic awe which convention-

THE NOVEL 2SS

ality 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 scrupu-
lous 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 conse-
quence of her life, its early greyness and mo-
notony, the sudden shock of a new and strange
environment and the resultant weakness of ynil
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 sordid-
ness 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

834 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

th^ 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 siunmits 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 men-
tioned 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 more than 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 NOVEL 235

The m.sia agent of it, Robert Louis Steven-
son, 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
wiU 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 common-
placeness lie magic possibilities beyond all tell-
mg; 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 novelrreader 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 modem

SS8 ENGLISH UTEBATDBB-MODEKN

LcMidon had its possibilities of lomaiioe. To
these two elements of his lomantie equipment
must be added a third — travd. 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 '* dis-
covery" of India is one of Uie salient facts of
modem 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 dement in the equipment of modem
romanticism — that which draws its effects from
the *'mirades" of modem science, has been
added since by Mr. H. G. Wells, in whose latest
work the realistic and romantic schools seem to
have united.

CHAFTER X

TH£ FBEBENT AGE

We have carried our study down to the death
of Ruskin and included in it authors like Swin-
burne 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.

THE PRESENT AGE 237

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 ex-
pressed by these questions is true enough. It
is always idle to anticipate the verdict of pos-
terity. Remember Matthew Arnold's prophecy
that at the end of the nineteenth century Words-
worth 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 grand-
children'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 axe
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 manu-
Cfactured daily under their eyes, and that on their
(sympathy and comprehension depends whether

S38 ENGLISH LITERATURE-MODERN

an author receives the saocess 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 contemporaiy 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 conunon conversa-
tional currency of unconscious quotation which
is the surest testimony to the permeation of a
poet's influence. Even Browning, though his
popularity came late, foimd himself carried
mto all the nooks and comers 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 lliose readers — and they are the majority —
who love their reading to convey a moral lesson,
just as Tennyson's i^ection of his time's dis-
traction 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 Rvbaiyat 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

THE PRESENT AGE 239

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 polysyl-
labic 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 English-
man. His later work in poetry and prose, devoted
to the reconstruction of English history, is re-

«40 ENGLISH LITERATDIU&-MODERN

markable for the justness and saneness of its
temper. There are other faults — a lack of sure-
ness in taste is one — ^that could be mentioned
but they do not a£Pect 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
be brought to bear on it and by which he trans-
posed it into poetry. It is Mr. Kipling's special
distinction that the apparatus of modem civili-
zation — steam engines, and steamships, and tele-
graph lines, and the art of flight — ^take on in
his hands a poetic quality as authentic and in-
spiring as any that ever was cast over the
implements of other and what the mass of men
beUeve 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 dis-
covery of India — an India misunderstood for
his own pmposes no doubt, but still the first
presentiment of an essential fact in our modem
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. Kip-
ling'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 con-
centrated 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

THE PRESENT AGE 241

making. In its inception, it arose out of a group
of young poets who worked in a conscious imi-
tation of the methods of the French decadents;
chiefly of Baudelaire andVerlaine. 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 objec-
tivity 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 fibres in them
scarcely become embodied. Then* lives and
deaths and loves and hates are only a scheme
on which they weave a delicate and dun embroid-
ery 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

242 ENGLISH LrTERATURE-MODERN

is of the earth earthy, if the dangour 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 whidi is most likely to differentiate
it from its predecessor, is the revival of the
drama. When we left it before the Common-
wealth the great English literary school of play-
writing— the romantic drama— was aheady dead.
It has had since no second birth. There followed
after it the heroic tragedy of Dryden and Shad-
well — 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 Sheri-
dan. With Sheridan the drama as a literary
force died a second time. It has been bom 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

THE PRESENT AGE 843

in 1660, and it is carried on as plentifidly as ever
at this present time. Only side by side with it
there has grown up a new literary drama, and
gradually tiie 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 sta^e 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 mis-
understood by their worshippers hardly less
than by their enemies, but all excrescences of
enthusiasm apart they taught men a new and
freer approadi 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, dose-jointedness, false correspond-
ences, an impossible use of coincidence, and a
quite unreal complexity and elaboration, they
become bolder and less artificial, more dose 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 tiie 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 Ber-
nard Shaw. In his earlier plays he set himself
boldly to attack established conventions, and

S44 ENGLISH LTTERATURE-MODERN

to ask his audiences to think for themsdves.
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 prepos-
terous self-sacrifice on which melodrama, which
is the most popular non-literary form of play-
writing, is conunonly based; Mrs. Warren* s
PrqfessUm made a brave and plain-spoken at-
tempt 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 listen-
ing to. But before his final success came he had
attained a substantial i)opukrity 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 im-
patient 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 >iinn
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 siuprise

THE PRESENT AGE 245

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 come-
dies of Oscar Wilde. For a parallel to their
pure delight and high spirits, and to the ex-
quisite 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 ap-
proved of socialism it was because in a socialist
state the artist might be absolved from the neces-
sity of carrying a living, and be free to follow
his art undisturbed. He loved to think of him-
self 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 noth-
ing, and his works remain as complete and sep-
arate as those of the earUer artificial dramatists
of two centiuies 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 ad-
mirers, gave us a new kind of romantic poetry^

246 ENGLISH LTTERATUBE-MODERN

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 commer-
cial 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 dir^ from life has become
a pattern whose colours and shape can be re-
peated 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 man-
hood, lived entirely abroad, leading the life

THE PRESENT AGE 247

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 sup-
plied the Irish dramatic movement with exactly
what it needed — a vivid contact with the reali-
ties of life. Not that he was a mere student
or transcriber of manners. His wandering life
among many peoples and his study of classical
Frendb and German literature had equipped
him as perhaps no other modem 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 hor-
rible, 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 reali-
ties 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

S48 ENGLISH LITERATURE— MODERN

the savour of imagination and of the astringency
and saltness that was characteristic of his temper.
He had at his command an instrument of in-
comparable fineness and range in the language
whidi he fashioned out of the speech of the com-
mon people amongst whom he Uved. In his
dramatic writings this language took on a
kind of rhythm which had the effect of produc-
ing 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 pmposes." 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
heanl 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 Jonson, to Cervantes, to Molifere —
even to Shakespeare himself. Probably in no
single case amongst our contemporaries could a
high and permanent place in literature be proph-
esied with more confidence than in his.

THE PRESENT AGE 249

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
tiiough the best creative minds in any age could
find strength for any one of these two great out- c^Vr^ 4
lets for the activi^ 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 char-
acter in action, has a more vigorous principle of
life in it than its rival.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

It 18 best to study Engliah literature one period, or, even in the ease of
the gre«kteet, one author at a time. In every oaae the student should
see to it that he knows the text of his authors; a knowledge of what
oritios have said about our poets is a poor substitute for a knowledoo
of what they have said themselves. Poetry ought to be read slowly
and carefully, and the readw ought to pay nis author the compliment
of crediting liim 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, nevex allow yourself to be
lulled by sound. Beading is an intellectual and not an hypnotio
ezerdse.

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, Chambers's CydoptBdia of English Literature
(3 vols., lOs. 6d. net each), which contains biographical and critical
articles on all authors, arranged chronologically and furnished very
copiously with sjpecimen passages, may be consulted at any library.

* The books with an asterisk are suggested as those on which reiMling
should be begun. Tlie reader ci^ 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; HoXluyee Voyaoee (Ed. J. Masefidd,
£^vei3rman's Library, 8 vols., 35 cts. net each). North's Trandor
tion of Plutarch' $ Livee (Temple Classics).

Chapter II.— Surrey's and Wyatt's Poems (Aldine Edition. Q. Bells
A Sons) ; ^Spenser's Works, Sidney's Poems. A good idea of the
atmosphere m 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. FLsher
Unwin) : *Bveryman and other Playe; ed. by A. W. Pollard (Every-
man's Library).

Chapter IV. — *Baoon's Essays: Sir Thomas Browne's Works; *Mil*
ton's Works; *Poems of John Donne (Muses Library, Routledge);
*Poeins of Kobert Herrick.

Chapter V. — *Poems of Dryden; *Poems of Pope; Poems of Thomson;
*The Spectator (Routledge's Universal library or Everyman's);
^Swift's OuUiver^e Travels; Defoe's Novels.

Chapter VI. — *Boswell's Life of Johneon; *Burke (in selections):
Goldsmith's Ciiiten of the World (Temple Classics); *Bums!
Poetical Works; ^Poems of Blake (Clarendon Press).

251

25S BIBUOGRAFHY

Chapiet VII. — *WordBworth (Golden Treasuiy Series); *Worde-
worth*e Prelude (Temple ClaaaicB); 0>leridge*e Poems; *Keat8's
Poems; ^Shelley's Poems; *Byn>ii (Qolden Treasury Series);
*Lamb, Btsaya €f BUa; HssliU (volumes of Essays in Worid's

Classios Series).

ChMtor VHI.— Tennyson's Works; *Braiwninc's Works; Rossetti's
works;. K^arlyle's Sartor Beaartua, Pad and PreaeiU, and French
Reaolution; Ruskin's Unto thit Latt, Seven LampB cf Arehitectvre;
Arnold's Poems; Swinburne (Selections).

Chi«>ter IX. — ^Fielding's Tom Jones; SmoUett, Roderick Random;
*Jane Austen's Pereuaaiont Pride and Prejudice^ and Northanger
Abbey (ss a parody of the Radoliffe Sohool); *6cott'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 Bamett;
*S3mge, Dramatio Works.

And every new work of the best contemporary anthors.

O.H.M.

LIST OF THE CHIEF WORKS AND
AUTHORS MENTIONED

The dates attached to the authors axe those of birth and death; those

with the books, of pubiioatton.

CSAFTBB I

Bir Thomas More. 1480-1535. ]

Utopia, 1516 (in Latin).
Willaim TindaU, 1484-1536.

TranakUion c^ the New Tettar-
mmt, 1526.
Sir John Cheke, 1514-1567.
Roger Asoham, 1515-1568.

Toxophilu9, 1545.

achoohfuuter, 1570.
Biohard Hakluyt, 1553-1616.

His Voyaoee, 1599.

I

Chafebb'II

Sir Thomss Wyatt, 1503-1542.
The Earl of Surrey, 1517-1547.

TotteTe Mieemany (containing
their poems), 1557.
Sir Philip Sidney, 1554-1586.

Arcadia, 1590.

Attrophd and SteOa, 1591.
Edmund Spenser, 1552-1599.

ShephenTe Calendar, 1579.

Fairy Queen, 1589, 1596.
John Lyly, 1554-1606.

Euphuea, 1579.

Buphuea and hie Bngtand, 1580.
Richard Hooker, 1553-1600.

Bedeaiaatieal Polity, 1594.

C^HAPrra ni

Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593.
Tambwrlaine, 1587 (date of per-
formance).
Dr. Pauetue, 1588 (date of per-
formance).
Bdvwd IL, 1503.

Thomas Kyd, 1567(r)-1595(7).

The Si^iah Tragedy, 1594

(published).

John Webster, 1580(7)-1625(7).

The WhiU Devil, 1608 (date of

performance).
Ducheee of Maifi, 1616 (date of

Serformance).
onson, 1573-1637.
Every Man in hie Humour, 1598.
Volpone, ieO&.
Poema, 1616.

CsAFTBB rV

John Donne, 1573-1631.

Poeme, 1633 Kfirst published,
but known, like those of all
Elisabethan poets, in manu-
soiipt long before).
William Browne, 1591-1643.
George Herbert, 1593-1633.
Robert Herrick, 1593-1674.
Richard (Trashaw, 1613-1649.
Francis Bacon, 1561-1626.

Advancement of Leamino, 1605.

Eeeoye, 1625.

The Bible, Authorited Vereiont
1611.
Robert Burton, 1577-1640.

AruUomy of Mdancholy, 1621.
Sir Thomss Browne, 1605-1682.

Religio Medici, 1642.
John Bunyan, 1628-1688.

Pilgrim*e Progreee, 1678.
John Milton, 1608-1674.

Parodi^e Loet, 1667.

253

854

LIST OP WORKS

P an M m B^paftwrf mm! Sa mt m
1«71.

John Dfyden, 1631-1700.
Abmd»m amd Aehitaphd and

ThiHwd amd M« Panthtr, 1087.
Alexander Pope, 1688-1744.

Btaoff on CnUeum, 1711.

Bap«_af ths Lock, 171^ ^
Jamee Thomeon, 1700-1748.

Th€ iSMMOfu. 1780. _^
Daniel Defoe, 1661-1781.

RMnmm Cnuot, 1710. _
Jonathan Swift, 1667-1748.

7A« TaU of tk$ Ttib, 1704.

OulitMr'* rroMla, 1726. ^
Joeeph AddiMn, 1672-1710.
Biehaid Steele, 1075-1720.

The TatUr, 1700-1711.

Tho apeetaior, 1711-1713.

Ghaptbb VI

Samuel Johnaon, 1700-1784.
Edmund Buxke, 1728-1707.
Oliver Goldsmith, 1728-1774.
Thomaa GAky, 1716-1771.
William Colttna, 1721-1760.
Robert Bums, 1750-1706.

PoeiM. 1786. __

William Blake. 1767-1827.

5on0f of Innoceneo, 1780.

GBAvnn Vn

Wnfiam Wordaworth, 1770-1860.
Z^riealBaawb, 1706.

Samuel Tfeylor Ooieridfe, 1773-

1834
Or Waiter Soott, 1771-1832.
Lord Byion, 1788-1824.

ChOio HaroUr» FOgnmaoo,

1813-1817.

Paray Byadie Shelley, 1703-1823.
John Keats, 1705-1821.
Gharlea Lamb, 1775-1834.

Buav of SUa, 1823. _^
William HaaUU, 1778-1830.
lliomaa de Qdnoey, 1786-1860.

vni

Lend Tttmyaon, 1800-1802.

Poema, 1842.

IdyUa of ths Kino, 1850.
Robert Browning, 1812-1880.

Jf en and Women, 1855.

The Ring and the Book, 1868.
D. G. Roasetti, 1828-1882.
William Morris, 1834-1896.
A. C. Swinburne, 1836-1900.
Thomas Cariyle, 1706-1880.
John Raskin, 1818-1000.

GHAPTUt IX

Samuel Richardson, 1689-1761.

Pamda, 1740.

Clarieea Hariowe, 1750.
Henry Fielding, 1707-1754.

Joe&ph Andrew, 1742.

Tom Jonea, 1749.
Jane Austen. 1775-1817.
WUliam Makepeace Thackeray,

1811-1863.
Charles Dickens, 1812-1870.
Qeoise Meredith, 1832-1900.

INDEX

AoDxsoir, JosBPB, 127, 135-137,
186. 187. 216

AdvoncemerU <nf Leaming, The,
101. 102

AnaUmy of Mdaneholyt The, 102,
103

Antonio and Mdlida, 60

Arcadia, the CounteBS of Pem-
broke's, 30, 41. 54^66

Arnold. Matthew. 162, 206, 237

Asoham, Roger, 16. 22, 23

Astrophd and SteOa, 40, 41

Ath0i8t*9 Tragedy, The, 67, 71

AugnBtan Age, 110, 111

AuBten, Jane. 224. 226

Autobiography, 83

Baoon, Franoia, 97, 00-103

BaUad, the, 167. 168

Beaumont and Fletcher, 73-75

Bennett, Arnold, 234

Bible, the, 97-00

Biograi^, 82, 83

Blake, William. 168-161

Blank Verse. 36. 74

Boewell. James, 140, 142, 143, 150

Brontte, the, 220

Browne, Sir Thomas. 103, 104, 187

Browne, William, 90

Browning, Robert, 02-94, 192»

1937201-204
Bunyan, John, 00, 216
Burke. Eklmund, 09, 146-149, 170
Bums, Robert, 163-168
Burton, Robert, 102, 103, 187
Byron, Lord, 167, 184, 185

Carew, Thomas, 06
Carbrle, Thomas, 100, 207-211
Celtic Revival, 240-243, 245-240
Character-writing. 83, 214
Chatterton. Thomas, 168
Cheke. Sir John, 16. 18-20
Christ* 9 Victory and Death, 90
Classicism, 70, 110-110
doufijh, Thomas. 206
Colendge. Samud Taylor, 164,

168. 180. 181
Collins, mniliam, 161. 153
Conrad. Joseph, 236
Cowley. Abruiam, 06
Cowper. ^Uiam. 151
Crabbe. George, 161
Crashaw, Richard. 96
Criticism, 82, 172-174

Decadence, 73, 74
Defoe, Daniel, 29, 129-133, 216,
217

De Qmnoev, Thomas, 187-189
Dekker, Thomas, 70
Dickens, Charles, 226-229
Discovery, Voyages of, 23-29, 31,

70
Disraeli, Benjamin, 194
Dr, Fauetus, 27, 66
Donne, Johnr84, 92-96,96, 114, 115
Drama, the, 65-79, 83, 217, 218,

242-249
Diyden, John, 115, 119-123, 128-

129,163
Dueheu of Maifi, The, 72

Earle, John, 214
Bdward II„ 67
Blia, Eesaye of, 188, 180
Eliot. George. 229
laisabethan Poetry. 30-17
Blisabethan Prose. 48^66
Bnaye, CivU and Moral, 100, 101
Euphrtea, 61-54, 66, 213
Bveryman, 60

Pavry Queen, The, iAr4:!, 87, 105
Fantastics, the, 06
Fielding, Henry, 222-224
Fitsgerald, Edward, 238
Fletcher, Giles, 90
Fletcher, Phineas, 85, 89
Ford, John, 76

French Revolution, the, 146, 157^
168, 170, 176, 177, 181

Gaakell, Mrs. 220
Gibbon, Edward. 161
Gissing, Geoise, 234
Goldsmith, Oliver, 150, 151, 224 1
Qorbodite, 64

Gray, Thomas, 151, 153, 167
Greene, Robert, 66
GreviUe. Sir Fulke, 82
ChMter*9 Traeeie, 133

Hakluy^e Voyagee, 25
Hardv, Thomas, 220, 230
Hawthorne. Nathaniel, 87
Haditt, WiUiam, 187, 180
Henry VII., History of. 101
Herbert, George, 84, 06
Herrick, Robert, 06
Hobbes, Thomas, 28
Hooker, Richard, 60

Italy, influence of, 22, 23

Jew of Malta, 67

Johnson, Samuel, 96, 137-146,

161, 163. 166
Jonson, Ben, 31, 70, 75, 70, 01,

92, 96, 99, 115

->

255