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MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
JOHN MILTON.
MODERN ENGLISH
LITERATURE
FROM CHAUCER TO THE
PRESENT DAY
BY
G. H. MAIR
AUTHOR OF "ENGLISH LITERATURE I MODERN'
(Home University Library)
WITH PORTRAITS
LONDON
WILLIAMS & NORGATE
14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
1914
LIBRAItY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA BARBARA
PREFACE
This book is an expansion of the volume on
" Modern English Literature " which I wrote two
years ago for the Home University Library. A
considerable number of additions and corrections
have been made, and authors have been dealt with
whom it was impossible to include in the smaller
book. Particularly the study of modern English
literature has been taken back to Chaucer, with
whom it may be said strictly to begin, so that the
book now covers more or less the whole range of
those English authors whose work can be read
without the intervention of the philologist or the
professor of dead dialects. Its plan, however,
remains the same, that is to say, it aims at
maintaining an individual point of view, at laying
stress on ideas and tendencies rather than at
recording facts and events, and it does not hesitate
to draw generously on standard works of criticism
and biography with which students are familiar.
I believe most of my debts are acknowledged ; for
any which are not I crave pardon. The portraits
which accompany the text have been carefully
chosen and are believed to be the most character-
istic in each case of the authors whom they
represent.
G. H. M.
TO
MY FATHER AND MOTHER
LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA BARBARA
CONTENTS
1. FROM CHAUCER TO MORE
2. ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE
3. THE DRAMA . . • •
4. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
5. THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE
6. DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME
7. THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL
8. THE VICTORIAN AGE
9. THE NOVEL
10. CONTEMPORARIES .
1
35
71
107
142
172
204
235
260
292
w.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
John Milton .
Edmund Spenser .
William Shakespeare
Benjamin Jonson
John Donne .
Alexander Pope
Jonathan Swift
Dr Samuel Johnson
William Wordsworth
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Charles Lamb
Alfred Lord Tennyson .
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Thomas Carlyle
Henry Fielding
George Meredith .
. Frontispiece
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ENGLISH LITERATURE
CHAPTER I
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE
(1)
It used to be the habit of historians of English
hterature and, still more, of English poetry, to
describe Geoffrey Chaucer as the father of Enghsh
verse. The title has fallen out of repute since
scholarship carried the history of Enghsh literature
backwards, through his predecessors in what is
called middle English, to the authors of the old
English epic and elegiac poems, but in its essence
the title and the idea which lay behind it were
both sound. His successors owe more to Chaucer
than he owed to the Englishmen at any rate, who
went before him. The great outburst of poetic
genius which took place when the Renaissance
reached England and afterwards, owed more to
him than to any foreign originator. The work
of such poets as Surrey and Wyatt and Spenser
derived most of its distinctive qualities from what
it had learned out of his work. He gave words
and phrases to them, plots to Shakespeare, inspira-
2 ENGLISH LITERATURE
tion to Milton, and material for the modernising
activities of Dryden and Pope and Wordsworth.
For the scholars our literature may begin earlier ;
for the poets it began with him, and if we go
no further back, though we may miss something
which is interesting in itself, we shall certainly lose
nothing which affects what is to come afterwards.
Old English poetry, for all its gravity and
beauty and its atmosphere charged with the life
of the sea-roving tribes who colonised our islands,
is written in a language as distinct from that of
modern English as German is at the present day.
Middle English poetry, that is to say the poetry
of the two hundred years preceding Chaucer,
has little literary merit, is always rude, some-
times unrhythmical, and never more than baldly
narrative. Moreover, though it approaches in-
finitely more nearly to modern speech than poetry
written before the Conquest, it is not possible to
read it without the help of a dictionary ; and
though a complete study of English literature
could not fail to take it into account, it is not
modern in the sense in which the word is used in
this book, because it bears no direct relation to
what comes after it. Chaucer owed little to it.
When he drew from his predecessors — which he
did largely, being, like all great authors, not afraid
of plagiarism, — he went to Italy and France. He
brought, therefore, into English literature that
factor which has constantly operated since his
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 3
day, namely the close relation, sometimes acting
one way, sometimes another, between writing in
our country and writing in the Continent. And
for all the obsolete words which his poems con-
tain, he wrote in modern English and he sang
in modern metres. There is a wider difference
between Tlie Canterbury Tales and the Vision of
Piers Plowman, which is nearly contemporary
with them, than there is between the I'ales and
the Faerie Queen. Langland is the end of an
old order, Chaucer the beginning of the new.
It would be almost impossible to exaggerate
the extent of the innovation which Chaucer made
in the use of the English language for literary
purposes. He is the creator of English poetry,
or at least of English poetic forms. All his
metres except one — the eight-syllable verse, which
was already in use, and has persisted as one of
the modes of English poetry — he had to make
for himself. Under the influence of French and
afterwards Italian poetry, he produced the ten-
syllable verse, which has been the chosen metre
of English poetry since his day : either rhymed,
as in the heroic couplet, or in stanzas, as used
by Spenser and by the romantic poets of a later
day, or unrhymed, as in blank verse, which was
devised by the earlier poets of the English
Renaissance on the basis of his metre. He intro-
duced the seven-line stanza, which has been largely
used for narrative poetry ever since. He was the
4 ENGLISH LITERATURE
first Englishman to experiment in the sonnet, and
he used quite naturally the forms of the ballade and
the rondeau, which, in spite of what he wrote in
them, did not become completely naturalised in
English poetry till fifty years ago.
But his greatest achievement, that which had
most moment for the future, was that he set
English on its feet as the literary language of
this country, and particularly that dialect of
English spoken in London and the counties to
the north of it, roughly between London and
Birmingham, the dialect with which he and every-
one moving round the Court was most familiar.
Chaucer's English, which was "the King's English"
(the phrase still persists), became, from the language
of English writers, gradually the spoken language
of the whole country. Even in his day, when the
law-courts were beginning to use it, the fortunes
of literary English were still uncertain. His con-
temporary, Gower, typified this uncertainty by
writing three poems, of which one was in French,
one in Latin, and one in English. In Scotland,
where the knowledge of Latin was more general,
it was used habitually by educated people, and
was even more familiar to them than the verna-
cular ; so that Chaucer, in using English, was adopt-
ing an attitude the novelty of which it is hardly
possible to appreciate properly at the present day.
He deliberately chose the common tongue because
it was really living, and because it had spread up
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 5
to the higher classes of the people ; but he resolved
at the same time to endow it with all the grace
and refinement which instinct and knowledge
enabled him to appreciate in French poetry ; and
if we grant him in this a clearer vision of his aims
than he really had, we cannot overrate the conse-
quences of his choice. By throwing the weight
of his genius into the balance against French,
he decided the future ; by importing all the
excellences and graces of French verse into
poems written in the particular English of his
district, he severed himself from the literary past
of English writing and founded the modern
literary language of the nation ; and because he
did so, he is the real father of English poetry.
It is not necessary to linger over the chronology
of Chaucer's work. His earliest things seem to
have been the product solely of French influence,
and he seems to have begun with lyric poetry,
making known to England the new forms — ballade,
rondeau, and so on— which had just been made
popular in France. At the beginning, indeed, his
mind seems to have been French in its outlook,
and, if style alone be considered, no trace of the
Anglo-Saxon literary past of the country persists
in its verse. The light touch which pervades it is
precisely the same as that of the best of its French
contemporaries. There is in it a sense of the mere
joyousness of living, which comes out in his fond-
ness for sunlight and springtime and the flowers
6 ENGLISH LITERATURE
and birds of May, and everything that he tells, he
tells in an even voice, pitched so that he can relate
without fatigue or failing a long and leisurely
moving story — the voice of the poets of con-
temporary France. He has, too, the charm of
that easy French simplicity which comes from a
perfect correspondence of words which are neither
difficult nor difficultly used, with thought that is
always equable and never deep.
" A thousand tymes have I herd men telle,
That ther is joye in heven and peyne in helle ;
And I accorde wel that hit is so ;
But natheles, yit wot I wel also,
That ther nis noon dwelling in this contree,
That either hath in heven or helle y-be,
Ne may of hit non other weyes witen
But as he hath herd seyd, or founde it writen.""
It was his training in the precise and difficult
forms of French artificial verse which gave him
his ease and mastery in his later narrative poetry.
Many of his early ballades are no doubt lost to us,
but the fruit of them remains in the direct and
brilliant compression with which in one or two
stanzas of a poem like Troilus or The Prioress's
Tale he can set a situation of a picture before the
mind of his readers. His earlier narrative poems
were written while he was still subjecting himself
to this training, and they show the effect of it
very little, being done on the model which was so
popular in his day, that of the Romance of the
Rose, and showing little sign of the originality in
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 7
handling his material which he was afterwards to
achieve. Such work is to be found in 21ie Death
of Blanche the JDuchesa, The House of Fame, The
Parliavient of Fowls, and The Legend of Good
Women. All these are allegorical, and they are
overweighted with learning of the mediiEval kind ;
for though Chaucer was contemporary with and
had probably met Petrarch, he still looked at Rome
through the eyes of a troubadour and not of a
humanist. One of them, The House of Fame,
contains almost as much autobiography as is to be
found in the Ca7Uerbu7'}i Tales, passages in which
he gives us a kind of picture of his daily life, of the
books he read, and of the character and turn of
his mind.
"... thou hast no tydinges
Of Loves folk, if they be glade,
Ne of noght elles that god made ;
And noght only fro fer contree
That ther no tyding comth to thee,
But of thy verray neyghebores,
That dwellen almost at thy dores,
Thou herest neither that ne this ;
For whan thy labour doon al is,
And hast y-maad thy rekeninges,
In stede of reste and newe thinges,
Thou gost hoom to thy hous anoon ;
And, also domb as any stoon.
Thou sittest at another boke,
Til fully daswed is thy loke,
And livest thus as an hermyte
Although thyn abstinence is lyte."
Had Chaucer died at the age of forty, he would
8 ENGLISH LITERATURE
have had a reputation somethmg similar to that of
his contemporary Gower ; that is to say, we would
have had to look upon him as a man with a light
and easy turn for versifying, a remarkable faculty
for transferring the smoothness and gracefulness
of French into his own tongue, but not a great
artist, although of course one who would have
been historically important. That he is so much
more than this is due to a fresh source of inspira-
tion which came to him at that age, opened up to
him a new literature and new ways of thinking,
and stimulated the development of his mind in a
new and original direction. Some time shortly
after he was thirty he visited Italy, and in the
ten years which followed he must have made him-
self familiar with Italian letters. We know that
he had read Dante, and that he understood the
greatness of Petrarch, though, judging from their
works, one would say that there was little intel-
lectually in common between the two men.
Boccaccio he must have heard about, and it is one
of the unsolved puzzles of Chaucerian scholarship
that there should be no mention of him in
Chaucer's works. Where we know that Boccaccio
must be referred to we find the mysterious name
" Lollius," which has not been found anywhere
else ; and though Troilus and Cressida is based
on a poem of the Italian, Chaucer oddly enough
does not seem to have known of the Decameron,
an even more amazing circumstance when it is
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 9
considered that the scheme of the Canterbury
Tales is in a way related to that of Boccaccio's
great book. At any rate, he got two great things
from him. One was Troilus and Cressida, and
the other was The KnigJifs Tale, the former of
them certainly the greatest narrative poem in
modern English even as it is the earliest. To
read it is to realise afresh that at its highest
moments there is no such thing as "progress"
in literature ; perfection reached as surely by a
master in the fourteenth century as in the seven-
teenth or the nineteenth, or as it was five hundred
years before the first.
In spite of the greatness of the Troilus, however,
it is not by it mainly that he has been remembered
by those who have come after him. What the
impulse was which set Chaucer about compiling
the Canterbury Tales we do not know, and we
can hardly safely guess. It is unlikely that he had
read the Decameron, and at any rate the scheme
of the Canterbury pilgrimage bears none but the
most superficial resemblance to the precise and
artificial form of Boccaccio. All the speakers in
his book belong to the same rank of society, and
there is no reason why one should be distinguished
from another ; they all possess the same even
elegance of speech, whether the tale be comic or
tragic, shocking or romantic. The variety of the
subject-matter in his stories is almost as great as
their number, but there is no variety in the manner
10 ENGLISH LITERATURE
of telling them, and probably not the closest or
most familiar student of the book could name the
narrator of even the best known of them. In
the Cantei'bury Tales, on the other hand, the
scheme of a number of stories related by different
persons is approached from the other end. Boc-
caccio cared much for his stories and little for the
lords and ladies of Florence who tell them.
Chaucer's first and last interest was with his
pilgrims and not with his tales. When his interest
flasfffed or became indolent, he had no hesitation in
simply using up whatever material he had ready
to his hand and putting it as a story into the
mouth of one of his characters. Many of the
tales are certainly older than the scheme into
which they are put, and indeed it would be possible
to argue that the author devised that scheme as a
means for giving interest and a certain continuity
to things which he had already written but which
were not in circulation.
Whatever the impulse or reason may have been,
he turned suddenly aside at the age of fifty from
the path of poetry which up to then he had been
following and founded a new type of writing,
that concerned with the observation and deline-
ation of character which in one form or another,
whether as the drama or the novel, has been the
chief and peculiar characteristic of English litera-
ture since.
A study of a book so large and various is outside
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 11
the scope of an essay of this kind, but it is worth
while observing before we leave it, how closely the
scheme of the Canterbury Tales approaches that
of the later novel of adventure. Had Chaucer's
deahngs with his characters stopped with the pro-
logue, he would have given us a masterly piece of
observation of contemporary social types which
has no parallel in any other country, and which
includes, except royalty and nobles on the one
hand and the lowest vagrants on the other, practi-
cally the whole English nation ; but he would have
been a long way behind the novel, because he
would have given us little about the relations
between the people whom he painted so well.
But Chaucer's handhng of his characters was not
Hmited to these truthful and delicate descriptions.
He does not pass abruptly from the portrait to the
tale. " In the course of their ride he makes the
pilgrims converse among themselves ; he shows
them calling out to each other, approving what
one has said and more often still rating each other.
They give their opinions on the stories that have
been told, and these comments reveal their domi-
nant thought, their feelings, and the objects of
their interest. A sort of comedy is being enacted
through the poem which binds together the various
parts. It is only just outlined, it is true, but it
suffices to show the intentions and comic powers
of the author. The gentle knight soothes the
angry ones with grave and courteous words.
12 ENGLISH LITERATURE
Some pilgrims, whose natures or occupations place
them at enmity, exchange high words and nearly-
come to blows. The sturdy Miller and the slender
Reve rail at each other ; the Friar quarrels with the
Somnour. First the Miller and then the Cook get
drunk. The Pardoner and the Wife of Bath each
deliver interminable discourses before coming to
their stories. The prologues and epilogues con-
stantly bring back the attention from the tales to
the pilgrims, who narrate them or listen to them.
In this way the characters who were first described
by the poet reveal themselves yet again by their
words and actions." ^ The Canterbury Tales, that is
to say, are on the way towards a novel of the type
of the Pickwick Papers, the kind of novel in which
a series of sharply defined characters pass through
amusing or exciting adventures, commonly strung
on a journey as the connecting thread. In the
nineteenth-century book some of the characters
tell stories even as they do in the Cantei'bury Tales,
but the stories have ceased to be the main thing.
Chaucer, on the other hand, though he went far,
hardly went so far as involving the pilgrims in a
plot of their own. But for all that, the resem-
blances between the two are greater than the
differences, and across nearly five centuries Chaucer
and Dickens join hands.
^ Chauce?; by Professor Legouis, a book to wliich I am indebted
for many of the opinions expressed in this chapter.
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 13
(2)
Of Chaucer's contemporaries and immediate
successors in England little need be said. The
greater of his two contemporaries, William Lang-
land, author of the Vision of Piers Plowman, was a
solitary genius, writing in an old-fashioned metre,
the last of the old English, having no relation to
what came after him. With the other of them,
John Gower, the case is different. For all the
mediasvalism of his subjects and the sources from
which he drew them, he remains an essentially
modern writer — always metrical and smooth and
graceful, but lacking in definiteness and strength,
and, above all, wanting in compression and in the
dramatic gift of telling a story with terseness and
point. His work belongs to that type of Hterature
of which examples are to be found in minor Eliza-
bethan sonnet-writing and, later, pre-eminently,
in the work of the lesser eighteenth-century poets,
in which the qualities of ease and fluency and
grace are caught from greater work near it, but in
which nothing is achieved beyond urbanity and
smoothness, which gives nothing to the intellect
of the reader and asks no service of it in return.
Gower was a man of literary capacity without
genius; Langland had genius without much
literary capacity ; Chaucer had both, and there-
fore what he did lives at the expense of the other
two. Yet it would be a mistake to undervalue
14 ENGLISH LITERATURE
Gower too much, particularly since Lydgate and
Occleve, his and Chaucer's immediate successors in
England, utterly failed to come up to his achieve-
ment. " If there had been no Chaucer, Gower
would have had a respectable place in history as
the one ' correct ' poet of the Middle Ages, as
the English culmination of that courtly mediaeval
poetry which had its rise in France and Provence
two or three hundred years before. The prize for
style would have been awarded to Gower ; as it is,
he deserves rather more consideration than he has
generally received in modern times. It is easy to
pass him over and to say that his correctness is
flat, his poetical art monotonous. But at the very
lowest valuation, he did what no one else except
Chaucer was able to do : he wrote a large amount
of verse in perfect accordance with his critical
principles, in such a way as to stand minute ex-
amination ; and in this he thoroughly expressed the
good manners of his time. He proved that English
might compete with the languages which had most
distinguished them in poetry. Chaucer did as
much ; and in his earlier work he did no more
than Gower." ^ That from his best critic is the
most that can be said for him ; it may be
recorded in support of it that from the day of his
death in 1408 till Sackville and perhaps Spenser,
no one attained the same perfection of method in
English verse.
1 Prof. W. P. Ker.
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 15
Chaucer's English successors, Lydgate and
Occleve, Skelton and Hawes, have a certain
historical interest in that they did indubitably,
during the course of the fifteenth century (a period
too troubled politically in England to have much
energy for literature), write certain works which
keep the chain of the production of verse unbroken
from the Canterbury Tales to the publication of
the Induction to the Mhi'or for Magistrates and
Tottel's Miscellany. But Chaucer's influence in
his own country did not come to its own till the
publication of the last-mentioned book. Surrey
and Wyatt, and those who worked with them, are
his true English inheritors, using his ideas, his
phrases, his conventions, and very often his actual
words, and handing on the best part of his bequests
to them as gifts to Spenser, who himself went
back and drew further from the riches of the
original estate. The earliest and greatest school
of Chaucerians flourished not in England but
in Scotland, and to them for a moment we
must turn.
Whether the first of the four great Scottish
poets was or was not James I. of Scotland has
been a question recently much debated by literary
historians. What is certain is, that the first great
Scottish poem is the Kings Quair {i.e. " King's
Book "), and that the title, the earliest manuscript,
the word of historians in the century following its
composition, and the universal witness of tradition,
16 ENGLISH LITERATURE
agree in crediting him with the authorship. Who-
ever wrote it (and we should give our vote for
the King himself) was under the first freshness of
the Chaucerian influence. Unlike Gavin Douglas
and Dunbar, and in a lesser degree Henryson, who
followed him, James writes not in the peculiar
literary Scots (never completely a spoken language),
but in the dialect which Chaucer himself wrote.
He uses the Chaucerian conventions — the things
learned by him from the Romance of the Rose — the
garden, the sleep, the dream, the vision, and so on.
The poem has the dreamy elegance of Chaucer's
early verse ; the grace which he caught from the
Romance is a sort of fancy work, musical and senti-
mental, with a mythology of personified abstract
qualities ; a little thin and impalpable, but always
graceful and always full of the freshness of spring-
time which seems to cling about this light and glad
dawn of modern English verse.
His successor in poetry, Kobert Henryson,
though not the greatest poet of the period (that
title belongs to Dunbar), is unquestionably the
most accomplished and poetical of the Chaucerian
school. Unlike James I., to whom can certainly be
ascribed only the one poem, Henryson left a large
body of authenticated poetry. He completed the
story of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida in his
powerful romantic poem. The Testament ofCressyd ;
he versified in a light and critical manner ^sop's
Fables ; did another romantic poem, Orpheus and
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 17
Eurydice\ and, best known of all, wrote, in the
manner of the old French pastourelle, a shepherd's
wooing ballad, Robm and Makene, which, from
its inclusion in Percy's Reliques, has remained
popular to our own day. The best of his works is
the Testament, a thing worthy (and there could be
no higher praise) to be set beside Chaucer's master-
piece itself. To Saturn and the Moon is referred by
the gods the punishment which Cressyd's faithless-
ness shall receive, and they decree leprosy. Struck
with the terrible disease, she goes out with a clapper
and a dish to beg for food. As she stands waiting
at the roadside, a gallant company rides out from
Troy, Troilus among them. Their eyes meet, but
her dim vision cannot see her old lover, and it is
impossible for him to see Cressyd in the ghastly
creature beside his horse. She receives his alms,
is told by one of his companions who he is, utters
a last complaint, and, having sent her ring to him
for remembrance, dies. These two passages— that
m which Saturn pronounces judgment and that
describing the lovers' meeting— are as near per-
fection as they could be; Chaucer himself did
nothing better at his best. They touch the highest
point, after him, in the tragic and pathetic qualities
of his narrative style.
The greatest of this group, William Dunbar, is
unquestionably the greatest Scottish poet before
Burns, and perhaps the greatest of them all. No
one of his time, except Villon, has the same vigour
18 ENGLISH LITERATURE
of expression, and the same hard and pungent
quaUty of irony in his outlook ; no one else can
show the same range of power and the same diversity
of work. Like the rest, he is a follower of Chaucer ;
but it is Chaucer in the mood of the JFife of Bath's
prologue that he prefers to follow, or, if it is the
Chaucer of the Death of Blanche the Duchess, then
it is with a satirical independence of his own, so that,
writing, for instance, in the latitude of Edinburgh,
he will have nothing to do with May mornings and
" Fresh flowers green," but embraces the east wind
straight away without convention or pretence. The
Thistle and the Rose, his most Chaucerian poem,
written to welcome Queen Margaret, daughter of
Henry VII., to Scotland, is written gracefully and
with spirit and good sense. The Two Married
Women and the Widow (one is conscious of a loss
in modernising the spelling of Dunbar's titles) has
enormous vigour and high spirits and a complete
accomplishment of form that beats all his con-
temporaries. Like his Dance of the Seven Deadly
Sins, which has a lurid strength unattainable by
Lydgate and Occleve, his English contemporaries,
the Two Married Wome?i has its unpleasant side.
The Wife of Bath was at least good - natured.
" Dunbar's wives and widow combine sensuality
with ill-nature in a way not to be paralleled in
English literature till we come to the relics of
the Restoration." Their ugliness is swallowed in
the mastery with which their portraiture is accom-
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 19
plished. Not till some of Shakespeare's or Ben
Jonson's pieces of low life is there anything in
English writing half so good.
(3)
But though Chaucer's followers help to bridge
the gap between him and the Elizabethans, the
main stream of English poetry passed into other
and obscurer channels. The origin and composition
of English ballad literature has always been, and no
doubt will always be, a matter of fierce critical con-
troversy, but it is agreed by those who have most
carefully studied them, that it was in the fifteenth
century that the popular and romantic ballads as
we know them first took their shape. The oldest
of them, The Hunting of the Cheviot, was probably
composed as early as 1400, the year of Chaucer's
death ; and whatever previous shapes they may have
worn, the great poems in this kind in their present
form are subsequent to that date. This theory
corresponds to what we can glean from external
evidence, but, indeed, the ballads bear marks them-
selves which support it. They belong to a period
when modern English as we know it was, roughly
speaking, formed ; the absence of inflexion gives a
backward date, and that date cannot be further back
than the fifteenth century. They belong, no less
certainly, to a period when oral transmission was
still a normal way of preserving poetry, and that
cannot be later than early in the sixteenth century.
20 ENGLISH LITERATURE
With the coming of the printed broadsheet, as
we shall see, the romantic ballad died, and the
occasional ballad was born. A form of poetry
which had till then been valued because it was old,
became despised unless it was new, and the ballad
form, degraded till it did no more than serve more
or less metrically the uses of sensational journalism,
had to wait till the end of the eighteenth century
before it was used again for literary purposes.
When it was taken up again it was consciously
" literary " and no longer " popular," but the men
of letters who used it could find no better model
than that left them by the anonymous and co-
operative authors whose work has survived.
It is necessary to use the word " co-operative,"
because it is plain that no ballad as it has come
down to us is the unaltered and final work of one
man ; but it must not be taken to imply adherence
to the curious theory of communal composition
advanced by some anthropologists, and fortified by
them with examples from the practices and rituals
of savage tribes, ancient and modern, in both
hemispheres. Poetry does not write itself, and the
fancied picture of a community sitting round a
village or camp fire and evolving, verse about, a
ballad of the kind we know, remains a picture of the
fancy only. What in the first instance a minstrel,
bard, or troubadour devised and sang, popular fancy,
taking hold of, moulded and altered, consciously
and unconsciously, each man who memorised it
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 21
adding his share of romance or fancy, and all the
time that great instrument and artifice of literature,
the human memory, transmuting it unconsciously
— taking a verse from one poem and adding it to
another, so that scores of ballads have recurring
parts in common — lightening its own burden by
the use of set and conventional phrases, planing
away roughnesses of metre and diction till the
whole thing came easily along the channels of the
brain and sped flowingly from the tongue. Who
the original authors were must remain for ever
unknown, though some of the ballads are no
doubt popular forms, wrought by the process
indicated, from written metrical romances of the
type of King Horn, which got into the hands of
wandering singers, and from them to the people at
large. It must have been the process of popular
transmission which gave their work the character
which we know. If one asks oneself what it is
that gives the ballads their unique attractiveness,
what it is that still makes them stir us as they did
Sir Philip Sidney, as the sound of a trumpet, the
answer is plain ; it is not the things wherein they
differ, like their plots, but the things which they
have in common. It may be lines like this : —
" Then he pulled forth his bright brown sword
And dried it on his sleeve " ;
or this : —
" He hadna ridden a mile, a mile,
A mile or barely three " ;
22 ENGLISH LITERATURE
or this : —
" Lord William was buried in St Mary's kirk,
I-,ady Margaret in Mary's quire,
Out o' the lady's grave grew a bonny red rose
And out o' the knight's a briar " ;
all of which occur in more than one ballad, and
all but the first two lines of the last in several.
Or it may be things which, if they cannot be
matched word for word from one ballad to another,
still breathe a common spirit. They are the things
which, as it were, express " idea " (in the Platonic
sense) of a ballad — things like
" Is there ony room at your head, Saunders ?
Is there ony room at your feet ?
Or ony room at your side, Saunders,
Where fain, fain, I wad sleep ? "
or like
" Half-oure, half-oure to Aberdour,
'Tis fifty fathoms deep ;
And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens,
Wi' the Scots lords at his feet " ;
or this, with its quintessential fragrance of
romance : —
" May Margaret sits in her bower door
Sewing her silken seam ;
She heard a note in Elmond's wood,
And wish'd she there had been.
" She loot the seam fa' frae her side,
The needle to her tae.
And she is on to Elmond's wood
As fast as she could gae."
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 23
These things, and the ballads which enshrine them,
have only to be compared with a typical late metrical
romance for the reader to see at once the superi-
ority in romantic glamour, in narrative skill, in
metrical lilt and felicity, of the popular poem,
the fashioning of which was co-operative, over the
product, written immediately and therefore fixed
in form once and for all, of a single (and average)
mind. For the authorship of a ballad, if only it
were left to oral transmission, never ceased. No
new possessor of it but, in getting it by heart,
might add, all unsuspecting, some new fineness or
wipe away some flaw.
The metrical romance was written ; it could
not be easily or quickly spread or duplicated save
by word of mouth, and oral transmission, as we
have seen, served it well. The invention of print-
ing meant the cheap and unlimited multiplication
of popular poetry (story-telling, that is, without a
consciously artistic end), in the form in which it
was first written, and printing killed the ballad
almost as soon as it came. Where the broadside
went there was no more need for singing or
reciting ; ballads could be read more quickly than
they could be heard or learned. The appetite for
them increased and the supply kept pace with
the increase ; thousands of broadside ballads
poured from the press. Unlike the older oral
ballads, which were concerned with romance or
tradition, the printed ballads sought news. They
24 ENGLISH LITERATURE
were, or pretended to be, matters of fact, carrying
as often as not the date of the occurrence they
commemorated on their face. Glasgcrion, Clerk
Saunders, Chevy Chase, and The Demon Lover
sHpped quietly down into the underworld of the
antiquaries, not to be fished out again for two
hundred years. In their place came ballads of
hangings, highwaymen, religious conversions,
monstrous births, and all the stock-in-trade of
Autolycus and his kind. So the ballad passed
out of literature.
(4)
Chaucer and his followers and the ballad-makers
between them are the fount from which modern
English poetry springs ; it is not till a hundred
years or so after Chaucer's death that we come
upon the beginnings of English prose. Chaucer's
own exercises in prose are poor ; they spring not
from his love of literature, but from his love of
learning — are either sermons like the Parsons Tale,
or translations of popular philosophy like his Boece,
or treatises on popular science like that on the
Astrolabe, done for "little Lewis, my son." He
was not interested, one feels, in prose style (though
curiously the tale he tells himself in the Canterbury
pilgrimage is in this medium), and this lack of
interest probably arose from the fact that he had
before him no models as he had in poetry on which
to form what he wrote. Good prose began to b^
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 25
written in England a century after him as the result
of three influences, one of a fresh subject-matter
and the other two opposite literary impulses, which
ultimately turned side by side and combined with
each other. There was the impulse to copy the
newly found masterpieces of classical literature in
an English dress, and there was the impulse which
feared that as a result of this the Anglo-Saxon
purity of the national tongue was being put in
danger, and strove to avert the evil by putting
native English, as distinct from latinised English,
on its own legs.
The Renaissance reached England late. By the
time its triumph was at its height in the work of
Spenser and Shakespeare, it had died out in Italy,
and in France, to which in turn Italy had passed
the torch, it was already a warning fire. When it
came to England, it came in a special form shaped
by political and social conditions. Hardly had the
forces of secular culture been mobilised by the
leaders in the van — men like Grocyn and Linacre
and Colet — when at their heels came the heralds
of religious revolt. Linacre and Colet were school-
masters who wanted to do no more than plant
the new classical learning in England. They
cared for the graces of latinity, for the study
of rhetoric, wished that their pupils might write
Latin like Cicero, and English like him too.
But the newly found books set men not only
trying to write like them, but, what was more
26 ENGLISH LITERATURE
dangerous, think like them. Erasmus carried the
solvent of his learning across the Channel to this
country. Men began to think for themselves on
the dogmas they had accepted unquestioningly, and
the Reformation, on the side of thought (not of
ecclesiastical politics), got its first impetus. To
Erasmus and his teaching we must put down the
work of men like Sir John Cheke, Sir Thomas
Wilson, and Roger Ascham. To the earlier group,
interested mainly in literary things, or, if in religious
and philosophical, not anxious to break with ortho-
doxy, we can fairly attach the work of Sir Thomas
More.
His Utopia, based as it is on Plato's Republic^
is the earliest fruit of the most lasting impulse in
the Renaissance study of the subject-matter of
Latin and Greek literature — the impulse given by
the political speculation of the ancients, which re-
appears in late books like Harrington's Oceana and
Bacon's New Atlantis, and, in a different form, in
the translations from Plutarch, in essays like
Montaigne's and Bacon's, and in the constant
political allusions and theorisings which are to be
found in plays. In one way or another, the redis-
covery of Plato proved the most valuable part of
the Renaissance's gift fi'om Greece. The doctrines
of the Symposium coloured in Italy the writings of
Castiglione and Mirandula. In England they gave
us Spenser's Hymn of Heavenly Beauty, and they
affected, each in his own way, Sir Philip Sidney and
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 27
others of the circle of court writers of his time.
More's book was written in Latin, though there is
an EngUsh translation almost contemporary. He
combines in himself a strain drawn from the active
side of the Renaissance as well as from the studious,
for besides its origin in Plato, Utopia owes not a
little to the influence of the voyages of discovery.
In 1507 there was published a little book called An
Introduction to Cosmography, which gave an account
of the four voyages of Amerigo. In the story of the
fourth voyage it is narrated that twenty-four men
were left in a fort near Cape Bahia. More used
this detail as a starting-point, and one of the men
whom Amerigo left tells the story of this " No-
where," a republic mostly resembling the ideal
world of Plato, but largely studied from and con-
trasted with contemporary England. It is the same
in all books of this kind, because no man can escape
from the influence of his own time whatever road
he takes, whether the road of imagination or any
other. His imagination can only build out of the
materials afforded him by his own experience ; he
can alter, he can rearrange, but he cannot in the
strictest sense of the word create, and every city of
dreams is only the scheme of things as they are re-
moulded nearer to the desire of a man's heart. In
a way, More has less invention than some of his
subtler followers, but, like them, he excels best where
he is most satirical. Utopias are interesting most
to us when they give us new eyes to see things as
28 ENGLISH LITERATURE
they are. This — the first of many in England — is
no exception to the rule.
The followers of Erasmus link themselves more
closely with the great age of English prose which
followed, and the lives of many of them go on well
into Elizabeth's reign. Sir Thomas Wilson, who
translated Demosthenes and wrote a famous text-
book of rhetoric, was one of her secretaries of state.
Roger Ascham wrote his Toxoi^liilus — a dialogue
on the use of the bow, done on a classical model
— while Henry VIII. was still on the throne, and
did not finish his Schoolmaster till ten years after
Elizabeth's accession. But literature as it de-
veloped in the reign of Elizabeth ran the other
way from their desires and hopes. The men of
the earlier Renaissance, in the reign of Edward VL
and Mary, belonged to a graver school than their
successors. They were no splendid courtiers, nor
daring and hardy adventurers, still less swash-
bucklers, exquisites, or literary dandies. Their
names — Sir John Cheke, Roger Ascham, Nicholas
Udall, Thomas Wilson, Walter Haddon — belong
rather to the universities and to the coteries of
learning than to the court. To the nobility, from
whose essays in belles lettres Elizabethan poetry
was to develop, they stood in the relation of tutors
rather than of companions, suspecting the extra-
vagances of their pupils rather than sympathising
with their ideals. They were a band of serious
and dignified scholars, men preoccupied with
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 29
morality and good citizenship, and holding these
to be worth more than the lighter interests of
learning and style. It is perhaps characteristic of
the English temper that the revival of the classical
tongues, which in Italy made for paganism and
the pursuit of pleasure in life and art, in England
brought with it a new seriousness and gravity in
life and art, and in religion the Reformation. But
in a way, the scholars fought against tendencies in
their age which were both too fast and too strong
for them. At a time when young men were
writing poetry modelled on the delicate and ex-
travagant verse of Italy, were reading Italian
novels, and affecting Italian fashions in speech and
dress, they were fighting for sound education, for
good classical scholarship, for the purity of native
English, and, behind all these, for the native strength
and worth of the English character, which they
felt to be endangered by orgies of reckless assimila-
tion from abroad. The revival of the classics at
Oxford and Cambridge could not produce an
Erasmus or a Scaliger ; we have no fine critical
scholarship of this age to put beside that of Holland
or France. Sir John Cheke and his followers felt
they had a public and national duty to perform,
and their knowledge of the classics only served
them for examples of high living and morality, on
which education, in its sense of the formation of
character, could be based.
In the work of these men, as we have said, two
30 ENGLISH LITERATURE
impulses fought with each other. The reading of
Cicero intoxicated men with a new full-mouthed
and decorative language unknown to English at
that date. Latinism, like every new craze, became
a passion, and ran through the less intelligent
kinds of writing in a wild excess. Not much of
the literature of this time remains in common
knowledge, and for examples of these affectations
one must turn over the pages of forgotten books.
There high-sounding and familiar words are handled
and bandied about with delight, and you can see
in volume after volume these minor and forgotten
authors gloating over the new-found treasure
which placed them in their time in the van of
literary success. That they are obsolete now, and
indeed were obsolete before they were dead, is a
warning to authors who intend similar extra-
vagances. Strangeness and exoticism are not
lasting wares. By the time of Love's Labour s
Lost they had become nothing more than matter
for laughter, and it is only through their reflection
and distortion in Shakespeare's pages that we
know them now.
Had not a restraining influence, anxiously and
even acrimoniously urged, broken in on their
endeavours, the English language to-day might
have been almost as completely latinised as Spanish
or Italian. That the essential Saxon purity of our
tongue has been preserved is to the credit not of
sensible unlettered people eschewing new fashions
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 31
they could not comprehend, but to the scholars
themselves. The chief service that Cheke and
Ascham and their fellows rendered to English
literature was their crusade against the exaggerated
latinity that they had themselves helped to make
possible, the crusade against what they called
" inkhorn terms." " I am of this opinion," said
Cheke in a prefatory letter to a book translated by
a friend of his, " that our own tongue should be
written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled
with the borrowing of other tongues, wherein if
we take not heed by time, ever borrowing and
never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house
as bankrupt." Writings in the Saxon vernacular,
like the sermons of Latimer, who was careful to
use nothing not familiar to the common people,
did much to help the scholars to save our prose
from the extravagances which they dreaded. Their
attack was directed no less against the revival of
really obsolete words. It is a paradox worth noting
for its strangeness that the first revival of medi-
aevalism in modern English literature was in the
Renaissance itself. Talking in studious archaism
seems to have been a fashionable practice in society
and court circles. " The fine courtier," says Thomas
Wilson in his Art of Rhetoric, "will talk nothing
but Chaucer." The scholars of the English Re-
naissance fought not only against the ignorant
adoption of their importations, but against their
renewal of forgotten habits of speech.
32 ENGLISH LITERATURE
Their efforts failed, and their ideals had to wait
for their acceptance till the age of Dryden, when
Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, all of them
authors who consistently violated the standards of
Cheke, had done their work. The fine courtier
who would talk nothing but Chaucer was in Eliza-
beth's reign the saving of English verse. The
beauty and richness of Spenser is based directly on
words he got from Troilus and Cressida and the
Canterbury Tales. Some of the most sonorous
and beautiful lines in Shakespeare break every
canon laid down by the humanists.
" The extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine *"
is a sentence, three of the chief words of which are
Latin importations that come unfamiliarly, bearing
their original interpretation with them. In attack-
ing latinisms and the language borrowed from
older poets, Cheke and his associates were attacking
the two chief sources of the Elizabethans' 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 con-
strained into the warped and ugly forms of Stern-
hold and Hopkins and those with them who com-
posed the first and worst metrical version of the
psalms. When their ideal reappeared, phantasy and
imagery had temporarily worn themselves out, and
a richer language made simplicity possible in poetry.
FROM CHAUCER TO MORE 33
Chaucer went to Italy for the plots of his
greatest stories ; the English scholars travelled
there to imbibe the new learning at its spring.
There resulted a circumstance which had a marked
and continuous influence on the literary age that
followed. On the heels of the men of learning
went the men of fashion, eager to learn and copy
the new manners of a society whose moral teacher
was Machiavelli, and whose patterns of splendour
were the courts of Florence and Ferrara, and to
learn the trick of verse that in the hands of
Petrarch and his followers had fashioned the sonnet
and other new lyric forms. This could not be
without its influence on the manners of the nation,
and the scholars who had been the first to show
the way were the first to deplore the pell-mell
assimilation of Italian manners and vices, which
was the unintended result of the inroad on in-
sularity 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
manner of living and false ideas which they
seemed to him to breed. The Italianate English-
man became the chief part of the stock-in-trade
of the satirists and moralists of the day. Stubbs,
a Puritan chronicler, whose book The Anatoviy
of Abuses is a valuable aid to the study of
Tudor social history, and Harrison, whose descrip-
tion of England prefaces Holinshed's Chronicles,
34 ENGLISH LITERATURE
both deal in detail with the Italian menace,
and condemn in good set terms the costliness
in dress and the looseness in morals which
they laid to its charge. Indeed, the effect on
England was profound, and it lasted for more
than two generations. The romantic traveller,
Coryat, writing well within the seventeenth century
in praise of the luxuries of Italy (among which he
numbers forks for table use), is as enthusiastic as
the authors who began the imitation of Italian
metres in Tottel's Miscellany, and Donne and Hall
in their satires written under James wield the rod
of censure as sternly as had Ascham a good half-
century before. No doubt there was something in
the danger they dreaded, but the evil was not un-
mixed with good, for insularity will always be an
enemy of good literature. The Elizabethans learned
much more than their plots from Italian models,
and the worst effects dreaded by the patriots
never reached our shores. Italian vice stopped
short of real life ; poisoning and hired ruffianism
flourished only on the stage.
CHAPTER II
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE
(1)
To understand Elizabethan literature it is necessary
to remember that the social status it enjoyed was
far different from that of literature in our own day.
The splendours of the Medicis in Italy had set up
an ideal of courtliness, in which letters formed an
integral and indispensable part. For the Renais-
sance, the man of letters was only one aspect of
the gentleman, and the true gentleman, as books
so early and late respectively as Castiglione's
Courtier and Peacham's Complete Gentleman show,
numbered poetry as a necessary part of his ac-
complishments. In England special circumstances
intensified this tendency of the time. The queen
was unmarried : she was the first single woman to
wear the English crown, and her vanity made her
value the devotion of the men about her as some-
thing more intimate than mere loyalty or patriotism.
She loved personal homage, particularly the hom-
age of half-amatory eulogy in prose and verse. It
followed that the ambition of every courtier was to
be an author, like Lord Buckhurst and Sir Philip
Sidney, and of every author to be a courtier, like
35
36 ENGLISH LITERATURE
Edmund Spenser and John Lyly ; in fact, outside
the drama, which was almost the only popular
writing at the time, every author was in a greater
or less degree attached to the court. If they were
not enjoying its favours they were pleading for
them, mingling high and fantastic compliment
with bitter reproaches and a tale of misery. And
consequently both the poetry and the prose of the
time are restricted in their scope and temper to
the artificial and romantic, to high-flown eloquence,
to the celebration of love and devotion, or to the
inculcation of those courtly virtues and accom-
plishments which composed the perfect pattern of
a gentleman. Not that there was not both poetry
and prose written outside this charmed circle.
The pamphleteers and chroniclers, Dekker and
Nash, Holinshed and Harrison and Stow, were
setting down their histories and descriptions, and
penning those detailed and realistic indictments
of the follies and extravagances of fashion, which
together with the comedies have enabled us to
picture accurately the England and especially the
London of Elizabeth's reign. There was fine
poetry written by Marlowe and Chapman as well
as by Sidney and Spenser, but the court was still
the main centre of literary endeavour, and the
main incitement to literary fame and success.
But whether an author was a courtier or a
Londoner living by his wits, writing was never the
main business of iiis life : all the writers of the
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 37
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 bio-
grapher, Lord Greville, says, " The truth is, his end
was not writing, even while he wrote, but both his
wit and understanding bent upon his heart to
make himself and others not in words or opinion
but in life and action good and great." Ben
Jonson was in turn a soldier, a poet, a bricklayer,
an actor, and ultimately the first poet laureate.
Lodge, after leaving Oxford, passed through the
various professions of soldiering, medicine, play-
writing, and fiction, and he wrote his novel
Rosalind, on which Shakespeare based As You
Like It, while he was sailing on a piratical venture
on the Spanish Main. This connection between
life and action affected as we have seen the tone
and quality of Elizabethan writing. "All the
distinguished writers of the period," says Thoreau,
" possess a greater vigour and naturalness than the
more modern . . . you have constantly the warrant
of life and experience in what you read. The little
that is said is eked out by implication of the much
that was done." In another passage the same
writer explains the strength and fineness of the
writings of Sir Walter Raleigh by this very test
38 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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 writ-
ings of the voyagers or the pamphlets of men who
lived in London by what they could make off
their fellows. Literature has always a twofold
relation to life as it is lived. It is both a mirror
and an escape: in our own day the stirring romances
of Stevenson, the full-blooded and vigorous life
which beats through the pages of Mr Kipling, the
conscious brutalism of such writers as Mr Conrad
and Mr Hewlett, the plays of J. M. Synge, occupied
with the vigorous and coarse-grained life of tinkers
and peasants, are all in their separate ways a re-
action against an age in which the overwhelming
majority of men and women have sedentary pur-
suits. In the same way the Elizabethan who
passed his commonly short and crowded life in an
atmosphere of throat-cutting and powder and shot,
and in a time when affairs of state were more
momentous for the future of the nation than they
have ever been since, needed perhaps 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 AND PROSE 39
(2)
It is with a group of courtiers that our fifteenth-
century poetry begins. In the latter end of King
Henry VIII. 's reign, says Puttenham in his Art
of Poesie (1589), there " sprang up a new company
of courtly makers of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt and
the Earl of Surrey were the two chieftains, who,
having travelled into Italy and there tasted the
sweet and stately measures and style of Italian
poesie . . . they greatly polished our rude and
homely manner of vulgar poesie from what it had
been before, and for that cause may justly be said
the first reformers of our English metres and style."
They were busy men ; they had no patrons to
please, and they belonged to a class in which
manuscript rather than print was still the normal
way of putting words on paper. 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 Miscellaiiy of Songs
and Sonnets (it was published first in 1557 and went
through six other editions) is one of the landmarks
of English literature. It begins lyrical love poetry
in our language. It begins, too, as Puttenham
observes, the imitation and adaptation of foreign
and chiefly Italian metrical forms, many of which
have since become characteristic forms of English
verse : so characteristic, that we scarcely think of
them as other than native in origin. And it begins
40 ENGLISH LITERATURE
that study of Chaucer as a master which was to
produce Spenser. To Wyatt belongs the honour
of introducing the sonnet, and to Surrey the more
momentous credit of writing, for the first time in
English, blank verse. Wyatt fills the most im-
portant place in the Miscellany, and his work,
experimental in tone and quality, formed the
example which Surrey and minor writers in the
same volume and all the later poets of the age
copied. He tries his hand at everything — songs,
madrigals, elegies, complaints, and sonnets — and he
takes his models from both ancient Rome and
modern Italy. Indeed, there is scarcely anything
in the volume for which with some trouble and
research one might not find an original in Petrarch,
or in the poets of Italy who followed him. But
imitation, frequent though it is in his work, does
not crowd out originality of feeling and poetic
temper. At times, he sounds a personal note : his
joy on leaving Spain for England, his feelings in
the Tower, his life at the Court amongst his books,
and as a country gentleman enjoying hunting and
other outdoor sports :
" This maketh me at home to hunt and hawk,
And in foul weather at my book to sit,
In frost and snow, then with my bow to stalk,
No man does mark whereas I ride or go :
In lusty leas at liberty I walk.""
It is easy to see that poetry as a melodious and
enriched expression of a man's own feelings is in its
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 41
infancy here. But it is hardly fair to judge Wyatt
by this side of his work. He was happier in re-
creating and putting new hfe into that lyrical mood
which had appeared fitfully in the thirteenth century
in the work of unnamed singers, but which in time
to come was to be one of the chiefest glories of
English verse. Such verses as
" Forget not yet the kind intent
Of such a truth as I have meant ;
My great travail so gladly spent
Forget not yet ! "
and those which follow it, or such lines as
" And wilt thou leave me thus
That hath loved thee so long
In wealth and woe among ?
And is thy heart so strong
As for to leave me thus .'*
Say nay ! Say nay ! "
are a worthy prelude to the Elizabethan lyric.
The new poets had to find their own language,
to enrich with borrowings from other tongues the
stock of words suitable for poetry which the drop-
ping of inflection had left to English. Wyatt was
at the beginning of the process, but his gracious
and courtly temper and his fine sincerity of feeling
give his work an interest greater than the mere
pleasure of experimenting could afford.
Surrey, so it seems in comparing his work, went a
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
42 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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-])lay, 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 rough in places, but
a sympathetic ear can catch in them something of
the accent that distinguishes the verse of Sidney
and Spenser. He is greater than Wyatt, not so
much for greater skill as for more boldness in
experiment. Wyatt in his sonnets had used the
Petrarchan or Italian form, the form used later in
England by Milton and in the nineteenth century
by Rossetti. He built up each poem, that is, in
two parts, the octave, a two-rhymed section of
eight lines at the beginning, followed by the sestet,
a six-line close with three rhymes. The form fits
itself very well to the double mood which com-
monly inspires a poet using the sonnet form ; the
second section as it were both echoing and answer-
ing the first, following doubt with hope, or sadness
with resignation, or resolving a problem set itself
by the heart. Surrey tried another manner, the
manner which by its use in Shakespeare's sonnets
has come to be regarded as the English form of
this kind of lyric. His sonnets are virtually three-
stanza poems with a couplet for close, and he
allows himself as many rhymes as he chooses.
^ I.e.. hover.
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 43
The structure is obviously easier, and it gives a
better chance to an inferior workman, but in the
hands of a master its harmonies are no less delicate,
and its capacity to represent changing modes of
thought no less complete than those of the true
form of Petrarch. Blank verse, which was Surrey's
other gift to English poetry (through his transla-
tion of the JEneid^ published after his death in
the same year as the Songs and Sonnets and the
first verse translation ^ into English of any classical
poet), was in a way a compromise between the
two sources from which the English Renaissance
drew its inspiration. Latin and Greek verse is
quantitative and rhymeless ; Italian verse, built up
on the metres of the troubadours and the degenera-
tion of Latin which gave the world the Romance
languages, used many elaborate forms of rhyme.
Blank verse took from Latin its rhymelessness, but
it retained the mediaeval accent instead of quantity
as the basis of its line. Here is a favourable sample
of Surrey's use of it : —
" With this the young men"'s courage did increase,
And through the dark, like to the ravening wolves
Whom raging fury of their empty maws
Drives to their den, leaving with hungry throats
Their whelps behind, among our foes we ran
Upon their swords, into apparent death.
Holding alway the chief street of the town,
Covered with the close shadows of the night."
^ Strictly, the first into a British vernacular is that of the
Scottish poet, Gavin Douglas, also of the JEneid, 1513.
44 ENGLISH LITERATURE
The line is the five-foot or ten-sylLable line of what
is called " heroic verse " — the line used by Chaucer
in his Prologue and most of his tales. Like
Milton, Surrey deplored rhyme as the invention of
a barbarous age, and no doubt he would have
rejoiced to go further and banish accent as well as
rhymed endings. That, however, was not to be,
though in the best blank verse of a later time accent
and quantity both have their share in the effect.
The instrument he forged passed into the hands
of the dramatists : Marlowe perfected its rhythm,
Shakespeare broke its monotony and varied its
cadences by altering the spacing of the accents,
and occasionally by adding an extra unaccented
syllable. It came back from the drama to poetry
with Milton. His blindness and the necessity
under which it laid him of keeping in his head
long stretches of verse at one time, because he
could not look back to see what he had written,
probably helped his naturally quick and delicate
sense of cadence to vary the pauses, so that a
variety of accent and interval might replace the
valuable aid to memory which he put aside in
putting aside rhyme. Perhaps it is to two acci-
dents, 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.
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 45
The imitation of Chaucerian Italian and French
forms which Wyatt and Surrey began, was con-
tinued by a host of younger amateurs of poetry.
The first and best of them was Thomas Sackville
(Lord Buckhurst), who towards the end of his hfe
(he outhv^ed the Queen) was to become Lord High
Treasurer. His Uterary work was done before he
entered pubhc Hfe, and though it is small in
compass and consists indeed of no more than two
poems, one narrative and the other dramatic, in
its way it helped to make an epoch. Gofboduc,
the first blank verse tragedy in our language, we
shall see later when we come to deal with the
drama. Sackville's other poem is the Induction
to the Mirroi- for Magistrates, a composite poem
modelled on Lydgate's Fall of Princes and
ultimately on Boccaccio, which was designed to be
for rulers and statesmen both a warning and a
glass in which they should see themselves. Sackville
designed the work, but after he had done the intro-
ductory portion and one of the tales, he left the
completion of it to inferior hands, and strangely,
the book was first published without his part of it ;
it was not till four years after, in 1563, that the
Induction appeared. The scheme of the book,
based on Vergil and Dante, was that the poet
should descend into hell and interview the person-
ages, who would tell their own story ; Sackville's
portion of it describes the descent. Since Chaucer,
two hundred years back, nothing comparable had
46 ENGLISH LITERATURE
been produced in English verse, nor can it be truly
said that it is in strength and power in any way
inferior to Spenser himself. The following stanza
will give the reader a taste of its quality : —
" Crookbacked he was, tooth-shaken and blear-eyed ;
Went on three feet, and sometimes crept on four ;
With old lame bones, that rattled by his side ;
His scalp all piled, and he with eld forelore.
His withered fist still knocking at death's door ;
Fumbling and drivelling as he draws his breath :
For brief, the shape and messenger of death."
The Induction runs to eighty stanzas, and it
maintains to the end the level at which it began.
When it ended Sackville put down his pen, and, so
far as we know, throughout his long life never, save
to sign a state paper, took it up again.
Sackville followed Chaucer ; his contemporaries
busied themselves with Petrarch and his school.
Laborious research has found a Continental original
for almost every great poem of the time, and for
very many forgotten ones as well. It is easy for
the student engaged in this kind of literary explora-
tion to exaggerate the importance of what he finds,
and of late years criticism, written mainly by these
explorers, has tended to assume that since it can
be found that Sidney, and Daniel, and Watson,
and all the other writers of mythological poetry
and sonnet sequences took their ideas and their
phrases from foreign poetry, their work is therefore
to be classed merely as imitative literary exercise,
that it is frigid, that it contains or conveys no real
ELIZABETHAN POf:TRY AND PROSE 47
feeling, and that except in the secondary and
derived sense, it is not really lyrical at all. Petrarch,
they will tell you, may have felt deeply and sincerely
about Laura, but when Sidney uses Petrarch's
imagery and even translates his words in order to
express his feelings for Stella, he is only a plagiarist
and not a lover, and the passion for Lady Rich
which is supposed to have inspired his sonnets,
nothing more than a not too seriously intended
trick to add the excitement of a transcript of real
emotion to what was really an academic exercise.
If that were indeed so, then Elizabethan poetry is
a very much lesser and meaner thing than later
ages have thought it. But is it so ? Let us look
into the matter a little more closely. The unit of
all ordinary kinds of writing is the word, and one
is not commonly quarrelled with for using words
that have belonged to other people. But the unit
of the lyric, like the unit of spoken conversation, is
not the word but the phrase. Now in daily human
intercourse the use, which is universal and habitual,
of set forms and phrases of talk is not commonly
supposed to detract from or destroy sincerity. In
the crises indeed of emotion it must be most
people's experience that the natural speech that
rises unbidden and easiest to the lips is something
quite familiar and commonplace, some form which
the accumulated experience of many generations
of separate people has found best for such circum-
stances or such an occasion. The lyric is in the
48 ENGLISH LITERATURE
position of conversation at such a heightened and
emotional moment. It is the speech of deep
feehng, that must be articuhite or choke, and it
falls naturally and inevitably into some form which
accumulated passionate moments have created and
fixed. The course of emotional experiences differs
very little from age to age and from individual to
individual, and so the same phrases may be used
quite sincerely and naturally as the direct expression
of feeling at its highest point by men apart in
country, circumstances, or time. This is not to
say that there is no such thing as originality ; a
poet is a poet first and most of all because he
discovers truths that have been known for ages, as
things that are fresh and new and vital for himself.
He must speak of them in language that has been
used by other men just because they are known
truths, but he will use that language in a new
way, and with a new significance, and it is just in
proportion to the freshness, and the air of personal
conviction and sincerity which he imparts to it,
that he is great.
The point at issue bears very directly on the
work of Sir Philip Sidney. In the course of the
history of English letters certain authors disengage
themselves who have more than a merely literary
position : they are symbolic of the whole age in
which they live, its life and action, its thoughts and
ideals, as well as its mere modes of writing. There
are not many of them, and they could be easily
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 49
numbered : Addison, perhaps, certainly Dr Johnson,
certainly Byron, and in the later age probably
Tennyson. But the greatest of them all is Sir
Philip Sidney : his symbolical relation to the time
in which he lived was realized by his contemporaries,
and it has been a commonplace of history and
criticism ever since. Elizabeth called him one of
the jewels of her crown, and at the age of twenty-
three, so fast did genius ripen in that summer-time
of the Renaissance, William the Silent could speak
of him as " one of the ripest statesmen of the age."
He travelled widely in Europe, knew many
languages, and dreamed of adventure in America
and on the high seas. In a court of brilliant figures,
his was the most dazzling, and his death at Zutphen
only served to intensify the halo of romance which
had gathered round his name. So far as we can
guess, all his literary work was done in four short
years, 1578-1582 ; but its bulk is such that even a
man of his burning vitality cannot have been long
idle from it. In prose he wrote the Arcadia and
the Apology for Poetry, the one the beginning of
a new kind of imaginative writing, and the other
the first of the series of those rare and precious
commentaries on their own art which some of our
English poets have left us. To it and the Arcadia
we shall have to return later in this chapter. It is
his other great work, the sequence of sonnets en-
titled Astrophel and Stella, which concerns us here.
They celebrate the history of his love for Penelope
50 ENGLISH LITERATURE
Devereux, sister of the Earl of Essex, a love brought
to disaster by the intervention of Queen Elizabeth
with whom he had quarrelled. As poetry, they
mark an epoch. They are the first direct expression
of an intimate and personal experience in English
literature, struck off in the white heat of passion,
and though they are coloured at times with that
over-fantastic imagery which is at once a character-
istic fault and excellence of the writing of the time,
they never lose the one merit above all others of
lyric poetry, the merit of sincerity. The note is
struck with certainty and power in the first sonnet
of the series : —
" Loving in ti'uth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my
pain, —
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her
know, —
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain, —
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain :
Oft turning others'" leaves to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful flower upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth . . .
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite.
' Fool,' said my muse to me, ' look in thy heart and write.' "
And though he turned others' leaves, it was quite
truly looking in his heart that he wrote. He
analyses the sequence of his feelings with a vivid-
ness and minuteness which assure us of their truth.
All that he tells is the fruit of experience, dearly
bought :
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 51
" 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 Avhich because it fades brings but
fading pleasure :
" Then farewell, world ! Thy uttermost I see.
Eternal love, maintain thy life in me."
The sonnets were published after Sidney's death,
and it is certain that like Shakespeare's they were
never intended for publication at all. The point
is important because it helps to vindicate Sidney's
sincerity, but were any vindication needed another
more certain might be found. The Arcadia is
strewn with love songs and sonnets, the exercises
solely of the literary imagination. Let anyone who
wishes to gauge the sincerity of the impulse of the
Stella sequence compare any of the poems in it
with those in the romance. One thing they plainly
show : had Sidney lived he would have done things
which must have set him on a plane not inferior to
that of Spenser himself, and he would have had
his hand, one knows not to what great purpose, in
the shaping of English poetry. When Zutphen cut
short his career, nothing of Spenser had appeared
save the Shepherd's Calendar ; Shakespeare was
52 ENGLISH LITERATURE
is^
known only as the author of Vemts and Adonis
the drama had not shouldered itself to the forefront
of letters. Would Sidney have turned his hand to
writing in an art which his class only patronized ?
With Sidney literature was an avocation, con-
stantly indulged in, but outside the main business
of his life ; with Edmund Spenser public life and
affairs were subservient to an overmastering poetic
impulse. He did his best to carve out a career for
himself like other young men of his time, followed
the fortunes of the Earl of Leicester, sought
desperately and unavailingly the favour of the
Queen, and ultimately accepted a place in her
service in Ireland, which meant banishment as
virtually as a place in India would to-day. Hence-
forward his visits to London and the Court were
few ; sometimes a lover of travel would visit him
in his house in Ireland as Raleigh did, but for the
most he was left alone. It was in this atmosphere
of loneliness and separation, hostile tribes pinning
him in on every side, murder lurking in the woods
and marshes round him, that he composed his
greatest work. In it at last he died, on the heels
of a sudden rising in which his house was burnt
and his lands overrun by the wild Irish whom the
tyranny of the English planters had driven to
vengeance. Spenser was not without interest in
liis public duties ; his f^iew of the State of Ireland
shows that. But it shows, too, that he brought to
them singularly little sympathy or imagination.
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 53
Throughout his tone is that of an unimaginative
kind of Enghsh officialdom ; rigid subjection and
in the last resort massacre are the remedies he would
apply to Irish discontent. He would be a fine
text — which might perhaps be enforced by modern
examples — for a discourse on the evil effects of
immersion in the government of a subject race
upon men of letters. No man of action perhaps
can be so consistently and cynically an advocate of
tyranny as your man of letters. Spenser, of course,
had his excuses ; the problem of Ireland was new
and it was something remote and difficult ; in all
but the mere distance for travel, Dublin was as far
from London as Bombay is to-day. But to him
and his like we must lay down partly the fact that
to-day we have still an Irish problem.
But though fate and the necessity of a livelihood
drove him to Ireland and the life of a colonist,
poetry was his main business. He had been the
centre of a brilliant set at Cambridge, one of those
coteries whose fame, if they are brilliant and
vivacious enough and have enough self-confidence,
penetrates to the outer world before they leave
the University. The thing happens in our own
day, as the case of Oscar Wilde is witness ; it
happened in the case of Spenser ; and when he and
his friends Gabriel Harvey and Edward Kirke
came " down " it was to immediate fame amongst
amateurs of the arts. They corresponded with
each other about literary matters, and Harvey
54 ENGLISH LITERATURE
published his part of the correspondence ; they
played, like Du Bellay in France, with the idea of
writing English verse in the quantitative measures
of classical poetry ; Spenser had a love affair in
Yorkshire and wrote poetry about it, letting just
enough be known to stimulate the imagination of
the public. They tried their hands at everything,
imitated everything, and in all were brilliant,
sparkling, and decorative ; they got a kind of
entrance to the circle of the Court. Then Spenser
published his Shepherd's Calendar, a series of
pastoral eclogues for every month of the year,
after a manner taken from French and Italian
pastoral writers, but coming ultimately from
Vergil, and Edward Kirke furnished it with an
elaborate prose commentary. Spenser took the
same liberties with the pastoral form as did Vergil
himself; that is to say, he used it as a vehicle for
satire and allegory, made it carry political and
social allusions, and planted in it references to his
friends. By its publication Spenser became the
first poet of the day. It was followed by some of
his finest and most beautiful things — by the
Platonic hymns, by the Avioretti, a series of
sonnets inspired by his love for his wife; by the
Epithalamiuvi, on the occasion of his marriage to
her ; by Mother Hubbard's Tale, a satire written
when despair at the coldness of the Queen and the
enmity of Burleigh was beginning to take hold on
the poet, and endowed with a plainness and vigour
y^r.
liMl|ll,iiwi/WHiituiiiiiTiiiiiil>|ii|i|i
iHi)»tt|UliH>'""«mf*rtwHi>«tmniiinmiUiifu*tJm'!m|ijutM]'iT
£D3\! f X t > M » i: X .< YM
lltiltlill!iilnmiltinliiHlliii^4lHili>iiiiliiiiiillliiiiilltJilillil:iiiliiiiniMiilnliiiH^
EDMUND SPENSER.
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 55
foreign to most of his other work ; and then by
The Faerie Queen.
The poets of the Renaissance were not afraid of
big things ; every one of them had in his mind as
the goal of poetic endeavour the idea of the heroic
poem, aimed at doing for his own country what
Vergil had intended to do for Rome in the jEneid,
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, it was only to forsake the sing-
ing of English origins for the more ultimate theme
of the origins of mankind. Spenser designed to
celebrate the character, the qualities, and the
training of the English gentleman. And because
poetry, unlike philosophy, cannot deal with abstrac-
tions but must be vivid and concrete, he was forced
to embody his virtues and foes to virtue and to
use the way of allegory. His outward plan, with
its knights and dragons and desperate adventures,
he procured from Ariosto. As for the use of
allegory, it was one of the discoveries of the Middle
Ages which the Renaissance condescended to
retain. Spenser elaborated it beyond the wildest
dreams of those students of Holy Writ who had
first conceived it. His stories were to be interesting
in themselves as tales of adventure, but within
them they were to conceal an intricate treatment
of the conflict of truth and falsehood in morals
56 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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
Wreckei^ is an example. The Faerie Queen was
designed on somewhat the same plan. The last
section was to relate and explain the unrelated and
unexplained books which made up the poem, and
at the court to which the separate knights of the
separate books — the Red Cross Knight and the
rest — were to bring the fruit of their adventures,
everything was to be made clear. Spenser did not
live to finish his work ; llie Faerie Queen, like the
jFneid, is an uncompleted poem, and it is only
from a prefatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh issued
with the second published section that we know
what the poem was intended to be. Had Spenser
not published this explanation, it is impossible that
anybody, even the acutest-minded German pro-
fessor, could have guessed.
The poem, as we have seen, was composed in
Ireland, in the solitude of a colonist's 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
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 57
theme would have been impossible, or at least
very unlikely, if its author had not been thrown in
on himself during its composition. Its intricacy
and involution is the product of an over-concentra-
tion born of empty surroundings. It lacks vigour
and rapidity ; it winds itself into itself. The
influence of Ireland, too, is visible in its landscapes,
in its description of bogs and desolation, of dark
forests in which lurk savages ready to spring out
on those who are rash enough to wander within
their confines. All the scenery in it which is not
imaginary is Irish and not English scenery. But
the imaginary scenery comes straight out of the
land of pure poetry.
Its reception in England and at the Court was
enthusiastic. Men and women read it eagerly and
longed for the next section as our grandfathers
longed for the next section of Pickwick. They
really liked it, really loved the intricacy and luxuri-
ousness of it, the heavy exotic language, the thickly
painted descriptions, the languorous melody of the
verse. Mainly, perhaps, that was so because they
were all either in wish or in deed poets themselves.
Spenser has always been " the poet's poet." Some
of them stole from him and were never caught in
the stealing. One remembers what came from the
following stanza in the second book of The Faerie
Queen : —
" So passeth, in the passing of a day
Of mortal life, the leaf, the bud, the flower ;
58 ENGLISH LITERATURE
No more doth flourish after first decay,
That erst was sought to deck both bed and bower
Of many a lady, and many a paramour.
Gather, therefore, the Rose whilst yet is prime.
For soon comes age that will her pride deflower ;
Gather the Rose of love whilst yet is time.
Whilst loving thou mayst loved be with equal crime."
Milton loved him ; so did Dryden, who said that
Milton confessed to him that Spenser was "his
original," a statement which has been pronounced
incredible, but is, in truth, perfectly comprehensible,
and most likely true. Pope admired him, and was
scornful when Addison hinted dispraise. Keats
learned from him the best part of his music. You
can trace echoes of him in Mr Yeats. What is it
that gives him this hold on his peers ? Well, in
the first place his defects do not detract from his
purely poetic qualities. The story is impossibly
told, but that will only worry those who are
looking for a story. The allegory is hopelessly
difficult ; but as Hazlitt said, " the allegory will
not bite you " ; you can let it alone. The crude-
ness and bigotry of Spenser's dealings with
Catholicism, which are ridiculous when he pictures
the monster Error vomiting books and pamphlets,
and disgusting when he draws Mary Queen of
Scots, do not hinder the pleasure of those who
read him for his language and his art. He is great
for other reasons than these. First because of the
extraordinary smoothness and melody of his verse
and the richness of his language — a golden diction
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 59
that he drew from every source — new words, old
words, obsolete words — such a mixture that the
purist Ben Jonson remarked acidly that he wrote
no language at all. Secondly because of the pro-
fusion of his imagery, and the extraordinarily keen
sense for beauty and sweetness that went to its
making. In an age of golden language and gallant
imagery his was the most golden and the most
gallant. And the language of poetry in England
is richer and more varied than that in any other
country in Europe to-day, because of what he did.
(3)
Elizabethan prose brings us face to face with a
difficulty which has to be met by every student of
literature. Does the word "literature" cover every
kind of writing ? Ought we to include in it writ-
ing that aims merely at instruction or is merely
journey-work, as well as writing that has an artistic
intention, or writing that, whether its author knew
it or no, is artistic in its result ? Of course such a
question causes us no sort of difficulty when it
concerns itself only with what is being published
to-day. We know very well that some things are
literature and some merely journalism ; that of
novels, for instance, some deliberately intend to be
works of art and others only to meet a passing
desire for amusement or mental occupation. We
know that most books serve or attempt to serve
only a useful and not a literary purpose. But in
60 ENGLISH LITERATURE
reading the books of three centuries ago, uncon-
sciously one's point of view shifts. Antiquity-
gilds journey-work ; remoteness and quaintness of
phrasing lend a kind of distinction to what are
simply pamphlets or text-books that have been
preserved by accident from the ephemeralness
which was the common lot of hundreds of their
fellows. One comes to regard as literature things
that had no kind of literary value for their first
audiences ; to apply the same seriousness of judg-
ment and the same tests to the pamphlets of Nash
and Dekker as to the prose of Sidney and Bacon.
One loses, in fact, that power to distinguish the
important from the trivial which is one of the
functions of a sound literary taste. Now, a study
of the minor writing of the past is, of course,
well worth a reader's pains. Pamphlets, chronicle
histories, text-books and the like have an historical
importance ; they give us glimpses of the manners
and habits and modes of thought of the day. They
tell us more about the outward show of life than
do the greater books. If you are interested in
social history, they are the very thing. But the
student of literature ought to beware of them, nor
ought he to touch them till he is familiar with the
big and lasting things. A man does not possess
English literature if he knows what Dekker tells of
The Seven Deadly Sins ofLondoii and does not know
The Faei'ie Queen. Though the wide and curious
interest of the Romantic critics of the nineteenth
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 61
century found and illumined the byways of Eliza-
bethan writing, the safest method of approach is
the method of their predecessors — to keep hold on
common sense, to look at literature, not historically
as through the wrong end of a telescope, but closely
and without a sense of intervening time, to know
the best — the " classic " — and study it before the
minor things.
In Elizabeth's reign, prose became for the first
time, with cheapened printing, the common vehicle
of amusement and information, and the books that
remain to us cover many departments of writing.
There are the pamphleteers, of whom Nash is the
ablest, the most productive and the most brilliant.
There are the historians who set down for us for
the first time what they knew of the earlier history
of England, Holinshed, Hall and the rest. There
are the writers, like Harrison and Stubbs, who
described the England of their own day. There
are the novelists who translated stories mainly from
Italian sources, like Painter and Fenton and Lodge.
Finally, there are the narratives of those voyages
which gave the age its essential romantic back-
ground and the air from which infuses its whole
literature, set forth by the voyagers themselves.
The two great collections of these, Hakluyt's and
Purchas's, were among the most popular books of
the time. To them indeed we must look for the
first beginnings of our modern English prose and
some of its finest passages. The writers, as often
62 ENGLISH LITERATURE
as not, were otherwise utterly unknown : ships'
pursers, supercargoes, and the like ; men without
any special literary craft or training, whose style
is great largely because of the greatness of their
subject and because they had no rhetorical artifices
to stand between them and the plain and direct
telling of a stirring tale. The influence of their
writing not only helped English prose towards the
gravity and simplicity which it attained in the
seventeenth century ; it gave a basis for a large
part of the philosophical literature which is so char-
acteristic a product of Jacobean England. On the
reports brought home by these voyagers and printed
in their narratives were founded in part those
conceptions of the conditions of the " natural man "
which took such a prominent place in the work of
Hobbes and Locke. Hobbes' description of the
life of nature as " nasty, solitary, brutish and short,"
and Locke's theories of civil government, and
abroad, the work of Montesquieu and Rousseau,
all took as the basis of their theories the observa-
tions of the men of travel. Locke himself is the
best example of the closeness of this alliance. He
was a diligent student of the text of the voyagers,
and himself edited out of Purchas the best collec-
tion of them current in his day.
All these people wrote without knowing that
they wrote well. Of authors as conscious of a
literary intention as the poets were, there are only
two, Sidney and Lyly ; and of authors who, though
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 63
their first aim was hardly an artistic one, achieved
an artistic result, only Bacon, Hooker, and the
translators of the Bible. The Authorized Version
of the Bible, and most of the work of Bacon, belong
strictly not to the reign of Elizabeth but to that of
James, and we shall have to look at it when we
come to discuss the seventeenth century. Hooker,
in his book on Ecclesiastical Polity (an endeavour
to set forth the grounds of orthodox Anglicanism),
employed a fine moderation which has permanently
influenced the study of the subject, and a generous,
flowing, melodious style which has attracted many
writers since and is familiar to us to-day in the
effect of it on Ruskin in his earlier works. Lyly
and Sidney are worth looking at more closely.
The age was intoxicated with language. It went
mad of a mere delight in words. Its writers were
using a new tongue, for English was enriched
beyond all recognition with borrowings from the
ancient authors ; and like all artists who become
possessed of a new medium, they used it to excess.
Rhetoric was the main subject of instruction in the
schools. It was the habit of the rhetoricians to
choose some subject for declamation and to encour-
age their pupils to set round it embellishments and
decorations, which cared rather less for enforcing
an argument than for the mere delight of language
for language' sake. The early Ehzabethans' use of
the new prose was very like the use that educated
Indians make of English to-day. It is not that
64 ENGLISH LITERATURE
these write it incorrectly, but only that they write
too richly. And just as fuller use and knowledge
teaches them spareness and economy and gives
their writing simplicity and vigour, so seventeenth-
century practice taught Englishmen to write a
more direct and undecorated style and gave us the
smooth, simple, and vigorous writing of Dryden —
the first really modern English prose. But the
Elizabethans loved gaudier methods ; they liked
highly decorative modes of expression, in prose no
less than in verse. The first author to give them
these things was John Lyly, whose book Euphues
(1579-80) was for the ten or so 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 Loves Labours Lost ; he
attempted a sequel of his most famous work with
better success than commonly attends sequels ; but
for us and for his own generation he is the author
of one book. Everybody read it, everybody copied
it. The maxims and sentences of advice for
gentlemen which it contained were quoted and
admired in the Court, where the author, though he
never attained the lucrative position he hoped for,
did what flattery could do to make a name for
himself. The name " Euphuism " became a current
description of an artificial way of using words that
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 65
overflowed out of writing into speech and was in
the mouths, while the vogue lasted, of everybody
who was anybody in the circle that fluttered round
the Queen.
The style of Eiiphues was parodied by Shake-
speare, and many attempts have been made to
imitate it since. Most of them are inaccurate —
Sir Walter Scott's wild attempt the most inaccurate
of all. They fail because their authors have
imagined that " Euphuism " is simply a highly
artificial and " flowery " way of talking. As a
matter of fact it is directly based on the precepts
of the handbooks on rhetoric current in the schools ;
Lyly only elaborated and made more precise tricks
of phrase and writing which had been the exercises
of his youth. Its fantastic delight in exuberance
of figure and sound owes its inspiration in its form
ultimately to Cicero, and in the decorations with
which it is embellished to the elder Pliny and later
writers of his kind. As is proper in what sprang
from an educational exercise, it is made up of a very
exact and definite series of parts. The writing is
done on a plan which has three main characteristics,
as follows. First, the structure of the sentence is
based on antithesis and alliteration ; that is to say,
it falls into equal parts similar in sound but with a
different sense ; for example, Euphues is described
as a young gallant " of more wit than wealth, yet
of more wealth than wisdom." All the characters
in the book, which is roughly in the form of a
5
66 ENGLISH IJTERATURE
novel, speak in this way, sometimes in sentences
long drawn out which are oppressively mono-
tonous and tedious, and sometimes shortly with
a certain approach to epigram. The second char-
acteristic of the style is the reference of every
stated fact to some classical authority ; that is to
say, the author cannot mention friendship without
quoting David and Jonathan, nor can lovers in
his book accuse each other of faithlessness without
quoting the instance of Cressida or iEneas. This
appeal to classical authority and wealth of classical
allusion is used to decorate pages which deal with
matters of everyday experience. Seneca, for in-
stance, is quoted as reporting "that too much
bending breaketh the bow," a fact which might
reasonably have been supposed to be known to
the author himself. This particular form of
writing perhaps influenced those who copied Lyly
more than anything else in his book. It is a fashion
of the more artificial kind of Elizabethan writing
in all schools to employ a wealth of classical
allusion. Even the simple narratives in Hakluyfs
Voyages are not free from it, and one may hardly
hope to read an account of a voyage to the Indies
without stumbling on a prehminary reference
to the opinions of Aristotle and Plato. Lastly,
Euphues is characterized by an extraordinary
wealth of allusion to natural history, mostly of a
fabulous kind. " I have read that the bull being
tied to the fig tree loseth his tail ; that the whole
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 67
herd of deer stand at gaze if they smell a sweet
apple ; that the dolphm after the sound of music
is brought to the shore," and so on. His book is
full of these things, and the style weakens and
loses its force because of them.
Of course there is much more in his book than
this outward decoration. He wrote with the
avowed purpose of instructing courtiers and gentle-
men how to live. Euphues is full of grave reflec-
tions and weighty morals, and is indeed a collection
of essays on education, on friendship, on rehgion
and philosophy, and on the favourite occupation
and curriculum of Elizabethan youth — foreign
travel. The fashions and customs of his country-
men which he condemns in the course of his teaching
are the same as those inveighed against by Stubbs
and other contemporaries. He disliked manners
and fashions copied from Italy ; particularly he
disliked the extravagant fashions of women. One
woman only escapes his censure, and she, of course,
is the Queen, whom Euphues and his companion
in the book come to England to see. In the main,
the teaching of Euphues inculcates a humane and
liberal, if not very profound creed, and the book
shares with The Faerie Queen the honour of the
earlier Puritanism — the Puritanism that besides the
New Testament had the Republic.
But Euphues, though he was in his time the
popular idol, was not long in finding a successful
rival. Seven years before his death Sir Philip
68 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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,
and when it came it ousted its rival at a blow.
Euphuism was killed ; it was the common praise
of Sidney that he had assisted at its death, and
Drayton compliments him as the author who
" Did first reduce
Our tongue from Lyly''s writing, then in use ;
Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies,
Playing with words and idle similies.
As the English apes and very zanies be
Of everything that they do hear and see."
The Arcadia is the first English example of the
prose pastoral romance, as the Shepherd's Calendar
is of our pastoral verse. Imitative essays in its style
kept appearing for two hundred years after it, till
Wordsworth and other poets who knew the country
drove its unrealities out of literature. The aim of
it and of the school to which it belonged abroad
was to find a setting for a story which should leave
the author perfectly free to plant in it any improba-
bility he liked, and to do what he liked with the
relations of his characters. In the shade of beech
trees, the coils of elaborated and intricate love-
making wind and unravel themselves through an
endless afternoon. In that art nothing is too far-
fetched, nothing too sentimental, no sorrow too
unreal. The pastoral romance was used, too, to
cover other things besides a sentimental and
decorative treatment of love. Authors wrapped
ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE 69
up as shepherds their political friends and enemies,
and the pastoral eclogues in verse which Spenser
and others composed are full of personal and
political allusion. Sidney's story carries no politics,
and he depends for its interest solely on the wealth
of differing episodes and the stories and arguments
of love which it contains. The story would furnish
plot enough for twenty ordinary novels, but prob-
ably those who read it when it was published were
attracted by other things than the march of its
incidents. Certainly no one could read it for the
plot now. Its attraction is mainly one of style.
It goes, you feel, one degree beyond Euphues in
the direction of freedom and poetry. And just
because of this greater freedom, its characteristics
are much less easy to fix than those of EupJmes.
Perhaps its chief quality is best described as that
of exhaustiveness. Sidney will take a word and
toss it to and fro in a page till its meaning is sucked
dry and more than sucked dry. On page after
page the same trick is employed, often in some
new and charming way, but with the inevitable
effect of wearying the reader, who tries to do the
unwisest of all things with a book of this kind — to
read on. This trick of bandying words is, of course,
common in Shakespeare. Other marks of Sidney's
style belong similarly to poetry rather than to
prose. Chief of them is what Ruskin christened the
" pathetic fallacy " — the assumption (not common
in his day) which connects the appearance of nature
70 ENGLISH LITERATURE
with the moods of the artist who looks at it, or
demands such a connection. In its day, as we have
seen, the Arcadia was hailed as a reformation by
men nauseated by the rhythmical pattens of Lyly.
A modern reader finds himself confronting it in
something of the spirit that he would confront the
prose romances, say, of William Morris, finding it
charming as a poet's essay in prose, but no more :
not to be ranked with the highest.
Yet Sidney when he liked could write clear and
nervous prose, direct and definite as a soldier's
despatches. His Apology for Poet7^y is full of
noble things ; he never, he said, " heard the old song
of Percy and Douglas but he found his heart
stirred as with the sound of a trumpet." He is the
author of those splendid concentrations of moral
wisdom—" then will be the time to die nobly when
you cannot live nobly," and " there is nothing more
terrible to a guilty heart than the eye of a respected
friend." Finally, read his letter to his father's
secretary, one of the most forthright documents in
English prose : —
" Mr Molyneux. Few words are best. My letters to my
father have come to the eyes of some. Neither can I condemn
any but you for it. If it be so, you have played the very
knave with me ; and so I will make you know if I have good
proof of it. But that for so much as is past. For that is to
come, I assure you before God, that if ever I know you do
so much as read any letter I write to my father without his
commandment, or my consent, I will thrust my dagger into
you. And trust to it, for I speak it in earnest. In the
meantime, farewell.'"
CHAPTER III
THE DRAMA
(1)
Men of science say that the family of mixed
ancestry — the product of more than one nationahty
— is more fertile than one descended from a single
ancestral stock ; perhaps the analogy is not too
fanciful as the starting - point of a study of
Elizabethan drama, which owed its strength and
vitality, more than to anything else, to the variety
of the discordant and contradictory elements of
which it was made up. The drama was the form
into which were moulded the thoughts and desires
of the best spirits of the time. It was the flower
of the age. To appreciate its many-sided signifi-
cances and achievements it is necessary carefully to
disentangle its roots, in religion, in the revival of
the classics, in popular entertainments, in imports
from abroad, in the air of enterprise and adventure
which belonged to the time.
As in Greece, drama in England was in its
beginning a religious thing. Its oldest continuous
tradition was from the mediaeval Church. Early
in the Middle Ages the clergy and their parishioners
began the habit, at Christmas, Easter, and other
71
72 ENGLISH LITERATURE
holy days, of playing some part of the story of
Christ's life suitable to the festival of the day.
These plays were liturgical, and originally, no
doubt, overshadowed by a choral element. But
gradually the inherent human capacity for mimicry
and drama took the upper hand ; from ceremonies
they developed into performances ; they passed
from the stage in the church porch to the stage in
the street. A waggon, the natural human plat-
form for mimicry or oratory, became in England,
as it was in Greece, the cradle of the drama. This
momentous change in the history of the miracle
play, which made it in all but its occasion and its
subject a secular thing, took place about the end
of the twelfth century. The rise of the town
guilds gave the plays a new character ; the friendly
rivalry of leagued craftsmen elaborated their pro-
duction ; 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 W^hit Monday. " The manner of
these plays were, every company had his pageant
or part, a high scaffold with two rooms, a higher
and a lower, upon four wheels. In the lower they
apparelled themselves and in the higher room they
THE DRAMA 73
played, being all open on the top that all beholders
might hear and see them. They began first at the
abbey gates, and when the first pageant was played,
it was wheeled to the high cross before the mayor
and so to every street. So every street had a
pageant playing upon it at one time, till all the
pageants for the day appointed were played."
The " companies " were the town guilds, and the
several " pageants " different scenes in Old or New
Testament story. As far as was possible, each
company took for its pageant some Bible story
fitting to its trade ; in York the goldsmiths played
the three Kings of the East bringing precious gifts,
the fishmongers the flood, and the shipwrights the
building of Noah's ark. The tone of these plays
was not reverent ; reverence after all may imply
near at hand its opposite in unbelief. But they
were realistic and they contained within them the
seeds of later drama in the aptitude with which
they grafted into the sacred story pastoral and city
manners taken straight from life. The shepherds
who watched by night at Bethlehem were real
English shepherds furnished with boisterous and
realistic comic relief Noah was a real shipwright.
" It shall be clinched each ilk and deal.
With nails that are both noble and new
Thus shall I fix it to the keel,
Take here a rivet and there a screw,
With there bow there now, work I well,
This work, I warrant, both good and true.""
Cain and Abel were English farmers just as
74 ENGLISH LITERATURE
truly as Bottom and his fellows were English
craftsmen. But then Julius Caesar has a doublet,
and in Dutch pictures the apostles wear broad-
brimmed hats. Squeamishness about historical
accuracy is of a later date, and when it came we
gained in correctness less than we lost in art.
The miracle plays, then, are the oldest antecedent
of Elizabethan drama, but it must not be sup-
posed they were over and done with before the
great age began. The description of the Chester
performances, part of which has been quoted, was
written in 1594. Shakespeare must, one would
think, have seen the Coventry cycle ; at any rate
he was familiar, as everyone 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 some-
thing so rapid in its accessibility to new impressions
and new manners and learning and modes of
thought, that for years the old and new subsisted
side by side. Think of modern Japan, a welter of
old faiths and crafts and ideals and inrushing
Western civilization all mixed up and side by side
in the strangest contrasts, and you will understand
what it was. The miracle plays stayed on beside
Marlowe and Shakespeare till Puritanism frowned
upon them. But when the end came it came
quickly. The last recorded performance took
place in London when King James entertained
Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador. And perhaps
THE DRAMA 75
we should regard that as a " command " perform-
ance, reviving, as command performances commonly
do, something dead for a generation — in this case,
perhaps out of compliment to the faith and inclina-
tion of a distinguished guest.
Next in order of development after the miracle
or mystery plays, though contemporary in their
popularity, came what were called " moralities " or
" moral interludes " — pieces designed to enforce a
religious or ethical lesson and perhaps to get back
into drama something of the edification which
realism had ousted from the miracles. They dealt
in allegorical and figurative personages, expounded
wise saws and moral lessons, and squared rather
with the careful self-concern of the newly estab-
lished Protestantism than with the frank and joyous
zest in life which was more characteristic of the
time. Everyman^ the oftenest revived and best
known of them, if not the best, is very typical of
the class. They had their influences, less profound
than that of the miracles, on the real drama. It
is said the " Vice " — unregeneracy commonly de-
generated into comic relief— is the ancestor of the
fool in Shakespeare, but more likely both are
successive creations of a dynasty of actors who
practised the unchanging and immemorial art of
the clown. The general structure of Everyman
and some of its fellows, heightened and made more
dramatic, gave us Marlowe's Faustus. There per-
haps the influence ends.
76 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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 in-
dustrious amateurs of the guilds, civic patronage,
and performing in town-halls, market-place booths,
or inn-yards, whichever served them best. The
structure of the Elizabethan inn-yard (you may see
some survivals still) was very favourable for their
purpose. The galleries round it made seats like our
boxes and circle for the more privileged spectators ;
in the centre on the floor of the yard stood the
crowd, or sat, if they had stools with them. The
stage was a platform set on this floor space with its
back against one side of the yard, where perhaps
one of the inn-rooms served as a dressing-room.
So suitable was this " fit-up," as actors call it, that
when theatres came to be built in London they
were built on the inn-yard pattern. All the play-
houses of the Bankside, from the " Curtain " to the
" Globe," were square or circular places with
galleries rising above one another three parts
round, a floor space of beaten earth open to the
sky in the middle, and jutting out on to it a
platform stage with a tiring room capped by a
gallery behind it.
The entertainment given by these companies of
players (who usually got the patronage and took
the title of some lord) was various. They played
moralities and interludes, they played formless
THE DRAMA 77
chronicle history plays like the Troublesome Reign
of King John, on which Shakespeare worked for
his King John ; but above and before all they were
each a company of specialists, every one of whom
had his own talent and performance for which he
was admired. The Elizabethan stage was the
ancestor of our music-hall, and to the modern
music-hall rather than to the theatre it bears its
affinity. If you wish to realize the aspect of the
Globe or the Blackfriars, it is to a lower class
music-hall you must go. The quality of the
audience is a point of agreement. The Globe was
frequented by young " bloods " and by the more
disreputable portions of the community, racing
men (or their equivalents of that day), " coney
catchers " and the like ; commonly the only women
present were women of the town. The similarity
extends from the auditorium to the stage. The
Elizabethan playgoer delighted in virtuosity ; in
exhibitions of strength or skill from his actors ; the
broadsword combat in Macbeth, and the wrestling
in As You Like It, were real trials of skill. The
bear in the Winter s Tale was no doubt a real bear
got from a bear-pit, near by in the Bankside. The
comic actors especially were the very grandfathers
of our music-hall stars ; Tarleton and Kemp and
Cowley, the chief of them, were as much popular
favourites and esteemed as separate from the plays
they played in as any of the artists who play in
music-hall or pantomime in our own day. Their
78 ENGLISH LITERATURE
songs and tunes were printed and sold in hundreds
as broadsheets, just as pirated music-hall songs are
sold to-day. This is to be noted, because it explains
a great deal in the subsequent evolution of the
drama. It explains the delight of having every-
thing represented actually on the stage, all murders,
battles, duels. It explains the magnificent largesse
given by Shakespeare to the professional fool.
Work had to be found for him, and Shakespeare,
whose difficulties were stepping-stones to his
triumphs, gave him Touchstone and Feste, the
Porter in Macbeth and the Fool in Lear. Others
put lines and songs in for him without caring
whether they were incongruous with the action. A
play like John Hey wood's Rape of Lucrece, in
which low comedy dialogue and catches are inter-
mingled with the tragic action, and further songs
too completely at variance with it printed by the
author, when he published his play, in an appendix,
is astonishing to the modern reader who takes
his notion of Elizabethan Roman tragedy from
Julius Ccesa?^ or Sejaiius. 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 JNIarlowe in Dr Faustus took
the course of leaving the low comedy which the
audience loved and a high-salaried actor demanded,
to an inferior collaborator.
Alongside this drama of street platforms and
inn-yards and public theatres, there grew another
THE DRAMA 79
which, blending with it, produced the Elizabethan
drama which we know. The public theatres were
not the only places at which plays were produced.
At the University, at the Inns of Court (which
then more than now were besides centres of study
rather exclusive and expensive clubs), and at the
Court they were an important part of almost every
festival. At these places were produced academic
compositions, either allegorical like the masques,
copies of which we find in Shakespeare and by
Ben Jonson, or comedies modelled on Plautus or
Terence, or tragedies modelled on Seneca. The
last were incomparably the most important. The
Elizabethan age, which always thought of literature
as a guide or handmaid to life, was naturally
attracted to a poet who dealt in maxims and
" sentences " ; his rhetoric appealed to men for
whom words and great passages of verse were an
intoxication that only a few to-day can understand
or sympathize with ; his bloodthirstiness and gloom
to an age so full-blooded as not to shrink from
horrors. Tragedies early began to be written on
the strictly Senecan model, and generally, like
Seneca's, with some ulterior intention. Sackville's
Gorboduc, the first tragedy in English, produced
at a great festival at the Inner Temple, aimed at
inducing Elizabeth to marry and save the miseries
of a disputed succession. To be put to such a use
argues the importance and dignity of this classical
tragedy of the learned societies and the Court.
80 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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 Eliza-
bethan audience, as we have seen, loved action,
and in these Senecan tragedies the action took place
" off." But they had a strong and abiding influence
on the popular stage ; they gave it its ghosts, its
supernatural warnings, its conception of nemesis
and revenge, they gave it its love of introspection
and the long passages in which introspection, de-
scription or reflection, either in soliloquy or dialogue,
holds up the action ; contradictorily enough they
gave it something at least of its melodrama.
Perhaps they helped to enforce the lesson of the
miracle plays that a dramatist's proper business was
elaboration rather than invention. None of the
Elizabethan dramatists except Ben Jonson habitu-
ally constructed their own plots. Their method
was to take something ready at their hands and
overlay it with realism or poetry or romance. The
stories of their plays, like that of Hamlet's Mouse-
trap, were " extant and writ in choice Italian," and
very often their methods of preparation were very
like his.
It is time now to turn to the dramatists them-
selves.
(2)
Of Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, and Peele, the
" University Wits " who fused the academic and
the popular drama, and, by giving the latter a sense
THE DRAMA 81
of literature and learning to mould it to finer issues,
gave us Shakespeare, only Marlowe is of consider-
able literary importance. 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. Greene's plays, indeed,
of which only five remain to us, are by no means
his best work. He is most charming in his novels
and in the songs and love lyrics interspersed in
them. One of these — Pandosto, the Triumph of
Time — seems to have given Shakespeare the plot of
the Winter s Tale. Of his plays all but one are
comedies, but they give no hint of the profligacy
of life which he has himself so fully unfolded to us
in his autobiographical pamphlets, and which made
him a byword even in the full-blooded age in which
he lived. Their chief merit, perhaps, lies in the
beauty of language and imagery which they dis-
close from time to time in their uneven pages — a
beauty drawn directly from a study of the classical
poets, chiefly Ovid, whom Greene's university
training enabled him, no doubt, to read in the
original. Of Peele's six plays, the two chronicle
histories were the most popular, and they had the
deepest influence on the drama of the succeeding
generation. As was natural in a writer working
for the new popular theatre and depending on
popular success, hatred of Spain and " no Popery "
are the mainsprings of their plots. Elinor, the
6
82 ENGLISH LITERATURE
wife of Edward I., is a Spanish princess and a
monster of lust and pride, and Stukely, the hero
of the Battle of Alcazai-, is a renegade Enghshman
commissioned by the Pope to raise a rebeUion in
Ireland. With Kyd we come to more serious
matter. We have seen how the drama modelled
on Seneca had attained in the Inns of Court and at
the Universities an academic and literary eminence ;
in the popular theatres, on the other hand, though
there was, by the time of Greene and Peele, a
vigorous comic tradition, there was as yet no tragic
school. By transferring the Senecan drama to the
London stage, by seizing hold of its essential faculty
which was the gift of arousing and sustaining horror
and excitement, and by altering its method so that
the action, instead of being reported by spectators
and messengers, was directly represented, and the
plot, instead of being concerned with classic myth
or tradition, took love or political intrigue for its
theme, Kyd gave English tragedy the impulse
which has given us not only Titus Andronicus, but
Hamlet, the Duchess of Malfi, The Ccnci, and for
the matter of that every popular melodrama since.
The Spanish Ty^agedy, which was the play by which
these things were accomplished, has little character-
interest ; individuality does not assert itself; it is,
as it were, Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.
But if it has none of the psychological study
which makes Shakespeare's tragedies supreme, and
in a less complete and subtle way gives interest to
THE DRAMA 83
those of Middleton and Webster, it has the merit
of continuous sensational interest — the interest of
incident and action — which is the mark of melo-
drama as a form of stage-craft. It has, too, a
narrower technical interest. It established for the
first time the device of the subordinate plot which
Shakespeare worked with such effect in Hamlet and
King Lear, and it is the origin of some of the most
permanent pieces of stage " business " of Eliza-
bethan tragedy — the use of dumb show (as in the
fourth act of Macbeth at his last encounter with the
witches), the device of a play within a play (as in
Hamlet), the employment of madness and feigning
madness, as in Hamlet and King Lear and many
others. It is no wonder that the play passed into
the minds not only of Kyd's fellow-authors, but of
his audiences, and that a quotation from it or a
line in parody was the surest and most successful
appeal that the stage could make for years after-
wards to the stalls.
But Kyd, though his historical position makes
him important, must take, on the general ground
of literary merit, an inferior place. IVIarlowe ranks
amongst the greatest. It is not merely that his-
torically he is the head and fount of the whole
movement, that he changed blank verse, which had
been a lumbering instrument before him, into some-
thing rich and ringing and rapid and made it the
vehicle for the greatest English poetry after him.
Historical relations apart, he is great in himself.
84 ENGLISH LITERATURE
More than any other EngUsh writer of any age,
except Byron, he symboKzes the youth of his time :
its hot-bloodedness, its lust after knowledge and
power and life, inspire all his pages. The teaching
of Machiavelli, misunderstood for their own purposes
by would-be imitators, furnished the reign of
Elizabeth with the only political ideals it possessed.
The simple brutalism of the creed, with means
justified by ends and the unbridled self-regarding
pursuit of power, attracted men for whom the
Spanish monarchy and the struggle to overthrow
it were the main factors in 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 un-
hallowed by anything but its own energy, which is
in the spirit of the time. In Tamhurlaine it is the
power of conquest, stirred by and reflecting the great
deeds of his day. In Dr Faustus it is the pride
of will and eagerness of curiosity. Both have their
basis in the voyagers. " Without the voyagers,"
says Professor Walter Raleigh, " Marlowe is in-
conceivable." His imagination in every one of his
plays is preoccupied with the lust of adventure and
the wealth and power adventure brings. Tamhur-
laine, Eastern conqueror though he is, is at heart
an Englishman of the school of Hawkins and
Drake. Indeed, the comparison must have occurred
to his own age, for an historian of the day, the
antiquary Stow, declares Drake to have been " as
THE DRAMA 85
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 unreaKty and romance were to the
EUzabethans real and actual ; things as strange and
foreign were to be heard any day amongst the
motley crowd in the Bankside outside the theatre
door. Tamburlaine's last speech when he calls
for a map and points the way to unrealized con-
quests 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 fi'om 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 Faustus
assigns to his serviceable spirits tasks that might
have been studied from the books of Hakluyt.
" 111 have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new round world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates."
Faustus is devoured by a tormenting desire to
enlarge his knowledge to the utmost bounds of
nature and art and to extend his power with his
knowledge. His is the spirit of Renaissance
scholarship heightened to a passionate excess.
The play gleams with the pride of learning and
a knowledge which learning brings, and with the
86 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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
Wittemberg, never read book ! " And after the
agonizing struggle in which Faustus's soul is torn
from him to hell, learning comes in at the quiet
close.
" Yet, for he was a scholar once admired,
For wondrous knowledge in our German Schools,
We'll give his mangled limbs due burial ;
And all the students, clothed in mourning black
Shall wait upon his heavy funeral."
Some one character is a centre of overmastering
pride and ambition in every play. In the Jew of
Malta it is the hero Barabbas. In Edward II. it
is Piers Gaveston. In Edivard II., indeed, two
elements are mixed — the element of Machiavelli
and Tamburlaine in Gaveston, and the purely tragic
element, which evolves from within itself the style
in which it shall be treated, in the King. " The
reluctant pangs of abdicating Royalty," wrote
Charles Lamb in a famous passage, "furnished
hints which Shakespeare scarcely improved in his
Richai'd II. ; and the death-scene of Marlowe's
King moves pity and terror beyond any scene,
ancient or modern, with which 1 am acquainted."
Perhaps the play gives the hint of what Marlowe
might have become had not the dagger of a groom
in a tavern cut short at thirty his burning career.
THE DRAMA 87
Even in that time of romance and daring specula-
tion he went further than his fellows. He was
said to have been tainted with atheism, to have
denied God and the Trinity ; had he lived he might
have had trouble with the Star Chamber. The
free-voyaging intellect of the age found this one
way of outlet ; but if literary evidences are to be
trusted, sixteenth and seventeenth century atheism
was a very crude business. The Atheist's Tragedy
of Tourneur (a dramatist who need not otherwise
detain us) gives some measure of its intelligence
and depth. Says the villain to the heroine,
" No ? Then invoke
Your great supposed Protector. I will do't."
to which she :
" Supposed Protector ! Are you an atheist ?— then
I know my fears and prayers are spent in vain."
Marlowe's very faults and extravagances, and
they are many, are only the obverse of his 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 parodists of
the day. And Shakespeare, though he honoured
him "on this side idolatry," did his share of ridicule.
Ancient Pistol is fed and stuffed with relics and
rags of Marlowesque affectation.
" Holla ! ye pampered jades of Asia,
Can ye not draw but twenty miles a day ? "
is a quotation taken straight from Tamburlaine.
88 ENGLISH LITERATURE
(3)
Shakespeare refuses to be crushed within the
limits of a general essay, and a detailed study of
him cannot be attempted here.
He was two months younger than Marlowe,
and he survived him by more than twenty years.
In the course of his life he raised the drama to a
point of perfection unimagined by those who had
gone before him, and made himself, not only the
greatest poet and dramatist of the age, but the
acknowledged master of written literature in any
time or tongue. Unlike most of his contemporaries
and successors, who were nearly all Londoners,
and most of them men of university education,
Shakespeare was a countryman born and had no
more than a countryman's schooling. It is the
fashion of those who would like to prove that his
works were written by someone else to assert that
we know little of his life, and that the little which
we do know makes it incredible that the son
of a butcher and wool merchant in Stratford-
on-Avon should have written these plays. It is,
on the contrary, the fact that we know more about
his career than we do about that of any of his
contemporary playwrights, that scarcely a year
passes but that we add something to our know-
ledge, and that what from the evidence of con-
temporary authors and others of the century
following, from records and documents, legal and
THE DRAMA 89
otherwise, which have been preserved, and from the
internal evidence which a laborious detective skill
has gathered from the plays themselves, we have
now a reasonably certain record of the course of his
life, and can place in their proper order the things
that he wrote. Of course, many points are still
dark to us. We know of his parentage, his
marriage, and his education, and the financial
troubles of his father, which supply an adequate
reason for his going to London to seek his fortune,
but we do not know exactly how or when he went,
and what he did when he first went there. What
is certain is that in 1586 he was already a member
of the company of players under the patronage of
the Earl of Leicester, and that he continued with
it until 1609, when he left for Stratford, by which
time it was under the patronage of the king him-
self. As an actor he does not seem to have been
particularly remarkable, and the few parts that
tradition or record has assigned to him are none
of them leading ones.
It is difficult to fix exactly the time at which his
dramatic work began. Probably it was at or about
the year 1590. At any rate, for twenty years after
that date he produced an average of two plays a
year, most of them entirely written by himself,
but some of the earlier and later probably colla-
borations with other men or adaptations from their
work. Only sixteen of them were published in his
Ufetime, and then clearly not at the dates at which
90 ENGLISH LITERATURE
they were written or produced. The others were
not put in print until seven years after his death, in
the foUo which is the main canon of his works, and
they are there arranged, not according to chrono-
logical order, but according to subject-matter.
Laborious research has, however, made the order
of them fairly certain, and the criterion by which the
order has been decided is mainly that of the quality
of the blank verse. We have seen earlier how this
metre after its introduction developed in variety
and freedom, and grew from a simple and rather
monotonous series of uniformly accented lines into
the most effective and various medium of poetic
expression that our language possesses. Now the
blank verse of Shakespeare, when the plays are set
in their proper order, is, as it were, an epitome of
the development of the metre from Surrey, who
used it first, through Marlowe to Milton, who a
quarter of a century after Shakespeare's death took
it up again for high poetic uses. If we find, then,
in the folio edition some plays in which blank verse
is used in the way of Surrey and Marlowe, that is
to say regularly following formal rules of accent
and pause, and clearly marking off one line from
another, and if we find in others that a varied
pause and stress continually run the sense on from
one line to another, and that even extra syllables
are added which the strictest rules of prosody
would not seem to admit, we are justified in assum-
ing that the more formal and imitative style came
THE DRAMA 91
first, and that the poet, when he increased his com-
mand over his medium, began to use it in his own
way, to find in it the possibihty of fresh dramatic
expressiveness, and gradually to absolve himself
from the formality of rule. Other signs of the
same kind enforce the theory of chronology which
was originally based on blank verse. Rhyme, which
is frequent in the plays which are written with
regularly built lines, is absent in the plays where
the verse is used more freely, and we are justified
in assuming that its disappearance is due to advanc-
ing mastery of an art. Finally, when we find some
plays that use continually fantastic images or puns
and plays upon words, and others which are entirely
free from these artifices, we feel justified in assum-
ing that freedom means maturity and that the
most fantastic are also the earliest works. All this
internal evidence is, of course, eked out by ex-
ternal help — contemporary references to plays,
quotations from them, records of performances,
and so forth, — and the result is the order of plays,
lighter comedies, and chronicle histories first, graver
comedies and an ascending scale of tragedies later,
and then grave and peaceful romances at the close,
which is familiar now to every reader and hardly
disputed by any.
Shakespeare, as all this implies, is superior to his
contemporaries in his command over the medium
of verse ; but that alone would not have sufficed to
give him the pre-eminence which they and his
92 ENGLISH LITERATURE
successors have united in according him. The
drama always comes very near the novel, and the
Elizabethan drama is closer than any to the methods
which novelists use. It is in fact a narrative art,
and it is in this power of telling the story that
Shakespeare excels the other playwrights of his
time. A study of the plots of either the comedies
or the tragedies will convince the reader that the
orderly faculty of marshalling events has never
been so completely shown in the work of any other
writer. Let such a play be taken as The Merchant
of Venice. It will be noted how easily the action
moves from Venice itself to Belmont, from the
fortunes of Antonio to those of Bassanio, and from
both to those of Portia on the one hand and Shy-
lock on the other. A dramatist of a stricter school
could not have got so many figures onto his can-
vas ; no novelist whose works we know could have
sketched his plot at once so fully and sparingly,
introduced so many figures and kept each one so
justly and perfectly in its place. If such a play be
compared (and the comparison would be even more
striking in the case of the tragedies) with the work
of Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors, it
will be seen that apart from the superiority of his
genius in the two domains of poetry and the de-
lineation of character, he was incomparably the best
story-teller of his time.
It is not, however, by his incomparable gift for
story-telling that the world has judged him to be
THE DRAMA 9S
the best dramatist of his own or any age. Shake-
speare is pre-eminent not because he was a teller
of tales — for indeed most of his stories had been
told beforehand, though less well than by him, —
but because of the incomparable insight which he
possessed into character, into the motives and the
springs of men's actions, and into the inevitable
processes by which events follow from the strength
or the weaknesses of the actors who take part in
them. As a successful business playwright, he had
to appeal to the audiences on whom his livelihood
depended with stories full of incident and cast in
a mould of melodrama, but he contrived to satisfy
his artistic conscience at the same time as he
satisfied the longings of his audience. Not only
did he do the melodrama better than Kyd or
Marston, but he added to it an interest M^iich was
absent in their work and that of other men.
Hamlet is a melodrama of the same school as the
Spanish Tragedy and the works of Marston and
Webster, but it has added to the interest of
incident which it shares with these the rarer and
more subtle interest of character. There is a
popular saying which compares anything which
has been robbed utterly of its significance to the
play of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark,
and the comparison gives the measure of Shake-
speare's peculiar genius. Hamlet without the
Prince of Denmark would still be the best melo-
drama of its time, but it would lack everything
94 ENGLISH LITERATURE
that has made it the greatest tragedy since the
fall of Greece, the greatest which the modern
world will ever know. The supreme and pre-
eminent interest in Hamlet is not the plot but the
character of the hero, the indecision which is born
in him as the result of a terrible train of events
and a great responsibility, his struggle with it and
his final triumph over it, with the tragedy which
follows on the immersion of a man too fine and
sensitive to bear the rude shock of the world into
the midst of events which were too much for him.
It is the same in Othello, in King Lear, and in
Macbeth, in all of which the story as a story is
better told than it has been by anyone else, but
in all of which the circumstance by which they
are remembered is the interest not of plot but of
character.
We must take up the story of the drama with
the reign of James and with the contemporaries of
Shakespeare's later period, though, of course, a treat-
ment 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 Marlowe, and particularly of Kyd,
whose Spanish Tragedy with its crude mechanism
of ghosts and madness and revenge caught the
popular taste, worked itself out in a score of
THE DRAMA 96
journeymen dramatists, mere hack writers, who
turned their hand to plays as the hacks of to-day
turn their hand to novels, and with no more
literary merit than that caught as an echo from
better men than themselves. One of the worst of
these — he is also one of the most typical — was
John Marston, a purveyor of tragic gloom and
sardonic satire, and an impostor in both, whose
tragedy Antonio and Mellida was published in the
same year as Shakespeare's Hamlet. Both plays
owed their style and plot to the same tradition —
the tradition created by Kyd's Spanish Tragedy —
in which ghostly promptings to revenge, terrible
crime, and a feigned madman waiting his oppor-
tunity are the elements of tragedy. Nothing
could be more eloquent as evidence of tlie rela-
tions of Shakespeare to his age than a comparison
of the two. The style of Antonio and Mellida
is the style of The Murder of Gonzago. There
is no subtlety nor introspection, the pale cast of
thought falls with no shadow over its scenes. And
it is typical of a score of plays of the kind we
have and, beyond doubt, of hundreds that have
perished. Shakespeare stands alone.
Beside this journey-work tragedy of revenge
and murder which had its root through Kyd and
Marlowe in Seneca and in Italian romance, there
was a journey-work comedy of low life made up of
loosely constructed strings of incidents, buffoonery,
and romance, that had its roots in a joyous and
96 ENGLISH LITERATURE
fantastic study of the common people. These
plays are happy and high-spirited and, compared
with the ordinary run of the tragedies, of better
workmanship. They deal in the familiar situations
of low comedy — the clown, the thrifty citizen and
his frivolous wife, the gallant, the bawd, the good
apprentice and the bad, portrayed vigorously and
tersely and with a careless kindly gaiety that still
charms in the reading. The best writers in this
kind were Middleton and Dekker, and the best
play to read as a sample of it Eastwai^d Ho I in
which Marston put off his affectation of sardonical
melancholy and joined with Jonson and Dekker and
perhaps Chapman to produce what is the masterpiece
of the non-Shakespearean 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 to those who reached their prime under
her successor. Quickly though insensibly the
temper of the nation suffered eclipse. The high
hopes and the ardency of the reign of Elizabeth
saddened into a profound pessimism and gloom in
that of James. This apparition of unsought
melancholy has been widely noted and generally
assumed to be inexplicable. In broad outline
its causes are clear enough. " To travel hopefully
is a better thing than to arrive." The Elizabethans
were, if ever any were, hopeful travellers. The
winds blew them to the four quarters of the world ;
THE DRAMA 97
they navigated all seas ; they sacked rich cities.
They beat off the great Armada, and harried the
very coasts of Spain. They pushed discovery to
the ends of the world and amassed great wealth.
Under James all these things were over. Peace
was made with Spain : national pride was wounded
by the solicitous anxiety of the King for a Spanish
marriage for the heir to the throne. Sir Walter
Raleigh, a romantic adventurer lingering beyond
his time, was beheaded out of hand by the un-
generous timidity of the monarch to whom had
been transferred devotion and loyalty he was
unfitted to receive. The Court which had been
a centre of flashing and gleaming brilliance de-
generated into a knot of sycophants humouring
the pragmatic and self-important folly of a king
in whom had implanted themselves all the vices
of the Scots and none of their virtues. Nothing
seemed left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.
The bright day was done and they were for the
dark. The uprising of Puritanism and the shadow
of impending religious strife darkened the temper
of the time.
The change affected all literature, and particularly
the drama, which, because it appeals to what all
men have in common, commonly reflects soonest
a change in the outlook or spirits of a people. The
onslaughts of the dramatists on the Puritans,
always implacable enemies of the theatre, became
more virulent and envenomed. What a difference
7
98 ENGLISH LITERATURE
between the sunny satire of Sir Andrew Aguecheek
and the dark animosity of The Atheists' Tragedy
with its Languebeau SnufFe ready to carry out any
villainy proposed to him ! " I speak, sir," says a
lady in the same play to a courtier who played
with her in an attempt to carry on a quick-witted,
*' conceited " love passage in the vein of Much Ado,
"I speak, sir, as the fashion now is, in earnest."
The quick-witted, light-hearted age was gone. It
is natural that tragedy reflected this melancholy
in its deepest form. Gloom deepened and had no
light to relieve it, men supped full of horrors —
there was no slackening of the tension, no 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
splendid and burning, smouldered in Webster into
a duskier and intenser heat. His fame rests on
two tragedies. The White Devil and The Duchess
of Ma/fi. Both are stories of lust and crime, full
of hate and hideous vengeances, and through each
runs a vein of bitter and ironical comment on men
and women. In them chance plays the part of
fate. " Blind accident and blundering mishap —
' such a mistake,' says one of the criminals, ' as I
have often seen in a play ' — are the steersmen of
their fortunes and the doomsmen of their deeds."
WILLIAM! SHAKESPEARE
Chaiidos portrait from the National Portrait Gallery
THE DRAMA 99
His characters are gloomy ; meditative and philo-
sophic murderers, cynical informers, sad and loving
women, and they are all themselves in every phrase
that they utter. But they are studied in earnest-
ness 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 Ltcar. His dirge in the Duchess of Malfi
Charles Lamb thought worthy to be set beside the
ditty in The Tempest which reminds Ferdinand of
his drowned father. " As that is of the water,
watery, so this is of the earth, earthy." He has
earned his place among the greatest of our
dramatists by his two plays, the theme of which
matched his sombre genius and the sombreness of
the season in which it flowered.
But the drama could not survive long the altered
times, and the voluminous plays of Beaumont and
Fletcher mark the beginning of the end. They are
the decadence of Elizabethan drama. Decadence
is a term often used loosely and therefore hard to
define, but we may say broadly that an art is
decadent when any particular one of the elements
which go to its making occurs in excess and
disturbs the balance of forces which keeps the
work a coherent and intact whole. Poetry is
decadent when the sound is allowed to outrun the
sense, or when the suggestions, say, of colour which
it contains are allowed to crowd out its deeper
100 ENGLISH LITERATURE
implications. Thus we can call such a poem as
this one, well known, of O'Shaughnessy's,
" We are the music-makers,
We are the dreamers of dreams,"
decadent because it conveys nothing but the mere
delight in an obvious rhythm of words, or such a
poem as Morris's " Two red roses across the moon,"
because a meaningless refrain, merely pleasing in
its word texture, breaks in at intervals on the
reader. The drama of Beaumont and Fletcher is
decadent in two ways. In the first place, those
variations and licences with which Shakespeare in
his later plays diversified the blank verse handed
on to him by Marlowe, they use without any
restraint or measure. *' Weak " endings and
*' double " endings — i.e. lines which end either on a
conjunction or 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 instru-
ment by letting this element of variety outrun the
sparing and skilful use which alone could justify it.
But they were decadent in other and deeper ways
than that. Sentiment in their plays usurps the
place of character. Eloquent and moving speeches
and fine figures are no longer subservient to the
presentation of character in action, but are set
down for their own sake. " What strange self-
trumpeters and tongue-bullies all the brave soldiers
of Beaumont and Fletcher are I " said Coleridge.
THE DRAMA 101
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 vivid-
ness which throws light on the working of the
human heart in Shakespeare or Webster, but in
tedious rhetoric. Resignation, not fortitude, is the
authors' forte, and they play upon it amazingly.
The sterner tones of their predecessors melt into
the long-drawn, broken accents of pathos and woe.
This delight not in action or in emotion arising
from action, but in passivity of suffering, is only
one aspect of a certain mental flaccidity in grain.
Shakespeare may be free and even coarse. Beau-
mont and Fletcher cultivate indecency. They made
their subject not their master but their plaything,
or an occasion for the convenient exercise of their
own powers of figure and rhetoric.
Of their followers, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley,
no more need be said than they carried one step
further the faults of their masters. Emotion and
tragic passion give way to wiredrawn sentiment.
Tragedy takes on the air of a masquerade. With
them romantic drama died a natural death, and the
Puritans' closing of the theatre only gave it a coup
de grace. In England it has had no second birth.
(4)
Outside the direct romantic succession there
worked another author whose lack of sympathy
with it, as well as his close connection with the age
102 ENGLISH LITERATURE
which followed, justifies his separate treatment.
Ben Jonson shows a marked contrast to Shake-
speare in his character, his accomplishments, and
his attitude to letters, while his career was more
varied than Shakespeare's own. The first " classic "
in English writing, he was a " romantic " in action.
In his adventurous youth he was by turns scholar,
soldier, bricklayer, actor. He trailed a pike with
Leicester in the Low Countries ; on his return to
England fought a duel and killed his man, only
escaping hanging by benefit of clergy ; at the end
of his life he was poet laureate. Such a career is
sufficiently diversified, and it forms a striking con-
trast to the plainness and severity of his work. But
it must not lead us to forget or underestimate his
learning and knowledge. Not Gray nor Tennyson
nor Swinburne — perhaps not even Milton — was a
better scholar. He is one of the earliest of English
writers to hold and express different theories about
literature. He consciously appointed himself a
teacher ; was a missionary of literature with a
definite creed.
But though in a general way his dramatic
principles are opposed to the romantic tendencies
of his age, he is by no means blindly classical. He
never consented to be bound by the " Unities " —
that conception of dramatic construction evolved
out of Aristotle and Horace and elaborated in the
Renaissance till, in its strictest form, it laid down
that the whole scene of a play should be in one
THE DRAMA 103
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 uncompromis-
ing ; he never bowed to the tastes of the public and
never veiled his scorn of those — Shakespeare among
them — whom he conceived to do so ; but he knew
and valued his own work, as his famous last word
to an audience who might be unsympathetic stands
to witness :
" By God, "'tis good, and if you like it you may."
Compare the temper it reveals with the titles of
the two contemporary comedies of his gentler and
greater brother, the one As You Like It, the other
HHiat You Will. Of the two attitudes towards
the public, and they might stand as typical of two
kinds of artists, neither perhaps can claim complete
sincerity. A truculent and noisy disclaimer of
their favours is not a bad tone to assume towards
an audience ; in the end, it is apt to succeed as
well as the sub-ironical compliance which is its
opposite.
Jonson's theory of comedy and the consciousness
with which he set it against the practice of his con-
104 ENGLISH LITERATURE
temporaries, and particularly of Shakespeare, receive
explicit statement in the prologue to Every Ma?i
Out of His Humour — one of his earlier plays. " I
travail with another objection, Signor, which I fear
will be enforced against the author ere I can be
delivered of it," says Mitis. " What's that, sir ? "
replies Cordatus. Mitis : " That the argument
of his comedy might have been of some other
nature, as of a duke to be in love with a countess,
and that countess to be in love with the duke's son,
and the son to love the lady's waiting-maid ; some
such cross-wooing, better than to be thus near and
familiarly allied to the times." Cordatus : " You
say well, but I would fain hear one of these autumn-
judgments define Quin sit covioedia ? 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 iniitatio vitce, speculum
consuetudinis, imago veritatis ; a thing throughout
pleasant and ridiculous and accommodated to the
correction of manners." That was what he meant
his comedy to be, and so he conceived the popular
comedy of the day, Twelfth Night and Much Ado.
Shakespeare might play with dukes and countesses,
serving- women and pages, clowns and disguises ;
he would come down more near and ally himself
familiarly with the times. So comedy was to be
medicinal, to purge contemporary London of its
follies and its sins ; and it was to be constructed
with regularity and elaboration, respectful to the
THE DRAMA 105
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 ex-
posed. This conception of " humours," based on a
physiology which was already obsolescent, takes
heavily from the realism of Jonson's methods, nor
does his use of a careful vocabulary of contemporary
colloquialism and slang save him from a certain
dryness and tediousness to modern readers. The
truth is he was less a satirist of contemporary
manners than a satirist in the abstract who followed
the models of classical writers in this style, and he
found the vices and follies of his own day hardly
adequate to the intricacy and elaborateness of the
plots which he constructed for their exposure. At
the first glance his people are contemporary types,
at the second they betray themselves for what they
are really — cock-shies set up by the new comedy of
Greece that every " classical " satirist in Rome or
France or England has had his shot at since. One
wonders whether Ben Jonson, for all his satirical
intention, had as much observation — as much of an
eye for contemporary types — as Shakespeare's rustics
and roysterers prove him to have had. It follows
that all but one or two of his plays, when they are
put on the stage to-day, are apt to come to one with
a sense of remoteness and other-worldliness which
we hardly feel with Shakespeare or Moliere. His
muse moves along the highroad of comedy which
106 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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, foohsh pragmatic fathers, a dissolute
son, a boastful soldier, a cunning slave — they all
are merely counters by which the game of comedy
used to be played. In England, since Shakespeare
took his hold on the stage, that road has been
stopped for us, that game has ceased to amuse.
Ben Jonson, then, in a certain degree failed in
his intention. Had he kept closer to contemporary
life, instead of merely grafting on to it types he had
learned from books, he might have made himself an
English Moliere — without Moliere's breadth and
clarity, but with a corresponding vigour and
strength which would have kept his work sweet.
And he might have founded a school of comedy
that would have got its roots deeper into our
national life than the trivial and licentious Restora-
tion 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 " — the forerunner of the age which gave
us Dryden and Swift and Pope. Perhaps that
is enough in his praise.
CHAPTER IV
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
(1)
With the seventeenth century the great school of
imaginative writers that made glorious the last
years of Elizabeth's reign had passed away.
Spenser was dead before 1600, Sir Philip Sidney a
dozen years earlier ; and though Shakespeare and
Drayton and many other men whom we class
roughly as Elizabethan lived on to work under
James, their temper and their ideals belong to
the earlier day. The seventeenth century, not in
England only but in Europe, brought a new way
of thinking with it, and gave a new direction to
human interest and to human affairs. It is not
perhaps easy to define, nor is it visible in the greater
writers of the time. Milton, for instance, and even
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 it fullest ex-
pression. Genius is a law to itself; it moves in
another dimension ; it is out of time. To define
107
108 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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 from the time which immediately followed it ?
Putting it very broadly, one may say that litera-
ture in the seventeenth century becomes for the
first time essentially modern in spirit. We begin
calling literature " modern " at the Renaissance
because the discovery of the New World, and the
widening of human experience and knowledge
which that and the revival of classical learning im-
plied, mark a definite break from a way of thought
which had been continuous since the break-up of
the Roman Empire. The men of the Renaissance
felt themselves to be modern. They started afresh,
owing nothing to their immediate forebears except
Chaucer, and even when they talked of him they did
so in very much the same accent as we do to-day.
He was mediaeval and remote ; the interest which he
possessed was a purely literary interest ; his readers
did not meet him easily on the same plane of
thought, or forget the lapse of time which separated
him from them. And in another way, too, the
Renaissance began modern writing. Inflections
had been dropped. The revival of the classics had
enriched our vocabulary, and the English language,
after a gradual impoverishment which followed the
obsolescence one after another of the local dialects,
attained a fairly fixed form. There is more differ-
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 109
ence between the language of the English writings
of Sir Thomas More and that of the prose of
Chaucer than there is between that of ^lore and of
Ruskin. But it is not till the seventeenth century
that the modern spirit, in the fullest sense of the
word, comes into being. Defined, it means a spirit
of observation, of preoccupation with detail, of
stress laid on matter of fact, of analysis of feelings
and mental processes, of free argument upon insti-
tutions and government. In relation to knowledge,
it is the spirit of science ; and the study of science,
which is the essential intellectual fact in modern
history, dates from just this time, from Bacon and
Newton and Descartes. In relation to literature,
it is the spirit of criticism ; and criticism in England
is the creation of the seventeenth century. The
positive temper, the attitude of realism, is every-
where in the ascendant. The sixteenth century
made voyages of discovery ; the seventeenth sat
down to take stock of the riches it had gathered.
For the first time in English literature writing be-
comes a vehicle for storing and conveying facts.
It would be easy to give instances : one is
sufficient here. Biography, which is one of the
most characteristic kinds of English writing, was
unknown to the moderns as late as the sixteenth
century. Partly the awakened interest in the
careers of the ancient statesmen and soldiers which
the study of Plutarch had excited, and partly the
general interest in and craving for facts, set men
110 ENGLISH LITERATURE
writing down the lives of their fellows. The earliest
English biographies date from this time. In the
beginning they were concerned, like the Lives of
Plutarch, with men of action ; and when Sir Fulke
Greville wrote a brief account of his friend Sir
Philip Sidney, it was the courtier and the soldier,
and not the author, that he designed to celebrate.
But soon men of letters came within their scope ;
and though the interest in the lives of authors came
too late to give us the contemporary life of Shake-
speare we so much long for, it was early enough
to make possible those masterpieces of condensed
biography in which Isaak Walton celebrates
Herbert and Donne. Fuller and Aubrey, to name
only two authors, spent lives of laborious industry
in hunting down and chronicling the smallest
facts about the worthies of their day and the time
immediately before them. Autobiography followed
where biography led. Lord Herbert of Cherbury
and Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, as well as less
reputable persons, followed the new mode. By
the time of the Restoration Pepys and Evelyn
were keeping their diaries, and Fox his journal —
Evelyn perhaps consciously for the sake of pos-
terity, Pepys and Fox for themselves. Just as
in poetry the lyric, that is the expression of personal
feeling, became more widely practised, more subtle
and more sincere, in prose the letter, the journal,
and the autobiography formed themselves to meet
the new and growing demand for analysis of the
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 111
feelings and the intimate thoughts and sensations of
real men and women. A minor form of literature
which had a brief but popular vogue ministered
less directly to the same need. The " Character,"
a brief descriptive essay on a contemporary type —
a tobacco-seller, an old college butler, or the like —
was popular because in its own way it matched the
newly awakened taste for realism and fact. The
drama, which in the hands of Ben Jonson had
attacked folly and wickedness proper to no place
or time, descended to the drawing-rooms of the
day, and Congreve occupied himself with the por-
trayal of the social frauds and foolishnesses per-
petrated by actual living men and women of
fashion in contemporary London. Satire ceased
to be a mere expression of a vague discontent, and
became a weapon against opposing men and
policies. Readers of the new generation were
nothing if not critical. They were for testing
directly institutions, whether they were literary,
social, or political. They wanted facts, and they
wanted to take a side.
In the distinct and separate realm of poetry a
revolution no less remarkable took place. Spenser
had been both a poet and a Puritan : he had de-
signed to show by his great poem the training and
fashioning of a Puritan English gentleman. But
the alliance between poetry and Puritanism which
he typified failed to survive his death. The essen-
tially pagan spirit of the Renaissance which caused
112 ENGLISH LITERATURE
him no doubts nor difficulties proved too strong
for his readers and his followers, and the eman-
cipated artistic enthusiasm in which it worked
alienated from secular poetry men with deep and
strong religious convictions. Religion and morality
and poetry, which in Sidney and Spenser had gone
hand in hand, separated from each other. Poems
like Venus and Adonis or like Shakespeare's sonnets
could hardly be squared with the sterner temper
which persecution began to breed. Even within
orthodox Anglicanism poetry and religion began
to be deemed no fit company for each other.
When George Herbert left off courtier and took
orders he burnt his earlier love poetry, and only
the persuasion of his friends prevented Donne
from following the same course. Pure poetry
became more and more an exotic. All Milton's
belongs to his earlier youth ; his middle age was
occupied with controversy and propaganda in
prose ; when he returned to poetry in blindness
and old age it was "to justify the ways of God to
man" — to use poetry, that is, for a spiritual and
moral rather than an artistic end.
Though the age was curious and inquiring,
though poetry and prose tended more and more
to be enlisted in the service of non-artistic 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 "prosaic"
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 113
age. Enthusiasm burned fierce and clear, display-
ing itself in the passionate polemic of Milton, in
the fanaticism of Bunyan and Fox, hardly more
than in the gentle, steadfast search for knowledge
of Burton and the wide and vigilant curiosity of
Bacon. Its eager experimentalism tried the im-
possible ; wrote poems and then gave them a
weight of meaning they could not carry, as when
Fletcher in The Purple Island designed to allegorize
all that the physiology of his day knew of the
human body, or Donne sought to convey abstruse
scientific fact in a lyric. It gave men a passion for
pure learning, set Jonson to turn himself from a
bricklayer into the best equipped scholar of his
day, and Fuller and Camden grubbing among
English records and gathering for the first time
materials of scientific value for English history.
Enthusiasm gave us poetry that was at once full
of learning and of imagination, poetry that was
harsh and brutal in its roughness and at the same
time impassioned. And it set up a school of prose
that combined colloquial readiness and fluency,
pregnancy and high sentiment with a cumbrous
pedantry of learning which was the fruit of its own
excess.
The form in which enthusiasm manifested itself
most fiercely was, as we have seen, not favourable
to literature. Puritanism drove itself like a wedge
into the art of the time, broadening as it went.
Had there been no more in it than the moral
8
114 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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 although life
as a preparation for eternity must be ordered and
strenuous and devout, and care for the hereafter was
not incompatible with a frank and full enjoyment of
life as it is lived, Puritanism as it developed in the
middle classes became a sterner and darker creed.
The doctrine of original sin, face to face with the
fact that art, like other pleasures, was naturally
and readily entered into and enjoyed, forced them
to the plain conclusion that art was an evil thing.
As early as Shakespeare's youth they had been
strong enough to keep the theatres outside London
walls ; at the time of the Civil War they closed
them altogether, and the feud which had lasted for
over a generation between them and the dramatists
ended in the destruction of the literary drama. In
the brief years of their ascendancy they produced
no literature, for Milton is much too large to be
tied down to their negative creed, and, indeed, in
many of his qualities, his love of music and his
sensuousness in description, for instance, he is
antagonistic to the temper of his day. With the
Restoration their earnest and strenuous spirit fled
to America. It is noteworthy that it had no
literary manifestation there till two centuries after
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 116
the time of its passage. Hawthorne's novels are
the fruit — the one ripe fruit in art — of the Puritan
imagination.
(2)
If the reader adopts the seventeenth-century
habit himself and takes stock of v^hat the Eliza-
bethans accomplished in poetry, he will recognize
speedily that their work reached various stages of
completeness. They perfected the poetic drama
and its instrument, blank verse; they perfected,
though not in the severer Italian form, the sonnet ;
they wrote with extraordinary delicacy and finish
short lyrics in which a simple and freer manner
drawn from the classics took the place of the
mediaeval intricacies of the ballad and the rondeau.
And in the forms which they failed to bring
to perfection they did beautiful and noble work.
The splendour of The Faerie Queen is in separate
passages ; as a whole it is over-tortuous and slow ;
its affectations, its sensuousness, the mere difficulty
of reading it, makes us feel it a collection of great
passages, strung it is true on a large conception,
rather than a great work. The Elizabethans, that
is, had not discovered the secret of the long poem ;
the abstract idea of the " heroic " epic which was
in all their minds had to wait for embodiment till
Paradise Lost. In a way their treatment of the
pastoral or eclogue form was imperfect too. They
used it well, but not so well as their models, Vergil
116 ENGLISH LITERATURE
and Theocritus ; they had not quite mastered the
convention on which it is built.
The seventeenth century, taking stock in some
such fashion of its artistic possessions, found some
things it were vain to try to do. It could add
nothing to the accomplishment of the English
sonnet, so it hardly tried : with the exception of
a few sonnets in the Italian form of Milton, the
century can show us nothing in this mode of verse.
The literary drama was brought to perfection in
the early years of it by the surviving Elizabethans;
later decades could add nothing to it but licence,
and as we saw, the licences they added hastened
its destruction. But in other forms the poets of
the new time experimented eagerly, and in the
stress of experiment, poetry which under Elizabeth
had been integral and coherent split into different
schools. As the period of the Renaissance was
also that of the Reformation, it was only natural a
determined effort should sooner or later be made
to use poetry for religious purposes. The earliest
English hymn-writing, our first devotional verse
in the vernacular, belongs to this time, and a
Catholic and religious school of lyricism grew
and flourished beside the pagan neo-classical
writers. From the tumult of experiment three
schools disengage themselves, the school of
Spenser, the school of Jonson, and the school of
Donne.
At the outset of the century Spenser's influence
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 117
was triumphant and predominant ; his was the
main stream with which the other poetic influences
of the time merely mingled. His popularity is
referable to qualities other than those which be-
longed peculiarly to his talent as a poet. Puritans
loved his religious ardour, and in those Puritan
households where the stricter conception of the
diabolical nature of all poetry had not penetrated,
his works were read — standing on a shelf, may be,
between the new translation of the Bible and
Sylvester's translation of the French poet Du
Bartas' work on the creation, which had a large
popularity at that time as " family reading." Pro-
bably the Puritans were as blind to the sensuous-
ness of Spenser's language and imagery as they
were (and are) to the same qualities in the Bible
itself. The Faerie Queen would easily achieve
innocuousness amongst those who can find nothing
but an allegory of the Church in the " Song of
Songs." His followers made their allegory a great
deal plainer than he had done his. In his poem
called The Purple Island, Phineas Fletcher, a
Puritan imitator of Spenser in Cambridge, essayed
to set forth the struggle of the soul at grip with
evil, a battle in which the body — the " Purple
Island " — is the field. To a modern reader it is a
desolating and at times a mildly amusing book, in
which everything from the liver to the seven deadly
sins is personified ; in which after four books of
allegorized contemporary anatomy and physiology,
118 ENGLISH LITERATURE
the will (Voletta) engages in a struggle with Satan
and conquers by the help of Christ and King
James ! The allegory is clever — too clever — and
the author can paint a pleasant picture, but on the
whole he was happier in his pastoral work. His
brother Giles made a better attempt at the Spen-
serian manner. His long poem, Christ's Victory
and Death, shows for all its carefully Protestant
tone high qualities of mysticism ; across it Spenser
and Milton join hands.
It was, however, in pastoral poetry that Spenser's
influence found its pleasantest outlet. One might
hesitate to advise a reader to embark on either of
the Fletchers. There is no reason why any modern
should not read and enjoy Browne or Wither, in
whose softly flo^ving verse the sweetness and con-
tentment of the countryside, that " merry England "
which was the background of all sectarian and
intellectual strife and labour, finds as in a placid
stream a calm reflection and picture of itself.
The seventeenth century gave birth to many things
that only came to maturity in the nineteenth ; if
you care for that kind of literary study which
searches out origins and digs for hints and models
of 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, as is now
thought, that he was the author of the epitaph on
the Countess of Pembroke ;
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 119
" Underneath this sable hearse
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother.
Death, ere thou hast slain another
Fair and learned and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee " —
then he achieved the miracle of a quintessential
statement of the spirit of the English Renaissance.
For the breath of it stirs in these slow quiet
moving lines, and its few and simple words im-
plicate the soul of a period.
By the end of the first quarter of the century
the influence of Spenser and the school which
worked under it had died out. Its place was
taken by the twin schools of Jonson and Donne.
Jonson's poetic method is something like his
dramatic ; he formed himself as exactly as possible
on classical models. Horace had written satires
and elegies, and epistles and complimentary verses,
and Jonson quite consciously and deliberately
followed where Horace led. He wrote elegies on
the great, letters and courtly compliments and
love-lyrics to his friends, satires with an air of
general censure. But though he was classical, his
style was never latinized. In all of them he strove
to pour into an ancient form language that was as
intense and vigorous and as purely English as the
earliest trumpeters of the Renaissance in England
could have wished. The result is not entirely
successful. He seldom fails to reproduce classic
dignity and good sense ; on the other hand, he
120 ENGLISH LITERATURE
seldom succeeds in achieving classic grace and
ease. Occasionally, as in his best-known lyric
" Drink to me only with thine eyes," he is perfect
and achieves an air of spontaneity little short of
marvellous, when we know that his images and
even his words in the song are all plagiarized
from other men. His expression is always clear
and vigorous and his sense good and noble. The
native earnestness and sincerity of the man shines
through as it does in his dramas and his prose. In
an age of fantastic and meaningless eulogy — eulogy
so amazing in its unexpectedness and abstruseness
that the wonder is not so much that it should have
been written as that it could have been thought of
— Jonson maintains his personal dignity and his
good sense. You feel his compliments are such as
the best should be, not necessarily understood and
properly valued by the public, but of a discrim-
inating sort that by their very comprehending
sincerity would be most warmly appreciated by
the people to whom they were addressed. His
verses to Shakespeare, and his prose commentaries
on him too, are models of what self-respecting
admiration should be, generous in its praise of
excellence, candid in its statement of defects. They
are the kind of compliments that Shakespeare him-
self, if he had grace enough, must have loved to
receive.
Very different from his direct and dignified
manner is the closely packed style of Donne, who,
BENJAMIN JONSON.
From the portrait after G. Honthorst in the National Portrait Gallery.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 121
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's, is more difficult to understand. The
obscurity of Donne and Browning proceed from
such similar causes that they are worth examining
together. In both, as in the obscure passages in
Shakespeare's later plays, obscurity arises not
because the poet says too little but because he
attempts to say too much. He huddles a new
thought on the one before it, before the first has
had time to express itself ; he sees things or analyses
emotions so swiftly and subtly himself that he
forgets the slower comprehensions of his readers ;
he is for analysing things far deeper than the
ordinary mind commonly can. His wide and
curious knowledge finds terms and likenesses to
express his meaning unknown to us ; he sees things
from a dozen points of view at once and tumbles a
hint of each separate vision in a heap out on to the
page; his restless intellect finds new and subtler
shades of emotion and thought invisible to other
pairs of eyes, and cannot, because speech is modelled
on the average of our intelligences, find words to
express them ; he is always trembling on the brink
of the inarticulate. All this applies to both Donne
and Browning, and the comparison could be pushed
further still. Both draw the knowledge which is
the main cause of their obscurity from the same
source, the bypaths of medisevalism. Browning's
122 ENGLISH LITERATURE
Sordello is obscure because he knows too much
about medieeval Italian history ; Donne's Anniver-
sary because he is too deeply read in mediaeval
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.
Seventeenth-century love poetry was idyllic and
idealist ; Donne's is passionate and realistic to the
point of cynicism. To read him after reading
Browne and Jonson is to have the same shock as
reading Browning after Tennyson. Both poets are
salutary in the strong and biting antidote they
bring to sentimentalism in thought and melodious
facility in writing. They are the corrective of lazy
thinking and lazy composition.
Elizabethan love poetry was written on a con-
vention which, though it was used with manliness
and entire sincerity by Sidney, did not escape the
fate of its kind. Dante's love for Beatrice,
Petrarch's for Laura, the gallant and passionate
adoration of Sidney for his Stella, became the
models for a dismal succession of imaginary woes.
They were all figments of the mind, perhaps hardly
that ; they all use the same terms and write in
fixed strains, epicurean and sensuous like Ronsard,
ideal and intellectualized like Dante, sentimental
and adoring like Petrarch. Into this enclosed
garden of sentiment and illusion Donne burst
passionately and rudely, pulling up the gay-
JOHN DONNE.
From a painting in the Dycc G}' Foster collection.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ]23
coloured tangled weeds that choked thoughts,
planting, as one of his followers said, the seeds of
fresh invention. Where his forerunners had been
idealist, epicurean, or adoring, he was brutal,
cynical, and immitigably realist. He could begin
a poem, "For God's sake hold your tongue and
let me love " ; he could be as resolutely free from
illusion as Shakespeare when he addressed his
Dark Lady —
" Hope not for mind in women ; at their best,
Sweetness and wit they're but mummy possest."
And where the sonneteers pretended to a sincerity
which was none of theirs, he was, like Browning,
unaffectedly a dramatic lyrist. " I did best," he
said, "when I had least truth for my subject."
His love poetry was written in his turbulent and
brilliant youth, and the poetic talent which made
it turned in his later years to express itself in
hymns and religious poetry. But there is no
essential distinction between the two halves of his
work. It is all of a piece. The same swift and
subtle spirit which analyses experiences of passion,
analyses, in his later poetry, those of religion.
His devotional poems, though they probe and
question, are none the less never sermons, but
rather confessions or prayers. His intense indivi-
duality, eager always, as his best critic has said,^
^ Prof. H. J. C, Grierson in the Cambridge History of English
Literature. His criticism there and his recent edition of Donne's
poetical works have added immeasurably to our knowledge of
the poet.
124 ENGLISH LITERATURE
" to find a North- West passage of his own," pressed
its curious and sceptical questioning into every
corner of love and life and religion, explored un-
suspected depths, exploited new discovered para-
doxes, and turned its discoveries always into
poetry of the closely-packed artificial style which
was all its own. Simplicity indeed would have
been for him an affectation ; his elaborateness is
not like that of his followers, constructed painfully
in a vicious desire to compass the unexpected, but
the natural overflow of an amazingly fertile and
ingenious mind. The curiosity, the desire for
truth, the search after minute and detailed know-
ledge 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,
Donne's by producing an era of extravagance and
absurdity which made a literary revolution impera-
tive. The school of Donne — the " fantastics " as
they have been called (Dr Johnson called them the
metaphysical poets) — produced in Herbert and
Vaughan, our two noblest writers of religious verse,
the flower of a mode of writing which ended in the
somewhat exotic religiousness of Crashaw. In the
hands of Cowley the use of far-sought and intricate
imagery became a trick, and the fantastic school,
the soul of sincerity gone out of it, died when he
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 125
died. To the followers of Jonson we owe that
delightful and simple lyric poetry which fills our
anthologies, their courtly lyricism receiving a new
impulse in the intenser loyalty of troubled times.
The most finished of them is perhaps Carew ; the
best, because of the freshness and variety of his
subject-matter and his easy grace, Herrick. At
the end of them came Waller and gave to the five-
accented rhymed verse (the heroic couplet) that
trick of regularity and balance which gave us the
classical school.
(3)
The prose literature of the seventeenth century
is extraordinarily rich and varied, and a study of it
would cover a wide field of human knowledge.
The new and unsuspected harmonies discovered by
the Elizabethans were applied indeed to all the
tasks of which prose is capable, from telling stories
to setting down the results of the speculation which
was revolutionizing science and philosophy. For
the first time the vernacular and not Latin became
the language of scientific research, and though
Bacon in his Novum Organum adhered to the older
mode, its disappearance was rapid. English was
proving itself too flexible an instrument for convey-
ing 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-
126 ENGLISH LITERATURE
mouthed oratory, which blended in its combination
of vigour and cadence the euphuistic and colloquial
styles of the Elizabethans, is in itself a glory of
English literature, belong by their matter too ex-
clusively to the province of Church history to be
dealt with here. The men of science and philosophy,
Newton, Hobbes, and Locke, are in a like way
outside our province. For the purpose of the
literary student the achievement of the seventeenth
century can be judged in four separate men or
books — in the Bible, in Francis Bacon, and in
Burton and Browne.
In a way the Bible, like the preachers, lies outside
the domain of literary study in the narrow sense ;
but its sheer literary magnitude, the abiding
significance of it in our subsequent history, social,
political, and artistic as well as religious, compel us
to turn aside to examine the causes that have pro-
duced such great results. The Authorized Version
is not, of course, a purely seventeenth-century
work. Though the scholars ^ who wrote and com-
piled it had before them all the previous vernacular
texts and chose the best readings where they
found them or devised new ones in accordance
with the original, the basis is undoubtedly the
Tudor version of Tindall. It has, none the less,
the qualities of the time of its publication. It
could hardly have been done earlier ; had it been
' There is a graphic Uttle pen-picture of their method in
Selden's Table Talk.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 127
so, it would not have been done half so well. In
it English has lost both its roughness and its
affectation and retained its strength ; the Bible is
the supreme example of early English prose style.
The reason is not far to seek. Of all recipes for
good or noble writing that which enjoins the writer
to be careful about the matter and never mind
the manner, is the most sure. The translators
had the handling of matter of the gravest dignity
and momentousness, and their sense of reverence
kept them right in their treatment of it. They
cared passionately for the truth ; they were virtually
anonymous and not ambitious of originality or
literary fame ; they had no desire to stand between
the book and its readers. It followed that they
cultivated that naked plainness and spareness
which makes their work supreme. The Authorized
Version is the last and greatest of those English
translations which were the fruit of Renaissance
scholarship and pioneering. It is the first and
greatest piece of English prose.
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 ex-
perience. In its own time it helped to weld
England, for where before one Bible was read at
home and another in churches, all now read the
new version. Its supremacy was instantaneous
and unchallenged, and it quickly coloured speech
and literature ; it could produce a Bunyan in the
128 ENGLISH LITERATURE
century of its birth. To it belongs the native
dignity and eloquence of peasant speech. It runs
like a golden thread through all our writing sub-
sequent 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 per-
suasion, of planting an unfamiliar argument in
the minds of hearers of whose favour they are
doubtful, but whose sympathy they must gain,
are usually of purpose diffuse. They cultivate the
gift, possessed by Edmund Burke above all other
English authors, of putting the same thing freshly
and in different forms a great many times in suc-
cession. They value copiousness and fertility of
illustration. Nothing could be more unlike this
normal legal manner than the style of Bacon.
*' No man," says Ben Jonson, speaking in one of
those vivid little notes of his, of his oratorical
method, " no man ever coughed or turned aside
from him without loss." He is a master of the
aphoristic style. He compresses his wisdom into
the quintessential form of an epigram ; so complete
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 129
and concentrated is his form of statement, so
shortly is everything put, that the mere transition
from one thought to another gives his prose a
curious air of disjointedness as if he flitted 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 discrimi-
nating phraseology, and in the minor arts of
composition — in the use of quotations, for instance
— it can be extraordinarily felicitous. But it lacks
spaciousness and ease and rhythm ; it makes too
inexorable a demand on the attention, and the
harassed reader soon finds himself longing for
those breathing spaces which consideration or
perhaps looseness of thought has implanted in
the prose of other writers.
His Essays, the work by which he is best known,
were in their origin merely jottings gradually
cohered and enlarged into the series we know.
In them he had the advantage of a subject which
he had studied closely through life. He counted
himself a master in the art of managing men,
and " Human Nature and how to manage it "
would be a good title for his book. Men are
studied in the spirit of Machiavelli, whose philo-
sophy 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, in-
9
130 ENGLISH LITERATURE
structing them how to acquire power and how to
keep it, deliberating how far they may go safely
in the direction of self-interest, and to what
degree the principle of self-interest must be sub-
ordinated to the wider interests of the people
who are ruled. Democracy, which in England
was to make its splendid beginnings in the seven-
teenth century, finds little to foretell it in the
works of Bacon. Though he never advocates
cruelty or oppression and is wise enough to see
that no statesman can entirely set aside moral
considerations, his ethical tone is hardly elevating ;
the moral obliquity of his public life is to a certain
extent explained, in all but its grosser elements,
by his published writings. The essays, of course,
contain much more than this ; the spirit of curious
and restless enquiry which animated Bacon finds
expression in those on " Health," or " Gardens,"
and " Plantations," and others of the kind ; and
a deeper vein of earnestness runs through some
of them — those for instance on " Friendship," or
"Truth," and on " Death."
The Essays sum up in a condensed form the
intellectual interests which find larger treatment
in his other works. His Henry VII., the first
piece of scientific history in the English language
(indeed in the modern world) is concerned with a
king whose practice was the outcome of a political
theory identical with Bacon's own. The Advaiice-
vient of Learning is a brilliant popular exposition
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 131
of the cause of scientific enquiry and of the in-
ductive or investigatory method of research. The
New Atlantis is the picture of an ideal community
whose common purpose is scientific investigation.
Bacon's name is not upon the roll of those who
have enlarged by brilliant conjectures or discoveries
the store of human knowledge ; his own investiga-
tions 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 worker
in research 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's plays,
and in its wilder moments with the composition of
all that is of supreme worth in Elizabethan litera-
ture. It is not necessary to take these delusions
seriously. The ignorance of mediasvalism was in
the habit of crediting Vergil with the construction
of the Roman aqueducts and temples whose ruins
are scattered over Europe. The modern Baconians
reach much the same intellectual level.
A similar enthusiasm for knowledge and at any
rate a pretence to science belong to the author of
the Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton. His
one book is surely the most amazing in English
132 ENGLISH LITERATURE
prose. His 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 illus-
trations from a range of authors so much wider
than the compass of the reading of even the most
learned since, that he has until lately been
commonly credited with the invention of a large
part of his quotations. Ancients and moderns,
poets and prose writers, schoolmen and dramatists
are all drawn upon for the copious store of his
examples; they are always cited with an air of
quietly humorous shrewdness in the comments
and enclosed in a prose that is straightforward,
simple and vigorous, and can on occasion command
both rhythm and beauty of phrase. It is a mistake
to regard Burton from the point of view (taught us
first by Charles Lamb) of tolerant or loving delight
in quaintness for quaintness' sake. His book is
anything but scientific in form, but it is far from
being the work of a recluse or a fool. Behind his
lack of system, he takes a broad and psychologically
an essentially just view of human ills, and modern
medicine has gone far in its admiration of what is
at bottom a most comprehensive and subtle treatise
in diagnosis.
A writer of a very different quality is Sir Thomas
Browne. Of all the men of his time, he is the only
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 133
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 styHst, the forerunner of Charles Lamb,
of Stevenson (whose J'^irginibus Piterisque is
modelled on his method of treatment) and of the
stylistic school of our own day. His eloquence is
too studied to rise to the greatest heights, and his
speculation, though curious and discursive, never
really results in deep thinking. He is content to
embroider his pattern out of the stray fancies of an
imaginative nature. His best known work, the
Religio Medici, is a random confession of belief and
thoughts, full of the inconsequent speculations of
a man with some knowledge of science but not
deeply or earnestly interested about it, content
rather to follow the wayward imaginations of a
mind naturally gifted with a certain poetic quality,
than to engage in serious intellectual exercise.
Such work could never maintain its hold on taste
if it were not carefully finished and constructed
with elaborate care. Browne, if he was not a great
writer, was a literary artist of a high quality. He
exploits a quaint and lovable egoism with extra-
ordinary skill ; and though his delicately figured
and latinized sentences commonly sound platitudin-
ous and trivial when they are translated into rough
Saxon prose, as they stand they are rich and melo-
dious enough. Bunyan belongs rather to the
special history of the novel, and it will be con-
134 ENGLISH LITERATURE
venient to postpone dealing with him till we
reach it.
(4)
In a century of surpassing richness in prose and
poetry, one author stands by himself. John Milton
refuses to be classed with any of the schools.
Though Dryden tells us Milton confessed to him
that Spenser was his " original," he has no connec-
tion— other than a general similarity of purpose,
moral and religious — with Spenser's followers. To
the " fantastics " he paid in his youth the doubtful
compliment of one or two half- contemptuous
imitations and never touched them again. He had
no turn for the love lyrics or the courtliness of the
school of Jonson. In everything he did he was
himself and his own master ; he devised his own
subjects and wrote his own style. He stands alone
and must be judged alone.
No author, however, can ever escape from the
influences of his time, and, just as much as his
lesser contemporaries, Milton has his place in
literary history and derives from the great original
impulse which set in motion all the enterprises of
the century. He is the last and greatest figure in
the English Renaissance. The new passion for art
and letters which in its earnest fumbling beginnings
gave us the prose of Cheke and Ascham and the
poetry of Surrey and Sackville, comes to a full and
splendid and perfect end in his work. In it the
Renaissance and the Reformation, imperfectly fused
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 135
by Sidney and Spenser, blend in their just propor-
tions. The transplantation into English of classical
forms, which had been the aim of Sidney and the
endeavour of Jonson, he finally accomplished ; in
his work the dream of all the poets of the Renais-
sance— 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 Faerie Queen and failed
splendidly. Where he failed, Milton succeeded,
though his poem is not on the origins of England
but on the ultimate subject of the origins of man-
kind. We know from his notebooks that he turned
over in his mind a national subject and that the
Arthurian legend for a while appealed to him.
But to Milton's earnest temper nothing that was
not true was a fit subject for poetry. It was
inevitable he should lay it aside. The Arthurian
story he knew to be a myth, and a myth was a lie ;
the story of the Fall, on the other hand, he accepted
in common with his time for literal fact. It is to
be noted as characteristic of his confident and
assured egotism that he accepted no less sincerely
and literally the imaginative structure which he
himself reared on it. However that may be, the
solid fact about him is that in this " adventurous
song " with its pursuit of
" Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,"
136 ENGLISH LITERATURE
he succeeded in his attempt, that alone among
the moderns he contrived to write an epic which
stands on the same eminence as the ancient
writings of the kind, and that he found time, in a
Hfe 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 im-
possible 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 Prof. Walter
Raleigh.^ All that can be done here is to call
attention to some of his most striking qualities.
Foremost, of course, is the temper of the man.
From the beginning he was sure of himself and
sure of his mission ; he had his purpose plain and
clear. There is no mental development, hardly,
visible in his work, only training, undertaken
anxiously and prayerfully and with a clearly con-
ceived end. He designed to write a masterpiece
and he would not start till he was ready. The
first twenty years of his life were spent in assiduous
reading ; for twenty more he was immersed in the
dust and toil of political conflict, using his pen
1 "Milton" (E.M.L.), and "Milton" (Edward Arnold).
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 137
and his extraordinary equipment of learning and
eloquence to defend the cause of liberty, civil and
religious, and to attack its enemies ; not till he
was past middle age had he reached the leisure and
the preparedness necessary to accomplish his self-
imposed work. But all the time, as we know, he
had it in his mind, and he used every form of self-
discipline, physical and intellectual, to fit himself for
its accomplishment. " Long it was not," he could
write, " when I was confirmed in this opinion, that
he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write
well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to
be a true poem ; that is a composition and pattern
of the best and honourablest things ; not presuming
to sing high praises of heroic men, or famous cities,
unless he have in himself the experience and
practice of all that which is praiseworthy." In
Lycidas, written in his Cambridge days, he
apologizes to his readers for plucking the fruit of
his poetry before it is ripe. In passage after
passage in his prose works he begs for his reader's
patience for a little while longer till his preparation
be complete. When the time came at last for
beginning he was in no doubt ; in his very opening
lines he intends, he says, to soar no "middle
flight." This self-assured unrelenting certainty of
his, carried into his prose essays in argument, pro-
duces sometimes strange results. One is peculiarly
interesting to us now in view of current contro-
versy. He was unhappily married, and because he
138 ENGLISH LITERATURE
was unhappy the law of divorce must be changed.
A modern — George EHot for instance — would have
pleaded the artistic temperament and been content
to remain outside the law. Milton always argued
from himself to mankind at large. His wife would
not talk to him, and so, an incorrigible " muteness "
and a desertion such as hers was to be a general
ground of divorce.
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 the
harmony of sound or sense ; his poems have all
their regular movement, from quiet beginning
through a rising and breaking wave of passion
and splendour to quiet close. His art is nowhere
better seen than in his endings.
Is it Lycidas ? After the thunder of approaching
vengeance on the hireling shepherds of the Church,
comes sunset and quiet :
" And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the western bay ;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue :
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.""
Is it Paradise Lost ? After the agonies of 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
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 139
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide ;
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."
Is it, finally, Samson Agonistes ?
" His servants he with new acquist,
Of true experience from this great event,
With peace and consolation hath dismist,
And calm of mind, all passion spent."
" Calm of mind, all passion spent," it is the
essence of Milton's art.
Yet Milton would not have assented to any
criticism which sought to regard him merely as an
artist. His prose works are avowedly polemical
in character; so in a certain sense is Samson
Agonistes ; Pai^adise Lost starts with an avowed
dogmatic aim : openly intending to
" Assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to man."
It intends, that is, to deal with the dark and
difficult problem of human destiny ; to explain
man's disobedience and the fruit of it, to make
clear heaven's purposes and man's failure to come
up to them, and to give us such a conception of
things divine and human as we can sincerely
accept, trust, and believe in. To what extent does
Milton succeed in this aim ? A modern reader
finds the question difficult to answer without
offence. To the vaguer and less certain way of
thinking which the nineteenth century taught us,
his scheme of the universe appears inconceivably
140 ENGLISH LITERATURE
artificial, and it is difficult to understand how he
could have believed in the reality of something so
obviously the result of his own ingenuity as his
" geography " (if an extension of the word be per-
mitted) of heaven and hell. In some ways his life
incapacitated him from approaching his subject
from our modern point of view. A scholar by up-
bringing and profession, and solitary in his old age,
his business in his prime fixed his attention on great
affairs, and if he was not an actor in revolution he
was at least a servant and confidant of the actors.
He had watched with eager sympathy arduous
political debate, of a kind more momentous than
anything of the kind could be to us now, and he
knew how surely, when something bigger and more
instant than the mere clash of party is afoot, what
is said will mirror the mind of the speaker. It is
this vivid experience shining through it which gives
reality and force to the second book of his great
poem, when Satan and his followers hold their
council in Hell. Without it, this part of the poem
could not possibly have been so magnificent and
awe-inspiring ; but without it the poem as a whole
might have been more easily accepted by posterity
in its contents, as well as in its style. The truth is,
Milton made the Fall of the Angels a political
transaction, and though the exigencies of his subject
forced him for once to be on the side of absolute
monarchy, his latent enthusiasm for revolt made
him make the rebellious element — Satan and his
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 141
crew — more interesting, and so disturbed the balance
of his poem. " Satan may have been wrong, but
on Milton's theory he had an arguable case at least.
There was something arbitrary jn the promotion ;
there were Uttle symptoms of a job ; in Paradise
Lost it is always clear that the devils are the
weaker, but it is never clear that the angels are the
better. Milton's sympathy and his imagination
slip back to the Puritan rebels whom he loved, and
desert the courtly angels whom he could not love
although he praised."^
Dr Johnson said that, after all, Paradise Lost
was one of the books which no one wished larger ;
probably he was right. But " after all," too, what
book in the whole range of modern literature is
really greater ? What other poet has devised a
style so full and dignified, so firm and continuous
in its music, so fitted to keep out the intrusion of
mean associations which might imperil the serious-
ness of its theme, so impregnated with a moral
and artistic tenacity, so compact of sublimity and
strength ?
1 Walter Bagehot : Essay on Milton.
CHAPTER V
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE
(1)
The student of literature, when he passes in his
reading from the age of Shakespeare and Milton
to that of Dryden and Pope, will be conscious of
certain sharply defined differences between the
temper and styles of the writers of the two periods.
If besides being a student of literature he is also
a student of literary criticism, he will find that
these differences have led to the affixing of certain
labels — that the school to which writers of the
former period belong is called "Romantic" and
that of the latter " Classic," this " Classic " school
being again overthrown towards the end of the
eighteenth century by a set of writers who, unlike
the Elizabethans, gave the name " Romantic " to
themselves. What is he to understand by these
two labels ? what are the characteristics of
" Classicism," and how far is it opposite to and
conflicting with " Romanticism " ? The question
is difficult because the names are used vaguely and
they do not adequately cover everything that is
commonly put under them. It would be difficult,
142
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 143
for instance, to find anything in Ben Jonson which
proclaims him as belonging to a different school from
Dryden, and perhaps the same could be said in the
second and self-styled period of Romanticism of the
work of Crabbe. But in the main the differences
are real and easily visible, even though they hardly
convince us that the names chosen are the happiest
that could be found by way of description.
This period of Dryden and Pope on which
we are now entering sometimes styled itself the
Augustan Age of English poetry. It grounded
its claim to Classicism on a fancied resemblance
to the Roman poets of the golden age of Latin
poetry, the reign of the Emperor Augustus. Its
authors saw themselves each as a second Vergil, a
second Ovid, most of all a second Horace, and they
believed that their relation to the big world, their
assured position in society, heightened the re-
semblances. They endeavoured to form their
poetry on the lines laid down in the critical writing
of the original Augustan age as elaborated and
interpreted in Renaissance criticism. It was tacitly
assumed — some of them openly asserted it — that
the kinds, modes of treatment and all the minor
details of literature, figures of speech, use of epithets
and the rest, had been settled by the ancients once
and for all. What the Greeks began the critics
and authors of the time of Augustus had settled in
its completed form, and the scholars of the Re-
naissance had only interpreted their findings for
144 ENGLISH LITERATURE
modern use. There was the tragedy, which had
certain proper parts and a certain fixed order of
treatment laid down for it ; there was the heroic
poem, which had a story or " fable," which must be
treated in a certain fixed manner, and so on. The
authors of the " Classic " period so christened them-
selves 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 anyone
else — its urbanity (English literature in their
hands became for the first time an affair of the
towns), its love of good sense and moderation, its
instinctive distrust of emotion, and its invincible
good breeding. If you had asked them to state
as simply and broadly as possible their purpose,
they would have said it was to follow nature ; and
if you had enquired what they meant by nature,
it would turn out that they thought of it mainly
as the opposite of art and the negation of what
was fantastic, tortured, or far-sought in thinking
or writing. The later " Romantic " Revival, when
it called itself a return to nature, was only claim-
ing the intention which the classical school itself
had proclaimed as its main endeavour. The ex-
planation 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
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 145
simplicity of style, at a normal standard of writing.
They were intolerant of individual eccentricities ;
they endeavoured, and with success, to infuse into
English letters something of the academic spirit
that was already controlling their fellow-craftsmen
in France. For this end amongst others they and
the men of science founded the Royal Society,
an academic committee which has been restricted
since to the physical and natural sciences and been
supplemented by similar bodies representing litera-
ture and learning only in our own day. Clearness,
plainness, conversational ease and directness were
the aims the society set before its members where
their writing was concerned. " The Royal Society,"
wrote the Bishop of Rochester, its first historian,
" have exacted from all their members a close,
naked, natural way of speaking ; positive expres-
sions, clear sense, a native easiness, bringing all
things as near the mathematical plainness as they
can ; and preferring the language of artisans,
countrymen, and merchants before that of wits
and scholars." Artisans, countrymen, and mer-
chants— the ideal had been already accepted in
France, Malesherbes striving to use no word that
was not in the vocabulary of the day labourers of
Paris, Moliere making his washerwoman first critic
of his comedies. It meant for England the disuse
of the turgiditie^ and involutions which had marked
the prose of the preachers and moralists of the
times of James and Charles 1. ; scholars and men
10
146 ENGLISH LITERATURE
of letters were arising who would have taken John
Bunyan, the unlettered tinker of Bedford, for their
model rather than the learned physician, Sir Thomas
Browne.
But genius like Bunyan's apart, there is nothing
in the world more difficult than to write with the
easy and forthright simplicity of talk, as anyone
may see who tries for himself, or even compares
the letter-writing with the conversation of his
friends. So that this desire for simplicity, for
clarity, for lucidity led at once to a more deliberate
art. Dryden and Swift and Addison were assiduous
in their labour with the file ; they excel all their
predecessors in polish as much as the writers of
the first Augustan age excelled theirs in the same
quality. Not that it was all the result of deliberate
art; in a way it was in the air, and quite unlearned
people — journalists and pamphleteers and the like
who wrote unpremeditatedly and hurriedly to buy
their supper — partook of it as well as leisured
people and conscious artists. Defoe is as plain
and easy and polished as Swift, yet it is certain
his amazing activity and productiveness never
permitted him to look back over a sentence he
had written. Something had happened, that is,
to the English language. The assimilation of
latinisms and the revival of obsolete terms of
speech had ceased ; it had become finally a more
or less fixed form, shedding so much of its imports
as it had failed to make part of itself and acquiring
ALEXANDER POPE.
From the portrait by IV. Hoare in the National Portrait Gallery.
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 147
a grammatical and syntactical fixity which it had
not possessed in Elizabethan times. When Shakes-
peare wrote
" What cares these roarers for the name of king,"
he was using, as students of his language never
tire of pointing out to us, a perfectly correct local
grammatical form. Fifty years after that line was
written, at the Restoration, local forms had dropped
out of written English. We had acquired a normal
standard of language, and either genius or labour
was polishing it for literary uses.
What they did for prose these " Classic " writers
did even more exactly — and less happily — for
verse. Fashions often become exaggerated before
their disappearance, and the decadence of Eliza-
bethan romanticism had produced poetry the
wildness and extravagance of whose images was
well-nigh unbounded. The passion for intricate
and far-sought metaphor which had possessed
Donne was accompanied in his work, and even
more in that of his followers, with a passion for
what was elusive and recondite in thought and
emotion and with an increasing habit of rudeness
and wilful difficultness in language and versifica-
tion. Against these ultimate licences of a great
artistic period, the classical writers invoked the
qualities of smoothness and lucidity, in the same
way, so they fancied, as Vergil might have invoked
them against Lucretius. In the treatment of
148 ENGLISH LITERATURE
thought and feeling they wanted clearness, they
wanted ideas which the mass of men would readily
apprehend and assent to, and they wanted not
hints or half-spoken suggestions but complete
statement. When they spoke of following nature
this was what they meant. In the place of the
logical subtleties which Donne and his school had
sought in the scholastic writers of the Middle
Ages, they brought back the typically Renaissance
study of rhetoric ; the characteristic of all the
poetry of the period is that it has a rhetorical
quality. It is never intimate and never profound,
but it has point and wit, and it appeals with con-
fidence 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
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 149
Romanticism which came before and after? In
the first place we must put the quahty we have
described as that of complete statement. Classical
poetry is, so to speak, "all there." Its meaning is
all of it on the surface; it conveys nothing but
what it says, and what it says, it says completely.
It is always vigorous and direct, often pointed and
aphoristic, never merely suggestive, never given to
half statement, and never obscure. You feel that
as an instrument of expression it is sharp and
polished and shining ; it is always bright and
defined in detail. The great Romantics go to
work in other ways. Their poetry is a thing of
half lights and half-spoken suggestions, of hints
that imagination will piece together, of words that
are charged with an added meaning of sound over
sense, a thing that stirs the vague and impalpable
restlessness of memory or terror or desire that lies
down beneath in the minds of men. It rouses
what a philosopher has called the " transcendental
feeling," the solemn sense of the immediate presence
of " that which was and is and ever shall be," to
induce which is the property of the highest poetry.
You will find nothing in classical poetry so poignant
or highly wrought as Webster's
" Cover her face ; mine eyes dazzle ; she died young,"
and the answer,
" I think not so : her infelicity
Seemed to have years too many,""
150 ENGLISH LITERATURE
or so subtle in its suggestion, the sense of what is
said echoing back to primeval terrors and despairs,
as this from Macbeth :
" Stones have been known to move and trees to speak ;
Augurs and understood relations have
By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks brought forth
The secret'st man of blood " ;
or so intoxicating to the imagination and the senses
as an ode of Keats or a sonnet by Rossetti. But
you will find eloquent and pointed statements of
thoughts and feelings that are common to most of
us — the expression of ordinary human nature —
" What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest."
" Wit and fine writing " consisting, as Addison
put it in a review of Pope's first published poem,
not so much " in advancing things that are new,
as in giving things that are known an agree-
able turn."
Though in this largest sense the " Classic " writers
eschewed the vagueness of Romanticism, in another
and more restricted way they cultivated it. They
were not realists as all good Romanticists have to
be. They had no love for oddities or idiosyncrasies
or exceptions. They loved uniformity, they had
no use for truth in detail. They liked the broad,
generalized, 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 AGE OF GOOD SENSE 151
the reader, so to speak, the materials for his own
impression, rather than rendering, as Milton does,
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 ascend-
ing spirit of humanity can find a better means of
self-expression. Out of the writing which aimed
at simplicity and truth to nature grew "poetic
diction," a special treasury of words and phrases
deemed suitable for poetry, providing poets with a
common stock of imagery, removing from them
the necessity of seeing life and nature each one for
himself The poetry which Dryden and Pope
wrought out of their mental vigour, their followers
wrote to pattern. Poetry became reduced, as it
had hardly been before and has never been since,
to a formula. The Elizabethan sonneteers, as we
saw, used a vocabulary and phraseology in common
with their fellows in Italy and France, and none
the less produced fine poetry. But they used it to
express things they really felt. The truth is it is not
the fact of a poetic diction which matters so much
as its quality — whether it squares with sincerity,
whether it is capable of expressing powerfully and
directly one's deepest feelings. The history of
literature can show poetic dictions — special vocabu-
laries and forms for poetry — that have these
qualities ; the diction, for instance, of the Greek
choruses, or of the ballad-makers, or of the Scottish
152 ENGLISH IJTERATURE
poets who followed Chaucer, or of the troubadours.
That of the classic writers of an Augustan age was
not of such a kind. Words clothe thought ; poetic
diction had the artifice of the crinoline : it would
stand by itself The Romantics in their return to
nature had necessarily to abolish it.
But when all is said in criticism, the poetry of
the earlier half of the eighteenth century excels
all other English poetry in two respects. Two
qualities belong to it by virtue of the metre in
which it is most of it written — rapidity and anti-
thesis. Its antithesis made it an incomparable
vehicle for satire, its rapidity for narrative. Outside
its limits we have hardly any even passable satirical
verse ; within them there are half a dozen works
of the highest excellence in this kind. And if we
except Chaucer, there is no one else in the whole
range of English poetry who 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 that for a reader
who knows no ancient languages either of those
translations will probably give a better idea of its
original than any other rendering in English that
we possess. The foundation of their method has
been vindicated in the best modern translations
from the Greek,
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 168
(2)
The term " eighteenth century " in the vocabulary
of the literary historian is commonly as vaguely
used as the term Elizabethan. It borrows as much
as forty years from the seventeenth and gives away
ten to the nineteenth. The whole of the work of
Dryden, whom we must count as the first of the
'* Classic " school, was accomplished before chrono-
logically it had begun. As a man and as an author
he was very intimately related to his changing
times ; he adapted himself to them with a versa-
tility as remarkable as that of the Vicar of Bray,
and hardly less simple-minded. He mourned in
verse the death of Cromwell and the death of his
successor, successively defended the theological
positions of the Church of England and the Church
of Rome, changed his religion and became Poet
Laureate to James II., and acquiesced with per-
fect equanimity in the Revolution which brought
in his successor. This instability of conviction,
though it gave a handle to his opponents in con-
troversy, does not appear to have caused any
serious scandal or disgust among his contempor-
aries, 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 sus-
pected apostasy of Wordsworth. Dryden had
little interest in political or religious questions ;
his instinct, one must conceive, was to conform
164 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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 extraor-
dinary genius slung and pitched upon a swivel,
it would certainly turn round as fast as the times,
and instruct him how to write elegies to Oliver
Cromwell and King Charles the Second with all
the coherence imaginable ; how to write Religio
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 changed his nature, he was as free from
cynicism as a barrister who represents successively
opposing parties in suits or politics ; and when he
wrote polemics in prose or verse he lent his
talents as a barrister lends his for a fee. His one
intellectual interest was in his art, and it is in his
comments on his art — the essays and prefaces in
the composition of which he amused the leisure
left in the busy life of a dramatist and a poet of
officialdom — that his most charming and delicate
work is to be found. In a way they begin modern
English prose ; earlier writing furnishes no equal
to their colloquial ease and the grace of their
expression. And they contain some of the most
acute criticism in our language — " Classical " in its
tone {i.e. with a preference for conformity) but
with its respect for order and tradition always
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 155
tempered by good sense and wit, and informed
and guided throughout by a taste whose catholicity
and sureness was unmatched in the England of
his time. The preface to his Fables contains
some excellent notes on Chaucer. They may be
read as a sample of the breadth and perspicuity
of his critical perceptions.
His chief poetical works were most of them
occasional — designed either to celebrate some
remarkable event or to take a side and interpret
a policy in the conflict, political or religious, of
the time. Absalom and Achitophel and The
Medal were levelled at the Shaftesbury-Monmouth
intrigues in the closing years of Charles II.
Religio Laid celebrated the excellence of the
Church of England in its character of via media
between the opposite extravagances of Papacy and
Presbyterianism. The Hind and the Panther
found this perfection spotted. The Church of
England has become the Panther, whose coat is a
varied pattern of heresy and truth beside the spot-
less purity of the Hind, the Church of Rome.
Astrea Redduoc welcomed the returning Charles ;
Annus Mirabilis commemorated a year of fire and
victories. Besides these he wrote many dramas
in verse, a number of translations, and some
shorter poems, of which the odes are the most
remarkable.
His qualities as a poet fitted very exactly the
work he set himself to do. His work is always
156 ENGLISH LITERATURE
pLain and easily understood ; he had a fine faculty
for narration, and the vigorous rapidity and point
of his style enabled him to sketch a character or
sum up a dialectical position very surely and
effectively. His writing has a kind of spare and
masculine force about it. It is this vigour and the
impression which he gives of intellectual strength
and of a logical grasp of his subject, that beyond
question has kept alive work which, if ever poetry
was, was ephemeral in its origin. The careers of
the unscrupulous Caroline peers would have been
closed for us were they not visible in the reflected
light of his denunciation of them. Though Buck-
ingham is forgotten and Shaftesbury's name
swallowed up in that of his more philanthropic
descendant, we can read of Achitophel and Zimri
still, and feel something of the strength and heat
which he caught from a fiercely fought conflict
and transmitted with his own gravity and purpose-
fulness into verse. The Thirty-nine Articles are
not a proper subject for poetry, but the sustained
and serious allegory which Dryden weaves round
theological discussion preserves his treatment of
them from the fate of the controversialists who
opposed him. His work has wit and vitality
enough to keep it sweet.
Strength and wit enter in different proportions
into the work of his successor, Alexander Pope —
a poet whom admirers in his own age held to be
the greatest in our language. No one would think
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 157
of making such a claim now, but the detraction
which he suffered at the hands of Wordsworth and
the Romantics ought not to make us forget that
Pope, though not our greatest, not even perhaps a
great poet is incomparably our most brilliant
versifier. Dryden's strength turns in his work into
something more fragile and delicate, polished with
infinite care like lacquer, and wrought like filigree
work to the last point of conscious and perfected
art. He was not a great thinker ; the thoughts
which he embodies in his philosophical poems —
the Essay on Man and the rest — are almost ludi-
crously out of proportion to the solemnity of the
titles which introduce them, nor does he except
very rarely get beyond the conceptions common to
the average man when he attempts introspection
or meditates on his own destiny. The reader in
search of philosophy will find little to stimulate
him, and in the facile Deism of the time probably
something to smile at. Pope has no message to
us now. But he will find views current in his
time or borrowed from other authors put with
perfect felicity and wit, and he will recognize the
justice of Addison's comment that Pope's wit and
fine writing consist " not so much in advancing
things that are new, as in giving things that are
known an agreeable turn." Nor will he fall into
the error of dubbing the author a minor poet
because he is neither subtle nor imaginative nor
profound. A great poet would not have written
158 ENGLISH LITERATURE
like Pope — one must grant it ; but a minor poet
could not.
It is characteristic of Pope's type of mind and
kind of art that there is no development visible in
his work. Other poets — Shakespeare, for instance,
and Keats — have written work of the highest quality
when they were young, but they have had crude-
nesses 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 Ciiticism
was his first poem it would be impossible to place it
in the canon of his work ; it might come in anywhere
and so might everything else that he wrote. From
the beginning his craftsmanship was perfect ; from
the beginning he took his subject-matter from
others as he found it and worked it up into
aphorism and epigram till each line shone like a
cut jewel and the essential commonplaceness and
poverty of his material was obscured by the glitter
the craftsmanship lent to it. He was quite sure
of his medium from the beginning, and when the
opportunity came he used it to most brilliant
purpose. The Rape of the Lock and the satirical
poems come later in his career.
As a satirist Pope, though he did not hit so hard
as Dryden, struck more deftly and probed deeper.
He wielded a rapier where the other used a broad-
sword, and though both used their weapons with
the highest skill and the metaphor must not be
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 169
imagined to impute clumsiness to Dryden, the
rapier made the cleaner cut. Both employed a
method in satire which their successors (a poor set)
in England have not been intelligent enough to
use. They allow every possible good point to the
object of their attack. They appear to deal him
an even and regretful justice. His good points,
they put it in effect, being so many, how much
blacker and more deplorable his meannesses and
faults ! They do not do this out of charity ; there
was very little of the milk of human kindness in
Pope. Deformity in his case, as in so many in
fiction, seemed to carry with it a certain malevo-
lence and meanness of disposition. The method is
employed simply because it gives the maximum
satirical effect. That is why Pope's epistle to
Arbuthnot, with its characterization of Addison,
is the most damning piece of invective in our
language.
The Rape of the Lock is an exquisite piece of
workmanship, breathing the very spirit of the time.
You can fancy it like some clock made by one of
the Louis XIV. craftsmen, encrusted with a heap
of ormulu mock-heroics and impertinences and set
perfectly to the time of day. From no other poem
could you gather so fully and perfectly the temper
of the society in which our " classic " poetry was
brought to perfection, its elegant assiduity in
trifles, its briUiant artifice, its paint and powder
and patches and high-heeled shoes, its measured
160 ENGLISH LITERATURE
strutting walk in life as well as in verse. The
Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic poem ; that is
to say it applies the form and treatment which the
" classic " critics of the seventeenth century had
laid down as belonging to the " heroic " or " epic "
style to a trifling circumstance — the loss by a
young lady of fashion of a lock of hair. And it is
the one instance in which this "recipe" for a
heroic poem which the French critics handed on
to Dryden, and Dryden left to his descendants,
has been used well enough to keep the work done
with it in memory. In a way it condemns the
poetical theory of the time ; when forms are fixed,
new writing is less likely to be creative and more
likely to exhaust itself in the ingenious but trifling
exercises of parody and burlesque. The Rape of
the Lock is brilliant, but it is only play.
The accepted theory which assumed that the
forms of poetry had been settled in the past and
existed to be applied, though it concerned itself
mainly with the ancient writers, included also two
moderns in its scope. You were orthodox if you
wrote tragedy and epic as Horace told you and
satire as he had shown you ; you were also orthodox
if you wrote in the styles of Spenser or Milton.
Spenser, though his predecessors were counted
barbaric and his followers tortured and obscure,
never fell out of admiration ; indeed in every age
of English poetry after him the greatest poet in it
is always to be found copying him or expressing
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 161
their love for him — Milton declaring to Dryden
that Spenser was his " original," Pope reading and
praising him, Keats writing his earliest work in
close imitation. His characteristic style and stanza
were recognized by the classic school as a distinct
" kind " of poetry which might be used where the
theme fitted instead of the heroic manner, and
Spenserian imitations abound. Sometimes they
are serious ; sometimes, like Shenstone's School-
mistress, they are mocking and another illustration
of the dangerous ease with which a conscious and
sustained effort to write in a fixed and acquired
style runs to seed in burlesque. Milton's fame
never passed through the period of obscurity that
sometimes has been imagined for him. He had
the discerning admiration of Dryden and others
before his death. But to Addison belongs the
credit of introducing him to the writers of this
time ; his papers in the Spectator on Paradise
Lost, with their eulogy of its author's sublimity,
spurred the interest of the poets among his readers.
From Milton the eighteenth century got the chief
and most ponderous part of its poetic diction, high-
sounding periphrases and borrowings from Latin
used without the gravity and sincerity and fullness
of thought of the master who brought them in.
When they wrote blank verse, the classic poets
wrote it in the Milton manner.
The use of these two styles may be studied in
the writings of one man, James Thomson. For
11
162 ENGLISH LITERATURE
besides acquiring a kind of anonymous immortality
with patriots as the author of " Rule, Britannia,"
Thomson wrote two poems respectively in the
Spenserian and the Miltonic manner, the former
The Castle of Indolence, the latter Tlie Seasons.
The Spenserian manner is caught very effectively,
but the adoption of the style of Paradise Lost,
with its allusiveness, circumlocution and weight,
removes any freshness the Seasons might have had,
had the circumstances in them been put down as
they were observed. As it is, hardly anything is
directly named ; birds are always the " feathered
tribe" and everything else has a similar polite
generality for its title. Thomson was a simple-
minded man, with a faculty for watching and
enjoying nature which belonged to few in his
sophisticated age ; it is unfortunate he should have
spent his working hours in rendering the fruit of
country rambles freshly observed into a cold and
stilted diction. It suited the eighteenth-century
reader well, for not understanding nature herself,
he was naturally obliged to read her in translations.
(3)
The chief merits of " Classic " poetry — its 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,
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 163
succeeded in expressing his personality not in
poetry, which was his vocation, but in prose, which
was the amusement of his leisure hours. Spenser
had put his politics into prose and his ideals into
v^erse ; 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 parent-
age, though honoured by use, does not always fit
literary history well ; none the less, the tradition
which describes him as the father of modern English
prose is very near the truth. He puts into practice
for the first time the ideals, described in the first
chapter of this book, which were set up by the
scholars who let into English the light of the
Renaissance. With the exception of the dialogue
on Dramatic Poesy, his work is almost all of it
occasional, the fruit of the mood of a moment, and
written rather in the form of a causerie, a kind of
informal talk, than of a considered essay. And it
is all couched in clear, flowing, rather loosely
jointed English, carefully avoiding rhetoric and
eloquence and striving always to reproduce the
ease and flow of cultured conversation, rather than
the tighter, more closely knit style of consciously
" literary " prose. His methods were the methods
of the four great prose-writers who followed him —
Defoe, Addison, Steele, and Swift.
Of these, Defoe was the eldest and in some ways
the most remarkable. He has been called the
164 ENGLISH LITERATURE
earliest professional author in our language, and
if that is not strictly true, he is at any rate the
earliest literary journalist. His output of work
was enormous ; he wrote on any and every subject;
there was no event, whether in politics or letters or
discovery, but he was ready with something pat
on it before the public interest faded. It followed
that a time when imprisonment, mutilation, and
the pillory took the place of our modern libel
actions he had an adventurous career. In politics
he followed the Whig cause and served the Govern-
ment with his pen, notably by his writings in
support of the union with Scotland, in which he
won over the Scots by his description of the com-
mercial advantage which would follow the abolition
of the border. This line of argument, taken at a
time when the governing of political tendencies by
commercial interests was by no means the accepted
commonplace it is now, proves him a man of an
active and original mind. His originality, indeed,
sometimes overreached the comprehension both
of the public and his superiors ; he was imprisoned
for an attack on the Hanoverian succession which
was intended ironically ; apparently he was ignorant
of what every journalist ought to know, that
irony is at once the most dangerous and the least
effectual weapon in the whole armoury of the
press. The fertility and ingenuity of his intellect
may be best gauged by the number of modern
enterprises and contrivances that are foreshadowed
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 165
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 commis-
sion of enquiry into bankruptcy ; and a system
of national poor relief. They show him to have
been an independent and courageous thinker where
social questions were concerned.
He was nearly sixty before he had published his
first novel, Robinson Crusoe, the book by which
he is universally known, and on which with the
seven other novels which followed it the best part
of his literary fame rests. But his earlier works —
they are reputed to number over two hundred —
possess no less remarkable literary qualities. It is
not too much to say that all the gifts which are
habitually recommended for cultivation by those
who aspire to journalistic success are to be found
in his prose. He has in the first place the gift of
perfect lucidity no matter how complicated the
subject he is expounding ; such a book as his
Complete English Tradesman is full of passages in
which a 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 knowledge of
the circumstances of life among different ranks and
166 ENGLISH LITERATURE
conditions of men ; none of them has reahzed with
such fideHty how so many different persons hved
and moved. His gift of narrative and description is
masterly, as readers of his novels know (we shall
have to come back to it in discussing the growth
of the English novel) ; several of his works show
him to have been endowed with a fine faculty
of psychological observation. Without the least
consciousness of the value of what he was writing,
nor indeed with any deliberate artistic intention,
he made himself one of the masters of English
prose.
Defoe had been the champion of the Whigs ; on
the Tory side the ablest pen was that of Jonathan
Swift. His works proclaim him to have had an
intellect less wide in its range than that of his
antagonist, but more vigorous and powerful. He
wrote, too, more carefully. In his youth he had
been private secretary to Sir William Temple, a
writer now as good as forgotten because of the
triviality of his matter, but in his day esteemed
because of the easy urbanity and polish of his
prose. From him Swift learned the labour of the
file, and he declared in later life that it was
" generally believed that this author has advanced
our English tongue to as great a perfection as it
can well bear." In fact, he added to the ease and
cadences he had learned from Temple qualities of
vigour and directness of his own which put his
work far above his master's. And he dealt with
JONATHAN SWIFT.
Fratn a painting by C. Jervas in the National Portrait Gallery.
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 167
more important subject-matter than the academic
exercises on which Temple exercised his fastidious
and meticulous powers of revision.
In temperament he is opposed to all the writers
of his time. There is no doubt but there was
some radical disorder in his system ; brain disease
clouded his intellect in his old age, and his last
years were death in life ; right through his life he
was a savagely irritable, sardonic, dark and violent
man, impatient of the slightest contradiction or
thwarting, and given to explosive and instantaneous
rage. He delighted in flouting convention, gloried
in outraging decency. The rage, which, as he said
himself, tore his heart out, carried him to strange
excesses. There is something ironical (he would
himself have appreciated it) in the popularity of
Gullivers Travels as a children's book — " that
ascending wave of savagery and satire which over-
whelms policy and learning to break against the
ultimate citadel of humanity itself" In none of
his contemporaries (except perhaps in the senti-
mentalities of Steele) can one detect the traces of
emotion ; to read Swift is to be conscious of intense
feeling on almost every page. The surface of his
style may be smooth and equable, but the central
fires of passion are never far beneath, and through
cracks and fissures come intermittent bursts of
flame. Defoe's irony is so measured and studiously
commonplace that perhaps those who imprisoned
him because they believed him to be serious are
168 ENGLISH LITERATURE
hardly to be blamed ; Swift's quivers and reddens
with anger in every line.
But his pen seldom slips from the strong grasp
of his controlling art. The extraordinary skill and
closeness of his allegorical writings — unmatched in
their kind — is witness to the care and sustained
labour which went to their making. He is content
with no general correspondences ; his allegory does
not fade away into a story in which only the main
characters have a secondary significance ; the
minutest circumstances have a bearing in the satire
and the moral. In The Tale of a Tub and in
Gullivei^'s Travels — particularly in the former —
the multitude as well as the aptness of the parallels
between the imaginary narrative and the facts it is
meant to represent is unrivalled in works of the
kind. Only the highest mental powers, working
with intense fervour and concentration, could have
achieved the sustained brilliancy of the result.
" What a genius I had when I wrote that book ! "
Swift is said to have exclaimed in his old age when
he re-read The Tale of a Tub, and certainly the
book is a marvel of constructive skill, all the more
striking because it makes allegory out of history
and consequently is denied that freedom of narrative
so brilliantly employed in the Travels.
Informing all his writings too, besides intense
feeling and an omnipresent and controlling art,
is strong common sense. His aphorisms, both
those collected under the heading of Thoughts on
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 169
Farious Subjects, and countless others scattered up
and down his pages, are a treasury of sound, if a
little sardonic, practical wisdom. His most insistent
prejudices foreshadow in their essential sanity and
justness those of that great master of life, Dr
Johnson. He could not endure over-politeness, a
vice which must have been very oppressive in
society of his day. He savagely resented and con-
demned a display of affection — particularly marital
affection — in public. In an age when it was the
normal social system of settling quarrels, he con-
demned duelling; and he said some very wise things
— things that might still be said — on the problem of
education. In economics he was as right-hearted
as Ruskin and as wrong-headed. Carlyle, who was
in so many respects an echo of him, found in a
passage in his works a " dim anticipation " of his
philosophy of clothes.
The leading literary invention of the period —
after that of the heroic couplet for verse — was the
prose periodical essay. Defoe, it is hardly necessary
to say, began it ; it was his nature to be first with
any new thing : but its establishment as a prevailing
literary mode is due to two authors, Joseph Addison
and Richard Steele. Of the two famous series —
the Tatler and the Spectator — for which they were
both responsible, Steele must take the first credit ;
he began them, and though Addison came in and
by the deftness and lightness of his writing took the
lion's share of their popularity, both the plan and
170 ENGLISH LITERATURE
the characters round whom the hulk of the essays
in the Spectator came to revolve was the creation
of his collaborator. Steele we know very intimately
from his own writings and from Thackeray's
portrait of him. He was an emotional, full-blooded
kind of man, reckless and dissipated but funda-
mentally honest and good-hearted — a type very
common in his day as the novels show, but not
otherwise to be found in the ranks of its writers.
What there is of pathos and sentiment, and most
of what there is of humour in the Tatler and the
Spectator, are his. And he created the dramatis
personoe out of whose adventures the slender thread
of continuity which binds the essays together is
woven. Addison, though less open to the on-
slaughts of the conventional moralist, was a less
lovable personality. Constitutionally endowed
with little vitality, he suffered mentally as well as
bodily from languor and lassitude. His lack of
enthusiasm, his cold-blooded formalism, caused
comment even in an age which prided itself in self-
command and decorum.
His occasional malevolence (if the word be not
too strong) proceeded from a flaccidity which
seemed to envy the activities and enthusiasms of
other men. As a writer he was superficial ; he had
not the energy necessary for forming a clear or
profound judgment on any question of difficulty ;
Johnson's comment, " He thinks justly but he
thinks faintly," sums up the truth about him. His
THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE 171
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
of the Restoration licence ; to their efforts we must
credit the alteration in morality which The School
for Scandal shows over The Way of the World.
Their professed object, as they stated themselves,
was "to banish vice and ignorance out of the
territories of Great Britain " (nothing less!) "and to
bring philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools
and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at
tea-tables and coffee-houses." In fact, their satires
were politically nearer home, and the chief objects
of their aversion were the Tory squires whom it
was their business as Whigs to deride. On the
Coverley papers in the Spectator rests the chief part
of their literary fame ; these belong rather to the
special history of the novel than to that of the
periodical essay.
CHAPTER VI
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME
By 1730 the authors whose work made the *' classic "
school in England were dead or had ceased writing ;
by the same date Samuel Johnson had begun his
career as a man of letters. The difference between
the period of his maturity and the period we have
been examining is not perhaps easy to define ; but
it exists and it can be felt unmistakably in reading.
For one thing, "Classicism " had become completely
naturalized ; it had ceased to regard the French
as arbiters of elegance and literary taste ; indeed
Johnson himself nev^er spoke of them without
disdain, and hated them as much as he hated
Scotsmen. Writing, like dress and the common
way of life, became plainer and graver and thought
stronger and deeper. In manners and speech
something of the brutalism which was at the root
of the English character at the time began to
colour the refinement of the preceding age. Dilet-
tantism gave way to learning and speculation ; in
the place of Bolingbroke came Adam Smith; in
the place of Addison, Johnson. In a way, it is the
solidest and sanest time in English letters. Yet in
172
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 173
the midst of its urbanity and order forces were
gathering for its destruction. The ballad-mongers
were busy ; Johnson was scarcely dead before
Blake was drawing and rhyming and Burns was
giving songs and lays to his country-side. In the
distance — Johnson could not hear them — sounded,
like the horns of elf-land faintly blowing, the
trumpet-calls of romance.
If the whole story of Dr Johnson's life were the
story of his published books it would be very
difficult to understand his pre-eminent and symbolic
position in literary history. His best-known work
— it still remains so — was his dictionary, and
dictionaries, for all the licence they give and
Johnson took for the expression of a personality,
are the business of purely mechanical talents. A
lesser man than he might have cheated us of such
delights as the definitions of " oats," or " net," or
" pension," but his book would certainly have been
no worse as a book. Yet the dictionary has an
importance of its own in the history of our litera-
ture, for it was the first systematic attempt to do
for the English tongue what the labours of the
academy did for French, and it is the foundation
on which succeeding edifices of research have been
built. Johnson's other works were miscellaneous
in character. He tried as many forms of writing as
a modern dilettante, though nothing was more alien
to his character than mere dilettantism. Poetry,
plays, journalism, the novel, biography, travel,
174 ENGLISH LITERATURE
letters, all gained something from his hand, though
nothing remarkable. In his early years he wrote
two satires in verse in imitation of Juvenal ; they
were followed later by two series of periodical
essays on the model of the Spectator ; neither of
them — the Rambler nor the Idler — were at all
successful. Rasselas, a tale with a purpose, is
melancholy reading ; the Journey to the JVeste?^
Hebrides has been utterly eclipsed by Boswell's
livelier and more human chronicle of the same
events. The Lives of the Poets, his greatest work,
was composed with pain and difficulty when he
was seventy years old ; even it is but a quarry
from which a reader may dig the ore of a sound
critical judgment summing up a life's reflection,
out of the grit and dust of perfunctory biographical
compilations. There was hardly one of the literary
coterie over which he presided that was not doing
better and more lasting work. Nothing that
Johnson wrote is to be compared, for excellence in
its own manner, with Tom Jones or the Vicar of
Wakefield or the Citizen of the World. He pro-
duced nothing in writing approaching the magni-
tude of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, or the profundity of Burke's philosophy of
politics. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose main
business was painting and not the pen, was almost
as good an author as he ; his Discourses have little
to fear when they are set beside Johnson's essays.
Yet all these men recognized him as their guide
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 175
and leader ; the spontaneous selection of such a
democratic assembly as men of genius in a tavern
fixed upon him as chairman, and we in these later
days, who are safe from the overpowering force of
personality and presence — or at least can only
know of it reflected in books — instinctively recog-
nize 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 litera-
ture of his time and excelled all others in his grasp
of them ; and he was perhaps more completely
than anyone else in the whole history of English
literature, the typical Englishman. He was one
of those to whom is applicable the commonplace
that he was greater than his books. It is the
fashion nowadays among some critics to speak of
his biographer Boswell as if he were a novelist or a
playwright and to classify the Johnson we know
with Hamlet and Don Quixote as the product of
creative or imaginative art, working on a "lost
original." No exercise of critical ingenuity could
be more futile or impertinent. The impression of
the solidity and magnitude of Johnson's character
which is to be gathered from Boswell is enforced
from other sources; from his essays and his prayers
and meditations, from the half-dozen or so lives
and reminiscences which were published in the
years following his death (their very number
176 ENGLISH LITERATURE
establishing the reverence with which he M'^as
regarded), from the homage of other men whose
genius their books leave indisputable. Indeed, the
Johnson we know from Boswell, though it is the
broadest and most masterly portrait in the whole
range of biography, gives less than the whole
magnitude of the man. When Boswell first met
him at the age of twenty-two, Johnson was fifty-
four. His long period of poverty and struggle was
past. His Dictionary and all his works except
the Lives of the Poets were behind him ; a pension
from the Crown had established him in security
for his remaining years ; his position was univer-
sally acknowledged. So that though the portrait
in the Life is a full-length study of Johnson the
conversationalist and literary dictator, the propor-
tion it preserves is faulty, and its study of the early
years — the years of poverty, of the Vanity of
Human Wishes and London, of Rasselas, which he
wrote to pay the expenses of his mother's funeral —
is slight.
It was, however, out of the bitterness and
struggle of these early years that the strength and
sincerity of character which carried Johnson surely
and tranquilly through the time of his triumph
were derived. From the beginning he made no
compromise with the world and no concession to
fashion. The world had to take him at his own
valuation or not at all. He never deviated one
hair's- breadth from the way he had chosen.
DR SAMUEL JOHNSON.
From a painting by John Opie in the National Portrait Gallery.
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 177
Judged by the standards of journalistic success,
the Rambler could not well be worse than he made
it. Compared with the lightness and gaiety and
the mere lip-service to morality of Addison, its
edification is ponderous. Both authors state the
commonplaces of conduct, but Addison achieves
lightness in the doing of it, and his manner, by
means of which platitudes are stated lightly and
pointedly and with an air of novelty, is the classic
manner of journalism. Johnson goes heavily and
directly to the point, handling well-worn moral
themes in general and dogmatic language without
any attempt to enliven them with an air of dis-
covery or surprise. Yet they were, in a sense,
discoveries to him ; not one of them but was deeply
and sincerely felt ; not one but is not a direct and
to us a pathetically dispassionate statement of the
reflection of thirty years of grinding poverty and a
soul's anguish. Viewed in the light of his life, the
Ramble?^ is one of the most moving of books. If
its literary value is slight, it is a document in
character.
So that when he came to his own, when gradually
the public whom he despised and neglected raised
him into a pontifical position matched by none
before him in England and none since save Carlyle,
he was sure of himself ; success did not spoil him.
His judgment was unwarped by flattery. The
almost passionate tenderness and humanity which
lay beneath his grufFness was undimmed. His per-
12
178 ENGLISH LITERATURE
sonality triumphed in all the fullness and richness
which had carried it in integrity through his years
of struggle. For over twenty years from his chair
in taverns in the Strand and Fleet Street he ruled
literary London, imposed his critical principles on
the great body of English letters, and by his talk
and his friendships became the embodiment of the
literary temperament of his age.
His talk as it is set down by Boswell is his best
monument. It was the happiest possible fate that
threw those two men together, for Boswell, besides
being an admirer and reporter sedulously chroni-
cling all his master said and did, fortunately in-
fluenced both the saying and the doing. Most of
us have someone in whose company we best shine,
who puts our wits on their mettle and spurs us to
our greatest readiness and vivacity. 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. Boswell not only drew Johnson out
on subjects in which his robust common sense and
readiness of judgment were fitted to shine, but
he was at pains to lure him into situations in which
he might display himself to advantage. It was the
biographer who suggested and conducted that tour
in Scotland which gave Johnson an opportunity for
displaying himself at his best. The recorded talk
is extraordinarily varied and entertaining. It is a
mistake to conceive Johnson as a monster of bear-
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 179
like rudeness, shouting down opposition, hectoring
his companions, and habitually a blustering verbal
bully. We are too easily hypnotized by Macaulay's
impression, and that is too near 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
literary work that need be considered), Johnson
must be allowed a high place. His natural indo-
lence in production had prevented him from ex-
hausting his faculties in the more exacting labours
of creative work, and it had left him time for
omnivorous if desultory reading, the fruits of
which he stored in a wonderfully retentive memory
against an occasion for their use. To a very fully
equipped mind he brought the service of a robust
and acute judgment. Moreover, when he applied
his mind to a subject he had a faculty of intense,
if fitful concentration ; he could seize with great
force on the heart of a matter ; he had the power
in a wonderfully short time of extracting the kernel
and leaving the husk. His judgments in writing
are like those recorded by Boswell from his con-
versation ; 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
180 ENGLISH LITERATURE
of distinction, subdivide subtleties, or be careful
to admit caveats or exceptions ; he passes, on the
contrary, rapid and forcible verdicts, not seldom in
their assertions untenably sweeping, and always
decided and dogmatic. He never affects diffidence
or defers to the judgments of others. His power
of concentration, of seizing on essentials, has given
us his best critical work — nothing could be better,
for instance, than his characterization of the poets
whom he calls the metaphysical school (Donne,
Crashaw, and the rest), which is the most valuable
part of his life of Cowley. Even where he is most
prejudiced — for instance in his attack on Milton's
Lycidas — there is usually something to be said for
his point of view. And after this concentration,
his excellence depends on his basic common sense.
His classicism is always tempered, like Dryden's,
by a humane and sensible dislike of pedantry ; he
sets no store by the unities ; in his preface to
Shakespeare he allows more than a " classic " could
have been expected to admit, writing in it, in
truth, some of the manliest and wisest things in
Shakespearean literature. Of course, he had his
failings — the greatest of them what Lamb called
imperfect sympathy. He could see no good in
republicans or agnostics, and none in Scotland or
France. Not that the phrase " imperfect sym-
pathy," 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
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 181
was in them, not in him ; a ruthless objectivity
is part of the classic equipment. He failed, too,
because he could neither understand nor appreciate
poetry which concerned itself with the sensations
that come from external nature. Nature was to
him a closed book, very likely for a purely physical
reason. He was short-sighted to the point of
myopia, and a landscape meant nothing to him ;
when he tried to describe one, as he did in the
chapter on the " happy valley " in Rasselas, he
failed. What he did not see he could not 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.
(2)
As we have seen, Johnson was not only great
in himself, he was great in his friends. Round
him, meeting him as an equal, gathered the greatest
and most prolific writers of the time. There is
no better way to study the central and accepted
men of letters of the period than to take some
full evening at the club from Boswell, read a
page or two, watch what the talkers said, and
then trace each back to his own works for a com-
plete picture of his personality. The lie of the
literary landscape in this wonderful time will
become apparent to you as you read. You will
find Johnson enthroned, Boswell at his ear, round
him men like Reynolds and Burke, Richardson
182 ENGLISH LITERATURE
and Fielding and Goldsmith, Robertson and Gib-
bon, and occasionally drawn to the circle minnows
like Beattie and a genius like Adam Smith. Gray,
studious in his college at Cambridge, is exercising
his fastidious talent ; Collins' sequestered, carefully
nurtured muse is silent ; a host of minor poets are
riding Pope's poetic diction and heroic couplet
to death. Outside scattered about is the van of
Romance — Percy collecting his ballads ; Burns
omnivorously reading the " bards " of his country-
side ; the " mad " people. Smart and Chatterton,
obscurely beginning the work that was to come
full-blown in Blake and finish in Wordsworth and
Coleridge and Keats.
Of Johnson's set the most remarkable figure
was Edmund Burke — " the supreme writer," as
De Quincey called him, " of his century." His
writings belong more to the history of politics
than to that of literature, and a close examination
of them would be out of place here. His political
theory strikes a middle course which offends —
and in his own day offended — both parties in the
common strife of political thinking. He believed
the best government to consist in a patriotic
aristocracy, ruling for the good of the people. By
birth an Irishman, he had the innate practicality
which commonly lies beneath the flash and colour
of Irish forcefulness and rhetoric. That, and his
historical training, which influenced him in the
direction of conceiving every institution as the
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 183
culmination of an evolutionary development, sent
him directly counter to the newest and most
enthusiastically urged political philosophy of his
day — the philosophy stated by Rousseau, and put
in action by the French Revolution. He disliked
and distrusted " metaphysical theories," when they
left the field of speculation for that of practice,
had no patience with " natural rights " (which as
an Irishman he conceived as the product of senti-
mentalism), and applied what would nowadays be
called a "pragmatic" test to political affairs.
Practice was the touch- stone ; a theory was useless
unless you could prove that it had worked. It
followed that he was not a democrat, opposed
parliamentary reform, and held that the true
remedy for corruption and venality was not to
increase the size of the electorate, but to reduce
it so as to obtain electors of greater weight and
independence. For him a member of Parliament
was a representative and not a delegate, and must
act not on his elector's wishes but on his own
judgment. These opinions are little in fashion
in our own day, but it is well to remember that
in Burke's case they were the outcome not of
prejudice but of thought, and that even democracy
may admit they present a case that must be met
and answered.
Burke's reputation as a thinker has suffered some-
what unjustly as a result of his refusal to square his
tenets either with democracy or with its opposite.
184 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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 over-
whelm his antagonists in the several arguments —
on India, or America, on Ireland, or on France —
which made up his political career. He was, said
Carlyle, " vehement rather than earnest ; a resplen-
dent far-sighted rhetorician, rather than a deep and
earnest thinker." The words as they stand would
be a good description of a certain type of politician ;
they would fit, for instance, very well on Mr
Gladstone ; but they do Burke less than justice.
He was an innovator in modern political thought,
and his application of the historical method to the
study of institutions is in its way a not less epoch-
making achievement than Bacon's application of
the inductive method to science. At a time when
current political thought, led by Rousseau, was
drawing its theories from the abstract conception
of "natural rights," Burke was laying down that
sounder and deeper notion of politics which has
governed thinking in that department of knowledge
since. Besides this, he had face to face with the
affairs of his own day a far-sightedness and saga-
city which kept him right where other men went
wrong. In a nation of the blind he saw the truth
about the American colonies ; he predicted with
exactitude the culmination of the revolution in
Napoleon. Mere rhetorical vehemence cannot
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 185
explain the earnestness with which in a day of
diplomatic cynicism he preached the doctrine of an
international morality as strict and as binding as
the morality which exists between man and man.
Surest of all, we have the testimony, uninfluenced
by the magic of language, of the men he met.
You could not, said Dr Johnson, shelter with him
in a shed for a few moments from the rain without
saying, " This is an extraordinary man."
His literary position depends chiefly on his amaz-
ing 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 fire and colour he added the strength of a full
mind, fortified by a wonderful store of reading
which a retentive and exact memory enabled him
to bring instantly to bear on the subject in hand.
No writer before him, except Defoe, had such a
wide knowledge of the technicalities of different
men's occupations, and of all sorts of the processes
of daily business, nor could enlighten an abstract
matter with such a wealth of luminous analogy.
It is this characteristic of his style which has led to
the common comparison of his writing with Shake-
speare's ; both seem to be preternaturally endowed
with more information, to have a wider sweep of
interest than ordinary men. Both were not only,
^s Matthew Arnold said of Burke, " saturated with
186 ENGLISH LITERATURE
ideas," but saturated too in the details of the busi-
ness and desire of ordinary men's lives ; nothing
human was alien to them. Burke's language is,
therefore, always interesting and always appropriate
to his thought ; it is also on occasion very beautiful-
He had a wonderful command of clear and ringing
utterance and could appeal when he liked very
powerfully to the sensibilities of his readers.
Rhetoricians are seldom free from occasional ex-
travagance, and Burke fell under the common
danger of his kind. He had his moments of falsity,
could heap coarse and outrageous abuse on Warren
Hastings, illustrate the horrors of the Revolution
by casting a dagger on the floor of the House of
Commons, and nourish hatred beyond the bounds
of justice or measure. But these things do not
affect his position, nor take from the solid great-
ness of his work.
Edward Gibbon — after Burke the greatest prose
writer of the century — was Johnson's junior by
over quarter of a century, and, living and working
much abroad, he made only fitful excursions into
the Fleet Street set. A word about his education
and upbringing is necessary because of their
remarkable bearing on his great book. In his
childhood he was sickly; he was therefore never
sent to school, and what knowledge he acquired he
got from a faculty for omnivorous and desultory
reading to which temporary masters and a sister
of his mother's gave occasional direction. At
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 187
fifteen he was entered at Magdalen College, Oxford,
but left it after little more than a year's residence —
during which he had been converted to the Church
of Rome— for Lausanne, to live under a Swiss
Protestant pastor to whom his father entrusted
him, in order to effect his re-conversion to the
Protestant faith. The immediate purpose was
successful, but the five years which he spent in
Lausanne were perhaps more important because
it was during them that he began to carry out
conscientiously, and indeed joyously, that course of
reading and study which was to be the foundation
of the great work of his life. At the age of twenty-
four he returned to England and became a captain
in the Hampshire Militia, in which he served for
nearly three years. As he himself has pointed out
in a famous passage, this military service, no less
than his reading in Switzerland, contributed to
preparing him for the great work of his life. " The
discipline and conditions of a modern battalion
gave me a clear notion of the phalanx and the
legion ; and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers
(the reader may smile) has not been useless to the
historian of the Roman Empire." In 1763, at the
conclusion of peace after the Seven Years' War,
the militia was disbanded, and Gibbon revisited
the continent and made his first journey in Italy.
Here he hit upon the idea which gave him his
great book. " It was at Rome," as he says himself,
*' on the 15th October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst
188 ENGLISH LITERATURE
the ruins of the eapitol while the barefooted friars
were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that
the idea of writing the decHne and fall of the city
first entered into my mind." Twelve years later
the first volume — one-sixth of the whole — appeared,
and made its author famous. A century and a
half of laborious historical research since has left
his fame undimmed ; the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire is still the standard book on its
subject, and it would be hard to think of a com-
petitor, whether ancient or modern, entitled to
dispute with it the first place in the whole of
historical literature.
The qualities which have given the book its
permanence and pre-eminence are not difficult to
divine, though only one side of them concerns our
purpose here. It is agreed by those competent to
judge that he performed the astonishing feat of
mastering all the vast materials which were available
to him, that he kept them in an ordered proportion
in his mind, that he showed wonderful acumen and
judgment in his critical use of them, and that on
points which they left obscure, and which subse-
quent discussions have elucidated, his inferences
were generally — almost invariably — correct. But
this fullness and correctness, though it would have
preserved him from obsolescence as a text-book and
maintained his fame in the universities, would not
have made him the great literary figure that he is.
He owes that partly to the mere magnitude of the
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 189
task which he accomplished, partly to the temper
in which he approached it, and partly to the style
in which he carried it through. " A great point in
favour of Gibbon," says one of his best critics with
some humour, " is the existence of his history,"
and indeed in this matter he stands alone
amongst modern historians. Think of Macaulay
struggling with masses of material, overwhelmed
with the weight of newspapers, pamphlets, state-
papers, and despatches, and leaving his great work
a mere fragment of what he intended to do.
Modern historical research has given the attempt
up in frank despair ; it finds so much to read that
it has no time to write; a single monograph on such
a thing as Gibbon would have compressed into one
balanced sentence exhausts the energies of its pro-
fessors, and when it attempts universal history it
does so on a co-operative basis. Gibbon conceived
a plan as voluminous as any of those devised by
the learned syndicates of to-day, embracing the
greatest transition in history, the foundation of
modern civilization and the growth and establish-
ment of the world's two chief religions, and he
carried it through to the end, preserving absolutely
the proportion with which he began. Parts of his
book, taken out of it by themselves, might have
given him an eminence almost as great as did the
whole. " It is melancholy to say it," wrote Cardinal
Newman, " but the chief, perhaps the only English
writer who has any claim to be considered an
190 ENGLISH LITERATURE
ecclesiastical historian, is Gibbon." This of his two
chapters on Christianity and his later sections on
the heresies and the crusades, but a similar tribute
might be paid to his picture of the barbarian
invasions which destroyed the Empire of the West,
or to the complete history of the rise and decline
of that of the East with which his book ends.
He excels, as no historian had before him and none
since, in magnitude and completeness.
It was the bent of his mind, the temper in which
he approached men and institutions, as much as
his industry, that enabled him to attain this excel-
lence. He had what may be called a masculine
tone ; a firm, strong, perspicuous narration of matter
of fact, a capacity for plain argument, a contempt
for everything which plain and definite people could
not thoroughly comprehend. He had, too, what
was characteristic of his age, a certain classical
moderation of judgment which saved him from the
idiosyncrasies of likes and dislikes which have
damaged the work of other historians, like, for
instance, Mommsen or Froude. " The cautious
scepticism of his cold intellect, which disinclined
him to every extreme, depreciates great virtues and
extenuates great vices." He does not engage
himself on a side ; the irony which critics of his
chapters on Christianity found oflTensive is in all
the other chapters as well and lends them just that
detachment, that command over the circumstances
he is describing, that keeps the reader's interest alive
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 191
where mere bald narration would soon leave it cold.
He feels that you are entitled to some definite
judgment, some finding on the facts, and he sees to
it that this finding is balanced and judicial, allowing
due weight to all points of view. It is, of course,
this temper and bent of mind which created more
than anything else the peculiar style which we know
so well. Space and time pressed upon him; judg-
ments had therefore to be conveyed by an epithet
rather than a sentence, by a sentence rather than
by a paragraph. The history had to keep marching
along, and it is perhaps the greatest merit of its
style that it gives you just this sense of consistent
steady pace, "like a Roman legion marching
through troubled country — a type of order and an
emblem of civilisation." Certainly no instrument
could have been better fitted to the purpose. No
one has improved on it since.
Boswell we have seen ; after Burke and Boswell,
Goldsmith was the most brilliant member of the
regular Johnson circle. If part of Burke's genius
is referable to his nationality, Goldsmith's is wholly
so. The beginning and the end of him was Irish ;
every quality he possessed as a man and as a writer
belongs to his race. He had the Irish carelessness,
the Irish generosity, the Irish quick temper, the
Irish humour. This latter gift, displayed constantly
in a company which had little knowledge of the
peculiar quality of Irish wit and no faculty of
sympathy or imagination, is at the bottom of the
192 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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 ridiculous-
ness, mere lack of dignity and folly. It is curious
to read Boswell and watch how often Goldsmith,
without Boswell's knowing it, got the best of the
joke. In writing he had what we can now recognize
as peculiarly Irish gifts. All our modern writers
of light half- farcical comedy are Irish. Goldsmith's
She Stoops to Conquer is only the first of a series
which includes The School for Scandal, The Import-
ance of being Earnest^ and You Never can TelL
And his essays — particularly those of the Citizen
of the World with its Chinese vision of England
and English life — are the first fruit of that Irish
detachment, that ability to see " normally " English
habits and institutions and foibles which in our
own day has given us the prefaces of Mr Shaw.
As a writer Goldsmith has a lightness and delicate
ease which belong rather to the school of the
earlier eighteenth century than to his own day ;
the enthusiasm of Addison for P'rench literature
which he retained gave him a more graceful model
than the " Johnsonian " school, to which he pro-
fessed himself to belong, could afford.
(3)
The eighteenth-century novel demands separate
treatment, and the other prose authors belong to
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 193
historical or philosophical rather than to literary-
studies. It is time to turn to poetry.
There orthodox classicism still held sway : the
manner and metre of Pope or Thomson ruled the
roost of singing fowl. In the main it had done its
work, and the bulk of fresh things conceived in it
were dull and imitative, even though occasionally,
as in the poems of Johnson himself and of Gold-
smith, an author arose who was able to infuse
sincerity and emotion into a fast-dying convention.
The classic manner — now more that of Thomson
than of Pope — persisted till it overlapped roman-
ticism ; 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 popu-
larity 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
was small ; you might almost read the complete
poetical works of either in an evening. But for
all that they mark a period ; they are the first
definite break with the classic convention which
had been triumphant for upwards of seventy
years when their prime came. It is a break, how-
ever, in style rather than in essentials, and a reader
who seeks in them the inspiriting freshness which
came later with Wordsworth and Coleridge will
be disappointed. Their carefully drawn still wine
13
194 ENGLISH LITERATURE
tastes insipidly after the " beaded bubbles winking
at the brim " of romance. They are fastidious
and academic ; they lack the authentic fire ; their
poetry is " made " poetry like Tennyson's and
Matthew Arnold's. On their comparative merits
a deal of critical ink has been spilt. Arnold's
characterization of Gray is well known — " he never
spoke out." Sterility fell upon him because he
lived in an age of prose just as it fell upon Arnold
himself because he lived too much immersed in
business and routine. But in what he wrote he
had the genuine poetic gift — the gift of insight and
feeling. Against this, Swinburne with character-
istic vehemence raised the standard of Collins, the
latchet of whose shoe Gray, as a lyric poet, was
not worthy to unloose. " The muse gave birth to
Collins, she did but give suck to Gray." It is
more to our point to observe that neither, though
their work abounds in felicities and in touches of a
genuine poetic sense, was fitted to raise the standard
of revolt. Revolution is for another and braver
kind of genius than theirs. Romanticism had to
wait for Burns and Blake.
In every country at any one time there are in
all probability not one but several literatures
flourishing. The main stream flowing through the
publishers and booksellers, conned by critics and
coteries, recognized as the national literature, is
commonly only the largest of several channels of
thought. There are besides the national literature
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 195
local literatures — books, that is, are published
which enjoy popularity and critical esteem in their
own county or parish and are utterly unknown
outside ; there may even be (indeed, there are in
several parts of the country) distinct local schools
of writing and dynasties of local authors. These
localized literatures rarely become known to the
outside world ; the national literature takes little
account of them, though their existence and prob-
ably some special knowledge of one or other of
them is within the experience of most of us. But
every now and again some one of their authors
transcends his local importance, gives evidence of
a genius which is not to be denied even by those
who normally have not the knowledge to appreciate
the particular flavour of locality which his writings
impart, and becomes a national figure. While he
lives and works the national and his local stream
write and flow together.
This was the case of Robert Burns. All his life
long he was the singer of a parish — the last of a
long line of forebears who had used the Scottish
lowland vernacular to rhyme in about their neigh-
bours and their scandals, their loves and their
church. Himself at the confluence of the two
streams, the national and the local, he pays his
tribute to two sets of originals, talks with equal
reverence of names known to us like Pope and
Gray and Shenstone and names unknown which
belonged to local " bards," as he would have called
196 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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 universal, raised out of rough and cynical
satirizing a style as rich and humorous and
astringent as that of Rabelais, lent inevitableness
and pathos and romance to lyric and song. But
he was content to better the work of other men.
He made hardly anything new.
Stevenson in his essay on Burns remarks his
readiness to use up the work of others or take a
large hint from it "as if he had some difficulty in
commencing." He omits to observe that the very
same trait applies to other great artists. There
seem to be two orders of creative writers. On the
one hand are the innovators, the new men like
Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, and later
Browning. These men owe little to their pre-
decessors ; they work on their own devices and
construct their medium afresh for themselves.
Commonly their fame and acceptance is slow, for
they speak in an unfamiliar tongue and they have
to educate a generation to understand their work.
The other order of artists has to be shown the
1 W, E. Henley, Essay on Burns. Works, David Nutt.
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 197
way. They have Uttle fertihty in construction or
invention. You have to say to them, " Here is
something that you could do too ; go and do it
better " ; or " Here is a story to work on, or a refrain
of a song ; take it and give it your subtlety, your
music." The villainy you teach them they will
use, and it will go hard with them if they do not
better the invention ; but they do not invent for
themselves. To this order of artists Burns, like
Shakespeare, and among the lesser men Tennyson,
belongs. In all his plays Shakespeare is known to
have invented only one plot ; in many he is using
not only the structure but in many places the
words devised by an older author ; his mode of
treatment depends on the conventions common in
his day, on the tragedy of blood and madness and
revenge, on the comedy of intrigue and disguises,
on the romance with its strange happenings and
its reuniting of long-parted friends. Burns goes
the same way to work ; scarcely a page of his but
shows traces of some original in the Scottish
vernacular school. The elegy, the verse epistle,
the satirical form of Holy Willies Prayer, the song
and recitative of The Jolly Beggars, are all to be
found in his predecessors, in Fergusson, Ramsay,
and the local poets of the south-west of Scotland.
In the songs often whole verses, nearly always the
refrains, are from older folk poetry. What he did
was to pour into these forms the incomparable
richness of a personality whose fire and brilliance
198 ENGLISH LITERATURE
and humour transcended all locality and all tradi-
tion, a personality which strode like a colossus over
the formalism and correctness of his time. His
use of familiar forms explains, more than anything
else, his immediate fame. His countrymen were
ready for him ; they could hail him on the instant
(just as an Elizabethan audience could hail Shake-
speare) as something familiar and at the same time
more splendid than anything they knew. He
spoke in a tongue they could understand.
It is impossible to judge Burns from his purely
English verse ; though he did it as well as any of
the minor followers of the school of Pope, he did it
no better. Only the weakest side of his character
— his sentimentalism — finds expression in it ; he
had not the sense of tradition nor the intimate
knowledge necessary to use English to the highest
poetic effect ; it was indeed a foreign tongue to
him. In the vernacular he wrote the language he
spoke, a language whose natural force and colour
had become enriched by three centuries of literary
use, which was capable, too, of effects of humour
and realism impossible in any tongue spoken out of
reach of the soil. It held within it an unmatched
faculty for pathos, a capacity for expressing a
lambent and kindly humour, a power of pungency
in satire and a descriptive vividness that English
could not give. How express in the language of
Pope or even of Wordsworth an effect like
this ?—
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 199
" They reel'd, they set, they crossed, they cleekit.
Till ilka carlin swat and reekit,
And coost her duddies to the wark,
And liuket at it in her sark.""
or this : —
" Yestreen, when to the trembling string
The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha"*,
To thee my fancy took its wing —
I sat, but neither heard nor saw :
Tho' this was fair, and that was braw,
And yon the toast of a' the town,
I sigh'd, and said, amang them a\
' Ye are na Mary Morison." "
It may be objected that in all this there is only
one word, and but two or three forms of words,
that are not English. But the accent, the rhythm,
the air of it are all Scots, and it was a Burns
thinking in his native tongue who wrote it, not the
Burns of
" Anticipation forward points the view " ;
or
" Pleasures are like poppies spread,
You grasp the flower, the bloom is shed,"
or any other of the exercises in the school of
Thomson and Pope.
It is easy to see that though Burns admired un-
affectedly 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 on-
coming school. The French Revolution, which
broke upon Europe when he was at the height of
200 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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-minded-
ness made him a Jacobite out of mere antagonism
to the existing regime ; the Revolution only dis-
covered for him the more logical republican creed.
As the leader of a loose-living, hard-drinking set,
such as was to be found in every parish, he was a
determined and free-spoken enemy of the kirk,
whose tyranny he several times encountered. In
his writing he is as vehement an anti-clerical as
Shelley, and much more practical. The political
side of Romanticism, in fact, which in England had
to wait for Byron and Shelley, is already full-grown
in his work. He anticipates and gives complete
expression to one half of the Romantic movement.
What Burns did for the idea of liberty, Blake
did for that and every other idea current among
Wordsworth and his successors. There is nothing
stranger in the history of English literature than
the miracle by which this poet and artist, working
in obscurity, utterly unknown to the literary world
that existed outside him, summed up in himself all
the thoughts and tendencies which were the fruit
of anxious discussion and propaganda on the part
of the authors — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb —
who believed themselves to be the discoverers of
fresh truth unknown to their generation. The con-
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 201
temporary and independent discovery by Wallace
and Darwin of the principle of natural selection
furnishes, perhaps, a rough parallel, but the fact
serves to show how impalpable and universal is
the spread of ideas, how impossible it is to settle
literary indebtedness or construct literary genealogy
with any hope of accuracy. Blake, by himself,
held and expressed quite calmly that condemnation
of the " Classic " school that Wordsworth and
Coleridge proclaimed against the opposition of a
deriding world. As was his habit, he compressed
it into a rude epigram :
" Great things are done when men and mountains meet ;
This is not done by jostling in the street."
The case for nature against urbanity could not
be more tersely stated than that. The German
metaphysical doctrine, which was the deepest part
of the teaching of Wordsworth and Coleridge and
their main discovery, he expresses as curtly and
ofF-handedly :
" The sun''s light when he unfolds it,
Depends on the organ that beholds it."
In the realm of childhood and innocence, which
Wordsworth entered fearfully and pathetically as
an alien traveller, he moves with the simple and
assured ease of one native. He knows the mystical
wonder and horror that Coleridge set forth in The
Ancient Mariner, As for the beliefs of Shelley,
they are already fully developed in his poems.
202 ENGLISH LITERATURE
" The king and the priest are types of the oppressor ;
humanity is crippled by ' mind-forg'd manacles ' ;
love is enslaved to the moral law, which is broken
by the Saviour of mankind ; and, even more subtly
than by Shelley, life is pictured by Blake as a deceit
and a disguise veiling from us the beams of the
Eternal."^
In truth, Blake, despite the imputation of in-
sanity which was his contemporaries' and has later
been his commentators' refuge from assenting to
his conclusions, is a thinker at once bold and
entirely consistent. An absolute unity of belief
inspires all his utterances, cryptic and plain. That
he never succeeded in founding a school nor
gathering followers must be put down in the first
place to the form in which his work was issued
(it never reached the public of his own day) and to
the dark and mysterious mythology in which the
prophetic books, which are the full and extended
statement of his philosophy, are couched, and in
the second place to the inherent difficulty of the
philosophy itself. As he himself says, where we
read black, he reads white. For the common
distinction between good and evil, Blake substitutes
the distinction between imagination and reason ;
and reason, the rationalizing, measuring, comparing
faculty by which we come to impute praise or
blame, is the only evil in his eyes. "There is
nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it
1 Prof. Raleigh.
DR JOHNSON AND HIS TIME 203
so " ; to rid the world of thinking, to substitute for
reason, imagination, and for thought, vision, was
the object of all that he wrote or drew. The
implications of this philosophy carry far, and Blake
was not afraid to follow where they led him.
Fortunately for those who hesitate to embark on
that dark and adventurous journey, his work con-
tains 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 Shake-
speare and Campion died could English show songs
like his
" My silks and fine array,"
and the others which carry the Elizabethan accent.
He could write these things as well as the Eliza-
bethans. In others he was unique.
" Tiger ! Tiger ! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry ? "
In all the English lyric there is no voice so clear,
so separate or distinctive as his.
CHAPTER VII
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL
(1)
There are two ways of approaching the periods
of change and new birth in literature. The
commonest and, for all the study which it entails,
the easiest, is that summed up in the phrase,
literature begets literature. Following it, you
discover and weigh literary influences, the in-
fluence of poet on poet, and book on book. You
find one man harking back to earlier models in his
own tongue, which an intervening age misunder-
stood or despised ; another, turning to the con-
temporary literatures of neighbouring countries ;
another, perhaps, to the splendour and exoticism
of the East. In the matter of form and style,
such a study carries you far. You can trace types
of poetry and metres back to curious and unsus-
pected originals, find the well-known verse of
Burns' epistles turning up in Provencal; Tennyson's
In Memoriavi stanza in use by Ben Jonson ; the
metre of Christabel in minor Elizabethan poetry ;
the peculiar form of FitzGerald's translation of
Omar Khayyam followed by so many imitators
204
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 205
since, itself to be the actual reflection of the rough
metrical scheme of his Persian original. But such
a study, though it is profitable and interesting, can
never lead to the whole truth. As we saw in the
beginning of this book, in the matter of the
Renaissance, every age of discovery and re-birth
has its double aspect. It is a revolution in style
and language, an age of literary experiment and
achievement, but its experiments are dictated by
the excitement of a new subject-matter, and that
subject-matter is so much in the air, so impalpable
and universal, that it eludes analysis. Only you
can be sure that it is this weltering contagion of
new ideas, and new thought — the *' Zeitgeist," the
spirit of the age, or whatever you may call it —
that is the essential and controlling force. Literary
loans and imports give the forms into which it can
be moulded, but without them it would still exist,
and they are only the means by which a spirit
which is in life itself, and which expresses itself
in action, and in concrete human achievement,
gets itself into the written word. The romantic
revival numbers Napoleon amongst its leaders as
well as Byron, Wellington, Pitt and Wilberforce,
as well as Keats and Wordsworth. Only the
literary manifestations of the time concern us here,
but it is important to remember that the passion
for simplification and for a return to nature as a
refuge from the artificial complexities of society,
which inspired the Lyrical Ballads, inspired no
206 ENGLISH LITERATURE
less the course of the Revolution in France, and
later, the destruction by Napoleon of the smaller
feudal states of Germany, which made possible
German nationality and a national spirit.
In this romantic revival, however, the revolu-
tion in form and style matters more than in most.
The Classicism of the previous age had been so
fixed and immutable ; it had been enthroned in
high places, enjoyed the esteem of society, arro-
gated to itself the acceptance which good breeding
and good manners demanded. Dryden had been
a Court poet, careful to change his allegiance
with the changing monarchy. Pope had been the
equal and intimate of the great people of his day,
and his followers, if they did not enjoy the equality,
enjoyed at any rate the patronage of many noble
lords. The effect of this was to give the prestige
of social usage to the verse in which they wrote
and the language they used. " There was," said
Dr Johnson, "before the time of Dryden no
poetical diction, no system of words at once re-
fined from the grossness of domestic use, and
free from the harshness of terms appropriated to
particular arts. Words too familiar or too remote
to defeat the purpose of a poet." This poetic dic-
tion, refined from the grossness of domestic use,
was the standard poetic speech of the eighteenth
century. The heroic couplet in which it was
cast was the standard metre. So that the first
object of the revolt of the Romantics was the
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 207
purely literary object of getting rid of the vice
of an unreal and artificial manner of writing.
They desired simplicity of style.
AVhen the Lyi'ical Ballads of Wordsworth and
Coleridge were published in 1798, the preface
which Wordsworth wrote as their manifesto hardly
touched at all on the poetic imagination or the
attitude of the poet to life and nature. The only
question is that of diction. " The majority of the
following poems," he writes, " are to be considered
as experiments. They were written chiefly with
a view to ascertain how far the language of con-
versation in the middle and lower classes of society
is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure."
And in the longer preface to the second edition,
in which the theories of the new school on the
nature and methods of the poetic imagination are
set forth at length, he returns to the same point.
" The language, too, of these men (that is those
in humble and rustic life) has been adopted . . .
because such men hourly communicate with the
best objects from which the best part of language
is originally derived, and because from their rank
in society, and the sameness and narrow circle of
their intercourse, being less under the influence
of social vanity, they convey their feelings and
notions in simple unelaborated expressions." Social
vanity — the armour which we wear to conceal
our deepest thoughts and feelings — that was
what Wordsworth wished to be rid of, and he
208 ENGLISH LITERATURE
chose the language of the common people, not
because it fitted, as an earlier school of poets who
used the common speech had asserted, the utter-
ance of habitual feeling and common sense, but
because it is the most sincere expression of the
deepest and rarest passion. His object was the
object attained by Shakespeare in some of his
supremest moments; the bare intolerable force of
the speeches after the murder in Macbeth^ or of
King Lear's
" Do not laugh at me.
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia."
Here, then, was one avenue of revolt from the
tyranny of artificiality, the getting back of common
speech into poetry. But there was another, earlier
and more potent in its effect. The eighteenth
century, weary of its own good sense and sanity,
turned to the Middle Ages for picturesqueness and
relief. Romance, of course, had not been dead in
all these years, when Pope and Addison made wit
and good sense the fashionable temper for writing.
There was a strong romantic tradition in the
eighteenth century, though it does not give its
character to the writing of the time. Dr Johnson
was fond of old romances. When he was in Skye
he amused himself by thinking of his Scottish tour
as the journey of a knight-errant. " These fictions
of the Gothic romances," he said, " are not so
remote from credibility as is commonly supposed."
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 209
It is a mistake to suppose that the passion for
mediagvalism began with either Coleridge or Scott.
Horace Walpole was as enthusiastic as either of
them ; good eighteenth-century prelates like Hurd
and Percy found in what they called the Gothic
an inexhaustible source of delight. As was natural,
what attracted them in the Middle Ages was not
their resemblances to the time they lived in, but
the points in which the two differed. None of
them had knowledge enough, or insight enough,
to conceive or sympathize with the humanity of
the thirteenth century, to shudder at its cruelties
and hardnesses and persecutions, or to comprehend
the spiritual elevation and insight of its rarest
minds. " It was art," said William Morris, " art
in which all men shared, that made life romantic
as people called it in those days. That and not
robber barons, and inaccessible kings, with their
hierarchy of serving nobles, and other rubbish."
Morris belonged to a time which knew its Middle
Ages better. To the eighteenth century the robber
barons and the " other rubbish " were the essence
of romance. For Percy and his followers, medi-
aevalism was a collection of what actors call
" properties " — gargoyles, and odds and ends of
armour and castle keeps with secret passages,
banners and gay colours, and gay shimmering
obsolete words. Mistaking what was on its
surface at any rate a subtle and complex civiliza-
tion, for rudeness and quaintness, they seemed to
14
210 ExNGLISH LITERATURE
themselves to pass back into a freer air, where any
extravagance was possible, and good breeding and
mere circumspection and restraint vanished hke
the wind.
A similar longing to be rid of the precision and
order of everyday life drove them to the mountains,
and to the literature of Wales and the Highlands,
to Celtic, or pseudo-Celtic romance. To the fashion
of the time mountains were still frowning and
horrid steeps ; in Gray's Journal of his tour in the
Lakes, a new understanding and appreciation of
nature is only struggling through ; and when
mountains became fashionable, it was at first, and
remained, in part at least, till the time of Byron,
for those very theatrical qualities which had hither-
to put them in abhorrence. Wordsworth in his
Lines ivritten above Tintern Abbey, in which he
sets forth the succeeding stages of his mental
development, refers to this love of the mountains
for their spectacular qualities as the first step in
the progress of his mind to poetic maturity :
" The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion ; the tall rock,
The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms were then to me
An appetite."
This same passion for the " sounding cataract "
and the " tall rock," this appetite for the deep and
gloomy wood, gave its vogue in Wordsworth's
boyhood to Macpherson's Ossian, a book which,
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 211
whether it be completely fraudulent or not, was of
capital importance in the beginnings of the Romantic
movement.
The love of mediaeval quaintness and obsolete
words, however, led to a more important literary
event — the publication of Bishop Percy's edition of
the ballads in the Percy folio — the Reliques of
Ancient Poetry. Percy to his own mind knew the
Middle Ages better than they knew themselves,
and he took care to dress to advantage the rude-
ness and plainness of his originals. Perhaps we
should not blame him. Sir Walter Scott did the
same with better tact and skill in his Border
minstrelsy, and how many distinguished editors
are there who have tamed and smoothed down the
natural wildness and irregularity of Blake ? But
it is more important to observe that when Percy's
reliques came to have their influence on writing
his additions were imitated as much as the poems
on which he grafted them. Chatterton's Rowley
Poems, which in many places seem almost incon-
ceivably banal and artificial to us to-day, caught
their accent from the episcopal editor as much as
from the ballads themselves. None the less, what-
ever its fault, Percy's collection gave its impetus
to one half of the Romantic movement ; it was
eagerly read in Germany, and when it came to
influence Scott and Coleridge it did so not only
directly but through Burger's imitation of it ; it
began the modern study and love of the ballad
212 ENGLISH LITERATURE
which has given us Sister Helen, the White Ship,
and the Lady of Shalott.
But the Romantic revival goes deeper than any
change, however momentous, of fashion or style.
It meant certain fundamental changes in human
outlook. In the first place, one notices in the
authors of the time an extraordinary development
of imaginative sensibility ; the mind at its countless
points of contact with the sensuous world and the
world of thought seems to become more alive and
alert. It is more sensitive to fine impressions, to
finely graded shades of difference. Outward objects
and philosophical ideas seem to increase in their
content and their meaning, and acquire a new
power to enrich the intensest life of the human
spirit. Mountains and lakes, the dignity of the
peasant, the terror of the supernatural, scenes of
history, mediaeval architecture and armour, and
mediaeval thought and poetry, the arts and mytho-
logy of Greece — all became springs of poetic in-
spiration and poetic joy. The impressions of all
these things were unfamiliar and ministered to a
sense of wonder, and by that very fact they were
classed as Romantic, as modes of escape from a
settled way of life. But they were also in a sense
familiar too. The mountains made their appeal to
a deep implanted feeling in man, to his native sense
of his own worth and dignity and splendour as a
part of nature, and his recognition of natural scenery
as necessary, and in its fullest meaning as sufficient,
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 213
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 signi-
ficance for his soul. The greatest poets of the
Romantic revival strove to capture and convey the
influence of nature on the mind and of the mind
on nature, interpenetrating one another. They
were none the less artists because they approached
nature in a state of passive receptivity. They
beheved in the autocracy of the individual imagina-
tion none the less because their mission was to
divine nature and to understand her, rather than to
correct her profusions in the name of art.
In the second place the Romantic revival meant
a development of the historical sense. Thinkers
like Burke and Montesquieu helped students of
politics to acquire perspective ; to conceive modern
institutions not as things separate, and separately
created, but as conditioned by, and evolved from,
the institutions of an earlier day. Even the revolu-
tionary spirit of the time looked both before and
after, and took history as well as the human
perfectibility imagined by philosophers into its
purview. In France the reformers appealed in the
first instance for a States General — a mediaeval
institution — as the corrective of their wrongs, and
later when they could not, like their neighbours in
Belgium, demand reform by way of the restoration
214 ENGLISH LITERATURE
of their historical rights, they were driven to go a
step further back still beyond history, to what they
conceived to be primitive society, and demand the
rights of man. This development of the historical
sense, which had such a widespread influence on
politics, got itself into literature in the creation of
the historical novel. Scott and Chateaubriand
revived the old romance in which, by a peculiar
ingenuity of form, the adventures of a typical hero
of fiction are cast in a historical setting and set
about with portraits of real personages. The
historical sense affected, too, novels dealing with
contemporary life. Scott's best work, his novels
of Scottish character, catch more than half their
excellence from the richness of colour and pro-
portion which the portraiture of the living people
acquires when it is aided by historical knowledge
and imagination.
Lastly, besides this awakened historical sense,
and this quickening of imaginative sensibility to
the message of nature, the Romantic revival
brought to literature a revival of the sense of
the connection between the visible world and
another world which is unseen. The supernatural
which in all but the crudest of mechanisms had
been out of English literature since Macbeth,
took hold on the imaginations of authors, and
brought with it a new subtlety and a new and
nameless horror and fascination. There is nothing
in earlier English literature to set beside the strange
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 216
and terrible indefiniteness of the Ancient Mariner,
and though much in this kind has been written
since, we hav^e not got far beyond the skill and
imagination with which Coleridge and Scott worked
on the instinctive fears that lie buried in the human
mind.
Of all these aspects of the revival, however, the
new sensitiveness and accessibility to the influences
of external nature was the most pervasive and the
most important. Wordsworth speaks for the love
that is in homes where poor men lie, the daily
teaching that is in
" Woods and rills ;
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The peace that is among the lonely hills."
Shelley for the wildness of the west wind, and the
ubiquitous spiritual emotion which speaks equally
in the song of a skylark or in a political revolution.
Byron for the swing and roar of the sea and the
grandeur of savage landscape. Keats for verdurous
glooms and winding mossy ways. Scott and
Coleridge, though like Byron they are less with
nature than with romance, share the same com-
munion.
This imaginative sensibility of the Romantics not
only deepened their communion with nature, it
brought them into a truer relation with what had
before been created in literature and art. The
Romantic revival is the Golden Age of English
criticism ; all the poets were critics of one sort or
216 ENGLISH LITERATURE
another — either formally in essays and prefaces, or
in passing and desultory flashes of illumination in
their correspondence. Wordsworth, in his prefaces,
in his letter to a friend of Burns which contains
such a breadth and clarity of wisdom on things
that seem alien to his sympathies, even in some of
his poems ; Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria,
in his notes on Shakespeare, in those rhapsodies at
Highgate which were the basis for his recorded
table talk ; Keats in his letters ; Shelley in his
Defence of Poetry ; Byron in his satires and
journals ; Scott in those lives of the novelists which
contain so much truth and insight into the works
of fellow craftsmen — they are all to be found turn-
ing the new acuteness of impression which was in
the air they breathed, to the study of literature, as
well as to the study of nature. Alongside of them
were two authors. Lamb and Hazlitt, whose bent
v^^as rather critical than creative, and the best part
of whose intelligence and sympathy was spent on
the sensitive and loving divination of our earlier
literature. With these two men began the criticism
of acting and of pictorial art that have developed
since into two of the main kinds of modern critical
writing.
Romantic criticism, both in its end and its
method, differs widely from that of Dr Johnson
and his school. Wordsworth and Coleridge were
concerned with deep-seated qualities and tempera-
mental differences. Their critical work revolved
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 217
round their conception of the fancy and the
imagination, the one dealing with nature on the
surface and decorating it with imagery, the other
penetrating to its deeper significances. Hazlitt
and Lamb apphed their analogous conception of
wit as a lower quality than humour, in the same
fashion. Dr Johnson looked on the other hand
for correctness of form, for the subordination of
the parts to the whole, for the self-restraint and
common sense which good manners would demand
in society, and for wisdom in practical life. His
school cared more for large general outlines than for
truth in detail. They would not permit the idio-
syncrasy of a personal or individual point of view :
hence they were incapable of understanding lyricism,
and they preferred those forms of writing which
set themselves to express the ideas and feelings that
most men may be supposed to have in common.
Dr Johnson thought a bombastic and rhetorical
passage in Congreve's Mourning Bride better than
the famous description of Dover cliff in King hear.
" The crows, sir," he said of the latter, " impede
your fall." Their town breeding, and possibly, as
we saw in the case of Dr Johnson, an actual
physical disability, made them distrust any clear
and sympathetic rendering of the sense impressions
which nature creates. One cannot imagine Dr
Johnson caring much for the minute observations
of Tennyson's nature poems, or delighting in the
verdurous and mossy alleys of Keats. His test in
218 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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. The famous " This will never do " of
Jeffrey's writing on Wordsworth's Excursion in
the Edinburgh Review was the last word of the
Johnsonian school. New modes of poetry asked of
critics new sympathies and a new way of approach.
But it is time to turn to the authors themselves.
(2)
The case of Wordsworth is peculiar. In his own
day he was vilified and misunderstood ; poets like
Byron, whom most of us would now regard simply
as depending from the school he created, sneered
at him. Shelley and Keats failed to understand
him or his motives ; he was suspected of apostasy,
and when he became poet laureate he was written
off as a turncoat who had played false to the
ideals of his youth. Now common opinion regards
him as a poet above all the others of his age, and
amongst all the English poets standing beside
Milton, but a step below Shakespeare himself— and
we know more about him, more about the processes
by which his soul moved from doubts to certainties,
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 219
from troubles to triumph, than we do about
any other author in our tongue. This knowledge
we have from the poem called the Prelude, which
was published after his death. It was designed to
be only the opening and explanatory section of a
philosophical poem, which was never completed.
Had it been published earlier it would have saved
Wordsworth from the coldness and neglect he
suffered at the hands of younger men like Shelley ;
it might even have made their work different from
what it is. It has made Wordsworth very clear
to us now.
Wordsworth is that rarest thing amongst poets,
a complete innovator. He looked at things in a
new way. He found his subjects in new places ;
and he put them into a new poetic form. At the
turning point of his life, in his early manhood, he
made one great discovery, had one great vision.
By the light of that vision and to communicate
that discovery he wrote his greatest work. By and
by the vision faded, the world fell back into the
light of common day, his philosophy passed from
discovery to acceptance, and all unknown to him
his pen fell into a common way of writing. The
faculty of reading which has added fuel to the fire
of so many waning inspirations was denied him.
He was much too self-centred to lose himself in
the works of others. Only the shock of a change
of environment — a tour in Scotland, or abroad —
shook him into his old thrill of imagination, so that
220 ENGLISH LITERATURE
a few fine things fitfully illumine the enormous
and dreary bulk of his later work. If we lost all
but the Lyj'ical Ballads, the poems of 1804, and
the Prelude, and the Excursion, Wordsworth's
position as a poet would be no lower than it is
now, and he would be more readily accepted by
those who still find themselves uncertain about
him.
The determining factor in his career was the
French Revolution — that great movement which,
besides remaking France and Europe, made our
very modes of thinking anew. While an under-
graduate in Cambridge, Wordsworth made several
vacation visits to France. The first peaceful phase
of the Revolution was at its height ; France and
the assembly were dominated by the little group
of revolutionary orators who took their name from
the south-western province from which most of
them came, and with this group — the Girondists
— Wordsworth threw in his lot. Had he remained
he would probably have gone with them to the
guillotine. As it was, the commands of his
guardian brought him back to England, and he
was forced to contemplate from a distance the
struggle in which he burned to take an active part.
One is accustomed to think of Wordsworth as a
mild old man, but such a picture, if it is thrown
back as a presentment of the Wordsworth of the
'nineties, is a far way from the truth. This darkly
passionate man tortured himself with his longings
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
Reproduced by tlie permission oj the Master and Feliows of Si Johns College., Cainl>ridge.
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL ^21
and his horror. War came, and the prayers for
victory in churches found him in his heart praying
for defeat ; then came the execution of the king ;
then the plot which slew the Gironde. Before all
this Wordsworth trembled as Hamlet did when he
learned the ghost's story. His faith in the world
was shaken. First his own country had taken up
arms against what he believed to be the cause of
liberty. Then faction had destroyed his friends
whom he believed to be its standard-bearers.
What was in the world, in religion, in morality,
that such things could be ? In the face of this
tremendous problem, Wordsworth, unlike Hamlet,
was resolute and determined. It was, perhaps,
characteristic of him that in his desire to get his
feet on firm rock again he fled for a time to the
exactest of sciences — to mathematics. But though
he got certainties there, they must have been,
one judges, certainties too arid for his thirsting
mind. Then he made his great discovery — helped
to it, perhaps, by his sister Dorothy and his
friend Coleridge — he found nature, and in nature,
peace.
Not a very wonderful discovery, you will say ;
but though the cleansing and healing force of
natural surroundings on the mind is a familiar
enough idea in our own day, that is only because
Wordsworth found it. When he gave his message
to the world it was a new message. It is worth
while remembering that it is still an unaccepted
22S ENGLISH IJTERATURE
one. Most of his critics still consider it only
Wordsworth's fun when he wrote :
" One impulse from the vernal wood
Can teach us more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can."
Yet Wordsworth really believed that moral
lessons and ideas were to be gathered from trees
and stones. It was the main part of his teaching.
He believed that his own morality had been so
furnished him, and he wrote his poetry to convince
other people that what had been true for him could
be true for them too.
For him life was a series of impressions, and the
poet's duty was to recapture those impressions, to
isolate them and brood over them, till gradually as
a result of his contemplation emotion stirred again
— an emotion akin to the authentic thrill that had
excited him when the impression was first born in
experience. Then poetry is made ; this emotion
"recollected," as Wordsworth said (we may add,
recreated), " in tranquillity," passes into enduring
verse. He treasured numberless experiences of
this kind in his own life. Some of them are set
forth in the Prelude — that for instance on which
the poem. The Thorn^ in the Lyrical Ballads is
based ; they were one or other of them the occasion
of most of his poems ; the best of them produced
his finest work — such a poem, for instance, as
Resolution and Independence or Gipsies, where
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL
some chance sight met with in one of the poet's
walks is brooded over till it becomes charged with
a tremendous significance for him and for all the
world. If we ask how he differentiated the ex-
periences which had most value for him, we shall
find something deficient. That is to say, things
which were unique and precious to him do not
always appear so to his readers. He counted as
gold much that we regard as dross. But though
we may differ from his judgments, the test which
he applied to his recollected impressions is clear.
He attached most value to those which brought
with them the sense of an indwelling spirit, trans-
fusing and interpenetrating all nature, transfiguring
with its radiance rocks and fields and trees and
the men and women who lived close enough to
them to partake of their strength — the sense, as
he calls it in his Lines above Tintern Abbey, of
something " more deeply interfused " by which all
nature is made one. Sometimes, as in the hymn to
Duty, it is conceived as law. Duty, before whom
the flowers laugh, is the daughter of the voice of
God, through whom the most ancient heavens are
fresh and strong. But in most of his poems its
ends do not trouble ; it is omnipresent ; it pene-
trates everything and transfigures everything ; it
is God. It was Wordsworth's belief that the
perception of this indwelling spirit weakened as
age grew. For a few precious and glorious years
he had the vision
224 ENGLISH IJTERATURE
" When meadow, grove, and stream.
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.""
Then as childhood, when " these intimations of
immortality," this perception of the infinite, are
most strong, passed further and further away, the
vision faded and he was left gazing in the light
of common day. He had his memories and that
was all.
There is, of course, more in the matter than
this, and Wordsworth's beliefs were inextricably
entangled with the conception which Coleridge
borrowed from German philosophy.
" We receive but what we give,"
wrote Coleridge to his friend,
" And in our life alone doth Nature live."
And Wordsworth came to know that the light
he had imagined to be bestowed, was a light
reflected from his own mind. It is easy to pass
from criticism to metaphysics where Coleridge
leads, and wise not to follow.
If Wordsworth represents that side of the
Romantic revival which is best described as the
return to nature, Coleridge has justification for
the phrase " Renascence of Wonder." He revived
the supernatural as a literary force, emancipated it
from the crude mechanism which had been applied
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 225
to it by dilettantes like Horace Walpole and Mrs
Kadcliife, and invested it instead with that air
of suggestion and indefiniteness which gives the
highest potency to it in its effect on the imagina-
tion. But Coleridge is more noteworthy for what
he suggested to others than for what he did in
himself. His poetry is, even more than Words-
worth's, unequal ; he is capable of large tracts of
dreariness and flatness ; he seldom finished what
he began. The Ancient Marine?^ indeed, which
was the fruit of his close companionship with
Wordsworth, is the only completed thing of the
highest quality in the whole of his work. Christabel
is a splendid fragment ; for years the first part lay
uncompleted, and when the odd accident of an
evening's intoxication led him to commence the
second, the inspiration had fled. For the second
part, by giving to the fairy atmosphere of the first
a local habitation and a name, robbed it of its most
precious quality ; what it gave in exchange was
something the public could get better from Scott.
Kubla Khan went unfinished because the call of a
friend broke the thread of the reverie in which it
was composed. In the end came opium and
oceans of talk at Highgate and fouled the springs
of poetry. Coleridge never fulfilled the promise
of his early days with Wordsworth. " He never
spoke out." But it is on the lines laid down by
his share in the pioneer work rather than on the
lines of Wordsworth's that the second generation
15
226 ENGLISH LITERATURE
of Romantic poets — that of Shelley and Keats —
developed.
The work of Wordsworth was conditioned by
the French Revolution but it hardly embodied the
revolutionary spirit. What he conceived to be its
excesses revolted him, and though he sought and
sang freedom, he found it rather in the later revolt
of the nationalities against the Revolution as
manifested in Napoleon himself. The spirit of the
Revolution, as it was understood in France and in
Europe, had to wait for Shelley for its complete
expression. Freedom is the breath of his work —
freedom not only from the tyranny of earthly
powers, but from the tyranny of religion, expressing
itself in republicanism, in atheism, and in complete
emancipation from the current moral code both in
conduct and in writing. The reaction which had
followed the overthrow of Napoleon at Waterloo
sent a wave of absolutism and repression all over
Europe. Italy returned under the heel of Austria;
the Bourbons were restored in France; in England
came the days of Castlereagh and Peterloo. The
poetry of Shelley is the expression of what the
children of the Revolution — men and women who
were brought up in and believed the revolutionary
gospel — thought about these things.
But it is more than that. Of no poet in English,
nor perhaps in any other tongue, could it be said
with more surety that the pursuit of the spirit of
beauty dominates all his work. For Shelley it
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 227
interfused all nature, and to possess it was the goal
of all endeavour. The visible world and the world
of thought mingle themselves inextricably in his
contemplation of it. For him there is no boundary-
line between the two, the one is as real and actual
as the other. In his hands that old -trick of the
poets, the simile, takes on a new and surprising
form. He does not enforce the creations of his
imagination by the analogy of natural appearances ;
his instinct is just the opposite — to describe and
illumine nature by a reference to the creatures
of thought. Other poets, Keats for instance, or
Tennyson, or the older poets like Dante and Homer,
might compare ghosts flying from an enchanter
to leaves flying before the wind. They might
describe a poet wrapped up in his dreams as being
like a bird singing invisible in the brightness of the
sky. But Shelley can write of the west wind as
" Before whose unseen presence the leaves, dead,
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,"
and he can describe a skylark in the heavens as
" Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought."
Of all English poets he is the most completely
lyrical. Nothing that he wrote but is wrought out
of the anguish or joy of his own heart.
" Most wretched souls,"
he writes
" Are cradled into poetry by wrong.
They learn in suffering what they teach in song."
228 ENGLISH LITERATURE
Perhaps his work is too impalpable and moves in
an air too rarefied. It sometimes lacks strength.
It fails to take grip enough of life. Had he lived
he might have given it these things ; there are signs
in his last poems that he would have given it.
But he could hardly have bettered the sheer and
triumphant lyricism of The Skylark, of some of his
choruses, and of the Ode in Dejection, and of the
Lines written on the Eugencenn Hills.
If the Romantic sense of the one-ness of nature
found its highest exponent in Shelley, the Romantic
sensibility to outward impressions reached its
climax in Keats. For him life is a series of sensa-
tions, felt with almost febrile acuteness. Records
of sight and touch and smell crowd every line of
his work ; the scenery of a garden in Hampstead
becomes like a landscape in the tropics, so extra-
ordinary vivid and detailed is his apprehension
and enjoyment of what it has to give him. The
luxuriance of his sensations is matched by the
luxuriance of his powers of expression. Adjectives,
heavily charged with messages for the senses, crowd
every line of his work, and in his earlier poems
overlay so heavily the thought they are meant to
convey that all sense of sequence and structure is
apt to be smothered under their weight. Not that
consecutive thought claims a place in his conception
of his poetry. His ideal was passive contemplation
rather than active mental exertion. " O for a life
of sensations rather than of thoughts," he exclaims
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
From a painting by A. Curran in the National Portrait Gallery.
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 229
in one of his letters ; and in another, " It is more
noble to sit like Jove than to fly like Mercury."
His work has one message and one only, the
lastingness of beauty and its supreme truth. It is
stated in Endymion in lines that are worn bare with
quotation. It is stated again, at the height of his
work, in his greatest ode :
" Beauty is truth, truth beauty : that is all
We know on earth and all we need to know."
His work has its defects ; he died at twenty-six, so
it would be a miracle if it were not so. He lacks
taste and measure ; he offends by an over-luxurious-
ness and sensuousness ; he fails when he is con-
cerned with flesh and blood ; he is apt, as Mr
Robert Bridges has said, '* to class women with
roses and sweetmeats." But in his short life he
attained with surprising rapidity and completeness
to poetic maturity, and perhaps from no other poet
could we find things to match his greatest —
Hyperion, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, and the
Odes.
There remains a poet over whom opinion is more
sharply divided than it is about any other writer
in English. In his day Lord Byron was the idol,
not only of his countrymen, but of Europe. Of
all the poets of the time he was, if we except Scott,
whose vogue he eclipsed, the only one whose work
was universally known and popular. Everybody
read him ; he was admired not only by the multi-
tude and by his equals, but by at least one who
230 ENGLISH LITERATURE
was his superior, the German poet Goethe, who
did not hesitate to say of him that he was the
greatest talent of the century. Though this exalted
opinion still persists on the Continent, hardly any-
one could be found in England to subscribe to it
now. Without insularity, we may claim to be
better judges of authors in our own tongue than
foreign critics, however distinguished and compre-
hending. How then shall be explained Lord
Byron's instant popularity and the position he won?
What were the qualities which gave him the power
he enjoyed ?
In the first place, he appealed by virtue of his
subject-matter — the desultory wanderings of Childe
Harold traversed ground every mile of which was
memorable to men who had watched the struggle
which had been going on in Europe with scarcely
a pause for twenty years. Descriptive journalism
was then and for nearly half a century afterwards
unknown, and the poem by its descriptiveness, by
its appeal to the curiosity of its readers, made the
same kind of success that vividly written special
correspondence would to-day, the charm of metre
superadded. Lord Byron gave his readers some-
thing more, too, than mere description. He added
to it the charm of a personality, and when that
personality was enforced by a title, when it pro-
claimed its sorrows as the age's sorrows, endowed
itself with an air of symbolism and set itself up as
a kind of scapegoat for the nation's sins, its triumph
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 231
was complete. Most men have from time to time
to resist the temptation to pose to themselves ;
many do not even resist it. For all those who
chose to believe themselves blighted by pessimism,
and for all the others who would have loved to
believe it, Byron and his poetry came as an echo
of themselves. Shallow called to shallow. Men
found in him, as their sons found more reputably
in Tennyson, a picture of what they conceived to
be the state of their own minds.
But he was not altogether a man of pretence.
He really and passionately loved freedom ; no one
can question his sincerity in that. He could be a
fine and scathing satirist ; and though he was care-
less, he had great poetic gifts.
(3)
The age of the Romantic revival was one of
poetry rather than of prose ; it was in poetry that
the best minds of the time found their means of
expression. But it produced prose of rare quality
too, and there is delightful reading in the works of
its essayists and occasional writers. In its form the
periodical essay had changed little since it was first
made popular by Addison and Steele. It remained,
primarily, a vehicle for the expression of a person-
ality, and it continued to seek the interests of its
readers by creating or suggesting an individuality
strong enough to carry off any desultory adventure
by the mere force of its own attractiveness. Yet
232 ENGLISH LITERATURE
there is all the difference in the world between
Hazlitt and Addison, or Lamb and Steele. The
Tatler and the Spectator leave you with a sense of
artifice ; Hazlitt and Lamb leave you with a grip
of a real personality — in the one case very vigorous
and combative, in the other set about with a rare
plaintiveness and gentleness, but in both absolutely
sincere. Addison is gay and witty and delightful,
but he only plays at being human ; Lamb's essays
— the translation into print of a heap of idiosyn-
crasies and oddities, and likes and dislikes, and
strange humours — come straight and lovably from
a human soul.
The prose writers of the Romantic movement
brought back two things into writing which had
been out of it since the seventeenth century. They
brought back egotism and they brought back en-
thusiasm. They had the confidence that their own
tastes and experiences were enough to interest their
readers ; they mastered the gift of putting them-
selves on paper. But there is one wide difference
between them and their predecessors. Robert
Burton was an egotist but he was an unconscious
one ; the same is perhaps true, though much less
certainly, of Sir Thomas Browne. In Lamb and
Hazlitt and De Quincey egotism was deliberate,
consciously assumed, the result of a compelling and
shaping art. If one reads Lamb's earlier essays
and prose pieces, one can see the process at work —
watch him consciously imitating Fuller, or Burton,
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 233
or Browne, mirroring their idiosyncrasies, making
their quaintnesses and graces his own. By the
time he came to write the Essays of Elia, he had
mastered the personal style so completely that his
essays seem simply the overflow of talk. They are
so desultory ; they move from one subject to
another so waywardly — such an essay as a Chapter
on Ears, for instance, passing with the easy incon-
sequence of conversation from anatomy through
organ music to beer ; when they quote, as they do
constantly, it is incorrectly, as in the random
reminiscences of talk. Here one would say is the
cream risen to the surface of a full mind and
skimmed at one taking. How far all this is from
the truth we know — know, too, how for months he
polished and rewrote these magazine articles, rub-
bing away roughnesses and corners, taking off the
traces of logical sequences and argument, till in the
finished work of art he mimicked inconsequence so
perfectly that his friends might have been deceived.
And the personality he put on paper was partly an
artistic creation, too. In life Lamb was a nervous,
easily excitable and emotional man ; his years were
worn with the memory of a great tragedy and the
constantly impending fear of a repetition of it.
One must assume him in his way to have been a
good man of business — he was a clerk in the India
House, then a throbbing centre of trade, and the
largest commercial concern in England, and when
he retired his employers gave him a very handsome
234 ENGLISH LITERATURE
pension. In the early portrait by Hazlitt there is
a dark and gleaming look of fire and decision. But
you would never guess it from his books. There
he is the gentle recluse, dreaming over old books,
old furniture, old prints, old plays and playbills ;
living always in the past, loving in the town secluded
byways like the Temple, or the libraries of Oxford
Colleges, and in the country quiet and shaded lanes,
none of the age's enthusiasm for mountains in his
soul. When he turned critic it was not to discern
and praise the power and beauty in the works of
his contemporaries, but to rediscover and interpret
the Elizabethan and Jacobean romantic plays.
This quality of egotism Lamb shares with other
writers of the time, with De Quincey, for instance,
who left buried in work which is extensive and
unequal much that lives by virtue of the singular
elaborateness and loftiness of the style which he
could on occasion command. For the revival of
enthusiasm one must turn to Hazlitt, who brought
his passionate and combative disposition to the
service of criticism, and produced a series of studies
remarkable for their earnestness and their vigour,
and for the essential justness which they display
despite the prejudice on which each of them was
confessedly based.
CHARLES LAMB.
From a /tainting by Henry Meyer in the British Museum.
CHAPTER VIII
THE VICTORIAN AGE
(1)
Had it not been that with two exceptions all the
poets of the Romantic revival died early, it might
be more difficult to draw a line between their
school and that of their successors than it is. As
it happened, the only poet who survived and wrote
was Wordsworth, the oldest of them all. For
long before his death he did nothing that had one
touch of the fire and beauty of his earlier work.
The respect he began, after a lifetime of neglect,
to receive in the years immediately before his
death, was paid not to the conservative laureate of
1848, but to the revolutionary in art and politics
of fifty years before. He had lived on, long after
his work was done,
" To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
That blamed the living man.""
All the others, Keats, Shelley, Byron, were dead
before 1830, and the problem which might have
confronted us had they lived, of adult work running
counter to the tendencies and ideals of youth, does
235
236 ENGLISH LITERATURE
not exist for us. Keats or Shelley might have
lived as long as Carlyle, with whom they were
almost exactly contemporary ; had they done so,
the age of the Romantic revival and the Victorian
age would have been united in the lives of authors
who were working in both. We should conceive,
that is, the whole period as one, just as we conceive
of the Renaissance in England, from Surrey to
Shirley, as one. As it is, we have accustomed
ourselves to a strongly marked line of division. A
man must be on either one side or the other ;
Wordsworth, though he wrote on till 1850, is on
the further side ; Carlyle, though he was born in
the same year as Keats, on the hither side. Still
the accident of length of days must not blind us
to the fact that the Victorian period, though in
many respects its ideals and modes of thinking
differed from those of the period which preceded
it, is essentially an extension of the Romantic
revival and not a fresh start. The coherent in-
spiration of Romanticism disintegrated into separate
lines of development, just as in the seventeenth
century the single inspiration of the Renaissance
broke into different schools. Along these separate
lines represented by such men as Browning, the
Pre-Raphaelites, Arnold, and Meredith, literature
enriched and elaborated itself into fresh forms.
None the less, every author in each of these lines
of literary activity invites his readers to understand
his direct relations to the Romantic movement.
THE VICTORIAN AGE 237
Rossetti touches it through his original, Keats ;
Arnold through Goethe and Byron ; Browning
first through Shelley and then in item after item
of his varied subject-matter.
In one direction the Victorian age achieved a
salient and momentous advance. The Romantic
revival had been interested in nature, in the past,
and in a lesser degree in art, but it had not been
interested in men and women. To Wordsworth
the dalesmen of the Lakes were part of the scenery
they moved in ; he saw men as trees walking, and
when he writes about them as in such great poems
as Resolution and Independence, the brothers,
or Michael, it is as natural objects he treats them,
invested with the lonely remoteness that separates
them from the complexities and passions of life as
it is lived. They are there, you feel, to teach the
same lesson as the landscape teaches in which they
are set. The passing of the old Cumberland
beggar through villages and past farmsteads brings
to those who see him the same kind of consolation
as the impulses from a vernal wood that Words-
worth celebrated in his purely nature poetry.
Compare with Wordsworth, Browning, and note
the fundamental change in the attitude of the
poet that his work reveals. Pippa Passes is a
poem on exactly the same scheme as the Old
Cumberland Beggar, but in treatment no two
things could be further apart. The intervention
of Pippa is dramatic, and though her song is in
238 ENGLISH LITERATURE
the same key as the wordless message of Words-
worth's beggar she is a world apart from him,
because she is something not out of natural history,
but out of life. The Victorian age extended the
imaginative sensibility which its predecessor had
brought to bear on nature and history, to the
complexities of human life. It searched for 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
closely related to life, and thus the object of greater
interest and excitement to its readers, than any-
thing which had been written in the previous
ages. It is the direct result of this extension of
Romanticism that the novel became the char-
acteristic means of literary expression of the time,
and that Browning, the poet who more than all
others represents the essential spirit of his age,
should have been, as it were, a novelist in verse.
Only one other literary form, indeed, could have
ministered adequately to this awakened interest,
but by some luck not easy to understand the
drama, which might have done with greater
economy and directness the work the novel had
to do, remained outside the main stream of
literary activity. To the drama at last it would
seem that we are returning, and it may be that
in the future the direct representation of the
clash of human life, which is still mainly in the
THE VICTORIAN AGE 239
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 Hterature.
But it went further than that. For the first time
since the Renaissance came an era which was
conscious of itself as an epoch in the history of
mankind, and confident of its mission. The
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries revolutionized
cosmography, and altered the face of the physical
world. The nineteenth century, by the discoveries
of its men of science, and by the remarkable and
rapid succession of inventions which revolutionized
the outward face of life, made hardly less alteration
in accepted ways of thinking. The evolutionary
theory, which had been in the air since Goethe, and
to which Darwin was able to give an apparently
incontrovertible basis of scientific fact, profoundly
influenced man's attitude to nature and to religion.
Physical as apart from natural science made
scarcely less advance, and instead of a world created
at 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 concep-
tion of a planet congealing out of a nebula, and of
some lower, simpler, and primeval form of fife
multiplying and diversifying itself through succeed-
ing stages of development to form both the animal
and the vegetable world. This conception not
only enormously excited and stimulated thought.
240 ENGLISH LITERATURE
but it gave thinkers a strange sense of confidence
and certainty not possessed by the age before.
Everything seemed plain to them ; they w^ere 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 begin-
ning to think for themselves, to whose awakening
interest his work so strongly appealed. There
were, no doubt, literary side-currents. Disraeli
survived to show that there were still young men
who thought Byronically. Rossetti and his school
held themselves proudly aloof from the rationalistic
and scientific tendencies of the time, and found in
the Middle Ages, better understood than they had
been either by Coleridge or Scott, a refuge from a
time of factories and fact. The Oxford movement
ministered to the same tendencies in religion and
philosophy ; but it is the scientific spirit, and all
that the scientific spirit implied, its certain doubt,
its care for minuteness and truth of observation,
its growing interest in social processes, and the
conditions under which life is lived, that is the
central fact in Victorian literature.
Tennyson represents more fully than any other
poet this essential spirit of the age. If it be true,
THE VICTORIAN AGE 241
as has been often asserted, that the spirit of an age
is to be found best in the work of lesser men, his
complete identity with the thought of his time is
in itself evidence of his inferiority to his con-
temporary, Browning. Comparisons between the
two men seem inevitable ; they were made by
readers when In Memoriam and Men a7id 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 what is at bottom something simple
and plain — using what has been called the " ornate "
style and founding what is in a way a new poetic
diction which has lasted to our own day ; Brown-
ing delving into the esoteric and the obscure, and
bringing up strange and unfamiliar finds ; Tennyson
in faultless verse registering current newly accepted
ways of thought ; Browning in advance thinking
afresh for himself, occupied ceaselessly in the ardu-
ous 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
Browning. It is this very accuracy that almost
forces us at this time to minimize and perhaps
dispraise Tennyson's work. We have passed from
Victorian certainties, and so he is apt, when he
^ See, for instance, Bagehot's remarkable and ingenious essay
on " Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, or the Pure, Ornate,
and Grotesque Styles in Poetry," for which Enoch Arden and
Dramatis Personce were the text. No writer of criticism better
repays the close attention of students of literature than Bagehot.
16
^V2 ENGLISH LITERATURE
writes in the mood of Locksley Hall and the rest,
to appear to us a little shallow, a little empty, and
a little pretentious.
His earlier poetry, before he took upon himself
the burden of the age, is his best work, and it bears
strongly marked upon it the influence of Keats.
Such a poem, for instance, as CEnone shows an
extraordinarily fine sense of language and melody,
and the capacity caught from Keats of conveying a
rich and highly coloured pictorial effect. No other
poet, save Keats, has had a sense of colour so
highly developed as Tennyson's. From his boy-
hood he was an exceedingly close and sympathetic
observer of the outward forms of nature, and he
makes a splendid use of what his eyes had taught
him in these earlier poems. liater his interest in
insects and birds and flowers outran the legitimate
opportunity he possessed of using it in poetry. It
was his habit, his son tells us, to keep notebooks
of things he had observed in his garden or in his
walks, and to work them up afterwards into similes
for the Princess and the Idylls of the King. Read
in the books written by admirers, in which they
have been studied and collected (there are several
of them), these similes are pleasing enough ; in the
text where they stand they are apt to have the air
of impertinences, beautiful and extravagant im-
pertinences no doubt, but alien to their setting.
In one of the Idylls of the King the fall of a
drunken knight from his horse is compared to the
ALFRED LORD TENNYSON.
From a painting by G. F. IVatis, R.A.
THE VICTORIAN AGE 243
fall of a jutting edge of cliff and with it a lance-like
fir-tree, which Tennyson had observed near his
home, and one cannot resist the feeling that the
comparison is a thought too great for the thing it
was meant to illustrate. So, too, in the Princess
when he describes a handwriting,
" In such a hand as when a field of corn
Bows all its ears before the roaring East,'"*
he is using up a sight noted in his walks and
transmuted into poetry on a trivial and frivolous
occasion. You do not feel, in fact, that the hand-
writing visualized spontaneously called up the
comparison ; you are as good as certain that the
simile existed waiting for use before the hand-
writing was thought of.
The accuracy of his observation of nature, his
love of birds and larvae, is matched by the careful-
ness with which he embodied, 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 eddying wild suns that wheeling cast
The planets,"
just as he knows what the catkins on the willows
are like, or the names of the butterflies : but he is
capable, on occasion, of " dragging it in," as in
244 ENGLISH LITERATURE
" The nebulous star we call the sun,
If that hypothesis of theirs be sound,"
from the mere pride in his familiarity with the last
new thing. His dealings with science, that is, no
more than his dealings with nature, have that
inevitableness, that spontaneous appropriateness
that we feel we have a right to ask from great
poetry.
Had Edgar Allan Poe wanted an example for
his theory of the impossibility of writing, in modern
times, a long poem, he might have found it in
Tennyson. His strength is in his shorter pieces ;
even where as in In 3Iemoriam he has conceived
and written something at once extended and
beautiful, the beauty lies rather in the separate
parts ; the thing is more in the nature of a sonnet
sequence than a continuous poem. Of his other
larger works, the Princess, a scarcely happy blend
between burlesque in the manner of the Rape of
the Lock, and a serious apostleship of the liberation
of women, is redeemed by the lyrics which it
contains. Tennyson's innate conservatism hardly
squared with the liberalizing tendencies he caught
from the more advanced thought of his age, in
writing it. Something of the same kind is true of
Maud, which is a novel told in dramatically
varied verse. The hero is morbid, his social satire
peevish, and a story which could have been com-
pletely redeemed by the ending (the death of the
hero) which artistic fitness demands, is of value
THE VICTORIAN AGE 245
for us now through its three amazing songs, in
which the lyric genius of Tennyson reached its
finest flower. It cannot be denied, either, that he
failed — though magnificently — in the Idylls of the
King. The odds were heavily against him in the
choice of a subject. Arthur is at once too legend-
ary and too shadowy for an epic hero, and nothing
but the treatment that Milton gave to Satan {i.e.
flat substitution of the legendary person by a newly
created character) could fit him for the place.
Even if Arthur had been more promising than
he is, Tennyson's sympathies were fundamentally
alien from the moral and religious atmosphere of
Arthurian romance. His robust Protestantism
left no room for mysticism ; he could neither
appreciate nor render the mystical fervour and
exaltation which is in the old history of the Holy
Grail. Nor could he comprehend the morality of a
society where courage, sympathy for the oppressed,
loyalty and courtesy were the only essential
virtues, and love took the way of freedom and the
heart rather than the way of law. In his heart
Tennyson's attitude to the ideals of chivalry and
the old stories in which they are embodied difflered
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
246 ENGLISH LITERATURE
enterprise failed, and left us with a series of mid-
Victorian novels in verse in which the knights
figure as heroes of the common mid- Victorian
type.
But if he failed in his larger poems, he had a
genius little short of perfect in his handling of
shorter forms. The Arthurian story which pro-
duced only middling moralizing in the Idylls, gave
us as well the supremely written Homeric episode
of the Morte (TArthm^ and the sharp and defined
beauty of Sir Galahad and the Lady of Shallott.
Tennyson had a touch of the pre-Raphaelite faculty
of minute painting in words, and the writing of
these poems is as clear and naive as in the best
things of Rossetti. He had also what neither
Rossetti nor any of his contemporaries in verse,
except Browning, had, a fine gift of understanding
humanity. The peasants of his English idylls are
conceived with as much breadth of sympathy and
richness of humour, as purely and as surely, as the
peasants of Chaucer or Burns. A note of passion-
ate humanity is indeed in all his work. It makes
vivid and intense his scholarly handling of Greek
myth ; always the unchanging human aspect of it
attracts him most, in (Enone's grief, in the in-
domitableness of Ulysses, in the weariness and dis-
illusionment in Tithonus. It has been the cause
of the comfort he has brought to sorrow ; none
of his generation takes such a human attitude
to death. Shelley could yearn for the infinite,
THE VICTORIAN AGE 247
Browning treat it as the last and greatest ad-
venture, Arnold meet it clear-eyed and resigned.
To Wordsworth it is the mere return of man the
transient to Nature the eternal.
" No motion has she now ; no force,
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees."
To Tennyson it brings the fundamental human
home-sickness for familiar things.
" Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square.""
It is an accent which wakes an echo in a thousand
hearts.
(2)
While Tennyson, in his own special way and, so
to speak, in collaboration with the spirit of the age,
was carrying on the work of Romanticism on its
normal lines, Browning was finding a new style
and a new subject-matter. In his youth he had
begun as an imitator of Shelley, and Pauline and
Paracelsus remain to show what the influence of
the " sun-treader " was on his poetry. But as early
as his second publication, Belb 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
248 ENGLISH LITERATURE
high and undimmed while Hfe was left him. Men
and Women was followed by an extraordinary
narrative poem, The Ring and the Book, and it
by several volumes of scarcely less brilliance, the
last of which appeared on the very day of his
death.
Of the two classes into which, as we saw when
we were studying Burns, creative artists can be
divided. Browning belongs to that one which makes
everything new for itself, and has in consequence
to educate the readers by whom its work can alone
be judged. He was an innovator in nearly every-
thing he did ; he thought for himself ; he wrote for
himself, and in his own way. And because he
refused to follow ordinary modes of writing, he
was and is still widely credited with being tortured
and obscure.^ The charge of obscurity is unfor-
tunate 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
^ The deeper causes of Browning's obscurity have been detailed
in Chapter IV. of this book. It may be added for the benefit of
the reader who fights shy on the report of it, that in nine cases
out of ten it arises simply from his colloquial method ; we go to
him expecting the smoothness and completeness of Tennyson ;
we find in him the irregularities, the suppressions, the quick
changes of talk— the clipped, clever talk of much-idea'd people
who hurry breathlessly from one aspect to another of a subject
— an obscurity similar to that of Shakespeare in his later plays,
particularly The Tempest and the Winter's Tale.
THE VICTORIAN AGE 249
in life was men and women, and in them, not their
actions, but the motives which governed their
actions. To lay bare fully the working of motive
in a narrative form with himself as narrator was
obviously impossible ; the strict dramatic form,
though he attained some success in it, does not seem
to have attracted him, probably because in it the
ultimate stress must be on the thing done rather
than the thing thought ; there remained, therefore,
of the ancient forms of poetry, the lyric. The
lyric had of course been used before to express
emotions imagined and not real to the poet himself ;
the Elizabethans and their successors, Donne and
his school, in the seventeenth century had so used
it ; Browning was the first to project it to express
imagined emotions of men and women, whether
typical or individual, whom he himself had created.
Alongside this perversion of the lyric, he created a
looser and freer form, the dramatic monologue, in
which most of his most famous poems, Cleon,
Sludge the Medium, Bishop Blougrams Apology ^
etc., are cast. In the convention which Browning
established, 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 inter-
dependent whole), and their author's peculiar and
robust philosophy of life. Out of the dramatic
monologues he devised the scheme of The Ring
250 ENGLISH LITERATURE
and the Book, a narrative poem in which the
episodes, and not the plot, are the basis of the
structure, and the story of a trifling and sordid
crime is set forth as it appeared to the minds of
the chief actors in succession/ To these new
forms he added the originality of an extraordinary
realism in style. Few poets have the power by
a word, a phrase, a flash of observation in detail
to make you see the event as Browning makes
you see it.
Many books have been written on the philosophy
of Browning's poetry. Stated briefly, its message
is that of an optimism which depends on a recogni-
tion of the strenuousness of life. The base of his
creed, as of Carlyle's, is the gospel of labour ; he
believes in the supreme moral worth of effort.
Life is a " training school " for a future existence,
and our place in it depends on the courage and
strenuousness with which we have laboured here.
Evil is in the world only as an instrument in the
process of development ; by conquering it we
exercise our spiritual faculties the more. Only
torpor is the supreme sin, even as in The Statue
and the Bust, where effort would have been to a
criminal end.
1 This way of telling a story, which is implicit in the method
of Richardson, who used the epistolary form to make his readers
see a situation separately from the respective points of view of
all the persons concerned in it, has been revived in a new form
in our own day by Mr Arnold Bennett, whose novels Clayhanger
and Hilda Lessrvay make a new departure in English fiction.
THE VICTORIAN AGE 261
" The counter our lovers staked was lost
As surely as if it were lawful coin :
And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Was, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a crime, I say."
All the other main ideas of his poetry fit with
perfect consistency on to his scheme. Love, the
manifestation of a man's or a woman's nature in
the highest and most intimate relationship possible,
is an opportunity — the highest opportunity — for
spiritual growth. It can reach this end though an
actual and earthly union is impossible.
" She has lost me, I have gained her ;
Her soul's mine and thus grown perfect,
I shall pass my life's remainder.
Life will just hold out the proving
Both our powers, alone and blended :
And then come the next life quickly !
This world's use will have been ended."
It follows that the reward of effort is the promise
of immortality, and that for each man, just because
his thoughts and motives taken together count, and
not one alone, there is infinite hope.
The contemporaries of Tennyson and Browning
in poetry divide themselves into three separate
schools. Nearest to them in temper is the school of
Matthew Arnold and Clough ; they have the same
quick sensitiveness to the intellectual tendencies
of the age, but their foothold in a time of shifting
and dissolving creeds is a stoical resignation very
different from the buoyant optimism of Browning,
252 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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 ItaUan
sources, Morris from Norman) a Middle Age which
neither Scott nor Coleridge had more than partially
and brokenly understood. The last school, that
to which Swinburne and Meredith with all their
differences unite in belonging, gave up Christianity
with scarcely so much as a regret —
" We have said to the dream that caress'd and the dread
that smote us,
Good-night and good-bye " —
and turned with a new hope and exultation to the
worship of our immemorial mother the earth. In
both of them, the note of enthusiasm for political
liberty which had been lost in Wordsworth after
1815, and was too early extinguished with Shelley,
was revived by the Italian Revolution in splendour
and fire.
(3)
As one gets nearer one's own time, a certain
change comes insensibly over one's literary studies.
Literature comes more and more to mean imagin-
ative literature or writing about imaginative litera-
ture. The mass of writing comes to be taken not
as literature, but as argument or information ; we
consider it purely from the point of view of its
subject-matter. A comparison will make this at
once clear. When a man reads Bacon, he com-
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
From a paintings by G. F. Watts, R.A.
THE VICTORIAN AGE 253
monly regards himself as engaged in the study of
English literature ; when he reads Darwin, he is
occupied in the study of natural science. A
reader of Bacon's time would have looked on him
as we look on Darwin now.
The distinction is obviously illogical, but a
writer on English literature within brief limits is
forced to bow to it if he wishes his book to avoid
the dreariness of a summary, and he can plead in
extenuation the increased literary output of the
later age, and the incompleteness with which time
so far has done its work in sifting the memorable
from the forgettable, the ephemeral from what is
going to last. The main body of imaginative
prose literature — the novel — is treated of in the
next chapter, and here no attempt will be made to
deal with any but the admittedly greatest names of
those whose object in writing was a literary object.
Nothing can be said, for instance, of the writings,
admirable in their literary qualities of purity and
terseness, of Darwin or Huxley ; or of the polemics
of Newman (whose literary qualities have been
perhaps overrated) ; or of Kingsley or Maurice.
These authors, one and all, interpose no barrier, so
to speak, between their subject-matter and their
readers ; you are not when you read them conscious
of a literary intention, but of some utilitarian one ;
and as an essay on English literature is by no
means a handbook to serious reading, they will be
no more mentioned here.
254 ENGLISH LITERATURE
But in the case of more than one nineteenth-
century writer in prose, this method of exclusion
cannot apply. Carlyle and Ruskin, Macaulay and
Matthew Arnold were all professional men of
letters ; each in the voluminous compass of his
works touched on a large variety of subjects ; all
wrote highly individual and peculiar styles ; and
all, without being exactly professional philosophers
or professional preachers, were, as every good man
of letters, whether he denies it or not, is and must
be, lay moralists and prophets. Of the two first
Ruskin is plain and easily read, and he derives his
message; Carlyle, his original, is apt to be tortured
and obscure, and probably some guidance to him
may be of service to those who embark on his
works.
As we saw, he was the oldest of the Victorians ;
he was over forty when the Queen came to the
throne. Already his years of preparation in Scot-
land, town and country, were over, and he had
settled in that famous little house in Chelsea which
for nearly half a century to come was to be one of
the central hearths of literary London. More than
that, he had already fully formed his mode of
thought and his peculiar style. Sartor Resartus
was written and published serially before the Queen
came to the throne ; the French Revolution came
in the year of her accession at the very time that
Carlyle's lectures were making him a fashionable
sensation ; most of his miscellaneous essays had
THE VICTORIAN AGE 255
already appeared in the reviews. But with the
strict Victorian era, as if to justify the usually
arbitrary division of literary history by dynastic
periods, there came a new spirit into his work.
For the first time he applied his peculiar system of
ideas to contemporary politics. Chartism appeared
in 1839; Past and Present, which does the same
thing as Chartism in an artistic form, three years
later. They were followed by one other book —
Latter-Day Pamphlets — addressed particularly to
contemporary conditions, and by two remarkable
and voluminous historical works. Then came the
death of his wife, and for the last fifteen years of
his life silence, broken only briefly and at rare
intervals.
The reader who comes to Carlyle with precon-
ceived notions based on what he has heard of the
subject-matter of his books is certain to be surprised
by what he finds. There are histories in the canon
of his works and pamphlets on contemporary
problems, but they are composed on a plan that
no other historian and no other social reformer
would own. A reader will find in them no argu-
ment, next to no reasoning, and little practical
judgment. Carlyle was not a great " thinker " in
the strictest sense of that term. He was under
the control, not of his reason, but of his emotions ;
deep feeling, a volcanic intensity of temperament
flaming into the light and heat of prophecy, in-
vective, derision, or a simple splendour of eloquence,
256 ENGLISH LITERATURE
is the characteristic of his work. Against cold-
blooded argument his passionate nature rose in
fierce rebellion ; he had no patience with the
formalist or the doctrinaire. Nor had he the
faculty of analysis ; his historical works are a
series of pictures, splendidly and vividly con-
ceived, and with enormous colour and a fine
illusion of reality, but one-sided as regards the
truth. In his essays on hero-worship he contents
himself with a noisy reiteration of the general
predicate of heroism; there is very little except
their names and the titles to differentiate one sort
of hero from another. His picture of contemporary
conditions is not so much a reasoned indictment
as a wild and fantastic orgy of epithets : " dark
simmering pit of Tophet," " bottomless universal
hypocrisies," and all the rest. In it all he left no
practical scheme. His works are fundamentally
not about politics or history or literature, but
about himself. They are the exposition of a
splendid egotism, fiercely enthusiastic about one
or two deeply held convictions ; their strength
does not lie in their matter of fact.
This is, perhaps, a condemnation of him in the
minds of those people who ask of a social reformer
an actuarially accurate scheme for the abolition of
poverty, or from a prophet a correct forecast of the
result of the next general election. Carlyle has
little help for these and no message save the dis-
concerting one of their own futility. His message
THE VICTORIAN AGE 257
is at once larger and simpler, for though his form
was prose, his soul was a poet's soul, and what he
has to say is a poet's word. In a way, it is partly
Wordsworth's own. The chief end of life, his
message is, is the performance of duty, chiefly the
duty of work. "Do thy little stroke of work;
this is Nature's voice, and the sum of all the
commandments, to each man." All true work is
religion, all true work is worship ; to labour is to
pray. And after work, obedience the best dis-
cipline, so he says in Past and Present, for govern-
ing, and " our universal duty and destiny ; wherein
whoso will not bend must break." Carlyle asked
of every man action and obedience and to bow
to duty ; he also required of him sincerity and
veracity, the duty of being a real and not a sham,
a strenuous warfare against cant. The historical
facts with which he had to deal he grouped under
these embracing categories, and in the French
Revolution, which is as much a treasure-house of
his philosophy as a history, there is hardly a page
on which they do not appear. "Quack-ridden,"
he says, " in that one word lies all misery whatso-
ever."
These bare elemental precepts he clothes in a
garment of amazing and bizarre richness. There
is nothing else in English faintly resembling the
astonishing eccentricity and individuality of his
style. Gifted with an extraordinarily excitable
and vivid imagination ; seeing things with sudden
17
258 ENGLISH LITERATURE
and tremendous vividness, as in a searchlight or a
Hghtning flash, he contrived to convey to his
readers his impressions full charged with the
original emotion that produced them, and thus
with the highest poetic eff'ect. There is nothing
in all descriptive writing to match the vividness of
some of the scenes in the French Revolution or
in the narrative part of 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 documents, in Sartor Resartus.
Alongside this unmatched pictorial vividness and
a quite amazing richness and rhythm of language,
more surprising and original than anything out
of Shakespeare, there are of course striking defects
— a wearisome reiteration of emphasis, a clumsiness
of construction, a saddening fondness for solecisms
and hybrid inventions of his own. The reader
who is interested in these (and everyone who reads
him is forced to become so) will find them faith-
fully dealt with in John Sterling's remarkable
letter (quoted in Carlyle's Life of Sterling) on
Sai'tor Resa7^tus. But gross as they are, and
frequently as they provide matter for serious
offence, these eccentricities of language link them-
selves up in a strange indissoluble way with
Carlyle's individuality and his power as an artist.
They are not to be imitated, but he would be much
less than he is without them, and they act by their
THE VICTORIAN AGE 259
very strength and pungency as a preservative of
his work. That of all the political pamphlets
which the new era of reform occasioned, his, which
were the least in sympathy with it and are the
furthest off the main stream of our political thinking
now, alone continue to be read, must be laid down
not only to the prophetic fervour and fire of their
inspiration but to the dark and violent magic of
their style.
CHAPTER IX
THE NOVEL
(1)
The faculty for telling stories is the oldest artistic
faculty in the world, and the deepest implanted in
the heart of man. Before the rudest cave-pictures
were scratched on the stone, the story-teller, it is
not unreasonable to suppose, was plying his trade.
All early poetry is simply story-telling in verse.
Stories are the first literary interest of the awaken-
ing 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 pre-
historic times, so does the epic, the ballad and the
lyric. The novel as we know it dates, practically
speaking, from 1740. What is the reason it is so
late in appearing ?
The answer is, partly at any rate, that there
seems no room for good drama and good fiction at
the same time in literature ; drama and novels do
260
THOMAS CARLVLE.
From the f>ortrait by James M'Neitl Whistle}-.
THE NOVEL 261
not easily exist side by side, and the novel had to
wait for the decadence of the drama before it could
appear and triumph. If one were to make a table
of succession for the various kinds of literature as
they have been used naturally and spontaneously
(not academically), the order would be the epic,
the drama, the novel ; and it would be obvious at
once that the order stood for something more than
chronological succession, and that literature in its
function as a representation and criticism of life
passed from form to form in the search of greater
freedom, greater subtlety, and greater power. At
present we seem to be at the climax of the third
stage in this development ; there are signs that the
fourth is on the way, and that it will be a return to
drama — not to the old, formal, ordered kind, but
something new and freer, ready to gather up and
interpret what there is of newness and freedom in
the spirit of man and the society in which he lives
and to suit its methods to the new material which
comes to its hand.
The novel, then, had to wait for the drama's
decline, but there was literary story-telling long be-
fore that. There were mediaeval romances in prose
and verse ; Renaissance pastoral tales, and stories
of adventure ; collections, plenty of them, of short
stories modelled on Boccaccio, like those in Painter's
Palace of Pleasure. But none of these, not even
romances which deal in moral and sententious advice
like Euphues, approach the essence of the novel as
262 ENGLISH LITERATURE
we know it. They are all (except Euphues, which
is simply a framework of travel for a book of
aphorisms) simple and objective ; they set forth
incidents or series of incidents ; long or short, they
are anecdotes only — they take little account of
character. It was impossible we should have the
novel as distinct from the tale, till stories acquired
a subjective interest for us ; till we began to think
about character and to look at actions not only
outwardly, but within at their springs.
As has been stated earlier 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 con-
cerned with actions viewed outwardly, a psycho-
logical interest ; he had taught that " character is
destiny," and that men's actions and fates spring
not from outward agencies, but from within in their
own souls. The age began to take a deep and
curious interest in men's lives ; biography was
written for the first time and autobiography ; it is
the great period of memoir- writing both in England
and France ; authors like Robert Burton came,
whose delight was to dig down into human nature
in search for oddities and individualities of disposi-
tion ; humanity as the great subject of enquiry
for all men came to its own. All this has a direct
bearing on the birth of the novel. One transient
form of literature in the seventeenth century — the
Character — is an ancestor in the direct line. The
THE NOVEL 263
collections of them — Earle's Microcosmogra^phy is
the best — are not very exciting reading, and they
never perhaps quite succeeded in naturalizing a
form borrowed from the later age of Greece, but
their importance in the history of the novel to come
is clear. Take them and add them to the story of
adventure — i.e. introduce each fresh person in your
plot with a description in the character form, and
the step you have made towards the novel is a long
one ; you have given to plot which was already
there the added interest of character.
That, however, was not quite how the thing
worked in actual fact. At the heels of the
" Character " came the periodical essay of Addison
and Steele. Their interest in contemporary types
was of the same quality as Earle's or Hall's, but
they went a different way to work. Where these
compressed and cultivated a style which was stac-
cato and epigrammatic, huddling all the traits
of their subject in short sharp sentences that follow
each other with all the brevity and curtness of
items in a prescription, Addison and Steele
observed a more artistic plan. They made, as it
were, the prescription up, adding one ingredient
after another slowly as the mixture dissolved. You
are introduced to Sir Roger de Coverley, and to a
number of other typical people, and then, in a series
of essays which if they were disengaged from their
setting would be to all intents a novel and a fine
one, you are made aware one by one of different
264 ENGLISH LITERATURE
traits in the squire's character and those of his
friends, each trait generally enshrined in an incident
which illustrates it ; you get to know them, that
is, gradually, as you would in real life, and not all
in a breath, in a series of compressed statements,
as is the way of the character writers. With the
Coverley essays in the Spectator, the novel in one
of its forms— that in which an invisible and all-
knowing narrator tells a story in which someone
else whose character he lays bare for us is the hero
— is as good as achieved.
Another manner of fiction — the autobiographical
— had already been invented. It grew directly out
of the public interest in autobiography, and particu-
larly in the tales of their voyages which the dis-
coverers 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 auto-
biographical ; their interest is a subjective interest.
Here is a man who endeavours to interest you, not
in the character of some other person he has
imagined or observed, but in himself. His treat-
ment of it is characteristic of the awakening talent
for fiction of his time. The Pilgrims Progress is
begun as an allegory, and so continues for a little
space till the story takes hold of the author. When
it does, whether he knew it or not, allegory goes to
the winds. But the autobiographical form of fiction
THE NOVEL 265
in its highest art is the creation of Defoe. He told
stories of adventure, incidents modelled on real life,
as many tellers of tales had done before him, but
to the form as he found it he added a psychological
interest — the interest of the character of the
narrator. He contrived to observe in his writing
a scrupulous and realistic fidelity and appropriate-
ness to the conditions in which the story was to be
told. We learn about Crusoe's island, for instance,
gradually just as Crusoe learns of it himself, though
the author is careful, by taking his narrator up to a
high point of vantage the day after his arrival, that
we shall learn the essentials of it, so long as veri-
similitude is not sacrificed, as soon as possible. It
is the paradox of the English novel that these our
earliest efforts in fiction were meant, unlike the
romances which preceded them, to pass for truth.
Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year was widely
taken as literal fact, and it is still quoted as such
occasionally by rash though reputable historians.
So that in England the novel began with realism,
as it has culminated, and across two centuries
Defoe and the " naturalists " meet each other.
Defoe, it is proper also in this place to notice, fixed
the peculiar form of the historical novel. In his
Memoirs of a Cavalier, the narrative of an imaginary
person's adventures in a historical setting is inter-
spersed with the entrance of actual historical per-
sonages, exactly the method of historical romancing
which was brought to perfection by Sir A'\^alter Scott.
266 ENGLISH LITERATURE
(2)
In the eighteenth century came the decline of
the drama for which the novel had been waiting.
By 1660 the romantic drama of Elizabeth's time
was dead ; the comedy of the Restoration which
followed, witty and brilliant though it was, reflected
a society too licentious and artificial to secure it
permanence ; by the time of Addison play-writing
had fallen to journey-work, and the theatre to
openly expressed contempt. When Richardson
and Fielding published their novels there was
nothing to compete with fiction in the popular
taste. And besides, a new class of readers had
arrived for whom some new kind of literature was
needed. The growth of business and prosperity
had increased the number of persons of leisure.
Town society and social life as we know it to-day
dates from precisely this period, and society must
needs have something, humanly interesting and
not too exacting, to read. Addison and Steele
ministered to this new taste, but in too brief a
manner to satisfy it ; it needed something more.
It would seem as though the novel had been
waiting for this favourable circumstance. In a
sudden burst of prolific inventiveness, which can
be paralleled in all letters only by the period
of Marlowe and Shakespeare, masterpiece after
masterpiece poured from the press. Within two
generations, besides Richardson and Fielding came
THE NOVEL 267
Sterne and Goldsmith and Smollett and Fanny
Burney in naturalism, and Horace Walpole and
Mrs RadclifFe in the new way of romance. Novels
by minor authors were published in thousands as
well. The novel, in fact, besides being the occasion
of literature of the highest class, attracted by its
lucrativeness that undercurrent of journey-work
authorship which had hitherto busied itself in
poetry or plays. Fiction has been its chief occupa-
tion 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 attention to
those authors to whom the English novel as a
more or less fixed form is indebted for its peculiar
characteristics. Foremost among these are Rich-
ardson and Fielding; after them there is Walter
Scott. After him, in the nineteenth century,
Dickens and Meredith and Mr Hardy ; last of all
the French realists and the new school of romance.
To one or other of these originals all the great
authors in the long list of English novelists owe
their method and their choice of subject-matter.
With Defoe fiction gained verisimilitude, it
ceased to deal with the incredible ; it aimed at
exhibiting, though in strange and memorable cir-
cumstances, the workings of the ordinary mind.
It is Richardson's main claim to fame that he
268 ENGLISH LITERATURE
contrived a form of novel which exhibited an
ordinary mind working in normal circumstances,
and that he did this with a minuteness which till
then had never been thought of and has not since
been surpassed. His talent is very exactly a
microscopical talent ; under it the common stuff
of life, separated from its surroundings and
magnified beyond previous knowledge, yields
strange and new and deeply interesting sights.
He carried into the study of character, which
had begun in Addison with an eye to externals
and eccentricities, a minute faculty of inspection
which watched and recorded unconscious mental
and emotional processes.
To do this he employed a method which was, in
effect, a compromise between that of the autobio-
graphy 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 know-
ledge of the supposed speaker, and that conse-
quently the presentation of all but one of the
characters of the book is an external presentation.
We know, that is, of Man Friday only what
Crusoe could, according to realistic appropriateness,
tell us about him. We do not know what he
thought or felt within himself On the other hand,
the method of invisible narration had not at this
time acquired the faculty which it possesses now of
doing Friday's thinking aloud or exposing fully the
workings of his mind. So that Richardson, whose
THE NOVEL 269
interests were psychological, whose strength and
talent lay in the presentation of the states of mind
appropriate to situations of passion or intrigue, had
to look about him for a new form, and that form
he found in the novel of letters. In a way, if the
end of a novel be the presentation not of action,
but of the springs of action ; if the external event
is in it always of less importance than the emotions
which conditioned it, and the emotions which it
set working, the novel of letters is the supreme
manner for fiction. Consider the possibilities of
it. There is a series of events in which A, B, and C
are concerned. Not only can the outward events
be narrated as they appeared to all three separately
by means of letters from each to another, or to
a fourth party, but the motives of each, and the
emotions which each experiences as a result of the
actions of the others or them all, can be laid bare.
No other method can wind itself so completely
into the psychological intricacies and recesses
which lie behind every event. It is a mistake to
suppose that Richardson adopted it haphazard or
merely because he was a "model letter- writer "
in his youth. He had a consciously worked-out
theory and a deliberate artistic purpose. A mere
chronicle of events, he says himself in Sir Charles
Grandison, would be shorter, but would it be
equally interesting ? Yet the form, as everybody
knows, has not been popular ; even an expert
novel-reader could hardly name offhand more
270 ENGLISH LITERATURE
than two or three examples of it since Richardson's
day. Why is this ? Well, chiefly it is because
the mass of novelists have not had Richardson's
knowledge of, or interest in, the psychological
under-side of life, and those who have, as, amongst
the moderns, Henry James, have devised out of
the convention of the invisible narrator a method
by which they can with greater economy attain in
practice fairly good results. For the mere narra-
tion of action in which the study of character plays
a subsidiary part, it was, of course, from the begin-
ning impossible. Scott turned aside at the height
of his power to try it in Redgauntlet ; he never
made a second attempt.
For Richardson's purpose, it answered admirably,
and he used it with supreme effect. Particularly
he excelled in that side of the novelist's craft which
has ever since (whether because he started it or
not) proved the subtlest and most attractive, the
presentation of women. Richardson was one of
those men who are not at their ease in other men's
society, and whom other men, to put it plainly, are
apt to regard as coxcombs and fools. But he had
a genius for the friendship and confidence of
women. In his youth he wrote love-letters for
them. His first novel grew out of a plan to
exhibit in a series of letters the quality of feminine
virtue, and in its essence (though with a ludicrous
and so to speak " kitchen-maidish " misunderstand-
ing of his own sex) adheres to the plan. His
THE NOVEL 271
second novel, Sir Charles Grandison, which designs
to set up a model man against the monster of
iniquity in Pamela, is successful only so far as it
exhibits the thoughts and feelings of the heroine
whom Grandison ultimately marries. His last,
Claiissa Haj'lowe, is a masterpiece of sympathetic
divination into the feminine mind. Clarissa is, as
has been well said, the " Eve of fiction, the proto-
type of the modern heroine " ; feminine psychology,
as good as unknown before (Shakespeare's women
being the " Fridays " of a highly intelligent Crusoe),
has hardly been brought further since. But
Clarissa is more than mere psychology ; whether
she represents a contemporary tendency or whether
Richardson made her so, she starts a new epoch.
" This," says Henley, " is perhaps her finest virtue
as it is certainly her greatest charm : that until she
set the example, woman in literature as a self-
suffering individuality, as an existence endowed
with equal rights to independence — of choice,
volition, action — with man had not begun to be."
She had not begun to be it in life either.
What Richardson did for the subtlest part of a
novelist's business, his dealings with psychology,
Fielding did for the most necessary part of it, the
telling of the story. Before him hardly any story
had been told well ; even if it had been plain and
clear as in Bunyan and Defoe it had lacked the
emphasis, the light and shade, of skilful grouping.
On the " picaresque " (so the autobiographical form
272 ENGLISH LITERATURE
was called abroad) convention of a journey he
grafted a structure based in its outline on the form
of the ancient epic. It proved extraordinarily
suitable for his purpose. Not only did it make
it easy for him to lighten his narrative with excur-
sions in a heightened style, burlesquing his origins,
but it gave him at once the right attitude to his
material. He told his story as one who knew
everything ; could tell conversations and incidents
as he conceived them happening, with no violation
of credibility, nor any strain on his reader's imagina-
tion ; and without any impropriety could interpose
in his own person, recalling things to the reader
which might have escaped his attention, pointing
at parallels he might have missed, laying bare the
irony or humour beneath a situation. He allowed
himself digressions and episodes, told separate tales
in the middle of the action, introduced, as in
Partridge's visit to the theatre, the added piquancy
of topical allusion ; in fact he did anything he
chose. And he laid down that free form of the
novel which is characteristically English, and from
which, in its essence, no one till the modern Realists
has made a serious departure.
In the matter of his novels, he excels by reason
of a Shakespearean sense of character and by the
richness and rightness of his faculty of humour.
He had a quick eye for contemporary types, and
an amazing power of building out of them men
and women whose individuality is full and rounded.
THE NOVEL 273
You do not feel, as you do with Richardson, that
his fabric is spun silk-worm- wise out of himself; on
the contrary, you know it to be the fruit of a gentle
and observant nature, and of a stock of funda-
mental human sympathy. His gallery of portraits,
Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams, Parson Trulliber,
Jones, Bhfil, Partridge, Sophia and her father, and
all the rest, are each of them minute studies of
separate people ; they live and move according to
their proper natures ; they are conceived not from
without but from within. Both Richardson and
Fielding were conscious of a moral intention ; but
where Richardson is sentimental, vulgar, and
moral only so far as it is moral (as in Pamela) to
inculcate selling at the highest price or (as in
G-randison) to avoid temptations which never
come in your way, Fielding's morality is fresh and
healthy, and (though not quite free from the senti-
mentality of scoundrelism) at bottom sane and true.
His knowledge of the world kept him right. His
acquaintance with life is wide, and his insight is
keen and deep. His taste is almost as catholic as
Shakespeare's own, and the life he knew, and which
other men knew, he handles for the first time with
the freedom and imagination of an artist.
Each of the two — Fielding and Richardson —
had his host of followers. Abroad Richardson
won immediate recognition ; in France Diderot
went so far as to compare him with Homer and
Moses! He gave the first impulse to modern
18
274 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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 in-
fluence came to its own.
To begin with, the imitators or rivals of Fielding
had it all their own way in England. The most
charming of them was perhaps Goldsmith, whose
single essay in novel-writing, The Vicai^ of Wake-
field, went straight to the hearts of his readers the
moment it was published and has been a classic
ever since. Of the others, Sterne won the greater
reputation, but Smollett gave and continues to
give the most entertainment. With a fine stock
of experience to draw upon — for he had been at sea
in the rough-and-tumble life of the eighteenth-
century navy, — Smollett turned his hand to the
novel of adventure of a type freer and more full
of incident than Fielding's, which had been founded
in France by Lesage. He took, however, nothing
but his plan from this French original, and the
scene in which his novels are laid, as well as his
characters and their and his prejudices, are entirely
British. " His novels," said Thackeray, " are recol-
lections of his own adventures, his characters
drawn, as I should think, from personages with
whom he had become acquainted in his own career
of life." No part of that career yielded him better
material than his time at sea, and the sea scenes in
Roderick Random are the best things of their kind
HENRY FIELDING.
Front the poytrait hy Hogarth in the British Museum.
THE NOVEL 275
in English writing. They gave the impulse to
Captain Marryat, and, what with that and the
closeness with which Dickens in some of his
novels followed Smollett's plan of writing, he may
be credited with having as deep an influence on
the future as Fielding himself He was coarser
than Fielding, not morally but in the eighteenth-
century way of brutality, and he had less art. But
his novels cover a wider range of experience, their
humours are broader, they give a greater impres-
sion of fecundity of invention than anything else
of their time.
No other writings exemplify so well the complete
freedom of construction which is the characteristic
of the English novel than those of Laurence Sterne.
His greatest book, Tristram Shandy, purports to be
a record of the life and opinions of its hero. In
fact, there is very little about his life and nothing
about his opinions. A large part of the book is
taken up with the troublesome business of getting
him born : the rest of it mainly with the eccentri-
cities of his father, a humorist and philosopher of
a type which seems to be very characteristic of its
time, and was looked upon by other countries as
peculiarly EngHsh ; with his mother, his Uncle
Toby, who has really made the book immortal,
and that uncle's servant, Corporal Trim. Round
about these figures, with no sustained narrative or
plot, and with indeed every stress, down to the
typographical, laid upon the desultoriness of the
276 ENGLISH LITERATURE
novel, Sterne weaves the curious irregular and
intermittent web of his imagination, helping him-
self, without acknowledgment, to large borrowings
from older authors as he goes. At its best, when
he is purely pathetic, or when his humour plays
upon the subject without becoming sniggering or
vulgar, Sterne is a fine writer. At his worst, when
his pathos passes, as it constantly does, into the
singular aberration of taste called sensibility, he is
unendurable. But it is worth remembering that
the things in him which we dislike were what gave
him his reputation with his contemporaries both in
England and France. To have acquired a reputa-
tion by bad work, and to retain it by virtue of
qualities less well esteemed when the work was done,
is not a bad basis for permanency in literary fame.
Miss Austen, as we have seen, belongs rather to
the school of Richardson than to that of Fielding,
and though her work belongs to a later date, it is
convenient to treat her here. Her work represents
the domestic novel in its purest form. Like
Richardson, she drew her subjects from ordinary
people, and her desire was to give a truthful and
minute picture of ordinary life and emotions ; but
unlike Richardson, whose temperament inclined
him to write about a people a grade above him in
the social scale, Miss Austen held resolutely to the
actual society in which she moved. She was con-
vinced that a really veracious picture of ordinary
life could be as interesting as any romance. The
THE NOVEL 277
people and incidents that she works upon seem, or
must have seemed to the readers of her day, to
promise httle that was interesting, and, as we
know from some modern writing of the kind, in
hands less skilful they would not be very attractive.
It is the triumph of her genius that she can make
a tea-party in Bath or at a country rectory as
interesting, and in the literary sense of the word
exciting, to the reader as is a description of an
adventurous night at an inn by Fielding, or of a
battlefield by Sir Walter Scott. On the other
hand, though she excels by her quiet observation
and record of detail, she does not, like the realists
later, bore us with detail for detail's sake. All that
she writes helps to develop the dramatic truth and
effect with which her characters are displayed, and,
without using the means of self-expression with
which Richardson endowed his, she contrives to
give to her people a not less vivid impression of
reality. If we miss great emotions, that is simply
because in the society which she set herself to
depict great emotions very seldom intrude. Per-
haps her temperament with its subtle quality of
irony and detachment would not have allowed her
to admit their existence.
The main road of the English novel — the road
from Fielding to « Dickens and Meredith — was
widened two ways by Sir Walter Scott. The
historical novel, which had been before his day
either an essay in anachronism with nothing histori-
278 ENGLISH LITERATURE
cal in it but the date, or a laborious and uninspired
compilation of antiquarian research, took form and
life under his hands. His wide reading, stored as
it was in a marvellously retentive memory, gave
him all the background he needed to achieve a
historical setting, and allowed him to concentrate
his attention on the actual telling of his story ; to
which his genial and sympathetic humanity and
his quick eye for character gave a humorous depth
and richness that was all his own. It is not sur-
prising that he made the historical novel a literary
vogue all over Europe. In the second place, he
began in his novels of Scottish character a sympa-
thetic study of nationality. He is not, perhaps, a
fair guide to contemporary conditions ; his interests
were too romantic and too much in the past to
catch the rattle of the looms that caught the ear
of Gait, and if we want a picture of the great fact
of modern Scotland, its industrialization, 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 obser-
vation, and the two mingling gave us the pictures
whose depth of colour and truth make his Scottish
novels. Old Mortality, The Antiquary, Redgauntlet,
the greatest things of their kind in literature.
(8)
The peculiarly national style of fiction founded
by Fielding and carried on by his followers reached
THE NOVEL 279
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 con-
ventions, as we have seen, of this national style.
Thackeray is present to his readers, indeed, not as
the manager who pulls the strings and sets the
puppets in motion, but as an interpreter who
directs the reader's attention to the events on which
he lays stress, and makes them a starting-point for
his own moralizing. This persistent moralizing —
sham cynical, real sentimental — this thumping of
death-bed pillows, as in the dreadful case of Miss
Crawley, makes Thackeray's use of the personal
interposition almost less effective than that of any
other novelist. Already while he was doing it,
Dickens had conquered the public ; and the English
novel was making its second fresh start.
He is an innovator in more ways than one. In
the first place, he is the earliest novelist to practise
280 ENGLISH LITERATURE
a conscious artistry of plot. The Mystery of
Edwin Drood remains mysterious, but those who
essay to conjecture the end of that unfinished story
have at least 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's
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 its cage go about and about his sugar before he
touches it." That his plots are always highly
elaborated is the fruit of this preliminary disciplined
exercise of thought. The method is familiar to
many novelists now ; Dickens was the first to put
it into practice. In the second place, he made a
new departure by his frankly admitted didacticism
and by the skill with which in all but two or three
of his books — Bleak House, perhaps, and Little
Dorrit — he squared his purpose with his art.
Lastly, he made the discovery which has made him
immortal. In him for the first time the English
novel produced an author who dug down into the
masses of the people for his subjects ; apprehended
them in all their inexhaustible character and humour
and pathos, and reproduced them with a lively and
loving artistic skill.
Dickens has, of course, serious faults. In par-
ticular, readers emancipated by lapse of time frgm
THE NOVEL 281
the enslavement of the first enthusiasm have
quarrelled with the mawkishness and sentimentality
of his pathos, and with the exaggeration of his
studies of character. It has been said of him, as
it has of Thackeray, that he could not draw a
" good woman," and that Agnes Copperfield, like
Amelia Sedley, is a very doll-like type of person.
To critics of this kind it may be retorted that
though " good " and " bad " are categories relevant
to melodrama, they apply very ill to serious fiction,
and that indeed to the characters of any of the
novelists — the Brontes, Mrs Gaskell, or the like —
who lay bare character with fullness and intimacy,
they could not well be applied at all. The faulti-
ness of them in Dickens is less than in Thackeray,
for in Dickens they are only incident to the scheme,
which lies in the hero (his heroes are excellent) and
in the grotesque characters, whereas in his rival
they are in the theme itself For his pathos, not
even his warmest admirer could perhaps offer a
satisfactory case. The charge of exaggeration,
however, is another matter. To the person who
complains that he has never met Dick Swiveller
or Micawber or Mrs Gamp the answer is simply
Turner's to the sceptical critic of his sunset, " Don't
you wish you could ? " To the other, who objects
more plausibly to Dickens's habit of attaching to
each of his characters some label which is either so
much flaunted all through that you cannot see the
character at all, or else mysteriously and unaccount-
282 ENGLISH LITERATURE
ably disappears when the story begins to grip the
author, Dickens has himself offered an amusing
and convincing defence. In the preface to Pick-
wick he answers those who criticized the novel on
the ground that Pickwick began by being purely
ludicrous and developed into a serious and sympa-
thetic individuality, by pointing to the analogous
process which commonly takes place in actual
human relationships. You begin a new acquaint-
anceship with perhaps not very charitable pre-
possessions ; these, later, a deeper and better know-
ledge removes, and where you have before seen an
idiosyncrasy you come to love a character. It is
ingenious, and it helps to explain Mrs Nickleby,
the Pecksniff daughters, and many another.
Whether it is true or not (and it does not explain
the poorness of such pictures as Carker and his
kind), there can be no doubt that this trick in
Dickens of beginning with a salient impression
and working outward to a fuller conception of
character is part at least of the reason of his
enormous hold upon his readers. No man leads
you into the mazes of his invention so easily and
with such a persuasive hand.
The great novelists who were writing con-
temporarily with him — the Brontes, Mrs Gaskell,
George Eliot — it is impossible to deal with here,
except to say that the last seems, because of her
occasional inability to fuse completely art and
ethics, inferior to Mrs Gaskell or to either of the
THE NOVEL 283
Bronte sisters. Nor of the later Victorians who
added fresh variety to the national style can the
greatest, Meredith, be more than mentioned for
the exquisiteness of his comic spirit and the brave
gallery of English men and women he has given us
in what is, perhaps, fundamentally the most English
thing in fiction since Fielding wrote. For our
purpose Mr Hardy, though he is a less brilliant
artist, is more to the point. His novels brought
into England the contemporary pessimism of
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
artificiality of a society which prevented its outlet
in action, he turned to the peasantry, because with
them conduct is the direct expression of the inner
life. Character could be shown working, therefore,
not subjectively but in the act, if you chose a
peasant subject. His philosophy, expressed in this
medium, is sombre. In his novels you can trace a
gradual realization of the defects of natural laws
and the quandary men are put to by their opera-
tion. Chance, an irritating and trifling series of
coincidences, plays the part of fate. Nature seems
to enter with the hopelessness of man's mood.
Finally, the novelist turns against life itself.
" Birth," he says, speaking of Tess, " seemed to
her an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion
whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed
284 ENGLISH LITERATURE
to justify and at best could only palliate." It is
strange to find pessimism in a romantic setting ;
strange, too, to find a paganism which is so little
capable of light or joy.
(4)
The characteristic form of English fiction — that
in which the requisite illusion of the complexity
and variety of life is rendered by discursiveness, by
an author's licence to digress, to double back on
himself, to start, maybe, in the middle of a story
and work subsequently to the beginning and the
end ; in short, by his power to do whatever is most
expressive of his individuality — found a rival in the
last twenty years of the nineteenth century in the
French Naturalistic or Realist school, in which the
illusion of life is got by a studied and sober veracity
of statement, and by the minute accumulation of
detail. To the French Naturalists a novel ap-
proached 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 confronta-
tion of the naked fact. On the contrary, it was its
business to carry it to the dissecting table and there
minutely examine everything that lay beneath its
surface.
The school first became an English possession
GEORGE MEREDITH.
Front the portrait by Frank Hollyer.
THE NOVEL 285
in the early translations of the work of Zola ; its
methods were transplanted into English fiction
by Mr George Moore. From his novels, both in
passages of direct statement and in the light of
his practice, it is possible to gather together the
materials of a manifesto of the English NaturaHstic
school. The Naturalists complained that English
fiction lacked construction in the strictest sense;
they found in the English novel a remarkable
absence of organic wholeness ; it did not fulfil
their first and broadest canon of subject-matter
— by which a novel has to deal, in the first place,
with a single and rhythmical series of events ; it
was too discursive. They made this charge against
English fiction ; they also retorted the charge
brought by native writers and their readers against
the French of foulness, sordidness, and pessimism in
their view of life. *' We do not," says a novelist in
one of Mr Moore's books, " we do not always choose
what you call unpleasant subjects, but we do try to
get to the roots of things ; and the basis of life being
material and not spiritual, the analyst sooner or later
finds himself invariably handling what this senti-
mental age calls coarse." " The novel," says the
same character, " if it be anything, is contemporary
history, an exact and complete reproduction of the
social surroundings of the age we live in." That
succinctly is the Naturalistic theory of the novel as
a work of science — that as the history of a nation
lies hidden often in social wrongs and in domestic
286 ENGLISH LITERATURE
grief as much as in the movements of parties or
dynasties, the novehst must do for the former what
the historian does for the latter. It is his business
in the scheme of knowledge of his time.
But the Naturalists believed quite as profoundly
in the novel as a work of art. They claimed for
their careful pictures of the grey and sad and sordid
an artistic worth, varying in proportion to the
intensity of the emotion in which the picture was
composed and according to the picture's truth, but
in its essence just as real and permanent as the
artistic worth of romance. " Seen from afar,"
writes Mr Moore, " all things in nature are of equal
worth ; and the meanest things, when viewed with
the eyes of God, are raised to heights of tragic
awe which conventionality would limit to the deaths
of kings and patriots." On such a lofty theory
they built their treatment and their style. It is a
mistake to suppose that the Realist school deliber-
ately cultivates the sordid or shocking. Examine
in this connection Mr Moore's Mummer s Wife,
one of our great English Realist novels, and, for the
matter of that, one of the fine things in English
fiction, and you will see that the scrupulous fidelity
of the author's method, though it denies him those
concessions to a sentimentalist or romantic view of
life which are the common implements of fiction,
denies him no less the extremities of horror or
loathsomeness. The heroine sinks into the miser-
able squalor of a dipsomaniac and dies from a
THE NOVEL 287
drunkard's disease, but her end is shown as the
ineluctable consequence of her life — its early grey-
ness and monotony, the sudden shock of a new and
strange environment, and the resultant weakness of
will which a morbid excitability inevitably brought
about. The novel, that is to say, deals with a
" rhythmical series of events and follows them to
their conclusion " ; it gets at the roots of things ;
it tells us of something which we know to be
true in life whether we care to read it in fiction or
not. There is nothing in it of sordidness for sordid-
ness' sake, nor have the Realists any philosophy
of an unhappy ending. In this case the ending is
unhappy because the sequence of events admitted
of no other solution ; in others the ending is happy
or merely neutral as the preceding story decides.
If what one may call neutral endings predominate,
it is because they also — notoriously — predominate
in life. But the question of unhappiness or its
opposite has nothing whatever to do with the
larger matter of beauty ; it is the triumph of the
Realists that at their best they discovered a new
beauty in things, the loveliness that lies in obscure
places, the splendour of sordidness, humility, and
pain. They have taught us that beauty, like the
Spirit, blows where it lists, and we know from them
that the antithesis between realism and idealism is
only on their lower levels ; at their summits they
unite and are one. No true Realist but is an
idealist too.
288 ENGLISH LITERATURE
Most of what is best in English fiction since has
been directly occasioned by their work ; Gissing
and Mr Arnold Bennett may be mentioned as two
authors who are fundamentally Realist in their con-
ception 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 main agent of it, Robert Louis Stevenson,
had the romantic strain in him intensified by the
conditions under which he worked ; a weak and
an£emic 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 everyday things. To
THE NOVEL 289
a Realist a hansom-cab driver is a man who makes
twenty-five shiUings a week, Kves in a back street
in PimHco, has a wife who drinks and children
who grow up with an alcoholic taint ; the Realist
will compare his lot with other cab-drivers, and
find what part of his life is the product of the cab-
driving environment, and on that basis he will
write his book. To Stevenson and to the Roman-
ticist generally, a hansom-cab driver is a mystery
behind whose apparent commonplaceness lie magic
possibilities beyond all telling ; not one but may
be the agent of the Prince of Bohemia, ready
to drive you off to some mad and magic adven-
ture in a street which is just as commonplace to
the outward eye as the cab-driver himself, but
which implicates by its very deceitful commonness
whole volumes of romance. The novel-reader to
whom Demos was the repetition of what he had
seen and known and what had planted sickness
in his soul, found the New Ai'abian Nights a
refreshing miracle. Stevenson had discovered
that modern London had its possibilities of
romance. To these two elements of his romantic
equipment must be added a third — travel. Defoe
never left England, and other early Romanticists
less gifted with invention than he wrote from the
mind's eye and from books. To Stevenson, and
to his successor Mr Kipling, whose " discovery "
of India is one of the salient facts of modern
English letters, and to Mr Conrad belongs the
19
290 ENGLISH LITERATURE
credit of teaching novelists to draw on experience
for the scenes they seek to present. A fourth
element in the equipment of modern Romanticism
— that which draws its effects from the " miracles "
of modern science — has been added by Mr Wells,
in whose work the Realist and Romantic schools
seem finally to have united.
It was not till towards the end of the nineteenth
century that one of the oldest and most popular
forms of fiction, that of the short story, came to
its own in our literature. Most of the novels
of the Renaissance were short stories in the literal
sense of the word, but into their brief compass
they compressed a narrative which might well
have served to eke out a long book, and when
the short story was revived in the nineteenth
century it made no attempt to follow this older
plan. Commonly it sought simply to describe an
incident or sketch a character, or perhaps even
only to suggest some single emotional or pictorial
efFect. "I found," says Mr Wells, "that taking
almost anything as a starting-point and letting my
thoughts play about it, there would presently come
out of the darkness in a manner quite inexplicable
some absurd or vivid little incident more or less
relevant to that initial nucleus. Little men in
canoes upon sunlit oceans would come floating
out of nothingness, incubating the eggs of pre-
historic monsters unawares ; violent conflicts
would break out amidst the flower-beds of
THE NOVEL 291
suburban gardens ; I would discover I was peer-
ing into remote and mysterious worlds, ruled by
an order logical indeed, but other than our common
sanity." That is the explanation of the making of
one kind of short story — simply the art of making
something very bright and moving, having this
in common with the short stories of an earlier day,
that it should not be longer than can conveniently
in a short space of time be read aloud, but making
no attempt as they did to state whole histories in
the fraction of an hour. This new mode of short
story, learnt perhaps from France, caught the
imagination of English writers, and in no form of
fiction is English literature in these later days
more rich.
CHAPTER X
CONTEMPORARIES
How can we who are contemporaries tell whether
an author's work is permanent or no ? It is easy
to find excuses for making a survey of English
literature stop short of writers who are still work-
ing. The easiest and quickest stated is that one
is anticipating the verdict of posterity. Of course,
in a sense, the point of view expressed by the
question is true enough. It is always idle to
anticipate the verdict of posterity. Remember
Matthew Arnold's prophecy that at the end of the
nineteenth century Wordsworth and Byron would
be the two great names in romantic poetry. We
are fourteen years 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 are dead. Round us men
and women are putting into plays and poetry and
292
CONTEMPORARIES 293
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 con-
tinuous 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 Masefield, Mr Shaw, or Mr Wells.
Students of literature must remember that classics
are being manufactured daily under their eyes, and
that on their sympathy and comprehension depends
whether an author receives the success he merits
when he is alive to enjoy it.
The purpose of this chapter, then, is to indicate
some characteristics of the general trend or drift
of literary effort as a whole, and to give a rough
picture of some of the lines or schools of con-
temporary art. The most remarkable literary
feature of the age is without doubt its comparative
inattention to poetry. Tennyson was a popular
author ; his books sold in thousands ; his lines
passed into that common conversational currency
of unconscious quotation which is the surest
testimony to the permeation of a poet's influence.
Even Browning, though his popularity came late,
found himself carried into all the nooks and corners
of the reading public. His robust and masculine
morality, understood at last, or expounded by
294 ENGLISH LITERATURE
a semi-priestly class of interpreters, made him
popular with those readers — and they are the
majority — who love their reading to convey a
moral lesson, just as Tennyson's reflection of his
time's distraction between science and religion
endeared them to those who found in him an
answer, or at least an echo, to their own perplexities.
A work widely different from either of these, Fitz-
Gerald's Rubdiydt of 0?nar 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 con-
tinuous thought from its readers, its appeal to the
indolence and moral flaccidity which is implicit
in all men, all contributed to its immense vogue ;
and among people who perhaps did not fully
understand it, but were merely lulled by its son
orousness, 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 as yet, unless it
be Mr Masefield, of the younger school. Probably
the only writer of verse who is at the same time a
poet and has acquired a large popularity and public
CONTEMPORARIES 295
influence is Mr Kipling. His work as a novelist
we mentioned in the last chapter. It remains to
say something of his achievements in verse.
Let us grant at once his faults. He can be
violent, and over-rhetorical ; he belabours you with
sense impressions, and with the polysyllabic rhetoric
he learned from Swinburne — and he is sometimes
deficient, though rarely, in the finer shades of taste.
But these things do not affect the main greatness
of his work. He is great because he discovered not
only a new method but a new subject-matter, and
because of the white-heat of imagination which in his
best things he brought to bear on it and by which
he transfused it into poetry. It is Mr Kipling's
special distinction that the apparatus of modern
civilization — steam engines, and steamships, and
telegraph lines, and the art of flight — take on in
his hands a poetic quality as authentic and inspiring
as any that ever was cast over the implements of
other and what the mass of men believe to have
been more picturesque days. Romance is in the
present, so he teaches us, as well as in the past, and
we do it wrong to leave it only the territory we
have ourselves discarded in the advance of the
race. That and the great discovery of India — an
India coloured by his own prejudices, no doubt,
but still the first presentment of an essential fact
in our modern history as a people — give him the
hold that he has, and rightly, over the minds of
his readers.
296 ENGLISH LITERATURE
But though from the death of Tennyson until
no more than a year or two ago the Enghsh-
speaking peoples have been inattentive to poetry,
English poetry has gone on, a steady and unabated
stream. Most of it, perhaps, has been heard of
rather than heard, and it is not until the narrative
poems of Mr Masefield, so recently published that
they belong rather to the reviewer than to the
literary historian, that any poetry of the best
quality in thought and writing can be said to have
caught the general ear. When Tennyson died he
left two followers, neither closely imitative, but
each, whatever his differences of outlook upon his
art and the world, imbued with what may be called
the Tennysonian spirit. Mr William Watson,
making himself the laureate of the Liberal spirit,
and so taking up a work which Swinburne laid
down, has invested with unfailing gravity and
dignity his verses on political themes, and, return-
ing to an eighteenth-century habit, he has used
poetry to criticise poetry with both finish and
sureness of touch. The other follower of Tenny-
son, Mr Bridges, with not less learning and certainly
more learned curiosity in metrical experiment, has
perhaps more spontaneity, more of the stuff of
poetry, and a fuller measure of the English spirit
in his verse.
It is not with these, however — still less with Mr
Kipling — that the main stream of English romantic
poetry flows. The younger poets of the nineties
CONTEMPORARIES 297
belonged, more or less, all to one school — the school
which had its origin in England in the work of
William Blake, but more, perhaps, in contemporary
France in the writings of Baudelaire and Verlaine.
Much of their work was imitative and none of it
perhaps very profound, but each of them — Ernest
Dow^son 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 richer
had they gone on working it. One of them, Mr
W. B. Yeats, by his birth and his reading in Irish
legend and folklore, which was being collected
during his youth by a few devoted students, 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 terri-
tory explored by Coleridge and Scott and Morris
a new province. Only, nothing could be further
from the objectivity of these men than the way in
which the Celtic school approaches its material.
Its stories are clear to itself, it may be, but not to
its readers. Deirdre and Conchubar, and Angus
and Maeve and Dectora, and all the shadowy
figures in them, scarcely become embodied. Their
lives and deaths and loves and hates are only a
scheme on which they weave a delicate and dim
298 ENGLISH LITERATURE
embroidery of pure poetry — of love and death and
old age and the passing of beauty and all the
sorrows that have been since the world began and
will be till the world ends. If Mr Kipling is of
the earth earthy, if the clangour and rush of the
world is in everything he writes, Mr Yeats and his
school live consciously sequestered and withdrawn,
and the world never breaks in on their ghostly
troubles or their peace. Poetry never fails to
relate itself to its age ; if it is not with it, it is
against it ; it is never merely indifferent. The
poetry of these men is the denial, passionately
made, of everything the world prizes. When such
a denial is sincere, as in the best of them, then the
verses they make are true and fine. When it is
assumed, as in some of their imitators, then the
work they did is not true poetry. But it would be
no (or only a little) more than the truth to say
that at no period in the past was English poetry
more full of promise than it is at the present
moment.
But the literary characteristic of the present age
— the one which is most likely to differentiate it
from its predecessor — is the revival of the drama.
When we left it before the Commonwealth the
great English literary school of playwriting — the
romantic drama — was already dead. It has had
since no second birth. There followed after it the
heroic tragedy of Dryden and Shadwell, a turgid,
declamatory form of art without importance ; and
CONTEMPORARIES 299
two brilliant comic periods — the earlier and greater
that of Congreve and Wycherley : the later, more
sentimental, with less art and vivacity, that of
Goldsmith and Sheridan. With Sheridan the
drama as a literary force died a second time. It
has been born again only in our own day. It is,
of course, unnecessary to point out that the writing
of plays did not cease in the interval ; it never does
cease. The production of dramatic journey-work
has been continuous since the reopening of the
theatres in 1660, and it is carried on as plentifully
as ever at this present time. Only, side by side
with it there has grown up a new literary drama,
and gradually the main stream of artistic endeavour,
which for nearly a century has preoccupied itself
with the novel almost to the exclusion of other
forms of art, has turned back to the stage as its
channel to articulation and an audience. An in-
fluence 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 misunder-
stood by their worshippers hardly less than by their
enemies ; but all excrescences of enthusiasm apart,
they taught men a new and freer approach to
moral questions, and a new and freer dramatic
technique. Where plays had been constructed on
a journeyman plan evolved by Labiche and Sardou
— mid-nineteenth-century writers in France — a
plan delighting in symmetry, close-jointedness,
300 ENGLISH LITERATURE
false correspondences, an impossible use of coinci-
dence, and a quite unreal complexity and elabora-
tion, they become bolder and less artificial, more
close to the likelihoods of real life. The gravity of
the problems with which they set themselves to
deal heightened their influence. In England men
began to ask themselves whether the theatre here
too could not be made an avenue towards the dis-
cussion of living difficulties ; and then arose the
new school of dramatists — of whom the first and
most remarkable is Mr George Bernard Shaw.
In his earlier plays he set himself boldly to attack
established conventions, and to ask his audiences
to think for themselves. Ai^ms and the Man dealt
a blow at the cheap romanticism with which a
peace-living public invests the profession of arms ;
The Devils Disciple was a shrewd criticism of the
preposterous self-sacrifice on which melodrama,
which is the most popular non-literary form of
play-writing, is commonly based ; Mrs Warrens
Profession made a brave and plain-spoken attempt
to drag the public face to face with the nauseous
realities of prostitution ; Widowers' Houses laid
bare the sordidness of a society which bases itself
on the exploitation of the poor for the luxuries of
the rich. It took Mr Shaw close on ten years to
persuade even the moderate number of men and
women who make up a theatre audience that his
plays were worth listening to. But before his final
success came he had attained a substantial popu-
CONTEMPORARIES 301
larity with the pubHc which reads. Possibly his
early failure on the stage — mainly due to the
obstinacy of playgoers immersed in a stock tradi-
tion— was partly due also to his failure in con-
structive power. He is an adept at tying knots
and impatient of unravelling them ; his third acts
are apt either to evaporate in talk or to find some
unreal and unsatisfactory solution for the com-
plexity he has created. But constructive weakness
apart, his amazing brilliance and fecundity of
dialogue ought to have given him an immediate
and lasting grip of the stage. There has probably
never been a dramatist who could invest conversa-
tion with the same vivacity and point, the same
combination of surprise and inevitableness, that
distinguishes his best work.
Alongside of Mr Shaw, more immediately success-
ful, and not traceable to any obvious influence,
English or foreign, came the comedies of Oscar
Wilde. For a parallel to their pure delight and
high spirits, and to the exquisite wit and artifice
with which they were constructed, one would have
to go back to the dramatists of the Restoration.
To Congreve and his school, indeed, Wilde belongs
rather than to any later period. With his own age
he had little in common ; he was without interest
in its social and moral problems ; when he approved
of socialism it was because in a socialist state the
artist might be absolved from the necessity of earn-
ing a living, and be free to follow his art undisturbed
302 ENGLISH LITERATURE
He loved to think of himself as symbolic, but all
he symbolized was a fantasy of his own creating ;
his attitude to his age was decorative and with- ^.
drawn 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, and
taught novelists to try their luck on the stage.
Wilde founded nothing, and his works remain as
complete and separate as those of the earlier artificial
dramatists of two centuries before.
Another school of drama, homogeneous and quite
apart from the rest, remains. We have seen how
the " Celtic Revival," as the Irish literary move-
ment has been called by its admirers, gave us a new
kind of romantic poetry. As an offshoot from it
there came into being some ten years ago an Irish
school of drama, drawing its inspiration from two
sources— the body of the old Irish legends and the
highly individualized and richly coloured life of the
Irish peasants in the mountains of Wicklow and of
the West, a life, so the dramatists believed, still un-
spoiled by the cheapening influences of a false system
of education and the wear and tear of a civilization
whose values are commercial and not spiritual or
artistic. The school founded its own theatre, trained
its own actors, fashioned its own modes of speech
(the chief of which was a frank restoration of
rhythm in the speaking of verse and of cadence
CONTEMPORARIES 303
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 pro-
duction of plays is concerned, it would seem to be
already in its decline. That is to say, what in the
beginning was a fresh and vivid inspiration caught
direct from life, has become a pattern whose colours
and shape can be repeated or varied by lesser
writers who take their teaching from the original
discoverers. But in the course of its brief and
striking course it produced one great dramatist —
a writer whom already, not three years after his
death, men instinctively class with the masters of
his art.
J. M. Synge, in the earlier years of his manhood,
lived entirely abroad, leading the life of a wander-
ing scholar from city to city and country to country
till he was persuaded to give up the Continent and
the criticism and imitation of French literature, to
return to England, and to go and live on the Aran
Islands. From that time till his death — some ten
years — he spent a large part of each year amongst
the peasantry of the desolate Atlantic coast and
wrote the plays by which his name is known. His
literary output was not large, but he supplied the
Irish dramatic movement with exactly what it
needed— a vivid contact with the realities of life.
S04 ENGLISH LITERATURE
Not that he was a mere student or transcriber of
manners. His wandering life among many peoples
and his study of classical French and German
literature had equipped him as perhaps no other
modern dramatist has been equipped with an
imaginative insight and a reach of perception
which enabled him to give universality and depth
to his portrayal of the peasant types around him.
He got down to the great elemental forces which
throb and pulse beneath the common crises of
everyday life, and laid them bare, not as ugly and
horrible, but with a sense of their terror, their
beauty, and their strength. His earliest play, The
Well of the Saints, treats of a sorrow that is as old
as Helen, of the vanishing of beauty and the irony
of fulfilled desire. The great realities of death
pass through the Ridei^s to the Sea, till the language
takes on a kind of simplicity as of written words
shrivelling up in a flame. The Playboy of the
Western World is a study of character, terrible
in its clarity, but never losing the savour of
imagination and of the astringency and saltness
that was characteristic of his temper. He had at
his command an instrument of incomparable fine-
ness and range in the language which he fashioned
out the speech of the common people amongst
whom he lived. In his dramatic writings this
language took on a kind of rhythm which had
the effect of producing a certain remoteness of
the highest possible artistic value. 'J'he people
CONTEMPORARIES 305
of his imagination appear a little disembodied.
They talk with that straightforward and simple
kind of innocency which makes strange and im-
pressive the dialogue of Maeterlinck's earlier plays.
Through it, as Mr Yeats has said, he saw the
subject-matter of his art " with wise, clear-seeing,
unreflecting eyes — and he preserved the innocence
of good art in an age of reasons and purposes."
He had no theory except of his art ; no " ideas "
and no " problems " ; he did not wish to change
anything or to reform anything ; but he saw all
his people pass by as before a window, and he
heard their words. This resolute refusal to be
interested in or to take account of current modes
of thought has been considered by some to detract
from his eminence. Certainly, if by " ideas " we
mean current views on society or morality, he is
deficient in them ; only, his very deficiency brings
him nearer to the great masters of drama — to Ben
Jonson, to Cervantes, to Moliere, even to Shake-
speare himself. Probably in no single case amongst
our contemporaries could a high and permanent
place in literature be prophesied with more con-
fidence than in his.
In the past it has seemed impossible for fiction
and the drama, i.e. serious drama of high literary
quality, to flourish side by side. It seems as
though the best creative minds in any age could
find strength for any one of these two great out-
lets for the activity of the creative imagination.
20
306 ENGLISH LITERATURE
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 beginning in which the drama will regain to
the full its position as a literature. More and more
the bigger creative artists will turn to a form which
b}^ its economy of means to ends, and the chance
it gives not merely of observing but of creating
and displaying character in action, has a more
vigorous principle of life in it than its rival.
INDEX
Absalom and Achitophel, 155.
Addison, Joseph, 146, 161, 170,
171,232,263.
Advancement of Learning, 130.
Anatomy of Abuses, 33.
Anatomy of Melancholy, 131-2.
Annus Mirabilis, 155.
Antonio and Mellida, 95.
Apology or Poetry, 49, 70.
Arcadia, 49, 51, 68, 70.
Arms and the Man, 300.
Arnold, Matthew, 251, 254.
Art criticism, 216.
Ascham, Roger, 28, 31, 33.
Astrea Reddux, 155.
Astrophel and Stella, 49-51.
Atheists Tragedy, 87, 98.
Aubrey, John, 1 10.
Augustan Age, the, 143.
Austen, Miss, 276-7.
Autobiography, no, 262, 264.
Autobiographical novel, 264, 268.
Bacon, Francis, 125, 128-131.
Bacon's Essays, 129.
Bagehot, Walter, 241.
Ballad literature, 19-24.
Beaumont, Francis, 99, 100.
Bennett, Arnold, 288.
Bible, the, 126-8.
Biography, no, 262.
Blake, William, 200-3.
Blank verse, 43, 44, 90, 115.
Boccaccio, 8, 9, 10.
Boswell, James, 175, 178, 191,
192.
Bridges, Robert, 296.
Brontes, the, 282.
Browne, Sir Thomas, 118, 132,
232.
Browning, Robert, 121, 241, 247.
Buckhurst, Lord, 45.
Bunyan, John, 264.
Burke, Edmund, 128, 182-6.
Burns, Robert, 195-200.
Burton, Robert, 131.
Byron, Lord, 215, 216, 229, 230.
Carew, Thomas, 125.
Carlyle, Thomas, 254-9.
Castle of Indolence, 162.
Celtic Revival, 302.
Character-writing, 111,262.
Chatterton, Thomas, 211.
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1-15, 17, 19,
24.
contemporaries of, 13.
Cheke, Sir John, 28, 29, 31.
Childe Harold, 230.
Christabel, 225.
Christ s Victory and Death, 118.
Citizen of the World, 192.
" Classic " poetry, 162.
Classic writers, 145-8.
Classical allusion, 66.
Classicism, 142, 144, 149, 150,
172, 193, 206.
Clough, Thomas, 251.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 215,
216, 226, 227,
Colet, Dean, 25.
Collins, William, 193.
Complete English Tradesman,
165.
Congreve, W., iii.
Conrad, Joseph, 289.
Coryat, Thomas, 34.
Cosmography, 239.
Cowley, Abraham, 124.
Crashaw, Richard, 124.
Criticism, 109.
art, 216.
dramatic, 216.
CromwelVs Letters and Speeches,
258.
Cumberland Beggar, 237-8.
807
308
ENGLISH LITERATURE
Death of Blanche the Duchess,
7, i8.
Decline and Fall of Roman
Empire, 1 88-191.
Defoe, Daniel, 146, 163-6, 264,
265, 267.
Dekker, Thomas, 96.
De Quincey, Thomas, 234.
Devils Disciple, The, 300.
Dickens, Charles, 279-280.
Donne, John, 1 19-124, 147, 148.
Dowson, Ernest, 297.
Drama, the, 71-106, 116.
decline of, 99, 266.
revival of, 298.
Dramatic criticism, 216.
Dramatic lyric, the, 249.
Dryden, John, 64, 146, 153-6,
162-3, 206.
Duchess of Malfi, 98.
Dunbar, William, 17.
Earle, John, 263.
Eastward Ho ! 96.
Edward II., 86.
Eliot, George, 282.
Elizabethan dramatists, 80.
Elizabethan prose, 59-70.
Elizabethan poetry, 35-59.
English prose beginnings, 24-5.
Erasmus, 26.
Essay on Criticism, 158.
Essay on Man, 157.
Essays of Elia, 233.
Euphues, 64-7, 261-2.
Evelyn, John, no.
Everyman, 75.
Faerie Queen, 55-7, 115, 117, 135.
" Fantastics," the, 124.
Fielding, Henry, 271-3.
Fitzgerald, Edward, 294.
Fletcher, Giles, 118.
Fletcher, Phineas, 99, 100, 113,
117.
Ford, John, loi.
Fox, George, 1 10.
French Naturalist school, 284-5.
French Revolution, 254, 257-8.
Fuller, Thomas, no.
Gaskell, Mrs, 282.
Gibbon, Edward, 186-191.
Gissing, George, 288.
Goldsmith, Oliver, 191-2, 274.
Gorboduc, 79.
Gower, John, 4, 8, 13, 14.
Gray, Thomas, 193.
Greene, Robert, 81.
Gulliver's Travels, 167-8.
Haddon, Walter, 28.
Hakluyt, Richard, 61.
Hamlet, 83, 93, 94, 95.
Hardy, Thomas, 283.
Harrison, Roger, 33, 61.
Harvey, Gabriel, 53.
Hawes, Stephen, 15.
Hazlitt, William, 217, 234.
Hetiry VII., The Reign of, 130.
Henryson, Robert, 16.
Herbert, George, n2, 124.
Herrick, Robert, 125.
Heywood, John, 78.
Hind and the Panther, The, 155.
Historical novel, 2yy-S.
Historical sense, 213-4.
Hobbes, Thomas, 62.
Holinshed, Thomas, 61.
Homer {Fope's), 152.
Hooker, Richard, 63.
House of Fame, The, 7.
Hymn-writing, 116.
Ibsen, Henrik, 299.
Idylls of the King, 242, 245.
Induction to the Mirror for
Magistrates, 45, 46.
In Metnoriam, 244,
Irish drama, 302.
Italy, influence of, 33-4.
James the First of Scotland, 15, 16.
Johnson, Lionel, 297.
Johnson, Samuel, 172-181, 208,
217,
fohnson, Boswell's Life of, 1 76.
fohnsotis Dictionary, 173.
Jonson, Ben, 37, 101-6, ng, 120,
135-
fournal of the Plague Year, 265.
Journey to the Western Hebrides,
174.
Keats, John, 58, 215, 216, 228-9.
King Lear, 83, 94.
INDEX
309
King's Quair, 15,
Kipling, Rudyard, 289, 295.
Kirke, Edward, 53, 54.
Kubla Khan, 225.
Kyd, Thomas, 81, 82, 94.
Labiche, 299.
Lamb, Charles, 217, 232-4.
Langland, William, 3, 13.
Latinism, 30-2.
Latter Day Pamphlets, 255.
Legend of Good Women, 7.
Linacre, Thomas, 25.
Lines above Tintern Abbey, 210,
223.
Lives of the Novelists, 216.
IJves of the Poets, 1 74.
Locke, John, 62.
Lodge, Thomas, yj, 61.
Lycidas, 137.
Lydgate, John, 15.
Lyly, John, 64-7.
Lyric, the, 47-8, 115.
Lyric poetry, 125.
Lyrical Ballads, 207, 220-2.
Macaulay, Lord, 254.
Macbeth, 83, 94.
Macpherson, William, 210.
Marlowe, Christopher, 81, 83, 86,
87, 94-
Marston, John, 95.
Masefield, John, 296.
Massinger, Philip, loi.
Maud, 244.
Memoirs of a Cavalier, 265.
Men and Women, 247.
Merchant of Venice, 92.
Meredith, George, 252, 283.
Metaphysical poets, 124.
Microcosmograf>hy, 263.
Middleton, 96. '
Milton, John, 32, 55, 58, 112, 134,
161.
Moore, George, 285.
Morality plays, 75.
More, Sir Thomas, 26, 27.
Mrs Warretis Profession, 300.
Mmnmet^s Wife, 286.
Mystery of Edwin Drood, 280.
Nash, Thomas, 61.
New Arabian Nights, 289.
New Atlantis, 26, 131.
Novel, the, 260-291.
Occleve, Thomas, 15.
Othello, 94.
Oxford Movement, 240.
Palace of Pleasure, 261.
Pandosto, the Triumph of Time.
81.
Paradise Lost, 115, 140, 141.
Parliament of Fowls, The, 7.
Past and Present, 255.
Pastoral romance, 68, 69,
Peele, George, 81.
Pepys, Samuel, no.
Percy, Bishop, 211.
Periodical essay, the, 169, 263.
Pickwick Papers, 12, 282.
Pilgrim's Progress, 264.
Pippa Passes, 237, 238.
Platonism, 26.
Playboy of the Western World,
304-
Pope, Alexander, 156-160, 206.
Prelude, The, 219, 220, 222.
Princess, The, 242-4.
Prose writers, 163.
Purchas, 61.
Puritanism, 97, iii, 113.
Purple Island, The, 113, 117.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 37, 38.
Rambler, the, 177.
Rape of Lucrece, 78.
Rape of the Lock, 158, 159, 160.
Rasselas, 174.
Realist school, 284, 285.
Religio Laid, 155.
Religio Medici, 133.
Religious drama, 71-4.
Reliques of Ancient Poetry, 211.
Renaissance, the, 25, 134.
poets, 55.
writers, 108.
Resolution and Independence,222.
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 174.
Rhetoric, 148.
Rhyme, 91.
Richardson, 267-271, 273, 276.
Riders to the Sea, 304.
Ring and the Book, 248, 250.
310
ENGLISH LITERATURE
Robinson Crusoe^ 165.
Roderick Random, 275.
Romance of the Rose, 6, 16.
Romantic criticism, 216.
poetry, 204-231.
prose, 231-234.
revival, 204-234.
Romanticism, 142-4, 149, 193,
200, 236, 238.
Rossetti, D. G., 240, 252.
Rowley Poems, 211.
Royal Society, 145.
Rubdiydi of Omar Khayyam, 294.
Ruskin, John, 254.
Sartor Resartus, 254, 258.
Sackville, Thomas, 45, 46.
Sardou, Victorien, 299.
Satirists, the, 159.
Schoolmaster, 28, 33.
Scientific spirit, 240.
Scott, Sir Walter, 211, 214, 215,
216,277,278.
Scottish poets, 15-19.
Seasons, The, 162.
Shakespeare, 32, 88-101, 151.
Shaw, G. B., 300, 301.
Shelley, 215, 216, 226-8.
Shepherd's Calendar, 54.
Sheridan, Mark, 299.
Shirley, loi.
" Short story," the, 290.
Sidney, Sir Philip, 37, 48, 49,
68-70, 107, 114, 122, 135.
Sir Charles Grandison, 271.
Skelton, 15.
Smollett, 274.
Sonnet, the, 115, 116.
Sonneteers, the, 123, 151.
Sordello, 122.
Spanish Tragedy, The, 82, 94, 95.
Spectator, i\ie, 169, 170, 171.
Spenser, Edmund, 3, 1 5, 32, 52-9,
107, III, 114, ii7> 118, 119,
160, 161.
Steele, Richard, 169-171, 263.
Sterne, Laurence, 288, 275, 276.
Stevenson, R. L.,
Strolling players, 76.
Supernatural, the, 214, 224.
Surrey, Earl of, 15,39,41-4.
Swift, Jonathan, 146, 166-9.
Swinburne, 252, 294.
Synge, J. M., 303-5.
Tale oj a Tub, 168.
Tambicrlaine, 84, 85.
Tatler, the, 169, 170.
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 240-7.
Testament of Cressyd, The, 16, 17.
Thackeray, W. M., 279, 281.
Theatre, Elizabethan, 'j'j.
Thistle and the Rose, 18.
Thomson, James, 161, 162.
Thoiightson Various Subjects, 169.
Tottel's Miscellany, 39, 40.
lyistram Shandy, 275.
Troilus and Cressida, 16, 32.
Two Married Women and the
Widow, 18.
Udall, Nicholas, 28.
Unities, the, 102.
Utopia, 26, 27.
Vanity Fair, 279.
Vaughan, Richard, 124.
Venus and Adonis, 112.
F^r^//(Dryden's), 152.
Vicar of Wakefield, 274.
Victorian Age, the, 235-259.
View of the State of Ireland, 52.
Waller, Edmund, 125.
Walpole, Horace, 209.
Watson, William, 296.
Webster, John, 98.
Well of the Saints, The, 304.
Wells, H. G.,290.
White Devil, The, 98.
Widowers' Houses, 300.
Wife of Bath, 18.
Wilde, Oscar, 53, 301.
Wilson, Sir Thomas, 28, 31.
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actions, published irregularly.
14 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London, W.C.
i
CATALOGUE OF PUBLICATIONS. 47
List of Periodicals, etc. — continued.
Royal Society of Edinburgh. Transactions. Issued irregu-
larly at various prices.
Liverpool Marine Biology Committee. Memoirs. I. -XIX.
already published at various prices. Fauna of Liverpool Bay.
Fifth Report, written by Members of the Commitee and other
Naturalists. Cloth. 8s. 6d. net. See p. 39.
Publications de I'lnstitut Nobel Norvdgien. Vol. I.
L'Arbitrage International chez les Hellenes. Par A. Raedar.
4to. IDS. net. Vol. II. Les Bases Economiques de la Justice
Internationale. By Achille Loria. 3s. 6d. net. Vol. III., Cata-
logue de la Bibliotheque de ITnstitut Nobel Norvegien. 250
pages. I OS. net. Vol. IV. Die Rechtskraft Internationaler
Schiedsspruche. Heinrich Lammasch. 4to, sewed, 7s. 6d. net.
Royal Irish Academy. Transactions and Proceedings issued
irregularly ; prices vary. Cunningham Memoirs. Vols. I. -XI.
already issued at various prices. See p. 31.
Royal Dublin Society. Transactions and Proceedings.
Issued irregularly at various prices.
14 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London, W.C.
INDEX OF TITLES.
Acts of the Apostles. Adolf Harnack, 12.
Acts, The Date of the. Adolf Harnack, 12.
Aeroplane, How to Build. Robert Petit, 24.
Africa, The Opening Up of. Sir H. H.Johnston, 16.
Agricultural Chemical Analysis. Wiley, 34.
Agricultural Chemistry, Principles of. Fraps, 9.
Agricultural Products. Wiley, 34.
Agriculture. Prof. W. Somerville, 30.
Alchemy of Thought, and other Essays. Prof.
L. P. Jacks, 15.
Alcyonium. yuWL.M.B.C Memoirs, 42.
All About Leaves. Heath, 13.
All Men are Ghosts. Jacks, 15.
America, Great Writers of. Trent and Erskine, 8,33.
American Civil War, The. Prof. F.L. Paxson, 24.
Americans, The. Hugo Miinsterberg, 22.
Among the Idolmakers. Prof. L. P. Jacks, 15.
Analysis of Ores. F. C. Phillips, 25.
Analysis, Organic. F. E. Benedict, 2.
Analytical Geometry, Elements of. — Hardy, 12.
Anarchy and Law, Theories of. H. B. Brewster, 3.
Ancient Art and Ritual. Harrison, 13.
Ancient Asia Minor, Wall Map of, 18.
Ancient Assyria, Religion of. Prof. A. H. Sayce, 27.
Ancient Greece, Wall Map of, 17.
Ancient Italy, Wall Map of, 17.
Ancient Latium, Wall Map of, 17.
Ancient World, Wall Maps of the, 17.
Anglican Liberalism, i.
Animal World, The. Prof. F. W. Gamble, 9.
Antedon. I'ide L.M.B.C. Memoirs, 43.
Anthems. Rev. R. Crompton Jones, 16.
Anthropology. R. R. Marett, 20.
Antiquity of Man, The. A. Keith, 17.
Antwerp and Brussels, Guide to, 11.
Anurida. ^zi/e L.M.B.C. Memoirs, 43.
Apocalypse of St. John, 43.
Apologetic of the New Test. E. F. Scott, 28.
Apostle Paul, the. Lectures on. Otto Pfleiderer, 24.
Apostolic Age, The. Carl von Weizsacker, 34.
Arabian Poetry, Ancient. Sir C. J. Lyall, 20.
Architecture. Prof. W. R. Lethaby, 19.
Arenicola. l^ide L.M.B.C. Memoirs, 42.
Aristotelian Society, Proceedings of, 25.
Army Series of French and German Novels, 35.
Ascidia. Johnston, L.M.B.C. Memoirs, 42.
Assyriology, Essay on. George Evans, 8.
Astigmatic Letters. Dr. Pray, 25.
Astronomy. A. R. Hinks, 14.
Athanasius of Alexandria, Canons of, 43.
Atlas Antiquus, Kiepert's, 18.
Atlas, Topographical, of the Spinal Cord. Alex.
Bruce. 4.
Atonement, Doctrine of the. Auguste Sabatier, 27.
Auf Verlornem Posten. Dewall, 35.
Babel and Bible. Friedrich Delitzsch, 7.
Bacon, Roger. "Opus Majus" of, 2; Life and
Work of. Bridges, 4.
Basis of Religious Belief. C. B. Upton, 33.
Beet-Sugar Making. Nikaido, 23.
Beginnings of Christianity. Paul Wernle, 34.
Belgium, Practical Guide to, 11.
Belgium Watering Places, Guide to, 11.
Bergson's Philosophy. Balsillie, 2 ; Le Roy, 19.
Bible. Translated by Samual Sharpe, 3.
Bible, a Short Introduction to, Sadler, 27 ; Bible
Problems, Prof. T. K. Cheyne, 5 ; How to Teach
the. Rev. A. F. Mitchell, 22 ; Remnants of
Later Syriac Versions of, 43.
Bible Reading in the Early Church. Adolf
Harnack, 12.
Biblical Hebrew, Introduction to. Rev. Jas.
Kennedy, 17.
Biology, Principles of. Herbert Spencer, 30.
Blaise Pascal. Humfrey R. Jordan, 16.
Book of Prayer. Crompton Jones, 16.
Books of the New Testament. Von Soden, 29.
Britain, B.C. Henry Sharpe, 29.
British Fisheries. J. Johnstone, 16.
Brussels and Antwerp, Guide to, 11.
Buddhism. Mrs. Rhys Davids, 6.
Calculus, Differential and Integral. Axel Har-
nack, 12.
Canada. A. G. Bradley, 3.
Cancer. Vide L.M.B.C. Memoirs, 43.
Cancer and other Tumours. Chas. Creighton, 6.
Canonical Books of the Old Testament. Cornill,
6.
Cape Dutch. J. F. Van Oordt, 24.
Cape Dutch, Werner's Elementary Lessons in, 34.
Capri and Naples, Guide to, 11.
Captain Cartwright and his Labrador Journal, 4.
Cardium. KzVrV L.M.B.C. Memoirs, 42.
Catalogue of the London Library, 20.
Catalogue de la Bibliotheque de I'Institut Nobel
Norv6gien, 4.
Celtic Heathendom. Prof. J. Rhys, 26.
Channing's Complete Works, 4.
Chants and Anthems, 16 ; Chants, Psalms, and
Canticles. Crompton Jones, 16.
Character and Life, 5.
Chemical Dynamics, Studies in. J. H. Van't Hoff,
14.
Chemical German. Phillips, 25.
Chemistry. Prof. Meldola, 21.
Chemistry, Elementary. Emery, 7.
Chemistry for Beginners. Edward Hart, 13.
Chemist's Pocket Manual. Meade, 21.
Child and Religion, The, 5.
China, The Civilisation of. Prof. H. A. Giles, 10.
Chinese. Descriptive Sociology. Werner, 31.
Chondrus. Vide L.M.B.C. Memoirs, 42.
Christian Life, Ethics of the. Theodor Haering,
II.
Christian Life in the Primitive Church. Dob-
schiitz, 7.
14 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London, W.C.
CATALOGUE OF PUBLICATIONS.
49
Christian Religion, Fundamental Truths of the.
R. Seeberg, 28.
Christianity, Beginnings of. Paul Wernle, 34.
Christianity in Talmud and Midrash. R. Travers
Herford, 12.
Christianity? What is. Adolf Harnack, 11.
Chromium, Production of. Max Leblanc, 19.
Church History. Baur, 2 ; Schubert, 28.
Civilisation of China. H. A. Giles, 9.
Climate and Weather. H. N. Dickson, 6.
Closet Prayers. Dr. Sadler, 27.
Codium. yide L.M.B.C. Memoirs, 42.
Collected Writings of Seger, 15.
Colonial Period, The. C. M. Andrews, i.
Coming Church. Dr. John Hunter, 15.
Commentaries on Jacobite Liturgy. Connolly
and Codrington, 40.
Commentary on the Book of Job. Ewald, 8 ;
Wright and Hirsch, 30 ; Commentary on the Old
Testament. Ewald, 8; Commentary on the
Psalms. Ewald, 8.
Common Prayer for Christian Worship, 5.
Common-Sense Dietetics. C. Louis Leipoldt, 19.
Common-Sense in Law. Prof. P. Vinogradoff, 33.
Communion with God. Wilhelm Herrmann, 13.
Comparative Religion. Princ. J. E. Carpenter, 4.
Conception of God. Alviella, i.
Concrete, Reinforced. Colby, 5.
Conductivity of Liquids. Tower, 33.
Confessions of St. Augustine. Adolf Harnack, 12.
Conservatism. Lord Hugh Cecil, 4.
Constitution and Law of the Church. Adolf Har-
nack, 12.
Contes Militaires. A. Daudet, 35.
Co-Partnership and Profit-Sharing. A. Williams,
34-
Copenhagen and Norway, Guide to, 11.
Coptic Texts on St. Theodore. E. O. Winstedt, 35.
Crime and Insanity. Dr. C. A. Mercier, 21.
Crown Theological Library, 36.
Cuneiform Inscriptions, The. Prof. E. Schrader,
27.
Cyanamid, Manufacture, Chemistry, and Uses.
Pranke, 25.
Cyperaceae, Illustrations of. Clarke, 5.
Dante, Spiritual Message of. Bishop Boyd
Carpenter, 4.
Date, The, of the Acts and of the Synoptic Gospels.
Harnack, 12.
Dawn of History, The. Prof. J. L. Myres, 23.
Delectus Veterum. Theodor Noldeke, 23.
Democracy and Character. Canon Stephen, 31,
Democracy, Socialism and, in Europe. Samuel
P. Orth, 24.
De Profundis Clamavi. Dr. John Hunter, 15.!
Descriptive Sociology. Herbert Spencer, 31.
Development of the Periodic Law. Venable, 33.
Differential and Integral Calculus, The. Axel
Harnack, 12.
Dipavamsa, The. Edited by Oldenberg, 7.
Doctrine of the Atonement. A. Sabatier, 27.
Dogma, History of. Adolf Harnack, iz.
Dolomites, The, Practical Guide to, 11.
Dresden and Environs, Guide to, 11.
Dynamics of Particles. Webster, 33.
Early Hebrew Story. John P. Peters. 24.
Early Christian Conception. Otto Pfleiderer, 25.
Early Development of Mohammedanism. Mar-
goliouth, 21.
Early Zoroastrianism. Moullon, 22.
Echinus. F/</^ L.M.B.C. Memoirs, 42.
Education. Herbert .Spencer, 31.
Education and Ethics. Emile Boutroux, 3.
Egyptian Faith, The Old. Edouard Naville, 23.
Eighth Year, The. Philip Gibbs, 10.
Electric Furnace. H. Moisson, 22.
Electricity. Prof. Gisbert Kapp, 16.
Electrolysis of Water. V. Engelhardt, 8.
Electrolytic Laboratories. Nissenson, 23.
Eledone. Vide L.M.B.C. Memoirs, 43.
Elementary Chemistry. Emery, 7.
Elementary Organic Analysis. F. E. Benedict, 2.
Elements of English Law. W. M. Geldart, 10.
Engineering Chemistry. T. B. Stillman, 32.
England and Germany, 8.
English Language. L. P. Smith, 29.
English Literature, Mediaeval. W. P. Ker, r7.
English Literature, Modern. G. H. Mair, 20.
English, The Writing of. W. T. Brewster, 3.
Enoch, Book of. C. Gill, 10.
Ephesian Canonical Writings. Rt. Rev. A. V.
Green, 10.
Epitome of Synthetic Philosophy. F, H. Collins, 6.
Erzahlungen. Hofer, 35.
Essays on the Social Gospel. Harnack and Herr-
mann, 12.
Essays. Herbert Spencer, 31.
Ethica. Prof Simon Laurie, 19.
Ethics, Data of. Herbert Spencer, 30.
Ethics, Education and. Emile Boutroux, 3.
Ethics. G. E. Moore, 22.
Ethics, Principles of. Herbert Spencer, 30.
Ethics of the Christian Life. Prof. T. Haering, 11.
Ethics of Progress, The. Chas. F. Dole, 7.
Ethiopic Grammar. A. Dillmann, 7.
Eucken's Philosophy, An Interpretation of. W.
Tudor Jones, 16.
Euphemia and the Goth. Prof. F. C. Burkitt, 4,
44.
Euripides and His Age. Prof. Gilbert Murray, 41.
Europe, Mediaeval. H. W. C. Davis, 6.
Evolution. Thomson and Geddes, 32.
Evolution of Industry. Prof. D. H. Macgregor, 20.
Evolution of Plants. Dr. D. H. Scott, 28.
Evolution of Religion, The. L. R. Farnell, g.
Exploration, Polar. Dr. W. S. Bruce, 4.
Facts and Comments. Herbert Spencer, 31.
Faith and Morals. W. Herrmann, 14.
Fertility and Fertilisers. Halligan, 11.
Fertilisers, Soil Fertility and. Halligan, 11.
First Principles. Herbert Spencer, 30.
14 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London, W.C.
5°
WILLIAMS & NORGATE'S
First Three Gospels in Greek. Rev. Canon Colin
Campbell, 4.
Flower of Gloster, The. E. Temple Thurston, 32.
Foundations of Duty, The. Bishop J. W. Diggle,
7-
Four Gospels as Historical Records, g.
Four Gospels, Light on the. A. Smith Lewis, ig.
Free Catholic Church. Rev. J. M. Thomas, 32.
Freedom of Thought. Bury, 4.
Freezing Point, The. Jones, i5.
French Composition. Jas. Boielle, 3.
French History, First Steps in. F. F. Roget, 26.
French Language, Grammar of. Eugene, 8.
French Literature, Landmarks in. G. L. Strachey,
32-
French Reader. Leon Delbos, 7.
French Revolution, The. Hilaire Belloc, 2.
Fundamental Truths of the Christian Religion.
R. Seeberg, 28.
Gammarus. Vzcfe h.M.B.C. Memoirs, 43.
Gaul, Wall Map of, 18.
General Language of the Incas of Peru. Sir
Clements Markham, 21.
Genesis and Evolution of the Soul. J. O. Bevan, 2.
Genesis, Hebrew Text, 13.
Geography, Modern. Dr. M. Newbigin, 23.
Geometry, Analytical, Elements of. Hardy, 12.
German History, Noble Pages from. F. J. Gould,
10.
German Idioms, Short Guide to. T. H. Weisse, 34.
German Literature, A Short Sketch of. V. Phil-
lipps, B.A., 25.
Germany, England and, 8.
Germany of To-day. Tower, 32.
Germany, The Literature of. Prof. J. G. Robert-
son, 26.
Glimpses of Tennyson. A. G. Weld, 34.
God and Life. Dr. John Hunter, 15.
Gospel of Rightness. E. C. Woods, 35.
Gospels in Greek, First Three. Rev. Colin
Campbell, 4.
Grammar, Ethiopic. A. Dillman, 7.
Greek-English Dictionary, Modern, 18.
Greek Ideas, Lectures on. Rev. Dr. Hatch, 13.
Greek, New Testament. Prof. Edouard Nestle, 23.
Greek Religion, Higher Aspects of. L. R. Farnell,
9-
Greeks: Hellenic Era, 31.
Grieben's English Guides, 11.
Gymnastics, Medical Indoor. Dr. Schreber, 28.
Harnack and his Oxford Critics. T. B. Saunders,
26.
Health and Disease. Dr. W. L. Mackenzie, 20.
Hebrew, New School of Poets, 23.
Hebrew Religion. W. E. Addis, i.
Hebrew Story. John P. Peters, 24.
Hebrew Synonyms, Studies in. Rev. J. Kennedy,
17-
Hebrew Texts, 13.
Hellenistic Greeks. Mahaffy and Goligher, 31.
Herbaceous Garden, The. Mrs. P. Martineau, 21.
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. C. B. Daven-
port, 6.
Hibbert Journal Supplement for 1909, entitled :
Jesus or Christ? 14.
Hibbert Journal, The, 14.
Hibbert Lectures, 38.
Highways and Byways in Literature. H. Farrie, 9.
Historical Evidence for the Resurrection. Kirsopp
Lake, 18.
History of Dogma. Adolf Harnack, 12.
History of England. A. F. Pollard, 25.
History of Jesus of Nazara. Keim, 17.
History of Our Time. G. P. Gooch, 10.
History of Sacerdotal Celibacy. H. C- Lea, 19.
History of War and Peace. Perris, 24.
History of the Church. Hans von Schubert, 28.
History of the Hebrews. R. Kittel, 18.
History of theLiterature of theO.T. E. Kautzsch,
17-
History of the New Test. Times. A. Hausrath, 13.
Holland, Practical Guide to, 11.
Home University Library of Modern Knowledge,
39-
House of Commons, The, from Within. Rt.
Hon. R. Farquharson, 9.
How to Teach the Bible. Rev. A. F. Mitchell, 22.
Human Body, The. Prof. Arthur Keith, 17.
Hygiene, Handbook of. D. G. Bergey, 2.
Hymns of Duty and Faith. R. Crompton Jones, 16.
Idolmakers, Among the. Prof L. P. Jacks, 15.
Immortality, Some Intimations of. Rt. Hon. Sir
E. Fry, 9.
Incarnate Purpose, The. G. H. Percival, 24.
India, Peoples and Problems of. Sir T. W.
Holderness, 14.
Indian Buddhism. Rhys Davids, 6.
Individual Soul, Genesis and Evolution of. J. O.
Bevan, 2.
Individualism and Collectivism. Dr. C. W. Saleeby,
27-
Indoor Gymnastics, Medical. Dr. Schreber, 28.
Industrial Remuneration, Methods of. David F.
Schloss, 27.
Infinitesimals and Limits. Hardy, 12.
Influence of Greek Ideas upon the Christian
Church. Rev. Dr. Hatch, 13.
Influence of Rome on Christianity. E. Renan, 26.
Initiation into Philosophy. Emile Faguet, g.
Initiation into Literature. Faguet, 9.
Inorganic Chemistry. J. L. Howe, 15.
Inorganic Qualitative Chemical Analysis. Leaven-
worth, 19.
Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy.
W. Tudor Jones, 17.
Introduction to Biblical Hebrew. Rev. J.
Kennedy, 17.
Introduction to the Greek New Testament. Prof.
E. Nestle, 23.
Introduction to the Old Testament. Prof. Carl
Cornill, 5, 45.
14 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London, W.C.
CATALOGUE OF PUBLICATIONS.
51
Introduction to the Preparation of Organic Com-
pounds. Emil Fischer, 9.
Introduction to Science. Prof. J. A. Thomson, 32.
Irish Nationality. Mrs. J. R. Green, 10.
Isaiah, Hebrew Te.\t, 13.
Jacobite Liturgy, Connolly and Codrington, 44.
Jesus. Wilhelm Bousset, 3.
Jesus of Nazara. Keira, 17.
Jesus or Christ ? The Hibbert Journal Supplement
for 1909, 14.
Jesus, Sayings of. Adolf Harnack, 12.
Job. Hebrew Text, 13.
Job, Book of. G. H. Bateson Wright, 35.
Job, Book of. Rabbinic Commentary on, 43.
Johnson, Dr., and His Circle. John Bailey, 2.
Journal of the Federated Malay States, 46.
Journal of the Linnean Society. Botany and
Zoology, 16.
Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club, 16.
Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society, 16.
Justice. Herbert Spencer, 31.
Kantian Ethics. J. G. Schurman, 28.
Kea, The. George R. Marriner, 21.
Kiepert's New Atlas Antiquus, 18.
Kiepert's Wall-Maps of the Ancient World, 17.
King, The, to His People, 18.
Kingdom, The Mineral. Dr. Reinhard Brauns, 3.
Knowledge and Life. Eucken, 8.
Laboratory Experiments. Noyes and Mulliken, 23.
Lakes of Northern Italy, Guide to, 11.
Landmarks in French Literature. G. L. Strachey,
32-
Latter Day Saints, The. Ruth and R. W. Kauff-
man, 16.
Law, English, Elements of. W. M. Geldart, 10.
Lays of Ancient Rome. Macaulay, 20.
Leaves, All about. F. G. Heath, 13.
Le Coup de Pistolet. Merim^e, 22.
Lepeophtheirus and Lernea. Vide L.M.B.C.
Memoirs, 42.
Letter to the "Preussische Jahrbiicher." Adolf
Harnack, 12.
Les Mis^rables. Victor Hugo, 15.
Liberal Christianity. Jean R^ville, 26.
Liberalism. Prof. L. T. Hobhouse, 14.
Life and Matter. Sir O. Lodge, 19.
Life of the Spirit, The. Rudolf Eucken, 8.
Ligia. Vide L.M.B.C. Memoirs, 43.
Lineus. Vide L.M.B.C. Memoirs, 42.
Linnean Society of London, Journal of, 16.
Literature, English Mediseval. Prof. W. P. Ker, 17.
Literature, Highways and Byways in. Hugh
Farrie, g.
Literature, Initiation into. Faguet, g.
Literature of Germany. Prof. J. G. Robertson, 26.
Literature of the Old Testament. Kautzsch, 15 ;
Prof. G. F. Moore, 42.
Literature, The Victorian Age in. G. K. Chester-
ton, 5.
I Liverpool Marine Biology Cotmnittee Memoirs,
I 42-
Liverpool Marine Biology Committee Memoirs,
I.— XVII., 47.
Logarithmic Tables. Schroen, 28.
London. Sir. L. Gomme, 10.
London Library, Catalogue of, 20.
London Library .Subject Index, 20.
Luke the Physician. Adolf Harnack, 12.
Mad Shepherds, and other Studies. Prof. L. P.
Jacks, 15.
Mahabharata, Index to. S. Sorensen, 30.
Making a Newspaper. John L. Given, 10.
Making of the Earth. Prof. J. W. Gregory, 10.
Making ofthe New Testament. Prof. B.W. Bacon, i.
Man and the Bible. J. A. Picton, 25.
Man versus the State. Herbert Spencer, 31.
Man's Origin, Destiny, and Duty. Hugh M'CoII,
20.
Maori, Lessons in. Right Rev. W. L. Williams, 34.
Maori, New and Complete Manual of. Williams,
34-
Marine Zoology of Okhamandal. Hornell, 15.
Marxism versus Socialism. Simkhovitch, 29.
Massoretic Text. Rev. Dr. J. Taylor, 32.
Master Mariners. J. R. Spears, 30.
Mathematics, Introduction to. A.N. Whitehead, 34.
Mathematics in China and Japan. Mikami, 22.
Matter and Energy. F. Soddy, 29.
Mediaeval Europe. H. W. C. Davis, 6.
Metallic Objects, Production of. Dr. W. Pfan-
hauser, 24.
Metallurgy. Wysor, 35.
Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta. Prof. Simon
Laurie, ig.
Midrash, Christianity in. Travers Herford, 13.
Milandapanho, The. Edited by V. Trenckner, 22.
Mineral Kingdom, The. Dr. R. Brauns, 3.
Mineralogy of Arizona. Guild, ir.
Mission and Expansion of Christianity. Adolt
Harnack, 12.
Missions. Mrs. Creighton, 6.
Modern Greek-English Dictionary. A. Kyriakides,
18.
Modern Materialism. Rev. Dr. James Martineau,
21.
Modernity and the Churches. Percy Gardner, 10.
Mohammedanism. Prof. D. S. Margoliouth, 21.
Molecular Weights, Methods of Determining.
Henry Biltz, 3.
Monasticism. Adolf Harnack, 12.
Moorhouse Lectures. Vide Mercer's Soul of Pro-
gress, 21 ; Stephen, Democracy and Character,
31-
Mormons, The. R. W. and Ruth Kauffman, 16.
Motor and the Dynamo. J. L. Arnold, i.
Munich and Environs, Guide to, 11.
My Life, Some Pages of. Bishop Boyd Carpenter,
4-
My Struggle for Light. R. Wimmer, 35.
Mystery of Newman. Henri Bremond, 3.
14 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London, W.C.
52
WILLIAMS & NORGATE'S
Naples and Capri, Guide to, ii.
Napoleon. H. A. L. Fisher, 9.
National Idealism and State Church, 5 ; and the
Book of Common Prayer, 5. Dr. Stanton Coit.
National Religions and Universal Religion. Dr.
A. Kuenen, 3S.
Native Religions of Mexico and Peru. Dr. A
R^ville, 26.
Naturalism and Religion. Dr. Rudolf Otto, 24.
Nautical Terms. L. Delbos, 7.
Nav>', The, and Sea Power. David Hannay, 11.
Nervation of Plants. Francis Heath, 13.
Nerves. Prof. D. F. Harris, 42.
New Hebrew School of Poets. Edited by H.
Brody and K. Albrecht, 23.
New Testament, Making of. Prof. B. W. Bacon, i.
New Zealand Language, Dictionary of. Rt. Rev.
W. L. Williams, 34.
Newman, Mystery of. Henri Bremond, 3.
Newspaper, Making a. John L. Given, 10.
Newspaper, The. G. Binney Dibblee, 7.
Nibelungenlied. Trans. W. L. Lettsom, 23.
Noble Pages from German History. F. J.Gould, 10.
Nonconformity. Its Origin, etc. Principal W. B.
Selbie, 29.
North Sea Watering-Places, Guide to, 11.
Norway and Copenhagen, Practical Guide to, 11.
Norwegian Sagas translated into English, 27.
Notre Dame de Paris. Victor Hugo, 15.
Nuremberg and Rothenburg, Guide to, 11.
Ocean, The. Sir John Murray, 42.
Old French, Introduction to. F. F. Roget, 26.
Ostend, Guide to, 11.
Old Syriac Gospels. Mrs. A. Smith Lewis, 19.
OldTestament in the Light of the East. Jeremias, 15.
Old Testament, Canonical Books of. Cornill, 6.
Old Testament, Prophets of Ewald, 8.
Old World, The, Wall Map of, 17.
Ophthalmic Test Types. Snellen's, 29.
Optical Rotating Power. Hans Landolt, 19.
" Opus Majus " of Roger Bacon, 2.
Organic Analysis. Benedict, 2.
Organic Chemistry. A. A. Noyes, 23.
Organic Compounds. Emil Fischer, g.
Origin and Growth of Religion. C. G. Montefiore,
22.
Origin and Nature of Life. Prof. Benjamin
Moore, 22.
Outlines of Church History. Von Schubert, 28.
Outlines of Psychology. Wilhelm Wundt, 35.
Pages of my Life, Some. Bishop Boyd Carpenter, 4.
Pacific, The, Problems of. Frank Fo.\-, 9.
Painters and Painting. Sir Fredk. Wedmore, 34.
Pali Miscellany. V. Trenckner, 33.
Papacy and Modern Times. Rev. Dr.Wm. Barry, 2.
Para Rubber Cultivation. Mathieu, 21.
Parliament, Its History, Constitution, and Practice.
Ilbert, 15.
Pascal, Blaise. H. R. Jordan, 16.
Patella, i. Vide L.M.B.C. Memoirs, 42.
Paul. Baur, 2 ; Weinel, 34.
Paulinism. Otto Pfieiderer, 25.
Pecton. Vide L.M.B.C. Memoirs, 43.
Persian Empire, Wall Map of, 17.
Persian Language, A Grammar of. J. T. Platts, 25,
Pharisaism. R. Travers Herford, 13.
Philo Judaeus. Dr. Drummond, 7.
Philosophy, a New. Edouard Le Roy, 19.
Philosophy, Initiation into. Emile Faguet, g.
Philosophy of Religion. Otto Pfleiderer, 25.
Plant Life. Farmer, 9.
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